This Week in Startups - Snap drops 40%, Layoffs at Gorillas & Klarna, Adam Neumann's new startup, Coinbase using Principles | E1468

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

First, we break down SNAP dropping over 40% after lowering earnings estimates (4:43). Then we cover some layoffs at instant-delivery startup Gorillas AND BNPL player Klarna (29:18). Next, we talk about Adam and Rebekah Neumann co-founding a tokenized crypto carbon marketplace called Flowcarbon (1:00:02). We wrap on Coinbase’s new Ray Dalio-inspired employee rating system (1:10:36). (00:00) Jason and Molly tee-up today’s news topics! (04:43) Snap down ~45% in one day, largest single day drop we can remember (11:03) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (12:19) Efficiency, pausing hiring, and cutting new projects in the downturn (28:03) Thorne - Personalized, scientific wellness. Go to https://Thorne.com/u/TWIST (29:18) More tech layoffs at delivery service Gorillas (37:09) Vanta - Get $1,000 off automating your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (38:22) More tech layoffs at buy-now-pay-later service Klarna (55:30) David Sacks’ thread about founders thinking about positioning themselves in a downturn (57:30) Amazon’s share of US eCommerce Sales hit All-Time High of 56.7% in 2021 (1:00:02) Startup of the Day: Adam + Rebekah Neumann have backed a blockchain-based carbon credits company Flowcarbon (1:10:36) Coinbase is trying a new meeting feedback rating system FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, it is Wednesday? Tuesday? Tuesday? Tuesday? No, it's Tuesday. Happy birthday, producer, Nick. Happy birthday, producer, Nick, it's Tuesday, which means this is the hardest part of the climb. That's right.

But tomorrow, you're going to get a little peak and you're going to see the downhill for the rest of the week. And yesterday it was Molly's birthday. Is that correct? Yeah. 30 again? Again. Happy 30th again. You know, it's great every time.

It's great. It gets better. It gets better. Yeah. Gemini Warriors. Shout out to my Gemini Warriors, but we're going to have a great show today on Tuesday. I don't even know what day of the week it is. I'm still recovering from the only weekend.

Yeah, I mean, no one weekend. The fact that the show is as coherent as it is, I think, is a testament to vanilla lattes and other such treats that are sent to us by the wonderful team at launch when it's your birthday. It is a little crazy today. There's a little Tuesday vibe going on specifically in the stock market, one stock in particular. we're going to break down Snap dropping over 40% in a day. 45% in fact. Wow. Crazy. After CEO Evans Beagle sent an internal memo letting the team know Snap was going to miss its earning estimates. Yeah. And I mean, listen, a 45% drop is super significant.

We've seen other drops of 85% over six months from their peaks like Coinbase and other stocks. So, you know, the stock market's off. But this feels like we're really hitting like a cataclysmic moment. And of course, that's being combined with the layoffs that seem to be every day, even the strongest companies are laying off significant portions of people. Yeah, we're going to talk about some of those layoffs at Instant Delivery Startup Gorillas and Buy Now Pay Later player Klarna. We're going to talk about specific industries that might be vulnerable and belt tightening overall. Yeah, you're going to need to, if you're a startup, really think about what your metrics are and how you're going to get through this moment in time. but it's not all gloom and doom. Our friend Adam Newman and his partner, Rebecca, are back.

They're back. They're back. They're back. And the Don Julio's back. The good stuff. The good stuff. They have co-founded and invested in a tokenized crypto-carbon marketplace. Oh, my Lord.

Called Floca. I'm going to go ahead and say it again. It's a tokenized crypto-carbon offset marketplace. Yeah. I mean, this is just what a Tuesday needs. Go! The complete chaos and the Newman's are back. I love it.

Crazy Tuesdays are back. You heard that right, a crypto-togynized marketplace. We got a lot of thoughts about it and just the carbon space in general. And then finally, we're going to wrap with Coinbase, our friend Brian Armstrong over there, who is super about optimizing everything, has now put in an employee rating system where live in a meeting, you rate each other. So this is either like Atlas shrugged and you're totally into it or it's Black Mirror and this is dystopian for you. But it comes from Ray Dalio's, you know, rating system and there's an app apparently for this like many things. And Molly and I are going to

talk about, you know, the best practices and how we run launch and the best practice for running meetings. Yeah. Which is, listen, it's super relevant to small companies and large and companies that are scaling and growing, how do you figure out management? This is one option. It's going to be a great show. So why don't just stick with us? Yeah, why not? What else you got to do? It's Tuesday. I know you're mad. It's a crazy Tuesday. Yeah, just get on the treadmill, go for a hike. Yeah. Get in your pre-core, row something. I don't know. Get your tone, whatever you're into, but stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your ideas into a new website.

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Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Happy Tuesday, everybody. Here we go. It's another episode of this week on startups. The market is getting demolished again. Feels like we are in shooting range of capitulation, but people are really anxious out there in the market. It feels like there's some foreboding.

People are scared of like this Taiwan situation escalation maybe. But it is some abject fear out there. It is absolute terror. We've been playing this game of what fresh hell is this now almost every week for like three years. And I think people are just like, you can never feel confident. You can never feel complacent. And when there are warning signs, it's like all the birds are flying away before an earthquake.

Literally, in fact, yesterday, all the dogs next door to me started howling. And I was like, there's going to be an earthquake. Like, I think we're just aliens are landing. Aliens are landing. This is it. Well, you know, you had to deal when you were at marketplace. These were times when I would assume ratings went way up. Everybody would rush in to just find out what was going in the markets and

trying to make sense of it. Yeah, absolutely. And some days you just have to be like, you can't, you know, some days you literally have to be like, you can't. Right. And that is when, you know, Kyra's all would just say over and over and over the stock market is not the economy. But I think as we know, when you start to be in a crash, the stock market becomes the

economy. And I think we're, people are now feeling like we might be closer to the moment where the stock market is the economy because real money is coming out of companies. employees are being laid off. Like we're seeing changes in, you know, employment numbers at a statistically significant scale. Yeah. And I think, you know, and to use the parlance like,

getting real. Yes. In the technical term. Yes. S-I-G-R. Sigger. It is a sigre moment. It is a sig-er moment.

It is getting real out there. Well, and I think that's a very interesting observation from Kai, which is, hey, yeah, you know, the stock market is not the economy. You can see things in the stock market can get way overheated. And the reality is, you know, not everybody got rich and has a private jet. It just felt like that for a minute. Right. And then it comes back down and it gets, and it has an overreaction, which clearly it's having now. And people have fear. And this is while many companies are putting up great numbers, not all, but most are putting up either great or amazing or very reasonable numbers.

Yeah. There are a couple of things that are weak. And then you have all these. jobs out there and then all of a sudden you have this panic and the cycle starts going the other direction which is layoffs, bell tightening, uh, investors are going to take a pause on investing in startups for a little bit. There's going to be a little bit of chaos perhaps. And, uh, we should, I think start with today's chaos. I was shocked to see today, um, that snap, um, uh, I guess preemptively reported that things are not going well for them. So let's, I think we should start there. and then go to layoffs, and then we can start triangulating around what's happening.

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, in way too real news, Snap shares as of this moment, I believe, are down over 40% today. This is a one-day drop on negative guidance that the company issued after hours yesterday. CEO Evan Spiegel warned in a note to employees that I guess must have been leaked.

I don't even know if this was like a deliberate release on SNAP's part, but warned in a note to employees that the company will miss its target for revenue and adjusted earnings for Q2. He wrote, today we filed an 8K. Okay, so they did file an 8K, sharing that the macro environment has deteriorated further and faster than we anticipated when we issued our quarterly guidance last month. I guess Evan has not been listening to Allent. As a result, he said, while our revenue continues to grow year over year, it is growing more slowly than we expected at this time. And then this internal memo leaking and the 8K cause shares of other social advertising platforms to drop. Metas down 9%, Twitter down about 4%, Pinterest down 22%.

But this one day drop by Snap on, we should say again, a report of growth. Right. Just growth that is more slowly. Yes, is a 45% drop. So this is showing massive, massive, a massive lack of faith that this can be turned around. I mean, people are saying the company's worth half as much. And yeah, 45, 46 percent. I'm trying to think of the last time I saw a one-day drop like that. Now, of course, Coinbase, I think, is perhaps the company that got wallop the most in this cycle or amongst the most.

I think they were down 86% from their peak, 85, 86%. So that's truly extraordinary, right? Like, you know, a $100 billion company or whatever goes down to $14 billion. What's going on here? But yeah, these are extraordinary drops. This is where I think you'll start to see boards of directors, investors, and the executives, that companies, start buying their own stock back, either as individuals, as companies, or investors. Because if stocks become this low and, you know, you're looking at it and, you know,

you by default have some inside information when you work at a company. So you're not allowed to sell to the best of my ability on that insider information. But if you're confident in the business, I think you're allowed to buy the shares. So, you know, it's really the timing of the selling of the shares that gets people in hot water with insider trading. I suppose there could be insider trading for people outside the company who are buying shares in the company, right? They find out there's going to be a deal and they know it's going to go up. But for people who are insiders, they're allowed to buy shares in their own company. I don't know what the rules are exactly.

