This Week in Startups - Shein registers for US IPO, Trump SPAC insider trading & more | E1771

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

This Week in Startups is presented by: Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to Squarespace.com/TWIST for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Fin can’t burn its mouth on hot pizza. Or wave at someone who wasn’t waving at them. Fin can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team. Meet Fin. A breakthrough AI bot by Intercom – ready to join your support team today. Visit https://intercom.com/fin * Today’s show: Nick joins Jason, who breaks down a report that Shein has confidentially registered for a US IPO (1:24). This leads to a discussion about Shein’s alleged unethical labor practices and voting with your dollar (11:22), Shein’s influencer stunt that backfired, DWAC’s insider trading debacle (47:25), and self-driving vehicle footage being used as evidence in criminal cases (33:27). * Time stamps: (0:00) Nick joins Jason for a full news show (1:24) Shein confidentially registers for a US IPO (9:54) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (11:22) Shein’s alleged labor practices and voting with your dollar (31:58) LinkedIn Marketing - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (33:27) Shein’s TikTok "factory washing" campaign (40:37) Fin - Try Fin, Intercom's new AI customer support chatbot, at https://intercom.com/fin (41:21) Jason’s advice for Dani Carbonari (47:25) Trump’s return to Twitter + Trump SPAC insider trading debacle (57:03) Police forces using autonomous vehicle footage to prosecute suspects * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

And last week, Sheen flew some TikTok influencers that are Americans to, I wish you didn't last. The way you cute it up and it's like, how do we solve this problem? It's like, you know, instead of paying people $16 at making people work 16 hours a day, like maybe cap it at 12. Yeah. Nope. It's like, no. Better solution. Yeah, we'll get private jets, first class flyouts and TikTok influencers and solve the problem in two days.

They'll solve the problem. Right. They'll solve it for us. That's right. UGC, ladies and gentlemen, UGC. Of course, that's what those workers need. Those workers need to be in a TikTok video doing a TikTok dance. Yeah. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace.

Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And Finn can't burn its mouth on hot pizza or wave at someone who wasn't waving at them. Finn can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team.

Meet Finn, a breakthrough AI bot by Intercom. Ready to join your support team today. Visit intercom.com slash fin. All right, everybody. Welcome to the show. we were doing all of these great interviews. You know, we used to do five days of news when Molly was here. It was amazing.

But it was maybe too much news and you guys said, what happened to the interviews? Then we started doing these interviews and I got addicted to all these AI founders and how great this is going and then our own portfolio companies, and I forgot to do news shows. So we're going to try to find some balance.

Today, Rachel Braun was back to do the news with me, but her internet connection went out. It happens, folks. And so I called an audible. I said, hey, producer Nick, You haven't slept in 24 hours. You've been doing the all-in editing. Can you jump on the call? And you don't have to put your camera on. But pretend you're a news reader. And let's do the news together. So a special treat for you. Everybody loves producer Nick. Producer Nick, you're there. I am. We got the C team going today. That's how you know it's summertime. July 4th weekend. I just, I called you up from the G League. The replacement squad. You got a two-way contract for 10 days. And let's see what you do. Maybe you'll be like- I apologize to everybody in advance. Maybe you pull a Gary Payton, too.

I mean, didn't Gary Payton second? Isn't that what he had like my G-League contract? All of a sudden, he crushed it? You could be like, who's our new guy on the Knicks, Jericho Sims? You can come in Jericho Sim style. Hey, Nick, I saw this story about Sheen, S-H-E-I-N. I know about this app or something. People buy clothes on it, but they filed for an IPO or something.

Let's go over this story because it's really interesting. And it touches on some of the human rights stuff that we've been talking about on the program for the years. Yeah, little human rights on a Friday for everybody. Yeah, human rights on a Friday. Friday coming up. So yeah, they they didn't file for it. They registered for a US IPO yesterday according to Reuters, but we should note up top that Sheen officially denied this. So they could just be posturing or whatever, but they denied Reuters report. Just a quick explainer on Sheen, it's a fast fashion retailer. It's valued at $66 billion. And just so everybody

knows, fast fashion basically, it's a pretty new business model in the retail world. It's where retailers create, let's call them affordable replicas, you could say knockoffs, inspired by recent high-end fashion trends. So if you see something, you know, on stage at Milan or Paris Fashion Week or whatever, a couple of days later, you'll see it for sale for like six bucks. The problem is they mass produce these at a really, really low cost. It's bad for the environment. And then they bring them to stores really quickly while demand is super high. So the value prop, just so I'm clear, is you're some young person. You're, you're, going to Coachella, you want to look great.

And, hey, here's the hack. These clothes were, you know, at men's fashion week, which I think was last week in Paris. And now we got them on Sheen and you can buy them for $10. But my understanding is you put it in the wash and you're done. It's like literally you throw it away. So it's great for a young person who wants to look good, but it's terrible for the environment. Exactly. And it's unfair to the brands that came up with these great dope designs.

That is true. You're not allowed to trademark a recipe. So if you make the cronut, you can trademark the name, the croissant donut. If you make a great outfit, you could trademark the branding of the outfit. But you can't actually the style or a recipe, these things are not trademarkable. Yeah, and there's kind of like a couple of reasons for the waste, right? It's one of it is, you know, the materials aren't great. Obviously, that's how they're so cheap.

And then also the short-term nature of trendy styles, right? that's kind of the thing with fashion is they go into style they go out of style it's not like blue jeans or something that's like good forever something in streetwear that's popular in january is going to be you know cringe in october and also because the manufacturing gets ramped up so quickly it's sort of it's kind of exploitative or can be exploitive on labor because you have to really get everybody you know rallying the troops getting things out the door quickly so um you want to get on to the news what actually happened yeah let's keep going here. And just in terms of the IPO, that's kind of an interesting little rub in and of itself, because I thought China was taking the position, the CCP, Xi Jinping, saying we're not doing US IPOs anymore. We want them to occur on the Hong Kong exchanges are domestically. That is true. And if you remember the last big Chinese company to go public, which I'm sure you're obviously very familiar with, D.D., the ride-sharing app, that didn't end very well. So what happened was D.D. went public in June of 2021 at a $68 billion, at a $68 billion,

ironically kind of close to Sheen's current valuation, which is 66. And they did this against warnings from CCP regulators. So basically the CCP told them, do not go public, do not do this. And DD's CEO was like, yeah, whatever, I don't care. I'm going to do it anyway. Had that work out for them. Very bad. And if anybody is a fanatic listener to this weekend startups, we covered this a bunch of times back in 2021 as it was happening. So shortly after DD's IPO, the CCP cracked down. They banned new downloads of the app on the app store. And they raided DD's offices and set them under some crazy security review. D.D. Stock crashed and eventually it wound up delisting from the U.S. market in spring 2022. So yes, these Chinese IPOs are, let's call them

risky for retail investors. Challenging. Yeah, challenging. Yeah, you got to be careful. And, you know, the thing for me was Uber, I believe, owned around 10% of it. So this was $6 billion. I think Uber started selling their shares in it and just cashed in their chips. This is why I said on CNBC, I don't know, maybe seven, eight years ago, I would never buy any of these stocks. And this is when Alibaba was surging. And people were like, you're an idiot. And I'm like, well, how do you know any of the accounting is correct? How do you know what you own?

