This Week in Startups - SpaceX valued at $137B, Starlink's massive market, Shopify purges meetings | E1649

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Jason and Molly are BACK for the first news show of 2023! First up, they break down SpaceX's reported $137B valuation, the astounding market opportunity for Starlink, and more! (7:14) Then, they cover two Shopify stories (37:38) and Apple shutting down fan-favorite weather app Dark Sky. (55:01) (0:00) J+M intro today's topics! (2:25) Thoughts on the potential year ahead (7:14) SpaceX is raising $750M at a $137B valuation, led by a16z (12:54) LinkedIn Marketing -  Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (14:24) Producer Sam (powered by ChatGPT), Starlink's bottom-up TAM, SpaceX's genius infrastructure play (29:56) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, sign up for free at https://coda.io/twist (31:28) More ChatGPT producing (37:38) Shopify is attempting to fill the ad targeting void left by Apple's App Tracking Transparency (45:07) Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast at https://www.founder.university/podcast (46:32) Second Shopify story: CEO Tobi Lutke has asked employees to purge meetings to increase productivity (55:01) Apple shuts down the Dark Sky weather app 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

Hey, everybody, we're back. It's 20, 23. Happy New Year's. I hope you had an amazing holiday. I know. I hope everybody's rested, ready to rock, fired up. Let's go. Any news, Molly?

You know what? Honestly, for 10 days, I couldn't have told you. But I can tell you today, there's... You went dark. Plenty. I did go dark. And it worked. It was amazing.

We have a great show, though. We have major news out of SpaceX. We are off and running with a big race. and an up round to start the year. It's not all gloom and doom. Fantastic. Awesome. And then after SpaceX, we're talking about Shopify,

two big news items at Shopify. They're eliminating meetings. So we're going to talk about efficiency inside of companies. And they figured a way to route around Apple, trying to obscure retargeting of customers by allowing one Shopify seller to bundle their users and, I guess, share those users with other Shopify users and do custom audiences. It's a very clever idea. Maybe a little controversial.

Molly and I will debate it. We'll take either sides of that. And then Molly's favorite app, Dark Sky, is no more. Pour a little out for the Dark Sky app and question Apple's decision-making just when it seemed like the competition conversation had quieted down a little bit. And then we're going to wrap with a little internet history. We look back as we look forward. Oceans rise and Empires Fall people. When the game is over, the king in the pond, go back into the same box.

We'll show you an infographic, if you're watching visually, one of the platforms like Spotify or YouTube. We'll show you this incredible visual of the largest sites on the Internet by visits. Obviously, you're going to know some of them, but the change is really spectacular to see which sites get the most visits. And I'll make a prediction about how many Starlink subscribers there will be in the next seven years. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us.

This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And Coda is the all-in-one dock for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Cota is the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to 20.

23, which will be a year of pain and suffering. Oh, it's going to be great. Virgin Reers already. It's going to be great. We're one minute into the year. No. It's going to be great. It's a year of the rabbit.

It's going to be a year of gentleness and joy and carrots. It is the year of the rabbit. Yeah. I think the rabbit is about to get eaten by a giant pack of wolves and ripped apart and shredded. I think the rabbit is like going to bounce along the mountain here. And like three wolves are going to rip it in half. Somehow we came back to the new year with a role reversal. Like,

Jason's like, I'm optimistic. And I'm like, no, it's going to be great. I think it's going to be fine. Like, honestly, everything's going to just bounce back. Here's the thing. Nobody knows. So let's just start with that problem is nobody knows, but we'll figure it out together here on the pod. We will look at everything from first principles.

We'll just break everything down. Zero, what they call? Zero budget. Zero base budgeting. Start of a blank sheet of paper. 23 and we'll just build it up from there. Yeah. And no matter what could go right will be.

What could go right? That's the, I love that. Let's make that our mantra for 2020. What could go right in 2020? Because we know what can go wrong. Everything. War in Ukraine. Taiwan.

COVID. We know all the things that can go wrong now. Did you spend the holidays with the all in guys? Because you came back on a bummer. I did actually. We were all up in Tahoe. Three or four besties. We had dinners.

It was great. But poor Freedberg. blew out his ACL the first day, you know, skiing. Oh, no. I'm on day 11, Molly. So I feel great. Nice.

I feel great. I'm just, I think I have startup PTSD. So I'm going to put it out there, everybody. I am now in full startup PTSD mode. This year has been, you know,

like, but I've been through it before, but I feel like a vet who like served in World War I and World War II. And now you're like, hey, Korean War, can you come back one more time? And I'm like, what do I got left?

What do I got left in the tank? Yeah. Literally my year, the second half of the year, was layoffs and shutdowns across, you know, I don't know, 50 companies, 100 companies. And I have to say, it does have a psychological effect on a human being to watch people lose their jobs, to watch companies shut down. But having been through this, it's part of the process. Everybody's going to be okay. We live in the modern world. but it's going to be, as I predicted last year, a double-dip recession.

Sometimes these recessions are light, they last, you know, whatever, three-quarters, four-quarters. But we had those two negative quarters, then a growth quarter. Now I think we're in the second part of the double-dip. We're going to have two negative quarters. The fourth-quarter of date will come out. I think it'll be negative growth. If not, it's going to feel like that. And then first-square, second quarter, could be negative.

That will represent the double-dip. And I think September is when we start to feel growthy again. And we start to feel opportunistic, which means, okay, you know, eight months of slog is what I predict. Eight months of slot. Okay. And slog is another way of saying opportunity. So focus on what matters. There's the J-Cal we know.

Opportunity. I, based on almost nothing, think that it will not be. Does salute when the emoji of the year last year, I think it was one of the top ones? I think it might have been the faceball. It might have been the face-pop. It was face-pop. That basically represents. sense it.

You know, you can basically sum up. You have like a face palm and then a salute. I'm now in salute mode. Back to it. I was in face palm for the year emoji. This year is going to be salute emoji for me. I think we're going to be okay and here's why. Because people can't take anymore.

I like genuinely think that there is going to be a bounce back fueled by sheer force of will. Like, you know what? No. I'm not coming from three years of freaking pandemic into economic down. I like it down turn into just like like 22 22 was a GD bummer all caps gosh darn and I'm over it. Yes. And I for one expect my level of over it to translate into financial performance. And I believe that it is going to.

Like I think people are just like, no, absolutely not over it. You see investors like toward the end of the year, there's starting to be more and more stories where it was like, investors are feeling confident. Like it didn't, you know, it was rough, but it hasn't been as bad as people thought it was going to be. And all, like, so economics is psychological. It just is sentiment driven. And I really firmly believe that the actual prevailing sentiment right now is, nope. I like it. I like this approach.