But if the stock goes down 45%, and they're sitting on, you know, some billions of dollars in cash, it might make sense to start a buyback program and reduce the number of shares in the pool. Therefore, the earnings for each share goes up. Yeah. And so that's going to be this massive trend. I think that's when we know we're going to be getting out of this is when you start seeing those share buyback programs. We've got some exciting news for this week in Startups listeners right now.

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He's blaming the macro environment. What is your interpretation of macro environment? What is he talking about? In this case, I mean, it sounds like he's talking about. obviously the global economic environment, the idea that e-commerce might be slowing as the pandemic ends and people, you know, turn to travel,

which is such a weird thing to be saying in the middle of this massive surge, where everybody I know has COVID, like in my town and every other town. Yeah. And yet, you know, we're talking about a change in consumer behaviors. But also, and I do think this is, you know, although it's, you know, analysts were saying it's almost idiosyncratic for

investors, there's the iOS situation. There's the privacy changes. There are changes in the digital advertising landscape on top of the broader kind of economic conditions that are specific to SNAP and digital advertising. And then I read a MarketWatch article

that in which one analyst said that SNAP, at least in the near term, is uninvestable as a result. Yeah. Interesting. So these are advertising-based businesses in a recession. advertising can take a hit as company.

Say, you know what, let's just pause our advertising. Let's pause our hiring. Now, pausing hiring, easy. Doing layoffs, easy for a management team to do. It's not easy on a human level, but it's easy on a practical level. We know you can get more, you can get more done with less. If you get rid of the weakest people in any organization, every organization has a bell curve of productivity. if you're reasonable at knowing that this person or this group of people are in the bottom quartile or even the bottom half, if you get rid of them, by default, it takes pressure off of the people in the top half, they'll pick up the work, things will be more efficient.

It's kind of like if you were running a relay race, if you cut the person who runs the slowest, the other three run faster, right? They'll have a better time. So if you think about it like a relay and there's four buckets of employees, the last bucket is kind of slowing down. down the top three people if you do the average. So you'll be more efficient. That's easy to do. Pausing hiring, easy to do. Pausing hiring in sales or in advertising and marketing, very hard to do. Because that will slow your growth.

That's actually where you want to spend. So what you want to do, the art of this is cutting new projects, cutting austerity measures, you know, lunches, travel, business travel, things that aren't directly going to hit the bottom line. Advertising, you know, on Facebook Snap, actually is what will move the needle and save some of these companies. Raising prices will save them and getting rid of employees.

So I actually think these companies will do quite well, the advertising-based companies, even in a downturn, maybe the weaker ones, like outdoor advertising comes to mind as being less efficient or television advertising, radio, online. I'll just be... They tend to go that, direction.

Yeah. I mean, listen, there is a real possibility that some of these companies, you know, maybe Facebook has the scale not to have to worry about it, Mata. But these companies, it's sort of like analogous to the conversation we've had about when you build your startup on top of somebody else's platform. Yes. These companies built an entire business model based on the idea that they could sell targeted advertising and that there would never be any change in the way that that advertising would

work. and iOS came, you know, Apple came along at, to be clear, the behest of consumers and privacy advocates and regulators in Europe, and Apple came along and said, hey, this is no more. Like, people don't want this anymore. No mas. We're going to stop that on this platform. And we sort of like talked about this, but it is in fact a sea change or a giant excuse,

right? Hard to say. Like maybe people are in fact, advertisers are like, snap is totally optional and so we're leaving. but I don't think we can sort of discount. Yeah. So the revenue is up. Exactly. This snap is a microcosm of the overall market, I think, in some ways because they're still,

they're throwing off free cash flow. Their cash in marketable securities is $5 billion. It's like a $5 billion sitting there. Their revenue was $1 billion. It was up 38% year over year. So things are growing. They're still going to hire 500 more employees this year, they said. and they've hired 1,200 employees over the last 12 months.

So they're on a hiring binge. They obviously have confidence in the business, but people don't want to buy the stock. So there is some disconnect between what they're seeing as a reality and what's happening in this market where I think there's people being margin calls, there are people over-extended. There are some things that are occurring that we are not privy to is what I feel, which is like there are giant funds that own these stocks that maybe they're. they over levered themselves and now margin calls are happening and they've got to sell something.

So if they look at their portfolio, they just sell a little bit of everything and maybe this is the weakest one or the one they have the least conviction in. That's a really good point. Free cash flow was $106 million last quarter. They defined free cash flow as net cash provided by operating activities reduced by purchases of property and equipment. They've been big on buying property. It's a weird thing that Evan Spiegel likes property, but I remember they were building all

of their building. They were buying their buildings. in Venice and stuff like that. It was a big controversy because Venice is very small, not very developed, Venice, California, below Santa Monica, Los Angeles. And they were just buying like houses and weird small buildings and putting 50 people in this building and 150 in those. And their campus was kind of like Venice.

Weird. Yeah, it was kind of weird for a while there. I wonder, like, is this partly like a communications issue? Because I know that you're not, I mean, earnings calls are spin to some extent. Like, I guess I don't understand, given these numbers, which are fine, right? Slower growth than you expected, but you're still growing. Like, I've gotten a lot of those emails over the years.

Like, yes, our growth was slower, but we're growing. Like, did he have to send out an email that was like, Everything is a disaster? Yeah, I mean, I think maybe that was like a bad call. Maybe. I mean, I think if they're going to not hit their numbers, they have to say something to the market when they know it, I think. Right.

And maybe, but maybe you're right. Maybe they should have waited. I don't know, but they have 6,100 full-time employees. Their revenue per employee is $655,000, just back at the envelope. Not perfect or audited. We did that number really quick. But it's very similar to Twitters, which is to say, you know, they're not as efficient as the Googles of the world. So maybe they get rid of, you know, a third of their employees at some point.

And this would look a lot better. But with $5 billion, they raised so much money. And then it lost where the first quarter was, yeah, $360 million. And their daily active users are up. And their U.S. are up. million people in the US, you snap. You snap at all. Do any of our millennial producers, you snap?

My kid and his friends use it. Justin. The Gen Zs are using it. I do, but I don't add anyone new. So, like, I only still have my friends from college, and I graduated two years ago. Exactly. Same experience.

So this is like your old school friends. It's like your old bar. They hang out it. Like your old pawn. Yeah, exactly. But you don't want to bring anybody else into that circle. Nostalgia. You're now on Twitter or,

LinkedIn or Insta. It's definitely like taboo and like not cool. Somebody asked daddy on Snapchat in my opinion. I don't know how Nick feels. It's taboo. Is it like if they, it's like when they call you without texting first? Yeah, exactly.

You're like, nah, I can't do that. I have a Snapchat chat named, Hot Boys 2016. And we haven't changed the name since 2016. Hot Boys 2016. Okay.

That's the only, that's the only snap I use. Obviously, you had a, obviously you had a very interesting experience in college. Anyway. It got a little weird. It got a little weird. It got a little weird.

Hot boys. All right. Okay. Okay. Wild boys. It does feel like weird. That was a great song. Wasn't Wild boys a great song? Who was that? Who was wild boys?

Wild boys. No, wait. What was that song? In excess. No. Who's saying Wild boys? Wild boys. Inexpped something.

Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, it seems like we are getting to a period in the market where if it seems optional, investors are out. And Snap pretty evidently seems optional. Maybe Duran Duran. Okay, we're all over the place here.

Hey, but you know what? This is also, I think the housing number shook people a little bit. We were wondering, and I had talked about on this pot over and over again, like housing seems to be holding up. Like, I think housing has to come back down as part of this eventually. And sure enough, new home sales, I just started to Tweeko by, $59,000. They expected new home sales to be $749,000. and I guess last quarter or maybe it's last month was 763.

So there was a dramatic mess there in terms of buying homes, which I think would be based upon It's based on mortgage rates. Like what is wrong? I don't even understand. Sometimes honestly, we did an episode of Make Me Smart. That's the greatest episode we ever did, which is why do we listen to economists?

They're always wrong. They're always wrong. We base our entire freaking economy and policy on it. Yes. Why would you not think that housing prices would come to a screaming halt when they are historically as high as they have ever been and interest rates just basically doubled if not tripled? They were over double because I had a small mortgage on the ski house. Look at you guys. There it is.

Well, here's what happened. I literally locked in a mortgage rate in December when I bought the ski house because I was like, these numbers are so low. Like, it's two and I got 2.6% for my mortgage, I think. And I was like, wait a second. If inflation is aid or, you know, the stock market's going up, this amount, whatever. I was like, that sounds fine. I can just buy the place for cash and not flexing and just was making an economic decision. So I was like, okay, I'll just do 2.6%.

