This Week in Startups - US chip industry update, fixing education, Amazon allegations + OK Boomer | E1580

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

First up, J+M discuss new developments in the US chip industry, including tighter restrictions on exports and a massive new investment in an upstate NY factory! (4:57) They also cover fixing US education (12:37) and a shocking lawsuit against Amazon. (27:58) Then, Producer Rachel is joined by Verci Co-Founders Ami and An on OK Boomer! (40:03)  (0:00) J+M tee up today's segments! (1:57) Molly and Jason catch up on Friday! (4:57) US clamps down on chip exports to China, Micron brings chip plant to Upstate NY (11:22) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://linkedin.com/twist  (12:37) Fixing US education (24:26) Masterworks - Skip the waitlist to invest in fine art using at https://Masterworks.com/twist (25:48) CHIPS positivity (27:58) Amazon lawsuit with shocking allegations (38:51) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (40:03) Producer Rachel is joined by Verci Co-Founders Ami and An to talk about their community group

Hey, everybody is Friday. It's Friday. Oh, is it Friday? Tons of news still happening, but we're making it through the week. We are. And first up, we're talking about on-shoring, on-shoring some chips and stopping some exports of those chips. The U.S. is imposing some new restrictions on chip exports to China. And then we make a detour, a little detour.

We talk about education and how broken education here is in this country and possible solutions to adding some competition or disruptiveness to that. if we are in fact going to build all these factories here and start doing manufacturing again in America in a big way. Exactly. And then we're going to note some pretty shocking allegations against Amazon that popped up on Twitter and are going viral and we think are going to become a bigger story. Yes, and we'll get into that with some trigger warnings when we get to that segment. And then finally, OK boomer, it's Friday. So some good news about a third space where founders can go and maybe instead of going to college, they can go to this third space and hang out in like a founder library with other aspirational founders.

The whole story arc. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Masterworks is the first company allowing investors exposure. into the blue chip artwork asset class. Twist listeners can skip the wait list by going to masterworks.com slash twist. And O-Doo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business.

Your first app is free forever, and right now O-Doo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at O-D-com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. All right, it is Friday. We made it, Molly. We made it. Look at us in our, like, somber. We're like, we put our black shirts on.

Yeah, I would like to kill this week. That's Friday. I just want you to know that I'm sending you a little hug from my garage studio to you. Yes, thank you. I mean, listen, high-class problems, right? Yeah. Lots of news in the news, if you haven't been watching the news. It's been like a lot of news.

A little bit of a, like a news. I started a news Slack channel, by the way, at our organization for our investment team. Because there's so much news. Yeah, I was like, you know, it seems like it can be useful. Twist taping thing is so great. Like, let's just keep up on the industry and trends and whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now I have to, now I have to resist the urge to be like.

Did you see what happened with Ginny Thomas? You know, like that's kind of. Well, yeah, you know, I think with the distractions at work, some people are sensitive to it. Some people are good at multitasking. So you have to always, like, think that through as a leader in the company. We're just putting in like VC stuff, like industry, you know. Pin a message up top as to what the intention of it is. Like things that would professionally develop the organization, right?

Great idea. Here's what this is for. So this is, and here's what it's not for. Right. That's where always gets people in trouble, Molly, is the, um, creating Slack channels that, you know, don't have a defined purpose or, um, ground rules, I'll say. Like, you know, like random, bad. In fact, maybe I'll change the name to like VC news or tech news or investment news.

Yeah, notable news or something like that. Nobody's putting at any politics. Like we didn't, that's not the, you know, it was like, we like a channel where we talk about things that are happening in the tech industry and investing, PD. Yeah, I think. Great. Yeah, I would say put things in this channel that would provide significant benefit for the team to discuss or know about.

Yeah, something to that effect. Because you may get somebody who is like, oh, you know, you know that person, like the uncle who forged you every news story? And they're like, Molly, you care about the environment. Check this out. This two-for-one solar panels for sale in my local newspaper. And I clipped it for you and I sent it to me with a post it on it. Yeah, you got that uncle. No, my grandma was that.

