This Week in Startups - The 2021 TWISTY Awards: best guest, most awkward moment, best chemistry & more! | E1350

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

Jason hosts "The 2021 TWISTY Awards" where we give out 10 awards for top podcast moments from this year including: the most surprisingly awesome guest (02:17), best chemistry (04:48), best live moment (23:43), most awkward moment (28:51), funniest moment (36:51), best guest (45:19) and more! At the end he has a short "after-party" discussion with producers (50:58). Thank you for listening, this is our last planned episode of 2021.

I'm in the new studio and here we go. We're going live with the 2021 Twisty Awards. It's going to be amazing. This week in startups is brought to you by Calm for Business can help your employees be their best selves at work. HR and benefit leaders can get a free year of Comfor Business at calm.com slash twist. That's C-A-L-M-com slash twist. NordVPN is improving VPN service.

services globally. Access content from over 59 different countries and stay safe online. Go to NordvPN.com slash twist or use code twist at checkout to get 73% off a two-year plan plus an extra bonus gift. And 8Sleep. Good Sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the pod pro cover to any mattress. Go to 8Sleep.com slash twist to check out the PodPro cover and get a special holiday offer. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week in startups 2021 Twisty Awards. And now give a warm welcome to your host, Jason Kalakannis. Oh, everybody, welcome. Welcome, welcome everybody to, yes, please sit down. It's too much. It's too much. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. It's been an amazing year on the Twillips Weekend startups,

and we are so, so excited to bring you. The funniest best, most insightful moments from the podcast this year are 11th year as a podcast. My God, we started before the iPhone. We were doing this when podcasts were listened to on an ancient device, which you might find in a landfill called an iPod. That's how old this podcast is and how old I am. I can even tell you why they're called podcasts.

Most of you literally don't know why they're called podcast because they used to be synced to iPods, which was a device that only did music. And it was, yeah, it was crazy. All right, everybody, we have a number of great awards. We might as well get right to it. The most surprising awesome guest is our first award. This is for people who, you know, a bit of a wild card didn't expect they were going to be awesome. And here are the nominees, Taylor Lorenz from the New York Times on episode 12, 17. Paul Judge, Angel, Season 5, Episode 9, and Splice CEO. Steve Bartosi, Splice founder on episode 12, 65. It's a cloud-based music creation and collaboration platform. Let's roll a clip of the highlights from these great moments. All right, everybody. Next up on the program is Teller Lorenz. I guess my feeling with going independent is covering the creator economy and having a lot of

friends who are YouTubers, you know, independent media people. Like, it's so much work. It's so much work. And my job now, it's work. It's work, but it's not like running your own business work, you know? It's not like staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. work wondering if you're going to make payroll. You have the security. I mean, you have the security.

And I don't know if I'm entrepreneurial enough. Today on the program, Steve Martosi. I say my biggest competition is people giving up on themselves. Because there's so many people who want to create. It's like this inert human desire to be creative. And all these kids want to be, you know, standout content creators now. So like, I'm not worried about anyone else in my space. I'm worried about can I keep people engaged?

Can I keep you a lifelong musician? Can I deliver you great value in product? My friend, Paul Judge. You know, it's filled a lot of things that we're cheering on right now. Like, we invested in a company called Praxis that does diversity training to help people with unconscious bias, right? Yes, it's caused people like double down on, you know, like I started a, a cannabis medical cannabis company two years ago because it's about, hey, there's inequality

in this industry. We can use our business skills to go solve that inequality. And so it's fueled the passion of, I think, this current generation to just go harder. And so to your point, I think ultimately what will happen is, yeah, in this lifetime, we'll get closer to equality. along the way. We'll see a lot of kind of good impact around education and kind of feeding the folks that are in need and so forth. All right. And the winner of most surprisingly awesome guests of the year for the Twisties 2021. Let me rip open the envelope, everybody. Okay, the winner is Splice CEO, Steve Martosi. Yes, submitted by one of our Nody Gang members. Congratulations to Steve. Okay, next up, Everybody loves this award. Sometimes they get into a vibe with a guest and we just start, you know,

just sharing the ball back and forth. The volleys get going and that's Best Chemistry of the year. The nominees are Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, episode 1261, Angel investor in front of mind for multiple decades, Joanne Wilson on Angel, Season 5, Episode 10, and Bradley Tusk. Let's check out some clips of those candidates and those outstanding performances for best chemistry. This is an interview with my friend Glenn who runs Redfin. Good to see, Jason. Good to see you. It's going to be a kind of different interview.

We're starting from wherever, catching up with each other. I'm in Florence. He's in, you want to disclose where you are? I'm in Seattle. You're in Seattle. And we've been friends for over a decade, I guess. We met at Sequoia back in the day, I guess. And you were on the podcast.

Not only that. I was at war. I just want all of your investors to know that I got into a funk with my investors. and I talked to you because I thought about quitting or I didn't know what to do and I was being totally dysfunctional and you told me just to grow up and to grow a pair, which I did. And it was some of the best advice I've ever gotten. So whenever you asked me to be on this podcast, of course I have to say yes. And it's also just a lot of fun.

So welcome to the podcast, the Gotham gal herself, Joanne Wilson. How are you? How are you? My big sister here. There were all these people buying real estate there as like some store of value and never living there, right? Well, they have to change the tax system, right? These people that go off to Florida for 180 days, fuck you, okay?

If you live in Florida for 180 days or you live in New York for 70 days, you pay 70 days worth of taxes. You get to take the subway. You get to drive on the streets. You get to enjoy New York. And you own a goddamn apartment. It's just bullshit. I mean, I didn't live in New York for 180 days this year.

but you can be damn sure I paid our, we paid our taxes. All right, listen, an hour with Bradley Tusk. You and I are going to become fast friends. I'm booking you for six months from now to come back on the program. Can't wait to do it. All right, and then I'm going to be in New York.

