This Week in Startups - Stripe launches Plaid competitor, Cameo layoffs, Elon raises $7B + Streaming news with Lon Harris | E1452

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

First we chat with Lon Harris from Inside Streaming about the latest Netflix news, strategy, exciting upcoming shows and the proliferation of ads on streaming services (2:23). Then we cover Plaid CEO insinuating that a Stripe PM probed their company for information before making a copycat (39:40), Cameo's round of layoffs that included 4 execs (53:08) and the latest on Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition (1:06:25). (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s show (02:23) This Week in Streaming with Lon Harris (10:55) iTrust Capital - Visit https://itrust.capital/twist to create your Crypto IRA today (12:11) The Hollywood Reporter published an article on the craziness inside Netflix that led up to them losing users and the stock collapsing (17:57) Nerding out on the upcoming Obi-Wan series and Star Wars (22:54) Masterworks - Skip the waitlist to invest in art using promo code TWIST at https://Masterworks.io/twist (24:02) More thoughts on what Disney will do with Star Wars and Marvel/DC (31:52) Peacock will introduce dynamically inserted in-scene ads (36:07) Microacquire - Sell your business with no fees at https://try.microacquire.com/twist (37:30) Wrapping up with Lon (39:40) Startup news: the Stripe mafia (52:08) Cameo lay-offs include execs (1:06:25) CNBC reports Elon Musk will serve as temporary Twitter CEO following takeover (1:11:25) The money behind Elon's Twitter purchase FOLLOW Lon: https://twitter.com/lons FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. It is Thursday, and we have a great show today with a little bit of a chaser for the week's news. Tuesday is a little rough. Wednesday, we got a view of what's going on in the world, and here we are Thursday, sliding it to the weekend, everybody. So it's Thursday, and Lon Harris is back for this week in streaming. We're going to talk a little bit about why Netflix might have gone wrong with their Walmartification of content. Talk about the Obi-Won series. And in-scene advertising plus, we pick the new show. that we're all going to, including you, start streaming this week, and then we're going to recap next Thursday. I mean, is streaming club the new book club? Yes, it is.

Yes, it is. So stay tuned for that because you, everybody better get on the jump. You have work to do between now and then. In the news, we're covering the mafia because the mafia used to do its business and secret, but now it's all on Twitter. There was a Twitter spat between Plaid CEO and a Stripe executive yesterday that we are going to break down with some terms. Formatic readings.

And then we'll talk about cameo laying off 25% of its staff. And then, you know, maybe when dunking goes too far. And then finally, we'll wrap with the news that Elon is going to be CEO of Twitter for a couple of months after the acquisition goes through. And that he lined up some new funding for Twitter and rolled over some very big positions. It's going to be a great show, Molly. It really is. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to. by I Trust Capital. Did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account

and still get the same tax advantages as a traditional IRA? Visititrust.competal slash Twist to start investing today. Masterworks. Masterworks is the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the 30,000 person wait list by going to masterworks.io and using promo code Twist and Microacquire, the startup acquisition marketplace. Start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace. Get free and instant access to over 100,000 trusted buyers with total anonymity.

Say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today. Go to try.m.micwire.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, it's Thursday. Welcome to this week in startups. With us again, as always, Lon Harris, the Lons, on Twitter. What's good, Lon? Hey, good to be here. What's popping? Oh, the same old

stuff, you know. Nothing new. When I saw, Lon, I was like, oh, it's Thursday. Yay! That's to be Thursday. We don't have any shows right now. Becoming Pavlovian. Well, I have shows, but you all are joining me on watching shows.

I have one new show. Come up with some new stuff. Which we can, but we got, yeah. So we always talk about streaming. It makes sense. A streaming industry is huge. It's also got some injuries right now. Maybe overspending. So we got a tumultuous time. We're going to talk today about the business of streaming. And then just some highlights that are coming.

We no longer are having blockbusters day and date released. That's over. That's gone forever, Lahn. Just, you know, it's not on that. Well, I mean, gone forever. I would say, no. We're still seeing this happen. I mean, Marry Me on Peacock was a good recent example,

that Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy with Owen Wilson. That opened day and date on Peacock. and in theaters. And then NBC Universal just announced this week. They're sending a few other films. They're going to skip theaters entirely and send them straight to Peacock. That includes John Wu's English language remake of The Killer, which is a hugely anticipated movie. Yeah, John Wu's directing his own remake of his classic Hong Kong, Chow Yun Fatt, shoot him up the killer.

No word on casting or whatever, but that's going to go straight to Peacock. So, you know, like theater owners and exhibitors. have been very big on this idea of, you know, that was a pandemic thing. Now that we can go outside again and the air is no longer poison as poisonous. We're not doing that anymore. I don't know if the streamers are all necessarily on board. I think that we're still going to see some experimenting with these releases. All I know is I got spoiled because my kids now thing, oh, we can see Dr. Strange.

We can see Batman. We can see Morpheus. And I was like, it's only in theaters. And I don't know how long Batman took, but that looked like two months or three months in theaters. That's six weeks, seven weeks, I think is what they're waiting now. I'm so irritated by that. That's what we're seeing with Paramount Plus. They're doing that a lot with the Paramount Movies, like scream.

They grabbed like right from theaters and dumped it on Paramount Plus. And Jackass Forever went within a few weeks from theaters to Paramount Plus. And, I mean, it's really interesting. It really does depend on the movie. what I was going to say with The Batman, that ended up doing better on HBO Max than a lot of the movies they didn't put in theaters and just put directly on HBO Max. And that was after a very successful international theatrical run. So it's starting to look, it's starting to look like you don't need to skip theaters. And in fact, playing in theaters makes your movie more appealing

to viewers once it arrives on streaming. I think we're probably going to see that again in the next few weeks with Uncharted, which was a big hit in theaters and is now going to come to streaming platforms. I think it builds interest when people know that it was a theatrical film, they feel more like, oh, I got to see this. Scarcity breeds interest, for sure. I mean, I was like, come on, the Batman, because I'm not sitting in the theater that long.

So bring it. I mean, I'm excited. All the hype was there. But don't we think the windows have to be eight weeks max? Like, I don't think that this three to six week, six month window, I don't know. I just think the window needs to get shorter. I mean, that's dead. The window that we all remember from the 90s and the aughts of where it would be several months of a theatrical window,

because that was also, there were all sorts of deals that were dependent on that window. There was, you know, when is it coming to VOD and digital? When is it coming to physical media? When is it coming to HBO versus cable versus all these other? Yeah. International used to drag three months or something. Right. And so there was that big window for all of these different players to kind of.

to get their individual windows. And now we're kind of pushing all that to the side. There's really only one window that matters. When do you show up on a service everybody has so they can watch it? What's the ideal? I personally, I think it's four weeks. I say six. I mean, I think six weeks worked pretty well.

I mean, obviously, look, like the way movies work now by week three, week four, the people who are really eager to see your movie in theaters have seen it. We're an opening weekend culture. you know, Dr. Strange people are going to pour into that starting today. It's happening right now. And so, yeah, I don't know if you need that full six weeks. But, I mean, to me, I think that's what we're seeing is that it's a good buffer. It gives people enough time to see it, who want to see it in theaters.

It builds up that little bit of level of anticipation so that when it does hit Peacock or HBO Max or Paramount Plus, there's a lot of built-up interest that maybe there isn't in something like Red Notice, which has big stars, had a big. marketing campaign but then kind of comes and goes and people sort of see it or don't. I was a little disappointed because I wanted to see Batman at theaters because I felt like the only way I could really experience it was to dedicate myself to going to a theater and experiencing it as a three-hour piece of art and making that commitment. And sure enough with kids at home, my kids, you know, my 12-year-old, it wasn't for the

six-year-olds, obviously, a little too violent, I found out very good. A little troubling, yeah. A little bit brutal. Seven, basically seven. It was basically I got through the first hour and I'm like super upset now because I'm like, I want to experience this as one piece of art. And I feel like when I go to a movie theater, I saw him Morbius and I actually really enjoyed it as a piece of art and an experience.

And so I feel like six weeks gives me enough time because I don't want to go during the rush typically. But I am going to go see Dr. Strange at like, you know, noon or 1 p.m. the other thing when you have kids, that happens. It should start doing the matinees. Right, yeah. I love my, my, like, my total top secret tip for movies is like the 9th or 10 a.m. movie.

