This Week in Startups - Slack’s troubles inside Salesforce, crypto trader gets jail time, DoNotPay’s robo-lawyer | E1655

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

First up, J+M cover the problems at Slack and Salesforce (3:00), before breaking down the anti-competitive issues with bundling software to harm competitors. (13:34) Then, they talk about the comeuppance from "A-players" regarding the lack of efficiency in big tech (26:35), a 10-month jail sentence for crypto inside trading (39:52), and DoNotPay's AI-based robo-lawyer taking a case! (51:14) (0:00) J+M tee up today's topics! (3:00) Breaking down the recent rift between Slack and Salesforce (12:00) AgeTech Collaborative - Find out more and apply at https://agetechcollaborative.org/twist (13:34) Issues with bundling, did Salesforce overpay for Slack? (25:00) AgeTech Collaborative - Find out more and apply at https://agetechcollaborative.org/twist (26:35) Lack of efficiency as a lightning rod at big tech companies, management styles (38:22) Nutrisense - Use code TWIST and get $30 off at nutrisense.io/twist (39:52) The brother of a former Coinbase PM was sentenced to 10 months in prison for using tips from his brother to make $900K (51:14) DoNotPay's robo-lawyer will be used in a court case, OpenAI will pilot a paid version of ChatGPT (1:06:51) Jason ends with an emotional video from Ke Huy Quan's Golden Globes acceptance speech FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

All right, welcome back. Everybody, it's Wednesday. And we got a good show for today. At the end of the show, I'm going to talk about a video clip that made me cry last night. And we'll see if it makes Molly cry today. I don't know if it's going to or not, but I have my tissue box. You're ready to go. But I think I might. If you've ever met me, you do not want to take the under on this bet.

However, we'll see. We'll see. There's news too. Yeah, we're going to talk about the drama going on at Slack, get a little deeper. into what may have happened with the Slack Salesforce culture integration and dive a little deeper into whether bundles are the king of a downturn or just unfair business practice. And we've been talking about the malfeasance and fraud in crypto for a decade here on the show. And we speculated, hey, the speeding tickets that we saw, Kim Kardashian Floyd Mayweather again

and some light action would eventually result in the perp walks, in people actually doing prison time today we're going to talk about the brother of a coin base manager getting 10 months in the big house for insider training front running the market and I think this is my theory this is the minnow then they get the tuna and then they get the big sharks in the whales this is part of the process of flipping up to get the bigger uh frautsters in crypto and sam bank mcfried being uh maybe perhaps the ultimate well so yeah and then on big on AI watch we live in the future as AI starts to potentially become people's lawyers in the courtroom. And then we'll talk more generally about what that could mean for overhauling the legal profession and people's access to justice because my God, are things moving fast in the AI world?

I mean, if you ask chat GPT to defend you in court, would that be better or worse in the next five years than having the average public defender? It's an interesting question. Exactly. Or not. We do a better job. denied access to that at all. Yeah. It's anyway.

It's going to be. And then, of course, we wrap with that wholesome weeper of a moment. Oh, well, we'll see. We'll see. It's going to be a great show.

Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by age tech collaborative. Startups. Your go-to market team is waiting. Age Tech Collaboratives cutting edge accelerator program connects you with investors, test beds, like-minded innovators, and industry expertise.

They're taking age tech to the next level. Join them at agtechcollaborative.org slash twist. And Nutrisense combines cutting-edge technology and human expertise so you can see how your body responds to different food, exercise, stress, and sleep in real time. By pairing a CGM with their app and expert dietitian guidance, Nutrisense can help you reach your health goals. Use code Twist and get $30 off at NutraSense.io slash twist. All right, everybody.

We, you know, I'm going to become that person this year. I've decided to double down on being that person. I have been saying that something is going on at Salesforce. And with every passing week, more stuff keeps happening at Salesforce. In this case, there's some drama at Slack. Oh. That probably stems from underperformance. but more and more information is coming out about some various dysfunctions at Salesforce

and its acquisition Slack, of course, Salesforce bought Slack for almost $28 billion about two years ago, and now Slack is underperforming. Okay. You know, there could be various reasons. It is likely not helped, let's say, exacerbated dramatically by the fact that Microsoft started bundling what is effectively Slack's core office. for free into office. So that's Microsoft Teams.

Teams, exactly. Microsoft comes along like, oh, we have teams. We'll just make that free. And all of a sudden, everybody's like, well, I'm not paying extra for Slack because our whole organization's already on Microsoft. And now we have that. And then, of course, just a few weeks ago, Slack founder and CEO, Stuart Butterfield announced that he would be stepping down and leaving Salesforce, which was almost certainly

due to the fact that he had vested, that his options had fully vested because it was exactly two years after Slack first agreed to be acquired. However, sometimes you get rich and you keep your job that you love. And he definitely did not. And he is being replaced by a long-time Salesforce executive, Lydiaan Jones, not by someone that he handpicked. Of course, Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor stepped down. A couple dozen salesports executives have left over the past year. Then last week, Slack held an all-hands meeting, which included Stewart and his new replacement, Lydia Ann Jones. The meeting was focused on the clashing cultures

between Slack and Salesforce, yes. And Stuart Butterfield responded to a question about that by admitting that he, quote, wasn't very successful integrating the two cultures. He said, the problem has been there's no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture. And unless there is some element of that,

then it's not integration in any sense. It's just the elimination. Okay. This is a common issue in the MNA world. We saw this acutely at Microsoft and Google before.

And the best practice in Silicon Valley is if you buy something with a strong culture, you leave it be. Let it have a separate building. Let it have a separate P&L. And if there are things that you can take off their plate like, say, infrastructure in YouTube's case, or the ad network in the YouTube case, Google, YouTube, most people would consider that the greatest

acquisition of all time. Why would people consider YouTube being acquired by Google as the greatest acquisition of all time? Well, they bought it for $1.6 billion. It's worth $250 to $500 billion if it was a standalone business. It does tens of billions of dollars in revenue. And it has grown massively. And when it was purchased, it was on debt store. They had the giant sword over their head. They were about to be decapitated by a lawsuit and also by their server bills. Google solved both those problems. And yeah, greatest acquisition ever. Also up there, Instagram, right? Instagram continued to grow.

Maybe a little heavy-handed at the margins with, you know, forcing stories into there. But they did stories better than even... Than Snapchat had done. Snapchat did. So what's happening here is, I think, a weak corporate culture at Slack. And, you know, like, or maybe because Stewart's not there, there's nobody to protect the Slack team. There's nobody to defend them. There's nobody to say, no, we don't do it that way here anymore.

And then you put- Well, Butterfield seems to be saying to be clear that he had not been doing that for the last two years. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, this is the problem. When founders check out, it's up to the acquiring company to then make these decisions. Oh, also Zappos, rest in peace, Tony Shea. Amazon did a great job of letting Zappos just run.

Right. And not trying to force Amazon culture on Zappos culture, which Zappos culture was quite unique, especially when compared to Amazon's culture quite unique. I think it's interesting that Slack seems to have gotten the worst of both worlds here, which is that Salesforce didn't defend against the Microsoft move by folding Slack into Salesforce products. Because here you have this situation, and there was an interesting anecdotal story from a Wall Street Journal article today.

interviewed the chief information officer at Carrhart, which by the way is like huge right now with the kids again. Love to see it. The CIO said that Slack did not make Salesforce any more useful to Carhart. Because Carhart was already using Microsoft. And then Teams came along and Slack did nothing. And this is a company that had both. It seems to me that Salesforce did two things wrong here.