Maybe we'll catch you next game. Maybe you take me to some great sushi place. Let's go. And I want to know about this new company you got. We got to start viving now because this is like a moment here. I think we got a bromance going. We got the shared history with Uber. This is going to be great.

Producers, six months from today. I want Bradley back on the program. I'm committing right now to doing. Okay. I think there's going to be a lot for us to check back up on. Well, yeah, this always evolves and changes. Look, there's all kinds of stuff we even talk about yet. Like drones, AI, machine learning, autonomous cars, autonomous trucks,

flying cars, all this stuff. Three great, you know, two great friends and then one new one. How do you choose here? Well, this was submitted by Goldbrick on YouTube. And the winner of Best Chemistry, drum roll, please. Let me get the envelope. Hold on.

I got it right here on my desk. Let me rip up with this envelope. I'm struggling with this one. It's particularly bad. Ah, there it is. Hold on. The winner is? The winner is Bradley Tusk.

Wow. Amazing. Congratulations to Bradley Tusk for best chemistry of the year. It's the end of the year, and lots of us are super stressed out with deadlines and planning for 2020. And business leaders know that healthy and happy employees create successful companies no matter what the industry. So Com for business can help your employees to be their best selves at work. And there is no better time to start fresh than in the new year. Com wants to help you kickstart your mental well-being initiatives like empowering employees to stress less and to get them to rest better and to build mental resilience.

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subscription for HR and benefit leaders at com.com. A free year of calm for HR and benefit leaders so you can experience what com can do for your company. So there's no risk. Go ahead and try it out. Play with it for a year. I'm sure after just a couple of days or weeks, you're going to want everybody in the company to experience the magic of calm. Get started today at c-alm.com slash twist. Once again, calm.com.com slash twist. Okay, moving on. Best food talk, even though the show is about business. You know I love food. And, you know, like when you're watching these clips of me, maybe I look like I'm 25 pounds heavier.

I am 25 pounds heavier in these. I'm 173 today on the scale. I was 198 in many of these clips, which is my peak weight, I think, of 2021. So very proud of myself for getting it together. Okay. I love talking about food. Everybody knows that it comes up. This year I had two amazing, incredible guests from the food world.

first up gold belly CEO Joe Ariel amazing guest and then talk and alinea founder nick Kokonis he was a great guest as well let's roll the highlights these guys are neck and neck as my two besty foodie buddies yeah linia is i've never been but is a three michelin star restaurant and was named the best restaurant uh in the united states so welcome to the program nick talk to me about the uh signature dessert you guys created the painted table that is often now copied. I think that it's copied and mocked. And it was on the front page of Reddit last week.

I was watching a Picasso documentary from the 20s or 30s, where they had mounted a camera behind some Plexiglass and watched him, watched him paint. It is bananas interesting how he creates layers of paint and stories under the final image that you don't even see. Like, one of the great things about a great hospitality experience or any experience is that it's new. And the older you get, the harder it is to have a new experience.

That is the childlike innocence that we all lose as we get older. So we decided we wanted to make people feel childlike. And the first thought that I had was I was once in a museum where everything was scaled to what it'd be like if you were five years old. So the chairs were huge, the table was huge. A couple are huge. So I was like, we're going to make a table plate. And it's going to be like the size of the table.

and it's going to be a plate. And at the same time, it'll be a new experience because everyone loves to paint when they're a kid. And you'll have this giant thing. So that was the start of the conversation. All right. Next up on the program is the founder of a website

I am absolutely obsessed with. That website is for foodies, goldbelly.com. The founder is Joe Ariel. Have you heard of Francis Melman, the Argentinian chef? He's famous for the giant like assados and the hanging meats and vegetables.

Oh, wait. He's the guy in Miami. at that new hotel, the, um, the faena. The faena. I had dinner at the faena with the owner of the faena and that chef did that for us on a giant thing. We had like 15 people, a couple of my friends. And it was outrageous.

Outrageous. I mean, it's like the best meat, best grilled meat that you could like ever have. So we actually shipped Francis Melman. Wow. And we've partnered up with him. And it's, it's this unbelievable like grill kit that you ask. like what some of my favorites are. It's something that I've ordered like two or three times this summer.

It's this like full asato kit where you get the most amazing meats and side dishes. And you can basically have this event for friends or family that come over using your own grill based on his recipes. All right. Listen, this is a tough one. They're neck and neck. I mean, I could roll with either of these gentlemen, both huge foodies, both with so much to add to the world. The food is so much passion for food. But the winner is, drum roll, please.

The winner is. Okay, Nick Kocanis, congratulations. Submitted by Nody Gang member Gordon Gill, congratulations on that. And I got that envelope open real easy. That one was particularly easy. On to the news topic of the year. There were no, absolutely no competition here. It was one of one.

The winner was tether and other alleged potential frauds we covered so often. But Tether was the one that just kept coming up and giving us more and more to talk about. So here is a highlight of all the amazing fraud coverage we did in 2021. It's like our in-memorium. There is something that everybody in the cryptocurrency community has been talking about for many years. And it seems to be bubbling up again. And sometimes when I feel this, I decide to go all in on it. So I've watched different scams in our industry, and I've seen them unfold.

And I'm starting to get that spidey sense with tether. Back to our never-ending obsession with fraud, or I should say mine, I am obsessed with business frauds. Theranos, Madoff, perhaps Nicola, perhaps Tether. Well, there's a company called Lordstown Motors that might be a fraud, and it could be going to zero. I'm using, I know how to use the words now. I know how to frame this without getting myself in trouble. But just this morning, CNBC has reported that Lordstown Motors, another pre-revenue, EV SPAC, okay, so it's pre-revenue, that's one thing.