You don't. And then the rules can change. So this is like playing in a casino and they're like, yeah, you know, a flush beats a straight. And they're like, well, I have a straight this time. And so now straight speeds be flushes. And you're like, wait, that's not how the game works. And they're like, yeah, we changed the game. Okay, fine.

So Sheen might be, we could read into this, challenging the, authorities, which is insane, or maybe they filed, and then the government told them, no, Bueno, you can't file, and they rescinded it, and now they're saying they never did. Yeah, so just a little background on Sheen or Shine. Sheen. It's very interesting. Their name is spelled S-H-E-I-N, and so it's Sheen, not Shine, but it is easy to mix up, yeah. Sheen like Charlie. Yes, exactly. Tiger Blat. Yeah. They've, buy me a cup. She has raised 3.5 billion to date.

All these stats according to Pitchbook. Shout out Pitchbook. We love you guys. Major backers, from what I found, the two biggest investors seem to be Hong Shan, which obviously formerly known as Sequoia China. They just changed brands two weeks ago. And Tiger Global. It was most recently valued at $66 billion back in May, two months, last month, I guess,

which is down 34% from a peak valuation of $100 billion, which they secured last year in October 2020. I have a theory that I want to run by you. Why Sheen is all the sudden kind of pushing for this US IPO. Tiger Global is super cash crunched. They've been not able to raise the funding they want to raise. They need a win. They need liquidity. Hong Shan, obviously changing over from Sequoia, China. I'm not sure how the distributions work with the USLPs or who like opted out. All the existing funds would be, and this is why it's kind of easy for a venture fund to break up like this or for them to end or change their names because each fund is a partnership. So if you're on, you know, Sequoia China 7, what you do is everybody's just still an LP

or a partner in that. The economics are all codified and legal documents. And then when you go to the next fund and it's Sequoia China 8, you can just change the name of it and change the dynamics of it. So, you know, I think Hong Chen and Tiger want to win. I think they need a little bit. They need a win. I think that's a great.

Yeah. I mean, they want to win. And yeah, if you think about where you would get the greatest return, it would be where the greatest number of investors are, not a limited pool of investors. So this is where this insane situation with Taiwan is so important for the United States to get right. And also, more important that China get this right. The more I think about it, the more I realize China will lose more by invading Taiwan. then the U.S. will by losing China or access to invest in China. I think there's a greater loss on the Chinese side because our economy is sputtering right now.

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It's low margin, right? So this is not Slack $30 billion, right? No, this is not Google ad revenue. No, no, no. This is direct to consume. So what is their cost on that? Their gross margins have to be really challenged. Yeah, and maybe they're a little bit higher because they make everything for so cheap and they might use force labor.

Yeah, but they got to ship it and then they have returns. Right. So this is why this business is like really low margin. So $30 billion in revenue, which was double 2021's revenue, which is pretty crazy. A website called Business of Apps has compiled reports. Again, none of this is confirmed, but it's just reports of their revenue over time. And you could see on the chart that Brian just showed from 2016 to 2022, There's been like an insane scale up in revenue.

But so, you know, for the business, obviously everything is looking good, but here is the big kicker. 24 U.S. representatives from both parties opposed the IPO back in May when rumors were first reported. And they asked the SEC to verify that Sheen has ethical labor practices. And they wanted to mandate that Sheen undergo an independent audit to verify that the company does not use Weger Forced Labor. Now, this is because Sheen allegedly violated the U.Ger Force Labor Prevention Act, which is his U.S. Act, that prohibits the import of goods into the U.S. that were manufactured whole or in part, so it could just be one piece of fabric, right, with forced labor in China. Last November, Bloomberg reported that tests on Sheen fabric on two separate occasions came back positive for cotton produced in China's Xinjiang province, where a majority of the Uighur forced labor allegedly or confirmed occurs. and a spokesperson from Sheen denied these allegations stating that the company has a zero tolerance policy towards forced labor. So I guess I'll just let you lay out for that.

Yeah. This is a very complicated issue. I think we should bring in President Jason Calacanis to comment on. Cue the music, everybody. As your president, it's important that we are considered when we think about our relationship with China and human rights on a global scale, while we want to have a vibrant, trade practice with all countries in the world. We must also address the suffering and human rights that are occurring around the world.

And sometimes here in America, we don't get everything right, but we try, and we have good conversations about that. And there is a conversation to be had about the situation with the Uyghurs and Fash Fashion and companies like Sheen going public. You don't want to stick it to one specific company, but when we are in deep relationships and we are going to have a company like Sheen leverage the full economic value of the U.S. markets,

we do need to think about their responsibilities to their own people. Therefore, we would like to humbly ask Sheen to create a labor best practice where they source their materials from and how their employees are treated and have that reach some basic tenets in terms of the number of. number of hours work per week, the compensation, and safety. And if those things are achieved and we can have a positive dialogue with that, we will absolutely embrace them going public here and increasing our relationship. If they can't achieve those or they feel it's not our place,

well, then we can't support them going public here in America, just like perhaps they wouldn't support our companies coming to China, Google, Twitter, not allowed in China, because we don't hit the notes that they want in terms of information flowing the way it does. So in this case, it's the balls in Sheen's Court. And we encourage them to do the best they can for their workers. It doesn't have to be exactly what we do in here in America, but there is a baseline that we'd like to see them hit. And we ask that with humility and in the spirit of collaboration to the great people of China and the amazing companies they've built.

So let's work together to have everybody benefit economically, even the people who are on the bottom of the economic ladder. And I'll see you all at the state of the union. Thank you very much. I won't be taking questions. Camera flashes, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I'm starting to sound more presidential. Yeah, it sounds like you're posturing for, what was Connor Roy going for?

Like 80 or something? I just want to, hey, listen, if I could get somewhere between Connor Roy and Ross Perra when I run, and let's be honest, the other three besties on All In cannot run for president. Oh, yeah. So I'm the all-in candidate by default. So it's clear somebody on All-In is going to make it to the White House. I think Sacks gets their first as Secretary of State. But I'm the only one who's got a shot at being president.

So we might as well get my presidential takes from President Jason. Now, let's get back to the doctor. So assuming that Sheen is telling the truth and that there is no Uigh or forced labor, right, there is still an issue with other labor problems going on at the company. Sure. So in an investigative documentary by the UK's Channel 4 called Untold Inside the Sheen Machine, they reported that workers at the company were subject to 16 hour long days, only got one day off a month, and earned wages of around $4,000 yuan or $572 a month.

That's actually okay. $7,000 a year in China. It goes a long way. That's good. To produce a problem. That's good context. Yeah, the pay is not the problem here. The days off is the problem and the 16 hour long days.

and do they get compensated for overtime? And I think this is where Americans have to take some ownership. If you want a $15 outfit for Coachella, these virtue signaling woke young people, they need to understand that this is how you achieve that, is people getting one day off a month. So for these young people who want fast fashion or anybody, could be an older person who's using these.