One, they didn't see the competition coming. And maybe they didn't pour the resources into Slack to improve its offering so that they wouldn't be so easily killed off by Microsoft. And they didn't just absorb it and integrate it into Salesforce to make Salesforce that much more of a powerful product for customers who already use Salesforce. So they have like, so Slack literally got the worst of both acquisition stories. It was left vulnerable to competition and it was not integrated by the parent company in a way that would make its core product stronger.

Yeah. There's a quote. I think it was culture each strategy for breakfast. and you have the best strategy in the world, hey, here's how we're going to compete with Microsoft, etc. But if you don't have the right culture at the company to execute on that, you could have problems.

And here there's a culture problem and a strategy problem. We put the two together. What do you get? You get declining quarterly growth. They're growing at like six and a half, seven percent now. They were growing at 10%. You get that.

That could all be explained by the Microsoft headwind, right? It could just be anybody who's got the office suite just says, hey, we have this. We don't need to put Slack in. We don't need to have a separate system. And then the other strategy, okay, we incorporate this into Salesforce. I'm a Slack user.

I don't want to log into Salesforce to go to Slack. I like Slack as it's like beautiful little independent thing for me, you know. I like the best of breed software. Just like I like Notion as my best of breed document management and Coda. I like Zoom, you know, as my best or breed. everybody wants a suite of products. Some people like, you know, best of breed.

And that's one of the philosophical things that's going on in corporate America right now. And you need to really be best of breed. And so maybe Slack, using the Slack product, I have to say, I love huddles. I think that product's gotten really good. Yeah. They're supposedly going to have some documents involved. I mean, supposedly. This is where I think, this is where I think this was a miss, right?

Salesforce may have, and we don't know, but this is the kind of thing that happens when you are acquired and you're not core. They may have been starved of the resources that they needed to build in those things,

like documents. And like, you know, I mean, huddles came kind of late to the game. So they were prevented. So again, they were prevented from becoming best in breed. And now that's happening at a time

when like best in breed is great. But if all anybody can afford as bundles, like think about it. If you could only pay for Zoom or Slack. Yeah. Right? Like one of those

could get killed because huddles now have video, but Zoom you could just do audio which is kind of like a huddle. Like if Zoom had chat, like if one of these, either Slack or Zoom

could pretty easily kill the other with a new feature set. I feel like Slack's closer to killing Zoom. So we'll Salesforce let them, right? Because Zoom can be more nimble in theory. Zoom added channels.

I went into it like twice. I added a couple people and I was like, this is poorly designed. Yeah. The design is ugly and it's not intuitive. And Slack has gorgeous UX and design. And so, I feel like Slack,

if I had to pick one, I'd pick Slack with huddles, then Zoom with channels. Right. And then now imagine that your company pays for Microsoft. Yeah, that isn't a brand. You're not going to have Zoom or Slack. No, of course not.

Staseration, baby. Like bundles in a downturn, bundles get hot again. Best of breed does not matter. Hey, everybody. It's time for a special interview with an old friend of mine, Rick Robinson. He is the GM of Age Tech Collaborative, which is brought to you by our friends at AARP, which I think, correct me if I'm not, at 52 as of last week. Am I able to be in AARP now?

You are welcome to join. Oh, man, you and I got old. Yes. What happened? This is amazing. You guys are really excited about engaging the startup community in building technology for folks who are getting up there in age. Yeah, it's really exciting for us developing the H-Tech Collaborative to try to put a focus on what we call H-Tech. And you might be wondering, like, what is H-Tech?

Well, it's the intersection of longevity and technology, really. These are health tech companies. These are FinTech companies. these are wellness companies. Essentially, it's going to be almost every company because the market, 50 plus, is becoming so enormous that they can't be ignored. And then you've got a lot of people who are supporting that market, who can be any age. It's kind of a white space because not a lot of product developers and marketers and startups and investors have put a lot of focus on this, but it's huge and it's growing. In fact, it's around $8.5 trillion in terms of economic value

in the U.S. right now. All right. Thanks, Rick. When you're selling, into the 50 plus market, having relationship with AARP gives you a bunch of credibility. Of course, in the meantime, you can go learn more about the Age Tech Collaborative at AgeTech Collaborative. Dotter.org slash Twist. And join us later in the program and you hear more about the age tech collaborative and how they help innovative startups succeed. I think this is where startups are unique in the world. Startups are really looking for cutting edge technology. They're small teams under 1,000 people, under 500 people. And you're like, if I can use my SaaS software, if Coda or Notion or Zoom or Slack give me or Airtable, whatever it is,

gives me that 10, 20% advantage over a competitor who's using a Microsoft bundle. Maybe they say, you know, well, the CIO, the CTO of the company at Carhart or whoever made this top-down decision. But, you know, the scrappy companies might want the little added functionality that you can only do in some of those products and they want the product velocity. So that's really what makes a nice competitive landscape. Here's David Sacks explaining and he's a free market, you know, a monster like the rest of us.

He has concerns about the bundling, and he thinks, hey, maybe this is a place, Lena Khan could spend some time. Here's 65 seconds from Molly's Bestie Sachs. I do think that Microsoft is a little bit unique in its ability to bundle.

So Tramatha is right about the power of the bundling. What they do is, I think it's called the E5 bundle. They have all these products. that virtually all enterprises use from office to, you know, active directory to, you know, there's like a whole long list of them. And so what they've done is they've created one price

for all of those products they sell as a bundle under a wall-to-wall enterprise license. And what they do is when they see a new competitor come along, whether it's Slack or Zoom or Octa, is they'll basically just clone it, create a worse version of that product, and throw it into the bundle. And so now every single end,

enterprise is getting the Slack clone or the Zoom clone or whatever for free. And that has a huge material impact on, you know, it pulls the rug out from under those startups. So now, that's not to say that Microsoft product is anywhere near as good as those, those competitors, but, you know, now of a sudden the Microsoft product is on a marginal basis free. Yeah, there it is. I mean, he explained it perfectly.

I always knew that Sacks and I were destined to become best. friends. Yeah. Because here's a piece I wrote in November 2021 for the Atlantic. Oh, okay. Uh-huh. That we have ready, I believe, to pull up here. Yeah.

There we go. Oh. Let's scroll up to the top. How has Microsoft escaped the scrutiny of reinvigorated antitrust regulators? There it is. And the piece goes on to note that Microsoft is still doing the thing that it got taken down for by the Justice Department in the 90s. And if you do a find here for bundling.

you'll find it. Because that is what they're, oh, look it is. They were sued for illegally bundling, and they still are. And I believe I mentioned Slack in this piece as quite specifically an example of how Microsoft is still doing all of the things,

all of the things that they've been doing all along. I wonder, it was a big part of it also was their OEM relationship. So those original equipment manufacturers, they kind of put a gun to their head and said, if you take Windows, you've got to put this on the desktop, this being internet explorer, right? Exactly.

So I think that they were barred from doing that, but bundling no. And then I think about it from a consumer basis, if something becomes a standard, there should be competition. So this is a very delicate concept here. The thing that people really hated back in the Bill Gates days was a concept of vaporware.

Not only, you know, would they copy something. Bill Gates would tell the sales team, tell everybody we have a Lotus Notes competitor coming out in six weeks or six months or whatever it was, allegedly. But I don't think it was alleged because I experienced it.

The Microsoft folks would be like, hey, yeah, we got a Lotus 1, 2, 3 competitor. You probably don't want to install a Lotus. And then this concept, this meme, right? This is where language is so important. Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM.

