This Week in Startups - Twitter's new Birdwatch moderation/annotation feature + OK Boomer: Flapjack's Patrick McDonnell | E1453

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

First Jason and Molly break down Twitter's new community annotation feature Birdwatch (1:40), they go through screenshots of the beta version and weigh the possibility for the Birdwatch to bridge the moderation gap. Then Producer Rachel interviews Patrick McDonnell of Flapjack (44:04) about working in a hacker house in Miami, optimizing restaurant menus and his experience making the Boring Company flamethrower. (00:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s show (01:40) BREAKING NEWS: Jason and Molly go over leaked Birdwatch Twitter feature screenshots (10:21) Notion - Get started for free at https://notion.com/thisweekinstartups (11:39) How does Birdwatch compare to Reddit or Wikipedia? Some examples of Birdwatch. (23:04) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (24:20) “Notes rated helpful” Birdwatch feature. Will Birdwatch work? (32:45) Intercom - Get advanced Intercom features and Early Stage Academy at a 95% discount https://www.intercom.com/early-stage (34:00) The power of mods in online communities (39:58) Rachel tees up this week’s OK boomer segments (44:04) OKB: Producer Rachel interviews Patrick McDonnell of Flapjack Check out Flapjack: http://flapjack.co/ FOLLOW Patrick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmmcdonnell/ FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. It's Friday, Friday, and we're going to do our variety show. We're going to do five for Friday. But then, boop, boop. Breaking news, Molly, we got a leak. We break down some leaks. Jason got his hand. Jason just can't stop with that investigative reporter bug. Got his hand on some Twitter leaks. Molly explained to the ones with the leaks for. The leaks were for Twitter's new crowdsource moderation tool called Birdwatch. It includes screenshots. So you are going to want to find the video version of this podcast. YouTube.com slash this week in.

And then we have another great OK boomer from producer Rachel. As always, it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. Stick with us. Why not? This week in startups is brought to you by Notion. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to notion.s.o and use promo code twist to get $250 off an annual team plan.

Our Crowd Our Crowd Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-R-WD.com

slash twist and Intercom. If you're an early-stage high-growth startup, you can get access to Intercom's Early Stage Academy today at a 95% discount.

Join the program today at intercom.com slash early dash stage or email them at startups at intercom. We're live, Molly, with breaking, breaking news. Hey, everybody, welcome to Friday. It's five for Friday. Is that what we call this? Five for Friday? Yeah, I like that. Five for Friday?

Because we can't promise the second five. So we're just calling it five for Friday. It might wind up being four, but this is where we do five topics and five minutes each. But this first topic, breaking news, alarm sounding must credit this week in startups, we have received the Birdwatch screenshots from the inside. Boop. Boop. So I cannot talk about how we got these screenshots.

That being said, we have the screenshots of Birdwatch. You're asking me, what's Birdwatch? I am. I mean, I'm not, but someone is. You know how Wikipedia has mods. Yeah, the best thing about it. Yeah. And, you know, they try to keep the community on track.

You know how Twitter has, you know, a harassment, truth, misleading information, all this, you know, fake news issue. Molly, you don't have that? Yeah. I believe I've heard a little bit about that here and there. Okay. Right. A lot of things going on there. All right.

So, Twitter has a great idea. We'll see, you know, if it works or not, and we're going to have an open discussion here. I am open-minded to this. They're going to have a community-driven approach to tackling misleading information. In other words, instead of Twitter saying, hey, Ivermectin or this post or this meme is fake news, they want all of us to do it. Now, how this is executed, the devil's in the details, right? like all things so

and we should clarify here that they announced this feature back in January so what we are January 2021 they were like we're going to do this birdwatch thing and everybody was like I'll believe it when I see it

well now you're going to see it exactly so here's the first screenshot I think I have six screenshots to go through here update okay so this is what you'll see in your app see it says bird watch there

and you're in the you have basically a bird watch in your menu now they're going to show you tweets and they're going to ask you, is this note helpful? Now, this is a note that somebody else made on somebody else's tweet. In other words, this is community on community checking.

So somebody said on somebody else's tweet, I believe it to be a joke. So there's a rating. And then this other member of the Birdwatch is being asked, is this note helpful? In other words, Molly, you're in Birdwatch. You said, I think this person is joking in their tweet because they asked, you to review a controversial tweet. And then I say, do I think Molly has been helpful? So this is

the Star Chamber checking the Star Chamber, right? And I say it's somewhat helpful. I think you've been somewhat helpful here, Molly. So for those of you listening, I click not yes, not no, is it helpful? I click somewhat. And then it actually asked you

what was helpful about it? And I'll just read you some of the choices here. Sites high quality sources, easy to understand, directly addresses the tweet claim provides important context, neutral or unbiased language, other. So they're asking me to pick one of these choices about Molly's commentary on a tweet that would be, let's say, a charge tweet. We'll get into that. Then they ask another question. What was unhelpful about Molly's note? So I'm policing the police. The most cynical view of this would be like Stasi

like spying on each other. We're like some underground. But if all this stuff was transparent, And you could see the ratings as a user. Well, maybe it's helpful. I don't know. So let's see. What was unhelpful about it? Why don't you read these ones, Molly, and tell us what you think of these.

So then you can say, and this is what I like about asking these questions, what's helpful and unhelpful, is it's creating a critical thinking muscle. So what was unhelpful? Sources are not included or they're unreliable. Sources do not support, note, incorrect information, opinion, or speculation,

typos or unclear language, misses key points are irrelevant, or argumentative or biased language. Ooh, the old framing of something. I like it. The old framing of stuff. So I have,

wait, I have a level set question before we dig deeper into this. Oh, and then there's one more there. I think that last one's kind of interesting. Oh, yeah. A note not needed on this tweet.

So what this is saying is there's going to be notes under tweets. Right. That was my question. So it seems like Birdwatch has two, is a two factor situation. You can put a note on a tweet that you believe. to be problematic, right? And then someone can rate the note, good or bad.

Yes. And then someone can rate the note. So it's like a double rating system sort of. I think that's what they're doing here. So who knows who gets invited into this. But of course, now the devil's in the detail. You as somebody on the right might think, well, MSNBC is not reliable. Ben Shapiro and Fox News are reliable.

You know, if you're a Joy read and, you know, who else is on the left? who's the media guy from CNN, who's very polarizing for the right people are always dunking on him. Anybody watching? Well, Brian Stelter is reliable sources. Brian Stelter, thank you. Is that reliable sources?

Yeah, that's reliable sources. Got it. Okay, so Brian Stelter is like, you know, the right thinks he's like, apologists for CNN, yada, yada, yada. That's interesting because all the women in media think he's the original catch and kill guy, but okay. All right.

Yeah, so many letters here. Sometimes the Westberg Network comes out on the show and it's very fun. Yeah, you know, I understand what you're saying because the Cuomo stuff, right? I guess. Anyway. So. So what we're, so our question here is one, it sounds like you may, some people may be able to attach notes to tweets.

