This Week in Startups - Twitter's takeover defense, Meta's AR project with The Verge's Alex Heath + Wordcab's Aleks Smechov + OK Boomer: Rachel Cantor | E1436

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Friday variety show! First, The Verge’s Alex Heath joins to talk about two big stories he recently broke (2:32): Facebook’s plans for AR glasses and Twitter’s internal reaction to Elon’s takeover bid. Molly sits down with LAUNCH Accelerator founder Aleks Smechov whose company Wordcab specifically focuses on speech-to-text AI summaries (1:04:54). We wrap with an edition of OK Boomer where Producer Rachel talks to writer and marketer Rachel Cantor (1:18:51)! (00:00) Molly tees up today’s variety show (02:32) Alex Heath from The Verge joins to discuss the news he broke on Facebook/Meta’s further push into AR/VR (10:40) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (11:59) Mark Zuckerberg’s ego in the AR/VR race, CTRL-labs acquisition a cool move or a fool move? (22:17) Gun.io - Get $250 off your first developer hire at https://Gun.io/twist! (23:33) Magic Leap & where is Microsoft in AR/VR? (33:24) Microsoft for Startups Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (34:41) Will Google get more involved with AR/VR? (38:04) Twitter's all-hands and future prospects (1:04:54) Introducing Molly’s interview w/Wordcab’s founder & CEO Aleks Smechov (1:07:10) Molly’s interview w/Wordcab founder & CEO Aleks Smechov (1:18:51) Toss to OKB w/Rachel & Rachel Cantor of Tydo FOLLOW Alex: https://twitter.com/alexeheath FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/rachelcantor_ FOLLOW Aleks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandr-smechov/ Check out Wordcab: https://wordcab.com/ FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. We have another Friday variety show for you today. A lot is going on. First up, we have The Verges Alex Heath to join us talking about two big stories that he recently broke. We talk about Facebook's AR Glasses plans and their war with Apple. The whole AR glasses situation is getting real personal. We also covered Twitter's internal reaction to Elon's takeover bid, another story broken by Alex Heath, which includes some backstreet boys and actually even some. Since we talked to him, there have been more developments on this story. Twitter confirmed that it is going to implement what's known as a poison pill. Basically, if any single shareholder or entity acquires more than 15% of Twitter's outstanding common stock,

it will essentially trigger a threshold in which Twitter can potentially flood the zone with shares, bringing down the overall price. It doesn't necessarily preclude Twitter from courting other buyers, but it does suggest that they are not having it. CEO Prague, Agrawal saying, I'm not having this Elon takeover bid. And then I sit down with another awesome launch accelerator founder. This is all about speech to text AI.

And then we told you, Friday show. It's got to get you all the way through the weekend. Another awesome edition of OK Boomer from producer Rachel. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. If you've got a stack of niche workflow tools,

or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Cota's the dock that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at coda.io slash twist. Gun.io, the simplest way for anyone to hire world-class developers, expertly vetted for you by senior engineers. Get $250 off your first hire at gun.io slash twist. And Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. For the challenges you face as a startup founder, Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub is here to help.

The platform provides founders with free resources like Azure Credits, development tools like GitHub, mentorship resources, productivity software, training, and so much more. The program is open to all and takes five minutes to apply, with no funding required. Learn more and sign up at AKA. MS slash this week in startups. All right, everybody. Alex Heath is here from The Verge. He broke some news on METIS plans for AR glasses.

Of course, you know VR virtual reality. That's when you block out the entire world and you see a virtual one. ARs when you see the real world, but it has pieces of virtual data put on top of the real world to augment your existing reality. Or some people might call it pass through. Welcome to the program. Alex. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. So tell Molly and I, what news have you broken here about Facebook's foray, which has previously, or to date, been only in VR with their purchase

of Oculus. Yeah. So listeners, viewers probably remember that Connect keynote that Zuckerberg did in October with the rebrand to Meta. And it was a vision presentation, he called it, because it was entirely CGI, but there was a connective tissue in that video of the idea of AR glasses, which are just lightweight, everyday glasses that have displays in them that let you see holograms of other people. His example was like, it's the classic, you know, board game on a table with a hologram, Star Trek style, holodeck, you know. And this to him, you know, he's called this like the Holy Grail device and something that he thinks will be as one day as big a deal as mobile phones. And I wanted to set out with the story to look at when are these actually coming?

What are their internal expectations versus the kind of high bar, frankly, that they've set externally. And so I actually got the full roadmap for the AR glasses. They're called Nazaree, and they're committing to three generations up front starting in 2024 through really the end of the decade. But the first version is not going to sell that much, and it's going to be very expensive. So it kind of also goes to show the company that is investing the most in this space and literally trying to will it into reality. Actually, it's pretty tepid expectations for how long this is going to take. It's going to take a really long time. That's a very like Google, I mean, all these years later, that's a very Google glass sounding roadmap.

Did you get a sense from your reporting of what's so hard about it still? There's a lot of problems. The expense of this technology, I mean, it's the bill of materials for very much. V one of these glasses coming in 2024 or in the thousands of dollars. So, you know, Zuck is kind of in the mindset of your margin is my opportunity. So he's looking to subsidize this hardware, like the Quest 2, for instance, is sold basically at a loss, maybe borderline break-even, just so that they can get it out into the world and get adoption going.

And now he's got this tough, you know, situation in front of him where he's got this really expensive device that's frankly pretty cool. I mean, the specs are cool. They have custom, fully custom silicone wave guides, full color, AR, pretty wide field of view. Four-hour battery life, which may not sound impressive, but is actually pretty impressive compared to what's on the market right now. And he's got to decide how much is he going to subsidize these things because Apple is also gearing up to attack meta on this kind of AR hardware strategy. So he's really, you know, he wants to beat Apple. I mean, this is, I think this is going to be the biggest big tech business feud over, you know, the next version of computing for the next decade.

And is this just to follow up on that name real quick? Sorry, Jason. Is it Nazare like the big wave surfing spot in Portugal? I just Googled it real quick. I don't actually know. I guarantee it's because of that dumb surfing documentary, you know, the 100 foot wave one. A lot of their internal code names are Spacey. So the glasses internally are called Orion.

and they have a kind of more Google Glass, if people remember North, which was this Glasses company that Google bought a couple years ago, too, kind of smaller heads-up display that's not full AR. It's going to be a lot cheaper, and it's going to be tethered to the phone. That's also coming in 2024. That was something else I scooped,

and that's code named Hypernova, so another spacey name. And the idea with Orion, the full AR glasses, is you don't need a phone. It's going to have a wireless phone-like, device that offloads some of the compute because they can't fit it all in the glasses without literally burning your face. And Hypernova in 2024 will need a phone, but also be cheaper and a little more everyday wear. So, uh, we also saw that Apple basically kneecap, ankleed, Nancy

Kerrigan style Zuckerberg by taking away the ability to do targeted advertising on iPhones, which cost them upwards of $10 billion a year in revenue. So this fight is getting extremely personal and targeted. Is there, I mean, it's pretty clear Apple targeted Facebook and now Facebook is targeting Apple. This is not a coincidence, is it? I don't, you know, think so. I think some of this stuff is not totally connected, but there is this real animosity between Zuck and Tim Cook on a lot of ways.

I mean, they really represent two of them. you know, kind of dominant worldviews in building in Silicon Valley where one is free, ad supported, as cheap, as accessible as possible. And Apple is luxury, high margin, respect your privacy, and in turn give us incredible margin on our hardware. And they just have very different world views. And I do think we're going to see that play out with the headsets. So I and others have reported Apple's got this pretty advanced mixed reality headset. So it's, it's VR, but it's kind of tricking. It's it's AR2 and you'll be able to kind of seamlessly go between both. But it's really designed for indoor use. Apple's AR glasses to wear outside are not coming

for a long time. But Apple has that coming and I think they may announce it as soon as the end of the year. There's been some supply chain reports that they may delay shipping into early 2023. They call these goggles. Apple's referring to them as goggles? Or is that just the press is describing them as goggles? They look like ski goggles on your face. Yeah. So I saw, I saw, an internal render of this device that I reported and recreated at the information, the last publication I worked at.

And they do look like an Apple ski mask that has kind of like imagine an Apple Watch band around the back of your head connecting it to your face. And it has the look of the really high-end earphones that they make, not the AirPods, the Studio

Max. Oh, Air Macs. Yeah, they never name these things. It's like AirMax Pod Pro. AirPod It's like, just name them something different. They don't have to have the AirPods name convention if they're nothing like AirPods. They're over the air. I bought those things. They were terrible.

They're like 600 bucks. They're heavy. And they were, they're so heavy. And they would just not connect properly. It was Bluetooth problem in apples. Prinicious. Yeah. Yeah.

So this will, the headset will have spatial audio. It'll have these detachable, swappable bands to put on your face with one with like a battery pack. It's going to be expensive, thousands of dollars. And, you know, Orion, meta's first AR glasses in 2024 will also probably be thousands of dollars. And meta has its own version of what Apple is doing, high-end mixed reality called Cambria coming this year. And they're trying to get that out before Apple. So everything meta is doing is in response to what they think Apple's going to do.

And I hear how Apple is internally reacting to what meta is doing. And they're hiring all their same people. That's a big factor here is the talent. So meta is scooping up talent from Apple and others. And there's been reports about Apple doling out additional grants to AR engineers just to keep them because Meta is so aggressively poaching and driving up the price of AR talent kind of across the industry. That's so interesting. It reminds me of kind of the autonomous car landscape where for a while it was just like there are five guys who know how to do this and you got to get one of the five or ideally all of them. Efficiency is one of the main components in startup success.

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How awesome is that? And of course, you can copy that template and use it for your podcast or for your internal Friday All Hands Meeting, etc, etc. Coda has an amazing program for startups to help them optimize and support all of your documents. Go to coda.io slash twist to get $1,000 in credits. I kid you not, $1,000 waiting for you at COD.io slash twist. The other thing that's interesting is you note that Zuckerberg has a lot of ego wrapped up in this and a lot of hope to not only beat Apple, but to sort of like recast meta as a company that actually makes things instead of just steals everything. And yet, they seem to be in a race to build kind of the same thing.

I do think that they are being more innovative here than they are in traditional social media. And that's drawing a lot of people to this part of the company, which is now about 18,000 people up from 10,000 last year. 18,000 losing 10 billion a year. Yes. I mean, this is like battalion upon battalion of Techtown. Yes. This is unprecedented. They have semiconductor fabs in Asia.

They have hundreds of people working on custom silicone, a massive resource organization. It's no expense spared. And the glasses are Zuckerberg's pet project. And yeah, he does want them to be like an iPhone moment. And, you know, the one thing we haven't talked about is they have this optionality, this tech that may pay for everything, even if the glasses don't hit scale for over a decade. In 2019, they bought this neural armband company called Control Labs for about a billion dollars. They're a little tiny research company pre-products launch for about a billion dollars, right? It had that kind of Instagram smell to it where everyone was like, what?

What is this? Yep. And apparently that is one of the coolest tech demos anyone that I talked to who has tried it has ever done. Because it's the controller, right, for the glasses and stuff? It's the controller, exactly. So how do you control glasses that don't have a touchscreen? They don't have a keyboard. They don't have a mouse.

You're going to want to bring that around with you when you're walking around. What if you had a smart watch, like an Apple Watch? Meta's releasing a smartwatch, by the way, as soon as this year that will then tie up with the glasses, where you can literally think to control them and you get a phantom limb where you can control a phantom limb with your mind. And I've heard of people being able to play ping pong with it, obviously, tied fully. And, you know, someone pretty senior on it was like, you know, if this thing works, at scale, everything else doesn't need to matter.