I don't think it's limited to young people, although that's probably the bulk of the users. We need to figure out a way to communicate to young people. When you open the Shee app, that means somebody, your age around the world, your contemporary, works 29 out of 30 days, and you're working 16 out of 30 days, and you're getting free lattes and massages, and you're protesting going to the office. This shows you the disparity, right? And I think this is where young people need to look in the mirror and say, if I want to be woke, if I want to, you know, support all these social media causes, well, you also have to vote with your dollar and know where this, clothes are coming from. And all of these crazy woke influencers and social media people who can't wait to lecture people about whatever the cause of the month is, here's your cause.

Let's see you go to work for the labor conditions of the people who work at Sheen. This is abhorrent. If they're getting one day off a month, we all know that's abhorrent. If you work six days a week and you work 60 hours a week, I work that. That's okay. But one day off a month and 16 hour long days when you're a factory worker, it's a, that's a bit over the top. I could see a 10-hour shift. People work a 12-hour shift as a dishwasher I did and a waiter. So, you know, eight to 12 hours is a is not a crazy shift. But the one day off and 16-hour day is crazy. I have to tell myself here a little bit because I read one day off a month as like a PTO day in addition to weekends. And my brain went, oh, no, no, no, no. That's 12 PTO days a year.

That's not like that bad. And then later I was like, Oh, they mean like one day not working. Nick, the standard hours in China is 9-96. We've talked about this on the program. 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week. If you work at an internet company, imagine I put that out as an edict at launch. And I said, we're working 996. Oh, wait, that's what we do anyway.

Yeah, I was going to say. I'm not too far off. No, that's pretty far off. 12 hours, six days a week is 72 hours a week. That's when you start pushing it. I would, if somebody in our company was working 72 hours a week, I would actually tell them pump the breaks. And if there are people who are working seven, two hours a week,

I'm telling you right now, pump the breaks. That's a lot. I mean, I would say that most people here are doing, uh, 50, 60. I know the statistics because I have the statistics from, I looked at the statistics recently from Slack and Notion. I can tell you people who work 50 hours a week on average. Yeah. I know how many hours people work because if you're working here,

you're using Slack and you're using Notion by default. If I correlate those two things, people are putting 50 hours a week here. Yeah. I would say long hours during the week and then some cleanup work on the weekends mostly. Which is reasonable. If you want to be successful in your career, that's a reasonable 50. I tell people who work for us, fixed 50, solid 60. Fixed 50 means if you're doing less than 50 hours a week, you're not going to be advancing

in your career. And a 60 is like really solid. Like, I really appreciate that. I don't think you should do more than that. Honestly, I think you get negative returns. You're going to make mistakes. And what's the point? I could always hire another person, you know, like I don't need you to work 70 or

week. Now, there might be a conference. We're doing an Allent Summit or Angel Summit. Yeah, you might do 80 hours the week before. But I gave people like a day or two off, like the day after the thing. And, you know, whatever. So this documentary also claimed that Sheen's was sometimes withholding first month wages for workers, which I've never heard of that before. No, yep, that is something that happened in America. And this was something that caused major issues in China before. They've had protests where people were getting paid like net 30. Imagine you're getting this raw deal. You've got to work 16 hours of day and you one day off a month and they pay you net 30. That's crazy. And then sometimes the factories would shut down and not pay their workers. And this is the fear of workers. So this would be

another thing. Like do they have guaranteed pay on what cadence do they get paid? These are just standards that emerging markets. So there's frontier markets and emerging markets, and then there's the developed world, right? It used to call it third world, but the more elegant phrasing today, more work phrasing is frontier emerging. And so frontier market might be like Vietnam or somebody where it's like, you know, really raw, you know, like Cuba or North Korea, right? It's real frontier markets.

And Vietnam would be included in that places where you don't have rule of law. etc. Property rights, etc. or any employer rights. They have emerging markets. China's now an emerging market. It's not considered a first world because it's not a democracy. And so that's what's happening here. They just don't have basic law and rights. Yeah. And then the final claim from the documentary was that mistakes made in production processes were deducted from worker wages. This was America. This was America 200 years ago or even 150 years ago. When people worked in factories, They used to be given work to take home and they would get paid per piece. And if they made a mistake, it came out of their bill.

So imagine you worked here and you lost an episode, you know, like the file got corrupted or something. And I said, okay, yeah, that was like $1,000 of work. I'm taking that out of your pay. I'm docking your pay. And then people realize, like, mistakes happen. You really can't have your employees do that. You have, you could fire an employee if they make too many mistakes, but you can't retroactive, be like, you dropped a steak at a restaurant. You owe me the $25 for the steak.

That's just insane. And it's probably true. And that's how it worked in America 150 years ago. And that's really what we're looking at, Nick, is, and this is why there's tension, China's saying, hey, we're an emerging market. We admit we're an emerging market. Give us time to hit these standards. Where Vietnam, we're an emerging market.

We'll hit these standards in our time. We don't need to be on the U.S. timetable. And I think that's what we're seeing here. So I don't doubt that that's what happened. And sheen responded to the controversies by pledging to spend 15 months. million dollars over the next three to four years to enhance factories and provide better training for workers. Okay, so just so we're clear, they did 30 billion in revenue.

300 million would be 1%. 30 million would be 10 basis points. 15 million would be 50 basis points. So, yeah, I think they need to maybe, instead of pledging 15 million, I think they need to just say 12-hour days of the max, any hours after that you get double time. You get, you know, it's a six-day work week and wages are at a minimum of this amount and they go up 5% per year. Okay. That's what I would negotiate if I was like, you know, the public markets here.

And then if the people who want to underwrite this also inherit this. So this is an important, this is my hot take on all of this, Nick, is you inherit. I'll go on my little rant here. You know, I won't do this as president, Jason. I'll do this as Jason the fund manager because I am faced with this right now raising Launch Fund 4. You can read the deal memo at launch.co slash memo. You inherit the worst behaviors of your partners. And that's a two-way street, right?

So we've seen this with the NBA with China and Hong Kong, right? Daromori just giving modest support for the Uyghurs or for the people of Hong Kong, rather, another situation. And we're seeing it now very acutely with Saudi and the kingdom. Kingdom is doing what they're doing in golf, with LiveGolf. We're seeing it with VC funds. The Saudi Investment Corporation and other folks are listing their VC funds. So now if they list, like they listed David Sacks craft there and other folks, now every time David talks about international relations, somebody can bring up, well, you have Saudi money.

So if another Khashoggi, God forbid, happens, then everybody who's taken money from the Saudi government has to answer for the Saudi government's worst. moment. Just like Americans, when we have something happen, like, let's say, George Floyd, when I travel internationally, people will bring up George Floyd. They'll bring up the BLM riots. They'll bring up January 6th. And does that mean you shouldn't do business? Should people not do business with our fund launch as an investment fund because of what happened on January 6th? Well, I'm not the government, but I am, you know, operating here in the United States. but if you took money from the U.S. government, yeah, you might have to address that situation. So the easiest thing to do, Nick, is just not take the money, right?

Then you can just have the high ground. I don't need to take the money. So I didn't take money from China. I didn't take money from the Saudi government and, you know, end of story. As many VC firms, by the way, do and now are marketing. I saw some firms on Twitter. I don't know if I should name them, but saying, hey, go name them. If they're on Twitter, they're doing it obviously for that reason.

I don't want to, it was one of two firms that have very similar names. I'm not sure which one is up the top of my head. It was either, but we could take that out, blute that out, Brian. But they basically were saying, hey, we'll never take money from a authoritarian. Authoritarian, yeah, basically. And that's their choice, right?