Breakfast in a movie. It's the best time to see a movie. What do you get a little Captain Crunch? You get a bowl of scurreling gum. All the way to the burbs. I have my, like, coffee, I'm a little bagel, and I'm, my brother and I like to, because, you know, I just, I also think that six weeks is just pushing,

but is okay for you're still in the conference. by the time you see it on streaming. Because I think that's a big part of it too. Like, I don't want the whole conversation to happen without me. But like, I don't like to go to the movies. I want to see that. This is something I think we're seeing, you know, like, that's so much part of what we're figuring out in terms of all these windows.

Because that's the same with like sort of the binge releases versus the weekly releases that they're all playing around with is, you know, can you keep the conversation going for longer? What we see with HBO shows is that they build as the season goes on, like the Gilded age premiere isn't doing as well as the Gilded Age finale because after a few months of everybody talking about it, people start to come over and check it out. And that doesn't happen with Netflix shows because they, Emily and Paris season two arrives all at once and everybody watches it on their own time. So I think, you know, you got to change gears on that. Perhaps. Well, they're starting.

I mean, like the circle is a great example. They've got that reality show, the circle. And so that arrives over the course of three weeks in batches. So here are the first four episodes, wait a week, here are the next four. Because, you know, reality show. You got to give people time to talk about who they like and who they hate and who's going to hook up with who and all that stuff.

I feel like the binge watching makes it feel like it's a chore. Sorry, interrupt. So like Ozark, the second half of the final season dropped. And I'm like, just, I got to get to the end of this, you know, kind of feeling. And I, for the first time, really, I put it on 1.5. I was like,

get me through this. You know? Really good. I was really enjoying you previously. And I feel like, I feel like a horrible human. I'm apologized to the artist. Jason Bateman.

You know, Laura Liddy directed one of those final episodes. You know, and then I was like, at one point I was like, I really should enjoy this artistically. I put it out 1.25 or 1. And I was like, God,

can you imagine you're a director or cinematographer? And you built this art. And Netflix is like, yeah, you put it on 1.5. I mean, it must crush their souls. If you are listening to this podcast, I'm betting you already have some exposure to crypto. Certainly, we all talk about it enough. And it turns out you can now invest in crypto through your retirement account.

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I trust Capital Inc. does not provide legal investment or tax advice. Consult with a qualified legal investment or tax professional. I mean, that's what's so much of the Netflix, I mean, there was that great article in, I think it was Hollywood Reporter last week, about these kind of, there were two camps at Netflix.

There's the old school Hollywood studio thinking of like, look, we've got to work closely with creators, shepherd these projects through development, make them into iconic shows. And that's how you got stuff like, you know, Grace and Frankie, oranges the new black, stranger things. But then there was this other camp that was like, look, we can churn out. We got all this money.

We've got a limited amount of time. We've got the whole world. We've got to take over and get interest from people. Just crank out as much as you possibly can. there'll be something to appeal for everybody. And even if it's hate watching, it's just killing them with content. If there's so much stuff, there's going to be something for everyone and let our algorithm sort of out.

And I think we're sort of seeing the end point of that now with a lot of shows that you want to go through at 1.5 speed. Exactly. Let's talk about this a little bit because that story did come out and we didn't get to it because we were so busy dissecting all of the pieces of severance, which I think was time well spent. But this article. is really interesting.

You know, by the way, I went back and I watched the last four episodes again because boyfriend. Dissecting. Although I felt I was a little unfair, good one. I see where you're going there.

To the finale, the, like the fourth time that they did another round of bopping between them, I still was like, nope, it's too long.

Anyway. Oh, okay. So this article, the Hollywood Reporter article, notes that Cindy Holland, who was Netflix's VP of content acquisition

and original series did seem to be one of the really loud voices pushing for quality, saying, like, no, we should go more high end. We should go more HBO. They booted her. She was let go. And two other executives were given raises to take her place.

Now, I'm not saying that's why. Like, there could have been some whole other thing happening. But we do know that. This article is, this article was definitely written from like the Cindy Holland favoring perspective. Like her people were talking to the Hollywood reporter more than the other camp. It's very favorable to her side. But right, that basically is what they make it sound like.

Look at that targeted advertising, by the way. Oh, wow. For those who are watching the video, Nick, it's producer Nick. Just, I think just pulled up this page. And there's a, we go old ad for Don William. We target. We cookie. This guy likes very high-end tequila.

So it's amazing. Oh, boy. That's amazing. This is funny. dangerous. So this piece was written, as you're saying, like, with the perspective of Cindy Holland. However, so what it says is she was let go. And then this quote, unquote, Walmartization of Netflix started where they just greenlit everything under the sun like go, go, go, go, go, go.

Yeah, it was the international head of content. Bella Bajaria, I believe, is that executive's name. And she was kind of, there was, if you read the article, a lot of, a lot of, of things came down to the Lifetime series You, which was originally pitched to Netflix. Cindy Holland and her team passed. It ended up going to the Lifetime cable network where it became a modest hit,

then Netflix licensed it from Lifetime, and it became a huge hit on Netflix, still an ongoing show. They're making season four right now. And so Bella Bajari is the one who brought it back to Netflix after it was a hit on Lifetime. And it became a little bit of a told you so,

she doesn't know everything. Cindy Holland knocked that she had passed on it when it was still in a development sort of stage. Then, you know, they talk about a few other projects as well. Cindy Holland was working on Queens Gambit, which they all thought would be overpriced and bloated and no one would care. And then insatiable, which was that very controversial show

about a sort of a teenage girl who had been overweight. Then she loses all the weight and goes on sort of a revenge, mission against all the classmates who used to torment her. It was a satirical teen series with this actress Debbie Ryan, who was thin and wore a fat suit for the scenes in which she was heavy. Attracted a lot of controversy, and that was a Bella Bajaria project that Sydney Holland's team was knocking her for. So it became this kind of back and forth about,

what's the, who's the soul of Netflix, to put it in We Crash terms. Got it. And then Sarandos ended up back. Bella Bajaria, letting go of Cindy Holland, and a lot, you know, from the perspective of this article, a lot of people at Netflix feel like maybe that was the point at which things started taking this wrong turn. Or all this content and doing a massive content push is what got them

this massive number of subscribers and engagement. And what got them to, let's say, this, you know, first Netflix waypoint, it was responsible some amount of growth quality. Then the Walmart got them to another big footprint. And, then that is not working now in the face of competition. So this is one of the things about strategies, like different strategies in hindsight, you know, it turns out the same strategy might not work when the environment changes.

So in an environment during a pandemic, you know, not having a lot of content wouldn't work. And then coming out of a pandemic, when people have more choices to go on vacation or maybe see their friends or go to a bar, you know, whatever it is,

do a physical activity or something, God forbid. Like maybe quantity isn't the move. Maybe it's back to quality now because people have less time and they can't keep up with all of this. So speaking of keeping up with all of this, what do you have in the hopper that you're most looking forward to? Because there's a lot dropping. I am losing my mind over the Obi-Wan six-part series. Yes.

Very excited. Very excited for a lot of stuff. Because I'm a big fan of the Clone Wars and I just watched a Clone Wars. episode last night with my daughters, the two sons episode with Obi-Wan fighting Darth Mall. I won't give any spoilers. It's been out for a while. It was a Rebels. There's a series called Rebels.

Rebels, right. Which takes place, you know, between episodes three and four. Anyway, my daughter just wanted to watch it again. They were like, we want to see Obi-Wan again in that show. So I found the great episode where he fights Darth-Mall again. So are you losing your mind over this one? or not. I'm definitely excited to check that out.

Are you scared that it's going to suck? I mean, it's going to be excited, but I'm nervous. I don't think it's going to suck. I'll tell you, I mean, Deborah Chow's doing it. She directed some of the better episodes of Mandalorian. I feel pretty confident about the creative team that's behind it. I think you and McGregor, great in that role. The perfect, he's just in the right phase of light, too.

They got him at the right time to make this. But I'll tell you, my word. One caveat here is really, I just kind of don't love the idea of Obi-1 being very active during this period. He's supposed to be hiding out. Even in the trailer that we got yesterday, there's that scene where he's saying to Owen, Lars, that, you know, we got to train young Luke Skywalker in the force. And it's like, yeah, when the time comes, yeah.