We invented the next keyboard and mouse. This has been something that's existed for a while from the gloves that MIT made. You saw a minority report where Tom Cruise was pinching and zooming in the air as opposed on the glass on an iPad. So it feels like this technology could be pretty interesting. I mean, obviously using Siri to direct it is interesting, but then you're talking to yourself when you're out of Starbucks. That's always been a problem of like, how stupid do you want to look, talking to your computer

a phone. But yeah, and then also, I know this sounds crazy, but he's been doing those motorized surfboards for a while.

And those are controlled by a handheld controller, right? Where you kind of just twist it and can control the speed and I think

that's got to have an influence on him that there is another way to control devices where you're not typing on a keyboard or on a glass screen.

The quote I thought was particularly interesting in the story Zuck's ego is intertwined with the glasses, he wants to be an iPhone moment. Do you sure gut tell you that he can pull this off versus Apple? I mean, it's far school to think that somebody who's good at building websites and

has made a couple of astute purchases when we think about what Zuckerberg has done to date. He copied Facebook, I'm sorry, copied Friendster and made a version that didn't crash. He copied Snapchat and he really got lucky to buy Instagram and WhatsApp to build this just huge footprint. But he's never come up with an original idea. Like when you ask anybody who's around there, what's the original idea? They say newsfeed. And it's like, yeah, there are other services that had the news feed before he did. So what are the chances he beats Apple at hardware at scale?

And then where is second part to that question, where is Google and all this? because if this is the next, you know, layer of compute, I don't see Google wanting to give it up either, and they have unlimited resources well beyond Facebooks. Yeah, and Google has much better AI than Facebook, which we should note AI is a key component of this. Exactly. Google wins there.

They have maps. They have really key assets, assistance, that Apple and Facebook are way behind on. You're right that it's a good question on, can he win? I see this playing out like iOS and Android, and I see, at the current, you know, state of things, Facebook, meta being the Android to Apple's iOS all over again in this race, where it's cheap, you know, it's more affordable. It's maybe,

you know, not as powerful, maybe not as good of an app store, but it's good for a lot of people. And I see that being the way that they compete because they can't outcompete Apple on supply chain, on industrial design. They know that. They're certainly trying. And I think they'll impress people the Quest 2 is a good device. I mean, I don't know if you guys have used it, but it's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, it's by try and then say goodbye. Like, it's interesting to use like at a party and then you never use it again.

The difference is, is meta is hiring the best across everything, across optics, across thermal. They're hiring Apple supply chain people. They're literally sparing no expense on talent. And it's like buy whatever you want because they can because the antitrust scrutiny isn't really in that area. and so I do think that they will be able to compete and that this is like Mark's founder I mean he's got this founder control of the company that makes it really unique and how they

yeah and how they can lean into this and this is his baby and you mentioned Google and you know I wrote this story about Google developing its own mixed reality headset that I've heard you talk about on the show Jason so thank you it's Google is experimenting the problem with Google is They don't have that founder bent on this. You know, when Larry and Sergey were there, Sergey especially, Glass was his baby,

the Magic Leap investment was his thing. With them gone, I haven't really gotten a sense. I do think Sundar thinks it's going to be big, but I don't think he's as motivated as Zuck is. I think Zuck sees this as like, I've got to get out of the thumb of Facebook and Google on mobile. I've got to make my own platform. Google has so much optionality.

Search is going to be key, no matter what platform comes now. right? They have clown. So in a way, you're saying it's existential for Facebook. And there's no going back. I mean, to be clear, the amount of money they're spending, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the reality labs.

Yeah, he's burned the boats. The reality labs division will probably be bigger than the family of apps and social media division in a few years. I wouldn't be shocked. And I wouldn't be shocked also if Mark becomes like chairman. And, you know, I asked him in an interview last fall, you know, will you be CEO in five years? And he didn't really give me a definitive.

answer. So that suggests to me that he might step back into some kind of chairman role, retain majority voting, but then really dive into the to the ARVR stuff and kind of really like go of the other stuff. I've heard a bit of that too, that I mean, like to your point in terms of the hiring, all the juice for several years now has been in the Oculus Division and the the ARVR division. And I have gotten that sense also. I wonder though, like, what does it mean for a public company to basically say we're going to, I mean, I know he has the ultimate control, right? But to just sort of say, we're all in on a project that you note at the end of your story could take decades to come to fruition.

I mean, the people that he's put in charge are the people who have been at Facebook for 10 plus years. So all the key leads on the glasses, Oculus, up to the CTO boss, it's one of like the third, maybe most tenured employee. The head of AR has been there for 13 years. I mean, it's all the people who built the early OG mobile ads business are now on this, which is a sign that this is like top, top priority and he wants his best people who are the missionaries on it, right? Wow.

And that's that kind of fervor, I don't see it in any other company. I think Apple is second for sure. And low-key, they have the second-most investment in this space. They just don't talk about it until it's ready. But this is the only thing Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg agree on, if you think about it, is that AR is going to be big. And so if that's the case, I don't know. You could also be like, look,

Zuck, is he not one of the greatest strategists, businessman in Silicon Valley of all time? I would say great competitor. And also, sitting around corners. I mean, people, the John Stewart clip of Instagram

being laughed at a billion dollars and WhatsApp people were still scratching their head. Like, why would they pay that much for that? Yeah. You know, and buying this arm band company for a billion dollars pre-launchment. Yeah.

Yeah. And buying this armband company for a billion dollars pre-launchment. It was like 20 people. It could be a similar thing where it's like, you know, in 10 years where like they just bought the next keyboard on mouse for nothing. And so, if it works, it'll be big.

But you're right, the boats are burned. The boats are burned. I like the idea of him becoming CEO of meta and then taking the existing assets and having Cheryl be CEO of the social network. Then all the social issues, when somebody gets dragged in front of Congress or in some other country, Facebook is impacting an election. Cheryl Sandberg comes over. She's the CEO of the Facebook collection of assets.

She uses her soft power to work things out. her empathy to, you know, mitigate whatever those issues are, maybe put a more human face, dare I say, on, you know, the Facebook and, you know, family sharing pictures of their kids. And then Zuck is the CEO of this. And the dual CEO structure we have right now at Google. The largest asset inside of Google is YouTube. And Susan Wojewski runs that. And when you have questions about it, Sundar says, talk to Susan Wojaki, the end.

That could be a perfect, you know, way for them. to split the assets up without splitting them up into two different companies. What I see is him being chairman and Chris Cox, potentially being CEO of the family of apps. The blue, I see that too. And he's running all the hardware with boss. And I think if any, there's going to be any CEO of the whole thing.

It's going to be boss in the future, actually. Not Cheryl. Huh. Interesting. Hiring software engineers can take a really long time, don't I know it? Sometimes it takes months, but gun.io is going to change that for you right now. They're a developer hiring platform. They're super focused and here's what

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I think they're going to lose the military contract. I think it's going to dissolve. It's been an organizational disaster. I'm told. And they are working on something consumer with Samsung, actually. But I wouldn't put a lot of chips on that. And same thing with Magic Leap. If you had to ask me,

where is Magic Leap going to be in a year? Sold for parts, is what I think. So I think this really is a giant fraud. I know. Because they now have a new CEO. People have been like, where's the product for seven years? You know,

what is the buzz behind the scenes? obviously you're a reporter, so you have to go with facts when you publish stuff, but this has been a pretty crazy back channel on Magically. And Peggy Johnson's the new CEO. We've invited her on here a couple of times. She doesn't respond. But what's the story? I mean, if they had a product, wouldn't they show something by now and then,

Andreas and Horowitz or whatever, people who saw it there were like, oh, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. But then they're like, it's a bat, but you have to wear a backpack. I don't know what to think of that company. They do a terrible job of communicating. They have an enterprise device that they're trying to put out as soon as they can. They keep delaying it. They haven't even listed what the price will be.

Peggy ran CorpDev at Microsoft. So I think that says a lot. They were basically recapped when Roney, the CEO left. They're not worth a fraction of what they were, you know, three years ago. Which was a couple of billion dollars. So they recapitalized for people who don't know. Yeah. I mean, no, it was more than that. They raised $3 billion. Oh, at 10 or something crazy. Yeah, like 10. And I heard about ridiculous offers they turned down actually before Peggy came in that would make your eyes roll. There was a lot of hubris there with the early management team thinking that they could do consumer too early, honestly. And it was just a bad judge of timing, I think. They actually had great IP. Too early. Too early. Too early and too expensive. You don't. You don't have the runway when it's hardware and you have like a whole like supply chain that you're building up to like misjudge demand. I did it. Actually, I did a story at the information too where I was like they misjudged demand by like a factor of 10x. I mean, they had they had thousands and thousands of these headsets that they couldn't sell. And so that really hurt them. So I don't know how they recover because it's a talent business and the best talent is not going to work, want to work at a private startup like that. They're going to want to work at Apple or meta.

I think those are the only two meaningful players in the near term. But you don't want to work at the one that wins, right, Alex? You want to work at the one that wins. You want to work at the one that has the money that has the, I mean, you know, if you're getting big tech benefits and resources, yeah, it's just different. I don't see how a startup can compete here because of the hardware. I mean, Snap is doing something interesting. We haven't talked about them on the software side. I could see them actually teaming up with Google doing something really interesting with social, AR.

Their lenses are getting used a lot. and their lenses being they have these snap spectacles that let you record video and it was always seen that like hey once we connect a social app to a pair of glasses well obviously we're going to keep following them up and version nine will have AR and version 6 or 7 we'll have quasi AR or something where maybe it shows a little green light if somebody else has Snapchat you know yeah you know above their head and I have a prototype that I've tried that they're not selling because it's so expensive and The battery life is only 30 minutes, but it's pretty good. I mean, it's not something that's mainstream. What is it doing? What's good about it? It puts lenses in front of you. Like I played like a, you know, like the snap lenses on the, on the camera, on the phone,

you can have in front of you. So you can look at somebody to have a dinosaur head or something. Yeah. Or something fun. It's games, you know, it's creative. There's art. People are doing NFT art with it. So I do think, I do think snaps a kind of dark horse here to watch.

They don't have the investment to really compete on hardware. So I think they'll link up with some. one. They're very tight with Google, but Google actually looked at buying SNAP around the IPO. And so, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know everybody's looking for the next compute platform and I definitely want to put my phone down, but do the experiences of glass, the stories of glass and Magically, and even Oculus, right, which has pretty good adoption for a consumer product, but is by no means, you know, mainstream or a household name. Like, what do we think about, demand long term for these products.

Like about making a bet on stuff on our face? I would say I'm unusually optimistic for being a reporter covering this stuff than a lot of my colleagues. I think a lot of people in the media write this stuff off until it's like already in your face. And you're like, wow, what would? I didn't see that coming. I, you know, Quest sold more units last year than Xbox.

So I'm seeing TikToks of like teenagers using it. Think once Roblox or like the Horizon thing. which was like their version of Roblox really takes off. I think VR is going to be more meaningful than people realized in the next few years. Why is it been so slow to start? Because it's not a cost issue. It's been five years under $500. No, it was the hardware.

I mean, if you used a Quest 1 versus a 2, it was a meaningful upgrade at a very good price point. So fidelity of the hardware's. Fidelity and not being connected to a phone was a huge deal. Remember the first option is connected to a phone? The next one is going to have eye tracking. So like your avatar will literally respond as your face is moving, which is going to just make it feel so much more immersive. It's going to be rich or graphics. So fidelity goes up one more jump.

Yeah. And audio, all that stuff is just going to keep getting better very quickly. And then when Apple comes out, everyone's like, okay, no, this is not just like Zuckerberg's like obsession with building something, right? This is like a thing that Apple was. Super consumer. Once Apple does it, it's like that's the super consumer stamp of approval. They're coming. They're coming.