Because, again, you inherit whatever the worst moment those countries have. And in the case of Russia, invading another country, you saw McDonald's, Starbucks, a bunch of people had to pull out basically, right, and just say, hey, Apple, we're done. We're done here. We can't be doing business in a country that's invading another free country. Sorry. We'd love to be engaged. But here's the thing. If we look at the debate we had on an all-in about the Uyghurs, that was the second most, that was the second biggest spike or tied for first and second of the term Uyghurs on Google Trends. I looked at it. The other time was when they had, taken a famous video, a drone video of a bunch of Uyghurs with their head shaved and in handcuffs basically on trains being sent to labor camps. That was published, I think, by The Guardian. And so when we have these tough conversations, it brings, it sheds the light on these things, right? And sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we talk about what's happening with the Uyghurs over and over again, well, the conditions for the Uyghurs might get better. And when I worked at Amnestan

international, they knew this. So they did letter writing campaigns. So these relationships like the one between the PGA and Liv have highlighted what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. And it will highlight what happened to the blogger Rafi, who is being caned for saying things that the government didn't agree with. And then that brings up the discussion, oh my God, caning exists. Well, we have the death penalty here. Caning is not as bad as the death penalty. Death penalty is final. Caning and torture is important. We also have a torture device here in the United States. That is arguably as bad as caning, as hard as that is saying. It's called solitary confinement. And it makes a person literally go mad to be alone for years. And those people do go mad. So all of this engagement in some ways,

even though you could be woke or you could take the high ground, like whichever firm you were referencing before said, hey, we'll never take this money. Great, you have the high ground. But for the firms that do take the money, well, now they have to have that conversation, just like PGA does. There's been more discussion about human rights

because of the PGA, because of Sheen, because of the All In podcast and the comments, you know, Chimoth made about, hey, listen, I'm concerned about domestic human rights more than human rights in other countries, which is a reasonable thing to say. Yeah, his comments completely got misconstrued, by the way. Of course, yes.

I mean, they clipped it and edited it. When he says it's below my mind, line. He's saying my focus is on my kids getting pulled over by a police officer because they're brown skin. Yeah. And I think actually what he even went further and he said like, I consider caring as putting money behind it. So when I say nobody cares about the Uighurs, what I'm saying is nobody's putting money and it's just something that comes up in the new cycle and then goes away. And then guess what happened? It came up in the new cycle and then it went away. He was right. What he said was true. Yeah. Absolutely. So I've decided.

So I'll make this personal here. I've had a lot of people reach out to me for, I don't want to say from where, but from places that are in the process of going from emerging markets, frontier markets, and, you know, wanting to engage with the West. And I've had to have a really deep, thoughtful discussion with myself. Do I want to engage or do I want to take the high ground? I'm rich already. I don't need to have any more money. I'll be totally honest. I'm not chasing the third comma, not interesting to me.

I just like to do what I do every day. Do you think I would spend six, you know, days podcasting if I was trying to optimize for cash? No, I wouldn't. I just enjoy it. So I'm optimizing for my own enjoyment. I would. And so I've given a lot of thought when I went to the UAE with Brad Gersner and I met everybody.

I wanted to go because I wanted to see, you know, how much further along UAE was than other regions. It turns out it's far along. And then you look at Kuwait, you look at Qatar. They're also making great progress. And Saudi wants to make great progress. And that's why they're doing a lot of this. stuff. So engagement, I think, is the right model. I think everybody has to make a personal

decision. And then if I take money from one of these places and someday you see me doing it and you say, oh my God, you're a hypocrite. Now, I'm not saying I'm doing it, but I am deeply considering it. You will have the ability for me to say, I am taking this token amount of money for my fund, 1% of my fund, whatever, 5% of my fund. I know that this is a risky bet for my reputation, but I'm doing it because I want to have the ability to say, you know what? I've decided to stop taking money from this region because of this happened. In other words, what Starbucks did in pulling out of Russia.

And I think more engagement between countries that disagree and more discussion between people who disagree is better. And I'm in a position where I don't need to do it. But I might do it. And you might see me give a keynote, just like you saw me go to UAE, which is not a democracy, but is also incredibly west. and is an incredibly safe place to be and, you know, has a lot of freedoms that are, it's kind of like being in the United States. Honestly, I think the freedoms in the UAE and the culture feels kind of

like the culture where I grew up in the 70s and 80s. It's not as woke as it is today, but it's it's not the 50s or 40s. It's kind of like they're in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 80s, maybe 80s 90s would be most accurate. So anyway, I just want to put that out there on the table because it's an important discussion that we've been having. And I think, think this moment, what's happening with Sheen, is absolutely fantastic. Ah, when you're looking for those B-to-B buyers, how do you find them, huh? They're so hard to find. You know, the decision makers, you know, senior VPs, executive VPs, CFO, C-O-O, CEO. Hard to reach them unless you use LinkedIn marketing. If you use LinkedIn marketing, you're going to have direct access to

180 million senior level executives. Think SVP, EVP, you know, the people, you know, the people, who really make thoughtful decisions about these, and they probably have the ability to sign off on up to 25K or something like that in my experience. But what if you need to get a 50K, $100K, $250K million deal signed off on? Well, you know what? Those are the 10 million C-level executives.

They're also on LinkedIn. If you use LinkedIn marketing, you will have direct access to them on the platform where they are in a business mindset. LinkedIn is about business business. Is LinkedIn? LinkedIn business, LinkedIn. You want those eyeballs to see your product or service.

you're selling into businesses. It's really just that simple. If you want to get access to these incredible decision makers and you want to make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit for your next campaign, go ahead and give it a shot. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in Startups to claim your credit.

LinkedIn.com, that's already in your browser cache. It's going to auto-complete it, but this is what you got to type in slash this week in startups. And then you get that $100. Terms and conditions do apply because my friends at LinkedIn are giving you $100 in advertising credits. Great job. Congratulations.

to LinkedIn and the LinkedIn marketing team, you're crushing it. Really great job. So why don't we get back to Sheen real quick? Because there's another angle to the story. See, this thing has a lot of angles. Yeah. So let's like level set real quick, right? Sheen registers for US IPO reportedly. They denied it. Yep. They're valued at around $66 billion. They have a couple of major shareholders who want slash need a big win. Okay. And there is. And very bad press in the United States, even going as far as regulated, saying, hey, we need to review this company. Got it.

So earlier this week and last week, Sheen flew some TikTok influencers that are Americans to do it. I wish you didn't laugh there. And it's like, how do we solve this problem? It's like, you know, instead of paying people $16 at making people work 16 hours a day, like maybe cap it at 12. Yeah. Nope.

It's like, no. Better solution. Yeah, we'll get private jets first class fly us and TikTok influencers. and solve the problem in two days. They'll solve it for us, right? UGC, ladies and gentlemen, UGC. Of course, that's what those workers need. Those workers need to be in a TikTok video

doing a TikTok dance. Yeah. Okay. Sheen flew TikTok influencers to a couple of its factories in China to try and help boost its image and then a insane backlash ensued. So, and flew this group of influencers out

to tour factories in Guangzhou. they toured, the influencers visited four factories while Sheen reportedly is, you know, has thousands of factories working in China, according to Time magazine. It's around 6,000 factories producing clothes for Sheen. They do not own their supply chain. So they're sort, they're like third party factories, I guess. Yep. They manage these factories using internal software. This is an aside, but I think it's pretty interesting. They use internal software that collects data and shows what items are trending, almost like an algorithm. And it boosts the most popular items on their website to the top. Kind of like how TikTok works.