I'm not doing that anymore. I like this approach of like. Shear force of will. We, it has to get better. And I mean, listen, there are green shoots happening. Yes. So for all the layoffs that are occurring, I am seeing green shoots. One of the green shoots I'm seeing is some fundings and for some

strong companies keep happening over the weekend, news broke that SpaceX, which I bought two I bought two... Just kidding. I did my two rockets. Sorry, well played. I bought two Starlings, one for this house

here up in the mountains, and one for my home in the Bay Area, has backups. Now you're like, hey, wait a second. That seems like a luxury item. And to an extent, spending $1,000 a year, $2,000 incremental is a luxury item, but you start thinking about my job. When I lose internet,

I can't do this podcast. So for $2,000 a year, for me to have a backup Starlink that goes into my unified router and we haven't figured out how to do this yet, but it should automatically fail over. We don't have automatic fail over yet, but we will.

This is going to be a pretty great use case for me. And then eventually, if Starlink is better than my wire connection, I might just turn off my wire connection. So I feel very bullish about SpaceX because of Starlink. But take us through what's happened here. I think this is a really interesting note because when people hear SpaceX,

I don't know that they always associated immediately with Starlink. And so that's a little bit of what we're going to break down here. And why SpaceX is able to raise $750 million right now at a $137 billion valuation with A16Z leading the round. That, by the way, that valuation would make. makes SpaceX more valuable than Salesforce, which is at $133 billion current market cap. Netflix, $129 billion, and Lockheed Martin, $125 billion. This is also, I believe, a slight upround. It's about 8% higher valuation than it's made $22, valuation of $127 billion.

But it is an upround, to your point, right? It's a green shoot. It's a huge raise, and it is a slight upround. And SpaceX had a huge 2022. They raised more than $2 billion in that year, which was eight days. It's like always so weird to talk about that last year, five days ago. Again, they were most recently valued at $127 billion in May 2022. Starlink is the investable opportunity here.

I mean, that's sort of where the, that's like the secret moneymaker, I think, that people hadn't necessarily realized. And Starlink surpassed a million subscribers in 20s. Wow. That was funny. That was fast. That was fast. And then SpaceX surpass 60 reusable rocket launches in a single year via.

I did see Elon tweet. And to be clear, just as the standard disclaimer, since most people consider me the Elon whisperer, I have no inside information. Elon's my friend, but I don't have inside information about this. Can you ask him if I could have my own rocket? No. Please do not use me. Literally, you know, it was so much better when people didn't know. we were

like Molly would get inside of Barack would be awesome can you just ask him real quick how many can you ask him text this was something that happened with Travis a lot

during the Uber heyday and Travis is running is like hey can Travis give the keynote at this day I'm like I don't know

can he but here's what I do now they frame the Starlink and this is as a consumer I know this they framed Starlink as a better than nothing

beta that's a really smart way to do it because they were still putting up the satellites. Last I checked, and there is a really great visualization of this online. I think they have 3,000 satellites in orbit of these low Earth orbit satellites. That's how you get the high speed and the low latency. The closer the satellite is to Earth, the, if you think of a cone,

if you put a satellite really far in space, the cone is really wide, right? That's the area of coverage. If you lower it, the cone gets smaller, right? It's a smaller area of coverage. the smaller area of coverage then is faster because the satellite is closer to Earth. Very simple way. Just imagine a cone coming, like an ice cream cone

coming out of the bottom of the satellite. So with these other services, I think they had like a dozen of these satellites out there. Now you, and here it is, there's the Starlink if you're watching this on YouTube.com slash this week in. You could see like the satellite array and these things are flying through the air but they're close to

the ground, which means lower latency. Latency is the time between when you make a request and it goes to the satellite and back. So it does work perfectly for Zoom unless your satellite isn't set up perfect, your dish isn't set up personally. This is my personal experience. Or like there could be weather conditions.

I think that can, you know, alter it a little bit. And then the density of those. So for one area, if too many people have it, obviously could slow down. So it's a little bit, and I don't know if this is even solvable.

It's not symmetrical internet. We should point out. Like the download speeds are much better than the upload speed. So sometimes the Zoom can be a little bit choppy. But again, if you're imagining that this is a low expectations beta, I think what has happened and the reason that it's gotten to penetration so quickly in places that literally did not have broadband options. Yeah.

Like you look at, sure, places in the Arctic, but huge chunks of the United States, right? You look at like Navajo Nation. They're just are not in the middle of the country. There just are not high speed internet solutions available. and satellite has basically been a joke, internet service. And Starlink appeared and people were like, well, yeah, great, let's go.

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What, a hundee? For free? That's right. LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your $100 credit terms and conditions apply. So just to think about this, putting aside SpaceX's rocket launch business, which is a vibrant business. As you pointed out, they did 60 of these launches already. And, you know, they've got the big mega rocket coming out, you know, on the Mars trip and, you know, going around. and the moon and stuff like that.

You can, and it's really funny, we're now, our producers are running our producer notes through chat GPT. Yeah. So I'll have the notes I'm going to give you here. This is amazing. Chat GPT,

which I have now figured out is just the ultimate plagiarizing content form. And I think there's going to be huge lawsuits around this. Like, I think chat GPT should be required to put where it's sourced the information from. That would be. actually really great. Like Wikipedia. Exactly. Yeah. So this is going to be, and somebody's going to have to clip this here,

message to Sam Altman. If chat GPT gives data, it should say where it got that data from and start putting some links to it. Because that would be fair to the data provider. If not, then the data providers should opt out of having their information in chat. GPT. I don't know why this hasn't come up in the conversation, but I had this great revelation over the holidays when producer Brian was like asking me like, hey, what's a good stinger? We were talking about like a little transition for big little things or segment on big little things. And I said, oh, let me ask Chad GPD. And I was like basically trolling him a little bit.

Yeah. Now he's trolling me back in the show notes today saying, you know it's about SpaceX are coming from here. He's like, well, Chad GPT says, blah, blah, blah. Well, and it's true. So now you're like, oh, do you need producers? It's like maybe the producers can do more, right? You have bionic producers. Right.

So they can, but it would be fairer. if it put the citation. And so this is what is going to be required of Chapputea. Let's put that on the side here. I like to do bottom-up TAMS. Total addressable market. We talk about this with startups constantly. If you just look at a couple of markets,

you know, let's look at India, population of whatever is $1.4 billion, 260 million households. So when you're looking at statistics, it's good to look at households because an internet connection would be bought by household, not by individuals, right? So it's not like,

but smartphones would be bought by individuals. So 260 million households, they have 600 million broadband connections. So some of those are obviously businesses, right? And so you kind of think, you know, 10% of, you know, those homes, if they, just in India, and they were paying, let's say, 45 bucks a month, maybe I don't know, they paid 30 bucks a month, something in that range, let's say 30 bucks a month. You could be talking about 20 billion a year. right, just in India. Yeah. Because they're not going to pay the same amount. They're not going to pay $90 a month. Sure, but they probably pay $20 a month. Yeah.

So in India, they might be charging $90 a month, I think, like any other service, maybe they'll start at 90, but eventually it's going to have to, if they're going to hit the mass market, be priced for that market. And then I think a lot of, you get a U.S. population, 330 million people, we talk about that all the time, 120 million households. We've got 300 million broadband connections here. Again, businesses are a big part of that. they get 10% of that market, $30 million, $110 a month.