My grandma sent the clippings. I'm that uncle. All that time now. Yeah. I'm turning into that uncle. Oh, is this tertiary related to you? Here you go. exactly.

It's always great. It's always great when somebody gives their screenplay and or business plan for a pizzeria to my dad when he was a bartender to give to me. And then my dad has to, you know, set up a phone call with me to discuss it. And I'm like,

dad, I don't invest in pizza. What am I supposed to do with this person? He gave me three copies of the business plan. One for you. One for Mark Cuban. One for Elon. There's one here for Larry Page.

I'm like, throw him in the garbage. I don't even know that last one. I understand they're bound. They're bound. Oh, that's amazing. I mean, they're bound. All right. Well, anyway, speaking of news.

Speaking of news. The U.S., of course, recently passed the Chips Act, the bipartisan Chips Act to jumpstart manufacturing of semiconductors and stuff here in the United States. Now, the Commerce Department, as of today, this morning, has issued new very strict restrictions on exporting and, selling advanced computing chips, chip making equipment, and other products to China. So now if you're Nvidia, say, or if you're some, you know, if you're Intel or you're an American-based company like Micron, you need a special license to export like GPUs, like really

high performance chips that power AI applications or, you know, help model nuclear blasts or guide hypersonic weapons. Like, if you want to sell those in China or even Taiwan, you now need a special license from the Commerce Department. I didn't even know that we were making those here, if I'm being totally honest, but I guess some of these advanced chips are being made here. I did see that Micron, uh, I saw Biden touting that Micron was going to invest up to $100 billion on a chip factory in upstate New York.

Now, I always hear these claims and it's like, hmm, that's a very large, number, $100 billion. Like, I guess it's 20, it's, it's as much as $100 billion. And they plan out spending $20 billion, I guess, this deck. So, uh, some caveats there to the number. Sometimes they add together like big numbers and whatever, but it's still a lot. Chip boundaries, the fabs, you know, the actual, um, plants where these things are fabricated.

Yeah. Are phenomenally expensive. Got it. insanely difficult to build because they're basically, I don't know if you've ever been to one, but they're basically like clean rooms. Do you remember those old Intel commercials where they have the guys walking around in the hazmat suits and stuff?

And it's because these are such high precision. You can't have any dust in there. Like, any specific semiconductor facility can cost like minimum $10 billion. Right. And then Intel and Texas instruments, those are also doing massive investments in chip manufacturing here. This seems like finally our government is doing something proactive and smart, which means the one thing that makes me a little nervous that they have information

that this Taiwan situation is going to become acute because this is an awful lot of spending. Oh, yeah. So like they have inside information that we don't have. I always think about that when people talk about Ukraine or Taiwan. I'm like, well, we have 20% of the information. I don't know. I always think about that when I'm screaming back at my phone listening to Allen. Well, no, I mean, a lot of folks.

Just because they haven't told you. I mean, you could know the entire history of Russia, Ukraine, your crazy uncle could have listened to every podcast and read every book on this stuff, you know, and smart people do read a lot of books and they do have great insights. Right. But you just may not know. You're still not getting classified briefings. Exactly.

And so, yeah, they're all at Marlaug in the basement. You can go. You can go visit them. Actually, any of us could read them by pretending to be a Vanderbilt. Sure. you can go find them. But yeah, no, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. Like, even a high level assumption that China could eventually invade Taiwan is not,

never should have been off the table. And so this, like, cutting off these avenues of dependence is really important. But it is interesting that we're restricting these exports now before all these plants have been built. Right? Like, right now we have a lot of promises Intel said it would do $20 billion worth of plants in Arizona. but they take years to spin up.

We're probably a decade away from full production. So the fact that we're restricting exports now is a little risky because of China in return said, okay, well, you can't have any chips from here. There's still TSM, which is in Taiwan. Yes. Which is still, you know, in the clear. And that's Apple's biggest. That's where Apple makes all its chips and tons and tons of companies get their chips from TSMC.