Like, it's definitely happening. They have thousands of people working on it. So it's a high priority. And they're very paying attention to how META is doing it. And I think the next, if we talk again in a year when Apple's out and Cambria from meta's out, I think we might be having a different discussion about like VR in general, honestly. Because AR will be the race to AR.

Yeah. That's going to be the game change of people because I think a lot of people are not interested in living in a virtual world. Yeah. They're just like, ah, you know, it's. It's interesting. You know, you play the golf game or you play the Sabre game. You're like, okay, that was interesting.

I tried it. But I don't feel particularly compelled to use it again. But I can tell you, man, if you were looking at your laptop and then above your laptop were six windows and one was YouTube, one was Netflix, one was Spotify, and the fidelity was pretty good. And I didn't have to buy four or five extra monitors floating on my central one. You'd quickly become addicted to that. And the idea of working with one monitor on your laptop as opposed to

six semi-transparent ones. And if you have an office worker, somebody comes up to talk to you, those all melt away and become opaque. Or 50% opaque because your partner comes up to talk to you while you're working. And it knows they are there. Like, I think this is going to become super addictive to people to have extra screen resources.

It's a very silly, pragmatic use case. But when you're working, more monitor space, let alone unlimited. You know, you turn your head this way, you turn your head that way. Yeah.

And you've got a whole other world going. going on? I mean, this could be transformative in the same way. Large monitors became transformative. Yeah. I mean, the Apple headset's going to be like IMAX on your face. Dual 4K displays, special audio, LiDAR sensors, and who needs a TV if you can put like a massive TV on a wall? And then the headset Apple bought for this had a dial on the side that lets you move in and out of VR and AR with a dial. So because they're doing constant HD video pass through. So they're piping video into it all at all times of the real world. You can literally...

Intermix. It's cheating. It's cheating to get to the air classes. I mean, I really like, I don't want you to think that that question came from a place of my personal skepticism because I am all in on this. Like, get the phone out of my hand. Get this on my face immediately. Well, I mean, think about this.

You're driving up and down the 280. You got your car on autopilot, whatever your jam is. And you're wearing these goggles. And it's giving you road data, the speed of, of each car, if it's slowing down, it's alerting you if a deer is coming across the 280. And at the same time, you're watching the Warriors game. But the Warriors game is that 20% opacity. Or I'm skiing, right?

I'm skiing and I'm watching the Knicks game or I see a CNBC clip over here. You know, and I still see the ski road in front of me. Like, this is a world that has not existed at this point. Or your email comes up and it's like, oh, you got an SMS from somebody. But I can still see the road ahead. Yeah. Like the heads up display you were talking about in your car, Molly, that projects onto the dashboard, the speed. Just put the speed right there.

Or like, I want to be walking around a conference and I want to have the agenda right here. Yeah, of course. Ideally, frankly, I know that Google had to get rid of this. Like, I want the person coming toward me. I want to see their LinkedIn pop up. That's what I want. I want the full on, the facial recognition. I want any time they tweeted about me, anytime Alex tweeted about me at Jason from the last 20 years,

I want to know what snark he threw at me seven years ago. We don't remember. And that I can be like, I could pinch it and pull it. Alex, why are you dunking on me in 2017? By some estimates, here comes the bad news. Over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. The good news? That's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders hub.

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Like, here's your last interaction. You dated their sister. It's, the privacy implications of this are going to be massive because we're going to be having conversations in five years about who gets, who gets to put an ad on top of the White House in AR? We're going to be talking about that.

So gross. Yeah. So gross. If you thought like the current content moderation debates, I mean, this is going to, when you make it 3D, you make it 3D, like it gets real, you know? A final question on this topic. Then we'll go on to the, um, Q&A that occurred at the Twitter headquarters, or I should say, on a Zoom, since nobody goes to

the Twitter headquarters anymore, and it's now a homeless shelter. Or that's the rumor. Final question on this. If you think there's an Android to be had in the space, and I would agree with that premise, why wouldn't Google make the Android and say, hey, Samsung and, you know, Huawei and anybody in between, whoever wants to make a headset, Sony, Xbox. man, have at it. We're making the operating system.

Y'all make it. And, you know, spectacles that can make their own and you can make your own flavor and your own price range, your own memory, battery life, a thousand flowers, boom, bloom, and, you know, let's go. Is that a possibility? Because we haven't heard anything like that yet. Yeah. No, I think that is what they'll do.

They have North that Glasses company they bought that was doing Google Glass type heads-up display. They're working on some kind of smart glasses product. they'll have a phone paired. They'll have the high end. So what every big tech company has agreed on, we need to have a high-end, mixed reality, pass-through headset,

and we need to have glasses. So Google's doing that as well. They're behind, though. They're behind in terms of talent, resource investment, just general fervor on this stuff. So in terms of stack-raking, it's meta, Apple, Google,

and then Microsoft still maybe could pull it together, but I have very low hopes. I put Apple above meta, but that's only because of previous history in terms of building the best product. But, you know, Oculus is the current best VR product. So maybe, you know, maybe I'm on the last. Well, also, you know, I saw someone point this out about Apple. They have no design leadership on their executive leadership page anymore on their website.

It's really a change as a company. They've had a lot of the OG designers who worked on the hit products leave Johnny I've left. Interesting. He was working on the headset. But you could argue Apple's had some pretty big design misses in the last few years, whether it's, you know, the home pod didn't do well. They've had some, both of the keyboard issues on the Mac, the touchbar. They've had some misses, you know, so I certainly doesn't feel innovative. I mean, AirPods were interesting. The watch obviously was a win.

But, you know, I agree on a design. I mean, the Mac Studio Pro is like a fat Mac Mini. I was like, really, that's the best you can do? They're going retro with the design. It's kind of interesting. Thickboy MacMany. I mean, going retro is the ultimate sign of a company that's out of ideas. Well, it's like, oh, you know what?

We're HBO. You know, it would be great if we did Sex in the City reboot. And it's like, wasn't the reboot called Girls? Like, are we really rebooting that? Like, are we going to go back to Sopranos again? Okay, great. Like, you're out of ideas? Like, probably, I agree.

Not a great place to be in. All right. The Twitter company has a lot of people interested in buying shares. I understand there's a new person who now has over. over 10% ownership, one of the hedge funds just inched above. So now they are the largest shareholder. I forgot which one it was, but a Vanguard, right? But once again, in Scooplands, somebody gave you previously the Facebook roadmap.

That's a great piece of information you were able to get access to. And I guess some of the Twitter employees are briefed you on what happened at the all-hands Q&A. So just tell us what happened at the all-hands Q&A according to your sources. Well, frustratingly not that much. I think employees were expecting because management had been totally silent on Elon, except for the public tweeting that Parag, Argoalwal, the CEO had done. They were expecting this all-hands Thursday, which, by the way, was happening on Focus Week, which is this thing Twitter does where, like, you have Monday off and then for the rest of the week,

you're not supposed to take meetings, you're supposed to be heads down on work. So they do this emergency Q&A during Focus Week with Parag, who was also supposed to be on parental leave. and it's just bad timing all around. And, um, yeah, it's bad timing if nobody works anymore. Well, day of rest. Focus week. Focus week is when, focus week is when you get work done. Focus week.

Like, if you're in a startup, focus week is called focus every day. You got competitors. I'll let you have the judgment of that, Jason. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So basically, this Q&A's, this Q&A starts.

I want it that way by the back. Street Boys plays literally over the video. Tell me why. Yeah. Parag gets on for 25 minutes to do Q&A. And he really avoids saying anything about, you know, when they're going to make a decision, which way they're leaning. But the tone throughout, I was told, it's very clear Twitter is going to fight this. And we've seen reporting that the board does not like must offer, that they're thinking

about a poison pill. And so what I think what a poison pill would mean in this. Sure. at a high level, a poison pill is a thing that a company can do to its shares to basically thwart an activist from buying all the shares by dilution usually. So just by issuing shares out of thin air. So they have that, they can do that. And I think they will do something to fight this. And, you know, he said something about like, you know, we're not going to be taken hostage.

And, you know, the problem is, is the employees are mentally already in the space of when we get taken over what happens. So it's almost like mentally, it's like Elon's one. So it's like the questions were, what are layoffs going to be like? I kept hearing this even before Elon said he was going to buy all of it. I heard employees saying there's going to be layoffs, there's going to be layoffs. Because Twitter's fairly bloated for the profit it makes. Absurdily bloated. Yes.

Yeah. And they know this. Like employees know this. And so that was a big question. People were asking about their stock. What happens when a company takes you private? What happens to your options? Do those accelerates?

Like Elon's figured this out with SpaceX. I've heard he actually has a pretty unique, like, secondary market for SpaceX. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty publicly known. Every year, they have a chance if you've been there for X number. This is the way it was explained to me years ago, and this was public knowledge, you can basically file to sell some of your shares and then they have financing set up to buy those shares. If you're an employee, because they're going long and they've been around for over a decade, you can clear out some of your position. Let me guess, was there an answer about are we going to have to come back to work in the work from home policy? there was not a question about that.

They are fully remote. So that's already been decided. But, you know, I think people feel like because they offered him the board seat and then, you know, then what happened? You know, there was a question about like, are we going to just start inviting any, you know, whole billionaires who ask to our board? Like, I feel like employees have kind of lost a little faith in management was the vibe I got from this. They want Argoal to tweet more at must to like respond. but that's like a losing game. Like you can't beat Elon Musk on Twitter.

Even if you're the CEO, like I just, I think Twitter's in like a lose-lose situation here. Yeah. Because if the muff steel falls apart, the stock's going to tank, you know, everybody's underwater and they have to maybe find

some kind of offer that's from someone else that they didn't want in the first place. So it's going to be really messy. And I, unless, I mean, yeah, I just don't see how this is not going to be really painful.

So it was a sad Q&A is what you're saying. It was muted. I would say it was muted and That was the other word I was going to use, yeah. Yeah, and like he wouldn't really divulge much, which I think people wanted. People wanted some more clarity. And it was just like, you know, we're going to do a rigorous process is what he said, which means run a process, get other bids, see if there's any other, you know, investors

who want to give Twitter money to fight this. And Musk said on stage at TED the same day that he had a plan B already if Twitter rejected his offer, which he said was his final offer. so I don't know why you'd say it's your final offer and you've got a plan B, but it's going to get more interesting from here, I think was the message for sure. Plan B is by Vanguard and just team off.

I mean, honestly, I don't know. Why not, right? I don't think you can even afford that. The stock has gone largely sideways since it went public a decade ago. Yeah. It's like flat, isn't it, to where it went public? Yeah, if you put a dollar in, you have a dollar now.

Congratulations. I mean, it feels like, well, the market It ripped for a decade. You had no appreciation. Yeah. It sold during the pandemic you did well. I mean, yeah,

you did have a little stonk action. Yeah, it hit 70. You would have been up. Yeah. Yeah, whatever, 80% and yeah.

But it's been mismanaged, right, Molly? I mean, well, yeah. I mean, what it feels like this has done more than anything is expose how weak Twitter really is,

right, as a company. It's exposed. It's got everybody talking about how if you bought 10 years ago, you wouldn't have made any money. We're all talking about how bloated this company is.

We have been talking about, everybody's been talking about how stalled out the pace of product development has been. And so, if anything, it's like, Elon has only one person in this Zoom knows what his true intentions are, but he has unquestionably kicked off what's

probably going to be a bidding war for Twitter. Right? Like, he's basically put it up for sale with or without the permission of the board. It's either going to be him or somebody else, seems like. Yeah. And that's side eye to Jason, the side, I think Musk has been pretty clear about what he wants. I mean, he said it, Ted, he has no economic interest in this.

Like, he doesn't care about the business. He wants, he wants to open source the algorithm. He doesn't care about the money. He wants to open source. I think he maybe does to the degree that it's, like, messing with the SEC. I think the SEC really got under his skin with the Tesla 420 tweets. And he's like, if I today, like they really did. And here's the thing.