Nobody ever got fired for picking Microsoft. So in the IT business, which I was part of in the 90s, these two things became, you know, best practices. Nobody got fired for picking Microsoft. So in this case,

they still don't. I mean, I don't think Microsoft is, I don't think Microsoft is doing anything wrong here necessarily, right? Like, it may be somewhat anti-competitive, but not illegally monopolistic. Those are two distinct things. And I think, what I think is so interesting about the Salesforce Slack story is that I think Salesforce screwed it up specifically. I think this is a Salesforce issue. One, they bought Slack for a lot of money for $28 billion.

Yep. Based, I think, on kind of a bubble perception, right? Like, Slack is awesome because a lot of startups use it and it's hot in Silicon Valley, like Notion, like this and that. Forgetting that out in the rest of the, and they left Slack vulnerable to competition. So they forgot that out in the rest of the world, nobody is getting fired for using Microsoft and didn't necessarily invest in making Slack the kind of thing that could get

huge at the enterprise level. And then 2 or B, like I said earlier, failed to integrate it into their core product to shore up Salesforce itself and make Salesforce that much more indispensable. Here's the thing. I blame Benny Off. Hot take.

There it is. You know, they paid, if you look at the, the current run rate, $400 million a quarter for Slack. I think they paid like 17 times what they're currently making, right? $28 billion divided by $1.6 billion. I think you get to like almost $20. It's like $17.5 or so.

So it's not the worst purchase in the world if it keeps growing. They can grow into it. It won't be a terrible acquisition. So I wouldn't say like they caught the knife. This thing is collapsing. It's still growing. It's still an important piece of software. But this should be like alarm bells are going off at sales for.

that their culture is inefficient or doesn't, they don't have an innovative enough culture here because in a competitive vertical like this, when you have people bundling, you got to up your game. And this is where like founders or, you know, very rarely, a non-founder can operate a founder's vision better than the founder. Two examples come to mind. Susan Wojewski and Salar with YouTube. I think they even took Chad Hurley's vision.

and even took it to another level because they had globalized Google already. And Chad had it. It's no dick to Chad. He had this incredible vision. But because Susan and Solar had been part of Google going to 100 countries, they knew the potential there. They had the playbook, as it were. And then the other one is obviously Tim Cook being able to take all the innovations that were backed up from Steve Jobs, including the iPhone and the iPad, just to extraordinary innovations. and milk them for every penny they can make

and just keep logistics the hell out of it. I mean, he did supply chain the heck out of it. And he did look at that supply chain and say, hey, well, what if we had our own chips? Right. And so there were some strategic decisions that I think Tim Cook was really able to do that maybe, you know, who knows if Steve Jobs would have,

I mean, Steve Jobs did hire him and did empower him, but maybe Apple's performance right now is even better on a financial basis because Tim Cook is still cut, throughout about that. And I just want to say, I had a premonition. Apple is doing so amazing. I think there's stocks at like a 52-week low or something crazy like that.

Can we put up the Apple chart for a second here? And I've been watching the stock market, you know, bounce along the bottom, right? Since I did my J-trading. I'm still down a bit on J-trading. You pull up the J-trading page if you want to. But you start looking at that one-year chart for Apple. My lord. You know, and then you look at the five-year.

You know, they've been flat with revenues going going crazy. And so this company is trading out a very reasonable P.E. here. And I get the sense that they're going to knock

the ball out of the park with the headset. I think the problem with headsets is use case and fit and finish you know, how they feel. Yeah. Oh my God, those two things,

we've talked about this ad nauseum. And so I haven't j-traded in months because I've been watching the world come apart. I thought, hey, this will be a good time to take a pause and see where this ends up. I kind of feel like, again, I thought it was a double-dip recession. Here we are in the double dip.

Feels like things are starting to turn over. I feel like it's going to be a rough, you know, two or three more quarters of chop, maybe four even. Sticking on my same prediction, six to, eight quarters of schlog and a double-dip recession.

I may have to J-trade into Apple. Oh, no. Apparently you're doing it. But my J-trading's not that bad. If you go to J-trading, I think I'm off like compared to, let's see, if I had bought an index, just to be intellectually honest here, I'd be down 2.39, and my current portfolio is down 9.7%.

Now I'm investing in tech. I believe tech's out of bottom. And so I'm trailing the market by seven points. I'm okay with it. And of course, the things that I'm up on are the things that I bought last. So, you know, I think it's an issue of timing. But the meta-Netflix, Adobe, Shopify trades have been great. My Amazon trades were a little rough.

Also, you saw the Stitchpix news this week, right? She's coming back. She's coming back. Is she coming back permanently or is it a temporary thing? And they made it sound like it's a temporary thing, which I think is a little odd. but I can tell you from my sources on the inside or very recently on the inside that people are stoked. I mean, she's so dynamic. Like she just is one of those people that you want to believe in.

And people are pretty thrilled. In case you miss this news, by the way, current Sitchfick CEO Elizabeth Spalding is leaving after a year and a half on the job. Yeah. That was a failed, I mean, she was trying to execute a turnaround in a really tough time.

Didn't work out. Katrina Lake is coming back in where authority being termed an interim role right now. So I'm just saying that trade could turn around. That trade could turn around pretty quick. I feel like Disney and Amazon are going to be great companies going forward.

Disney's made a little rebound too. Mm-hmm. So I'm still bullish on all these trades. I was looking at the trades and I was like, who would I sell in this group? Who do I think? Stitch Fix, Disney, Amazon, Warner Brothers, Taiwan, Sam, Conductor, Shopify, Disney, Robin Hood, Uber, Apple, Adobe, Netflix, Facebook. Which one of these don't I want to own?

And I was like, I don't still love all these names and we'll be going into earning season. So it'd be good to look at when I made these trades and what's changed since, you know, that point in time. Yeah. Hey, everybody. It's time for a special interview with an old friend of mine. Robinson. He is the GM of Age Tech Collaborative, which is brought to you by our friends at AARP. So how does the collaborative work? How do you help companies and investors kind of access these companies and these markets? So essentially what we do is we look for companies,

we incubate them, we invest in them, and then we bring them into this new environment we call the Age Tech Collaborative Community. So yes, we have pitch competitions that we run throughout the year, themed, and some of them are open mic style. And it's a way for us to source and find great early stage companies, usually pre-series A. We invite some of them into our accelerator program, which is extremely high touch, eight weeks, four times a year, where we bring in aging experts. We help get them best prepared to deliver their product or service to the market. And as I mentioned, we often invest in these companies. And then they graduate into the ACHT collaborative community, which is an online platform that makes a

an ecosystem that we're developing that includes, of course, the startups, investors, test bed organizations, enterprises, and business services, all in this one online environment where they can support and draw from one another. Great. So there's an online community that people can go visit. They can go visit that at agtechcollaborative.org slash twist. Agetech collaborative.org slash twist. And so if you want to build in that market, if you want to sell into that market, if you want to invest in that market, is a great way for you to partner with AARP, correct? Absolutely, yep.