It's in a really hard space, electric vehicles, and it's a SPAC. They confirmed they're being investigated by the DOJ for its reporting of pre-orders. Uh-oh. Okay, we've got a Nicola Fraud update, as alleged Trevor Milton, brazenly and repeatedly used social media and appearances and interviews on television podcasts, hmm, and in print to make false and misleading claims about the status of Nicholas trucks and technology. They definitely watched our podcast. But one time, I'll take a shout out from the Department of Justice and be really thrilled about it. All right, there you go, folks.

So many frauds. I forgot about Lordstown and all of this crazy stuff. Remember, shout out to all the frauds. We're going to miss you when you're in jail. We're to miss you when you pay your fines. Just so many frauds and alleged frauds, app any headspin, that may be alleged ones, ginko, Zimergen, maybe incompetence, maybe fraud. Who knows where the line is? But we will keep covering all the shenanigans into 2022. And for me, this is like our in-memorium. Rest in peace. To the guilty and to the innocent, we don't believe you.

We still think you're guilty. Too many shenanigans, too many red flags this year. The market's definitely at a peak. All right, Jason's inside of the year. And again, I don't bring these up, but the fans and the producers find these great moments. They tell me that the nominations for my best insight of 2021 are my take on Rivian's market cap surpassing $100 billion.

Or they delivered even one car. That was episode 1324. My comparison of YouTube versus Netflix in terms of revenue growth and users from episode 255 and my take on how the use. US should change their immigration policy in episode 13, 23. These are my hot takes, my insights. And let's play this two minute and 50 second clip. Rivian should be worth if I gave them just an incredible amount of credit.

If you gave Rivian a million dollars in valuation for every truck bates sold, that would be $50 billion. That would be kind of crazy because you don't make a million dollars off each one. gave them $100,000 in value. It would be worth $5 billion. I think $5 billion would be a fine valuation for Riven right now. But obviously they've raised all this money, so they have to have a valuation over $17 billion because that's how much cash they have. So maybe double that $40 billion.

Even there, it doesn't make much sense. I think it's a terrible stock to own right now. And YouTube grew revenue almost 100% year-over-year, 80% year-over-year growth is just extraordinary for a large business. Let's break down how YouTube compares to Netflix, two seemingly very different businesses, but who line up kind of interestingly. Their ad revenue was $7 billion up 83% year over year. The $7 billion is pretty close to Netflix's Q2 revenue, which was $7.3 billion.

I think it's great for us to look at these two businesses. Netflix has 10 times less users than YouTube. They only have 210 million subscribers compared to YouTube's 2 billion-plus users who use the service every month. So one is 10% of the size of the other. they both have the same revenue. And the revenue comes from different places. So if you look at where the content comes from, what is the product?

Well, Netflix spends billions on premium content every year. We know that YouTube has billions of users, obviously. And it's generally user-generated content or professional-generated content, but it's an open platform. YouTube is not a gatekeeper. Anybody can upload anything. I'd actually give the edge to YouTube here because I don't think they have a contemporary. There is no business out there.

that can reach as many people as quickly with video than YouTube. Maybe it's time for us to talk about a point-based system at the border. What does it mean? It means you just take the emotion and the polarization out of immigration. Immigration shouldn't be all or nothing. There's a lot of nuance here. Everybody coming into the country provides some amount of value. Why don't we tie the number of jobs that are available to the number of people that we let in?

So in other words, you take the last five years, you have a rolling average of the last 200 weeks, 250 weeks of unemployment data. You look at it and say, what jobs are open? Okay, teachers, doctors, lawyers, construction. Okay, great. Let's take out construction. Great. Where can we get incredibly trained construction people? Great.

If you're applying and you say, I've got 12 years experience in construction, I'm a plumber, I'm an electrician, great. We need more of those. Looking back at these four years, we're going. need, we will give a preference to what we actually need in the country. Is that too cutthroat or is that logical? There's a tough one even for me. I like all of my takes. You'll be surprised to learn. I still stand by those takes. I like each of those takes. So let's go to the winner drum roll, please. I know everybody's very excited. This is a very, oh, let me get this envelope open here. This is a very important category, but I'm struggling with the envelope so much. It's so hard.

Wait. Hope I don't make a mistake. The winner is Rivian's insanely juiced up valuation shortly after going public. They were the second most valuable car company in the world. I kid you not. And they peaked at a $150 billion valuation with no cars on the road. What is happening, folks. The market cap, of course, after I told you, this was ridiculous, has been cut in half to 76 billion. When things are this frothy, eventually the air gets let out. And I would say, we are only, you know, a half or a quarter of the way there. The company's market cap is now 76 billion. In the first earnings report, they reported they have only produced 652 vehicles and delivered 3186 of them. And I think a lot of those went to employees, never a good sign.