And when I signed the paperwork and then I saw yesterday, it's 5.6%. Yeah. So it's gone up more than double, as you're saying. That would have been like a huge colossal difference. So if you're going to buy a home, and it's 5 or 6%. That's way different than two or three. That's a huge difference in your buying power, like massive.

At a time when consumer confidence is super low, it's like they're not even reading their own reports. Consumer confidence is low. Mortgage rates are super high. If it is optional at all to buy a house, in fact, half of the reason people bought houses right now is they were like, oh my God, this is historically insanely low rate. I'm going to get in now, even if I wasn't planning to.

Like, of course they weren't going to buy. I would have been like, I just don't, I don't understand. I mean, looking at this website, Fred is great. Like, you just look at how low it was for so long. And then boom, it's just, yeah, the 30 year fixed mortgage rate. That's like a several hundred to a thousand dollars per month difference, depending on the cost of your house. 5.3, I think is like it's now somewhere 5.3. And if you locked it in, you know, in 2021, you were as low as like 2.6, which actually, it looks like I locked in at the lowest possible.

Holy cow, I did something right. Nice work. It's nice when you do something right, right? The rich get richer. The rich get richer. Well, no, it's one of these things where I think I just got lucky, you know, like I could have sold a bunch of equities and gone to Austin, sold my house at a peak valuation. I mean, there were other moves that could have been made if I really wanted to super

optimize. But actually, I think the super optimization, you know, Molly, you and I were having this conversation, we're looking at a bunch of investments. And a lot of the valuations that people were trying for to, just, you know, two months ago are now probably half, I think. And I think it's going to be very hard, just like housing. And so this is what happens. People have an asset, a house or a startup, or just great examples of an asset.

Cryptocurrency, not a good example because there's no intrinsic value. But a house and a startup do have a company and a startup. A house and a company have intrinsic value. The house you can live in and it can generate revenue. The business you can sell, it can generate revenue. So you got a pizzeria, it's making $10,000 a month. If you're not going to sell it, if you're making $10,000 in profits a month, you can just keep making pizza.

Yeah, just keep making your profit. Now, if the market's hot, yeah, you might sell it. Now, oh, you might open a new one, etc. But you don't need to sell it because it's throwing off cash. With a house, even if you had an extra one, you could rent it and make some money, maybe cover half your mortgage or all your mortgage, maybe make a slight profit, whatever it is. Yeah.

And so. Well, that's the other thing about the housing market is nobody's selling. if you have that rate, two and a half or three percent, you're not going to buy a new house at five some percent. And you're certainly not going to sell that house. You're going to rent it if you can. Which again, is a report that I read from some economists who apparently did not bought, nobody shared it to the other ones who were like housing. I mean, come on. But here's the thing. You know, this was the goal. They wanted to stop out of control inflation. If inflation is going to be 8 percent, how do you stop it? Well, you have to slow down the economy.

You have to slow the appreciation of asset value. Congratulations. The asset value of snap just went down 45% today. The number of homes. Mission accomplished. Does this mean they hit the brakes too hard? And like everybody in the backseat is now, you know, like literally hanging out the front windshield. It feels like these folks running and trying to steer keep oversteering. Trump went way too fast.

Then Biden went way too fast. And now Biden slam on the brakes maybe way too hard. It just feels like everybody in the car is a little nauseous. I mean, Powell, to be clear. Powell is the independent. actor here, he is. The Fed chair has to be independent. If it's not independent,

nothing has any meaning. Yeah, I guess. I mean, they say it's independent, but I feel like they all kind of are working as a team and there's some communication of like, they may not tell him like, this is the exact plan you need to do,

but I think there might be a conversation like, is this economy too hot? Do we need to slow it down? I mean, they're talking. Don't get me wrong. They're talking about like, we need to slow the economy down, right? For sure.

There has to be some high level discussion. But I think that, but everybody has been saying that, that Powell is clearly going to slam the brakes too hard. I thought everybody had been saying. Like, it just seemed, you know, it was like, dude, ease us in here. It's not easy. This is like really, I think, and for people who are, have 401Ks,

uh, and investing in the market, you know, they are going to get scared and they're going to sell and then they're going to sell low instead of when they should be probably putting more money into their account. So if your 401k is down right now and you're down to 25 percent, like selling now and losing the 25%. It might actually be, I don't want to get financial advice, but what I would do and what I am doing is maybe buying more stocks and companies.

I'm buying, I happen to be buying more privates, but I might also dip into some publics because if you look at the publics right now, there's no doubt in my mind that some of these are going to triple quadruble up when this thing all sorts itself out when they're winners. I'm shopping.

It's a huge sale at the stock store. It is. It's a huge sale. And so if you're not, if you don't have to retire now because stocks do go up. and down, you know. I like to take 10-year reviews of these things, like hold the stock for 10 years, and I just make that decision.

Now I check in on it. Is the company suddenly lost its ability to execute? Yeah, sure, you want to check in on it every year, every six months. But I like this idea of just really picking stocks that you think are going to be here. If you're a high-performing founder or operator or human, you need to make sure you take care of your health and your wellness. A founder is one of the most stressful jobs you can have. You can take a huge toll on your physical health.

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next couple of months, hopefully that's what happens, is that inflation comes slamming down because people are stopping their spending. And you know who's going to really stop their spending? People who lost their freaking jobs, especially people who have well-paying jobs. So what we're not seeing right now is Apple store or Starbucks or Uber Drive is losing their jobs. We need more of those. Who's losing their jobs, Molley? Unfortunately, instant delivery, it's interesting to look at this through the lens of the category. So we've talked a lot about instant delivery startups contracting for expanding the gopuffs and the one in South America. Yeah, that one.

Anyway, that one. Yeah. So instant delivery startups and buy now pay later. These are particularly weak sectors right now. We're going to start with Gorillas, a Berlin-based instant delivery startup. It had raised $1.3 billion to date was last valued at $3 billion in a series C that they did in September 2021. One, according to a Reuters report this morning, they're going to cut 300 employees. That's about 50% of staff.

They will not be laying off any of the 14,000 bicycle delivery people. But they're shifting focus from, and I think we're going to hear a lot of this in the months to come, from rapid expansion to turning a profit. They're also considering exiting several countries, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium. Makes sense. Again, I talked earlier about, hey, what do you do? in a moment like this, you get rid of the weakest people and you get rid of the weakest markets and projects. So in the case of somebody who's operating in multiple markets, if you're trying to expand into a market and there's too much friction in this market, let's say it's San Francisco.

There was a moment where I think the local government, I think if you remember this, they were like, you can't charge more for Treasure Island to get deliveries or something like that or Oakland. There was some, you know, intervention in the market. by local government and what did Uber and Torres say? Okay, we just won't deliver there. Buy. If we can't make it profitable, we're out. And so you have to let the market work these things out.

And some markets, in this case, it looks like those markets include Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium. These might be markets where, I don't know, you have to have full-time employees as opposed to contractors. Maybe there's a minimum wage there. Maybe there's taxes there. And this is where you start to see which markets are efficient and the free market works well in when you see, you know, the harder markets drop off because they might have been subsidizing, you know, Spain and Italy with, you know, France and England, right? Because those were more profitable.

They could charge more there. And so now you start to figure out, you know, which entrepreneurs are willing to take the medicine and which ones are not. And that's going to be the story of the rest of 2022. Who can, in a storm, batten down the hatches and who is going to just pretend like, you know, a passing storm, but 300 employees, 50% of its staff. That's not a 5% or 10%. Anytime anybody does 5% or 10%, you know what that is? That's a shave.

Yeah, this is, you're getting a serious buzz cut here. Joker. Was the South American? Joker was the South American company, Naketeer, which is the one in Turkey. That's how many there are. Yeah, I think this is interesting and it's also

it gets to something that came up at the All In Summit with the Roundtable with Bill Gurley and Brad Gersner, which is now episode 81, is this idea, and I love this, that like, if you're a business with negative unit economics, you can't. And delivery is consistently that business, right? Delivery is consistently the business that either needs massive surplus, massive subsidies and or capital expenditures and loses money in search of growth. And I honestly, I don't, I still want to see. Like, we still don't have proof, even this many years after the dot com crash. Yeah.

that delivery works as a business. Yeah, I mean, clearly working for Amazon. But it's not. That's the part of Amazon that's like break-even. AWS makes all the money. I think, yeah, AWS is a fantastic business. At any time, you know, Amazon is still taking massive market share when it comes to actual commerce.