It's kind of interesting. Yeah. So one influencer named Danny Carbonari had a really controversial TikTok that went viral where she basically did like a tour of the factory, said how amazing it was, how it was clean, that it was automated. So we have a 63 second TikTok that she made that we're going to show, which by the way was deleted because there was such a strong backlash against it. Okay, I want to see this. China trip has been one of the most life-changing trips of my life. Getting to see the whole process of Sheehan clothing from beginning to end with my own two eyes was so important for me. Making off the trip, I heading to the factory of the leading manufacturer for Sheehan was the perfect way to start.

I was really excited and impressed to see the working conditions. The next day, we headed to the Sheehan Innovation Center. This facility blew my mind. It's over 600,000 square feet. There's so much technology. And Sheehan is just such a developed and complex company, and it was so beautiful to see firsthand. I was able to interview a woman that worked in the fabric cutting department. And you guys know me.

She's an investigative journalist, so I asked her all of our questions. And she answered them honestly and authentically. She was very surprised at all the rumors that have been spread in the U.S. She told me about her family, her lifestyle, her commute, her hours. Her last stop was to the Sheehan warehouse. This place was massive. It's about 84 acres. And almost fully run by technology and automation.

I was really impressed by the extensive checklist that each item had to go through where it's shipped off. I think my biggest takeaway from this trip is to be an independent thinker, get the facts and see it with your own two eyes. There's a narrative fed to us in the U.S., and I'm one that always likes to be open-minded and seek the truth. So I'm grateful for that about myself. and I hope the same for you guys.

Oh, my God. That is the worst thing I've ever seen. Did they put a gun to her head or just give her a bag of diamonds to say that? The CCP wrote that script, basically. Did you know what she said about the woman who worked in the fabric cutting department who was an investigative journalist? I was like, what? Yeah. The whole thing makes no sense.

It is so scripted and so abhorrent. If you wanted to do that and you were in it, this is why investigative journalism is really important in society. This is why the Googles of the world should pay a licensing fee, like this whole thing going on in Canada we talked about previously. They really should be trying to send more support and money to investigative journalists, whether it's Reuters or the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times. They really should be trying to get some more money to those organizations. And if you should subscribe to them, if you can. Because this is not investigative journalists. This is a PR campaign by an ill-informed, easy. bought and sold influencer. I mean, if you're getting your news from an influencer, this is a bought and sold influencer. This person didn't mention the working conditions. She never used the word Uyghurs. She never used the word forced labor. She never said Tiananmen Square. If this person wants to see how free she is and that she is not a shell for the torture of humans or the unfair labor conditions or the sterilization and genocide of an entire race

of people, she should start her next TikTok video with, I looked at the history of the Uighurs. Here's what I read about the Uyghurs. Then she should do another follow video. Here is what I've learned about what happened to Apple News and the takeover Hong Kong and these people who wanted a bookstore and who were disappeared for two years. Here's what I learned about tanks running into Tiananmen Square. Here's what I learned about the worst labor conditions in China.

Go ahead and do those videos and see if they trend on TikTok. That's what she should do. Let me stop you right there. So after she posted this, she was the comments were. We're basically roasting her all over TikTok and Twitter. Obviously. And how old is this person? Is it 25?

I have no idea. She looks like she's in her 20s, I think. Yeah. I mean, what is this person now? I mean, like, honestly, I almost look at her as like, there's a term in, and I don't mean to say this to be cruel. There's a term useful idiot in international relations. And a useful idiot is like somebody who you can just flip really easily for propaganda

reasons. And so, like, the KGB, I think, came up with the term useful idiot. like they put people into buckets. And like a Trump or somebody like, you know, one of Trump's kids would be put into the bucket of useful idiot, right? He could just easily manipulate them. You could give them a little bit of money. You can give them a little bit of shine.

Could you kind of say that was like Tom Wamsgans, what he kind of signed up for to be the guy's useful idiot when he said, I can just take all the pain? Absolutely. Yes. I am willing to sing for my supper. You know, he just says it outright. I'm a pain sponge, I think is what he said. I'm a pain sponge.

He's a pain sponge. And he said, sure, I'll sing for my supper. says, why should you be CEO? And listen, useful idiot or I'm, you know, you can have a price and here's the price and you put me out there, I'll tap dance for you. And so for a young person, this is a hard lesson. I actually feel bad for her because I do think she's kind of like in the useful idiot category. And listen, I'm not saying that to say she's an idiot. I think she needs to understand that she's being manipulated and they gave her a first class ticket, which must be very exciting to go on a trip to China. And they probably gave her, what, 10 grand to do this, 20 grand as

an influencer. So if you're watching TikToks and you're getting used from an influencer, understand for 10 or 20K they will say whatever you want. Brian just added she's 30 years old. Okay, yeah. So I mean, she's she doesn't have enough experience in the world

to know that she's being manipulated or they give her a great price to be manipulated. Finn can't spill coffee on a white shirt or wave at someone who wasn't waving at them or burn its mouth on hot pizza, but Finn can resolve half of your customer support tickets instantly before they reach your team.

What's Finn? Finn is a breakthrough AI bot from Intercom, designed for customer support teams and ready to put other chatbots out of work. It learns your entire knowledge database and has the ability to carry conversations. And remember context and nuance while slashing your resolution times and support volume. Meet Finn, a breakthrough AI bot by Intercom, ready to join your support team today. Visit intercom.com slash finn. So after she eventually deleted this video later, but before she did, she wound up making a first response video where she basically called anyone that took issue with her taking the trip xenophobic and got even harsher responses from that.

Then she deleted both of her videos, the original one and the response, and then eventually released an apology video where she said she cut ties with Sheen. So Brian, if you want to cue that one up. Hey everyone. I wanted to come on here and clarify a couple things after yesterday's live. The first thing I want to make abundantly clear is I have terminated my relationship with Shean upon returning from the trip and I will no longer be aligned with them or work with them in any capacity now or ever in the future. I made a mistake. I made a huge mistake. I always try to lead with me, my younger self and my community in mind and I let us down. I did us wrong. I led us to the wrong path and I'm very aware of that now. I am ready to take accountability and look at myself

and look at my role in my industry and I'm going to take a couple weeks off. I'm going to reevaluate, rebalance, and I'm going to come back and I'm going to be better and I'm going to be stronger and I'm going to continue the fight for us in a new way and continue to be an even better pioneer for the plus size community. So thank you, and I'll see you then. All right. So snaps up for that apology. Well done.