But if China did invade Taiwan and all of a sudden TSM, was like not exporting to us. Available, yeah. We could have hard drive shortages. We could have phone shortages. I mean, this is one of these very challenging problems, like energy. Chips and energy seem very analogous.

And same with pharmaceutical drugs. Now, when you look at each one of these, each country has a different challenge. We're so lucky here in the United States that we found fracking and chel. I'm not saying those are good things. I don't want to see like, you know, some state, you know, fracked and, and poisoning their water tables and all that kind of

stuff. I think we have to do it very intelligently. But the fact that we're not sitting here worrying about winter like Germany is, is really important. And I think this road to resiliency is something every country has to invest in. And this is something like on a bipartisan basis that we elected Biden to do. He was supposed to be like this old guy who came from a different era where people could work with somebody across the table and then go, you know, disagree with them about, you know, some, you know, um, cultural issues or whatever, stylistic issues. But hey, it's in all Americans benefit from energy, resiliency, chip resiliency and pharmaceutical lower prices. And so that's great to see that they're working together. Finally, these incompetent morons in Washington are getting something done together. Well, that is for the American people. Like, we need to be resilient on chips. We need to be resilient on pharmaceuticals. We need resilient on energy. Let's go.

Yeah, let's go. I don't want to deal with any of these dictators anymore. It's like this overhang of anxiety. And how great would it be if we're like, yeah, we don't need your chips. We don't need your drugs. We don't need your masks. And what this requires, you know what the other shoe that has to drop here is? We have to take our immigration system and we're going to need to overhaul it to make sure that we have people to work.

in these factories, you know, and some of them will be automated, of course, robotics, we get it. But other things that require humans. And so we're going to need to let some people in if we have too many job openings. These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high stakes wager for your small business because, listen, we're living in turbulent time. So you want to be a hundred percent certain that you have access to the most qualified elite candidates. That's why you need to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs helps find the right people for your team faster and they'll do it for free. And you can add your job and the purple hiring frame around your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. They've got tons of simple tools over there at LinkedIn jobs to make

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LinkedIn jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. And did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? That's right. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash twist. That's LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T. to post your first job for free terms and conditions apply. I feel like not to go all like Politics Friday, but the other last shoe that has to drop is that we have to make the commensurate investments in education.

And that is the one thing we have not done in this country for like a half-friking century. And we were talking, we were talking to our chat about globalization like we do. And, you know, there was this sense that globalization will lift all boats, right? that but it has. It has and it does, but in the short term, some boats sink.

And so we pushed through, you know, in the last 30 years, under 100% the Clinton administration, the Obama administration, these were very pro-globalization administrations that couldn't then,

or didn't, or couldn't get through Republican Congresses, equal and opposite investments in education and training and retraining and retraining and upskilling and shoring up, hatching the freaking holes in the bottom of the boats in the rural parts of this country that then

went on to vote for Trump. And we're still not doing it. Like, we're still not pairing. What's your silver bullet? You got a silver bullet. You got to act with investment. It's just freaking money. Like, it's got to be the same investment in higher education. Because we spend more than any country. Like we're, we're, we're, what's really off here is our spend is absurdly high per student and our results are, you know, mid at best. So what's your solution? I mean, is that true that we are spending. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you pull up a list of spending per student education table in the world. Yeah. Boom. Nick found it. Okay. The U.S. spends more on education than any other country, but students lag behind academically here. How much? Oh, right now. Yeah. Yeah. This is one I've, I've gone down the rabbit hole. In the U.S. in 2017, we spent 12,800 per student of public education. And then we are U.S. 38th in math and 24th in science

when compared to 71 other countries. It's so pathetic. I mean, that is a polly. Yeah, I, you know, I saw this problem start. We were talking about this in the group chat. I saw this start when I was in high school. Now, I, in 1984, brother Bonte at Severan high school, gave me a 62 average on math.