If you look at e-commerce, they have a disproportionate number. So if the producers could look up Amazon's percentage of commerce of the United States versus e-commerce. They have a lot of e-commerce, but not a lot of commerce. So I think they just want to keep that top. line growing. But they're doing it in the same way, right? Like there was that analyst report after the last Amazon earnings that said that Amazon's

commerce business, retail business, is effectively zero. You know, when I read that, I just think if you were to add a dollar or two to every Amazon order, would it change the number of orders being done? I don't think it would. I think what they're trying to do is just kill their competitors. and it's more of like a market share play. But putting that aside, this 15-minute delivery, instant delivery, has to have a massive premium on it.

If you want people to drop what they're doing and race something to you on a bicycle, you kind of need to pay. And I think what happens is they were told just double growth, triple growth every year. How do you do that? You do a lot of discounts. When people get those $5 or $10 credit

coupons, they use them. So they're effective. And I don't know if you remember in the early days of Uber and Lyft, you would give a ride to get a ride or give $5 to get $5 or $10, whatever it was. And you would be like, wow, that's a pretty good incentive.

I tweeted it a bunch. I got hundreds of people who joined Uber. I mean, I did it because I was an investor, but it was also the second benefit was I didn't pay for an Uber for a year or two because I had so many credits coming in. Yeah. And they just looked at the customer acquisition costs.

If I had to pay for this customer, you know, in an advertisement, television, outdoor, online, I'd pay $40. If I get a friend to invite a friend and I give them a $15 credit each, that's $30. It's $10 cheaper than what I was spending in advertising. So maybe I'll just go for that and get people more addicted to the product. So I think that's what people have to realize is instant delivery should be extremely expensive. It should be $30. bucks. If you want something to deliver it instantly, it should just be $30. Like, whatever the cost of the person is times two. So if it costs 15 bucks for the delivery person, you know, per ride, if they

get paid 30 bucks, well, if they get paid 25 bucks an hour, it should be 1250. You should double it to 25. And whoever's selling should get the other 1250. And in some instances, that would be worth it. Like you're having a party and you need ice and beer and cigarettes. Right. But it's not going to be worth it for a quart of milk, you know. And then we'll see, I mean, then we'll see people will do it. I really, like, I maintain that we do not know yet whether delivery is, is actually viable as a business. If you have to build AWS in order to grow enough to have to own the competition and then make it economically viable, like that's a, that's a pretty hard. It's certainly low margin. It's certainly low. It's certainly a low margin scale business and with

too many players in it. I think when the players come out, that's when you start to see, oh yeah, this could be a good business. You can't have seven people losing money and it's just like, Like, it's basically everybody running full speed to the cliff, jumping off the cliff, increasing their speed, and then eventually plummeting to their death. Like, it's got to be like a realistic pace here and not running off the cliff. Listen, when you're a founder, it's fun to trade your craziest stories with other founders. Recently, Balloon CEO Amanda Greenberg, one of my portfolio companies told me how Vantas SOC2 solution helped her save an important deal in the final hours. Yes, balloon sells SaaS products and collaborative software, and when they needed 10 documents in place within 48 hours to close a deal,

well, Vanta saved the day by supplying customizable templates for Amanda to fill out and helping them through the process all the way to close. So if you don't have your sock too tight, you can't close major customers like this. Vantus compliance software makes it easier to get and renew your sock two. They continually test against technical and non-technical sock tool requirements. They partner with over two dozen audits. firms who have been trained to file SOC2 reports directly within Vanta. And on average, Vanta customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks.

Compare that to three to five months without VANTA. And guess what? Vanta's going to give you $1,000 off right now for your SOC2. Because you listen to this week in startups, get that $1,000 off right now. Vanta.com slash twist, V-A-N-T-A dot com slash twist. Once again, Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 on. Well, ironically, another business model that seems to have exactly the same dynamic happening is by now, pay later, which of course we've talked about a firm. There are lots of company.

There are lots of companies that ran into this. And then we are now hearing that the Wall Street Journal reported that Clarna, which is now laying off about 10% of its workforce, that's 700 employees, was raising a billion dollars. the Wall Street Journal reported last week at a $30 billion valuation, which would be a downround from a peak of $46 billion. So, Clarenda, raising in a down round and laying off 10% of its employees, it currently has 6,300 employees. That feels like a lot for a buy now, pay later company. They have a lot of employees.

I think it's a lot of people in partnerships. And interestingly, I had read a headline that they had done a video message. I would really love to see that video message. but 700 of 7,000 employees. Again, it's 10%. So even though that's a large number, people, 700, you know, and obviously we have sympathy for anybody who loses their job, this is like a little trimming and it will probably make things more efficient ultimately.

So this is like a preemptive sign of strength, I think, when you see these 10%. It's just like, well, 10% means we can, our runway, if employees are the number one cost, theoretically our runway will be 10% longer. So if we had 20 months, maybe we have 22 months or whatever. Or if you were only burning a small amount like 10% or 20% of your spend, this could get you to break even. So depending on how much they're spending, this could really extend runway.

And that's really what founders have to look at. Let's say you have 10 people in your company and you're spending 100,000 and all in each employee is costing 10,000 with their desk and their computers and health insurance, everything else, you know, and you're making, I don't know, 50K, well, you're losing 50K a month, you're losing 600K a month. But if you get it down to 75,

now you're losing 25K a month, you're only losing 300, and you have 900 in the bank, you now have three years of runway. And that's really what founders are going to be faced with, and independent of the size of the company, you're going to just have to extend that runway. We've been saying it over and over again on this podcast,

on All In, in Tweetstorms. you just want to be able to survive three years. There was a really funny video. I don't know if you saw it. But I think liquidity, that Twitter handle liquidity, it was like some yogi giving advice and it said, just survive three years. Please, just survive three years.

So somebody looked that up. It's a looped video saying, survive three years. That's all you have to do is just survive three years. I think you have to survive 18 months is what I will tell everybody. Yeah. And I, you know, inside launch, all the companies. I run, like, we'll be here on the other side.

Other companies, I'm not so sure you have the 18 months, you know, to 36 months to survive. But this is why, here it is. I mean, if we can play the sound on this, it is a hilarious video. I saw this. Oh, yeah, this is amazing. Just be alive for next three years. Don't die within next three years. I guarantee you, I will reach you wherever you are.

I'll reach you wherever you are. just don't die within next three years be alive somehow be alive for next three years I will reach you wherever you are whichever corner of the world

you may be I will reach you with enlightenment understand it'll be yes I will reach you with alignment if you survive three more years you know what this is

the greatest tweet ever what is the tweet of the day folks what is the movie with like Kevin Koster and it's like you stay alive I will find you it's that

it's literally that It literally is. I'll come back for you. Oh, my God. And that's incredible. That's where we all are. So, you know, to the, and what's going to happen now, you know, I was just giving some people some advice on this was, you know, we had a little bit of an out of control employment market. Not enough people, you know, competing offers, Google, Facebook, Apple, you know, Uber, Airbnb.

They just hire everybody. It was like, just keep hiring. If you find somebody talented, hire them, we'll figure out what to have them work on. Because this thing is just going up and to the right. And when you're going up into the right, stock price, raising money, revenue, consumers, everything's up into the right. You're like, we need to staff this place for two years from now. We need to be thinking about our revenue growing 35% a year.

If we're growing 36% a year, we're going to have double the amount of revenue two years. So people just said, whatever our model, whatever our financial, performance will look like in two years, let's build for now, right? So it's like on this podcast, like, hey, want to build another podcast, let's hire another person, let's hire another video editor.

Now people are going to take the opposite approach. We're not going to do another podcast. We're not going to, you know, add another day of the week. We're going to contract. We're going to go to four days a week. They're just going to take a very conservative approach. I think in this kind of market,

if you're smart, you can take an aggressive approach, it's got to be thoughtful about it. And so if you're planning on hiring four people, Maybe you tell people we're hiring two, everybody's got to work a little hard or be a little more efficient. I need to hire the best people. And because all these people are getting laid off, now instead of one person having five job offers and you're in a competition, you might have five people going for your one job offer. Yeah. And then you're picking the best person out of the five, not having the employee pick the highest offer of the five.

And that is another silver lining in all of this, if you are listening and you are listening and you are. are a founder. You need to think, like, and this is a super cutthroat, Molly, but you might be like, well, I hired this person during these boom days. Did I overpay them? And are they as good as the other options out here? That's when you know this is going to get really crazy is when people start negotiating, giving people pay cuts, or they start hiring other people for positions and laying off high price people. This happened at the New York Times, many times where people who were there for like 30 years, they got these like guaranteed union base. Buy out.

Rays this. And then they were like, we got to buy you out because, you know, this 35 year old is filing more interesting stories, twice as many. You're getting paid three times as much as them and you're filing one third of the time. So people are going to back that sharpening of pencils. People are going to start sharpening pencils. And does hiring get harder in startup land too?