Other people's tweets. Other people's tweets. But they may, that we think is going to be by invite. Like it won't be like. Well, right now you apply to be in Birdwatch. I don't know if they're going to go to Birdwatch and say, we'll have 50, we'll have 35 people a third of people who are on the left, third of people who identify on the right,

and third of people who are independent, or are they going to say, we're going to go to librarians, you know, and people with degrees in library science, which was, what a Wikipedia's original thing? A lot of people who were into this degree of library science,

and back when I did Mahalo, I tried to hire those folks. They're a really interesting group of people. They would love to work for free. If you try to pay them, it'll be really bedlam. Okay, next screenshot. Okay, so we have the note thing,

and then we have the moderating of the rating of the note situation, and then let's keep going through the features. Okay, so now here we see a tweet from Elon, and this is an actual tweet, and this is an actual birdwatch in effect. You see Elon's tweet there. It says ultimately the downfall of the Freemasons was giving away their stone cutting services for nothing,

which is a joke, I believe. Like, I don't think the Freemasons actually did their work for free. And it says, help rate notes submitted by Birdwatch contributors. So this person is being asked to look at other people in Birdwatch and rate their notes. And it says only visible to Birdwatch contributors. So this is like how the sausage is getting made behind the scenes. And actually a reply from Joe, the co-founder of Airbnb is there. This couldn't compete with the discount masons.

Some revenue is better than none. So anyway, there you see how it exists in the wild. Let's see another one. But it is notable to me that the note is only visible to Birdwatch contributors. And again, we don't know if that's the case now with a bit. Well, then what's the difference between a note? What's the difference between a note and a reply? Okay.

So the idea would be replies everybody's doing already. There's a C of them. Yeah. Notes would appear right under the tweet, abstensibly, and would be by this group of people who are trusted in some way. Uh-huh. So it might be if you write a note, and 25 other birdwashers say,

great note, accurate, yada, yada, then it appears. But if your note is not deemed to have consensus around it, I'm taking a guess here, it wouldn't, right? Okay. So just like if somebody made a good argument as a Wikipedia person editing a page, there's like a discussion page, and they said, listen, this person is not notable. Here's the reasons I don't think they're notable.

Another person replies, hey, they are notable. They're on this top 100 list. Here's a link to them being quoted in the Wall Street Journal five times. and then people kind of can vote on that and you get some sort of consensus going. Startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work now more than ever. That's because we're all living in this crazy remote world.

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team plan. That could be a couple of months for free, so it's pretty great for a growing startup like yours. That's notion.s.o and use that promo code twist during checkout for $250 off. Okay, so here are the notes. Kind of closer even to Reddit than Wikipedia, where you can, because you upvote responses. Yeah. So in a Reddit thread, what you'll end up seeing is the responses that have been deemed the most useful or helpful. But again, this is more structured data here. So they're structuring it by giving you like that, I don't know what you said, but like turn your brain on kind of

situation. What was the word you use when it gives you the mental model of here are all your choices, how to think about that? You use some term of like, hey, this is engaging your brain. And so, here we go. We're looking at this and so this isn't a place to make other jokes or be publicly replying. This is a place only to do this structured kind of data. So here it says this thing needs more rating. So here are the comments people put on Elon's tweet in there. Don't go too fast here. Go back up,

please. I'll tell you when to move down. Got to admit here's the note. Got to admit their third basement was killer though. Don't know what that's about. Yeah, I guess so. Right. Let's keep going. So this is where someone is abusing their note privilege to put a funny comment on the tweets. There are many conspiracy theories about the Freemasons, and this is a joke about those theories. The etymology of Free is disputed, but it doesn't mean they refuse payment for their work.

Oh, my God. This is so useful! This is showing it being super useful. Yeah. Somebody is literally explaining to people who don't understand Elon's sense of humor, the joke. like all, all people? How much you have to freaking know about Freemasons to get his jokes? A lot of times when I make a joke and listen, I'm a funny guy who makes good jokes.

That are very understandable. When I make jokes, sometimes I will put the laughing face. In other words, I laugh at my own joke. Right. At the end, I put the smile at face. Just so I don't get a flood of replies where people take the joke seriously. Yep. And then when people refuse to understand it's a joke because there's four.

hilarious rolling on the floor laughing emojis, I will reply with the absolutely perfect animated gift of Superman looking around like this and he's flying and then somebody put the word the joke and the joke moves around but Superman can't find it. Showing even Superman can miss a joke. So anyway, this is a perfect example if somebody unpacks this for somebody.

Next, let's scroll down another little bit here. So we would have clicked, yes, that's helpful. See anything you'd like to approve. There's nothing to approve here. This person nailed it. It's amazing. Amazing. And so great.

Here is a Birdwatch screen. We're going to go, I think this is the third screen we're on here. And Birdwatch says, we need your help. Rate these notes chosen for you. Okay, so let's pause for a second here. If you're not watching the video, you can go to YouTube.com slash this weekend. You would search for the May 6th episode. Go to the videos and you can just sort them by date.

Go to the May 6th episode. Fast forward a couple of minutes in. And you'll see these actual screenshots. Or if you're on Spotify, we're part of the video thing where you can just, if you turn your phone sideways, I think it turns the video on.

And then if you're on Apple podcast, you'd have to search for this week in Startups, video. We have two feeds, one's audio and a video. Okay. Now, rate these notes chosen for you. Notes on these tweets need a more

diverse range of feedback, and your point of view could help decide if they're helpful. This list refreshes regularly. So this is notable. No point intended. Sorry. It's notable.

Thank you. Thank you. for no. I didn't do that. I also laughed at my own joke because no one else was gonna. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. The puns are heavy today. So anyway, what's notable about this note, about making, writing notes, is that they were chosen for you. Right. So I think the algorithm here is going to say, hey, you seem to understand Elon's sense of humor, COVID, politics, the Supreme Court, whatever it is, whatever your jam is, we'll show you more notes like that. So let's scroll down here and take a look. And in this case, we're assuming you are one of the Birdwatch mods,

so to speak. And that's where you're seeing, that's why you're seeing this screen. Okay. So it's not like everybody will show up on Twitter and he'll be like, hey, check out these notes. Like, God help us. No. Yeah. The point 0.01% deemed worthy of being a birdwatch and trust, trustworthy will be in here. Yeah. And, uh, okay, you're going to say, well, who watches the watchers? Yon yada. You really are. Of course. But it, what we saw at Wikipedia was, You know, it winds up trending towards incredibly helpful unless you're a bio of a living person. Because if you're a pile of a living person, the anonymity there means anybody who's your enemy or you're ever fired or you ever beat in competition or has got an axe to grind with you is going to shape your Wikipedia page to be 90% your failures and 10% your victories. Yeah, totally.

So here, Ian Miles Chang or Chang, Chang, Chang, he is a polarizing citizen journalist. muck raker if I had to describe him. I don't know exactly what his deal is, but I think he's known for covering the Antifa folks and getting beat up by them on a number of occasions. Somebody fact-checked me, if that's not correct, but he's like a pretty full, you know, like when people go to like Portland

or wherever those sit-ins and riots and stuff were happening, he kind of goes there with a camera and live streams. And he's like one of those dudes. Okay. Oh, no, that's not him. What is Ian? Is Ian Miles part of the alt right?

I'm thinking of Andy, no or go. But I think they're both part of the right. I'm assuming that he's right. I'm assuming this guy is right wing because he is, appears to in this case be retweeting a meme that is full on Putin disinformation and propaganda about Ukrainian battalions being made up of neo-Nazis. Ah, okay. So Chiang has made a name for himself in right-wing.

circles by frequently weighing in our U.S. politics, I guess, is one description on the internet. Okay, so you're describing a meme. It's that line drawing, which is like a trolling drawing. So this is kind of like a 4chan, A. Chan kind of vibe. We and Azov Battalion are neo-Nazis. I don't understand this joke, actually. There was this sort of disinformation campaign about how there was an entire regiment of Ukrainian fighters who were neo-Nazis to try to bolster the claim that Putin invaded because he's trying to purge Nazism from Ukraine. Got it. And this is like one of those situations.