They also reported they will fall short of their goal to build 1,200 cars by the end of 2021. They also have 71,000 refundable deposits at an $80 billion market cap revenue is getting $1.1 million of credit for each of their 71,000 deposits. In other words, you buy a car for whatever it is, 50 to $100,000. I think they're more like $100,000. They're getting credit for a seven times that, and they're probably not even close to profitable on each car. In other words, it makes no sense. I value the company at $25 billion, maybe $16,17 billion in cash, maybe give them $5 billion for their innovations and team and potential, but it has a $25 billion company. So I think it could lose two-thirds of its value from here. But you never know. It could be

stonks and people pumping this up, or people could be incredibly optimistic. But, man, I really like for people to have their valuation of their company in some way correlated with the reality of their business. Call me old school, but I'll give you a lot of credit for potential, but let's not have these things disconnect from reality folks. Do you want to increase your online security? Don't we all? If so, you need to hear about NordVPN. NordVPN offers a VPN that's a virtual private network with benefits such as helping customers stay safe online and accessing content from over 59 different countries by changing your virtual location with just one click. So if you're outside the U.S., you still have access to all the U.S. streaming services and will

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Best live moment. We started doing live moments as you know. Here are three of the best, oh my lord, moments from my life. this is one where the twins crashed a live stream and wanted to watch Star Wars with me we watched Clone Wars we watch Bad Batch we've watched every Star Wars movie then there's me trying to get the people with the leaf blowers so please stop with the leaf blowers oh my God they're so loud in California I never heard a leaf blow before I moved from New York to California and now it's just like

every day I didn't know there were so many leaves and so few rakes Okay. And then the moment when I invested live, $25,000 in a Nodigang member and founder, university participant, Chris Niblet, live on air. Roll the tape. If you didn't know this. Hold on guys. Hey, guys. I'm on the phone. I'm on a call right now. Okay. Can you give me 10, 15 minutes? Okay. I'll make it 10 on 50. 50 minutes. You use your iPad and play two games. Two games? Two games. Like 20 minutes. Okay.

Use your time timer. Okay. Thanks. Well, whatever. You can use the time timer or just 20 minutes, okay? I'll do it on my time. Okay, on your right, that sounds good. Okay.

What was 20? Like 20 minutes is like watching one episode of Star Wars. Long episode? Like a long episode. Yeah. You can watch an episode with a bad batch if you want. Oh, I'll watch the last episode, then I'll watch the new one with you later, okay?

Yes. Okay. Okay. Daddy? Yes. I have to go right now. I'm okay. Can I, you know, 10 time things on my adverb and goes on with that?

20 minutes. 2.0. 2.0. 2.0. Okay, good luck. Do you have a window open by any chance? I do. You hear the gardeners next door?

Yeah, I do. Oh, damn it. They're banning those things soon. Hold on. I did. Yeah, I do that now as soon as I get on. Guys! Guys!

He's such a clown. Hey, guys! We're live. It's ridiculous. Hey, guys. No noise over here. Okay. I'm on the phone. I'm on the phone. No noise right now on the side. On the phone, too. Okay. Thank you. 64 people. Have you raised any money for this vision?

No. Have you incorporated? So I have an LLC that I've used for other things, but I've not really used it for this. So the short answer is, no. Yeah. What would $25,000 do for you guys now? Have you had $20,000? Yeah, that would be incredible. we would love to be able to grow to have the time and the resources to go get more restaurants, get more businesses on board, and then especially on the consumer side also. Yeah, that would be a game changer. Okay, so here's the deal.

I told everybody during the 12-week course that I'd pick my favorite startup and give them 25K. So I'm going to keep that in for the last week. But how about I give you 25K right now for 1% of the company? So 25K for $2.5 million valuation, we're saying a convertible note. You incorporate in Delaware properly. And then we just ship your 25K. Is that something you might be interested in? Yeah.

I'll go ahead and yank your hand off on that. Absolutely. Okay, folks, do you have it. I just put 25K into this company. I just such a heartwarming moment with my kids. Oh, so cute. And if you haven't watched the Clone Wars, if you're Gen X and you're into Star Wars, to watch the Clone Wars with your kids and have that become their favorite is a

really surreal experience because then they're like, well, Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader, but you don't see Darth Vader in the Clone Wars, but for, you know, the last episode, spoiler alert, but spoiler alert, at the end of the Clone Wars, he becomes, Anna SkyWaker becomes Darth Vader. So that's really what Clone Wars is about, and it's just such a great, great moment. But, you know, let's, let's stay focused here, folks. My God, and just even trying to get the gardeners to stop with those leaf blowers, they are banning them in California, which is going be great because, you know, they just use like some weird mixture of like oil and gasoline. They pollute like there are 100 cars or some crazy statistic I read because they're like one

of these two-stroke engines where you pour the oil and the gasoline. There's no filters on them. So it's terrible for the person. You're replacing them with electric ones, which would be great for everybody. And of course, putting 25K in on the spot is a baller move and super interesting. Let's see who the winner was. Let me get this envelope here and wait for the drum roll. all right, I'm getting this open.

There it is. Oh, wait. Not my daughters. Not the gardeners. And that means it must be investing $25,000 in Chris's company on air. Of course, I should have seen that coming. What a magical live moment for everybody involved. And he's actually in our accelerator.

So the 25K bet became 100K bet. Our ownership went from 1% to 6%. And that's great for everybody involved. Okay. Award number seven, the most awkward moment. if you can believe it, we had some awkward moments happen. And this one was really awkward. I had tried the better bagel, the better brands keto bagel.

And I gave it a score. Like I thought maybe she was halfway there. And she was not too excited about me rating her bagel on a scale of 1 to 10. But I thought this was an important thing to do. I thought I was helping her. She may have felt differently about that. And then SourceGrav CEO Quinn Slack refused to answer my question about SaaS pricing after four tries.

And I usually don't do the four triving. I'm usually a little bit more, you know, I'm a two try, maybe three try kind of guy with like the questions and then I'll let it go. But I'm certainly not like, you know, Chuck Todd just says like, okay, onto the next topic. Or okay, you didn't answer my question, but they just goes to the next topic because he assumes he's not going to get it out of the person. I decided I'd knock on the door four times to see what happens.

Okay, let's play the highlights. Where do you feel you are on that journey of like sort of competing against, you know, the most legit Brooklyn bagel, New York bagel. Oh, gosh, you gave us 50%. I think 50%. Yeah, I think you're halfway there. The mouth feels a little chewy, but in a different way than a bagel. Flavors a little bit off.