I mean, I feel like I remember this that there's like a flight to safety. I feel like during the last downturn, I remember. that people who might have taken a chance on, you know, equity at a startup. Yep. Because they felt like there were lots of options where instead like, I'm going to Google. If those places are still hiring, you will have people who maybe want to lower risk, you know, thing. You know, I got a job at Google or I'm at Klarna, like a more, an older startup. Yeah, my options are underwater.

They let go of 10% of the people, but I got a pay package that was negotiated in 2021 at the peak of the market. I got all these benefits. If I leave for another startup, who knows if they're going to be able to have funding in year two, I'm not going to do that. So what that does is, it's actually good for startups conversely because you don't get the lazy, entitled, conservative people, you get all the hardcore people. And there might be, you're right, there might be less of them to choose from, but they're going to be more believers and hardcore. So that's a nice actual effect for startups, is you get the more rugged, resilient, you know, self-actualized, you know, warrior types.

Yeah. And the people who are just mercenaries who are like, oh, I want to get, you know, shares at a dollar each and run them up to a thousand dollar. Yeah, exactly. I want to win the lottery people, you know, maybe and who are resting, investing, they go away. So it's going to be a mixed bag, but. It was last of the Mohicans, by the way.

I looked it up while we were talking. Daniel Day Lewis to Madeline Stowe. I mean, it's literally, it's like he mixed up these two quotes. He's like, you stay alive no matter what occurs. I will find you, no matter how long it takes. no matter how far, I will find you. Yeah. That's why.

Florida is not public yet. Right. So we don't know that much about. Well, we do know they have them. I think they released some numbers for 2021. It was a pretty robust business. 80 billion in GMV. This is a gross merchandise value.

This is like what they sold. So $80 billion worth of product was done on a buy now, pay later. You know, that's that for installation kind of payment. Their operating income was $1.6 billion. So they get a fraction of that $80 billion in gross market value. It looks like it's about 2%. But they didn't tell anybody their revenue or their profit loss. But with 7,000 employees, if you were to put that 100,000 in change per employee, maybe 150,

you get a pretty big number there, you know, over a billion dollars in salaries. So I don't think they're profitable or, you know, break even yet. And they do a lot of marketing. So, but 1.6 billion in income, you know, off of that GMV, $30 billion valuation. It's 20 times for a high growth business. I think they were growing close to 40% year over year. So they didn't, they don't have a crazy valuation until you start looking at the market and it's like, Snap is worth $15 billion and they have a billion a quarter in revenue, I believe.

So $4 billion, $1.15. They're four times revenue. Uber's 1.8 times revenue or 1.5 maybe now. So you're starting to see the difference between the private markets, Molly, and the valuations, the public markets. Those public market valuations are, you know, severely below the private market ones. And that's where we saw that with Instacart, right? They ran their valuation down. I think Klarna will be doing that.

A lot of people are going to readjust their valuations and do down rounds. Yeah. And down rounds are hard. I think we should do that. I think we should bookmark that for VC Sunday school and talk about down rounds. Yeah, the dangers are down rounds. Pretty relevant. Pretty relevant.

Yeah, we can only compare this really in some ways to affirm. They're not like a one-to-one because Klarna does have a bigger product suite and do with some other banking and payment stuff. A firm is like that's of course Max Levichin's company from the PayPal Mafia, buy now pay later all the way. And their GMB in 2021 was $8.3 billion. So about 10% the size of Clerna. Operating loss was $380 million. So we know they were not.

profitable. Klarna had an operating profit of 1.6 billion. A firm had 7.1 million active customers at the end of 2021 or about 5% of Clarnas total customer base. Oh, that was that 1.6 was operating profit for Clarnia. Okay. Operating profit. It's operating profit is on without their cost structure and their investments, I guess. So we don't know what's below that line. Right. Yeah. I don't know. So Clarenas valuation, we, based on what little we know, might be fine. But I do think there are ongoing questions. I think there are just ongoing questions about buy now, pay later. Well, here's the thing. Buy now pay later. The thing I've heard is like you have people who have credit card debt and credit card debt all of a sudden we went from record savings during the pandemic to credit card debt and household debt all of a sudden reaching new records.

And then is buy now pay later independent of your credit card? So if you do Pai Now Pay Later, I think Klarna, a firm and the merchants are taking that risk. If your credit card's maxed out as a consumer and then you go buy a laptop or a TV or a vacation on Buy Now Pay Later, now you've got your mortgage,

which is at a really high rate, 5, 6%, then you get your credit card, which is going to be at a pretty high rate. It's like 15, 20%. And now you got Buy Now Pay Later. I don't know what Buy Now Pay Later winds up being.

Is it per individual and they make a calculation on you or is it some sort of flat rate and they split that. It's per individual and a lot of times, at least with a firm, it's zero. It can be zero percent. And one of the things they're trying to do is sort of reevaluate how they assign credit. As a result, the pay later part has already proven to be the sticking point, right? Like there was a story in March of this year saying one in five US adults who took out a buy now pay later loan missed a payment in January. Oh.

Yeah. Uh-oh. The pay later is the problem. If you got a monthly this and a monthly that and a monthly that. And like there's this idea. It's almost like streaming subscriptions, right? Or news. Like it's like there's this idea that it there's,

it's no big deal to add another $4.99 or $5.99 or $9.99 or $9.9 or $9. Or $6 a month for this or $10 a month for your couch. But the next thing you know, you do a digital audit and you're looking at $400 a month in payments for all of this stuff. And the one that's like sort of zero percent and isn't your. credit card is the easiest one to ignore. So they're going to overdraft. They're going to be the ones who are over their skis.

So this is maybe the canary in the coal mine. It doesn't feel like it's enough. It doesn't feel like enough people are using this for this to be the systemic shock black swan. But it also is kind of a new thing. So it's maybe like a mini black swan, like a black tiny little duckling that just came around the pond. and you're like, huh, haven't seen that before.

Feels ominous. Well, I mean, if you took crypto and you take buy now, pay later, right, and NFTs, you put this into a bucket of things that we have not had in the system before. These are new risks in the system. And, you know, just like mortgage-backed bundles of securities were a new risk in the system, just like the dot-com bubble was a new risk in the system. So there are some new risks in the system now. And I think that's what people are scared of.

And I think we have to flush some of those out and say, what is the actual value of Tether? What is the actual value of Bitcoin? Does it have some fundamental value other than we believe in the future? And we think it might be a new philosophy for living life without government control. Like a philosophy, unlike the pizzerie example I gave earlier in the episode or your house episode, a philosophy doesn't generate revenue. Right. And I think that's where we might have a little bit of a problem here is like things need to actually generate. value in the world. By now, pay later. That does generate value in the world. That's a nice service for people to take advantage of. Yeah. But it also. But who should be taken advantage of it?

The fundamental question is should you buy stuff you can't afford? That's the problem. And I think weren't the vendors, you know, the people selling the merchants, the one picking up the Vig on this. So they're like, well, if we sell the laptop and we make 10% on it, it's a $2,000 laptop we're making 200 bucks. Yeah, we'll give them back 75, you know, and buy now, pay later company gets some amount of money. So we'll make a smaller profit on it, but we'll get more customers to buy laptops. So it is a way to maybe squeeze a couple of, you know, 10% more purchases out of the market. Oh, it absolutely is.

And I actually think that with some of them and I had this experience when I bought an Xbox, I think I've told this story already. But they were like, do you want to just do it, you know, zero percent? And I was like, sure, why not? Who cares? Right. It's zero percent. Why not?

Might as well. And then they make it. There's so much friction. They don't just then automatically charge the card that you used. There's so much friction to set up your ongoing payments that I ended up spending $400 on my $200 Xbox. Oh, man. They built in the penalties.

I don't doubt for a second that that's part of the model. Got it. Interesting. Like, I don't doubt that at all. Like, it didn't need to be that hard. If you want me to pay it back, it doesn't need to be hard. But if you don't want me to pay it back, make it hard. Part of the reason I'm like cool as a cucumber right now is like, I never bought the plane.

or put myself into debt. I was just like, I'm just going to live well below my means and just keep working and focusing on my work. And I'm just not going to spend a ton of money. I can buy a couple of things that are nice to have, you know, again, the ski house. And I live in a nice house. But no, I was going to replace all my cars. And I'm like, yeah, seven year old, six or seven year old model X, two year old model Y.

I think I'm okay. Three year old minivan. I think I can keep each one for two more years. So I just said, you know, until I have like a clear path to getting the Nix, I'm staying in my lane. I'm going to drive the same car. But seriously, like America. I would buy now pay later for the NICs. I would buy now pay later for the next.

I'll put a little deposit. Paging Max. Hey, James Lovicin. Hey, James Lola. Can I buy now pay later? Monthly installment 500 million. I mean, America loves debt. Like, this does not happen in other countries.