You know, that's about $40 billion a year in the U.S. So there's a big prize at stake here. You start thinking about those numbers, and then you think about how profitable this could be. The satellite array, that constellation, is essentially a fixed cost business. You put it up, there's going to be some maintenance, some will come down, some will go up,

but there's a redundancy there, I believe. So, you know, they could be lowering the price. Once it's fixed cost, they can start lowering the prices. and get more people. And, you know, just combine markets like that. Brazil is another big market. People forget how big Brazil is.

You know, Brazil, U.S. And India alone. India alone, you start looking at hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue with just a small percentage of the market. And then, you know, so anyway, let's just stop there. Any thoughts on that in terms of the total addressable market for these services? No, I mean, I think we should go. on to this idea of it as supplemental internet too.

And the question of, like, does Starling currently have, all of this is predicated on households? You mentioned businesses. Presumably there will be a business offering at some point when there is. It's business offering now, yeah. It's business operating now. Like, that exists. But you can start to do segmented pricing when you have enough kind of critical mass

and economies of scale of satellites in orbit. Then you, and then there will be presumably, like Amazon supposedly has been working on this and launching lower, orbit satellites and is maybe going to do an internet service eventually. There will be three of these, I think. I think the market will support two or three, yeah. And you'll start to, but then the competition leads awareness, right? It's like when you put a Starbucks on every block, all of a sudden, everybody wants a coffee shop.

Absolutely. Coffee being does better. Rising tide lifts all boats. And that's the moment. The million people who have this are early adopters like us. Yeah. And then we're going to go to the early majority. If you can look up the bell curve there and kind of see this.

And then you'll have the laggards, right? And for businesses, and to just give two comparables here, Verizon and AT&T, you know, their revenue in the United States in 2021, 133 per billion for Verizon and 169 or so for AT&T in 2021. And they have other businesses, but they're primarily data businesses. And I think that's what people are seeing here. And it is good to note that even before we get into kind of, the other use cases for Starlink, this is just that side of the house. Like, I don't know, I don't think SpaceX has ever revealed the breakdown in revenue, you know, the NASA contracts, for example, versus.

So we have no idea how much of the business Starlink contributes, but all by itself. Yes. It's a potentially $100 plus billion year market with 10% of just say the top three global markets. And people have been talking about, and I don't think Elon's ever said this, but I've seen tons of people speculating that Starlink would then be spun out. It'd be its own IPO. And then you'd have the SpaceX business

and then you have the Starlink businesses. So there could be two ponies inside this one barn. And that could be amazing. You could make a bet on SpaceX for putting satellites in space and going to Mars. You can make a bet on Starlink just for providing it. The thing I think that people are not taking to account here because there's a lot of news that's high.

in plain sight. When you do these market analysis, when I do a market analysis, I learned from Bill Gurley and Uber. That was my first upfront seat to me not understanding as an investor or as a human, what market size was. And he, you know, when people first started talking about Uber, they were saying, okay, the market size is Lincoln Town cars, what we call black cars, livery cars, a high end, rich people, you know, taking $100 linking continental.

Lincoln Town cars. Then he said, okay, cabs, add to that. Then people said, oh, yeah, what about rental cars? Because some people might, when they go to L.A., not rent a car, and then go full Uber. Oh, then what about David Sacks? He stopped driving his car, and he recaptured that time he went full Uber. Okay, he's a rich VC. You know, he's odd. But, well, then, oh, we had UberX come out. Okay, Uber X. Yeah, a young person in L.A., young person New York who might have bought a car at some point in their life might just go full Uber X. All of those things contributed. to the total addressable market that weren't anticipated

Airbnb. You have people taking longer vacations. You have people who are nomadic and lifestyle. You have people taking more frequent vacations. So you can't compare it to just hotel rooms because the hotel still exist in Paris, but all these extra rooms emerged and it just had more travel longer stays.

So here's what people are missing out on. and you'll see this if you just say, you know, like Starlink plus a keyword on Twitter. Do a search on Twitter. Starlink boat, Starlink car, Starlink RV, etc. And you will see people in the wild

using Starlink in weird kind of ways. Royal Caribbean, the cruise lines are now using Starlink. Everybody, I've never been on a cruise. You've been on cruises. Everybody complains about the internet on cruises. I do not cruise. Oh, you're not. I've never cruised.

Okay, great. Maybe it's cool. I don't know. Anyway, but apparently I'm sure it's really hard to get internet. Like you can find lots of Starlink. It was very expensive is what I understand and slow. Yeah. On cruises.

So now people with boats are all putting Starlink's on their boats. And then you have RVs. Now they're Starlink for RVs. Then you have outposts and they have planes. They've come on with one foot planes. And then you have buses. Here's what I predict will happen. I predict that.

And I don't have inside of, information. But I believe what's going to happen eventually is every, and there was a startup doing this in Spain with a, it was one of these startups that was doing like share your Wi-Fi. They had pitched me 10 years ago on in Spain, I think they were doing it in Barcelona or Galithia or some town. They put Wi-Fi on every single bus. And then they created a mesh network.

And then they created a Wi-Fi hotspot in the entire city because buses are moving around. So they want to know where the buses are. They got to put an internet connection on it. Why not share it? I predict that every Tesla produced will have a satellite dish on it. I don't have any inside information on this. It's just a prediction. But imagine if every cyber truck eventually or every one of the Tesla semi-trucks

had this built in. There's no reason they can't license it eventually to- Or license it, just like satellite radio was in every car. What does that mean? I have Spectrum, I think, at home or one of these services. and then when I'm on other, when I'm traveling, sometimes say,

hey, you want to connect to this person's Wi-Fi, and you can make your Wi-Fi shared. And like Boingo Wireless guy didn't create it. I think this is going to be a Boingo kind of solution. Yeah. Where once you have an account, even if you don't have Starlink on your home,

you might be able to buy a Starlink $25 a month subscription, which then let you go on at any time with your mobile phone. All around. Yeah. Totally. I mean, there's a lot of kids who have mobile phones without cellular service, right?

Their parents give them in their old phone. now imagine for $10 a month you can get onto the Starlink service for some amount. Yeah. I mean, internet service providing and providing of an internet service that is, it's so interesting because it is obviously a massive infrastructure investment, but it's an infrastructure investment that can also generate revenue. Like I was thinking earlier how clever it is,

look, to spin up a rocket company is just a bunch of CAPEX with government sales, pipelines and it's really hard. To attach an internet services business to your rocket company is genius because they each pay for each other. And so if you're Verizon and you want to lay fiber or you want to install 5G network nodes all over and towns are putting up flyers saying that you're giving everybody cancer, like your infrastructure, you can maybe do peering agreements to make some money off of that infrastructure, but mostly what it is is

CAPEX. It's just cost. So, Tesla, so SpaceX, sorry, SpaceX has this great business where the rockets make money, the satellites make money, and they can pay for each other. So the cost of putting up all that infrastructure is completely worth it and maybe even like evens itself out. Here's my prediction. One million subscribers turns into 100 million

subscribers in under seven years. So in seven years, they'll have 100 million subscribers. So one goes to five. Five goes to 15. So one goes to five in a year. Five goes to 15 in year two. 15 goes to 30 in year three. 30 goes to 50 in year four.