And I will give her some instructions if she wants it. Well done. She takes full ownership of it. She was manipulated and she says, I'm never going to work with in the future. Remember I said earlier, Nick? Like, when you make these engagements, the danger for the people who are trying to use their money to human rights wash or to work or condition, factory wash. This is factory washing. I'll come up with that term. If you want a factory wash

and your sheen, if you do that and you get busted doing it, now it makes it even worse. Oh yeah. The cover-up is always worse than the crime. And so this is exactly my point about engagement. Eventually, somebody like LeBron James, who has, you know, really fought for human rights here and Black Lives Matter and all this stuff in the United States is rightfully called out for the human rights conditions and his involvement in China. And at some point, you know, he has to say, listen, my community is facing these human rights violations here, but I'm making this huge pile of cash here. I'm not going to take that huge pile of cash unless these things change, right?

And so this is exactly my point. Engagement can lead to the disengagement, the disengagement moment puts so much shine on the issues that it's actually good for the people who have those issues and the people who are suffering. So this is absolutely a fantastic outcome. And I would say she has an opportunity to do more here. She should do a series. And this is my best advice for, what's her name again?

Danny Carbinari. Okay, great. We'll post this to my TikTok, Danny. It was very brave of you to do the apology video and to break off all ties with Sheen. Congratulations on that. As somebody who worked at Amnesty International and has been passionate of human rights,

for 30 years. I want to give you a roadmap here. I highly recommend you get educated on the workers' conditions, and specifically those of the Uyghurs, the sterilization, the forced sterilization of women, and the Uighur community, the torture of the Uighurs, and also get educated on Tiananmen Square, the takeover of a Hong Kong,

and just workers' conditions generally. And you could become, through this turn of events, the greatest advocate for factory workers on TikTok and make a series of videos where you either interview and the same way you interviewed that woman who was an investigative journalist and you said, hey, listen, everything looks okay to me and you were in one of 6,000 factories, well, what about you visiting the worst of those 6,000 or you getting a video and you becoming an investigative journalist, and you exposing the suffering of the six worst sheen factories, as opposed to getting duped by the number one one, which they clearly made beautiful

and tried to dupe you and use your reputation to factory wash. Danny, you could become the number one advocate in the world for these people who are suffering, and not just in China. You could do this for any country where you think factory workers are suffering. and what a great legacy for you and what a great story. And you could be the hero of this story, Danny. You can be the hero who made a mistake, owned it, but then you could do more. You could

actually improve conditions with your voice. So bravo to you. Snap's up. That's it. Good. So are you buying the IPO or no? What's the deal? Oh, yeah. I was looking at the IPO prize and no, you know, listen, this is another way you can vote with your dollars. If you're an influencer, you can have influence.

So you should stick it to them. You should stick it to them. They duped you. They made you look stupid. They cause damage to your brand, Danny. Now, you should do the same to them. You should stay on sheen until the workers' conditions continue. You should be absolute beast, an animal, a wolverine, a berserker for human rights and factory

conditions. And, yeah, no, I think you do have to vote with your dollar when you're buying socks. and, you know, I wouldn't buy tobacco stocks. I'm, you know, I am not so cutthroat about winning that I feel I need to take every opportunity. I'm not acts from Axe Capital, right? Like, I think those hedge fund guys think a certain way. Any trade is worth doing, and the trade is the trade, and I'm just making a trade. Speaking about voting with your dollar, would you like some blue meat?

Oh, I got some blue meat for you, I think. Blue meat is that the opposite of my red meat? Yes, it is. I blew me. Okay. So we have a little bit of a Trump update today. But I promise the people that hate politics do not too now. This is not about politics.

I promise. It's financial mostly. Such nasty people at Twitter. Oh, your Trump impersonation is lagging. You got to get, yeah. Okay. Elon Musk, great rockets, terrible social network. Okay.

And Zuckerberg, Asperger's going to demolish him in the ring. I'll be there. Cuttside. Okay. All right. What's going on with Trump? Okay, so a couple of updates. One, he's considering coming back to Twitter, which has been floated for a while and, you know, is exciting for a lot of people.

And YouTube and Facebook, right? Isn't he back on those two? Did they end his fans? Okay. I think they ended the Facebook ban before the Twitter ban. And I don't know about YouTube, but I think all the platforms, since it's a presidential leading presidential candidate, let him back on. Okay. So, Axios reported that Trump is entertaining.

the idea of getting back on Twitter. He hasn't posted since his account was deactivated during January 6th, the riots, insurrection, whatever you want to call it. So for more than a year, he's been posting truths on his truth social app where he's a majority shareholder.

Yep. And let's just, there's more news about truth social that we need to get into. So it's hard to know exactly how many users that truth social has, how many active users rather, but reports online vary from somewhere

between 500K to 2 million. which seems like it tracks, right? That seems like a fair number, you think? Yeah, sure. I mean, it's basically a, it's the most mag of people who would download a, you know, a clunky piece of software to have a more direct relationship and get those faster because anything he says on there is quickly reposted to Twitter anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Because didn't he have, I think as part of his deal, he had to wait six hours between a post on truth and Twitter. That was, I think, the term they gave him in order for him to own all that. that money in TMTG. I'm not sure, but anyway, Truth Social is owned by Trump Media and Technology Group, also known as TMTG. You might know TMTG because they are the company that agreed to go public via SPAC by merging with DWAC, big acronym show today.

DWAC is Digital World Acquisition Corp. That's a SPAC. And that agreement happened back in October of 2021, right? So that date's important. Since then, and Brian, you could pull up the stock chart. The DWAC stock price has been all over the place. Insane surges. It was obviously $10 a share like most SPACs start at, ripped up to 94, went back down to 40, went back up to 97.

And it's basically, you know, I don't want to say vaporware, but it's truth social and like Trump's future media properties, whatever those may be, right? So you're basically just betting on Donald Trump to create some media properties. So the SPAC is still not closed, even though it first agreed to the merger in October 2021. Usually you see the DSPAC process within six to 12 months. It's been a lot longer since that. That's wild. So recently they extended the closing deadline to September 2020. And the reason that it's been postponed is because the deal is currently under investigation by both the SEC and FINRA,

FINRA obviously the financial industry regulatory authority. And just yesterday in just incredible news, three minutes. were charged with insider trading for buying D-WAC shares before the merger was announced and then selling for a profit. What idiots. I want you to strap your seatbelt in. Okay. One of the people charged is named Bruce Gerlich, Gerlich, Bruce Garlich, Bruce Garlick, something, G-A-R-E-L-C-K. I don't know how to say his name.

He was a director of the SPAC. You're kidding. Oh, my Lord. Okay. So this is the first question. is he the dumbest white collar criminal of all time? Pretty close. Yeah, I'd have to really think this through because whenever any kind of major

transaction goes on, people look at who bought the stock right before it. This is just a standard practice. So before a merger gets announced, you know, Slack's being bought by Salesforce, they would just go back and say, okay, show me the last 60 days. Anything unreasonable occurring here, right? And that's how they catch these folks. They catch them all, every time they get caught. Martha Stewart, everybody, doesn't matter if you're buying 10,000 shares or 10 million.