And this battalion might be, I don't know, but this was definitely part of this whole, right? Like this was one, unquestionably a whole part of this big like, look, everyone, they're Nazis. And it, I think it's, I think they are like in this. I mean, it's just a very, it's messy. They might in fact have some Nazis, but it may not be as pronounced as people are making. But a perfect one for Birdwatch to check in on because. We're relatively well-informed people. And I have questions about, is this reality or not?

I have questions. I have, I mean, it's, listen, if you're dealing with disinformation and it's Putin and it's the fog of war, I mean, this is the ultimate use case here. And if you're the guy throwing this in here and your whole history is that you are, as one Twitter user described it, a right wing or an alt-right gamer gate ding-dong. Then one assumes that you're, which by the way, bravo. Bravo. Bravo, Amani, Gandhi for that one. All right, here we go. Next one.

Okay, so let's look at the notes. Let's scroll down a little bit here. So this gets posted, and then presumably the notes are everything we just said, like, well, that battalion is actually neo-Nazi. Yeah. Oh, there we go. Yeah. And then the second half of the meme is, that is Russian propaganda.

Putin is the real neo-Nazi. Okay. And then it says here, help rate one note on this tweet. So somebody put a note and you can rate it. Is that the end of the screenshot? I think so. So then we go to the next screenshot. So you can see what this would be helpful.

And then here are birdwatch in this birdwatch tab, which only the oversight committee, the ministry of truth, the truth, birds. The note holders, the note holders, the keepers of the notes. The keepers of the notes would have access to this tab, not us. And it says birdwatch's newest notes, hot off the presses. These are the most recently written notes. Contributors can rate these notes to determine their healthness. So again, the bird watchers. Oh, God, here we go.

Marco Rubio. I know. This is terrible. This sounds like a unique form of purgatory. Yeah, this is literally like a black mirror episode. Hey, here are the most loathsome people in the world. How would you like to rate their tweets? I mean, right?

I think this is Saw 9. This is the, this is what the, what's the evil guy in Saw? I don't know. The guy who's like the little puppet. Oh, I don't watch that stuff. No, I'm a big chicken. Jigsaw. Jigsaw.

So in the horror film, Saw, there's like a little jigsaw puppet and he comes up with all kinds of contraptions to torture you and maim you. This is kind of that. This is, it's jaw, saw nine, this is going to be the premise of it. If we have your jigsaw, wait, wait, do we have to? Can you? Let's say there's like a particularly inflammatory tweet from one Marco Rubio related to abortion. Then you get some notes submitted by Birdwatch contributors. I just think, okay, let's move to...

You don't want to read this trade from Marco Rubio. It's amazing. No, because I'm just going to go into like the fog of war, speaking of which. Full tilt. I don't want to tilt, you, Molly. Tilt. Oh, oh, I'll read it. If we have, quote, pregnant people, then how, says Marco Rubio, in I'm sure, completely good faith.

Yeah. Can Roe be about a woman's right to choose? Ah, because men who we've perverted the concept of women, with the existence of trans people, then the question of abortion is utterly specious. Okay. I don't need. Let's not even go there. I mean, I'm just saying, what the f*** is a note going to do for this?

Well, oh, good, there's a note on it. Well, it might explain it. It might explain it. Or might explain its history or like. He's referring to trans people here. Well, I mean, people might not get it at first. Yes. I think that actually.

A popular Republican trope that as long as women don't actually exist, neither can abortion. Perfect. I think actually might be... What is that going to do for anybody? I think there might be people who, when they read the tweet, don't understand it at face value. I guess that's the idea of putting more context in it. Or, you know, maybe you could link to other tweets by him. Anyway, let's keep going here. If you were like, in case you're wondering how loathsome this tweet really is, let me help you understand.

Okay, here we go. And then here is a new your post, pansexual Florida teacher can for discussing orientation with students. Okay. So I guess that's the don't say gay slash parents. rights kind of post to be. I mean, there's one where a lot. I feel like you tricked me today. What?

I'm not trying to trigger you. This was not, I'm not troll you. I promise. These were the ones leaked to me. It's a trap. Obviously, I think what this is showing is like that bird watch at least can identify. Anybody can identify these. You could already report them.

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Let's talk about the goals. What are they? Okay. Why don't you read this one and just describe what we're seeing here on the screen for the people listening? So this is the third tab on the Birdwatch tab. In which, right. So then you, Birdwatcher, are also asked to review notes that have been rated helpful

by contributors. Birdwatch relies on contributors to rate each other's notes. Notes shown on these tweets have been rated helpful by contributors of multiple perspectives. Ah, that's a key graph at the end there. Uh-huh. So they're saying multiple people, wait, hold on, go back to that. Contributors of multiple perspectives. So they're not using political leaning here. Oh, we don't know.

Well, they're not. Right. And the copy, they're not saying that. This could be like when Facebook was like, we're going to surface all news sources and they were like, and it includes Brightbart and Alex Jones. Daily Wire. And Daily Wire. Exactly.

Feelings on Roe V. Way. Right. Just can't wait for those. My contributors of multiple perspectives. The language they're using is specifically to uncharge it, right? They're trying to keep this like cool and calm here. Contributors of multiple perspectives. I salute them for writing good coffee.

I think it's good copy. Okay. So the example given here, let's scroll down. I wish I had more examples of the notes, to be honest. I know. We have a lot of examples of utterly horrible tweets. Here's a governor. Scroll down.

Okay, so here's some. Do we see the rest of this screenshot? I can't. But it says Stitt claims all four million Oklahomans. So they're basically taking a claim by a. Right. So he says, in this case, the tweet by the governor in Oklahoma says, I represent all four million Oklahomans who overwhelmingly want to protect the unborn.

One assumes the note here then, on to say all four million Oklahomans have been pulled and in fact, this is not accurate, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So great. That's a.

But again, that would be in the replies. So I don't totally understand how the. Well, proximity and featuring matters. Yeah. So if it's in the replies, people are like, you're saying that because you're a west coast, East Coast, coastal elite, or you're saying that because you're a hillbilly, you know, from Appalachia. Here, it's like there was some sort of process.

the community of birdwatchers who are thoughtful and monitored in some way voted this note as the best note. So I have a feeling that the notes will be ranked by how helpful they were and that what they hope is, if you're good at voting them and you're not using bias or trying to spin, that the best note will make it to the top. So they're probably trying to find thoughtful people with a sense of purpose. Now you say, hey, you know, that's never going to work. Well, it's kind of working over at Wikipedia. More often than not. I think most of the stuff on the Wikipedia is surprisingly accurate for the majority of large pages. Long-tail pages, no.

They're not edited. They're not looked at. And if you have your profile on there, it's just going to be your haters. Anything it can happen. Yeah. Although somebody would update my photo, that'd be amazing. It's like 15 years old. I look 11.

That's a bad thing. Right on my Twitter profile if you just want to... Can somebody put a thin Jason photo on there, not a bad Jason? Because I like can't edit my own. I am definitely not of the opinion that this could never work. My initial response is that this is... Yeah, let's go. Let's get there. Yeah, my initial response is that this is overly complicated when in fact,

it's a Wikipedia model when they could just start with a Reddit model. Like, I actually think if you could upvote and downvote, that by itself. I think they do that in replies now. I think they do show. the replies based on the likes. I know that was like an experiment they were doing. I don't know if they broadly did it. Right.