65 was passing. If you hit 63.5, they would, would let you take like one test. You got like one final thing and you skip school. Brother Bondi decided to teach me a lesson because Jake Al when he was 13, 14, so I was a little bit of a punk. He gave me a 62,

just to send me a message. And my summer was ruined. I had to go to six weeks every day for an hour and a half of math. Every morning, and it was the first class. I'm with you in math summer solidarity. I had to do the same thing for geometry. Now, this was a blessing for me.

Yeah. Because I realized it is up to you to not ruin your summer. You have control over this. So I thank Brother Monty for doing this to me. And then I watched as I hired people when I became a business owner over time, basic arithmetic, math, and writing just, you know, faltered. And people couldn't do basic math. They couldn't do division.

They didn't know how to do a percentage. And I was like, what's going on here? And I think what happens, we just made accommodations and we just passed people instead of forcing people to actually pass. And I think this is the great disservice we've done. So now we're spending all this money, but we're not holding teachers or people accountable. I think it's competition has to come. This has been a failed experiment for three decades, four decades.

I don't know how many decades. It's the only thing I think that does this is a radical amount of competition. I just had a very basic idea. Let me see what you think of this. Okay. Because I know people are very passionate about public school. I don't know where you stand. It's just a really complicated, right?

There's not a silver bullet, but I'm coming around to your competition. I mean, honestly. The only silver bullet I've ever seen in my life is competition. Disruption works. Exactly. So here's my competitive idea. We do an experiment. You don't have to do this in every state.

You can just do this in one state and see how it goes. You can do it in one city. That really has terrible. A city where you have nothing to lose. You just take the four most important tests and you tell private companies, come up with whatever service you want, we'll give you $4,000 a student. It could be in person. You could give them an iPad, a laptop, it could be video cameras. We don't care what it is.

You got $4,000 per student to make these students awesome at math. And you got $4,000 for making these other group of students incredibly, you know, just perfect SAT scores. $4,000 per student. and we're going to give you the ones, you know, in three strata, like bottom, mid, bottom, you know, lowest quartile, second lowest quartile, and then, you know, the middle. And we're going to see how you do for each one. And depending on how many standard deviations, they go up on the standardized testing. I know it's not perfect, but it's something.

That is administered by another company. We will give you an incentive bonus. If they go up one, well, that's what you got the 4K for, but if they go up two, you're going to get an extra 2K per student. And we just make it like a marauding capitalist where some founders go, you know what, some YC founders, launch founders, founders, founder university founders go,

I can solve that problem. I want 6K per student. I'll get every one of those students. I'll get 1,000 students a year from the bottom to the mid. And I'll get $6,000. I make $6 million. I know how to build that software.

I know how to build that live video conference. I'll have every Saturday, every day at 5 to 10 p.m. We'll have online tutors and we'll have tutors from around the world. world would pay them 100 bucks. Whatever it is. Come up with a really good solution.

Yeah. And crush it. Because we're not getting our money's worth anyway. No. And I think we are. I think we're, I think the pandemic could end up being a turning point for education that way. Like you're seeing enrollment tank.

Yes. You know, people are just like, oh, turns out homeschooling works way better. That's a form of competition. It is a, it always takes society longer to get where you want to. him to be than you would or it takes longer than you wish you know it's sort of like like one simple example is now all of a sudden everybody's realizing oh hey if you start school later that's way better for kids it's like what better for their brains and the earlier you start you're talking about time of day they get a literal time of day yeah 10 to 5 would be better 10 to 5 would be perfect for kids

and teenage brains right in their biology but the thing is like I read that in that for economics guy's book 20 years ago before I even had a kid yeah and it's It takes so much longer. Well, not, no, I mean, teachers would like it too. It's parents who are driving to school or to work. Well, they could drop them off and just have them do like exercise or, you know, whatever when they get there. They could do something other than-

Sure, but schools would have to like provide that and da-da-da-da-da, right? Why are schools eight hours a day? Where are they seven hours a day instead of 12? Like, well, exactly. They should be open the whole 12 hours. Like now we're just asking those questions, right? Why are they? And I mean, I'm sorry.