But when I toasted it, I'll give you this. When I toasted it with butter, I think it got to like maybe 60% of like what of my joy in eating a bagel, which by the way, that to me was phenomenal. My expectation was because I've had some funky stuff and, you know, I've had all. all the mock meats. And, you know, if you put up the steak that I get, if I'm getting, you know, Kobe beef or a wago or a great rib-eye, I would say like the burgers and the steak are probably 25% of satisfying. So I felt like 50, 60% was pretty great for a first iteration.

So 300 bucks a year for the software, 25 bucks a seat. I'm just seeing a Google result as ballpark. Is that about right? It depends on what features you're using. on average. It's less than 1% of what you're going to pay a developer a year. It's so easy for- Why are you so secret about the pricing?

Well, I'll tell you why. We are a very transparent company. So, you know, you can look at our handbook. You can see, you can look in our code. I'm just talking specifically about pricing. It's really easy to get started with Sourcegraph. What does that have to do with the pricing, though? This doesn't answer my question about pricing.

I'm asking you very specifically. Why do companies who are SaaS not just disclose the pricing? Because the price. the price that it takes to get started is often a lot lower than the price. Once it's rolled out to a whole company and the CTO and CIO and so many internal business processes are dependent on it, and if you show the price to get started, then those people are going to be anchored. And if you show the price that is once it's delivering tremendous enterprise value, then the devs are going to say, that's way more than, you know, I am comfortable with. This is interesting. See, the reason why I answer

the question three times, two or three times, because I knew there was an answer. All right, so that was a little, both of those are incredibly awkward moments. I have to admit, the poor Better Brand CEO, I, you know,

I don't watch my own show, obviously, I experience it when I do it, but looking in, you know, Amy's eyes, when I gave her a five of ten, I felt terrible now.

She looks grassfallen. I think it's a journey. Like, you know, did anybody eat the first impossible burger and say, you know, 10 of 10, nine of 10? Everybody was like two of 10.

This thing's terrible. It tastes like sawdust. You know, it's barely better than a veggie burger. And then slowly, I think, you know, people who would ever have an impossible burger or beyond meat, I think they put those at like a six or seven if you're a meat lover. And if you're a vegetarian, maybe it's an eight or nine because you've got nothing else to compare it to you. You're not allowed to eat a burger. And I was like, yeah, you've been toast that I give you one more point, which I think is,

that was also kind of like an insult. So that was certainly awkward. But at least you know I'm honest. And then I, you know, the Sourcegraph CEO. that also was very awkward, I think, for all of us. And I'm actually shocked that I kind of went there, but I did have a personal frustration with why they don't share the prices. So here we go.

The winner of the 2021 most awkward moment, and there were many, on this week at startups is, oh, God, this, Jesus, why do they put these, this one's in two envelopes? Why would you double envelope it, producers? there we go. Fine. Wow, this is a shocker to me. I thought for sure the bagel moment was more awkward, but the winner is Quinn Slack.

Congratulations, submitted by producer Nick, because his skin, according to Nick, was crawling on the Zoom call when I kept banging him on this, as if I was interviewing somebody about weapons of mass destruction or something incredibly important in the world. I can chime in on this, because I was on both calls, and I promise you the Quinn Slack one was more awkward. That video is about as short as I could cut that.

That was like a four-minute segment where you were just like, Oh, really? But why aren't you answering my question? And he was like, well, you don't really understand the ecosystem. And you're like, I'm not asking about the ecosystem. Why aren't you answering the question? And I was like, oh, sorry, Quinn. I did think it was an instructive moment because he actually wound up answering the question.

And the answer was very simple. Sticker shock, right? Super easy. Okay, nobody cares. If you have 10,000 developers, and this is $1,000 per developer, 1% of the cost of $500 per developer, like, okay, you're going to pay for your 1,000 developers, 1.5 million. You'd be like, I'll build it myself. I'll hire five developers and I'll save money on my own internal weapon. And that is, of course, true.

Like, if you had a, if you're using Slack for $15 a month, okay, it's a, what is that per year, $180,000 a year? 1,000 people, 180,000 a year. You're like, eh, maybe we should have our own server, or maybe if you had 10,000 people, it's $1.8 million. When you start getting to eight figures, I'm sorry, when you get to seven figures, it does become hard for SaaS companies to justify the cost in a big enterprise. And it's kind of silly, but they do hide the pricing and they make a call and all this kind of stuff, as if people are not going to do the back of the envelope mat. You got him out of PR mode. It broke the media training. Yes.

You broke it. So I thought it was a good moment. He'll never come back on the show. I don't know about that. I'm not investigating his next cup. I don't know. Quinn, if that was too much, I apologize. I just was excited to hear your answer.

Let me leave it at that. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. We all know that. And according to eight sleep, over 30% of American struggle with sleep and temperature is one of the main reasons. I know this because my wife and I, listen, we run at two different temperatures.

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When I sleep on a bed that doesn't have eight sleep, I don't sleep as well. Period. End of story. So go to eightsleep.com slash twist to check out the pod pro cover and get a special holiday offer. You're going to love it. Just trust me. I love it so much. I put a little placed a little bet. I wet my beak. I invested a little bit in eight sleep. A lot of my friends are investors in eight sleep as well. Great job. Okay. Funniest moments. Now we can get the other side. This is, you know, the fans love when I do an impersonation. So the first one is my Melania Trump, NFT impersonation. The second is the greatest CNBC hit of all time. You know what my favorite is. And three is Howard Linsen. Absolutely. busting my chops relentlessly. I believe he called me a Nazi

or had a Nazi haircut or something. He's absolutely savage to me on Twitter. Let's just for all the highlights because there are so many funny moments we're laughing on the show. The NFT is watercolor art that, quote, embodies Mrs. Trump's pole-blue eyes providing the collector

with an amulet, an amulet to inspire. It also includes an audio recording of Melania Trump. and here it is. A message of hope from Melania Trump. My vision is look forward with inspiration,

strength, and courage. My vision is... Look forward to being inspired. My vision is who? Divorce Donald. And get Marlao Goet and settlement.