But then it becomes a popularity contest, Molly, where it's, you know, the top one is going to be maybe the joke. The top one's going to be the most. I mean, yes, but honestly, I read a lot of Reddit. So my two, I actually think that my two trusted, most trusted news sources in a weird way are Wikipedia and Reddit. Because I believe that the bulk of that audience on Reddit, depending on which community you're in, let's be clear.

But even still, like, this is a community that's actually devoted to a really smart discourse. And I don't see things get voted up or voted down just because it's like, oh, this conforms with my worldview. It's more like, wow, this contains a lot of really interesting information and it's very useful. And if that was the message around upvoting, downvoting, and you had managed to get rid of spam and bots, then I think it's not so much about, because right now surfacing replies based on likes is a popularity contest, but including downvotes allows for moderating influences on either

side. I just think there's a simpler way to improve this than like a sort of like anonymous layer of hand-picked elite, you know, Twitter Roddy who are empowered to deal with this. If I know who they all are, maybe there's that, but it just, I don't know, it feels a little like. Here's the thing. If you know who they are, then you can start lobbying them. Right. Then you just come for them. Yeah. So then it's just, them and you, yeah, it could get ugly. So then it's an unelected board of mysterious elites who get to

decide. I mean, they're, they're policing each other, but I don't know, it's just like, it's complicated. That would be the most It's overly complex. It's the most cynical slash concerning worldview of it, right? That's the, if this is executed horribly, that would be

the possibility. I'll take the other side. Yeah. If they pick thoughtful people. And, and you have enough thoughtful people there, even if there is bias, in aggregate, people are going to pick the most sensible note to put up there, and it's only a note for explanation and clarity.

It's not the final answer. So if it is framed as, here's a note on this tweet from the community and the people who retweets, if you want to see these and you don't have to see them, you can turn them off. Maybe it would be an option. Don't show me these.

but if you do choose to see them, this is what a group of thoughtful community members voted as the most important context for you to know. So it's just context and it's context from the community mods. I think if it's framed as here's some context from community mods, not the definitive answer. It could be very helpful. And so context matters, I think.

That's why I like it being right under the tweet. And even if it wasn't opened, If it just said community notes or community manager notes, that's kind of what, you know, we had this term called list moms. It wasn't gender specific. It was just the mothering concept of, you know, being nurturing. There was a concept of a list mom for list serves.

List serves were like the original group message boards for people who don't know. And you would just sign up for an email list and then you would get flooded with 300 emails in a day. People talking about Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. I mean, the moderation is great. Yeah. Like Wikipedia works. A moderate, you know, we have moderators in our chat. Like, it is really, it has traditionally been a very valuable concept in terms of keeping online

communities. When does it work, Molly? When does moderation work in your experience, you know, decades of experience on the internet and before that online services? When have you seen it work well? What do you think makes it work? I think it always works well. You mentioned our YouTube chat room.

Right. I think it always works well. I think like always when you have impassionate. when you have passionate, empowered people as part of communities who are in charge of taking care of those communities and keeping them safe, it works until there's a certain amount of scale or lack of empowerment or overwhelming by bots and brigades that makes it impossible. So the question is whether this can be accomplished at Twitter at scale and whether people will trust this moderation layer.

Look, every effort in this direction by Twitter is a good one. Let me be clear. Yeah. Like, that's a good one. So I give a thumbs up for the experiment. You like the experiment? Yes. Actually, I will say thumbs up to experimentation.

Implementation to me seems complicated, but I think just because we haven't seen it in the wild. And we're bouncing back and forth between the mod view and the public view and the this and that. And, you know. So, but yes, bravo for trying everything to make this thing better. You might not realize it, but you've probably used intercom before. You know, when you visit a website and that little chat bubble pops up, and they help you with any question you have? Well, that's Intercom.

I literally used it this weekend. It's the best way to connect with your customers. Intercom's platform helps you engage and support your users through personalized chat-like experiences. And over 25,000 companies use it every single day. I kid you not. Because they want to foster their relationship with customers. They want to covet those customers.

And those customers have great things to say. In fact, here's a testimonial from Twitter. It's almost like all websites I visit with that Intercom chat button. I instantly associate them with great customer service, just like Intercom intended. So if you're an early stage high-growth startup, you can get access to Intercom's Early Stage Academy today at a 95% discount. Join the program today at Intercom.com slash early dash stage or email them. That's how cool they are at Intercom. They'll just email them. Startups at Intercom.com. How easy is that?

By the way, you can register for Intercom's next custom experience for growth webinar on May 18th by clicking on the link in our YouTube description or the episode page. Great job, Intercom. I would say you kind of nailed it in there to make it even more succinct. The communities that really have great moderation is when you select people who truly care about that community and have great intent. So it really is in who you select. It is. And so how did we select the mods for our YouTube chat, which have the ability to ban somebody, time somebody out?

You know, they have like God powers in our chat. We can't sit there when we're on air and do it. But, you know, I'm a mod for Nix fan TV. How did I get that privilege? They saw me there every night and they heard me dial in and they saw my contributions and they said, Jake How really cares about the Nix. He's been here for 20 nights. He's commented on 20 games.

Yeah, let's make him a mod. We saw a beard script. We saw Zenprofit. We saw folks who showed up every day for YouTube.com such this weekend. We said, yeah, it's obvious we should be a mod. And if they did a bad job, we would take them out. So you kind of lightly met, you pick people in the community who truly care, as you pointed out, and you empower them.

And I guess you got to. Yeah. You got to monitor them, make sure they don't go rogue. And there could be some going rogue. But I think this is an interesting idea. Some people might say, just know thumbs on the scale

just let people interpret for themselves. Yeah, I don't think that's helpful. Other people might, you know, see, here's the problem. If you hire a bunch of fact checkers, there's a certain group of people out there who are just unbelievable liars

and another group, and they don't care about their lies. Like, they're like lying is trolling to them. So it's kind of fun. And there's one side who uses lying kind of as a sport, like a blood sport, and there's another group that uses framing and words as their sport.

I don't want to tell you which side it is, but if you watch politics, there's one group who uses framing and emotion, and then there's another group that just uses straight up lies and trolling to great effect. Fire hose of lies. Yeah. And fact-checking, we know what's valuable

about the mod concept. And again, I keep going back to Wikipedia and Reddit, it, which I think are like remarkably accurate and managed and well executed because they are, because they have communities who care about them in charge of making sure that they're okay places or horrible places, but whatever. What works about that is that it is not top down. And we also know that fact checking as a concept, like, sadly, in many cases, doesn't work. It reinforces the lie.

Like, it just restates it. And it also, because of the way our brains literally work in terms of the grooves, hardens positions. Yeah, that is a very weird thing that we will have to overcome, especially when the leaders of a certain group are like just keep going in harder and harder on the lies. I mean, let me just be clear. I'm talking about the election lie conspiracy that the election was rigged. Yeah.

And you lose like 61 cases or whatever number of cases they did. And I think Trump has every right and his group to take every single court case that they want to spend money on. That's how the justice system works. But when you lose 30, 40, 50, 60, whatever the number wound up being, I think it was in the 60s that they lost. At some point, and they don't have like a single piece of evidence that like it was rigged. At a certain point, you're like, you lost 60 times. Like, do you need to lose 120 or 70? What's the number of court cases you need to lose for us to deem you a loser? Like, the justice system makes mistakes. I doubt it gets it wrong

62 times in 60 different two different venues. I hate to be political here, but was it not obvious to everybody? And to your point, for people who believe it, the groove had been so carved in their brains that they can't get out of the groove that it was stolen.