Well, no, Obi-Wan wouldn't want to, that's letting Darth Vader know where you are. You can't connect to the force. Vader will find you. So I don't know. Like to me, that's a big hurdle they've got. Obviously, they're going to engage with it in the show. You know, what about you, Molly? Some explanation for, well, here's why this is happening.

And here's why Luke still grows up and just thinks of him as old Ben, the hermit, living in a cave and doesn't know any of this stuff. But, yeah, I don't know. To me, I like the idea of Obi-Wan just like living alone, meditating in a cave for 20 years waiting for Luke to grow up. Like, I feel like there's much more gromatous, yes. Yeah, there's like a mythic sort of legendary kind of thing to that. And I think that when we micromanage it, go back and be like, yeah, but he was probably doing stuff.

He kind of he kind of cheapen it in a way. But I'm still, I'm very excited for the show. Yeah. I did not. I mean, what do you? Molly, you have some bots? What do you have what you're going? I don't know.

I mean, I think Star Wars like has gotten more comfortable somewhat controversially with ripping up the cannon. So I think this might be a step in that direction. And frankly, like, I'm fine with it. I'm here for more Star Wars content. I'm excited. I like the U.N. I mean, I like more Star Wars.

I like more Star Wars. But I do want it to be good, though, because I don't want it to be, I don't want it to be the Netflixification of Star Wars, where it's just quantity over quality. And I do worry a little bit about that. Here's the thing. You put Ewan McGregor in it. It can't be bad in my mind.

I mean, they would, especially given how good the Mandalorian was, I thought Book of Boba Fett people didn't like it. I kind of digged it in some ways with the exception of the biker gang. So the mods. They're called the mods. I'm still so mad about that. The mods were just, yes. The Genzies.

The Genzies. The token genzies. But you know what? It was kind of like every series has to have their EWox. You know, there has to be one mistake made. Well, I will say a lot of people were very down on them having like 60s Vespas in Star Wars. But that's a very George Lucas touch. He loves that 50s and 60s.

He does. It was a bit of an homage to American graffiti. It felt like a little bit of a nod. too classic George Lucas to me. It was an homage for sure. Why were they so sparkly? Like, I'll give you that, but come on. That's sparkles. That's the reference.

It was just they were like two, you know, less than zero, you know, hipster, you know. It was like a breakfast club coming in to fight. You know, you know. I just, I wanted it to feel more like if you're going to set the whole show in Moss Espa and Tatouet, it's got to feel more like a real place. I wanted to dig in more to the reality. of life. You know, like, there's that one scene where you meet the mods and they're like, there's no work here in Moss Espo. We don't have any way to make money. Like, I want more of, give me more of that. I don't need as much of like, you know, like references to the old movies.

Like, build out the world, build out the culture. And that's what I mean by tuckins. Like, I felt like Rogue One did such a good job of explaining the existence of this different group of people during this tumultuous time. So it was like, here, there's a group of people and their only mission was to steal the death store plans and like, here's what happened to them. Yeah, spoiler. They all die. It's like, which is so well done. You know my saying, fortunes are made in the down market and they're collected in the up market. It's important to invest through cycles, not just when everything is going at all time highs. And it's also important to diversify. This is all good, basic investment advice. And now you can invest in an asset that is historically

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Yeah. The chat, I do want to shout out the chat, by the way, for a possible show for us, because they have been talking up halo this whole time. I watch the halo. If you guys want to get on board, let's do it. I watched the first HALO was in. I watched the first one. How many are we in?

We're like six into Halo or something? Yeah, I think we're six weeks into Halo. Maybe seven. I'll throw one into the half as an option. Yeah. I would be down to talk about Hale. The other one I was going to say if we do sci-fi today on Paramount Plus,

Star Trek Strange New World's debuts. The new Star Trek series. And this one, it's set right before the classic Kirk Spock Star Trek. So Young Her are in the first. this one, Anson Mount Christopher Pike.

I'm definitely going to check this one out. Let's do it. Let's do. It's just a no-brainer. We're just closing on the Star Wars thing because I got a lot of feelings. Then we'll come back to business.

I think people derided the prequels a lot and it was only until they saw the sequels that they realized like, hey, these aren't bad. But Hayden, what's his name? Hayden Christensen. Hayden Christensen gets a lot of

about his performance. When you watch the Clone Wars, the animated series, and you see, like, they kind of took that character and, you know,

let it breathe a lot more. And you kind of got this, like, playfulness, confidence. And then when he gets dark, you kind of understand why he fell out

with the Jedi. And Ashoka as his apprentice and his Padawan just fills in a lot. Yeah. I think what they're going to do is they're going to take, if Obi-Wan succeeds, because you and McGregor needs some bank, I mean, he's at that age

where he needs to, you know, take down 25, 50 million. They need to take Obi-Wan and then immediately Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor and Ashoka, do a little bit of the de-aging or whatever they got to do on makeup and just do the full-on clone wars. And that would be tremendous because there, Cadbane, who you saw in the original, who you saw in Boba-Fet, is a cat. character from Clone Wars. So they keep mining Clone Wars characters, Ashoka. So the most interesting things in Mandalorian and BobaFet, in my mind, were mined from the Clone Wars series. This is definitely the Disney Plus playboh.

I mean, Dave Faloni, who created the Clone Wars series, one of the co-creators of Mandalorian, a BobaFet. He's really kind of along with Favro's sort of laying the blueprint for the Disney Plus Star Wars world. And this is exactly what they're doing. They know that this whole generation of, you know, people your kids age and a little older grew up with the prequels in these cartoons and that this is, to them, this is core Star Wars. So you've got Rosario Doss is doing the Asoka show. Hayne Christensen is in this Obi-Wan show, we know. So they're already bringing all these characters back. And that's what they're going to do.

Nothing going on. Did he like ever work again? I know. I don't know if they're going to recreate events from the Clone Wars series or they're just going to spin it out in a bunch of different directions. but what you're saying is what they're doing, basically. Like, this is the game plan. And when I talked to John Favreau about the Mandalorian, we had a conversation about it at an event, just socially,

he said, you know, he was like, well, have you seen the Clovis? I was like, yeah, he's like, I've seen all the Clone Wars like three or four times. He loves them and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he, one of the reasons he wanted to do the Mandalorian, all this stuff, was because he was such a fan of what Dave Faloni had done. Dave Filoni is like, who is a Kevin Faggie? Faiiagia. They've often made that connection of the world builder and the coordinator.

Right. Which by the way, DC doesn't have, right? DC's got no Faloni, no Kevin Faggy. The difference is that the way it was always structured was you had the Warner Brothers film executive development team and then you had the DC Comics film team.

And so you always kind of had two teams instead of one team. Marvel Studios, it's like, this is the team. And it's Kevin Feige and his people and they make the decisions and everybody is sort of going through them. But then you always had these-W doing stuff. And DC just has a big upsetting mess with Zach Snyder and then the whole Justice League situation. And that's exactly. If you look at it, it's Toby Emmerich and Kevin Fujihara and all these Warner Brothers executives

who were fighting with the DC people over what these movies should be like and how it should work. So they're working now that WB Discovery has kind of taking this over. They're making it sound like they're doing away with all of that structural business and they're just going to have a pipeline that's more similar to Marvel Studios that just cranks out DC stuff. They got to just coordinate what they're doing so they can explain it to people so they can buy in. So like when I see Green Arrow or the Flash TV show, I'm like, oh, should I watch it? Then I watch it. I'm like, what is this shlocky nonsense?

This wasn't my expectation. It's like what Molly was at saying. Greg Berlin. does all those CWs. They're kind of winding this down now. We just Batwoman and Legends of Tomorrow were both canceled just this past week. Listen, a lot of people like those shows a lot. Legend of Tomorrow, which was just canceled,

was on for like seven seasons and has a lot of fans. I know people liked Batwoman. Superman and Lois, which is still, they're still making that one. That one has a lot of fans as well. I mean, people like them.