I do think efficiency in companies is becoming a major issue. I saw in one of my group chats, you know, John Carmack was leaving Meta. We saw that in December, and he kind of lit some things on fire on the way out. But then Boz, who's the CTO, he had some choice words about how inefficient things are at Meta. Now, meta has been turning it around. in terms of layoffs and maybe cutting spending, but I think it's worth looking at this in relation to the Salesforce story,

which is corporate bloat and the lack of nimbleness that you expect at IBM or Microsoft, very large companies, very huge international companies, it's kind of getting embedded into what were previously nimble companies, the Googles, the Salesforce, and the Facebooks now feel

like they're having bloat too many people involved in decision. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that moment. Yeah, 100%. I mean, years ago, I was like, I want to write a book called Scale about how scale actually ruins everything, right? Like, you just, I mean, growth, unchecked growth is cancer. Yeah. And it kills you. And you have these companies that have had just such growth. And you have a decline. We've talked about this a whole bunch, a decline in managing as a skill set. Yeah. And, and like a respect for what managing even means. And then no training. And even now, it's so interesting.

Like, that's the class that everybody's like, oh, you just got to get rid of managing. And it's like, okay, well, you can do that if you're only ever going to be 30 people or maybe 20. But at some point, actually, you really do have to care about managing because then if you don't, then what happens is you get Andrew Bosworth writing about your 18,000 person division. He's talking about reality labs and saying every week. I see, he said, we've solved too many problems by adding headcount. This is according to an internal memo obtained by the verge. But adding headcount also adds overhead and overhead makes everything slower.

Every week I see documents with 100 plus editors. He wrote to the roughly 18,000 people in reality labs, a meeting with 50 plus people that took a month to schedule. Sometimes there is even a pre-meeting with its own document. I believe the current situation is unten. he wrote. And that's why Carmack apparently left too. It was just like, we can't get anything done. And he said things had been really a struggle. So this is the truth positive that A players can get very frustrated with bloat. Yeah. And when I was at AOL, you know, coming in as an entrepreneur, an A player, by estimation, to a company that was filled with, I'm not going to say not A players. I'll just say lifers. You know, they had been at AOL for over 10 years.

Yeah. They had gotten very comfortable. They had very, the pay. packages, the scale of going from a director to a vice president to a senior vice president, to a senior vice president, it was juicy. And I could see somebody, you know, with a family and kids and, uh, you know, maybe didn't want to take risk or, you know, wasn't as risk inclined at that point in their life, you know, somebody who's 40 years old with three kids in private school, you're like, yeah, and a mortgage, you're like, oh, if I get to that next wrong and it kicks in this, it kicks in that. It was pretty great. You know, they were maxing out pension. And that pension's maxing out 401 case, all that stuff.

And I remember one time I came into Jim Bancoff's office, who now runs Vox. And, you know, it was like one of my first days. And I just dropped by his office to say, hi, I happened to be in the building. And he's, you know, this little portico window kind of situation. I just kind of waved it. I mean, he waves me. And I come in. He's on mute.

And he starts talking to me. And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt your call. He's that guy, it's a standing call. I'm like, what do you mean? It's a standing call, you know, like, we just have this call. every week. I can talk to you whatever. So he's talking to me while he's on a conference call. And he's multitasking. He just turns the volume down. And I realized that that's what everybody was doing. They were filling their calendars. So time boxing, but with meetings. And we just saw Shopify

last week, so we said, hey, no more meetings, right? So I have a theory about management. I don't think there's like one management style that necessarily works. I think management is a process and that the process of exploring different management techniques and even changing them is and having them be variable and dynamic leads to increased performance. In other words, I don't think you lock into one management philosophy and then that's the winner. I think you can try different management styles. You can try different things. It makes it exciting for A players to try different things. So as but one example, Amazon has, the leader, right? I forgot what they call it in the book working backwards, but there's like,

there has to be a person in charge, right, of every project. Some people like pods where you have like three or four projects going on and a group of five or six people will manage one project. Now, what is the benefit of each? The benefit of one person in charge is obvious, like single person responsible, no matter what happens, you could fire, blame that person, reward that person, and they got the heat on them, right? The single-threaded leader. You know, Bezos knows, hey, if I'm going to go

chew somebody out because, you know, the Kindle feature that I used last night sucks. He can go find that person in the directory and just go. Or conversely, if somebody crushes it at audible, he can go find that person

and give him a raise or say, give it more resource. Hey, do more of that. Okay, that's single-threaded leader. Then it turns out when you have a pod, we have integration. So then the other big

complain inside of companies. Molly is, hey, Slack and Salesforce aren't integrated and, you know, they don't talk to each other. It's two different cultures or YouTube is distinct or Instagram doesn't work with Facebook, right? So how do you manage those kind of issues? I literally just did this this morning for the first time. Here at launch, we have programs. Founder University, the launch accelerator. We have remote demo day, Angel University. And then we have a new project we're doing and we're talking about yet, but it's a new accelerator in a really exciting vertical that we're launching. That'll be like a fun experiment.

So it's five of them. And I had one person in charge of every single one. And then I said, you know what would be interesting? These things are overlapping so much. I'm going to have Jackie run a call every morning, a stand-up for the programs team. And then let's see if we can integrate them more. And we had the first call today. It was like, oh, you know what?

Just one little discovery. Customer interviews and customer research is something that our founders keep asking. about. What's customer research? That's when you talk to your customer. You do some analysis of what their needs are. And it turns out, like, some of our companies do that really well. And some of our companies, whether they're in the Founder University Accelerator, or even their $10 million companies, don't have that function at all. So I was like, can we find out in our portfolio of 350 companies, or historically 350, maybe 200 or so active, who's great at this? Get those four people together. Create an afternoon where the four of them

talk, invite all of the Founder University, all of the Accelerator, all the portfolio companies to that, then can we make a couple of blog posts and Founder University podcasts out of it? And then every single program, we should have that integrated. And we just did the same thing with accounting because so many people are not good at accounting and we see that kill companies. And so we said, okay, let's have accounting for Founder University planning for Accelerator and let's do some accounting in the Founding University podcast. So it's just another way of saying management is about

changing it up in my mind, keeping it fresh, thinking about how we could all be better. Sometimes time boxing is a good thing. Sometimes outcome management is a good thing, right? Just what's the outcome we're looking for? But also, like, sometimes it's good to everybody look at their calendar and say, hey, how are you spending your time, right? Now, that doesn't mean you want to do that forever. Do I want to look at everybody's time boxing forever in their calendar forever? No, but I might want to do it for a couple of months or two quarters and get everybody really charged up about efficiency, and then maybe that goes down,

and then maybe we talk about outputs, right? So anyway, it's just a philosophy I'm playing with, which is variable and changing up management strategies on some cadence, right, to keep it fresh and exciting and engaging. Yeah, yeah. But what I think, yes, not even but, yes, definitely. And I think companies need managers.

Like, I think management layers carefully sprinkle. As these companies grow, this is a problem of scale without management. Or maybe too much management. They might have overhired in the manager roles, but that doesn't mean,

now they're going to overcorrect. And so then it's just going to be like, oh, you've got everybody who's equal. And it's like, oh, okay, cool. No one's in charge. Everyone's shoved in the doorway all at the same time. And no one's directing traffic. Like literally someone's job at,

The company over a certain size. Let's say you get to 100 people, you'd have traffic directors. And you need to respect that freaking job. And those people don't want to self-promote and they don't want to be out here, being the power law star of everything, but they're the only people who make it run. Yeah. And that actually kind of speaks to my very, my variability, I'm going to call it back. A hundred percent.

Changing it up. So just a little change. Because you got to have that person who has, they have to have the bandwidth to be aware that now we need a change. Like, oh, we've been doing calendar. for three months, which means people are probably stuck doing old jobs.