The SEC is still suing him. They're still in court over this. The SEC could potentially legally keep him from tweeting. if they win. But if Twitter is a private company, the SEC doesn't have jurisdiction in that way over a private company. I think there's some chess news going on here. And I've also heard a conspiracy from someone pretty senior at Twitter who knows Jack,

who used to work there, that Jack may be involved as well because Jack's still on the board for another month. Elon did this right before Jack leaves the board. And Jack still has like 2%. And they're very close. And they see eye to eye on the decentralization and the opening it up and all that. So this could be Jack's revenge for Elliott and for Elliott management and that takeover getting him to leave prematurely. I think that's a pretty fun.

I don't know if that's true, but it's a fun conspiracy theory. Alex, you're my new favorite. This is fun as hell. Wow. There's certainly been nothing this interesting. No, I mean, there's been nothing this interesting in tech for a very long time. That's really true. This should be the next episode of Succession, the next season of Succession.

I mean, this is like better than TV. I mean, especially if there's. Incredible. There's another thing. There's another thing that someone raised to me. So when Elon disclosed his shares that he was purchasing, right, for those like three months, that was basically the entire float of Twitter during that period. There's no way that one person buying that on the open market would not have triggered

Twitter management knowing right away and the stock like ripping, right? So what was he probably doing? He's probably buying blocks from someone else, is the theory I've heard from people much smarter than me about this stuff. because he was buying essentially the float in terms of the volume he was buying. I mean, it is highly traded. We have to look at, I don't know if that's accurate. I would wonder about the.

There's a lot of people. That stock moves a lot. Check it out. Check it out. Yeah. Check it out. So you're saying during that period, there was only $3 billion and he bought all $3 billion. In terms of shares bought, yes, it was almost like all of it that was trained.

One wild card that has come up too is that one investor did sue him for not reporting it when And he reached the threshold after which you were going to. The moment it came out that he didn't file the form right away, that was like for sure. And they'll probably will win something because that's like basic. Or settle. Or settle. Or settle. Yeah.

Because you have to actually look at the damage. If that person lost some money, like how much did they actually lose, you know, it winds up being de minimis. I think the tot's fine. No matter how this plays out, some shareholders are going to sue, right? Because either it's going to be taken private. and maybe they cash out or maybe they don't or they lose a bunch of money

because Elon sells this whole position and it's like the hell with you I don't know but this is the challenge no big tech company can buy it Apple Microsoft with Lena Con running the show

Um Salesforce nobody maybe sales course for that I don't lose Yeah yeah so that's a conflict

obviously since he's Yeah slightly conflicted They almost did they almost did previously I wonder how shareholders over there would think about it they might think better of it since Elon was interested

would they out bid Elon I doubt it I don't know so I mean no big tech can buy it so the buyer list is small the bar list is very small Talal and our Notagang makes the point that what have Bezos made a bid like independently I don't think Amazon can for antitrust

They had MGM put their antitrust Not Amazon Oh Bezos Just Bezos yeah No, I don't think he has had anyone. Merge it with the Washington Post, just complete the reporter circle of life on Twitter.

Oh, my God. That would be horrific. I mean, as long as we're playing this really fun speculation game, like, well, I just wanted to mention that because you brought up Google and stuff, Jason, like the last time Twitter ran a formal process was in like 2016. I did some reporting on this. It was Salesforce, Disney, Apple, and Google. Apple and Google were not really reported on at the time.

I found this out with some colleagues at the information later. And there were also some takeover private, like take private ideas floated, including one by your good French amos. And so there are a lot of people who would want to buy Twitter, but you all are right to point out that the antitrust environment has gotten so heated that it would have to be a sales force. Apple even, you could argue they would get antitrust scrutiny, and they don't do big acquisitions. No way Apple's going to buy it.

They don't want that heat. They don't want to manage all that nonsense. No way. So you have to have somebody who has a high tolerance from Musuggana. And like, that's an individual. It's like literally the last thing Apple wants to deal with is the problems Facebook has around the government, right? They do not want to get dragged into antitrust discussions and then have that on the long list of reasons that they threw Trump off. And they got their thumb on the scale for this person or that person.

It's just, it's too much crazy. They don't need it. They don't need it. And they don't need it. Yeah. That's plenty of. I mean, we, you know, when we talked about the heads of, we didn't know, like Apple is pouring a lot of money into a really high quality. content. The last thing they want is just like

a dumpster fire. People need to focus. I do think Google would buy it if they could. I think Google would like it. Sure, they would. They have no social. Yes, they've always wanted that. It fits in our real house. It makes up for Google Plus, the original proof. Their algorithms. They could make the algorithms better.

They could, yeah, they would be good. They have identity information. They could clean up bots. They have AI to clean up bots. I mean, let's face it, Twitter's been mismanaged to the point of absurdity. They can't even get rid of bots. they can't deal with spam, they can't get the edit key out. It's just they're just a dysfunctional organization that can't ship product.

I mean, it's a mismanaged organization which is set up to be bought out. And if they don't take the offer, and unless I'm not saying they should or not, but I think your gut is right, Alex, if they don't take the offer, I don't think there's another buyer. Elon sells his 10% or whatever he's at, 9%. And then the stock goes back down to 30, which is, what I think a lot of analysts have it at $30 over the next year. So you basically now are going to go from 54 down to 30. The thing's going to crash. Management's going to get fired. The board's going to get turned over. And then what's the stock going to be worth then? And who's

going to buy it then? Well, Jason, what do you think about the theory of Elon and Elon from Silver Lake, who's on the board of Twitter and helped Elon with the 420 takeover bid for Tesla taking Twitter private together? Well, I do think there's a without, I don't know is the answer to it. But In terms of theories, if you were a hedge fund who had a big investment or just any institutional owner, who would you rather see run and pick any company? You're an institutional owner. You've been sideways on an investment forever. And then you have arguably the world's greatest CEO right now wants to be involved. And who's running Twitter now?

What's his public? Yeah. I mean, the reason I'm saying it's true, I know who it is, but what's his public company? experience and track record? Okay, let's put it up against Elon's. You know, it's like basically it's unfair, but the truth is you're looking at a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates level executive. They're once every couple of generation, or once a generation. So anybody in the right mind would say, I'd love to have Elon on the board or involved or a shareholder in this. They're going to vote with him. 100%. Who would vote Parag over Elon? And that's not a dig to Parag. It's just the reality

of track records. Well, I mean, if you care about making money, if you care about making money. Well, I don't know. I mean, Elon is a master of hardware and supply chain

and rockets and cars and social media is hard. It's different. I mean, we got to admit that. I mean, really? He's building self-driving software. He's got an AI team second

only to deep minds. Or most people will consider on par and there's probably been some back and forth between the two in terms of talent. And remember Elon was the original investor along with Larry in Deep Mind.

So if you can build the software to land two rockets at the same time and drive, you know, in terms of soft driving, almost every route except for edge cases perfectly in a major city. With the new soft driving.

Like, I think he could figure out bots. Well, it's funny because, like, I had a pretty viral tweet about the Twitter thing and, like, his bots are crazy. Like, if you tweet about Elon and you get some, but it's kind of ironic that it's like,

it's Elon bots. I get all these, like, haters saying that I'm an Elon I'm like, I didn't even say anything bad about Elon. I just mentioned his name. To be fair, the chaos bots. The chaos bots like prop up Tesla did for, right, during the downtime. Tesla Q did the opposite.

Yeah. It's like it sort of everywhere. I agree with you that it is ironic that the person who probably employs bot armies better and more effectively than anybody on Twitter. Well, no, he doesn't employ them. Yeah. I mean, he said today he doesn't want there to be bots. He doesn't have a lot.

He benefits. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, benefits and also doesn't benefit. I mean, the Tesla Q guys almost killed Tesla for three years. It was brutal. Yeah. I mean, I mean, Tesla Q was bonkers.

The shorts or what? Well, they were doing, they were doing bot armies on the other side of the stands that were flying videos over parking lot saying, like, look, Tesla's not moving any model threes. And meanwhile, you were watching every model three going up and down the 280 in San Francisco and he's sitting sales records at the same time. Even now if you have the like temerity to tweet a thing about Tesla, they will come for you on mass. And so I think that it has been a benefit to him in some. It's this weird symbiotic relationship where they need each other. Like I think Elon needs Twitter. It's his main marketing channel for all his companies.

Tesla has no marketing budget. And 80 million followers. 80 million. And he doesn't need a comms team. He doesn't need marketing. He doesn't need to spend on any of that. And so Twitter is like this for him. It's like, I got to spend billions of dollars on marketing if I don't have my Twitter a year.

You know, it's basically a really good way to look at it. I mean, 80 million followers. I mean, what did Trump have at the peak before they bounced him? I would say the only person who was better as like a high profile active person would have been Obama and then Trump. They both had mastered it as well. But Obama wasn't bad. But even Obama was, you could tell it was people doing it for him, you know? Yeah, he didn't really use it.

He just had a lot of followers. Yeah, exactly. He was really retweeted. But I mean, who else has been that. good at it. And who has ever done an activist takeover this way that is not motivated by getting stock up? This is in another leak. I mean, I've never heard or seen of anything like this. It's a meme activist. No, it's a principal activist. Like, he's doing it based on principle. You know, like he actually, what he said today at TED is the absolute accurate story. Yeah. He is,

this is a principal, First Amendment thing. He thinks like the town square should not be owned by Zuckerberg. The algorithm is bull-bots are bullshit. All this can be. fixed and he has a very simple way to fix it. Software engineers are qualified. But do you think him saying the town square should be open and then I'm going to own it, though? Like, do you think that's ideologically consistent? He was clear today.

He doesn't want to own all of it. You know, he would like to own enough to have influence. He wants to bring the shareholders along. I mean, I believe me, Alex, I had the exact same thought. But he did say he wants to bring to, you know, only 2,000 shareholders along, maybe decentralized. Which would be the biggest 2,000. Make it a Dow.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's probably his intention. Wow. That would be insane. If he could convince these institutional. I mean, he probably could already has Silver Lake in his pocket. If he could convince Vanguard, a couple others, Ark. Kathy loves him to actually follow with him.

He could just convince all the institutionalists to go with him. He doesn't even maybe need the board. I would say they've already been convinced. He doesn't even have to ask them. Well, the Saudis, the Saudis, the Saudis. The Saudi's own 1% of the same. They opt it. It's fascinating.

They made an offer too. Yeah, they opted to. Did they make an offer? Yes. They didn't make an offer. No, what? No, there was a bunch of tweets where somebody was like, I rejected the offer. No, I saw the prince's tweets.

No, I think it was that they increased their stake. It's like over 6% or something now. Okay. I don't think 6% is going to be enough. It's not going to be enough. You're right. And Jack only, Jack owns two. I mean, that's the thing with Twitter doesn't have that dual class protection, right?

I mean, think about how Facebook would have been taken out. Yeah. Which is awesome. It makes it more fun for me. Well, no, it's also awesome for governance that like, you know, a majority of party of people could fight over an asset which increases shareholder value for all of them as opposed to some god king saying, you know, oh, we're the New York Times or Facebook, buy as many shares as you want. We don't care because we control this forever and we'll do what we want and

your votes are neutered and mean nothing. Well, unless it goes sideways and the Mustang doesn't work and they poison pill it and it collapses, which is like how this also could go. I do think that the Saudis, if they really were for some reason wanted to build a share, they could, but here's the thing. Is the Justice Department going to let the kingdom own this? No. And did you see Elon's response to them?