50 goes to 75. In somewhere around year six or seven or eight, they'll have 100 million of these connections. So 100 million connections on average at $75 each, I think that's $7.5 billion. in revenue per month. So 100 million would be like way less than 10% of the global online population. So just in terms of calculating that damn, if you're sitting at home thinking that sounds like a crazy number,

in 2015 alone, they had estimated that 3.2 billion people would be online by the end of the year. So one assumes that there are probably what, billion people online right now. 4.5 billion. 4.5 billion broadband connections worldwide. So 100 million of that is de minimis, as Jason might say.

As Jason might say, 8 billion people on the planet. Divide that by 10, you get 800 million. Divide that by 10 again, you get 80. 8 billion to 800 to 80. So 1% of the global population having one of these connections would be 80 million people. In seven years, yeah. And that is why, friends, that's why SpaceX just raised. on a slight up round.

That's my hot take. And so I think these things are going to be everywhere. And it's going to make a question, do I need to have a cellular connection? So just like we saw dial-up go away and landlines go away, now I think the conversation moves to

which works better, a cellular, a cable connection, a fiber connection, or a satellite connection. Yeah. And I think most homes, this is my other big prediction,

are going to be two connection homes, internet is so integrated into what we do, it's so critical, why wouldn't we have to? That's like the idea that people would have more than one television in their home seemed crazy in the 50s, right? It was so expensive. Where would you put them? They're so big. That's not, this is not a wild prediction either. Every home already is a tubble connection home because we have cell phone service and like when my internet goes out, I use my cell phone service. So the idea of getting yet another connection, like a backup connection, is, simple.

Although, frankly, I would do anything to be able to have satellite cell phone service instead of paying Verizon to not build infrastructure in my area. This is where like the big, big, big story here we're missing is the infrastructure story. I'm just going to go back to that even though it's so freaking nerdy, which is that because they have a successful rocket business that NASA is paying them to build,

putting up infrastructure is part of the business instead of a cost of the business. So because Verizon and AT&T are, foot dragon and redlining and like not and they have to dig ditches and they have to do like the infrastructure like the reason that starlink is going to get there faster is because they're putting satellites in the sky which seems so counterintuitive like digging a hole versus launching a rocket yeah but the infrastructure cost for them is already paid for make 2023 the year that your startup starts firing on all cylinders well how are you going to do that

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I kid you not. C-O-D-A.io slash twist for $1,000 in sign-up credits. C-O-S-T-A. dot I-o slash twist. All right, yeah. And just so you know, produce your... Our producer chat GPT tells me. Verizon had 134 million wireless cell connections at 2021.

Right now my producer is like, what's our job? Producer Sam. Producer Sam. We're going to call it producer Altman. From now on, I want to refer to chat GPT as producer Altman. Producer Sam Altman who works for me now. Producer Sam. It's more friendly.

It says AT&T, 145 million wireless cell connections. I trust chat GPT. with these numbers. Because you know chat GPD, here's what CHAPGD did. Instead of giving you all the blue links like Google did, you know,

and indexing all that data, they're just scraping the data. They just pick the right one. Running it through a processor and rephrasing it, plagiarizing it. This is what I've come to. It's actually not plagiarism.

It's a mass plagiarism tool. It's index the world's information and instead of giving the rightful owner the click and the view. Literally what people said about Google. You can go back. You can use Google to go back in time and find the exact same article written about Google when Google launched.

Like, oh, if Google's giving you a snippet, it's just plagiarism, but it's not. Well, Google giving the snippet, at least it was the snippet not reedited. Reedited is what makes it not plagiarism. But reedited, based on somebody else's work, without their permission. It's not plagiarism. Like every kid. It's what every kid does right now. They take out of the source and they rephrase sentences.

So it's like-plagiarism. Producer Sam asked how many AT&T wireless cell connect? Producer Nick asked, producer Sam. How many AT&T wireless cell connections? 18-T and producer Sam, Altman said, AT&T is one of the largest cell communications in the United States. As of 2021, it is estimated that AT&T has about 140 million, 45 million wireless cell connections.

Some operators consist constantly changing as AT&T adds new customers and as existing customers change their wireless firms. 18 is known as the wide area coverage in the other words. So what I would do is, I'm going to guess, if you do a Google search and you pick the top four results here and you look at the top four results in Google, including the Wikipedia,

then you could back into this and say which facts did they pull from which websites. Then if you built a tool where you just told a human, rephrase this in your own words. That's in some ways what chat GPT is doing. I know I'm greatly simplifying it.

I know that it's doing all these chunks and predicting the next word. But it's like if I told, it's like you said, if you told a student, write an article on, you know, I don't know, Rhode Island and they went to the Wikipedia page, they rolled all the facts down, then they put the facts on a piece of paper,

and then they rephrased it. Would that be plagiarism or not? It's not considered plagiarism. It's not considered plagiarism. Like you, a, but I will say, an important aspect of that is citing your sources. Like, you can paraphrase from sources. Yes.

You are supposed to cite them. So this is going to be how this gets settled to them? Like taking from multiple sources and because that's what chat GBT is doing too, right? In no way is it ever presenting something I assume from just one source. It's aggregated sources. It's pulling from multiple and it's paraphrasing them all together. Now, if somebody could come along and be like, I wrote this paragraph in this textbook and chat GBT took the exact same information and just rearranged the words a little and didn't cite me,

then we might, then you would be creeping closer to plagiarism. paraphrasing and repackaging information from multiple sources, like, no way, that's not going to fly. That's just Google. That's literally Google. Can somebody ask ChatGPT to write a play in which ChatGPT, ChatGPT and Open AI is sued by content producers in court,

and they have famous attorneys figuring out if Chad GPT has broken the law and stolen the content. Can we write a play in ChatGPT of that, just to get super mad to hear. And Chatt GPDT isn't going to end it with, I win. I win. It's just going to win.

All right. What are you? What are your main exit? Write a play in which Chat GPD and opening eyes sued by content producers in court. They have famous attorneys trying to figure out if chat GPT broke the law.

Enter. Here we go, folks. Oh my God. Sorry, I'm not able to try to play. Here I'm runs as it goes beyond my capability. Now it's like, but here are some legal issues. Ooh, if chat GPT or open eye

use content produced by others without proper action permission, they could be sued for copper infringed. This would depend on the specific circumstances of the case and the laws of the jurisdiction filed. Another potential legal issue liability, chat GP and open AI. I'm a husband,

but their artificial intelligence technology. That was good. Yeah. I mean, this is crazy. We now are asking chat GPT. What is the best- if we should sue chat GPT? Yeah.

What are chat GPT's biggest legal liabilities as a service? As a service. Oh, here we go. It is not accurate it to refer to Chat GPD as a service as chat GPD is not a real entity. Chat GPD is a name that has been used to refer to a specific version of a large language model trained by OpenAI.