They're a little cheesy. It's a little schlocked yet, but I think that's okay. And it doesn't all have to be grim, dark, three-hour the Batman, you know, like, you can have silly stuff too. The same universe and some general. I don't know. I mean, I agree with what you're saying. But at the same time, if you look at the big successes DC has had, they're not necessarily all, like you had wonder woman and Aquaman from that interconnected world that both did really well.

But then, you know, what about Joker? Like, that Joker movie wouldn't have made sense. in a interconnected world, but it made over a billion dollars and it won, you know, film festivals and Oscars. And so you know, like a wild card like that once in a while. Or the Batman.

You know, Matt Reeves is not like, you're not going to get Robert Pattinson interacting with the Justice League or whatever. He's doing his own thing. So I don't, I think there's already to be made for both versions. Did they do, Logan? No, that's Marvel.

He's a, that was Fox. That's like the Foxx. That's like the cross. thing where they're meeting in the middle. Fox and Marvel both owned X-Men. So Fox was making X-Men movies with sort of like tacit participation for Marvel. And that's why that one was so good.

And that's what Dr. Strange is going to have. My theory, they're saying that Dr. Strange, I haven't seen it. So this is not a spoiler. They're saying Dr. Strange has some unbelievable groundbreaking. You won't believe it. Cameos that introduce shareholders to the Marvel universe. Well, they started there.

Patrick Stewart's in it. That's already been spoiled. by the trailer. My guess is that Hugh Jackman is going to show. I'm sure he is. They started that with the Scarlet Witch. I, I, right. They, they, they, they, they, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're so totally getting, I love, my favorite. I love that X-Men are the best. Days of Future Pass. What a masterpiece. I have like, I have not very much actual art in my life, but I do have a long time ago there was a comic artist who made dinosaur X-Men and oh yeah, I remember that.

Four-frame Dino X-X-Men down in the, downstairs and sometimes like actual adults will come into my house and be like, what is this? Yeah. Before we go, I mean, they're definitely coming back. One way or the other. We'll get, we're getting new X-Men soon. Before we lay go, quick business update on the business of streaming. Peacock is now introducing in-scene ads.

Yeah. That I want to ask you about as also Netflix and these other streamers have these conversations about an ad-supported model. In the case of the Peacock thing, exactly. Like these ads will be dynamically inserted, like a video game. So you can see we have a example. That's Jurassic World Dominion being advertised. Which, yes, please.

I just, I wonder to what extent is two things. One, is the ad industry so stoked because digital advertising turned out to be a little bit of fraud because things like Facebook kept overstating the metrics, TV, everybody skips unless it's live sports. There hasn't really been ad-supported streaming on sites like Netflix and HBO. Like, is this actually a little bit of a revival for the advertising industry slash going to ruin our viewing experience completely? I mean, so far, streaming has actually been pretty good for ads. These ads-supported free services are more popular than I think most people expected. Your 2Bs, you know, your sort of Roku channels, those kinds of platforms.

found a big audience and I think that the ads are not as omnipresent as they are on like basic cable. If you're watching a Bravo show, you're being interrupted every three to five minutes for a few, you know, few ad breaks. And on streaming, it's less

oppressive. And so I think people mind it less. So, and then, you know, obviously if they could start even integrating it into the shows, that that's going to work even better. Yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of counterintuitive because at first you would think subscription services we're all the rage. We all just assumed

everybody will pay for Amazon Prime and Netflix and Hulu and then that'll be it. And that's what they're watching. They have their subscriptions and there's no ads. But I think we're seeing that more options people are willing to check out as long as they can keep costs down

by having some ads. They're willing to do it. You know, sometimes when an artist wants to have a Heineken, you know, or a Diet Coke for a specific reason or a Tesla or an Austin, Austin Martin or something, you know, and it's on brand.

I kind of like this. James Bond comes to mind, right? Austin Martin pays for that inclusion, I'm sure, but it's on brand. It feels like that's what he would drive anyway. Yeah, the big knock where there were a few movies where there were a few movies where Bond drove of BMW because they paid instead of Austin Martin and not that the diehards didn't love that. Yeah.

Yeah, that felt a little... But I do love that about the Mission Impossible movies. What's that? Is that the one that they always have the cool BMWs? Is that the one I'm thinking about? Maybe not. Maybe I'm thinking of that. Yeah, right?

I mean, a funny joke, too, a lot of Avengers movies, Tony Stark is driving a sob because they're the ones that paid it. It's like, I don't know if Tony Stark would have the Audi RX6. You're right, Audi. That's back in the day. That was like the hottest car on the planet. And remember briefly, they had Accura. And that was just like, no, no.

Yeah. Tony Stark will drive whatever, whoever is the highest bidder. The Audi I was 100% here for. This shows you like this pen, the fact that we can talk about this can show it can take you out of the narrative. It can really work. Well, yeah. It can really work when executed well. And it can also take you out of the era where you're like, he's driving in Hackero?

What? Right. Tony Stark can afford. At this point, product placement, so omnipresent in Hollywood films, I doubt will really note. I doubt this will be worse, so much worse that we will even notice. I just watched Uncharted and there's a whole scene where Mark Wahlberg is not only in a Papa John's location

but verbally shouts it out like hey I'm inside of Papa John's right now and it's like that's the level of product place we're getting. That's where I mean like this is probably less bothersome than that you know I mean we'll see how intrusive it is I feel like it's stuff like the

ad in the background of that shot a lot of people probably won't even notice yeah Microacquire is a startup acquisition marketplace that cuts out everyone in the middle. Basically, this means they help a startup get acquired super efficiently. Yes, if you're a founder looking to sell, microacquire is free, it's private, and nobody is going to get into the middle of your deal and insert their motivations, which might not be in your best interest to date while they've helped hundreds of startups get acquired.

I kid you not. And they've facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in closed deal volume. Their platform includes over 120,000 buyers that pay $390 a year for a subscription. And thousands of startups currently are listed for sale at Microacquire. They've had hundreds of successful acquisitions so far. So founders can get free access instantly to over 120,000 trusted buyers, and you're going to stay totally anonymous. On the other side of the marketplace, again, buyers are paying that $390 a year,

so you know they're serious. Microacquire will help you find a buyer for your starting. up. It's as simple as that. Buyers can browse listings for freight, and the platform is totally free for sellers. Sign up for a premium subscription right now for just $390 a year to access all these great deals at try.com. At try.com slash twist. Once again, t-R-Y dot micro-M-I-C-R-O-Aquire.com slash twist.

All right. So I think we have our show for next week. We'll go with Star Trek Strange New World. Strings aren't World. I bet they'll put two up for the debut week. All right. So whatever numbers are out for Thursday, even if it comes out Wednesday drop, we all agree, we'll be fully caught up by Wednesday night.

Yes. And that means you too as the audience. Thanks, Lon. Everybody follow at Lonz. And is that the new betting back there or did we not get that to you? No, I haven't. I chopped around. I got all caught up in my bed shopping.

I will figure something out and send some options to you. My next Thursday, I want to. When Lawn comes on air, I want him to be... Don't blame the producers. This is all odd. Well, I, I threw it back to the lawn because I don't want to get him expensive bed sheets

that he doesn't find comfortable. This one's on me. I want his review of them. If he would be doing more on once, I will get on this by next week. Just send them them and then if he doesn't like them, we send them back, Lon gives a review.

And then you're my gifting concierge producers here. Oh. My gifting concierge team for my producers. We're doing gifting now. I want to get a gift. You know, Mike Ovitz had the gifting suite. Yeah, yeah, and they talked about that. It was like legendary.

Speaking of gift bags, like we talked about earlier. So I got a little gifting suite going on here, a little gifting. Might be gifting some Warriors tickets this Saturday night. I'm home. You keep your Saturday night open. I may have gotten gifted. All right. Pretty legit seats.

I just, basically. Basically, everybody in my life just went to the curb. To the curb, friends. Might, might be, might be, might be gifted some. Could be good for branding. All right. All right. We'll see you soon.

Stay soon. Happy watching. Happy streaming. Happy streaming. We need a little like a little punchy catchphrase for a lot. Happy streaming. Happy streaming. Yeah.

Happy streaming. Stream on. May the stream be with you. Stream on. Stream on. I know. We really kind of missed our opportunity to have mine yesterday for the May the fourth. We caught up with you.