You buy a house when you have the cash to buy a house, you know? 50% right, right? You know, you have some. Monthly installments of 500 million. David Sacks, bestie David Sacks, had a great threat about how founders can think about positioning themselves during the downturn he did it last week. Startups, instead of thinking about whether you are default alive or default dead, you know, which is Paul Graham's famous essay, profitable or losing money, default alive is your break-even profitable. You can't die if you're not spending any money. Think about whether you're default investable or devout uninvestable.

And I think this is really, you know, another great lens to look at this. you're not investable at this point in time. Interestingly, you and I, Molly, we're having conversations about companies we're looking at and just saying, is this investable at this moment in time? Right. And, you know, do you want to be the person catching the knives? That's the conversation happening inside of venture firms. Are we going to catch this knife for the previous investors? You've got to fix the business and the problem. And as David Sachs says here, you've got to give yourself adequate time to fix your metrics, tinkering, experimenting, finding, product market fit, all of that takes time. Fixing problems in the business is typically more

successful with a lean team anyway. Back to the point. You cut the bottom 20%, you're going to run faster. The average time with that fourth person in the relay cut is going to be much higher because you're keeping the fastest people. And so move fast and get those metrics in line. And then funding will be available and maybe not on the terms that you aspire towards, but you'll be on the path to being alive. And as the guru said, three years, I'm coming for you. I will find you wherever you are.

Stay alive for three years. Please. No matter how long it takes. No matter how hard it is, startups, stay alive for three years. Just don't call Daniel Day Lewis. It's the most romantic. You stay alive.

Just stay alive, for three years. I'll find you. We'll do the pod. Oh, my God. We'll start our quick times. Over here we have the runtime. time. Just start your quick time, Molly. We'll be there.

The runway. We have the runway. Yes, as we were talking about earlier, Molly, let's tee this up. This is really fascinating. See, this is what people don't understand about e-commerce because there's two different numbers you need to understand. This is why actually sometimes in the sometimes say five or six years ago, if you were to write an article at the New York Times about Amazon's sheer size and how eventually everything you do on the internet will run through Amazon, then they'll call you and be like,

hey, just on background, we're not that big. And what they mean is we're only about 5% of total commerce. Right. In America, which is such a harmless, tiny number. Just 5%. We're 5%. One in 20. Of total commerce.

Now. One of 20 bags or boxes that gets shit, you know, that people buy. And, you know, one of 20 bags of stuff is ours. The other 19 or other people like talk to Walmart. It's like nothing. Now, our share of U.S. e-commerce sales. Stuff that originates on a website or your phone.

People may have, they may have hit an all-time high of 56.7% of all e-commerce sales in the United States in 2021. We're on it up to 60 and that means three out of five bags being shipped, three out of five boxes are Amazon. And all of a sudden they're like, okay. One and 20 bags of groceries leaving stuff. stores, one in 20 bags leaving stores, we'd be Amazon, but three out of five boxes on trucks that originated from a website is them.

So, yeah. It's not 90% like Google search, but it's on the way. And I think if they win that prize, that's their goal. That's the goal. I mean, it is so insane. But you have to be able to keep these two numbers in your head. And then here's what happens. Old people die.

So the people who are still going to the stores are people over 50. Like that's who goes to stores. People over 40, 50 go to stores. People under 30? Are they going to stores? Maybe for like a drop or something like Kanye or Kylie, something drop, like where they line up and take selfies or something goofy. I think they generally want to get their shirts online. They want to buy stuff online.

It's just easier. And Amazon will just. break even on that business forever until 90% of those boxes and the groceries too. All right, let's have a little fun, shall we? It's been a long show. Depressing show. Welcome to this week and it's over.

Economic outlooks this week and it's over. It's not over. I mean, yes, this is individually terrible. Perfect for you, though. I know, this is a lot of opportunity. We talked about this. I said you were like, am I joining at the top of the market? I said, yes.

but I get a sense that you'll be at the bottom of the market soon and you'll be able to ride it up just like I did and I've been waiting for this moment in time because a lot of people are going to be curled up in a ball you know taking their ketamine or whatever antidepressant they're on trying to figure out how they function in their life and I'm built for this totally it's not too my now I'm ready to go to war I'm ready to go it's not doom like yes this is all we're doing is reporting the news

this is not doom this is just things go down and they go up Let's like invest into the down and build a bigger up. Let's go. Yeah. You guys can go buy your Xanax on cerebral. Oh, I'm sorry. Too soon. I'm sorry, your cerebral prescription.

Woo. We are going to get to Xanax for you kids. We're getting to cerebral tomorrow. But right now, cue the Don Julio. Do you have your bottle there? Of course I have my Don Julio. Molly, Molly, Molly. We're back in business.

We're back. We're back. Rivka. We're going to take the carbon. We're going to take the carbon. We. We green. We green. We green. We green. Shout out to our friend Adam Newman. He's back. He didn't call me. I guess he's, but he's back. He's not going to be CEO of this new thing.

He's just backed it. He's smart enough to, he's smart enough to be like, I'll just be back here. I'll be back to you. But there, let's just say there are fingerprints of the Newman's all over this new business. So the company is called flow carbon. It's a blockchain based carbon credits company. Ding, ding, ding, ding, buzzword, buzz. buzzword, bingo, bingo, bingo. Okay, so we have carbon and climate. Credits. Blockchain. Blockchain.

Got it, credits. And then we got it. Got it. Okay. Offsets. We are going to bring community to the blockchain, Riefka. Adam, uh, Adam Newman and his wife, Rebecca Newman, uh, are co-founders. Please come on the pod, Rebecca.

Please come on the pod. Okay. I can't even. I'm like, talk to you for five hours. I'm trying so hard. I love Rebecca Newman. She's my favorite. human. Like, I'm trying so hard

not to skip ahead to the token. Okay. First, the fact. Stannick. Oh, is it token too? Ding, ding, ding. Oh, yeah. There's a token. Wait, what about my NFT? Can I can't wait. It's called the goddess nature token. Bah!

Goddess nature token. Oh my God. Did they include red flags? Did they include pictures in the white paper? I'm dying. I'm just... That's why we put the pictures in. Nobody's done it before. What is the EBAA?

He's the doctoring so stupid. What's the EBIDA? Do they have green EBIDA? Iber. Green Diena serves as CEO. Caroline Klatt previously co-founded headliner labs, which created an enterprise SaaS platform that did like voice activated

e-commerce tools. Yeah. So, okay. Let's get to the fun part. What is it? The Newman said that flow carbon was started because they realized that they wanted, they were doing these philanthropic

forest conservation efforts. And they said it simply couldn't go far enough. Couldn't scale. So they decided to ask the team at their family office to come up with a solution that they thought could also make money. And then they launched the goddess nature token. The GNT. Goddess nature token. A crypto token.

It's the Gaia token. The goddess of planet Earth is Gaia. So it's the Gaia token. They should have called it that, honestly. It's a crypto token on the C-lobe. blockchain backed by carbon credits. The tokens can be retired. I'm just going to read all this and then we'll come back to does it make any sense.

Or translate it to English. Yeah. Exactly. The tokens can be retired as an offset, sold, used for borrowing, lending, or redeemed for an underlying real world credit, according to flow carbon. This company has raised $70 million led by notably not a bunch of climate tech investors, crypto investors. Andries and Horowitz, obviously, the crypto unit led it.

$32 million came from VC. and $38 million came from the sale of the goddess nature token. Okay. Should we do the missions? The mission statement? Oh, no, there's a mission statement? Yeah. Well, sort of.

According to their press release, they said... Are they going to enlighten consciousness of carbon? It's actually, it's like, this is pretty straightforward, sort of, except that it's just like bloop-de-blop-blop crypto talk. Flow carbon's mission is to drive billions of dollars directly to project, that reduce or remove carbon from the atmosphere by creating the first open protocol for tokenizing live certified carbon credits from projects around the globe. Through flow carbon's protocol, project developers can immediately access a marketplace of buyers interested in their credits by bringing them onto the blockchain. Buyers are then able to purchase live carbon credits directly from project proponents.

So they're not going to elevate the world's consciousness? Not at this time. And they're not actually, if I'm being honest, even going to particularly elevate carbon offset markets. Like they're just putting it on the chain for no evident reason. Like there doesn't seem to be like there's a big market for carbon offsets, which has debatable value in my opinion. The big problem with carbon offsets is that it's hard to verify the value.

If it's just like an old project, that doesn't necessarily generate that much renewable energy or they've sold offsets of a berylion times over. There's a question of quality. It sort of sounds like what they're doing here is they're creating a marketplace for people who have planted a really big forest or done a really big solar installation and want to sell these carbon credits. And then on the other hand,

at the end of the marketplace, there will be people who want to buy those carbon credits. And then I think the blockchain part, just make sure that you only sell it once. Yeah. I mean, I get it. It doesn't seem that necessary for me. It's completely unnecessary.