As a language model, Chad GPD does not have any legal liabilities or obligations. That is genius. If it were to be offered as part of a product, then it could potentially be held liable for any legal issues arising from the use of chat. So what it's saying is, hey, man, I'm just a mirror. Yeah. Like, I'm just a tool here. You, I'm Google.

It's like, you're describing it the way that everybody described Google when it first started to aggregate content and presented in snippets. And it's saying, I'm just Google. Well, but Google in Australia lost their case for news and they have to start paying news providers. Sure. But everybody all over the rest of the world was like, no, that's dumb. Even here. Like, even big news providers were like, no, that shouldn't. Yeah.

Yeah. It is nice. An agency that can be sued. cases these things become settlements. All right, let's move on in the news here. Yeah, let's do it. We got some interesting Toby Lukie. We got some interesting Shopify information today.

Speaking, spoiler alert of being sued. Spoiler alert from my prediction. Two huge announcements. One, the company has created a workaround for Apple's ad tracking app tracking transparency. Okay. So as you know, Apple crushed the ad targeting market back in 2021 with the app tracking transparency updated in iOS 14. and a half that gave users the ability to opt out of being tracked. That specifically hurt D to C and consumer packaged goods, uh, CPG companies, many of which of course relied heavily

on Facebook and Google ads and many of which were Shopify businesses, part of Shopify's like aggregated network of retailers. Now Shopify is trying to prop up some of that D to C business and fill the ad targeting void by creating a new, tool called audiences, and here's how it works. So in 2022, Shopify made these deals with Meta and Google for this audience's marketing tool. So like, we'll use these ad networks to market to our consumers. And the way the tool works is that Shopify retailers can pool their customer data and

then upload that data to Meta and Google's ad platforms. And then marketers at these Shopify companies, the retailers themselves, can target ads to lookalike customers based on all of Shopify's aggregated data who might be more likely to buy their products. This is a workaround for Apple's new privacy features. And this is what I asked our real life producers when we were going over the notes. I said, as a person, a consumer on the internet,

what comes to mind when you hear Shopify retailers can pool their customer data and upload it to meta and Google's ad platforms? Hmm. What comes to mind? Yes. What's your response to that sentence? Yeah.

So if they, is there any personally identifiable information there? Yes. Assume yes. There always is. Everybody says there's not, but there is. Yeah,

I mean, there could be privacy issues and should people be able to opt into that or not. Right. So there is some data privacy issues. You said a much nicer version of what I said, which is what the, Frigg.

Freg? And also, you are going to get a phone call from Margaret the Vestager over at the European Union because consumers who bought at one Shopify store in no way opted in to having all of their data aggregated with every other store and uploaded to Google and meta. I would say, as a Shopify shareholder, my interpretation of this is brilliant. And I think users will appreciate getting more targeted ads as a shareholder at Shopify and law for this. Yeah, I mean, possibly correct. It's another one of these issues where people opting into it is the issue.

And so, yes, consumers, it better say in a terms of service somewhere that we have the ability on Shopify's platform to use your information to target ads to you. and if it doesn't say that in the terms of service and consumers are not aware of it, they just need to make that people super aware of that. It's very much like this Shopify checkout or the other checkout services. If consumers opt into it,

where it's in the terms of service, and then you go to the next Shopify store and you don't have to put your credit card information and it knows who you are and you log in and it's all good. Yeah. It's a feature and it's fine. And so this might require everybody to re-opt-in kind of situation.

I'm going through this to a lesser extent. Like we moved off of one email service provider and we started these substacks because substack is free. It has a network effect. So I was like, okay. And it has the chat feature. So let me give a shot. And I don't have to pay for my email services anymore.

When I did that, I had my team run all the email lists through like the third party software, which was really impressive. There's third party software right now that will tell you, hey, these people are known, these email addresses are known to complain about spam. I don't know how they get that information. These are dead emails. They kind of basically give a health check. And so I have like Jason's list, which is a 15 year old list. And I got to take off like,

I don't know, of the 70,000 people on. I took off like 20,000 people. Bad emails, people who often complain about spam. I don't want those people on the list. They can reopt in if they want it. And so I think this like really cleaning up lists kind of situation and then resetting the expectation with consumers is a smart move. think that would be a very smart move that there is no sign of Shopify making so far. What they're claiming is that according to the FT article that we read about it, which doesn't mention a consumer opt in or opt out at all, is that Shopify is arguing that retailer data is first party as opposed to third party.

So they're trying to say, if you came and shopped out a Shopify store, you shop on Shopify the way that you would shop on Amazon. And so we are allowed, even though it's an aggregated network of retailer, as opposed to like a direct service itself that also includes an aggregated network. Now, that's a, that's a fine slicing, right? It's a fine argument. It is, I'm just going to say now, a big mistake

not to make a lot of noise about consumer opt in or opt out about this. And by mistake, I mean the kind that the EU calls about it. It's just an own goal. You basically, you know, have to think about jurisdiction as a startup and it's clever. I mean, if the counter argument would be, or like a parallel argument, just trying to think, I always try to think intellectually, honestly.

As a shareholder, I'm conflicted. Right. Intellectually, honestly, if I visit a WordPress site, you know, let's say mollywood.com, I don't know if you have, oh, wait, sorry, that's the, that's not a good site to go to.

Don't go to Mollywood. No. What is your domain name? The Molly. If you go to The Molly, please don't go to Mollywood, Doug. Nobody go there. We had this discussion 10 years ago.

If you go to the molly. com. You can get the greatest MDMA therapy you ever want it. Somebody's going to offer you. I just took the website down and when is somebody

going to offer me a ton of money for it because I'm ready. I think the molly.com is going to be an MDMA couples therapy website when this becomes legal. I'm accepting offers. So what I think will happen is like if you were,

if I went to calicannis.com, I went to the molly.com. Both are hosted on WordPress. Would it be cool for us to have an expectation that because we both use the same platform to host our content or our shop that we were had a terms of service with it. I don't know. It's a sort of borderline issue.

It's tricky enough. Here's the thing, right? If it's gray in the environment we live in now, if it's gray, don't try to budge it. Like that would be my advice to search Shopify is tackle the privacy implications head on. Sure. Give people. I understand that giving people the opportunity to opt out is similar to the app tracking transparency thing in the first place.

but what the app tracking transparency thing signaled in the first place is the end of this kind of meshugana. Yes. Because because it is being cracked down upon. So you don't want to be on the wrong side of that. Yeah. They're going to just have to make this clear. Yeah.

It's fine. Hey, everyone. It's Molly Wood, co-host of this weekend startups and managing director here at launch, where our mission is to back builders and help build founders. To do that, we're trying to create as many opportunities as we can for you to to learn how to start a company. And now we've made that education a lot more portable. Founder University podcast is a short form video podcast for founders to learn tactical advice from other founders and operators. It is for you. It's for startup founders, startup executives

and founding team members, and even aspiring founders with an idea or who are trying to build an MVP. The format is super consumable. It's 10 to 15 minute tactical talks with the goal of being able to implement what you just learned right away. Along with the Founder University podcast, we also have the Founder University blog, founder.university slash blog, where you can get the same tactical advice in written form. Here's some of the content you can expect from the podcast. How to write investor updates? This is crucial.