I think our Obi-Won discussion did a lot of fan service there. I felt pretty good about that. All right, we got more news to cover. We got things. We got things. Do we want to talk about the Stripe? Mafia? Yeah, we do. Story. I mean, startups are so interesting. Like, yes. It used to be like, we all knew about these, like, dramatic things happening here in Silicon Valley. And now, I guess, the, dare I say, Elonification of Twitter where like every fight is just out there where maybe I contributed to this too a bit. We're being totally candid.

I take a little ownership. But I guess every fight has to be public. So like me fighting Martin Andreessen and, you know, me talking about a publicie, people are like, why would you ever do that publicly? Is that bad for business or whatever? I'm like, I'm like, what the heck do I care? Now I got to give Breslow a shout out because he started this whole thing. You got to admit he started with FinTech was so sharp elbowed, but here we go.

So somebody sent me before we even get into this, somebody sent it to me was like, Like, have you seen this thread? And said, quote, my new vice is Twitter, bro founder scandals. It's a genre now. It's a genre. It's its own. This is going to be a, I mean, if we think about the Theranos, we were universe, the, the, we got to come up with a venture capital universe, the VCU. The VCU.

The VCU. The VCU. The VCU. The VCU. The venture capital universe. God damn it. Why is Lon gone already? The VCU.

We have to architect the VCU here because it's starting to emerge. This is going to be a great limited run series. Yeah, VCU.c.u.com? No, exactly. It is the VCU universe. So here we go. Oh, my God, yeah, here we go. In the VCU universe, low out and order VCU.

Damn, Rachel. Damn, good punch up. Rachel, good punch up. This is incredible. Here we go. The Stripe Mafia. Strait Mafia. Should we understand the players first?

set up the characters for us. You set this up, Molly, as only Molly Wood could do. All right. So we're going to get into the story because there has been yet another chapter of the Stripe Mafia Chronicles. The Stripe Mafia Chronicles. Let's talk about our character. Zach Parrott is the CEO of Plaid, he with the beautiful surfer locks, which builds

software. I don't know if you've ever seen Zach Parrott, but the dude has some like golden lock surfer hair. It's a, it's fascinating. It's just a, the hair is like, he's got good hair. I always comment on great hair. Really good hair. Plaid, of course,

build software that enables apps to connect with users' bank accounts. So, like, if you buy a car on Carvana, Plaid is what enables the transaction and makes it secure. So it was like a big innovation. Jay Shaw is a business lead at Stripe, who appears to be leading something called Stripe's new financial connections platform. And the new business line for Stripe looks pretty similar to Plaid. I mean, it is Plaid.

I mean, financial connections is the description of what Plaid is. It actually really is. It's basically like you took Plaid and you stripped away the cool name and the good hair and you just made it a feature. Made it a feature. So Jay tweets about the announcement of financial connections. Yay, we're launching financial connections today enabling businesses and their customers to safely share their financial data. Businesses can go directly to stripe to access a privacy first authentication flow and our new data API. The classic Twitter victory lap.

Victory lap. What could go wrong? Plad, CEO, Zach Parrott, responds, uh-oh. Wow. I'm not making that up. Wow, exclamation point. Jay, you took interviews with Plaid and asked probing questions multiple times over the past few years.

And your team sent repeated RFPs under NDA to ask us for tons of detailed data. I wish you all the best with these products, but surprising to see the methods. RFP being a request for proposing and NDA non-disclosure agreement, if you're new to the industry. So what he's saying here to translate is you guys pumped us for information under NDA, under false pretense, and then photocopied the product. Yep. Okay, so there's your story. Nothing else happened, I'm sure. No, definitely not.

No, uh-uh. Except that Jay responded and said. go and said, Zach, sorry you feel this way. Oh, boy. Which is always, who, but this isn't true. That is a little bit of a troll. I'm sorry, you feel that way. It feels like couples therapy.

It really does. I'm sorry you feel that way. It's always just like, oh, you did not. Oh, he did. Sorry you feel this way, but this isn't true. And I think you know that. You reached out to me repeatedly. I never reached out to you for information.

Striped in an RFP because we work with partners for this product and we had hoped to include Plaid. Oh my God. So many levels. Hold on. I just need to get my paper towels here because so much tea has spilled. I'm going to need to get my red flag too. I'm getting my red flag for, sorry you feel this way. So let me, yeah.

Rachel's got the one-liners today. I don't know, man. Rachel's Adderall is kicking in here. Dude, Rachel is hilarious. Rachel is hilarious. Everyone follow Rachel on Twitter because she is a machine. She's got the Twitter thing on dial. She's getting Rachel, this is giving me toxic college boyfriend vibes.

It really is. Really? It really is. I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm so sorry that they banned everybody's instant adderall online. This isn't true. And I think you know that. I mean, that is like, ooh.

Ooh. Gaslighting. Well, he's like, and we had hoped to include Plaid. It's like, we, you were thirsty. You screwed it up. You were sliding into our DMs. And I have the receipts. And child, not only were you sliding into our DMs.

We didn't want to do that. We were going to include you in the party, but. But we didn't. So then you know our content King Ryan Breslo could not say out of this one. The Ryan King slid in. He's blocked me. I can't even see this. Oh, and then the Ryan King, of course, shows up on cue.

the Ryan King signal was broadcast into the air and he was like, oh, bummed that this happened to you, Zach. Empathy. Empathy on a hundred. Stripe does this because they can. Most are too afraid to call it out, but the tide is turning.

Wow, look at this. He's literally like an empathetic Batman. They threw up the dancing, Grateful Dead bear. Start up Batman. They put the, you know, the bears, like the dancing bears from the Grateful Dead? If you're being harassed by Stripe, Just put that signal of a dancing. Grateful Dead Bear.

And the Ryan King will be there. And the Ryan King's going to be sliding into your DMs. Brian, you cannot block me. It's okay, bro. Come on. We love you, bro. We'd love you. We'd love you.

We unironically love you. He's starting up Batman. And then in comes everybody, right? In comes Antonio Garcia Martinez, who's like, I love how what you used to be behind the scenes drama is now totally public and out in the open. Yes. What I was just saying. Yes.

Exactly. And he's like, this sort of thing used to happen all the time at every company can name, but feature only in word of mouth lore. And now everyone spectates on the blowup, which makes me wonder if the Ryan King is right, that the tide is in fact turning. Yeah, everything's public now. Everything's full contact. And I like it.

I'm here for it. I like a full contact. No bull. Let's just keep it candidly out there. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I kind of agree.

Like, why we all have the stuff that we say and then we have the stuff that we say out loud. And then we have the stuff that we say about business. And business is all just people. You know, it's like there's things that you can speak about and there are, you know, sometimes you can't, right? So you have to use your judgment here of when it's time to speak up. Basically you got to pick your battles. You got to pick the hill you want to die on. You got to pick your fights wisely because enemies accumulate. And so I find myself in the awkward position of like, you know, listen, Andre's and Horowitz and I don't get along, but it's really Mark

and Driesen and I don't get along, but he's a fan of the pod. We got a lot of besties in common. You know, David Yulevich is a close friend of mine. He's come to All In Summit. He went to work there. So, you know, it's all of a sudden these things become into gang wars when, you know, like I'm friendly with a lot of people at A16C in fact. And, you know, superhuman. I invested in and then

Indrisen Horowitz invested in. So, you know, you can have like little funny battles. But this one is turning out to get me, it's getting a little more real now because I think what we're going to see is a group of people lining up on pro-stripe side, people who own shares in the company. And they have a group of people who feel like this company is behaving in a way. Whether that's true or not, that is predatory. And I'm not making a judgment on that. I don't know that they're predatory. I don't know that they're not.

And they're playing hard. They're playing hard. Well, and Zuckerberg, I have been. been very outspoken. He just steals everybody's ideas. I mean, I made a joke on CNBC. Like, it's amazing what a great job Evan Spiegel is doing at Snapchat, especially since

he's CEO of that company while being product manager of Facebook. You know, because they just steal well as ideas. Yeah, exactly. I got you. I mean, I didn't tell that. I didn't, I had, I dropped the joke better, but I said. It was a slow burn. It was a slow burn on my part. That was my fault. That was my fault. No problem. No problem.