I mean, you know, throwing blockchain at something is just a way to, you know, in a lot of these cases, open you up to another set of investors and another funding source, which is bag holders in the public who buy the token because they think it's going to appreciate. And so this is, you know. It's kind of just honestly, like, I'm a little disappointed that this is their big, first big outing because like it's crypto, which you know, or blockchain is totally energy intensive. I'm against it. it does not improve the quality of the offsets that I can see. And then offsets are just a haul pass for more emissions instead of reducing emissions. Yeah. I mean,

I'm bummed about this. I would rather, I would rather they come up with projects that actually remove carbon, you know, or actually replace things. So I understand theoretically the concept of these carbon credits, but I agree with you that I think it's for rich people and companies to be like, okay, I want to keep burning. burning fossil fuels and, you know, burning a hole in the ozone.

Therefore, I'm going to buy these carbon credits from somebody else. Theoretically, that's going to lower it. I mean, I guess theoretically it works. Like, I'm flying a private jet and I'm doing this much carbon. Therefore, I'm going to underwrite a solar farm. Right. Or I'm going to under, I'm going to, you know, somebody installs a solar farm. Somebody planted a bunch of trees.

And it discounts it or they plant some trees. There's like interesting. I understand it theoretically, but I've never seen it work. Maybe the idea, Molly, is that because. it's on the blockchain, you can trace back the carbon credits to the person who actually did it and then evaluate if they actually did it. But it feels like to me, like a giant washing machine to wash people's guilt as opposed to actually just, you know, doing a project. Where it can potentially be good is that, for example, it could incentivize, like,

I'm very interested in the growing and still very nascent carbon offset market for agriculture. So it could incentivize really big farms and agriculture operations to do regenerative agriculture that's healthier for the crops. It uses fewer pesticides. It gives us less cancer. And also the soil then sequesters a ton of carbon. So if you start paying farmers to do that instead of paying them to just like not plant, that's a good thing.

Right. There's got to be a much more straightforward way. But right now it's just a hot freaking mess. And it incentivizes people to build like crappy projects. that don't last very long and it just, and what we need to do is cut, 50 to zero. It would be very, I would very much like to see a simpler project. We do like the Manhattan Project for Solar.

We say, this, you know, these five solar farms are going to be built out infinitely. And every panel that is added, every gigawatt that's added, cost X amount. So I'm just going to make a number up here. Like, this panel is like, you know, this five by five inch panel, or section of the panel is $100. So for every $100 and, you know, carbon you're putting into the world, or we just put a tax on things.

You want to drive a truck that's under X number of gallons per mile. You've got to buy $1,000 in solar. And here's your $1,000 solar panel on this farm. So you can be like, okay, I get it. I want to buy this truck that burns, you know, or this car that's low emission, that's low mileage. I buy this other thing that costs $1,000. I'm good.

And we just watch that one project get larger and larger and larger. And we'd just be very clear to people what's going on, right? And you can do fundraisers and say, hey, every time we do a fundraiser, it's going to add 10 panels. Or you can add 10 panels to this. And then eventually we're done. I do like the swag. I have to say, they're doing Flow Lab surfboards. And we know Adam Newman famously bought that wave garden company with the artificial waves.

That was one of the things that got them in trouble. Oh, right. You know, remember that? God, I've forgotten about that. So magical. And then when he was doing the IPO, there was this whole thing where, like, people had to come to the Maldives and find him to talk about the IPO because he didn't want to cut his vacation short. So, you know, he was living his best life.

And shout out for living your best life, Adam. There you go. Shout out. We're glad to see you back in the news. On the plus side, we're delighted to see you back in the news. We're delighted to see you back on the news. And we cannot wait to have you on the show. All right, let me tee this up, because I find this fascinating.

All right. You know, I like efficiency. I like, you know, people management kind of things, you know, like for myself. Like, I like, you know, optimizing my own life and I like to see people be super efficient. And meetings we've worked on. We have really efficient meetings, I think. So Coinbase is trying a new real-time meeting feedback rating system, which sounds dystopian and scary unless you're a high performer

and you want more credit in your life. So this could go either way on the Black Mirror scale. It could be Black Mirror or it could be, you know, what's Anne Randi and, you know, you get to be Alice Shrugged. It could be Atlas Shrugged or it could be Black Mirror. Right.

I suppose for some people, Atlas Shrugged is Black Mirror. Same same. Yeah, exactly. Not for me, though. I like the builders. The information reported, the information.com,

the great news source. that Coinbase is using Dot Collector, an app to solicit real-time feedback during meetings. Doc Collector was first developed as an internal tool at Ray Dalio's hedge fund, Bridgewater Associations. We've talked about this. We've had people who worked at Bridgewater on the program. They rate each other. They're brutal to each other in the concept of everybody becoming absurdly high performers. They're kind of like those nerdy kids who just want to rate each other and really drive a competitive. kind of culture. It's kind of the opposite of what we're doing at launch. We want to have a

singular success. And once we have you on the team, we've kind of accepted you. If you pull your weight, you're on the team. If you're not on the, if you're not pulling your weight, it's my job to make sure or management's job to make sure you're not on the team. But I don't want to have Game of Thrones in the company because that seems like chaotic. Dots captures moments of microfeedback during media. Feedback is given on a personal performance like exemplifying company value. In his books, in his book, Principles, Life and Work, Dahlia also, which I listen to, is okay. I like Dahlio's concepts. It seems a little too extreme at times for me. Dahlia also outlines how their internal doc collector app allows for believability-weighted voting.

Believability-weighted voting is where polls are matched with Bridgewater's back-end system of believability weight, where people's relative strengths are scored. For example, Jason would have a 10-weight for investing, but producing, Justin might have a one because I've been doing it longer and Justin hasn't done it yet. For ops, Ashley on our team might be a nine, Jason might be a five and Andre might be a four because that's not my bag and that is hers. And so this is what it looks like. I guess you get rated and it's all public. I find it fascinating. And it's literally happening in real time during a meeting. So like you're in a meeting and somebody, you know, Maria might be like, Amy, I'm watching your presentation right now and it's inclusive and there's a good leadership and it's not that collaborative.

So it was great how you recognized the team's effort, but you missed an opportunity to draw the group into the discussion. And so I assume you would read this later, not during. Yeah, I guess. And then here we go. Here's Cecilia Rose in this example. And the next slide shows, I guess, adaptable, managerial courage, inspiring, assertive, collaborative. So I guess people are rating each other. I can't see the detail level here.

It's a little blurry. But what are your thoughts on this level of feedback? You're a high performer. Would you want to come into a meeting and have people rate you based on our value system? Like we just went through a personal development week. Yeah. I'm trying to decide if this would be helpful for people. You know, it's interesting.

It almost feels to me like the opposite of the OKR and KPI system. Like, if you said an OKR, you're like, we have a high level goal. Here's our objective and these are the key results. And these are the key results. The key results that support the objective. And then here are the key performance indicators that each of you in this organization are responsible for. That enables a system in which you're like, I don't care how you get there.

I don't particularly care what you're like as a person, right? Like, there's a version of work where you sort of have to ask the question, like, is it okay to let people? Some people are annoying. Some people are not great presenters. Some people you don't ideally want to be in a meeting with for two hours, but do they get the job done? They do. So I sort of feel like if you have good KPIs in an OKR, could you, I guess the question is, could you accomplish the same thing as sort of constantly, this tool feels to me like it would create a lot of analysis paralysis.

Like if you were like, I was, I was 99, I achieved my larger goals, but I got a three in this thing and a two in this thing and a that thing and it might have been subjective or not. Like it's about our values, positive energy. What if you don't have positive energy, but you're awesome at work? I don't know. I'm not sure. Yeah. And I also think.

Also, I personally, no. Some people are coming at me at a meeting all the time, just being like, I think you mithing up, but it feels like, well, actually all the time, be like living on Twitter. No. You know, the other thing is, I think this creates a little tribal, or it has a danger of creating tribalism because I gave you good scores. Now, do you give me good scores? Did I get in some sort of fight with you in a meeting? And I'm getting my revenge by giving you a lower score. Like, it's politics. Yeah. Like politics. It feels like this is ripe with politics. I do like, you know, basically, I do think it'd be cool for people to wait, like, let's say we did a deal memo and we said, hey, this deal memo. I like to give specific pieces of feedback like this needs to be better for this reason. This isn't clear. You know, and I kind of try to explain the why behind why I would say this needs to be changed.

But, you know, that takes work. And I think you have to decide if you want to do work to mentor people or if you just want to be critical. And let everybody criticize each other. It also assumes that there's no such thing as like leadership or managerial skills. You know what it is? It's direct democracy. And direct democracy sucks. There's a reason that we elect representatives to do the work for us.