How to find a co-founder. How to design loved products. How to acquire customers on social media. how to build an email campaign. I mean, we're talking the literal nuts and bolts of building and running a successful company. Learn more and subscribe at founder. At founder.com slash podcast.

But there was also this thing about meetings. Hobie's banning meetings? Super interesting. Yeah, there are other interesting thing. So that was the external for the partners. Yeah, that's the external. Super interesting. The external is that at Shopify,

and all of this is in response to slowing growth at Shopify. We should be close. Yes. So much like every other company, they're saying, okay, we're looking for ways to get more efficient in 2023. And one of the ways that we're going to do that is no freaking meetings. So they said, a friend of the pod and Shopify CEO Toby Lukie sent a company-wide email detailing its new policy around meetings. All calendar meetings with more than two people have been eliminated.

One-on-ones only. No meetings can be held on Wednesdays. Love it. Meetings with 50-plus employees will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursday. with a limit of one a week, and employees are encouraged to decline meetings and remove themselves from large group chats, according to Forbes Shopify expects to eliminate

10,000 calendar events company-wise. As you said in the early part of the show when we're debating like 2023, like this is part of the, we have to be more efficient, we got to do more with less, we have to get growth back. I'm going to basically, you said,

I'm paraphrasing, but I'm going to go down swinging. I'm not going to have this anymore. So what all leaders are doing, I started it today with our sales team here at this week and startup, let's do a daily stand-up. And over the break,

I said, hey, let's look at this CRM software we're doing. Are we using every feature? So if it's going to take twice as long for a sales team to sell half as much, how do you counter that? Well,

you have to make, you could make twice as, you can make four times as many phone calls. You could be, you could make better packages or upsell people for 50% more on their spend, you got to come up with some system to counter a slower market. And this is part of that.

He's saying, hey, he downsized the company already. Now he's saying, instead of laying people off, what if I, or hiring more people, what if I just make everybody 20% more efficient? And what I'm hearing here is more like less reactivity and more work. How much of our jobs are responding to email, responding to slacks, as opposed to time boxing and saying, I'm going to spend these two hours finding companies to email to invest in. I'm going to spend this hour, you know, emailing people to come on the show. I'm going to spend these four hours making clips that grow the podcast, whatever your business is.

Time boxing, and we did a Founder University episode on this. We've talked about it ad nauseum on this podcast. Everybody in your organization this week could become 10% more efficient. What that means is if everybody this week could be 10% more efficient, not adding hours, adding efficiency. If you've got a 20-person company, you just hired your next two people, or you didn't have to lay off your last two people.

Yeah. So this is what everybody has to do. A spree to corpse in a down market, get together and say, in your company, what's slowing us down? Endless meetings. Look at your calendar.

And I did a calendar review in November, December with some folks, and I was like, wait a second, this important person is doing customer service stuff when they could be doing phone calls with LPs for Fund 4, launch from 4. okay, let's

let's get that off of this person's plate and move it on to this person's plate who gets paid a third of what that person gets paid or whatever it is to, you know, move this stuff around. Yeah. And yeah, be more efficient. Great job, Toby. It's interesting too because meetings,

I mean, this is, I think this is addition by subtraction in the best possible way, because the way that you get to efficiency is 100% about figuring, about editing. Yeah. And he said, you know, was quoted as saying, the best thing founders can do

is subtraction. everybody knows that they have too many meetings, especially at like at a big company. At a big company, there are so many stupid meetings where at least half the people who are in the meeting don't need to be there. And it's just a time suck.

And to take that away means that people don't have to work from 6 to 8 p.m. Because they just got back two hours that they were wasting. Like, this is great, this is great management. These kinds of efficiencies are key. And even just saying,

like, I try my damnedest to make Friday and no meeting day. because or to make it an only internal meeting day because they're like you have to make room for work. Timeboxing does that. Timeboxing says these three hours are just for me to literally do the work instead of talk about the work.

100% of meetings too. I love this. Yep. Quote from Shopify's VPF product. People join Shopify to build to make cool ish. To see the thing they had their hands on get released so they can say, whoa, I made that.

Meetings are a bug along that journey. Elon says, like, if you're in a meeting, I think one of his meeting rules is, if you're in a meeting, you're not contributing, leave. It's okay to leave. He gave permission to people to walk out of a meeting if they don't feel they need to be there. That's, you know, I think meeting culture,

middle management culture is something that kills companies. You want people in a company to be building something, you make something, you sell something, you support the people who do those two things. This is what I've always believed as an entrepreneur. You make the product, you sell the product, where you support the two people who do. And then everybody wants to insert a management layer.

And then the managers, then put more managers in, and then you have this managerial class. And in some cases, like, what value are they actually providing? They're lording over some group of people making the product, and then some group of people selling the product. And what is their actual business? What their business is meeting with people. and then checking that they're doing their work.

Well, if people are working from home and they're accountable to each other through time boxing, SOD, end of day, reporting, and they're actually builders, you need much less managers. And that's what people are thinking about right now. That's what people are considering right now.

Exactly. Like, this is a huge part of when we were having that conversation about the culture shift and the, you know, we had that like worker versus manager. Yeah. Conversation. But one of the, one of those conversations is,

that management as a class did not adjust at every company to remote work. And one of the ways you adjust to remote work is to say the idea of performative meetings and performative check-ins so that you can prove to me that you're working as opposed to me managing to your outcomes and making sure that those outcomes are occurring, that didn't entirely go away. And so this could happen at a company that wasn't working remotely also, the meeting culture thing, but it works even better and frankly it does allow you not to be mercenary but allow you to eliminate an entire layer

of pretty highly paid people which is not to say you don't need any product managers right you do need an organizing layer like you need a layer of some of like you need a layer of some and it could just be like one person per hundred who's just like is this on track has everybody talked to everyone they need to talk to

or those people could be player coaches or their player coaches exactly Right. Like if you look at you are, people don't know this, but you help produce the show. So before the show goes on air, you spend a half hour with the producers looking at what they put in the show and going back and forth. You're a player coach. You're playing right now. You're doing the show as a performer, as the co-host. But you're also coaching everybody before the show goes on and doing the helping the production. Right. So that role, you know, you're doing some management, but you're also, you know, actually doing work. And I think that's where things are going to go. If you're want to be. be like the idea of a sales manager who doesn't sell, a developer who doesn't write code, the idea of a product manager who doesn't make mockups, you know, all of that's going to go away.

I think in a market like this, people are going to say, you know what, fire those two layers of management. Who's the third person? Okay, who's the top salesperson? Have the top salesperson sell 80% of time and manage 20% of the time.