And what 60 court cases does is it sows down. Because on the other side, you're like, why would there be 60 court cases about this if there wasn't something to it? So you just keep repeating. and repeating and repeating the lie. And it doesn't matter how many times someone says that's a lie, some portion of the population is going to be like,

yeah, but it keeps coming up and where there's smoke, there's fire. I have this issue at Saxville's time where it's like there was no Russian collusion. And then I give the facts. And I'm like, yeah, but what about this? And what about this meeting? And what about, you know, this person getting a fine, this person going to jail? And then these people getting part in, like, all of this was because of Russian interference.

And like, yeah, but Trump wasn't ever proven to be a puppet for Putin. But you just had the whole Russian collusion thing. was false. Right. There was all these examples of Russian collusion. Did you not read the Mueller report? They didn't get a smoking gun of Trump, you know, getting a bag of cash.

And he, you know, but you did have all these people around him meeting with the Russians and you had him asking for them to hack Hillary's email. So like, what about that? And they're like, oh, yeah, well, that's different. They're all of a sudden their argument breaks down and they don't want to talk about it anymore. Very disciplined. Sachs is very disciplined. Oh, God.

He's so disciplined. Let's just put it out. It's very, yeah. And we're still friends. Yep, there you go. All right, guys, that's it for one for Friday. One for Friday. We threw out the five.

You know what? This is such big news. Producing on the fly. We're moderating. It's too big news. This week is startups exclusive. If you have an exclusive, we don't pay for scoops here. So don't, I'm not sending you a bottle of Don Julio, but the person who gave me these

leaked screenshots, I'm sending you a bottle of Don Julio. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the screenshots. This is an exclusive. If you are going to rewrite this Verge Fox, Business Insider, Muslink to...

Musling to Mollywood and Jaycoe. That's right. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you next time. Must link. Okay, bye. All right, everybody. It's Friday.

It's Friday here, and everybody loves. At the end of the Friday episode, Rachel Braun, Rachel reporting here with her O.K. Boomer segment. Tell us, Rachel, who do you have on? Okay, Boomer? this week. This week I got to talk to Patrick McDonnell. He is the co-founder of Flapjack. Flapjack is a really cool startup that uses data to optimize the layout of restaurant menus. Flapjack is also one of my favorite fake swear words from when I was trying not to corrupt my

child. How big a business is this? Like what does Patrick have to say about Flapjack and why that specifically restaurant menus? So we did talk a lot about how he got into the restaurant industry. He found out this was a pretty big problem when he started making air filters for people during the pandemic. People that were buying the air filters were restaurants, you know, because they wanted people to come in and start eating inside again. From doing that, he found out that a lot of these companies had issues with their restaurant design. Even the grammar in some of the menus kind of sucked. And he found out that if he just kind of tweak the menus, people were able to save a ton of money. And I thought that was kind of a cool way he found it.

Interesting. So this is AI or it's a consulting service? So they look at the menu and they consult with you and tell you, hey, listen, your Caesar salad would do better if you had shrimp and you could say plus $7 for shrimp and you had a flank steak plus $6 or $8 for flank steak. That's a layup for you. Why don't you have, you know, add chicken, add shrimp, add flank steak to the bottom of any salad? Yeah.

Is it that kind of like advice that you would think every restaurateur would know? but maybe it's not obvious. So exactly. They use food cost data, sales data, and online reviews to design the most profitable menu. He also said that there is like an 8 to 10 increase in gross profit after people use clapjack. And he's right.

8 to 10. Percent. Percent. Yeah. So I said not possible to be 8 to 10 X, but not in restaurants. 10% makes sense because if you could lower it, you could certainly lower your food cost by 5%. You can certainly increase orders by 5%.

I mean, all that optimization is there. Do they, did you talk about taking to account? I know, we're totally like, we're interested. We're interested. The feedback that you give on Uber or DoorDash, because they ask you to thumbs up and down stuff on an individual item basis. And if you thumbs it down, they might ask you why, hey, it came cold, whatever. Because, you know, it's, let's face it, some things don't travel well.

Maybe the restaurant tour thinks it does in optimal conditions, but in reality, you know, if you order ramen, you know, sometimes it comes in a big globular brick of ramen and you're like, this is terrible. And then some places seem to have figured out how to deliver ramen without making it turn into a brick of. You got to separate the broth. Who's not doing that? He did not mention it being used for Uber Eats or anything, but I think that would be a great use case. He's in a incubator type of thing, a residency program called HF0 down in Miami. so I'm sure he's building out there.

I like it. So, you know, it's really funny. What's going on? Did you get an allocation? I think it would be really cool. You may need an allocation. I think he's raising right now. So.

Okay, we'll call him up. But the funny thing is that actually, despite our interest in the business, it's like the least interesting thing about this kid who worked on the flame thrower project at the boring company. Yeah. Who negotiated from a spoon to a BMW.

Like, this sounds like a really fascinating founder. Yeah, he is crazy cool. So he was the first and only, I believe, full-time employee at the boring company's not a flamethrower project, which was really cool. And then he was a product manager at Dropbox. So the jump to bring a startup to creating a startup, I thought was kind of interesting going from like two kind of pretty big companies. Excited to hear your interview. Rachel. Stick with us, everybody.

Yeah. Nicely done. Good catch. Good get. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. So thank you so much, Patrick, for coming on the segment of OK Boomer. So to give everybody a little bit of backstory, I met Patrick because I showed up at HF0,

which is a hacker fellowship in Miami. I heard there was a bunch of cool people there, and I quite literally just went to your guys' little compound to see what was up. You were sitting outside eating, and we talked for a little bit, and I realized your startup would be something that Jason would be really interested in. And you were really funny. So I thought you'd be a great person to have on this segment. You are the co-founder of Flapjack, right?

Yeah, that's correct. Awesome. So can you give us a rundown of what Flapjack is? Yeah, so we optimize restaurant menus, at least as a starting point. So we like leverage sales data, online review data, food costing, eye tracking studies to optimize, like, a piece of paper. So it's effectively like conversion optimization or like funnel optimization, except we do it on like a printed out item. So we can generally lift restaurant gross profits like 8 to 10 percent. which is pretty meaningful for restaurants.

That's like another 70K for like our average customer. That's awesome. And so are you guys only doing physical paper menus right now or do you ever do online menus? We're starting out with paper just because like the competition in the space is less. Restaurants already understand it. We're saying a lot of restaurants switch back from QR codes to paper menus. But it's like a really good wedge.

Like it enables us to like get access to a lot of like restaurant data. We get their live order data, their inventory data, their food costing data, like their food delivery profiles. So like I think we can kind of position this almost as like, like maybe like a main street to restaurants where we just like continually find, you know, 5, 10, 20K just kind of like lying around their business. That's awesome. I love this idea because I do not like QR code menus. I don't hate them in the beginning. I kind of understood like why we had to do them,

especially when we were like slowly getting back to like the restaurant world. But at this point, I hate the fact that sometimes it takes a long time to like open up the actual QR codes. Somebody always has a problem with it if you're with a big group. And also like once you're on your phone in the beginning of like a meal, feel like it's a little bit difficult to get off. So super excited to see Flapjack come into play. And can you also explain what HF0 is the area that we met? I assume are you still there right now?