It's just so brutal. So you can buy this. I think she's going to do it every day. I think it's pretty awesome. I got to admit, like, I don't want to be one of 10,000 apes, but kind of do want to own one of these. And I think she should cameo it. So it should be like, this is special inspiration to this week in startup's team.

Be your best. Your boss is insufferable, but be best. This is legitimate art. Yeah, so well, up starts up about 25% just in four days since we bought it. We bought it on about four days ago. So that's actually made a nice little move in the short term, probably a little extended right now, but longer term,

that's a good-looking name. Very powerful, very strong earnings. These stocks are... What do they do? What do they do? Excuse me? What does Upstart do? Well, I'm sorry.

What kind of company is it? Yeah, you're breaking up. Oh. Well, I guess we've got an audio problem there, Mark. I'm sorry. What you saw there was, you know, he's having a panic attack. Obviously, he's recommending a stock on national television without even knowing what they do. I mean, this is the height of insanity.

You literally could just visit their website and know what they do. Do you do any prep for coming on CNBC? As someone who doesn't even like you that much, don't do that. Don't even dee that. Don't even do that. We like each other, remind each other too much of each other. That's why we fight? What is it?

Like siblings? No. I just don't like your haircut. Really? I've felt that haircut was a little Third Reich. I've always felt it was a little third Reich. I got it. So, you know, it's interesting you bring that.

As a Jew, I always worried that that haircut had some. It's interesting you bring up the Nazis. I didn't say, you said it. Oh, my God. It is so brutal. That was so brutal. All of them are so brutal. And Mark Minervini, his people emailed me, actually.

and so I'll take them at their word that there were in fact audio issues. It's obvious that you do zero research and know little about the people you smear on your show. Wouldn't it smear? The host of CNBC and the producer already acknowledged that there was an audio issue during Mark's October 15th in appearance, an issue that started before the thing.

As a result, CNBC took down the replay of the interview from the YouTube channel. Maybe you should be interviewed. Maybe you should have interviewed somebody at CNBC first or at least given Mark an opportunity to respond before you try to tarnish a stellar reputation. It certainly was bad timing appeared. that Mark drew a blank, but the fact is it simply had the audio break up and let the host know.

He wasn't expecting the interview to end. So, uh, anyway, um, I don't believe them. If I'm being totally honest, that sounds like, but I'll take them at their word. Sure. Why not? We'll take them at their word. That's true. That's what we'll do.

All right. Sorry, Mark. Sorry, Mark. I don't believe your PR people. I mean, it's just obvious. Just own it. Be like, one of my. people bought it, I should have known. That was a mistake. But you know, everybody's a tough guy,

wants to be on CBC, they want to throw stuff out there. You've got to be able to bring it. You should know something. You have to have skin in the game. If you're just buying stocks because their momentum stocks, say it. Say, I bought it because it had momentum on Wall Street bets. And I thought, let me see if I can just get 10% out of this. So I'm just going to buy it on a momentum play. I mean, that's a total, there are people who are technical traders who just look for certain chart things. That's a way of trading. There are people who trade just based on Flash trading or whatever they call it. You know, there's all kinds of trading concepts out there.

You don't have to know. Anyway, it's a hard one for me. For me, the funniest moment is the greatest NBC hit of all time. But let's see, who? My producers and the audience picked. Okay. All right. This envelope's opening up pretty easily.

There you go. That's the way you pack an envelope. Okay. And people seem to love my Melania. Trump, NFT impersonation, okay, fine. I like my Bernie Sanders, but, okay, if you like... Bernie, you're a terrible person, Bernie. You want to take all the taxes from Donald.

He's not actually that rich, and you want to tax him like he's a billionaire. He's only worth $200 million. He's $800 in debt. All right, enough. Here we go. Best reoccurring guest of the year, as we wrap up here. Best Reoccurring guest of the year. Bet and David from acquired five appearances.

Zach Collius on Ask an Angel, eight appearances. Neck and neck here. And let's play a quick clip. What is the biggest missed investment opportunity you're willing to admit and why did you pass on them? The anti-portfolio, classic question. I always talk about Twitter and Zinga. What are yours? The one I talk about is Uber. So like, I met Uber when it was an idea. And Travis and I had this huge debate about whether or not he would be able to make it work. And I was like, look, the taxi lobby is going to crush you. There's not a chance. Like you're fighting with laws and corrupt your. bureaucrats here, you're going to get killed. And he's like, I'm a fighter. I'm going to win this. And it actually taught me more important. You identified the key. You literally identified the key risk factor.

Yeah. Yeah. But the thing for me that taught me is that like the best most exciting startups are the ones that have really clear normative violations. And the normative violation was, can you succeed in violation of the rules that these dumb cities have put in place and the corruption that they have? And he demonstrated that it's possible. And so now when I look at other deals that have like normative violations like that, I think, okay, maybe there's this thing that obviously is going to cause them to die, but what happens on the other side?