So this thing's going to get unwound. I thought would be my guess. Can I give a personal anecdote about this? Sure. So I worked on a SPAC presentation about a year ago. Oh. Everything is public now, obviously. But I remember as part of the, I had to sign an NDA that basically,

said. And again, this is a side? You did a side job? Yeah, you don't remember this? Oh, I gave the okay for it. You did give the okay for it? Of course you did. You think I'd ever take a side job without the okay? No, of course. I mean, it's how it works in a corporate America. I had to sign an NDA. I had, and basically, it was like, and again, this is a editor, right? The lowest person on the totem pole who means nothing to anybody. And it was like, if you buy shares or you tell someone and they buy shares, you will go to jail. It had big red flags everywhere. For the lowest person on the totem pole. Yes. This is the direct. of the SPAC that did this. How did this guy think that he wouldn't get... This is insane. I mean, people commit crazy crimes, and it's arrogance, entitlement, and stupidity all wrapped up in a ball. Like, if this was an SNL skit, they would throw it out because they'd be like, no, that's stupid.

That's just stupid. It was a plot point in a movie. You'd be like, too... This is dumb. Too dumb. Yeah, the person knows the rules. They sign the documents, yeah. So I think the more interesting part of this story is, you know, I think this will unwind

I think Trump loses whatever stake he had in this. I think it's worth us. It's just throw it in the garbage. There's no way when you have all of this, you know, all of all of these alleged crimes going on that you would want to go forward with this because it's going to result in a ton of lawsuits. So it's a disaster. But the bit more important thing is Trump needs Twitter. Trump needs YouTube. Trump needs Facebook.

He's got to get off truth anyway. So I think he can easily walk away from this and just say, listen. Truth social is great. We built a great product, but, you know, I need to be on these other platforms where a lot of the voters have asked me to be present, you know, and I got to meet the fans where they are. I can't just broadcast to 2 million people, even though it's a better product and I created a much better product. So he'll figure out a way to blame somebody else for this failure and set himself, even though he's the majority shareholder. If you're the majority shareholder, he should have got together. He said, this is the majority shareholder.

You're all fired off the board. These are five really highly competent people, but highly competent people don't. work with Trump. This is what we've learned. And every time highly competent people go try to help Trump, you know, who are like, well, he's our president. And this is my hope. I tried to give him a chance when he won the presidency. I said, yeah, maybe there'll be like a little of these good people, these generals and these like, you know, lifelong career servants who are trying to help him. The mooch? Be a great president. What's that? The mooch? Well, not that one, but, no, mooch is I, you know.

I like the mooch. I like the mooch. I was thinking like even earlier. I got you. I got you. earlier in his presidency, you know, Chief of Sets and Mattis and yeah, Mattis. I get maddog Mattis. I mean, he had a lot of really great people, or at least people with great reputations. I don't know anything personally, but you just thought they were like he'll rise to the occasion, even Pence, right? You know, may disagree with him about abortion and some other things and having lunch with women. You know, I have some differences in opinion with him on the margins. I might agree with him about other things. But like, wouldn't he, wouldn't they be able to help him rise to the to the office, right? And it,

The truth is, he is the ultimate iconoclass who listens to nobody, including his lawyers or including the smart people who brings around him. So you can't build a large enterprise without attracting great talent. He was unable, unable to attract great talent. The end. He'll be back. I mean, when he comes back to Twitter, oh, my God. That's going to just, I think it'll be like a 10% boost to engagement on Twitter when he comes back. It's going to be a total free-for-all when Trump comes back to Twitter.

I think it will be like a 10% boost in engagement on Twitter in terms of like users and everybody rushing back to hear what he's going to tweet next. And, you know, Twitter is pretty engaging right now because a lot of the voices who were silenced on Twitter are now back. So it will be a full contact, even more engaging free-for-all. What is that free-for-all mode when you play like a game? You know, like a first-person shooter. It'll be like one of those free-for-all modes where like 30 people are battling 30 people at once. It's going to be pure chaos. You're going to have the left, the right, moderate, everybody is going to be going crazy.

And the same thing with YouTube. I mean, if he just started doing YouTube live streams, it would be incredible. I would highly encourage him to, if I was Trump, I would take a, I would do a combination of Twitter and YouTube live. because YouTube Live seemed to work pretty well, the live streams. It's certainly going to be interesting. All right. And then the last story for today. Quick hit, quick hit.

The quick hit, there you go. So over the past year, for people that don't know if you don't live in San Francisco or one of these areas, Waymo, which is owned by Google and Cruise, have both launched self-driving taxi fleets in limited areas. So Waymo's main markets are San Francisco and Maricopa County in Arizona, and Cruz is operating in SF, Austin, and Phoenix. and police are now requesting self-driving car footage as video evidence for different crimes. So just yesterday, Bloomberg published a report where it found nine search warrants for footage from Waymo self-driving cars and one search warrant that was sent to Cruz. And the story referenced the 2021 scenario where footage from Waymo from a Waymo self-driving car was used in a case where an Uber driver was murdered between shifts in San Francisco. And Waymo and Cruz basically state that they require warrants and court orders before they provide any footage, and they aim to provide the minimum amount of data necessary and object to overboard requests. And both companies blur license placed in faces to protect bystanders' privacy when the footage is requested.

But yeah, it's pretty crazy. Fantastic. There will never be an at-scale, zodiac killer again, to just use a San Francisco analogy. if you just think about kidnappings, serial killers, and just other random crimes, or even crimes where, you know, there's like a riot or something like that or looting. I think anybody who lives in a city

should be thrilled with this, provided there is a backstop, which is you need to get a warrant. And the warrant needs to be approved by a judge and the people who own the surveillance footage are purging it on some regular basis. Maybe, you know, they keep it for a year or two. So if you needed footage, like a child was abducted,

if a child was abducted in your neighborhood in Pack Heights, God forbid. And you said, listen, the child was abducted on this day. And we knew it was during these 12 hours because there were witnesses or, you know, the child, we knew when the child went missing or the teenager went missing, you could immediately pull up every Waymo in the, city and then do facial recognition for the child, who would not approve that? So I'm sure people in San Francisco will try to ban this.

Oh, yeah. But all you have to do is, as a person in San Francisco, put yourself in the shoes of a victim. And that's what I always do here. As a victim of a crime, God forbid, your child was abducted or God forbid there was a hit and run and you lost a loved one. Wouldn't you want to have the footage of that person from these mobile surveillance devices? and I was driving in San Francisco the other night I went to a dinner. And there were just a ton of Waymo's around or Waymo and Cruz.

I must have saw 10 of them maybe in one night. Do the cruises still have the cameras like wrapped all around them? Of course. They all do. They all have cameras. It's like the big part of the technology. Right. I'm saying like the rig is like built on top of the car.

Oh yeah. These are major rigs that cost I think 50K still to this day, 100K worth of technology on them. It's the opposite of the Teslas, which is maybe I think 10K worth of five or 10K worth of technology. I'm not sure what the price point is. I'm guessing here, maybe it's 5K because LIDAR are so expensive. But not only should this be allowed, it should be encouraged and people should look at it as a fantastic way to make cities safer. Now, it would be terrible if the companies were using it. So there should be some legislation or, you know, some

guard rails. I don't know where this has to occur, if it has to be laws or not, that the companies can only keep this data for some amount of time and they can't use it themselves. to do facial recognition. So we wouldn't want Google through Waymo doing facial recognition and knowing, oh, Jason was in Union Square shopping and we saw him go into the Prada store. And now we're going to give him Prada ads. Right. So there should be some access log.