Oh, yeah. I'm still here. With the palm trees, I can tell. I'm still in our hotel. Yeah, it stands for Hacker Fellowship Zero. The idea is it's like a 12-week kind of like residency out here, Miami. So in person, kind of all like housing food, like laundry, room turning, and kind of everything's done with the idea that you can just like singularity kind of like focus.

So it's been like really refreshing. It's been nice to have like been able to just like fully work on one problem for this kind of period of time. Yeah, it's been really fantastic, but a really good experience. Awesome. And how did you find out about it? Was this like some application process or do people find you? They're a little under the radar, maybe a little bit on purpose. We got connected with the man who he was like, I have a background of mechanical engineering and he was working out some hardware stuff.

So I just like curious. he like knew that we were about ready to like start fundraising and he's like yeah you should like look at these people instead and then kind of got talked into coming out here so here we are very cool so it's a really really cool area that you guys are living at like you kind of mentioned it's like a hotel to me they almost felt like I was in like a college dorm area but like a really tropical college dorm with like a bar fairly close by so how has it been having to focus on flapjack, like solely, literally nothing else. Like you guys aren't cooking, like you said, there's

meals that are provided for you, everything's really done up, just make sure you can focus. Has this like intense period, you think, helped Flapjack? Or do you feel just incredibly burnt out from it? I think it's like something that you can do for like a short period of time. Like I don't think burnt out is quite

the right word, but I definitely think you can like have to keep this up intensity for like a period of time, get the business where it needs to be like clothes. We're like raising kind of like a pre-seed to see a round. We'll like have that close pretty soon. And I think that's important. And then I think I might need to take a little bit of a vacation after this for,

you know, three, four days and maybe get slightly more on like a little bit of a more normal work schedule and like maybe take like a day off on the weekends. Oh my gosh, a day off. Don't say that. I want to, I know, Ray. I want to flashback because you have a really interesting background. And I know that because you kind of mentioned it when we were talking. But then because you were so happy to come on the show.

Thank you so much. I was able to stalk you a ton on the internet. And I found a lot of cool stuff about you. One thing I do want to read out loud from your LinkedIn. You're a 2019 grad from USC. You did mechanical engineering. This activity stood out a lot to me. Personal bartering, starting with a spoon,

gradually traded up to a BMW 328I on Craigslist. Is that true? Yeah. It was like on Craigslist and baseball marketplace. And like back when offer up and let go were a little bit more of a thing. I don't know. It was fun. It was like I read the story about.

the guy who went from the paper clip to the house. And I'd like, I just like sold a lot of stuff on Craigslist and eBay as a child. For better or for worse. So like I kind of wanted to see if I could do it. So like I went from like a spoon to like a piece of antique film equipment, the antique film equipment to like a bicycle trailer that you like haul your kids in behind a bicycle. From that to like a garbage disposal,

to a security camera system, a security camera system to like a set of rims, tires that to a moped. Moped to this kind of like beater accurate, done this beater accurate to this like BMW. And then I sold, I graduated college. But it was great. It was like, yeah, you'd be amazed.

Like, it's just all about kind of like relative values. Like, how do you find somebody who like isn't willing to put in the work to sell something? But like, wants the item you have. I want to do it again. There's like some people who popped off on TikTok with it recently. I saw. I saw. I thought this was like, dang.

Like, was this part of a challenge or something? But because you graduated in 2019, I guess you weren't able to even put this up on TikTok or musically, I guess, would be back then, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm jealous. There's people who picked up some really good size audiences doing it. We capitalized on that. I also found out that you were the only full-time employee on Elon Musk's, not a flamethrower

project. That was really cool. How did you get from doing things like training a spoon on Craigslist to working on this flamethrower at the boring company being a PM at Dropbox, which is the only thing that I, that you told me about when I met up with you at HFCRO to founding Flapjack. What is this timeline and how did you find yourself doing a bunch of really cool things? Let's see. So I studied mechanical engineering in college somewhere around like junior year.

They worked a couple of internships. And I'm like, this just isn't like the right like path for me. Like there's people are way too excited about this. Then like I thought I'd really love it. But it's like a great place to be from and I'm really glad. But so I'm like, okay, now what? So I was like, okay, I have like a mechanical engineering portfolio, like, things that I built. I don't really have like a business portfolio or like anything else.

Like I have a lot of things that I've like welded or like design. But like I'm like, okay, I'll try the spoon project. Like I had done it once before back in like high school. I went from like an Xbox controller to like a dirt bike. So I'm like, I'll try that. That's like I don't know like a good story. I can like get that on kind of a portfolio. And then like the star is kind of aligned.

I don't know some combination like hard work. Meets opportunity meets like some dumb luck. And like the boring company had sold flame throwers. And they're kind of like looking for somebody. I don't want to say run the project, but like I was a student in college. But just kind of like take on just like the day-to-day work of it. So like I cold emailed Elon's chief of staff who kind of passed the message down to the boring company. Kind of like the background worked out.

They want somebody with a hardware background. They like appreciate it kind of the hacky projects. I was like a student at the time. So I could just kind of like hop out of school. and like, you know, was willing to, like, work pretty hard hours. So really thankful of them. It was, like, a really fantastic opportunity. Like, I owe a lot for it.

That's awesome. And then, like, I'm like, okay, like, I'm kind of doing product work here. Like, I don't know, everything from, like, instructions to assembly, to pick up events to, like, customer support. Like, if you emailed Flamethrows of Boring Company.com, I responded. And I'm like, well, this, like, kind of product work. Like, maybe I can get, like, a PM job in tech. And they're, like, kind of notoriously, like, challenging to get. Like, a lot of people applying Dropbox, like, very much.

valued people with like interesting backgrounds. Like I had kind of like a weird story, a little bit of a, um, just like your non-traditional, uh, like PM and tech job. Uh,

and like the hiring manager and kind of person running the program really appreciated that. Um, so yeah, I don't know. Some combination like things compounding, some kind of like dumb luck. Some like,

uh, I don't know. I don't quite. Yeah, this is a great answer, but no, that is a really, really good answer because it sounds like,

you said before that you hacked a bunch of projects together. And I wish that was something, that more people were told in college to do, because I actually think projects matter 10 times worse than anything you actually end up doing in the classroom. What kind of projects were you hacking together that you ended up showing the boring company and Dropbox? Yeah, let's see. For boring, the like trading up to a spoon to a car was like a big one. I had like some hardware projects around like I had worked for like a drone company and underwater robotics company and that was important just to show some like technical proficiency because it's like a hardware

project and like most of the engineering work was done but um there's like a little bit of kind of like holdover um and then like going into dropbox like i had some kind of like specific almost like case studies that i could like compartmentalize out of flame throwers um that like showed like understanding your customers like how to think about production schedules and like um like how to interpret data and like that was really important how did you find your stuff then going seems like you had a pretty heavy hardware background you really liked hardware it sounds like you were doing a bunch of projects in it um but then going to Flapjack, this doesn't sound like there's any hardware in it right now. Do you ever think that you're going to want that hardware experience again?

Or do you think you've found like a love here in that product space doing software? Yeah, I guess like I ended up with Flapjack because I had prior small business producing like air filters for restaurants during the pandemic. It was like pre-vaccine. How did you find out that was like a thing? How did you get into this? This was a project with like a good friend. It was like, hey, we were frustrated because like during COVID, there's been like a lot of focus on like hand sanitizer, right? Which is great.