It is my job to make sure that we come in and we like, shake it up and make sure we look at outcomes. Yeah. And that was like really, another part of my, I always like talking about my day. Like on my,

I had two pod calls. I had two of these like stand up meetings this morning sales and then the programs team. And with the programs team, I was also like, let me talk about the output we're looking for here. Because I'm on the calls with LPs raising Walsh one for.

they get most excited when we find a company early, that's 100x return. In fact, I think that's how people select what venture funds are in. They're like, what did you find really early that you owned a meaningful percentage of and that you were able to liquidate to investors? It's pretty straightforward. So I said, you know, when I'm in my meetings, when we talk about these five companies, I see LPs light up. Oh, wow, that's so exciting.

You know, com.com. They were on the podcast. Then you invested. Oh, and you syndicated it. Oh, oh, this company, you found them and then you joined the board and you made these six investments in them. Oh, and you sold some second. And I said, that's actually what these programs are here for, for us to identify a company

that can be 50 to 100 X our original investment. So let's incorporate that into our lens. And so it's like, I think really good for a manager. But then if this meeting went for three hours and I had the whole company on it, which is what we used to do, right? We were doing a whole company meeting every Wednesday. And then I was like, wait a second. I could just see it looking at the Zoom of 22 people.

I'm like, these eight people are doing email. And these 14 people are listening because this has nothing to do with their job. Anyway, speaking of doing your job. Look at you evolving. It's all about because your company is growing. Like, I think people don't realize that like you are literally having to evolve in a management way because your company has gone from you in this case, this company. Like it's not that you haven't been managing this whole time. Me plus 10, me plus 20.

Yeah. Exactly. And now it's like, oh, now it's a program team. Right. Like it's. Yeah, there's not just one, there's not just the accelerator. When COVID hit, I was struggling with my weight. So I tried a continuous glucose monitor.

CGM, you probably heard of them. And this product is called Nutrisense. And it helped me understand why I was gaining weight. And it helped me get my weight under control because I understood when my glucose was spiking. I sometimes stress-eat cereal with whole milk would spike my glucose like you wouldn't believe. And then I'd have a small portion of full fat ice cream. like a Hagenas? And I was like, wait a second, I am having my glucose spike much lower.

I would have thought the opposite. I would have thought the Hagenas was worse than a bowl of cereal. If you don't have the data, you can't manage it. With the data, you can manage it. And you will be able to learn how your body responds to these different foods. Here's how it works. The CGM, that continuous glucose monitor, it's a small device. You put on your body and it tracks glucose in real time.

The application, it's painless. Then you scan your CGM, right? You look at it. You visualize the data. You start logging your meals. should take pictures, et cetera, and you're going to get expert guidance from a dietitian based on your goals. And that's how I learned about the sugar versus ice cream. Example I gave. Understand this data will make it much easier to identify what you're doing well and where there's room for improvement.

Let Nutrisense help you reach your full health potential. It was a big part of my journey. Visit nutrasense.io slash twist and use the code twist to save $30 and get one month of free dietitian support, N-U-T-R-I-S-E-E-N-S-E-E-D-O-S-T-W for $30.com. off and one month of free dietitian support. Speaking of doing your job, we talked about Coinbase cutting 20% yesterday. During ad job.

Ooh, yeah. But remember I said perp walks would happen? People were going to go to jail because we saw the speeding tickets. Typically how enforcement works is you get investigations, you get document requests, you get speeding tickets, settlements. But then at some point,

some people go to jail. In the crypto world, we are now on that precipice of people doing jail time. It took six, seven years of musugina and malfeasance and outright crimes. But the brother of a former Coinbase product manager has been sentenced to 10 months in prison. This is prison, Molly. This is where you go and they don't let you leave because you broke the law. this is not a speeding ticket.

This is some crypto bro who was front running listings on Coinbase is now going to stare up at the ceiling in his prison cell and cry for his mama for a week and say what life choices did I make that I tried to make a couple of shackles off of a Ethereum trade or XRP trade. and now I'm in the I'm in the big house as a crypto trader wondering if I should close my eyes and go to sleep oh man this is real talk I've been watching Scarelli videos Martin Shkreli's talking about his prison time Oh really?

Well you know like Screlly and I had a little flare up at one point that he went to jail Yeah and I watched it he does like a live stream So I watched Wondershowlerley's live stream streams and now Shreli's go to Martin Shrelli's go-to linkbait is talking about prison and talking about how he was running prison with his thugs and his crew and he's got like all the names of his crew. And he was explaining like how he would punk, you know, Sam Bankman Free when he came to jail

and how he would take his commissary and, you know, they would dress him down and yada yada. So anyway. I just can't wait for someone to come out of the same jail. and be like, no. I beat him, I put him in the locker every single day. Anyway. Anyway, U.S. prosecutors are calling this the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency. I think we'd probably edit that and say, that has been prosecuted.

Nikiel Wahee used anonymous Ethereum wallets to take advantage of tips from his brother, who was the former Coinbase product manager, letting him buy those cryptocurrencies before Coinbase announced that they were going to be listed. with that he made almost $900,000 trading 40 different crypto tokens following these tips from his brother. He was arrested in July. He and his brother, I think, and pleaded the brother is pleading not guilty, the former product manager. A friend of theirs was also charged. You remember, it was like these three guys, but was not in custody and it appears to be at large still.

while he pleaded guilty back in December to account of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and had to forfeit $892,500 and was given two years probation along with the prison sentence. He's also subject to deportation in India after he serves his sentence. Prosecutors that asked for him to get as much as 16 months in prison. And according to Bloomberg, the defense lawyer called her client who was 26, a quote, incredibly decent young man who did the wrong thing for a misguided reason. here's a crazy thing. I've been at many, I was involved in many discussions at events

when I would be at an event and crypto people were talking about XRP is going to be listed on... I know. I'm kind of bad about this. Like honestly, yes. I'm having a little bit of like bleeding hard about this kid. Are you?

Yeah. Because I think everybody was doing this. And I think the idea that he, you know, like I just think like everybody was pretending these weren't securities. Like, this is the exact same kind of thing as the 2008 financial fraud or whatever. Like, these poor kids, these two guys are going to go down and get deported and $900,000, you know, they say they were sending it back to their parents in India.

That's a lot of money in India. Like, I'm just like, they're going to go down and like SBF's going to walk and I'm over it. I'm just over the system being like this. You also thought there and I was just going to walk too, by the way. You thought that they might get up. That's true. I did think that. I did think that.

I might be, I hope I'm dead wrong about SBF. I really do. But I also think that there are like so many. institutional investors who were doing all this same crap. Like I just feel like the first person you see go down like this is always just like, that's a tiny, that's a minnow. That's the tiniest little minnow that ever minnow. I mean, what if a venture firm was, what if there was a venture capital firm?

What if? That was all in on crypto. And they were also hearing what was going to be listed on Coinbase or they were buying tokens and doing pre-sales and setting stuff up in Panama. Like, I think, I said this before that I think we're going to see a bunch of domino's drop. Just like on January 6th, you know, they, they, I listened to Preet Brahara. That's my guy. And I listen to stay tuned to and Prit and then Cafe Insider.

It's a hundred bucks a year for Cafe Insider. Go to cafe.com. It's really great to listen to because he explains how the Southern District of New York, where he worked pursued cases. You start at the bottom, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, settle, settle, settle, settle, settle,

evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence. And then all of a sudden, you're like, oh, and there's the well. This is the minnow. You are correct, Molly. This is the minnow. Then they take the minnow, they put it on the hook, they throw it back out.