We are assuming that they're more qualified. If you're taking away the idea that leaders and managers are qualified to do the work that they do. Or the idea that you need to train them to do that work. And instead you get to let everybody just like at each other all the time. The Lord of the Flies. It becomes like Lord of the Flies. Like everybody's rating everybody. I'm not sure I like it.

I understand why somebody might try to implement this. I do understand. They want to have high performers, or they want to demand high performance, and you're kind of crowdsourcing high performance, you know, to the peers. So theoretically, you would think it's more democratic. I could see it working for a small group of people

with a lot of trust, you know. If you and I were like, hey, good performance today, or you were like, hey, bad performance, Jake, how you could have done better here? We got enough trust. We could say those things to each other. If it was four people, it was all in. I think we could say those things to each other.

But then you get to like 40 people or 10 people in a meeting. I just don't know if there would be enough trust built up between people to give it. And then I wonder what value it has. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't, it feels, it feels potentially very destructive. Maybe not. Maybe not.

I mean, rate the meeting makes more sense to me. Like, is this meeting? Was this meeting worth it? was this part of the meeting productive? And so Nick wrote something interesting. If everybody in the meeting has low scores, is that indicative of the meeting should have just been an email or a Slack message or a Coda or a notion page,

like a punch list? And that's what I'm always trying to get at. Does this need to be a meeting? Or can we just write in our corporate wiki a page and a punch list and just edit and refine it? And I'm really getting into this writing things down culture and writing down the best practices. and I prefer the Google OKRs, KPIs combined with the Amazon write first culture, six-pagers, and the checklist manifesto.

So I think as a founder and a team, you've got to come up with your own secret sauce. For me, Checkless Manifesto. So Amazon working backwards is like, hey, you write the press release, you write the FAQ, and internal FAQ, and external FAQ. And it just creates massive clarity because writing, is clarity of thought. That's why people who are not experts should not write a book to become an expert

because they're not going to be clear because they don't understand the why behind everything. So checkless manifesto means you don't make mistakes and skip steps and crash the plane or f*** up the surgery. And then Amazon working backwards, working backwards from the press release,

working backwards from a six-pager where you explain why you want to build this product and what it's going to do in words, not images and performance. performance, which this seems performative. And the third piece. The running culture. Oh, and then Google's KPI system.

Oh, and then O Kriads. Yeah. No rules. Does that factor in it all? No rules rules. Freedom and responsibility is a nice credo. So no rules rules. The Netflix culture book.

The Netflix culture, I think, is a little too cutthroat. I don't think having people fear for their jobs every January and having to reapply for them is a great long-term tool. I do understand. It probably has resulted in some higher. performance, but I think long term it could create mistrust. But the no rules rules is like autonomy, make the best decision you can, given the information you have, have a good thesis of why you did that and better to make a decision, which you've seen me do with people is just, I want you to make a decision and then come back to me with that decision. I'll tell you if it's a good idea or not.

It's, you know what it is? It's like the distorting effect of incentives. If at Netflix or even with this system, if your goal is just to survive, then you will do whatever it takes to survive. And that includes killing your coworker. Correct. And if the goal is to succeed together, to meet goals, and we're all rowing in the same direction and the direction, you know, is defined. Yeah. Then I think you can maybe create a little more camaraderie out of that.

And then you get there. What does it go fast versus go far? Yeah, exactly. If you want to go far, if you want to go fast, go alone. to go far, you know, go with a team. I think actually that's kind of what's happening here at Bridgewater is they want individual excellence and individual decision making and they have fiefdoms. Like you might have a book of business and I might have a book of business with my team.

And we're kind of all like this little marauding fiefdoms, I guess, is the word? Fiftems or fiefdoms? Amazon's very similar. Actually, I talked to another large employer in the Seattle area once, CEO who was like, yeah, we had to stop hiring people from Amazon because. they, everything up. They're two cutthroat.

That's the third F word. I'm sorry. But they're two cutthroat. And it literally like undermines goals because you'll say, don't do this. But in Amazon, that's like a challenge. And what it means is do this.

And so they're like, what then these employees waste a bunch of time because they went off and did this thing. And I was like, no, I legitimately don't want you to do that thing. Instead of like, go do it and prove me wrong.

This is what happens when you have very large organizations. Like there's five direct reports to the CEO founder. They have five reports each. And there's just got to be some way for people to evaluate, you know, thousands of employees at Klarna or Coinbase or Uber. So they come up with some system to evaluate everybody. And according to the information, Coinbase's version lets employees evaluate coworkers, including their managers on how well they exemplify the crypto firms,

10 cultural tenants, which are, number one, clear communications. I like that. Two, efficient execution. I like that as well. three, act like an owner. Four, top talent, five championship team. Seems like it dovetails with number four. Continuous learning.

I like that too. Customer focus, obviously a good one. Repeatable innovation. Okay, efficiency, right? Positive energy. I like that. That's like super pumped. Get pumped.

Be pumped. And mission first is number 10. I would think mission first has to be number one, but okay. It's so hard to get to 10. Every time somebody has a list of their 10 values, That's a fair point. Yeah, they read out of steam. Even with the Peloton one, remember, like, our favorite new CEO and his 10 was still just like, I think six is the same as two.

And then they kind of peter out a little bit. For polling, they have do's and don'ts. This is interesting for polling people. Be curious. Surface perspectives by asking questions. Engage. Read the responses people submit. Draw out a richer understanding through discussion.

A line. Consider different viewpoints. Differing viewpoints. It's okay to disagree, though everyone needs to get behind a decision. eventually, I guess. Record, track everyone's input, viewpoints, capture decisions to enable learning from others over time. I like that. Don't. Don't ask questions about everything. Ask about the important things. That's great. Staying focused. Two, don't be too open-minded. What does that mean? Free-form questions have their place, but they take time responding

and reading. Frazier questions clearly and concisely. That's good. Be concise. You always hear me say that. Like, what was the question I asked? Especially with young people, I ask one question. They don't answer it or they give me a general. Okay, how many, How many new advertisers did we have this month? And they're like, a lot. Yeah. I'm like, a lot. Okay.

It sort of sounds like maybe Brian just doesn't like meetings. Like, somebody here doesn't like meetings. That's what's really happening. It might be a little cranky pants about the meetings. Everyone has had this experience where you're in a meeting and there's somebody who's like super literal and they're asking super literal questions and it's just slowing the meeting down. Or then there's the person who's like, yeah, I know we're having this tactical conversation. But like 10,000 feet. like, what's our philosophy?

Yes, right, 30,000. Right? Like, we've all had those meetings and with those employees. And I'm sure that every manager everywhere is trying to figure out the solution for like how to make meetings not that way. But maybe the solution is like, don't have that meeting or smaller meetings or, you know, you have to admit is meetings. He's trying to correct for annoying people and you just can't do that. People are annoying. Here's a thing.

And you're trying to collect for that. And then there's also a lot of, there's a lot of meeting culture where people have meetings unnecessarily. Yes. And so an unnecessary meeting is ultimately frustrating. A meeting that is not, doesn't have clear goals is super annoying. Now, that's why I say our weekly lunch is like a catch-up. It's just for everybody to just catch up with each other. I'm not like, there's no goal of that meeting. The Tuesday meeting for, you know, the investment team, the goal is clear. We need one-liners and, you know, to find bets and we need to make a decision on are we going to invest or not, Are we going to go to diligence or not?

Like, it's a very specific type of meeting. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, the Wednesday, when I just have an all-hands meeting, it's just for everybody to understand what I'm thinking, get to say hi to each other, build culture. It's not meant to be efficient. It's meant to look at what our goals are for the year and how we're tracking against them

and then just generally have a discussion and say hi to each other because we're virtual. So the definition of success for each meeting can be different. I think that's something for everybody to think about is just defining this meeting. There is no specific goal to get out of it. I just want everybody to understand what the founder's thinking and what each department head's thinking

and how we're tracking against our goals, right, just to catch everybody up. All right, we're at 80 minutes. I think it's enough meeting for now. It's enough meeting for now. We met with our, oh, look that, 276 people still watch me. I know. Every day, there's a little bit more,

a little more of you come and hang out with us. We really appreciate that. If you're listening to this on the pod version, just go to YouTube.com slash this weekend. You made it to the end. You obviously love the show. subscribe, click the bell, and you'll get a notification on YouTube. You get to hang out with this live.

We'll do questions, games. We have fun. There's about 20% to 30% more show that you miss if you're just listening to the pod. Because we do a little warm-up, we kind of shoot the shit. We chew the fat. We chop it up. And we're a little loosey-goosey with the audience. And see, this is a very good show.

You get all the cliches. You get all the cliches. There was an arc. It was amazing. I love a, I love a structure. I love an art. I think there's a cathartic release at the end. We talked about getting along at companies and not killing each other.

Exactly. And also, look, if you're a little annoying, it's okay. You be you. Just don't come to the meeting. Okay. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you all tomorrow. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.