Yeah. But like you get COVID from like respiratory droplets, like things floating in the air. So there should just be air filters everywhere. Right. So we found this like vice article that was if you take like a box fan and you strap like a Merv 13 filter on the back, it's like a really effective air filter. And I'm like, I understand it hardware. Like I can put a nice little sheet metal housing around this and we like produce this to scale. So like produced a couple hundred of them and like installed them around the Bay Area.

like air filtration is not a fantastic business for a variety of reasons. But started to like get to know restaurant owners and like the conversation just kept kind of being like, hey, thanks for the air filter, but like can you help me stay in business next month instead? Yeah. So kind of just started like walking through their business of like where are the opportunities? Is it in like spoilage or inventory or like labor or whatever it might be? and then like stumbled upon kind of menus and like it's kind of this field called like menu

engineering or menu optimization like new from time at dropbox of like you know you can run experiments and like kind of nudge users to do things like have really big lifts to pay on like how you design your product and then start to look at these menus I'm like these aren't like professionally designed not because like a restaurant does a value but just because they have a lot going on so like did some menus at places as like experiments for free and like started to get data back it's like wow like these people are going to make another like $50,000 off of this. And then they started to, like, email me weekly to make updates to the menus.

Oh, my gosh. I'm like, not only is like a consulting business, like where they'll, like, pay enough for unfee, but like, I think there's a need for kind of like an ongoing menu management system that, like, enables them to edit their menus because they have, you know, like, six, seven menus, but then can also just, like, drive additional value out and kind of like continually optimize it for time. Were you doing this while you were working at Dropbox? Or did you realize somewhere during the time that, you know, consulting is obviously

pretty time consuming, a consuming thing to do? Like, how long were you at Dropbox? I was at Dropbox for a year and a half. I mean, like, in all honestly, like, I was actually laid off from Dropbox around, geez, like a year ago. So, like, had a decision of it's like, okay, I can, like, go back into tech. I am thankful that, like, Dropbox name, like, experience, like, carry some weight and, like, felt like I could get a job somewhere doing, like, something that I would love.

And Dropbox had, like, a good amount of resources to, like, just help with that transition. but also thought there might be maybe something that was a little bit kind of greener feel with something that I can maybe find a little more meaning in and like really enjoyed working with like small businesses at Dropbox

and like really enjoyed restaurants and thought that like they could just get like a little more kind of like wind in their sale which would just be like a little more data savvy if you just kind of like talk to them and approach them the right way and just like really understood them so kind of just took like a flyer on it

Wow that's so crazy So do you think you would have taken the jump to become a full-time entrepreneur if it wasn't for getting laid off? Or do you think you would have done it and it just would have taken a little bit more time? I don't know. It's hard to say. I definitely think I always had side hustles and I've always had projects just like always going on. Those are just my hobbies, right? It was like trading on Craigslist.

But like there's always a little bit of a difference between those and, you know, something that's like a company or something that can have venture returns. I think it's easy to lie to yourself of like, oh, I'll get it done, you know, in six months or a year. And I think I've watched a lot of people I know kind of do that. I mean, hindsight will tell in 2020. We're still pretty early over here with a flapjack of like if this was the right decision. But regardless, it's like been like a fun adventure. How has going to a hacker fellowship benefited Flapjack or just you as a founder? Yeah, I was a little skeptical at first.

not going to lie. I think I had like gone some bad advice from people that like incubators and accelerators are like a waste of time. There's like really expensive in terms of like equity. I think there's some truth to that. I think it's more of like your odds of success as like an entrepreneur and as like a startup are just like unfortunately pretty low. At least like having these like crazy venture returns, right? Like you know you being becoming a unicorn is like 10% but probably lower.

I don't even know. It like it's not super high. So like I think it's like a first. time, like, founder, especially, like, you know, it's been time in tech, but, like, didn't have a deep enough network to, like, raise a funding round off of, or at least didn't think so. Like, I think there's just, like, a lot of just, like, good housekeeping that you kind of pick up that I think, like, would have taken us a lot longer to figure out. Just, like, you know, we're undercharging for a long time. So, like, increasing prices. And, like, being honest of, like, okay, like, we should hit these prices.

Because, like, if we don't, like, then, like, the margins on, like, this being, like, a venture scalable company which isn't there. So we're like back out the product into this and like it ends up working out and like we're in a good place. But I think it would have taken us another like three months or even to think about like how like growth metrics and like, you know, how much to grow monthly and like how to think about that and how to back into hiring. Like I think maybe like incubators and accelerators or maybe like a tax on kind of first time

entrepreneurs and like that's okay and like maybe you can get around it. But like overall like I think like I'm pretty happy that we're here and it was the right decision in hindsight. That is a great analogy, like a tax on first-time founders, because I like how, at least, I guess I haven't seen that many accelerators and incubators operate, but, you know, Jason obviously has founder you and things like that happens. And it's really interesting hearing some of the stuff they cover because it comes down where it's just like the, almost like the basics. And I feel like if you don't have like a good foundation as a founder with those basics, it is so easy to mess up along the way. And it's almost worth like having to shell out that portion of

your company, like you kind of mentioned in equity, to have a really, really stable foundation as you're like, as time goes on, your company grows. Where, yeah. Yeah, I don't mean a tax is like a negative form. I think it's like, uh, like you have a lot of shots and like doing odd, general things. You can do it multiple times. Like, I think you can do it on your own. You can definitely do without.

I just think it's maybe a little bit of like a harder journey. Oh, yeah. And now that you know it, I feel like now you know it. So do you think that you would go in, for example, like if you start another startup, do think that you'd ever, like, go back into another, like, accelerator or incubator? Um, maybe. I think it depends on, like, the company in your stage and your success.

Um, I think, like, our goal coming out of this was to, like, get the underlying business metrics working out, making sure we, like, had happy customers. But then also, like, the process of fundraising is, like, very opaque and, like, very much designed to be opaque. And it felt like we just, like, needed, despite having, like, read up a lot on it, just, like, needed some, like, clarity on, like, how to run a process, how to, like get intros, how to think about it, how much to raise, or what cap. So I think

it depends on like whether your business is venture scalable, whether it's not, whether it's like super out there and you kind of like need these champions like pushing on the bleeding edge or like maybe it just like makes sense kind of on the surface and like you can just raise around on your own or like maybe you have enough success too. So I don't know, hard to say. Who do you think would be like the best contender?

Like what types of startups and what stage to do something like a hacker fellowship? Yeah. I mean, it depends on your risk profile. At least to us, it was important that we had kind of like proved this out to ourself. I definitely think you can take a different approach and just kind of like go in and be like, we'll figure something out. But I think it was important that we felt like we had customers, we had some data behind it. We like knew that this generally worked, especially because like what

we're pitching is maybe like a little bit of kind of like a strange concept to like people who aren't super familiar with restaurants. Like we optimized pieces of paper, at least to start. I don't remember the question. Now I'm just off on a tangent. No, you're good. So, perfectly fine because I don't know if I could go back to it anyway. So, but you said optimizing pieces of paper and this is just where you guys are starting. You said that multiple times. So obviously, this sounds like what you're doing is like you're collecting data. What is your guys's long-term goal with Flapjack? Yeah, I think we can kind of be like the main street almost of restaurants where like we just kind of help them find money in their business without that much work.