Puega rental. Especially since he's doing two. job. And so we, you know, people do steal from each other. People do pump people for information. And is it actionable or illegal to copy a product? No, no. You could look at Twitter and make a literal photo copy of it. People have. We'll make an open source products that are a copy of Facebook or whatever. Kind of how the world works, right? And what you want to do is build an organization for founders who are listening that can constantly innovate because just copying somebody, you don't know why they made the decision. So sometimes you copy somebody, like let's say the features

that Plaid, if they copied a bunch of features and they don't know why they made them, they may have made mistakes and copied things that Plaid's going to deprecate down the road or that don't work or that plot would not rebuild again. So you just have to be careful and be thoughtful and have a team that's actually understanding the customer base, not just copy, right? And to be fair, there's no reason in the absolute ever-loven universe that Stripe would not have a feature like this at all. From a business perspective, it actually didn't even make sense that sort did not have a plaid, like it's going to be on the roadmap. I don't doubt that on some level they probably did pump Plaid for information and probably under the guise of maybe not even under the guys. They may have

legitimately thought we should partner with Plaid or bring them on or even acquire them and then decided, no, we can build them this ourselves. That happens all the time. Yeah. So, uh, Zach Parrott, come on the pod. Come on, man. I, I, I, I, DM Zach. Good.

He should totally call on the pod because I mean, for one thing, it is a transformative product. And like, yeah, get some, get some exposure for Plaid out of this. Um, he's almost come on a lot of times. I, my understanding is he's a fan of the pod. So, uh, comm's team. Come on the pod. You know, we'll have a, we'll have a discussion. It's not going to be like gotcha journalism or anything like that.

It would have a discussion about like, what's the product, how are things going? and, you know, how do you feel about them as a competitor? That's it. Yeah. But they did have that Visa acquisition, if you remember. They almost spacked. I mean, Platt's a great business, but they've had some chopy. What was the deal? Visa almost bought them and then it was broken up?

It was a DOJ thing? Is that what happened? I think that might have been what happened. Yeah, I'm trying to remember it. You know, my memory is usually rock solid from these things, and I actually don't remember in that case. Turns out, there's kind of a lot going on in the world these days. It's hard to keep it all straight.

They called it off due to regular the job. Right. It really was that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that. Yeah. So I don't think they were blocked, but the scrutiny was so high that they felt like maybe the chances that they could get it through would be low and it would take a long time. Interesting. The DOJ had some concern. Clearly made some noises. All right. Well, let's keep rolling. There's a lot of little news tidbits to get through a cameo. You want to go to the cameo layoffs? I think that's kind of interesting because I got into it with some people who were dunking on the founder. Oh. I remember who was the VCU you had on that was an investor in Cameo and had that great line about how it was too stupid to fail. No, I don't remember that.

It was hysterical. He's like sometimes stuff from Klinea Perkins, I think did the latest round. I can't remember. It was a pretty recent interview. Okay. That I was not on. It was like one of those like year old homie that and he just, he was like and then there are sometimes, sometimes there are ideas like cameo. They're too stupid to fail.

And I was like, I'm writing that down. That's amazing. Anyway, cameo, too stupid to fail. and maybe so smart that they, like all these other startups are starting to make some cuts in response to changing conditions. Cameo laid off about 87 employees. That's 25%ish of the company. Including, though. And so that is significant.

It also included, however, the CTO, the chief product officer and the chief people officer. Okay. So is there more than just course correction happening here? We've had this discussion. There is this term, never waste a crisis. I think it's a political term. I don't know where the origin of the term. Somebody can educate me, producers at

this week in startups.com. When you have a crisis like this, you might be looking at your team and saying, hey, who's overpaid and not bringing it? And then who's their number two and number three? And you might say, you know, our chief product officer really should be the CEO. And the chief product are officers getting paid

$300, 400,000, $400,000. they got 2% of the company and they haven't been in the office they're not coming up with great ideas but hey the number two and three people are kind of crushing it and they're in Figma or in vision all day making these mockups and they're coming up

all the ideas and then you might be like you know our CTO is out to lunch and overpaid and our chief people officer is unnecessary we're just going to have HR now we're not hiring a ton

we're going to be at this size for a year or two so we don't need them either. So this shows me maturity. This shows me a high degree of maturity, which is, hey, we're going to make cuts, we're going to make them up and down. It's not going to be the people on the bottom. It's not going to be the people on the bottom. It's not going to be the people who are either redundant,

unnecessary, or overpaid, or some combination of that. Now, this sounds really cutthroat. Well, actually, I feel like we should course correct ourselves here because I'm looking a little further down on our notes, and it turns out, and what you're saying may be true and or also chief people off a episode. outgoing two people officer, Melanie Steinbach, wrote on LinkedIn that all four of those execs wrote themselves onto the list in order to save more members of the team.

Supuku. Right. Wow. So they literally committed ritual suicide to. Apologies if we suggested otherwise, but it seems like in fact, these four. That's unprecedented. I know totally. I was like, wait, wait, wait, stop.

This is not the story that we think it is at all. Hold on. That's a huge deal. That is very cool. Okay. Yeah. The four executives who left, Rob Post, Emily Boschwitz, Nundu Janakram, and me all wrote themselves into the list in order to save more members of their teams.

And in wrecking, I'm like, going to tear up. That's amazing. Even if it's not true, it's a remarkable thing to write in recognition of the readiness of the teams they had built to face the work ahead of this company. All right. So again, playing cynics here. Usually when you do this, it's because you are going to do it for performance, etc. Now, they say they're doing it because they wanted to do what was best for the team.

Third possibility. So if you ever seen the Kurosawa film, Roshamon, there's like your version of the truth, my version of the truth. And the truth is always somewhere in between, yep. What could have happened here is CEO says, board says, hey, we think your positions are not going to make it through this round of cuts. And they say, hey, you know, I don't disagree. and I was thinking of moving on anyway.

So it's kind of like that breakup discussion where it's like, is this working? And you're like, do you think it's working? It's like, I'm not so sure. And I'm not so sure either. Maybe we should take a break. I think we should take a break. I'm sorry, I can't even remember

who suggested that we're breaking up, but we're breaking up, right? Kind of what might have happened here. And then the CEO, a board, whoever is driving this, rightfully says, okay, for the protection of their reputations, if they want to, this was their idea, great. Again, I don't want to be cynical here.

We can't know the truth. Yeah, but it's true that if you only need, I mean, Nick points out that if you, you might need some execs for scaling that you don't need for just maintaining, keeping the plane level. You put it on autopilot. You know, a lot of times there's a lot of redundancy in these companies. And, you know, it's, we're going to be seeing a lot of this. if we're actually going into a recession and late stage funding isn't available, we're going to see a lot of this with the companies that raised a series C, D, E, perhaps even Bs,

who just, you know, quite reasonably thought every round of funding has been up and for larger amounts and people want to keep calling us to throw more money in. Every time we make an announcement, people say, hey, can I get in that round? Is it still open? And so if founders and boards C rounds closing with ease They might very reasonably think Well, the A, B, C We're so easy to close That the D is going to be even easier

It's gotten easier every time Therefore, we don't need to keep more than 12 months in the bank Because we should optimize And we talked about this as well on the show. So now what we're going to see is people saying, You know what? We may not get last rounds valuation until we triple, quadruple,

you know, five, six, seven, X our revenue. Okay, that's going to take three years. If we double every year, you know, it's going to take

a couple of years for us to get there. Therefore, maybe we got to get there on the money we have, or if we do raise, it's going to be a bridge based on the last round.

Yeah. You put all that together. There's going to be a lot of these. I suggest, yeah, people refrain from dunking on these. It's quite painful for people. Now,

it's easy to dunk on these in the situation. We have dunked. We are guilty of dunking. Sure. Mostly on Dom. Well, and so.

But Dom had employees who lost their jobs and that part really is painful. Right. And so here's the thing. There will be situations in which there's fraud. Fair knows. There'll be situations where it'll be mismanagement and just crazy, poor management, poor board decisions. I would probably put fast into that.

You put we work into that. are those worthy of criticism? Absolutely. A place where maybe we can, you know, maybe find a little bit of room for kindness. You know, my experience, having been through this multiple times. We always should.

Yes. Kindness costs you nothing. And losing their job. So somebody at TechCrunch, I don't know the person, but they do a crypto podcast over there. I was like dunking on the CEO of the company. You can read what they said there.