And there it was super clear. Like you push a button and you get a car. Oh my God, that's like the most valuable thing ever. And so the other side of that normal evaluation was just unlimited value creation. Warren's whole thing that you hear him say over and over and over again all the time, never bet against America. You know, America's feature. great. And he has been a master at taking the long view on that. Whatever is going to happen in any given year, any given cycle, just like we saw a crypto here, you know, like it's all noise in the long run. And you believe that. I believe that view. I'm not sure it's necessarily America is the domain that it applies to anymore. It may, it may not. I don't have a view one way or the other. In that the market is bigger than America, but American exceptionalism will continue. Do you believe it will continue through our life?

time. I think it applies to the internet. This is the Rosenthal Doctrine. It's not never bet against America, but never bet against the internet. Exactly. Oh, I like that. I like that. I would agree with both of those statements. All right. And the winner is, oh, here we go. Okay. Acquired FM. Amazing job. I can see the Acquired right as I ripped open the envelope. I have to say, Zach did an equally good job, but the audience went with Acquired FM.

this year, you know, just being nominated is such a blessing. But great job to the Acquired FM team, great podcast, and great collaborators with this weekend startups. Okay, here we go. It's the big one. Guest of the year. The guest in episode of the year, the nominees are Toby Lutki from Shopify, J.B. Schrable, former co-founder of Tesla now doing his own new battery recycling company, Redwood Materials. I. Yes. And Coffeezilla, in the heat of the pandemic, I had to all of the coaching and course scammers. Toby from Shopify is back.

Number one priority is, let's go build the best product we can possibly build. And then, you know, priority number two is, let's make some revenue so that we can do more of priority number one. And then actually priority number three is never mix one and two, right? And so I think that's if you really look at, because that seems to be the commonality, right?

It's like, there's a reason why this is done. like why the company is built and what it's standing for. But you don't drive a car just to burn fuel. You burn fuel to get somebody. You're not in a combustion engine. We're not opening the hood and be like, wow, look at how it's burning gas. Where did it take us?

Welcome to the program, J.B. Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So many different OEMs, you know, countries, you know, factories, customers are leaping into EVs, you know, making these huge announcements, you know, saying they'll be fully electric in their fleet, you know, this decade or next, they haven't, I think, really done the math fully on, you know, what that entails in the supply chain and tracing it all the way back, literally all the way back to the mines. You know, it has the feeling to me of kind of a giant

overbooked flight. You know, everybody's saying they want to go there at the same time. Meanwhile, you know, we have to sort of build the planes to get there. We have to, you know, figure out how to, you know, sequence everyone. You know, it can all get sorted out over time. But, you know, Obviously, we're trying to do this fast as a society and as a species. I do think, you know, we're going to have a really painful time of it. And, you know, it won't be just a simple battery shortage. I think it's going to kind of ripple through different parts of the supply chain. You know, it may at one point be nickel shortages.

Maybe it'll be cathode shortage. Maybe another day it'll be separator shortage. I am here with Stephen from the most amazing YouTube channel that I love to watch. It's called CoffeeZilla. Can we form a supert? team, the Justice League, and we go after the Legion of Doom Scammers, and we find the victims. Have you ever ever gotten one of them on camera to interview? Because I'm getting them DMing me. It's one of my most viral videos is a Dan Locke video of this teacher who quit his job, sunk 26K into this,

into Dan Lock's course. And it describes a cycle of the upsell, because first it's high ticket closer. Then it's, that's not enough. I'm not making any money. I thought I was making money. So I'm going to join Closers in Black. Then, okay, wait, wait, Closures in Black isn't making any money. Maybe I should go join high ticket millionaire or whatever. He's got like a million upsells, right? Because it's all about getting people keep buying in, buying in, you need that back in. So it describes the process of this victim, and I call him a victim because he literally was out 26K.

He thought he was bad off before as a teacher. Then he was without a job out of 26K. So you do this and these are really powerful interviews. All right, there you have it, folks. Three amazing interviews. But for the guest at episode of the year, there can only be one winner. Let's open the envelope. The winner is...

Ah, I see a T. It's Toby. Toby from Shopify. This is one for the ages, although I have to say the Coffee Zillow episode was also great. J.B. was killer. Coffee Zillow episode, I looked so fat in. My God, I was 198 or 199 pounds in that. But the Toby episode, episode number 1184 of this week in startups, his second appearance, I think, or third appearance on the show.

What a great, great, great guest. That's required listening or watching for anybody in the internet space. So let's go with our newest category, new for this year because we're doing so many live streams, the notie member of the year. The candidates are Walton Dornish, who sends me a lot of emails with a lot of great ideas. Bob G, the OG, Toby Zhang, Serge Dog, Eniak 78, Brandon Francis, Lita, and Joe Chad Hari. These are all members of the Nody Gang. When I go live, they're in there every time within seconds and minutes.

Sometimes we even think that they have a bot. And the winner is for Nodie Gang member of the year. Drum roll, please. Oh, here we go. All right, let me open the envelope. Oh, wait. What do I see? I see an E.

I see an E. I see another E. I see a G. Oh, my God, it's Bob G. O.G. Bob G. He wins Nody Gang member of the year. What a great job from Bob G.

The OG, because he gave us so many great questions. All right. Next up, the producers and I will talk about in the after party. We're going to go to the conference. We'll have the after party where we will discuss what happened tonight. We're all going to get out of these tuxedos, put on some casual clothes, and go over to the party hosted by just a cavalcade of celebrities. And here we are. We're at the after party, people milling about.

All right, producers, Nick, what was your favorite moment from the show in the past year? So my favorite moment was it was episode 1242. The news story on that episode was the Nextdoor Spack breakdown. And this was the first thing that I did that I was like, oh, all right, this is cool. I found in like, you know, a byline of a byline of an appendix that next door is the way that they count their daily and monthly active users is if someone opens an email. Yeah. And I was like, wow, that's kind of weird. A little aggressive.