He was like, I did see it. He's like, oh, what's your position on? Journalistic freedom. The free press and journalists are like, and the Saudis were like,

bone saw. It was like, no, no, no, no. I mean, that probably was one of the sickest burns that's ever occurred on Twitter. I'm not going to lie. In the most tragic and horrific way, but it literally is just like,

how dare you? I mean, it was like, can you imagine the kingdom's like, hey, Jason, Molly, Alex, you're going to keep your blue. check marks, but we will be reviewing your tweets in real time. And if you're going to be allowed

in a hotel. I won't be allowed on. Yeah. We might commandeer your room if you're staying in a hotel in a foreign country. They'll be like, get rid of the lady. Alex and Molly would like to invite you by the embassy to discuss your recent tweets about the kingdom. It's not funny. It's so not funny.

No, thank you. So not funny. Oh, God. Well, this has been amazing, Alex. Thanks for your great reporting. And where's the audio? How come there's no audio? I mean, all these people who are leaking inside of Twitter. We demand.

Record the damn audio next time. There's no fingerprinting on audio, right? There's no way to catch somebody taking out their phone or can they catch people. Do they audio footprint these things, do you think? I take what I can get and I can never reveal the methodology. Just tell them about the voice memo app on the iPhone. They just conference you in, right? They put you on speaker.

I knew it. I knew they put you on TV. I cannot reveal. I cannot reveal. You know, people trust reporters for this kind of thing. And so that's a huge trust. And we're just like, you know what? Alex's like, I applied to work in the, I applied to work in customer support.

I'm pulling down a 40K salary while I'm doing my job at the verge. I have two jobs. Like everybody else working from home. He's like, it works great because during Focus Week, you don't do shit. I mean, on Monday was there, get rest day. If your stock is sideways for a decade, you don't get a rest day. That's not how it's supposed to work. Really true.

That's really true. I still want Twitter employees to talk to me, so those are your words. Those are my words, absolutely. Twitter employees are scared to. I'll tell you why Twitter employees are scared to death. They're going to have to do work again. If this company sells, somebody's going to look at their TPS reports. I did see, I did see, I did see Keith for Boy tweet about Elon, like, firing the interns in the SpaceX coffee line because they were waiting for coffee for too long.

He set up, like, cameras, and they were forming on coffee lines. I don't know if I buy that story, but. Keith tweeted it. I don't know, but yeah. Keith might have a source. I don't know. I mean, listen, I can tell you I was just at the Gigafactory in Texas. Like, people who work for him love and adore him and do the best work of their careers, period, full stop.

Like, I took 50 selfies when I was there with people who listened to the pods. And they were just like over the moon at what they had accomplished. When you see the scale of that building, it's like, it took me 20 minutes to walk to where the presentation was. I mean, I'm not kidding. It was a, I walked like two miles inside of the building. It's the biggest footprint and it was built in under two years. Like, I think he'll fix the bot problem at Twitter, you know, like, he has a way of inspiring people to do their best work.

I mean, criticisms aside of his quirky behavior, I think Twitter would be an amazing company post, I mean, the product and the service, I think would be amazing post him having influence. That's my feeling. So you think he takes it over. You think he wins and takes it over? I don't know. I think it's kind of like a coin toss, because.

it's not up to him, right? It's up to them. And I don't understand how they don't take the offer if there's no other offers because when he leaves, I think people are going to look at the company as, well, this is damaged goods. It was damaged goods before Elon made an offer.

Nobody else wants to make an offer. Management hasn't really gotten much done. It's bloated. It needs to cut half the staff or a third of the staff or whatever it is. Is that the stock you want to buy going into a recession? I mean, their only play is to find another buyer. That's it.

If they don't find it, I agree, Molly. No, no white knight. And then they don't take Elon's offer, it goes back down to $30 a share. And everybody who owns, it's like, what, what just happened? Yeah. We could have cashed in our shifts a winner. I mean, yeah, Mark Benioff is calling his institutionals right now. I guarantee.

I thought maybe he was calling you. Someone's calling you. Oh, yeah, just put him on speaker, Alex. Yeah, Brett, call me. I've DMed you a couple times. call me. That's the problem. It's like CEOs are just not available to talk these days. You know, there's no upside.

Some of them are cool. Tim, Twinney at Epix, he's an OG. There's some that are, but the big public ones, no, they don't, they're wrapped up. It's a bummer. It's a, like, just 10 years ago, 15 years ago, like, everybody used to talk and they were cordial and, you know, you may not be happy with your press, but you were, you were active, right?

Like, and you were mixing it up, and you and I have had this discussion privately. Like, yeah. I think we just needs to be a reset between the press and the, and the, I could agree more. As it were. The summit. Well, just, you know, like a little rebuilding of trust on both sides, you know, kind of thing. But whatever.

I'm all for that. What it is. Tech is so. I don't want to get, I don't want to get past that to where we can't do that, you know, to where we can't have come back together. I mean, I just don't, I don't think democracy suffers, honestly, you know. Yeah. I mean, it's just, I think Twitter's, like, Twitter might not be an important investment.

or a business, it's just an important platform. It's an important part of society. And it just needs to be cared for, you know? So like, if the stock price goes sideways or not, it's just so important, I think, to society that all these people talk there. All these people are available, you know, for discussion there and the influence it has. It would be a shame to see it deprecate and then I don't know where that conversation goes. I don't know. Save Twitter.

Hashtag save Twitter. Hashtag save Twitter. All right, Alex. Thanks for everyone. everything. Keep up the good work. Thanks for keeping us

in the loop on your, all the leaks you're getting. If anybody has leaks and you want a trusted reporter to give them to Alex is your guy. Follow him.

Alex E. He-E-A-T-H-D-M's open or you probably have that link for anonymous tips and your P-U. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So many ways to teach me.

I'm on every app. Every app. You can drop them on. Which one is, where do people like to leak stuff to? Signal. Is that the? Signal's the best.

It's the safest. I always say signal. If you're going to DM me, I'm going to send you to signal really talk, we'll really do the goods there. Yeah, because they got you on the other ones. If you're doing it from your office, they got you. Well, especially, I mean, my sources work at these companies that these apps run on.

So I'm like, we're not talking on Twitter DM or Messenger or WhatsApp. No. Good God. You start talking to Alex on WhatsApp. All of a sudden, it's just CC's Zuckerberg, like a blind CC. It's just BCC's Zuckerberg. One of his Android clone shows up and is just like, I'm sorry, I'll take that phone. You got to have good infoset, guys.

Good info. sake, it's important. Absolutely. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Alex. Take care. All right, Molly, you've got a quick interview with WordCab co-founder Alex. Smec-off.

Did I pronounce his name correctly? Smekoff. I'm making my way through our accelerator founders. And it is just so interesting. Okay, so WordCab, I want this for everything. They sell access to an API that lets you generate call summaries at scale and add them to any application. So basically what happens is you're on a call. And it makes not a transcript.

It literally summarizes it. It's like, and then Jason said that he definitely thought that this was going to happen if he didn't do this. It creates a narrative of the call to make it more readable. So you can imagine if you're a salesperson or, I don't know, venture capital is and you go through a lot of phone calls and you want a quick summary. That's what it does. Alex is the co-founder and CEO and we just did a little 10-minute interview about the progress. Amazing. And for those of you who don't know, we've run an accelerator called Launch Accelerator.

We put $100,000 into companies, just like the tech star. and Wycommoners world, and we work closely with them. And we always like to feature them here on This Week in startups. I thought, I did the first 24 classes. I'd have Molly take a shot at doing a couple of classes here. I mean, just a lot of work to do on this pod. We're doing a lot of startups. But I just love this idea because AI, you know, there's something that must come after

transcripts. And now that we do have transcripts, hey, that was great. Oh, we got a transcript of the call. But you're going to want to get some action items, knowledge, and summaries out of them. And that really is where AI shines. And so, you know, if somebody mentions there's an action item or we need to loop somebody into this conversation or there's bullet points, having software do that could be a real game changer. And we love the fact that this is an API type service like AWS or like Twilio. Plug into Zoom.

Yeah, it's great. You don't even, one of the great things is you don't have to think about the applications. Maybe somebody wants to transcribe a podcast and summarize it or maybe somebody wants to do a city council meeting. Maybe somebody wants to do the transcript of C-SPAN, right? And you know, you don't have to think when you make an API of what the uses are. You leave that to your users and then they find a thousand different applications or a million ones for your product. And that's always lets the team focus just on making the core technology work better, right? So we just love that and enjoy the interview.

Yeah. All right, everybody. So Launch Accelerator recently started its 24th cohort. And I have been sitting down with some of the founders every other week. or so to dig into their businesses a little bit. So far, we've talked with Craig Zingerline of Growth University. That was episode 1387. Hosei Ordonez from AirPALs, episode 1392, Ben Miller from Chronify on episode 1416. And today, I'm here with Alex Smekho from WordCab, which I'm excited to let Alex explain. I'm going to take a crack at the elevator pitch here, which is API as a service

that summarizes recorded calls at scale. How does this magic work, Alex? And well, Welcome to the show. Thanks a lot. Yeah, so I think you got the just correct WorkCab developed a technology that turns meeting transcripts into human-sounding bullet point style summaries. And we serve these capabilities by a set of developer-friendly APIs. And, you know, I figured I could go into the why before I dive into the technology and, like, kind of why we started us, if that's fine. That is, in fact, my first question. Who needs this and is willing to pay for it?

Right. So the amount of business communication that's being recorded is only growing after the pandemic. And people are hungry for ways to leverage this recorded data. But for the most part, all they have is the transcript. And that's fine as a reference, but it's not a sustainable or scalable way to figure out what happened during a call, especially if you didn't participate in those calls. So existing tools have tried to make sense of these lengthy conversations. and they're improving all the time, but for the most part, they're focused only on the

internal meeting space where people usually remember what happened during the call. Like, what do you do if you're a sales manager that has to review your reps calls over the past week? And you didn't participate in any of their conversations. What do you do if you're a contact center supervisor who needs to review dozens of calls on a daily basis to determine how well your customer support reps are doing? And that's really where WordCAP's API comes in. There's something like 100 billion business calls made in the U.S. every year.

And every year, a percentage of that, a bigger percentage of that is being recorded and analyzed. And given this opportunity and my background, my co-founder's background, we decided to build WordCap. So there's this long meeting. There's a lot said. Obviously, reading a transcript might be unwieldy. And so talk to me about the summary and what? that looks like. It's bullet points that summarize the actual content. Is there analysis? I mean, how good are you? Can you be like it seemed like no one like that idea? The way I describe it as a

narrative summary, right? It's it's linear. It's chronological. It just tells you what happened as if someone sat in the meeting and wrote down notes and then gave you those notes. And our focus is really on making these summary sound as human and being as pleasant to read as possible. That's a huge focus. And not just extracting bits and pieces of the transcript and then kind of mushing them together, but giving a more narrative story-like summary that you'd actually want to go back to as opposed to reading through the wall of text that is the transcript. What services does your API plug into?

So it's pretty plug-in play on its own, meaning that in a few lines of code, a developer can quickly retrieve a human-sounding summary. And we offer several customization options for that, right? So they can make it more abstract and shorter depending on a few parameters or longer and more fine-grained. So really, we act as an OEM solution, right? So we plug into any platform that wants to use our API. But by any platform, do you mean Zoom or Microsoft Teams? Like, how do companies actually deploy this? Is it you run a transcript through WordCab or it's automatically, you know, in real time recording and transcribing our Zoom call?

So it's more passive than that. It summarizes after the call. But the way companies integrated is that they usually create a summary space in their UI. For example, if you've heard of Gong or KORIS or these revenue intelligence platforms, they usually record the call, then provide you with some analysis, but they don't provide these styles of summaries. So we aim to give these companies the ability to summarize calls and present that to their users. How does the pricing work? So it's volume-based pricing. It goes as low as one cent per summary.