Now they get a nice tuna. Then they take the tuna, they slice it up, they put it back out there, start flap around, and then the shark grabs it. And then they got the shark on the hook. These are the minnows. Next come the mid-tier, you know, the $10, $20, $50 million,

and then comes the billion dollar whale. And the billion dollar worth, Sam Bankman-Fried. I mean, that kid is going to be skewered. I hope so. But even he is like his own, yeah, we'll see, we'll see. We don't have a good track record of white collar accountability in this country. I don't know. Did you read that, read that Jesse Isinger? Is that his name, the chicken-ish club? No, I don't know what that is. Oh, it's fascinating. Oh, my God, you got to read it. It's basically about how American prosecutors have just stopped pursuing white collar accountability because it's like too difficult and politically fraught. And then it's just become this lay. And so what happens is most of the time we go for minnows or even like I would argue that Sam Bankman-Fried is a tuna, but that there are unnamed whales behind him who probably won't ever, you know, have even a sweat drop.

You know, this whistleblower stuff that the, I believe it, the SEC does this whistleblower. and I have tracked it. Because I follow like... Why the Justice Department fails to prosecute executives. Interesting. This is such a good book. I'm going to send it to you. I will get out.

Don't just send me the link. Or you could buy it on the internet. Yes, totally. Yeah. There have been so many of these awards to the SEC. If you go to SEC.gov slash whistleblower, it's fascinating because they don't tell you who the whistleblower was, but they are,

if you whistleblow, you get a percentage of whatever is recouped. So there is an absurd, if you want to be a millionaire, this is a message to journalists. If you're a journalist and you want to get paid

to measure it with the fraud you uncover, don't be a journalist. Go work as a receptionist, as an accountant, as, you know, a mid-tier manager at some criminal enterprise of a finance company or a corporate company, document everything, and then take it to the SEC. SEC awards went more than $37 million to a whistleblower, and they love to put these press releases out. And this just happened in December 19.

And the whistleblower was the initial source of the company's internal investigation, as well as the source of the investigation of the investigation of SEC and other agencies. the company reported alleged conduct to the SEC and other agency, the whistleblower receives credit for the investigation being initiated because the whistleblower provided the same information to the SEC within 120 days of providing it internally. So they are literally explaining, they're giving a roadmap at the SEC

of how to flip. If you're involved in a crypto enterprise right now that is doing illegal stuff, go to sCC.gov slash whistleblower. and get paid. Just round up. I mean, listen, I don't want to give you advice.

You're not making money on your crypto equity, so. Your crypto equity is going to zero. Secure the whistleblower back. I mean, literally, if you worked at, I don't want to give advice, but let's say you worked at a venture firm.

Or you were at LP in a venture fund, and you knew there was stuff going on, and you lost your money or you're not going to make any money on your carry? Like, I could see some associate at a venture firm that was involved in crypto, who knows where the bodies are buried, and all they're going to do is just download the entire document dump

and hand it to the SEC and say, hey, this is the fraud I saw. This is what I saw. I was at a firm. They liquidated their tokens. And here's my involvement. I made 15 grand because I also bought the token. I realize now I made a mistake.

They're going to give you a slap on the wrist, and they're probably going to give you $10 million bucks. And I think that's like a good, It's a just thing to do because you feel, and this book was written, and a lot of people feel like white-collar criminals are held to a different standard. And you know what? That's probably true, but it doesn't need to be true. I think it's in a down market like this when a lot of people lose their money, and I've been

saying this for five years now, Molly, when people start losing money and grandma or the retiree or your cousin who's not in the biz, lost their money on a crypto grift, and they go to their local um um um d-a district attorney

is like oh what a wonderful case I was just pursuing you know I don't know some you know bullshit card game or some you know

casino running out of the back of a bagel shop this is much more interesting this is the bigger pelt so get me more social cred if I go after this

it'd be more interesting the first perp walk of many I predict and these are the minos get ready for the big tuna and then get ready for the Sharks and the Wells. It's coming everybody. Let's, we have been talking a lot about AI.

Obviously, it is one of the bubble themes. It's, I mean, one of the big themes in 2023. And also, it's just starting to heat up and get kind of, this is kind of dishy. So a couple things are happening here. Do Not Pay, which is a site that basically was founded in 2015 as a chatbot to let people, Which is Bill Browder.

Yeah, that's Bill Browder who wrote Red Notice his son. Right. He was on episode 1007. He's like a consumer advocate. Yes, exactly.

And so Do Not Pay was this chat pot that would let people kind of like get out of parking tickets. Like navigate these tricky bureaucratic things. So then Do Not Pay has integrated some, I think chat GPT type technology. Okay.

Pivoted in 2020 with a real focus on AI and now apparently a defendant in an actual court case who's fighting a parking ticket unbeknownst to the judge will be trying to use

this AI lawyer in a U.S. courtroom. So in real time allegedly or supposedly this AI will listen to the proceedings analyze what is being said and instruct the defendant on what to repeat. Joshua Browder would not provide any other details to Gizmodo, who first reported about this,

to protect the identity of the defendant. This is, in theory, super not allowed because most or at least many courtrooms in the country ban the use of mobile phones and the internet, but they're relying in this particular court on hearing accessibility standards. So he or she, the defendant will have an air pod in their ear. so and say that it's an accessibility thing. And then Browder said, Do Not Pay is collaborating on another,

with another parking ticket defendant in a Zoom-based trial. And they're deciding whether they're going to use an AI generated teleprompter or even synthetic voice. The second option, though, Mr. Browder said, is highly illegal. Okay. Currently. So, and then now he's out here trolling the world saying, do not pay, we'll offer any lawyer or person a million dollars with an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court. to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says.

Okay, this is fascinating and makes total sense. If there is an optimal script for getting out of a parking ticket, perfect thing for generative AI to do, just like people use templates for investing in companies or employment agreements or any kind of thing. So what this is is a real-time template, a real-time script. This to me seems like a total valid use of AI. Now, I do think they're doing this to push the envelope and it's like a press-getting story, right? Yeah, it's a stunt.

I mean, the Supreme Court thing is just a stunt. It's a stunty, of course. It's so much of a stunt that I fear that it risks undermining your very good point and very good point that other advocates have made, which is that this is actually the kind of technology that can make the law and actual justice more accessible to people. who can't afford lawyers. Right. So if you had a case, like a small claims court case, and you said, hey, I feel like, I don't know, I got a predatory loan from one of these like predatory mortgage brokers,

right? And it scanned all your documents. It scanned every court transcript of a predatory loan. It looked for the similarities. And it said, these of these 1700 cases that were one, out of 5,000, the 1700 wins use these three defenses most often. The judges cited these as the reasons. The jury cited this.

That's what people are, that's what attorneys are doing anyway. Rich people's attorneys, they throw 100 attorneys at the problem. They say, how do we get OJ off? Okay, we have to put some doubt. This is the, you know, case law. And if there's some doubt, if it doesn't, the thing doesn't fit, you must acquit. Whatever the doubt is, we can plant with just one person. Those strategies are only available, like you're saying, to the rich.

AI could determine, this is really actually fascinating. I know. That's kind of why I'm annoyed about the stunt, although the stunt could push the envelope and get them to change these kind of BS laws, like, you should 100% be able to use. This is a research tool. Like, all a lawyer, I'm going to get in trouble, because it's not all a lawyer is.

But if you look at the bulk of what happens in law school, And actually, lawyers have been talking about this for decades, that AI is going to come and, like, paralegals. What they do is research and then turn that research, synthesize the research and turn it into some kind of an opinion. It's the best of what they do. Exactly. But if an AI can do that for people who can't afford it, well, and then you get somebody like fancy to perform it in court. Lawyers will come down to talent. It'll be all the actors, right?