That's where all this is going in my mind in a down market. And of course, when things go gangbusters, at some point, we'll start adding more fat. But right now, because you might find you need it to be more like 50-50. Like managing is real and it's a real skill and making sure that people are okay. You know, like especially at a big company, again, the more people you have, the more you do need to make sure the outcomes are occurring and then optimize when

they're not. Maybe it's 50-50 and you're like, oh, we need a person. But yeah, like right now, no time for that. Nobody's got time for that. One of the other big trends we're looking toward in 2023 is what is going to happen, if anything around all of this like antitrust and anti-competition legislation. And into the tech companies have spent tons of money making sure that like Amy Klobuchar,

Klobuchar's antitrust bill didn't go anywhere. But into, like over the holiday, her whole antitrust bill just got like, it's in hibernation. Yep. They just spend a burjillion, kertrillion dollars to make that all go away.

And yeah, and apparently big tech is feeling fine about where they're sitting right now. because Apple went ahead over the weekend as of January 1st with its very controversial and consumer infuriating plan to shut down

dark sky. Dark sky is a weather app. Dark sky was beloved. Like it launched and it was a freaking sensation. It's graphically stunning. You can zoom out to the whole globe and it gives you hour by hour micro-targeted forecasting.

It was a sensation. It was like, I think I paid $20 for it. It was so awesome. It was cross-platform. It was incredible. And then in March 2020, Apple bought it. And it came out a long time ago. Like, I feel like I've been using Dark Sky for almost 10 years.

In 2020, yeah, it was founded in 2011 and launched in 2012. So everybody is like used to loving this app on Apple and Android. Apple comes along in 2020 and buys it and immediately shuts down the Android app and announces. that it's going to kill dark sky as of January 1, 2023. Because they're going to incorporate its features into the Apple Weather app and release an API. And I have to say that this is one of those things where they announced it and I was furious and I tweeted about it and I ranted about it and da-da-da-da-da. But I was like, there's no freaking way they're actually going to do that. What's the antitrust in your mind here?

They bought it, they own it. It's anti-competitive because they caught and killed a competitor. Catch-and-kill. Yeah. It's anti-competitive. So explain that to the audience who might. not understand the concept here of why this feels underhanded. Yeah, so this is why.

I'm not disagreeing, by the way. I'm asking on behalf of my case. Yeah, no, absolutely, 100%. This is why, for example, Lena Khan, when she came in a chair of the FTC, and even in the Amy Klobuchar antitrust bill, there are provisions about acquisitions. Yes. And Lena Khan had said at one point, I think that they were, the FTC was going to go back in time and review some acquisitions to make sure that they weren't anti-competitive because it's a very

common practice to take an up-and-comer, buy them, incorporate the technology, and shut down the competitor. Or in the case of Instagram, just acquire it and, you know, make it part of your business, but potentially starve it of resources. So it doesn't, like, cannibalize the big blue. Yeah. That's the kind of classic example. This is, and so this is like a situation where Apple has a default weather app of its own.

But Dark Sky, which was a huge competitor, literally removed it from a competitive platform. Android, and then incorporated all the best features into its weather app. The only way that it skates out of it being 100% anti-competitive is that they've now released an API from Dark Sky technology so that if you want to build a cool weather app on Android using that technology, you can. Yes. This has been seen with Microsoft Office not being available for iOS. Remember that?

It was never available for iOS. It's only available on Microsoft's failed mobile operating. system that they ran for a while. Less. Windows mobile. Once Bomber left, he was like, okay, fine, office can work on iOS. And it became some of the top. If you go to the top 100 productivity apps, I'm sure Excel and Word and teams and all that stuff, that collection is available in the top.

We had this app and we invested in a company called Swell, personalized radio app, and back in, I don't know what year this was, but Apple bought it in 2014 maybe. and they shut it down. And Swell was a really cool app. If you look at the image there, the way Swell worked was, it would, and you can zoom in on that image,

Swell would play you a card, you know, like a Tinder swiping card, and we would start playing you a portion of a podcast. So it might fast forward you to the best part of this week and start. This conversation right here on antitrust. And if you listen to the antitrust section,

it would know, hey, you listen to this content. Now when you swiped Mali, when you got off of it, or you thumbsed it up or you bookmarked. That would give it some signal. It would show you more of that. So let's say you listen to sports podcasts and when the NBA is on,

it knows from the transcript you're listening to NBA content, but then all of a sudden, you know, Bill Simmons's podcast starts talking about the NFL and you swipe. Okay, it knows you like NBA. It knows you don't like NFL. You jumped off NFL. Wow. Then it knows, oh, you listen to the Knicks and Lakers,

but you didn't listen to the Warriors and the Trailblazers. It just starts learning and it presents you with, you know, cuts into podcasting app. And I think the reason Apple podcast app is so much better now, I remember it was like, kind of you were in iTunes and you were kind of, I guess I can't use the word ghettoized anymore. What's the term I can use so I don't get canceled? You were, Can I say ghettoized?

You were sort of segregated. I don't know if that's super cancelable. We're not really. We're not allowed to use ghettoized it. It's not like cancelable, but it's not ideal. Okay. So it's problematic, but not cancelable. automatic. There we go. Got it. Okay. So can somebody

please tell me a word I can use when I say they ghettoized, did they put it in the you know? They sideline it. Perfect. Okay. So they're not as good as ghettoized, but okay. No, it's not. We'll get there, folks. We're going to get there together on language policing. They made it like not a main character, side stage.

There's got to be something good. There's something. Some way for me. Oh, Brian's asking Sam. Oh, yeah, chat GPT. Yeah. What is a word for ghettoized that J-Cal can use so he doesn't get canceled? Yeah. There we go. Thank you, Sam Holtman. Thank you, Sam Wotman.

Oh, some synonyms could include I said segregated, yep, isolated, quarantined, confined, or restricted. Quarantined? Might it cancel for that too, maybe. Oh, you would not. People might feel I'm being cavalier about COVID and then cancel me for that. Anyway. If they, okay, well, if they do that, that's absurd. Let's just, we can in fact.

There can in fact have layers. We can have layers. policing speech. Okay. Let's move on. You do it way more than I. I do it because I think it's hilarious as a bit. Okay.

Moving on. Oh my God. This is lame for Apple to do this. It's a bad. They should be self-aware. It's a bad look at this time. It's a bad look. It's the same.

See, what Apple does is they do this until somebody smacks their wrist. Right. I message is still not available on Android. App Store is still not open. You could side load app stores onto Android, I understand, right? You can have different ones. You couldn't have the iBook, the audible issue on Apple. Apple abuses their monopoly position until they get their wrist smacked and they push it as far as they can.

And then they pull back. My understanding is Apple is going to start letting people, this has been a rumor that's going around, that Apple is going to allow other app stores soon, which I think is great. Yeah. And I think if all the video game companies get together and they all make their own app store or Facebook meta plus the video game companies create an alternate app store, I think that would be great for Apple. It'll make Apple look magnanimous. And I'm not going to download stuff from some third party app store. Why am I going to do that as a consumer?

Well, that's the thing. Exactly. I'm going to keep using Apple. Use it. Right. Yeah. But if I want gambling apps, Apple doesn't let me use gambling apps, right? Wagering app, poker apps are going to be worth some crypto apps.

They treat, they treat every customer. like a 15 year old or a 14 year old. Right. Adult apps. Yeah. Right. Like or more adult themed apps, I guess, might not be allowed there. So yeah.