So if you feed it a transcript, it summarizes that transcript and you pay one cent. Where do you sit now? What's the status of the business now? How's your growth doing? I know you've been pitching every week to various investors through launch accelerator. How's it all working out? So, yeah, we're talking to investors every week via launch, so it's been very helpful. And we've seen an average of 19% growth on 4 of a month in terms of revenue. And our primary KPI is total meeting summarized, right? Since we're an API as a service, we're a consumption-based business, we're looking at the number

of requests made every month. And that is around 130,000 at the moment. And our next milestone is 4 to 8 million summaries processed every month, which gets us to 1 million AR. Tell me about the technology to the extent that you can. How hard is it to do this, effectively natural language processing on the fly? Right. So really the core IP of WordCab is only partly in the deep learning models that we use or the data we train them on. It's more the methodology we've developed over the past year to reduce the amount of training data that we need, as well as a robust way to score the quality of a summary. And these are both very difficult problems in that training data for summarizing conversations is largely unavailable due to privacy reasons. Right. Connacht centers don't want to give up their recorded data.

And private companies don't want to do that either. So there's that data retrieval problem. And then there hasn't been a definitive set of metrics developed for grading the quality of summaries, right? What one person finds a great summary, another person might say that's not enough information or that's too much information, right? So we've been developing a rubric to score the quality of a summary on a more objective scale. Interesting. Do you imagine that that could have applications outside even your own company? Like, could that become a usable metric for the whole industry?

Yeah. Not to like add more to your plate if you weren't already planning that, but. No, definitely. After we've made it a little bit more robust, we've been speaking to academics who've been kind of doing this since 2008. Right. So there still isn't like a definitive way to do this. And it's kind of. ad hoc at the moment, but we're always trying to improve it. So when we have something a little

bit more solid, I'd love to share it. Perfect. And then who's the ideal customer for this? Who's the sort of primary audience? I feel like you live in the world and you realize there are so many kinds of businesses that you don't know anything about. Is this for those businesses or is this for law firms? Like, who's the primary audience? So it's anyone who records and possibly analyzes their customers calls. So it could be remedy intelligence platforms, sales training platforms, contact center software, in any case where the platform records tens of thousands to millions of calls every month, that's who we're targeting.

These platforms is where information overload happens. We've spoken to companies where very low numbers of users of these platforms actually go back and look through the transcript. There's search options. There's ways you can skip through the audio a little bit quicker. But for the most part, if you didn't participate in that conversation, it's a pain. So that's what we're tackling. What are the, you mentioned privacy and I wonder what are the regulatory concerns I saw

that you're in the process of getting SOC2 certification wrapped up. I would imagine there are lots of layers to reassuring companies that you're not misusing these recordings. The larger the prospect, the more will have to jump through regulatory compliance security hoops. And yet, we're currently wrapping up our SOC 2 Type 1. Our SOC 2 type 2 will come maybe three to six months later. But that's definitely been a requirement. I think we went for this certification a little bit early.

We've seen companies that, you know, are Series A or later start to do their SOC 2 type 1. and we're doing it, you know, precede. But, you know, it makes sense because we're handling very sensitive customer data, their transcripts. So it's something we have to tackle initially and GDPR as well. Right. Of course. And then finally, I vowed that I was going to ask every one of our LA 24 cohort.

And I think I've managed most as our final question, what is your path to $100 million? Yeah. So we see it in three stages. Right. So the first is getting to 1 million AR with an average price of 1 to 2 cents per API call. That means 4 to 8 million API requests per month. And we're at 130,000 now. We currently have maybe 70 companies in our pipeline that process anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of calls every month and would find summarization a big value add.

And we expect this to be facilitated by the SOC2 certification, which will be final. in the next week or two. Getting to 10 million includes branching out to multiple languages. So we're currently working on summarizing in Spanish, but this can expand to French, Italian, German, as well as summarizing other types of conversations, including emails and chats, which users and prospects have been asking for. Wow. I would love that in email.

I would love it to just lay on top of my email and actually just summarize all of them. Just give me a headline, everything that's in my inbox. Alex, make it. So what some companies have actually asked us is, can they repurpose emails in a way that makes them formatted in kind of a transcript style to be fed into the summarizer, right? So instead of having just an email thread, you'd have, for example, a speaker label, the person who sent the email, and then what they said in the email. So it looks exactly like a transcript would. And then if you feed that to the API, would it give back a human sounding summary of that email thread?

And it does. Like in our experiments, you can kind of repurpose email to look like a transcript to summarize it. Amazing. So that's pretty cool. But that still requires some fine-tuning. All right. Well, we can wait.

Alex Meehov from WordCab, CEO of WordCab, which is already a super cool utility. That is even sounds like, and become more so. Thanks so much for the time. Thanks a lot, Molly. All right. It's time for everybody's favorite segment of the week. Fridays on this week in startups. We always have at the end of the episode, Molly, everybody's favorite. Okay, Boomer. Okay, Boomer. Okay. Okay, Boomer. I see you right there, Boomer. Today, it sounds like Rachel's interviewing her doppelganger.

I am. I had on Rachel C. I'm Rachel B. I had on Rachel Cantor. She was absolutely amazing. Right now, she's a brand and content marketing lead at Taito, but I actually found out about her through her writing. What's Tito? Yeah, what is that? Tido is a absolutely, really, really six startup in the e-commerce space. I actually didn't even talk to her much about that. I talked to her about journalism, which is where her roots were. Breaking in the tech is on a non-technical, and her time at Morningboro where she wrote Sidekick, and she launched that whole project. It was a two times a week, weekly lifestyle newsletter with 180,000 readers. Super incredible, but now she's a non-technical in tech,

and we talked about writing culture and tech, how she broke into the worlds of startups, and then the impact, of course, of writing in public and how more people should be doing that. Awesome. Well, another great segment. Well, done, Rachel reporting. Awesome, thank you.

And I do, before I log off, I have to plug, she made a pallet. Rachel.com, and we actually had the palette. I'm sorry, what is pallet? I know, this is okay, but we don't know any of these terms. You guys got to remember this, because it was Paige Fin Doordy, who was in episode 1377, came on and talked to you about it. And then she invested to them.

And then Kai, who was phenomenal, came on his segment of OK Boomer. It's a job board thing. It's a job board thing. Yep. Episode. Well, did they give you like 1,400 was on there too? Did they give you some like advisor grant or something? No.

Is this a random yours? You get paid every time you drop ballot on the show? Do we need to book them? Is that what's happening here? I already booked him. He was already on. Kai was on. Had them.

Had him on. He's just absolutely killing it. Kai, I said 1400 guys, got to listen. You're up with all these Rachel reporting segments. Listen to the end of the show. Listen to the end of the show, I promise. But yeah, so that's cool crossover. All right.

All right, a little crossover going amongst these Gen Zs who are going to inherit the earth. Yeah, because they all know each other and they're all on the same job boards. Well done, Rachel. Awesome. Thanks guys. I mean, now all you have to do is get Gen Z's to take jobs. You know, there's a reason why all these job boards are having. because none of you guys want to work. Stop.

What do your friends think about you working 50, 60 an hour? An honesty, Rachel. What are your friends think about you working 50, 60 hours a week for me? Nobody believes I have a full-time job. They're like, oh, wait, that's like a full-time job. And I'm like, that's a full-time job. I think a lot of people think that being a producer isn't a full-time job or writing in general or journalism.

And I'd like everybody to do a mental health check on all their journalists friends out there because it very much is. And I absolutely love it. So I think if I'm happy, my friends should be happy for me too. So much emotional labor going into. So much emotional labor going into producing this show. Yeah, don't worry.

HR has me covered, though. And all the fire engines and police. And plus that New York energy. The sounds of the city. I miss my days in New York. The very safe area. Well, just also trying to sleep at night and like garbage trucks. And now I live in the wilderness and I sleep like a baby.

but oh my god my days in new york with those garbage trucks coming around the four or five a m like whale song yeah yeah yeah it gets up early garbage trucks always delightful at four that is terrible that's true i like the people yelling personally those are my favorite crazy people drunk people yelling at each other always delightful at four or five a m yeah that's good rachel reporting okay boomer i understood the assignment thank you so much rachel for joining today i have known you for quite a while now on the internet and I actually got to meet you in real life. So I'm really happy that you got to come on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So for everybody who doesn't know, and if you don't know, you must be living under a rock because Rachel's all over Twitter. And I assume everybody who listens to

our podcast is on Twitter as much as I am. Rachel Cantor is the brand and content marketing lead at Taito and is previously a writer at the Morning Brew. And she did some really cool stuff at Morning Brew, which I believe is around the time that I actually found you on Twitter, was when you were spearheading the development and launch of Sidekick, which was like two times a week lifestyle newsletter with over 180,000 readers. That's awesome. Yeah, it was fun. It was a good time.

My first question is, how did you find yourself in the world of writing and journalism? I always loved writing, but quite honestly, I never thought I was good enough to be a writer or could ever become a writer. I studied communications at Northwestern. I loved writing and that was always a part of school. I didn't think I would pursue a journalistic path by any means. But when the pandemic hit, I was a senior at the time. I graduated in 2020 and I started thinking about what I wanted to do next and what I was good at. And as a passion project, I started my own newsletter. And that was kind of my first deep dive into writing in a more, writing in public and writing online and what that could do for someone, both career-wise, and also the opportunities that writing online could provide too.

So that was the first time I ever started writing. And then from there, it kind of just spiraled on. That's awesome. So I feel like the hot job right now with Gen Z's R age is becoming like a UX, UI designer, everybody's on Figma and doing that. What do you think we can do to get more people interested in the journalism space of tech because writing in tech is incredibly important. Obviously, Jason, one of the hosts of our show has an extensive history with journalism and so does Molly Wood, the other host of our show. And I just don't see that many people as jazzed up and excited about writing about tech or working in a position that involves a lot of writing and tech. What do you think we can do about that? I think there's a lot of

pressure around writing. And I think the first step is removing that. Obviously, that's a little hard when you're doing it professionally when there's standards and expectations there. But also the first step to me is always seeing writing as an exploration and an adventure. Because when you write for the sake of writing and having that mentality, it takes you in incredible directions and you kind of follow that natural curiosity. Writing about tech is really interesting because we're at a time where every company wants to be a media company. And you see that with venture funds. You see that with podcast taking off and then spiraling into more podcasts,

into repurposing and repackaging content. You kind of see it everywhere. So it's very much in demand right now. But I also think in addition to kind of seeing writing as an exploration, it's also encouraging people from different backgrounds who don't necessarily have a degree in journalism to pursue content and writing too because anyone and everyone is a writer. And it doesn't matter if you don't have a degree in journalism, you can still write. It's a skill you build over time through practice. And so really encouraging people from different disciplines and different backgrounds

to pursue that path is another key step on that journey. And then also the wonders it can do for a company, but also the wonders it can do for your personal brand. We've seen how people build brands online through Twitter, through their own newsletters, being a solo operator or a solo substack writer. So it can really transform not only your career, but also a company and your personal life, too. That's awesome advice. And I've noticed that you are really good long form writing in particular. The first piece of work that I've read of yours was actually about pop-up grocer, which is a really really cool basically pop-up

that comes around. It was created by a woman named Emily Schilt, I think. And there was one at Miami Hack Week that I got to attend a few weeks ago. And it was really cool, but you wrote about that in 2021.

It was a longer piece of work, definitely longer than a tweet. You were really good at writing tweets too, but what advice do you have for people trying to write these long-form articles specifically about startups? Yeah. Pop-up's a great example, and I've always wanted to go to pop-up grocer in person.