Maybe mine. He said, I'm sorry, but you've got to at least temporarily change the board ape avatar when you tweet out that your startup is making layoffs. Okay. I get it. I get it. Steve, uh, Galanis, who was on the program, who's the CEO, uh, Mr. 312. Not only does he have a board ape, you know, he's got the NFT uploaded to Twitter, which makes it like a, what is that?

What's a six-sided called? It's not an octagon's eight, rectangles four. What the hell is a six-sided object called? Uh, sorry, it's been a wild. Like, I know, I'm like, I'm like a sexagon. You don't remember anything from when you're called. I don't think it's called a sexagon, but I do now want to start a band called sexagon. It's pretty sexy that gone.

Sexygon. That's a awesome. Hexagon. Thanks, Miguel. Thank you. I don't care. I call it a sexagon now forever. Oh, that's a sexy gun.

Yeah. I mean, look, there, look, everybody, when, if there are layoffs and there are layoffs at a company who's too stupid to fail, right so like not an obvious like need in the world like cameo and it appears that the CEO is spending stupid money on board apsexagons like I unfortunately these reactions are to be expected in the hellscape that is Twitter and also have some freaking empathy have a little empathy so I said people are losing their jobs no need to dunk here to which this journalist uh and this is where like I think this is why the New York Times is asking journalists, maybe spend a little less time on Twitter and maybe put it more

into stories or, you know, in his case, I guess is a podcaster. And he got back to me and was like, listen, I'm not going to get to this debate or whatever, blah, blah, blah. But I do think like for journalists, like the dunking. And then somebody called me out on my saying Twitter could be done with like half the number of people. So I thought this was actually a particularly productive dialogue. So he said, pretending, this is Lucas Matney. Blue Check Mark. He said, Mark, he is a journalist at TechCrunch. Pretending like the hurt of downsizing is evenly spread between founders and the people who are getting canned isn't a game I'm interested in playing.

I don't understand the response exactly, but I said, listen, everyone will be fine. Ultimately, these are tech workers in the modern world with 11 million plus job openings waiting for them, i.e., there's 11.5 million jobs in the United States. Hardest wants to fill the tech ones. So folks will probably get months of paid recreation and a raise, at least in my experience, which is the absolute truth. So here we are in the West with tech workers, man, do they get treated overall amazingly when compared to a factory in China that gets shut down and you don't get paid for the last two weeks you work? You know, like that's kind of how it works and there's no safety net.

So yeah, your tweet struck me as a bit mean-spirited. So and somebody rightfully called me out like, hey, about Twitter, you know, I was saying like, listen, Twitter could be done with 2,000 employees instead of me. And so, you know, I think making commentary about how much. many employees it takes to run a company and doing that strategic analysis is different than in the moment people are losing their job. So in the moment, if there was, you know, layoffs at Twitter or whatever, yeah, I'm not going to go out there and dunk on them and be like, ha ha, as, you know, they're leaving the building. And, you know, it's a, it's a horrible feeling when you lose your job and you're laid off because it has nothing to do with you, but you may be really believed

in the company. I've done three layoffs, four layoffs of note in my life, dot comera and 2008. Right. It's distinctly different analyzing a business. And should they do this or not? Because Twitter did go sideways for a decade. And the people on the inside have all told me universally, the reason we're not making this work is because we're so bloated. Right. That's the word from the inside of the company long before Elon showed up,

long before Jack got a second tenure. You know, I'm talking about the Dick Costolo era, people were questioning the number of people working there. Yeah. I, what I would say with while refraining from dunking on, you know, while people are getting laid off, is that an up market will encourage a lack of discipline. And so it is a little frustrating.

Because this pain is not felt evenly, right? Like that's Lucas's point. The CEOs who are doing the laying off are not necessarily, they're going to feel pain. And that's the part he misses. It is very painful as a leader to have to lay people off. That is a failure, right? You feel the failure of that.

However, that pain is not necessarily felt equally. and these companies maybe weren't as disciplined as they could have been in their own hiring. Like, they got drunk on an upmarket and got too bloated. And now the employees pay for that. And so I think there's like, it's a little bit fair to say, yes, I understand CEO that you're feeling pain as a result of laying these people off. But did you have to be so big in the front? Did you like go crazy? Did you Don Julio them or not?

Yeah. And that would be a great thing to do in an investigative story, not just. a one-off tweet. So as a journalist, you're damaging the brand you're working for by just dunking on people when you could just do a story, like actually dig into it. Like, is there malfeasance here? Is the company mismanaged? Like, okay, sure, that's a fine story. I do an analysis of it. Right. But just dung it because he happens to have a board ape. What if you bought the board ape for 10K and it's now where 300k or whatever these things are worth, like, okay, he made a savvy purchase of a piece of art. Like, this is like when they showed somebody's home.

It was like a little funny. Well, that's why I called it a dunk. I get why it releases dopamine. Good point. It's a dopamine release and it's a literal dunk. It's like when you dunk on somebody and then you flex when they're on the ground. There's no need to flex and walk over the person you know and nutmeg them because they use it's not exactly the term of nutmeg. I mean I was just going to say to Draymond Green them but you went for the more descriptive version of that. That would be when you get hit in the nuts but a nutmeg is in basketball when the ball goes between your legs for an assist, Chris Paul, you know,

being the master of the nutmeg. Gotcha. But anyway, you don't have to just like, actually, who was it who walked over the person? I think it was Alan Iverson who did the step over. There's a famous clip of Alan Iverson stepping over somebody after he, you know, Ty Lou after the, who's now a coach.

Oh, yeah. Basically, I believe he ankle breaks them and then does like a dramatic stepover. It's just disrespectful. So just a little coaching here for, you know, cub journalists. I don't know if this person's a cub journalist, but this is why there's a little animosity between tech press and tech, you know, leadership is because you don't need to dunk at this time. I don't know. This is why. I will say most outlets are not allowing this level of dunking. I think it's more the heightened scrutiny, I would argue. It's both things. Yes, it might be both things.

I will say, we are gearing up for a time of much dunking and much commentary on tech CEOs. one in particular because there's also reporting today from CNBC breaking news as of this morning that says that Elon Musk is planning to serve as temporary Twitter CEO following the takeover meeting that he will likely be the one to execute any of these layoffs should they occur. There you go. And taking all the fire for it. Okay. Yeah.

Great. So Parag Agrawal, we should know just as by way of background, is the current CEO of Twitter. He has only held that position for six months. So this is also sort of subtly an announcement that he is out in some way. We don't know what way. But we do know that. Maybe he sticks around for a year. And, you know, because was he previously the CTO or the VP of engineering?

I can't remember. I think he was CTO. Yeah. So he can stick around for six months or be a consultant. Who knows? I have no inside information. Yeah. But great.

I think that is if you're going to buy something this big and put this much of your net worth and reputation on the line, he should be CEO. He's got to uncover what's going on there. And there's a group of people who will be very inspired to work there as him CEO. There might be conversely a group of people who don't want to work for him, which will set a culture. And a culture needs to be set there because the culture has, according to all the CEOs, according to Jack and everybody, the culture has meandered, right? There hasn't been a wartime CEO there ever. as one person described it to me, like a series of CEOs who, you know,

maybe couldn't make decisive decisions or maybe there wasn't as decisive a decision-making structure. And Jack sort of hinted at that. Didn't he that the board was always like pushing them in one direction when the product vision needed to go a different direction? And so there does need to be a strong hand at the wheel. There's going to need to be a culture that is established, re-established, rebooted, whatever.

And, you know, that's what Elon will bring to the table for the court. Matt Levine, I don't know if you read him, but he had that great, great email newsletter guy. Amazing newsletter. And he had a remarkable one the other day where he was sort of taking apart Parag's statement about two Twitter employees about why, you know, they voted for this purchase. And the response was basically like, well, it was good for the shareholders. And he just, he just had like paragraph after paragraph that essentially resulted. in the same outcome, which is like, it seems like everybody who works at Twitter

doesn't give a shit about Twitter. All of the executives at Twitter can't be bothered to say, this is a really impactful product. It's really important to the world. Like, they just, sure, one assumes. Yeah. And just says, you know, Twitter's board gave up. It was really remarkable.