Like, AI is going to write a perfect Quentin Tarantino script. And then it's just a matter of who's going to. Bruce Willis or whoever's AI. But, you know, it's a big deal. I actually know some of my money. It's a very big deal because what this also will do, you know what the analogy here in Molly is? This is very interesting conversation that we stumbled into here.

Do you remember the Justice Project? Barry Sheck, I think, did it. When DNA came out, they went back and they said, okay, find everybody who was convicted, who claims they didn't do it. Yeah. which obviously everybody claims they didn't do it. But that it was like people had concerns that felt like this person got railroaded and there is some DNA available to be tested.

So when they found those two vectors, hey, the person claims innocence. Oh, it's called the Innocence Project, Barry Shack, really like cool project. Then they paid for the DNA testing, am I understanding. And then they would, and then it was like, yeah, there's blood on the knife. There's, you know, whatever other bodily fluids. getting graphic here. It's not this person's. Yeah.

This person is innocent. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, now we have 23 and me, and we know it's this person who's their relative. Because nine times out of ten, it's a relative, right? Or whatever. I don't listen to all this crimes, dramas, but I think that's kind of the theme is, you know, it's, it's, shockingly, it's the ex-husband who killed. Oh, my God. Was the ex-boyfriend?

Really? I'm so shocked. There's like a family guy about that where he uses his Nielsen household power to rewrite all of TV and it's like, can you just give me the answer up front? And it's like, oh, it was the ex-girlfriend who did it? Yeah, it was. Perfect.

You know, like long-gung. You know, like literally take all of Law & Order episodes. Yeah. Put them through AI. Spoiler alert. I think this could be like, you could go through every court case that happened, Molly. Yeah. And if you, let's say you knew there was an injustice that happened frequently.

something to do with eyewitness testimony. You could say, hey, anybody who's convicted based on eyewitness testimony, let's go check all those transcripts and look for trends. And you might exonerate a lot of innocent people. The Innocence Project has exonerated 194 clients. Incredible. Yeah, I mean, I think this could upend,

this could 100% upend. You know, I'm actually, I'd sort of forgotten about this because we haven't had a meeting, but I'm an advisor to this newly formed justice tech, association, which is specifically for using tech to increase accessibility to access to justice. Maybe we should have money to talk about this AI trend because it is really interesting. Like, this is how you replace a lot of lawyers, but also how you do make a lot a lot more

accessible, like sort of separate from these stunts, although, you know, stunts do get attention. They have their value. We're talking about it right now. We're talking about it. Thank you, Josh, for making us talk about it. Well, here's. Well, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, accessibility of a law library, the accessibility of the online, there's two online services,

Westlaw and there's another one, these two legal services that let you look up case law. It's very expensive. These people would scan all the documents in. I remember when I was in the 90s in IT, they would send all these court cases, the physical documents to like India to be transcribed, you know, by two people, they would look for mistakes and then we put it all into a database and then lawyers would pay $1,000 a month for Westlaw and these other online services. Giving access to those databases, giving access to the law library in a prison to, you know, people who needed to do their own research was like a big unlock. Well, giving AI to a prisoner who feels they were unjustly or in fact were unjustly convicted

of something, giving them access to AI to study all the cases and to study their case and say, hey, why, you know, there might be a trend that your public defender. Like, if I'm a small appeals firm, this just became my strategy for getting clients. Sure.

100%. Yeah. 100%. I mean, it's going to be transformative. And I think it would bend towards justice. Now, you could have it been the other way, which is people find loopholes of how to get guilty people off, but we, you know, that's part of fair game.

Well, only rich people. I don't mean to be flip, but like, we're using a lot of loopholes to, I mean, AI could also close some of those loopholes. Well, that's the thing. So if it does find, just like DNA exonerated some people, and then maybe, maybe some people got exonerated, you know, who were in fact guilty or something, you know,

could be the wrong DNA was on the side and it's another excuse for it being there or whatever. Overall, examining something as important as the legal system is worthy of technology's attention. And so it starts with a speeding ticket, ends with a, you know, railroaded manslaughter conviction or something or a murder conviction. Yeah. AI, the story of 2023 and beyond. No question. No question. Also, judges are flawed too, right?

Because they're humans. Of course they are. They're human. They're bribed. They're biased. They're this and that, you know. I don't even know if judges know their own bias. You know, that's the other thing is like bias that people are unaware of.

Right. sometimes they're very aware. And it's like, you know, oh, you call people racial slurs your entire career on the bench and you're still there and you're still just like your record speaks for itself or what I mean, what you could do is analyze records. Yes. Like you would analyze the conviction records of judges, right?

Because like there still will have to be judgment. Sentencing guidelines have in some cases, you know, like third strike sentencing guidelines have proven to be very unfair because arrests themselves can be based in so much bias. for example. So the last thing you want to do is be like a computer will decide this based on these strictures and that will be the end of the story and there will be no nuance. Like you'll still have to have humans. But to have a dispassionate analysis that can reveal bias, yes, let's go.

Speaking of Chad GPT, since we're on a roll, Molly, let's keep rolling here. All right. I showed you on just a show and I saw on our TikTok account, which I think is TWA startups. Search for This Week in startups on TikTok. I saw that the TikTok of my demo of the chat GPT app, which I'm in the test flight of started trending yesterday. And you made a really good point, which was, you know, I was like,

hey, tell me the best restaurants in Yontenville. That's like an area next to Napa where all the fancy restaurants are, French laundry, yada, yada, yada. Then I said, hey, tell me which ones have the best duck, because if you're going to really test a chef, duck's a pretty good way to do it. I had incredible piece of confi, the confi when I was in Yonfville.

At Bouchon. Man. Bouchon is the best. Oh, like, I just was like, you know what? I want to have a birthday

party and just rent out Bouchon. Right. Definitely do that. Tre man, if he. Putting that aside. Yeah. You said,

well, then Google could then do that thing where they call on the phone and get you a reservation, which Google has now. Google voice, well, if they don't have a reservation system,

call me like, hey, I'm calling on behalf of Mali Wood. Can we have reservation tonight? They have the conversation. That's kind of what this Bill Broder, I'm sorry, Josh Broder, do not pay thing is doing. Exactly what you mentioned there, which is, well, once the AI does the analysis,

well, AI could have the conversation. AI could navigate what the outcome is going to be, which means there is a very professional use case for chat GPT and other services. Again, I think chat GPT is probably as good, but probably not better than whatever Google or Facebook have right now that they haven't released. and Google and Facebook need to release those. They do.

They get 10%, 20% pop in their stock. Open AI quietly put out a form that we found on the Discord there, and I filled it out. They are asking people, how much would you pay for a professional version of chat GPT? And I put in, I would pay,

and they did a very interesting pricing survey. They said, what would be too little that you would think the price was too cheap and I put 20 bucks? they said what would be like too much I put $5,000 and they said what do you think would be like make you feel like it's a good value

I put 50 and then they said when when you start like considering it was like too expensive so it's like this classic pricing survey concept I put $500 and I filled it out hopefully I get into chat GPT professional but I think they've started a wait list based on a Google form

and the idea would be you wouldn't be throttled maybe it would do some of the things it doesn't do currently that you have to say like oh write a play in order to get it So maybe some of those things. Maybe it could have multiplayer mode. This is what I'm thinking. And you would have no limits so they could uncap it.