I've actually never made it out. Oh, my gosh. It's super cool. Yeah, Longform is a very interesting medium and very interesting form of content. I think the best, something that I've heard time and time again that's really helped me is interview first content is incredibly valuable, where you're not necessarily taking kind of with a pop-up piece. for example, those were Emily's ideas and Emily's thoughts. And then it's kind of your job as a writer to take those ideas and thoughts and then turn them

into a story and kind of distill that. So I think for people who are overwhelmed by creating a massive long piece of original content, going the interview first route is super valuable because you can take those insights from someone and then tell that narrative and then transform that into even more content and also the ways you can co-collaborate on that are immensely valuable too. But I think it's just finding your medium too. For some people, it's long form. For some people, it's not.

And that's okay. It doesn't necessarily have to be long form too. So just trying a bunch of different things and experimenting. The issue with long form is that it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of research, unless you're doing kind of the interview first route, which is a little bit more scrappier. But if you're someone who is really curious about something and ready to dive in and then ready to synthesize, it's a good route for you. So I would say experimenting and then also thinking through how you're approaching the content, whether it's interview first or research

first kind of piece. At you. So with your personal newsletter that you were doing before Morning Brew, was that long form or was that short form? It's kind of a combination. It was half personal narrative and what I was experiencing as a new grad, some of the things that were top of mind for me. And then also short firm in the sense that I shared a lot of recommendations. Like, I've always been that friend people go to for restaurants, for new direct-to-consumer brands, for interesting pop culture moments.

And so I was writing little blurbs, which is kind of the style format of the brew, where it's like long form in the sense of the newsletter, but the way that you talk about recommendations and talk about things is very snappy, very to the point. And so it was a combination of both long form and short form. And I kind of do a little bit of both now as well. That's awesome. Are you still writing your own personal newsletter? I actually wrote a recent edition about three weeks ago. And so I'm hoping to bring it back. It's a big 2022 goal. Just figuring out like what I wanted to look like and how often I want to do it. Yeah, no, that newsletters take so much time and effort to start. I feel like once you have the format down and once you know what it's going to be about,

it's a little bit easier to kind of fill in the blanks. The first newsletter that I had to write was for a fellowship and for supply chain and logistics. It was an amazing fellowship, but it was probably my least favorite part of the entire fellowship. I'm not going to lie. I was so bad at it. Like if Santosh is listening, who's my own boss, like he, my old boss, he definitely knows. I was horrendous. Like I, they had a whole style guide for it that was already set in place.

They had other news outlets being like, these would be good stories to like feature in it. Like it was all set up and I was just really bad at it. And then I did it every single day for six months or every single week for six months. And eventually I got a little bit better at it. And after I left that fellowship, I was able to freelance and one of the freelancing positions I got was writing weekly newsletter.

And they were like, you're so good at this. Like, where did you learn? And I was like, oh my gosh, like, who do I have a story for you? Because every week it was like a battle. Do you have any advice for anybody trying to start up a newsletter? Because for me, newsletters are from that experience now, the scariest, like one of the scariest methods of writing in public. Yeah. It's a lot of work.

I think people think it's easy because so many people have done it. But it's actually to do it right, it's a whole process. but also, like, going back to what I said earlier about the pressure, I think now there's all this pressure to start a newsletter, build an audience, figure out what your audience wants, what are the needs? Like, talk to your audience, get feedback, all these things. But I think when you're starting out a newsletter, either you have that approach where you're super purposeful.

But for me, when I was starting out my newsletter, I honestly had no idea where it was going to take me and what the goal of it really was. It was kind of a selfish endeavor in a lot of ways. And there's a really good quote from Joan. Didian about how writing is selfish. And I think sometimes we kind of lose track of that. It's selfish and both selfless at the same time in a lot of ways. But I think leaning into kind of, why do you want to write about what you want to write about? And what are you going to say that's different is what I say is the first step. Like forget the audience, forget like building it in

public and all of that. Just focus on why are you doing what you want to do? Like, are you writing a newsletter because you feel pressure to start a newsletter because everyone is starting a newsletter or are you writing a newsletter because you feel like it's a personal format where you want to slide into someone's inbox and you feel like it's relatable and can have a conversation or are you starting it because it's an opportunity to own your audience and have distribution in a really unique way. So leaning into that and then forgetting about the how many subscribers do I have all of that once you kind of write about what you want to write about and build that from your own point of view, then you can lean into the audience and be like,

I want to know feedback. What are you liking? What are you not liking? What do you want more of? And then figuring out who those people are and then kind of building a consistent brand. But it's okay if the beginning is messy. I always say, just put it out into the world. I know that's the scariest part. It's easier said than done. But you can always iterate. Even with the format of a newsletter, so many people get stuck on that. Like, what are the recurring sections? What are the, what are the sections that change week to week, but just start experimenting and put that out there. And then you can always change that down the line. It's not as big of a deal to change sections of a newsletter as you think.

Like at Morning Brew, we would change them all the time based on audience feedback. And it feels like a big deal and it's kind of scary and you're like, oh, the audience is going to be taken aback by that. But they're also, they'll feel invited into your process and feel really part of the community. So going back to the taking off the pressure and just kind of doing it for the sake of doing it. I love that. I guess I didn't find my why in writing a newsletter about supply chain logistics. So maybe maybe I'll one day I'll pivot and I'll write something a lot more fun about right recommendations. So you mentioned one aspect of newsletters that I completely agree with with the fact that sometimes they feel really personable when you just like you said, sliding into someone's inbox.

The one that came to mind, I subscribed a ton of newsletters. Kinsey Grant's for Thinking is Cool. Her newsletter is so casual and it's super well written. Do you have any other recommendations on your end with, besides your own, obviously, on newsletters that people should subscribe to that feel very personable like that? I really like Haley Nomman's newsletter. She used to work with me in Rappellar. She is a great voice.

And I actually really look forward to sitting down and reading her newsletter. She's great. I also really love, I love my friends who have started like personal newsletters as well. Sarah Wood is someone who comes to mind and she shares updates about her life as well as the book she's writing and also about her life in Barcelona. And a wide variety of topics, honestly. But that's very personal. I love the newsletters where you feel like you're sitting in the room with someone and you kind of know them. So those are two that come to mind in terms of personal solo writers. And then another newsletter that I also really like is perfectly imperfect where they bring in like influencers and fun people and talk about their recommendations. And that just feels like authentically. Again, another piece of interview first content.

But that feels like really true to the voice and brand. Awesome. Those are phenomenal recommendations. And I do want to pivot a little bit to your role. at TIDO. So TIDO provides visibility into ECOM brand unit economics, marketing channels, and customer retention. Is that correct? That got that straight off your guys' website. Yes. I think about it as like analytics for direct to consumer brands. Got you. That's a lot, that's a lot easier set than the line I just spat out of you. So you work, is this a startup? Tito.

Yeah, startup. You work out of startup right now. Your history previously was a writer. How do writer get into the startup world. Oh, it's such a, it's such a needed role for people currently. And I don't think it's actually, it feels like a big pivot when you like say it out loud and think about it.

But honestly, writing is such a good, entryway into almost anything because as a writer, you're constantly creating and the output you put out there is so wild. I think Brewer,

taught me how to do that well was to constantly create and move really fast and be a doer. I was kind of already, I was a doer before, but more so in the sense that you're just constantly creating new things and keeping up with everything. And in a startup, you have to keep up and wear a lot of different hats. As cheesy as it sounds, it's true. So another way, actually, that's really good for writers is there's so many freelance opportunities. And going back to Another thing I said earlier is that every company wants to be a media company. So everyone is kind of investing in content currently. So there are lots of opportunities to join in a freelance capacity.

And from there, go full time. It's hard to find really great writers. It seems easy to find someone and you can pull someone from like a freelancer marketplace and all that. But to create really strong content is a whole different story. And so finding those people can be really hard for startups. So I think going from the freelancer to full-time route is a really great idea. And there's a lot of good job boards, a lot of good communities for writers that will help

them launch into that career path. I love that. I'm a huge fan of gig work, freelancing, independent work, anything like that, because I've just seen so many people absolutely kill it in their career, starting off with this type of work or stopping what they're doing right now in their current career and pivoting because then you get a bigger portfolio, your hours. Obviously, you're a little bit more flexible. You get to pick them yourself and say you're a morning person, but you work with a West Coast team and you live on the East Coast. You could perform way better if you were freelancing and you had

the opportunity to work in the morning, whereas, you know, having to write later at night. So absolutely love that. Where are people going to be able to find, though, these freelancing jobs? There's, I'm actually launching tomorrow a palette board, a palette job board. Oh, love Kai. Kai was on the podcast. Huge fan. Okay. Now I was about to say,

are you going to put jobs on, not Paki McCormick's? There was somebody, oh, Paige, Paige, who was also on the podcast. Unfortunately, not on my segment. She was on with Jason Calcanus, Paige Van Dordy, a Gen Z, VC,

and Children's Book, Arthur, which is, I think, very cool. So we, love it, love it. What newsletter is it going to be? on. So I don't know where we're going to like where I'm going to launch it newsletter was yet, which you need to figure out, but it's all going to be content and brand marketing focused roles. So everything, so it'll be pretty niche and also launching the talent collective

portion of Pallet, which is a new feature they they launched. And I'm really pumped about that. Saw that. Saw that. To have freelancers and cool people as part of the community. So it's going to be really hype. So hopefully that will be a good resource for people. too. And I'm asking a lot of pointed questions at the companies who will be posting roles, because it's really important for me to source from companies that are doing good in the world, but also have a strong company culture and treat their employees well. So it's going to be, that's going to be awesome. And then there's some other communities, another one that came to mine is a Slack community. I think it's called SuperPath, and that's for content people. And there's a lot.

of great resources in there. They also have a job board online. And then, trying to think of where else for freelancers. Honestly, through, through friends. I feel like every person I know who's in tech is like, knows someone who's looking for a writer currently. I totally agree. Always content people. It's always content people. And we don't really all talk about it. Like it just kind of, and I feel like people ask me and then you have to put the feelers out there. But then sometimes you don't, yeah, if there, I think people just need to ask other people like openly and be comfortable doing that, which is, which is hard to. And just because you want a freelance job also doesn't mean

you're unhappy in your job. It can be like, because you want to learn something different, because like you're curious about something, because you want to try, um, exercise a new skill, whatever. But yeah, I would say palette board, which I'll launch, um, Superpath. And then through, friends of friends. That's how like I got freelance jobs was just through people being like, oh, I need a writer or like someone so-and-so wants to launch a newsletter. Like, would you want to help them out? I love that. So before the speaking startup, so I was doing my freelancing, I was really into the content world. And I think that's like probably if people don't know me from OK Boomer or my podcast, they probably know me from creating content for other people, which I don't know if the

this speaking startup's crowd and those people that were looking at that content probably don't overlap. So I just want to put that out there. And how I would find people to do content for is I would look who was raising a series B on TechCrunch and then slide into the founders' DMs on Twitter. Because once they hit a Series B, I realized they had enough money that they would probably at that time be more willing to hire on contractors and things like that. So that was like my like in in the beginning. I love that. That's awesome. Honestly, like that's such a good idea. And also a lot of solo founders and a lot of big people on Twitter

too will also take content people too. If you just slide into their DMs, the amount of people who have ghost writers and who have a content team behind them, you would have no idea. But it's true. It's incredible too. So I've also seen a rise. Maybe this is because I am at Gen Z, but I've seen a rise of

young people diving headfirst into this freelancing community, whether that be a freelance offer engineer or a freelance writer. across all fields. Why do you think so many people that are young are choosing to do contract work over traditional nine to fives?

Definitely the flexibility is huge. You get to make your own schedule, like you said earlier. You also think people are, don't want to be beholden to niches and are really interested in expanding outside of a current, just one particular role.