So like menus act as like a really good vehicle where like we're able to get access to like a lot of data. within the restaurant, we're able to understand how it operates, and we're able to, like, build a lot of goodwill with that customer. And they, like, understand it through the context. Like, we get good data back from it. And we're like, it's like a little magical. They're like, we're going to make an extra $50,000 a year. And like, that's really meaningful to most of our customers. But then it's also easy to kind of like see opportunities in their business where, like, we can just kind of make small tweaks and just like find them another, you know, 5, 10, 20K. Like, their credit card processing rate can be, you know, dropped a 10th of a percent or something.

or like the way they order inventory, like one company is charging them more than another or like their utilities can be negotiated down or like some of the like vendors and SaaS products they pay for can be negotiated down. And like we get access to all this information like through the menu process and like we just have more data on restaurants

than pretty much any other vendor. So like I think that's kind of like the long term. Like I really like the idea of kind of being like the friend to like all restaurants where you're just like every month you're finding them another, you know, $5,000, $20,000 in their business. And like hopefully you have. a really good relationship with them through that.

That's awesome. And is that difficult to be selling to sell in restaurants like selling to offer like this? Is this a notoriously difficult group of people to adopt new technology? Or do you find that they're pretty okay with it? I used to work at a fellowship that did like supply chain and mobility. And whenever we dealt with like people in trucking, it was like pulling teeth to get them to adopt something new, you know? So what is it like trying to sell to people that are restaurant owners?

Yeah, I think people a little bit get it wrong. and people say that it's really challenging. And I think selling to all customers is challenging or has its challenges. I think no, you know, anytime anybody's going to pay you $4,000 or $5,000, like there's challenges with it. I think like what people get wrong is like restaurants only really pay for two different types of things.

Like they pay for things that they have to have like a point of sale system, inventory, labor, rent, you know, utilities. Or they pay for things that like directly make them more money, like food delivery. And like it is attributable to Uber Eats that this order came in. And, like, they can go in the Ordeed's dashboard to be, like, we're going to make an extra 2K this month, even if that, like, cannibalizes other channels. So, like, I think as long as we always stay in this kind of, like, vein of, like, we will impact your bottom line. We'll do it in, like, a trackable way in a way that, like, you understand and, like, can kind of, like, pull back to us.

Like, I think we'll be in an okay spot. Got you. And I kind of want to make a little bit of a 180, but what was really interesting, too, when I was talking to you and your co-founder while we were eating dinner that one, day was that you guys said you were from SF and you were in Miami and you were planning and going back to SF. And I do meet a lot of people from SF that made their way down to Miami, but most of them are pretty gung-ho about staying around there. What is the difference between being like a founder in this space in Miami, which I feel

like is like the new hot place to be in tech, especially if you're young, versus SF, which is like such a legacy city. Yeah. I mean, so like I guess I'm not entirely sure where we'll be in all honesty because we We keep having, picking up customers out here, but we also have customers in the Bay Area. So, like, I think we'll be somewhere between the two. I guess, like, I grew up in the Bay area and the East Bay. So, like, I have, like, a good amount of just, like, friends and family and just kind of, like, roots there.

I also just, like, haven't really left this kind of, like, HFO bubble over here. Like, I've literally just kind of, like, been at this hotel for a couple months in, like, the four-lock radius. You need to explain, like, what this place looks like. I took an Uber out to this place. I've actually went to it once without. knowing during Miami Hack Week, I didn't know that it was HF Sears thing. But explain to everybody what this place looks like, because this is so interesting to me. Yeah.

You guys should have Dave on the podcast. I don't know if I'm meant to be like the, this spokesperson for this. This spokesperson? It's like, it's a cool compound. It's like, it's at this hotel and it's like three historic buildings, like 100-year-old buildings built by shipbuilders. And then kind of like a couple like apartment rows on it with kind of this like big courtyard. It's kind of like a hotel meets a hostel meets like, I don't know. It also has like a bar on the side that honestly I've never been to.

But like it's like kind of tries to be a nightclub. It's actually a little bit of a noisy neighbor. It is like kind of on the edge of like a little Havana and Brickle. And like it feels like kind of like they found like a Miami hack house here. Yeah. I definitely think that's a good description of it. And what are the age ranges between the people that you are currently working, like working around?

Because I was talking to the wonderful founders of Paiaa, and they were saying that in their cohort there was somebody, I believe as young as like 14 or something in theirs. And I thought that was very incredible. So what is the age range for you guys? I think here it's like 23 to like 50 something. It's pretty broad. definitely no 14-year-olds.

I think it generally gears towards like mid to late 20s. I definitely think like, yeah, people, there's like this notion of like the college dropout starting stuff. Like maybe that's true. But I was like the majority of people at least like I hang out with their C. or like have like been through a couple jobs in tech and like have noticed a problem and are now working on that. Yeah.

Do you find it to be like beneficial than having that experience at the Boring Company and at Dropbox as a founder? Like I feel like a ton of my friends have jobs. I mean, myself included, like, I haven't worked a corporate, besides an internship. I've never worked in big tech or a very corporate job for that matter. Do you think having that experience has benefited you as a founder? Or do you think that's a step that like Gen Z founders as a whole can skip? I think like every job can teach you something.

I think there's always questions of like how long you should spend there and like when does the learning stop. At least for me, like the learnings from Dropbox where like how you can like systematically like build products, use user data, research, talk to customers. Like, what's the role of, like, an engineering manager or, like, a researcher? Just, like, how does a company that historically has, like, had good success iterating on features and, like, getting growth, like, function? Yeah. And, like, the boring company was, like, almost the exact opposite. It's, like, how do you take a bunch of people who've, like, never dug a tunnel before and, like, dig a tunnel as fast as possible?

Yeah. Yeah. Just, like, wildly different cultures, wildly different goals. Like, yeah, just complete opposite. And they both have their pros and cons And like at least I was fortunate enough To kind of see both I think like the lessons for boring

Where like you can just have a lot of people move like Really freaking fast doing something really amazing And the lessons from Dropbox where like you can be really methodical About like what you build and like very intentional And have good results out of it Um so yeah I like that I think that's really interesting I hear a lot about people doing the whole like moving fast and baking things

And it's I always wonder I'm like is this the best Is this really the best way to like start your career off as a young person breaking, breaking things. But obviously, like you said, there's pros and cons to both. I guess I'm probably in the realm of the breaking things part of what we do, I guess, to tech. Like, our whole team moves incredibly fast all the time. I would not consider us to, like, dig very, very deeply in on, like, one thing ever.

And I've definitely learned how to move faster than I ever thought I possibly could. And it's benefited me a lot. I've never had to work slow, so I'm not sure how that would benefit me. but it's definitely been an interesting role here for sure. So thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you? And more importantly, where can people find Flapjack? Yeah.

I guess on my Twitter, which is at Product Patrick. Is that right? That's a good handle. That is a good handle. I don't even know. How long have you been on Twitter? Not that long. That's good.

The profile. At Product Patrick. Yeah. How did you get that name? It was just open. It was just like available like six months ago. No way.

I'm Googling this right now. I'm a little bit of a lurker though. Maybe one day I should start posting. That's really good. And Flapjack is available on Flapjack. Are people already using it? Companies already using Flapjack? You said you have some customers over in SF

companies over in Miami. Yeah, one in Australia. We're like a couple dozen locations using Flapjack, like menus and service of places. Any in New York? No. Not yet. Some of you've been talking to, but they're a little larger.

We'll get there. We'll get there. Okay. You have to let us know because producer Justin, producer Nick and myself are all based in New York. So we'll have to check out one of the Flapjack menus when we get the chance. Yeah, yeah. We'll make it away there.

It's too much of like a restaurant capital that we just can't avoid it. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much again for coming on. Patrick McDonald of Flapjack. Awesome. Thanks for having me.