There's got to be an access log. There has to be, if they're going to be on public streets, they shouldn't be able to do facial recognition. Now, you don't have an expectation of privacy on the streets, but you also don't have a expectation that, you know, Google would be recording you on the streets and then putting it to the database that they spotted you, which they could easily do. And license plates come into play here.

There's a great piece of technology. We had the company on the speaking startups a couple of times where a community can track the license plates coming in and out of your town. So block safety. And, you know, if you live in a town and you have a crime wave and you could know all of the license plates coming in and out and you recorded it for, 30 days. And if there was a crime, you could say, show me all the license plates of people who came into the town who hadn't previously been in the town. So you can say, here are the license plates

that have coming and out of the town 50 times or more. Give me all the ones that are, you know, 10 or under. And then, you know, and that we're here on these three days when the crime, the crime, the crime wave occurred or a murder or a murder or child abduction, then it becomes easier for you to parse this. So in the case of a murder or child abduction, you said, hey, give me all the new license plates here. And you just went down and say, hey, what were you, you, doing in Venice, California? What were you doing in Santa Monica on this day? And, you know, the detectives just went to anybody who were in Santa Monica on this Sunday in this 10 block area. And the person says, yeah, I go to yoga. No harm or foul. I don't mind if you come knock on my door

and you're like, hey, there was a child abducted. Why were you in Santa Monica? I'm like, yeah, come on in. I'll make a cup of coffee. And I was in Santa Monica because I was doing yoga at this hot yoga place. Here's a receipt. Yeah. Can I ask you a business product question? Sure. Have you written in one of these yet? I have not. I got invited to the cruise beta. I just haven't had a chance yet. I think that these are still maybe five years away from being a mass product,

but I was just using the Tesla full self-driving in a small town that had roads where, you know, when you go to some small towns, there are some roads where you can fit like 1.5 cars and you have to like. No divider. No divider, really. And it's just a little suspect. And it nailed it. And I was pretty impressed.

And I use self-driving 100% of the time when I'm on the highway because it's just more accurate than I am at staying in the lane and keeping perfect distance. Obviously, it's going to be. But I have been reticent to use it on like back roads or in towns, mainly because they don't need it in a town. And there are humans jumping out in the street. But what I'm starting to realize is it actually is the Tesla FSD. is actually doing such a good job there, we might be very close to a tipping point where it's safer than me on those roads.

And I think it might actually be safer than me right now. I don't have the statistics, safer than a human. But I don't think that means they can take the steering wheel out and have driverless yet. The reason why crews can do this is they have a very confined corridor

and they can turn them off. They're not essential. They're not your only option. So if there was rain or if there was a protest or if there was snow, there are conditions where, like, maybe you don't want these things running. You just turn them off. It's not a big deal.

And what is the pitch to consumers that it's going to be cheaper than a normal Uber ride and safer? I think it will be eventually cheaper. How much cheaper we'll see. Because, you know, Uber rides are pretty cheap already. But if you do take the driver out, that's probably a third of the cost or something or half the cost. But you then add in the cost of the, you know, self-driving stuff. So I do think in five years, it'll be 50-50 if you're in a self-driving car in a major city or in some cities or in a, you know, in a robo-taxy versus a not-robotaxie. I think it's going to be, we're getting close to the tipping point because obviously these things are working now.

But there's also societal acceptance and legislation and then, God forbid, just like with Uber, somebody's going to get killed in a car, which happens. and that could pause it. So already they're trying to stop it in San Francisco because during an emergency situation, the cars don't know what to do. So that's an edge case that they'll easily be able to work on, which is if there's an emergency situation, like a shooting or a fire,

these things need to get out of the way. So what should happen when they need to get out of the way is if there is an emergency situation on a remote basis, they should be able to just pull them over to the side of the road, and they should be required to be able to get somebody there within 10 minutes or less to take the car out of the way. Or they should have the ability to let the police officer get behind the wheel and just drive it out of the way. That would be a fine solution too, where they could just say remote access turned on, hey, police officer, jump in,

you know, just drives like a regular car, right? Put it in a regular car driving mode. So there's like a really easy solution. Press a button. Anybody can drive this thing off, you know, off and put it on the side of the road or something. And then we'll send somebody an operator. So that would be an easy solution. If you're running one of these robotoxy things, you have to have remote operators stationed 24 hours a day in the city. Yeah. Ready to take over. I'm really curious what the price point is where people are like, oh, I need to do this

instead of getting an Uber. Is it half the price where people? People might prefer it eventually because you have more privacy or the perception of more privacy. In fact, you do have cameras in them. I would say for me, 20, 30% cheaper would make it a no-brainer. under that, I don't know if I care. I honestly don't care. Either way I would do it,

I believe they'll be safe enough. I do think, you know, like on the highway, some people might be freaked out. That's why they're not running on highways, you know, I'm surprised they're running in SF because it's so insane

with some of the roads in the hills. I could totally see Phoenix, right, where it's flat, it's a grid, it's very simple, but San Francisco gets a little crazy on some of the streets. They're not doing it in all of San Francisco. They've picked a certain section

of San Francisco for them to run in. Right. And then what that does is they can look at all the most challenging moments in that area and really refine it. So it's all about edge cases now. You know, that weird road where, you know, becomes 1.5 lanes or their stop signs that are hidden. So somebody just shared a, there are some roads and intersections still in the United States that just have not been fully considered if it should be a stop sign or a red light or where the placement of the cameras are. So these self-driving cars, specifically Tesla's FSD, are finding those. Because the FSD, let's say a stop sign, is covered by trees.

And it misses it. Well, it might be the government's, you know, the local municipality is not clearing the trees fast enough for the stop signs. And somebody actually showed an example of that on Twitter reason. Yeah, definitely. All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of this week in startups. Great job, Nick. I think what's going to happen is now the audience is going to say you have to do this every time because you're so good at it.

And you have such a great knowledge of the this week in Startups Corpus and things I've said on other podcasts because you've been listening to me for a couple of years. Four years now. Four years. Amazing. Congratulations. All in Summit is occurring in September. Tickets are, I think, sold out for everything but the VIP. And I think just fair warning for folks.

I don't have free tickets to give you. Basically, each bestie got an allocation of 25 tickets, which I'm using for my family. And for LPs in our fund, I will not be able to give them to our founders. I will not be able to give them to friends. So if you want to come and buy a VIP ticket, do that now. The general admission tickets are sold out, but I might have access to some of them if you want to buy the $1,500 tickets. And I think scholarships, you can apply for one.

It is unlikely you'll get one unless you are in a group that maybe is underrepresented at it. But write a thoughtful essay there. And I hope to see you at the All In Summit. Founder University is starting up at sixth class. If you want to go to founder. You can sign up there. If you're interested in being an LPNR fund or just learning more about that,

launch.co slash memo. And I teach Angel University two courses now, like a 101 course, introductory to Angel investing and then an advanced course on how to select companies and evaluate companies. So that deep evaluation of companies

is the 2.0 course. You see both of those at angel. dot university, all the proceeds from that, all the profits from that. Go to charity and we think we hit 200K over the last five years teaching that course. Angel thought university

and we'll see you all next time on this week's service. Bye bye. On behalf of the producers and the partnership team, thank you for listening to episode 1771. We'd like to take one more time to thank our partners. Squarespace, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at Squarespace.com slash twist.

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