That was something that was always super appealing. to me with freelancing was that I'm someone who has a lot of different interests. And I think a lot of people, um, our age and younger are like, I don't want to be held to one particular thing. I want to do a lot of different things. And so for me, when I'm just with all my different curiosities and interests, I was like, oh, this is an opportunity to explore things outside of, um, outside of my job, too. But the, the ability to now to be able to do that where you can explore a lot of different things and then kind of build your own job from there is so cool. And you get to have full ownership over that too. And I think we're as we see, I think there's some stat about this, about how most Jensiers like want to see

themselves as entrepreneurs. And being a freelancer is being an entrepreneur. You're running your own business. And so I think that's just one easy way to kind of dive into that. You know, you can be an entrepreneur and you don't have to start your own company. But being a freelancer is basically starting your own company. You're just working with a lot of different people. Yeah, that's so, that's very, very true. And I guess I never thought of it like that, but at the end of the day, you are, you're around when you're doing taxes, you're writing yourself down as a sole proprietorship or an LLC. You are, you are the commodity almost at that point. So for freelancing, do you have any tips for people that are interested in becoming content creators or writers?

Like, how would you actually make that job? Like I said before about just reaching out to people. I think I think doing that is so valuable where find people who you admire and who are already creating content or who you feel like could actually, they could add more value by creating content but haven't yet and just reach out to them too and say, hey, you know, I love following you. I love what you're building. I have these ideas for how you can create really cool content. We'd love to chat with you about them and make it super, super, super, low stakes, but just kind of show them the ways that you can offer them value. So I would say reaching out to people and just kind of shooting your shot with that.

And then also kind of you can kind of start to build your own content as well. Like I think building in public and writing online will take a lot of people to that next stage. And so it's also hard to be, it's hard to be a freelancer if you don't have a portfolio or work to show. And it's even more valuable when you have an audience already. So I would also say invest your time in writing and creating. That's the most important thing. You've done it really well at building an audience on Twitter. Like you have a pretty good following and not just like, oh, you have a lot of Twitter followers.

But people actively keep up with the work you produce, which I think is even more impressive than being very verified and having a ton of people hit the follow button, having people that engage with your content is what the big thing is. Engagement means everything in content creation. How are you able on your own personal brand to keep up this engagement? It sounds so cliche, but I honestly just authentically try to show up as myself online. And I don't have a strategy. I don't look at like retweet to like ratios when I feel like there's.

a thread that is like forming in my head, I'll write a thread. And when I don't feel like I have a thread, I don't force myself to write a thread. And honestly, I think that's kind of paid off in the long run just because now, and that wasn't the goal was to like, you know, build an engaged audience. It was to show up as myself and then build a community from there, really, and meet people and engage with others who are thinking about the same things or who have interesting perspectives or challenge me to think differently. But I just, I don't have a strategy. And I just kind of like, I obviously gut check myself when I, when I tweet things.

But I also, I also don't really believe in niches, which is like a hot take, totally. I think it's, it's great early on to kind of niche yourself. But then for me, it could be easy to kind of position myself as like as a strong, as a content person, which I have done in a lot of capacities, but I also like to tweet about, like, how I'm exploring Web 3 or direct-to-consumer brands. And I think my audience finds that way more interesting, like the variety of interests versus just Rachel only tweets about content.

Oh, yeah. And I also think that's a Gen Z thing, too, where... I completely agree. Gen Z is just more interested in, like, the wholehearted, holistic, like, the full picture of the person. And that's what I'm more interested in, too. Like... Yeah. I actually think, I don't know if it's like TikTok necessarily, but I think people are multifaceted, right?

Yes. And when you have these people like influencers on the internet, they're just not showing up and only being beauty gurus, for example. I don't think, I don't watch any more beauty guru people. Like those were kind of in the pastime back and back when I was like probably five or ten years ago. A niche group of people, right? They were killing it, doing it really well on the internet. Now you're starting to see a lot more people more in that lifestyle space, whether they be like, They could be vegan moms that live in San Diego that also own a Dalmatian, like from the influencer perspective, not even talking about tech or anything, but they have so many different buckets to pull from that their niche is themselves.

Like their niche is talking about what they're interested in. And I think the idea of a niche as an online personality, granted, like I'm not out here trying to create like commentary, YouTube videos or something to be said about niche content. That's very cool. But I think if you're starting out on something especially Twitter, why not? show off that you're multifaceted. Like, I would not want to follow one account that just talks about, like, soccer stats. I'd want to follow an account that, like, is interested in watching soccer and also went to a similar college as me. You know what I mean? Yeah, you want to see,

like, the whole person. And it's, it's way more interesting, too, versus just picking one lane. That's definitely, like, a fast track to, I feel like, growth, because you're, like, really well known in one field. But then, um, ultimately, like, I think the long-term, engagement and community you build from being like that multifaceted person is gets you there not faster but like is pays off really really well because then you have like a really committed and engaged community. Yeah. And I also feel like you could tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like Gen Z though is starting or has been the entire time that we've existed. We don't treat our online selves even on LinkedIn. I've seen this as professional. There are aspects of us that are

professional, but it seems, because there's so much of our life online, creating a professional, like almost facade, it feels like almost showing up as half yourself on the internet. And so for me, when I was first on Twitter, I was like, I only want to post things on this Twitter account that would help me get a job. And I realized, I'm like, this is only showing off such a small amount of me. And for how often I spend on the internet, only being able to produce content and a certain voice focusing on a certain thing, acting like a certain way, it felt fake and it also felt like it wasn't an accurate representation if somebody did want to hire me. I totally agree. I think now the lines between personal and professional, I mean, not that it

hasn't been that way, but I think more so for our generation are so blurred. Like, to me, I think my personal and professional are like totally mixed together. And also, you being you makes you a better professional too. So like why why hide that? Um, like I think bring your full self to, to what you do. And that will make you a stronger, stronger your job, but also just stronger as a person and like developing through life. Um, so it does feel inauthentic. And I think also Gen Z like sees through that bullshit at the same time too. Right. So you do. You see that and you're like, okay, well, I don't want to follow you or, um, that's not really worth my time. I'm also saying this I realize out of a place of privilege.

I do work at a place that values my creativity. That is very, if I said on Twitter, I would not get fired. I don't think any. In fact, my bosses might interact with it because my, you know, my bosses follow me on social media platforms. So I'm definitely saying this out of a place of privilege. And there is a line. I'm not out here doing investment banking at like Morgan Stanley, you know.

Totally. Yeah. For speaking in tech terms here, you know. Yeah. I'm definitely the same. I feel the same way we're definitely privileged to be in that position too. And it would be a different story if I was talking to someone, you know, who wanted to get a job at Bain or something like that too.

Maybe that's changing. I guess I'm not on the inside. But I find that startups actually find it more attractive in a candidate, too, to be yourself and also have a voice. And if you have this opportunity, like take it and run. Like if you have the opportunity to show up as your full self on the internet or show up as your full self. any aspect, take that and run.

You know? Yeah. I really like that, especially in the tech community. I think that's a really, really cool place to be in. And I'd like people that are hiring Gen Zs to show a little bit more personality online as well, especially in the VC space. Like, I've seen a lot of partners and stuff. And I'm like, I don't know if you would be a cool boss or not, because like, I can't

get your vibe off of your Twitter account, but it seems like you tweet. like violence amounts like every single day but like with zero personality like I can't tell what you're going to be like as a boss like obviously sometimes with founders too but I don't know it's something that really frustrates me it's like vibe checking your boss before like you know yeah and some people like don't want to post online too and like that's okay that's okay as well it's just like figure figure out kind of like what you what you want to you know what you want to do and like if that's not you, then that's not you. But it is a good way to like showcase yourself and also like what you're doing and like share

that with a larger group too. Somebody who I actually think does really well at this but doesn't share any of their personal life is Nicole from Harlem Capital. She was on an episode of OK Boom or a while ago. And she does like really good threads and things like that about starting off in venture capital, but also does really well at tying in her own experiences. and by tying in her own experiences, she has a great Twitter account of being professional,

but still having some sort of like empathy to run off of. You know what I mean? But she doesn't mention like really like where she lives, where she like who her family is nothing like that. But I don't know, it's still a good, she's good barriers, I think. If you're interested in looking at somebody,

Nicole from Harlem Capital, if you don't want to like share your life on the internet, because not everybody wants to do that. She killed it. I love that. Yeah. it's like really good. My last question to you.

How do you recommend people get the courage, I guess, for lack of a better words, to start writing in public? By honestly just doing it. I know that's like not the, like, it's, I know that's like unfortunate. People don't want to hear that. And I always, people are always like, how do I become a better writer too? And also the answer to that is to keep writing. Okay.

And to write. but it's true. I mean, doing it is hard, but you also need, that's why I think it's important to know why you're doing what you're doing, because if you're, again, just creating because everyone's creating a newsletter

or you want to keep up, that's probably not a good enough reason that's going to motivate you to keep going. So asking yourself that. And then just, again, putting it out there, it doesn't have to be the best thing you ever created. It doesn't have to be, like, the Mona Lisa, anything, just create.

and then you can change it from there too. And then also talk to your friends too. They're, I think, your biggest ally in the process of writing and creating online. Like I remember when I first started my newsletter and still, to this day, I send my writing to so many people. And that doesn't make someone less of a writer. It's more valuable to get feedback and also to understand how other people are reading it too before publishing it. So if you're scared, definitely send it to a friend or a family member before. But then also just put it out there.

And then you can also go through an exercise that's called fear setting. And Tim Ferriss talks about it in a TED Talk where you think about like, what's the worst case scenario, what's a neutral case? And then what's the best case scenario? And then what would you lose if you didn't take the opportunity to publish online? And I think that's really helpful because oftentimes the worst case is really not the worst case. And there's always ways to prevent the worst case from happening. So that's also a good exercise to do if people are scared about writing online. But really, if you're scared to do anything in life, like walking through that exercise is very helpful.

If you're setting, I'll have to check that out. Tim Ferriss, I think, has a lot of really good, like bits and pieces to apply to life. I definitely wouldn't have gotten my job here talking to you right now if I didn't put out my own podcast in the beginning, which Jason has said multiple times that it was pretty not great. I think he said it quote was a seven out of a 10. It's pretty bad. But just by putting myself out there, doing things like repetitively over and over again, I'm sure writing is like very similar to writing out a podcast. Writing a newsletter is similar to writing out a podcast where those repetitions, you know, add up. Yeah, they add up. And like you created something and there's something. Most people don't get to the creation phase. So it really speaks large amounts about a person, I think, when they can just put it out there. Awesome. Thank you so much, Rachel. Where can people find you?

They can find me on Twitter. It's Rachel Cantor underscore. And same thing for Instagram as well. But Twitter is probably the best spot for that. What are we going to do? We need to get rid of these underscores because I'm at underscore Rachel Braun. And the woman that doesn't have the underscore literally added me. She was like, oh, I bet you really want to get rid of that underscore, don't you? And I was like, are you beating me on Twitter right now? It was crazy. I was like, okay, okay, calm down here. The peanut gallery. I need the username without the underscore.

But now I've owned the underscore though with other accounts. So then I'm like, for consistency. I have like a Instagram account, which I'm never on Instagram. Like nobody follow me there. Literally I'm never on it. I'm always on Twitter. And I have a TikTok account and all of the underscore. And I'm like, probably missed the opportunity now to even have like ditch the underscore, you know, and everything else.

So we'll embrace it. We'll embrace it for now. We're the Rachel underscore gangs. Yes. Well. Stand by that. Oh, and then also where can we find the Pell-up board? This won't come out to later, so it'll be.

Oh, I will post it on my Twitter. So the, yeah, I think it's like slash Rachel, honestly. But I will post it on my Twitter and probably pin it there. And so people can find it there. Phenomenal. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. This was a really cool conversation.

I haven't talked to anybody that has really dove into the world of writing with me. So this was really, really helpful. Awesome. Well, thank you again. And always down to chat about writing and all things, really. Thanks. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate.

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