We, yeah, and then, so you talked about it. Then the next day, Alex Wilhelm from TechCrunch also found the same thing. He talked about it. And then it kind of became like a story that like, hey, why is that next door? That was a great moment for you as a producer to add something to the mix. Yes, this was a selfless choice. Fantastic. Yeah, no, I like it.

Justin, do you have a favorite moment from the show this past year? Yeah, I really liked Everett Randall, episode 1207. We were discussing his article. on Tiger Global and him probably only being a few years older than me. It kind of, uh, inspiring. Yeah, inspiring. The depth that he understood the topic and how he kind of pierced the VC. Randall from Founders Fund, yeah.

Great discussion, too. Great discussion. Rachel, uh, you've been with us only for half the year, I think, but what was your best moment and congratulations on the studio looking good? Thank you. Yeah, it got really dark while we were recording. It promises a lot later about an hour ago. So my favorite episode.

from this year was actually from before I came here. It was Angel, season five, episode eight with Gary Tan on lessons from startup failures. I just thought he was really well articulated, and I'm a huge Gary Tan fan, so that was just really awesome to see. All right. Now, favorite thing about working on the podcast? It's a great job. Everybody wants to come work here on the podcast and sacrifice their entire life to make me look good.

Everybody knows that. So what was your favorite moment in all seriousness about? working here, Nick. So I really liked how this year, a little bit towards the end of last year, we started to go on this route. But originally, for people that don't know, for people that don't know or just someone that wants background, like producing here was just doing show notes for guests. We never did the news, right?

And we never dug into S-1s. We never dug into SPAC investor presentations, nothing like that. And at the end of last year- We would do a news roundtable, and the news roundtable would kind of serve that function. We'd have two journalists on to talk about their story. Right, but I guess I'm saying we, even in those cases, the store, we'd more so talk about what they wanted to talk about instead of like, hey, this is something interesting. Here's where you should be looking, right? Got it. And we started doing that. So I love that. And I really like, and we, from we had old news roundtables, like, we would never be going through and like, hey, here's our last three months of revenue. Here's their price of sales ratio. Here's how much money they have in the bank. Here's how much runway they have if they're burning this much last quarter and like doing all these crazy calculations, which I love doing. I think it's so much fun. And now, uh, I love, I actually you too, you pushed us to, even when there's like a fraud,

like I remember for App Annie or alleged fraud, you were like, hey, explain this simpler. I need to know what they do in one sentence. It's super simple. So anytime we cover a fraud or we go through an S1 or a SPAC presentation, we have to explain the business almost like we work there in the most simple, easy, basic way.

And we, like I feel like I understand all these businesses is now like 10 years ahead of where I should be because of how far you push us on these things, right? So it's great. Awesome. Justin, did you have one for everything about working here the past year? This is your chance to suck up to the boss.

I mean, obviously my weight loss has been inspiring, but I want you to pick something after that. From the last year was learning how to communicate effectively to you who has less patience than other people I've worked with, which is good, because that definitely, less pace inches of virtue, I think, in media business.

A bold choice. So dealing with me as a boss and learning how to communicate efficiently, when I say, please just answer the question, please, just give me the answer to the question. Don't make excuses. Just I didn't do it. I fucked up. I screwed up. Whatever it is.

Just own it. Let's move forward because we don't have time. It's a daily show. We're producing every day. Great job. It's been great to work with you, Justin. You got a month severance and two months of COBRA. you left for better CEO. And Rachel, shout out there's a year. My favorite part was probably

learning how to become a single threaded leader. I don't think I have ever had this much leadership opportunity before in a role considering it's basically like my first role out of college. So I think that's really cool getting to be able to do research for OK Boomer. And of course, everything with meetups. It's been, it's been really cool. Absolutely. We like to put people in charge of stuff. We'd take people who are starting their careers, you know, just in the first couple of years for their first job, we'd throw them right in the deep end of the pool, and then we give them a couple of cinder blocks and we watch them sink. Then we tell them they can let go to the cinder blocks and come back and get some air. All right, Charles, what about you?

A favorite part about working here, you were off for a little bit during the pandemic, but you're back and you're in the zone. Any great memories from the year? You know what? It's difficult to give any single moment. Working here is challenging and wonderful. I think just generally speaking, I would say that the way that you push us, the way that you challenge us every single day, you expect A1 every single day. And then when we deliver A1, you're like, why have you not got A1 star plus plus? I don't get it. You know, use your brains. Get it going. What's next? You're like, let's go. Okay, I have to just push it. You know, we really try to make the show really great for the audience. We try to make it so it's worth your time. And I couldn't do it without this incredible team. And then, of course, Matt and Jamie helping sell the ads. And then, of course, on the investment side, everybody involved, Ashley, Jackie, Heidi, Amber, Presh, Marine, Karen, and Kelly, joining us recently. And we'll welcome Molly in the new year. Let's be part of the team. I think I got everybody. Yeah.

Oh, Andreas is new. Yes. He's only been here like two or three months. I don't remember anybody's name until month four. That's just part of the gig. I just am like, show me something first. Then I'll remember your name. I'm joking.

Basically, to work at launch, you first have to prove your worth. And then Jason's like, okay, you work here. Okay. It's almost like you get a paycheck, but you don't actually really get any acknowledgement until you actually put a number on the board. And then Jason's like, oh, okay. You did something. Congratulations.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a group of high-performance people, and they hold each other accountable, and the product speaks for itself, whether it's on the investment side or the podcast we do. You know, hopefully, you know, just trying to be one or two percent better every week means, you know, every year the product is twice as good. And we really feel like we, I really feel like the team did a great job this year on this weekend startups. Products obviously getting better, the meetups, the guests, the formats of the show, the quality, the quantity of the show, launching all in as a side project. I mean, just incredible. Great job, everybody. And we will look forward to seeing you in the new year.

Bye-bye.