But imagine multiplayer mode where like the producers of this week in startups are all in a chat GPT instance. And we're saying, somebody asks a question, what are Slack's historical quarterly revenues? And it puts that there. And then it says, hey, can you average that? And it averages it. Right now we ask a person there. But we could have a chat window open right now and imagine if chat chaptainpT was built into Slack.

and you could just do slash chat GPT what were Slack's quarterly earnings and it just gave it to you? Oh my God. Oh my God. Professionally. Each query would be like if you just paid, if you just paid 25 cents a query,

like you would need half the number of people at your company or the company people at your company would be 50% more productive. Right? So this is going to have a dramatic impact in the enterprise. When you were talking about and I do not, I'm not trying to dismiss the ability capabilities,

but when you were talking about like, oh, well, I'm just going to hire people in the Philippines to do that job that you want too much money for in the U.S. All of a sudden, instead of all of that, you hire a computer. Like that future is the future that everybody talks about when it comes to AI that is finally, like I can't believe how we know that these things evolve slowly at first and then all at once, but I can't believe how all at once it is right now.

Everything all at once. It's like everything all at once or returning to my hot take from yesterday. It's all a house of cards. It's one or the other. Either this chat GPT thing is total smoke and vapor. I just want to end with my daughter's, my 13-year-old daughter was really emotional last night because she saw me cry.

And she was like, are you crying? And I was like, I'm not crying. But I got the clempt last night because one of my favorite films from my childhood was Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. This is like we're going to go a little random here, okay? Okay. Now, Temple of Doom, you've seen.

It's a very dark film. And it turns out Spielberg and Lucas, I think they were both going through divorces or whatever, and people were like, you know, that film dude was pretty dark. And they've kind of come back and said, you know what, we were going through a dark period of our life, and we went kind of dark on the Indiana Jones stuff.

If you remember, you know, like there's children as slaves being whipped, parts being ripped out of people's chest. It is. intense. And it was like a little shocking for people. And we had like a very interesting discussion about Kay Hugh Kwan in short round, because my daughter started, is he a little bit of a racist trope when he was in Indiana Jones? Because he talked with a little bit of a broken English thing.

And I said, you know, that's interesting. Like this generation sees it as problematic. I said, our generation. And I asked my wife, I was like, she's Asian. I said, I saw it as like, whoa, there's a Chinese character, a young Chinese character in a significant role. He's the third lead in the film, essentially. It's like, K. K. Kapshaw, Harrison Ford, obviously, and then K. Hugh Kwan.

And he won a Golden Globe last night. And so my producers will pull this up, and it will end with the speech. He was in everything all at once? Everything everywhere, all at once. Okay. Now, I enjoyed that film. It wasn't like maybe like top 20 for me, but not on my top 10. But for a lot of people, it was top 10.

But when I saw him in the film, my heart was filled with joy. Because I just thought, I always loved this. He was also in the Goonies, I believe. It was. Hollywood forgot about him. Yeah. And he gives his speech at the Golden Gloves last night. And there is not a dry eye.

in the Golden Gloves. And I had just had the conversation with my family about representation in films and why it's important and how this was like a moment of representation. And we just had this very nuanced discussion about his, you know, English, et cetera, as a second language. And was that like, you know, when people make fun of Asian people and speak or any foreigner speaking broken English, it could be an Italian person or whatever, just or me speaking Italian or poorly, you know, in White Lotus or something.

Anyway, he wins. And he gives the speech of a lifetime. And I play for my entire family. And I didn't realize it, but two tears just came down. I was so happy for him. And he just says, like, I always, you know, was taught to remember who, you know, to be thankful in my life. And I just want to say I'm so thankful to Steven Spielberg for giving me a chance.

but then I thought for the last 30 years of my life I thought I will never achieve what I achieved in my childhood my entire life will be downhill from here wow and then these and this video is trending all over TikTok

it's trending all over Twitter it was like going he was almost I think number one last night it was first or second trend and I didn't even know his name I'd be totally honest I just knew him a short round because I always, when I saw Indiana Jones, I thought when I saw Indiana Jones when I was whatever, eight, nine, ten years old, I would love

to be short round. I would love to be Indiana Jones psychic, right? Yeah. That to me was like a dream. I think that's why Spielberg did it. He was like, wouldn't it be cool if Indiana Jones had like a 10 year old or 12 year old as a sidekick who would drive him?

And they'd let short rounds, the joke of short round is he's short because he's a kid. And he drives the getaway car for Indiana of Jones in Hong Kong during this like really tense scene. But he's so short, he ties blocks to his shoes to make his shoe reach the gas pedal. But he can drive a getaway car. Just brilliant on Steven Spielberg's part.

And so he gave this speech. And then he says, and these two filmmakers, these two or three filmmakers remembered me from 30 years ago and said they would give me another shot. and they gave him the shot and he wins the Golden Globe. Oh my God. Boom. And they say it's his first nomination. And everybody in the audience is going,

it's his first nomination. This guy's been MIA for 30 years. Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. It's his first role. Yeah, basically, it's his first adult role. Now, I'm sure he tried. And he basically then shouts out his wife

for believing him for these 30 years. but you may remember, you know, in 2022, he ran into Harrison Ford and he gives him a hug at some photo shoot and that had trended and I don't even know if I brought it up on the show. That is too cute, no. But I just thought it would be good to end. I hope this doesn't get us a strike. It's like a redemption story.

I love it. Well, we'll just, we'll add like a couple of minutes. I'm going to end on this video just because I thought it was so beautiful. When I started my career as a child actor in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I felt I felt so very lucky to have been chosen As I grew older I started to wonder if that was it

If that was just luck For so many years I was afraid that I had nothing more to offer That no matter what I did I would never surpass what I achieved as a kid Thankfully more than 30 years later, two guys thought of me.

They remember that kid. You monster. And they gave me an opportunity to try it again. Oh, got me again. Holly, it got me again. I am so happy. It's the greatest video of the internet. I'm a little fragile this week.

Like, must you? that is amazing. Sorry, Molly. I just, I mean, literally got me again. I am so happy for you, K, Hugh Kwan. Congratulations. 30 years later.

Yeah. You gave yourself a little tissue on the lip there. Sorry about that. We're falling apart. We're like a mess. That was very wholesome. Oh.

That's incredible. And I just said last night, like, exactly your response. Like, this is what we need right now. More of this in the world. More joy and people getting another shot. and crushing it.

Give this guy like 10 more rolls. And then I saw trending. Somebody said, what if they did a spinout of short rounds as a Disney series? They should totally do that. And he's just a little action Jackson. He is inspired by Indiana Jones

and he goes on his own adventures as an adult. He's an adventure hunter. And let him go do some adventure like a little, it's like a young, Remember young Indiana Jones? There was a series. People don't remember this. Oh, yeah.

That, I think it was River Phoenix, rest in peace, you're a great actor. But I think he played young Indiana Jones. And they've been talking about who might play Indiana Jones, you know, in the future. I say nobody ever. Also, kind of delightful because it's a wonder. Yeah, also don't know. Don't ever try. No, don't do that, Hollywood.

But do the short round spin-off. I love that. Yeah. How great is that? That's amazing. Sorry, I got your mom. It got me too. It got me twice.

You got me twice. All right. Well, there it is, folks. There you're a wholesome end of the show. Didn't see that coming. Didn't see that coming. But I just thought, you know, people listen to the show. It's great.

You know, people like to have a little, when we go off on our little tangent. So I think it was like a tangent worth your attention, given how everything's horrible, all that once. And this is not. That's wonderful. All right. There is, folks. Thank you. We'll be back with more pop culture tomorrow too with line.