And he sort of said, like, you know, Tesla, Amazon. Like, these are not companies who have CEOs that are just like our fiduciary duty is to maximize. the shareholder returns at all. And as a result, those companies are returning wild returns to their investors, unlike Twitter, which has had a series of leadership that barely uses the product. I mean, I made that point many times. Yeah.

And I think that is why he will be a great CEO. He understands loves and uses the product, has, you know, absolutely built the most important car company in the history of cars, perhaps. since Ford, I guess, or Mercedes. I'm not sure who is the most important car company in history or how you would judge that, but certainly he's one of the most important, if not the most important car company in the world,

and he's done it with no advertising budget. And we would, I think, all agree that his ability to engage socially on Twitter has been a big part of landing employees, customers, and building those brands and his personal branding and the fact that he does customer support on Twitter all day long. And obviously we're friends. And, you know, like, if I'm... Because I would, I think you, you don't have to say, but I will say he is also occasionally

lost customers on Twitter. Yeah, maybe, you know, take the good with the bad. So it is what it is. You know, if you don't like his style, you don't, and you buy your car based on that. And then it's probably people, AOC, at least drove a Tesla for some period of time. And you don't like them. I drove a Tesla for some period of time, yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, his style, as he said on Saturday at Live, like, well, yeah. I'm a little strange. Right. If you haven't been paying attention, I'm not exactly a normal. We have to at least point that out that there is a, there is a universe in which you, when you drive a Tesla,

feel that you have to apologize or Cinderella for some of those things on Twitter. Like it's, they're inextricably linked, is what I'm trying to say. I think you can drive the car. I think a lot of, I think you can still drive the car

and enjoy it and not worry about it, you know? You'd be amazed. Come to Oakland, my friend. I know, some people it is. Come to Oakland. Yeah.

For some people, it is a thing. Let's very quickly, because I have another interview right after this, but let's talk about the money real quick behind Twitter. So here we go. Because there have been some rumblings that not all of the money has been secured and what's going to come next. And then there is an SEC filing revealing where some of the money has currently come from. It revealed that Musk has raised $7 billion in capital for this takeover from 18 investors who include Larry Ellison, who committed a billion dollars. Sequoia Capital, Vi Capital, Binance, A16, and the Prince, the largest investor in the disclosure was Saudi Prince Al-Waleed pledging to roll over $1.7 billion in shares.

So I guess he was not mad about the tweet. So just to clarify, the Saudi Prince is the only rollover. Al-Waleed apparently saying he would roll over his existing shares to contribute to this purchase. All the others are new capital. And I think there could be more to come, is my guess. So who knows what date was this filed? And I wonder what date this was, you know, what date this was locked. Because now that this list is out here, it's quite possible that somebody who owns a certain

amount of shows might want to roll over or new investors. You know, other sovereign wealth funds might look at this. I think Elon can 10x the company. That's, and I think that's probably what the investors believe. A two, three X, I think, will be a layup for Elon. I think a 10x will be quite possible. There's no reason it can't be a $400 billion company. There's that potential there.

And certainly it's going to throw off massive profits at some point if they can change the cost structure a bit. 8,000 employees, whatever thousands of freelancers, contributors, contractors could, you know, I don't know. I've heard it could be done with half or less, just like Google could be done with probably 80% or less. I'm talking about public statements by over the years. That's what analysts who wanted Twitter to be profitable were speculating. You know, if you have half the number of people, this thing would be a money printing machine. It would look totally different. And you need to have momentum in a business. As we're seeing with Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, we talked about yesterday, Molly, you know, they really took layoffs, cost cutting, getting rid of spending on driver perks,

all this stuff, right? Molly, they took out of the business to have discipline to show that it could reach profitability and that free cash flow will arrive. What does that do? It builds confidence in the business. And the whole dialogue on CNBC today, you know, I'll listen to it in between we're taping our podcast or whatever. and people were picking Uber and Airbnb

as their stocks of the day or their picks because they were saying, listen, management because they heard our show. They heard our show, but they were also just looking at the numbers and saying, hey, this is great management.

Look at all the signal from management that they get it. The signal. Yeah. The intentionality. Intentionality. You know, a plan being executed by a group of people

that's in the best interest of the customers, the sheriff, shareholders and the employees. And so back to that, is it Matt Levine's comment? You know, he's right in that like, they're not talking about the product,

it's a place in the world, and the customers, they're talking just about the shareholders. You actually have to keep three things in mind running these businesses. Yes. I got my employees here who have to build a product that hits customers.

Okay, those two things, you have to get right. And we've talked about this in early stage investing, right? I always talk about like, who's the team, what's the product, what are the customers think about the product? Let's talk about that first. And then we can talk about everything else.

And the founders who talk about their team, their customer, and their product, 90% of the time, seem to be, for me, the ones that win. And then you'll meet some founders who are talking about everything but their team, customers and products. They're talking about the market, the competitors, how bad this competing product is. You know, some startup award. Who is the mafia. Who they're mad at. Yeah. Who they're mad at.

all the stuff that is not the customer, that is not the product. And, you know, finally, shareholders, yes, you have to have all three of these people, investors, customers, employees, the team, all of that has to remain in your brain at the same time. You have to be having all of those things dialed in and you have to continue to improve those things, which is you're seeing me at work here, you know, running this company. What do you see my focus on? Yeah. Who's our customer?

Yeah, well, but, but. Really, what are we focused on? Who's the customer? Okay. The customer is the founders listening to the show and the founders we invest in. Okay. And who's on the team? Well, we added Molly Wood this year.

We added Mike Savino and we added this person. We added this person. Justin and Rachel. Okay. And we're mentoring those people, right? Professional development. We're trying to make them better at their jobs. Okay.

Check. Check the product. I'm sorry. Check the customer. Check the product. Check the team. And now we look at the product. Okay.

VC Sunday School. Rachel reporting. Okay, boomer. Launch, streaming. meetups. We're thinking about this product this week at startups. The Nodies, doing it live. We're really thinking about what's the product. Well, we're never done. We're never done. Like, it seemed like Twitter got to a point where they were done. They were just like, it's like, like Craigslist, right? Like Craigslist has looked the same. eBay. Since we were babies on the

internet. eBay, same. Never be done. And Amazon, exactly. Amazon is also like the same for like way too long now. Yeah, but you know what? You look at that Amazon basics list. I don't know if that was Monday. we talked about that last week. And you go down that Amazon basics, it's like, they're like, here's every style of wrench and wrench. And I'm like, does Amazon need to make a wrench? I don't think so.

Amazon was like, we might be done sort of, but we're stealing all these products and then we're building AWS. So they weren't done either. And maybe you look at Lyft, right? And there are problems. Like, what's the latest feature of product from Lyft? Right.

I can't name it. Talk to me about Uber, I can tell you, like, they're doing grocery and convenience stores and they have Uber 1 and they're doing Uber experiences and restaurants and making a super app

so I can literally tell you the roadmap because the CEO is talking about that right? Yeah. Okay, let's go to Twitter. And same with Airbnb. He's like, we're moving in this direction. We're going to handle it this way. We've got a new thing dropping.

Like, this may feel like exhausting advice to you founders and humans in the world, but what you are now is not how you should stay. You get no credit for it and it's not how you can remain. You have to keep moving or you will be disrupted and killed. It's just such a great observation and point you're making because I am always telling people, please, no credit for what's in the review mirror. Please, please look through the windshield.

Now, I'm not saying that Craigslist is not a money-making machine. It has been. The thing is printed money. But if you look at marketplaces, like the Facebook marketplace is doing pretty darn good. Nextdoor, like, I don't use Craigslist. I use Nextdoor Facebook Marketplace. And I think if you were to look at Craigslist metrics, it peaked like four years ago. If this is right, this is AIM Group Marketplaces report.

Revenue, let's see, bounced back in 2021 due to the hot job market, but it's still down more than a third from its pre-pandemic total of a billion dollars annually. Okay, so who knows if that's pandemic-related? I would be very interested in seeing where Facebook Marketplace and Nextdoor were introduced here and the impact those two have had because those and those two are basically straight up trying to compete there. Yeah. All right.

Anyway, I have to go to a super cool interview. So we have to go now. All right, everybody. We'll see you on the pod next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.