I mean, it would be like a. It's interesting. Like what I think is interesting about this move. The quarantine area. What I do think about is interesting about this move is that they went ahead with it. Like it, to me, it shows some confidence that they're not going to get their hands left right now. Like they've spent a long time, you know, they killed the Android app

a long time ago and maybe people weren't paying that much attention. They've spent a long time integrating the API into the existing weather app. And unfortunately, I'm with all the other Twitter users who are like, yeah, but it still sucks. It's all form over function. It's too slow. It's too graphical. It's too hard to see like multiple locations.

It's just like, blah. It's not for you. You want the power app. I want the thing I've been using for a decade. Here's all you have to do. some group, this is an opportunity for some group of founders to make a cross-platform gorgeous app again. They already have it. So go find people who worked at Dark Skies. As a matter of fact, let's do that right now.

If there are a group of employees who previously worked at Dark Skies who want to restart it, email Molly at launch.com, pitch them on coming to our accelerator will give you 100,000 dollars to recreate. Not recreate, I should say. Well, to evolve. There's an app called Carrot. I mean, you never used Dark Sky, so you don't know. But this new app called Carrot is a literal clone, except with like more. personality and games and stuff. So it's already, it's happening because the API is out there. Yes. But to me, it would be speaks some confidence about the current, the competition crackdown

landscape that Apple's like, yeah, we're going to go ahead and kill it. Apple will push the envelope until somebody wrist slaps them. When they get wrist slapped, they'll respond. And what they do is they push it so they can, and all companies do this, they push the envelope, they build their moats. and then when the moats fully entrenched then they let things happen that are, they opened their system up.

They did it with browsers. Remember they banned dolphin browser, opera browser, Firefox, you couldn't use those on iOS. You could only use Safari. Yeah. And at a certain point,

people started shaking the cage and rattling and wrist lapping and then finally like, okay, now you can have it in your, I think it's probably year five or six of the iPhone. They let people have browsers.

Right. They did the same thing with interop. They did the same thing with Audible, right? Now you can buy credits on Audible and then buy books, you know. Totally. I honestly think that the other interesting miss, you know, look, this might not be the world's biggest outcry. I just did a hashtag search.

It's like 444 tweets in the last hour, so it's not the hottest topic on the internet, but people are very mad about it. It also seems kind of adorable that Apple doesn't seem to get that the weather is kind of a big deal. Yeah. Like, people are legit weather nerds. Anyway, yes, you're absolutely right. There's a whole group called like Snow pals and, um, snow pals.org.

Um, and what snow pals.org is, is, I think, yeah, there's like, I have a couple of these snow trackers. And so it turns out the whole ski community, there are a bunch of meteorologists, um, who, uh, will make custom more granular. so to speak, predictions for snow for mountains.

And they do it for Tahoe. They do it for Utah. They do it for Hokkaido, wherever. And they've made like a little pop-up business out of it. So these specific meteorologists are now essentially having their own like Patreon substack subscription services and apps. And you know, they'll make like a couple hundred thousand a year.

$100 at a time, get a thousand people to subscribe, get 2,000 people to subscribe. And you can get for, 50 or 100 bucks a year, you know, real-time reporting because the reporting on snow matters. Yes. I have cameras on the mountain, which you see behind me. Surfing has it. There's one for surfing.

And so, yeah, let a thousand flowers bloom. The smart move would be, and this would also be a little anti-competitive, would be for like a Google to copy that model. And then in their weather reporting, have more granular services. That's actually the direction they should be going. If I type in, there's one for surfing. Well, and that's what Apple should be doing. Apparently, those same people have a surfing one called Magic Seweed.

If you want to be anti-competitive, then make a better product. Right? Like, the hallmark of you being anti-competitive is when you then integrate these services into a crappier product. Like, the weather product is crappier when it actually could have become the flake-by-flake snow tracker or the built-in surfing predictions based on your interests and where you like to surf. But no, no. They just made a crappier thing, and they killed my favorite thing. You don't go around killing something that's been around for a decade just to be a D.

Yeah, it's, it's lame. It's lame when they kill stuff. I mean, I get it. I think they gave you 10 years. That's enough. No, they got your 10 year. They should just give you like a warning. How much warning did they give you?

Like a year. Oh, they gave you a year. I mean. No, no. I'm just saying, I'm just saying it's a bad look. Like, if you really want this competition conversation to quiet down a little, don't be killing people's favorite toys and giving them crappier versions.

It is a little lame. All right. And here's a fun video, Molly. We'll play it right now. This will tell you which were the largest sites on the internet. Yeah. Over time. I love when people make these graphics.

If you're not seeing it, it's a bar chart, you know, and it's like racing ahead. AOL's number one, Yahoo, number two, MSN, excite, GeoCities, Lycos, Netscape, BBC, Amazon, etc. And this is the most popular website since 1993 as it changes over time. Speaking of competition and how...

And yeah, you see Yahoo runs away with it when broadband happens and AOL starts shrinking when broadband happens. That's what happens in 1999, 2000. It's the broadband impact. That's when all those Yahoo people, every meeting you had with them, they were so cocky.

I'm just saying they were so cocky. Yeah. They were like, well, we have a fire hose of traffic. What do you have, loser? Yeah, and they were going to buy about 2005. AOL bought it. Here comes Google. Oh, damn.

You're coming. And then comes Google. Woof. Racing hand. Wow. I can't wait until YouTube and Facebook show. MySpace was up there. Now MySpace is falling.

Yahoo makes a little comeback. Boom. Around 2008 and there's YouTube. YouTube and Facebook coming in. And some point we'll see Twitter in here. Wikipedia also getting listed at the top of Google. You get some Yandex in there. Wow.

Yahoo makes a couple of comebacks over the years. You got to admit it's impressive. I mean, y'all who still has. Oh, but there's Facebook, the dark horse. Yeah, well, Facebook becomes number one at some point. Yeah. 2012, 2013. Facebook's just that line.

There's Twitter, by the way. Well, look, look at that little baby Twitter. Baby Twitter coming in. Oh, look at baby Amazon, below Twitter. Yeah. And a lot of this is about globalization. If you think about YouTube and Facebook and Google, they just did a really good job building global services.

Facebook's moving to the inside. You know, Google gets a lot of visits, but they're short visits. So this is entire. on site, if this was time on site, YouTube would be higher here. Oh, and there's X-video. In 10th place. What's X-Video? I have to Google that.

I wonder what that is. Maybe I should Google X-Vit chat. Hey, hey, Sam, bot. What's X-Vito? Yeah, don't do it. Wikipedia. Bidu starts creeping up to your globalization point. Bidu's creeping up an hour in 2022, and Google is far and away the winner.

YouTube right after, so Google owns most of the traffic on this. time on site. But even Twitter is still number four. Then we got Facebook, Twitter at number four, by do in there. Always great to look at. Good times. The big thing here is what's a global service

that you come back to multiple times a day? And, you know, social networks, search engines and video. The start of a new year. It's always a good time to revisit the past. All right, everybody. Great show. We'll see you tomorrow.

Bye. Bye. Bye-bye.