Like, I agree with you. This is an entrenched system. We spend all of this money on schools, but the teachers I know in public school are literally running donors choose fundraisers to get like a new carpet. Because that money is going to administrators and real estate and all of these things

that aren't really, it translates to $15,000 per student. That's not where that money goes. That does not make it on the plate. It's like some restaurant where it doesn't make it on the plate. Right. And teachers are still buying all their own supplies. You know, so it's just like,

this is a busted system. And as much as I respect those teachers, break it down, get Uber in here. No, I mean, the teachers unions are fighting for the rights of their teachers. That's their job. We get it. But at some point, somebody's got to be held accountable here. And is it the administrators? Is it, you know, the machine writ large?

Is it, you know, the teachers unions plus the administrators? Who knows? All you need to know is look at the results at a certain point. I don't want to get into like hand-wringing over who's most at fault. It's a failed system. It's a failed system. That's it. That's all you need to.

know. It is. And I say that with all respect to my sister-in-law, the public school teacher, like I was the auction mom who raised money for my school. I have nothing but respect for the people within the system. It is also a failure. It's a failure. Bull stop. And I'm sure there's corruption in there. I'm sure there's incompetence in there. I'm sure there's a bunch of bureaucrats getting paid twice as much, three times as much as the teachers and doing nothing. That's exactly what's happening. When like the Oakland school superintendent got run out of the district because he had hired 300 fake employees. This was a school that was under state.

This was a district that was under state receivership for decades because it was like bankrupt and all this stuff. Turned out this guy had made up 300 jobs and basically embezzled the money. And you know what he did? Scampered to D.C. and got hired. It's unbelievable. It's not teachers. I mean, there's the union part for sure, but it's not individual teachers.

Like, that's the system. I'm going to get myself canceled here. School vouchers. I know like it's triggering for a lot of people. Oh, public school is going to be a disaster. If parents are not getting a good product for the $16,000 a year, the parents who are suffering the most are the ones who can't afford to go to private school. I guarantee you there's a parent or two who could get together five, ten students.

And if you gave them that 75 or 150K, I bet you they could create a better micro school. Yeah. Because the schools are terrible anyway. So what do we have to lose? Is that, is, you know, what this always comes down to. it so. Right. And honestly, without, I mean, when you look at, like, if you look at the history of South Korea's dominance, like, it's recent dominance, right? It's sort of March to global stage. It all began with a super specific investment in education. All of it. And we just, we got to like,

we have to do that. And you're right. It can't just be like shoveling money. It's got to be a whole system of incentives and outcomes. And yeah. And it's right now, it's, you know, the really sad thing is they're changing. I don't know if so the New York Times story. I didn't read the whole story. I just skimmed it. But there was a story about it, you know, I guess it was a chemistry class and like, who's responsible?

Like, he can't fail students and they're not coming in prepared enough. I hear this all the time. Oh, that professor. Yeah, the professor was like. That was a really, that was more complicated than it appeared. It seemed like a very complicated one. But I do hear anecdotally many times, people come to college. They get in.

Yeah. But they're not prepared. And it's like, we need, this person. needs a year or two of free college. And it's like, well, that should have been high school. It's like, yeah, that system's broken. So the conveyor belt got them into college, the college accepted, and then they wind up failing

on a college. Or they feel like they're stupid because they're sitting next to somebody. And I was that student. I felt stupid sitting next to certain students. And then I just took control of my own destiny. But not everybody has that ability. It's interesting because I think that New York Times story, that university professor story actually goes specifically

to what we were saying a minute ago, is that that is equally likely to have been a massive administration failure in never dealing with because there's no accountability, right? There's the BS tenure thing and then nobody ever does any oversight. And it seems like this might have been like a pretty bad professor with a whole 90s teaching style vibe that was never dealt with administratively. And it took students being like, this is bad. And so you have that, but basically the end result here, and we still agree, busted

system, not working. And we cannot win as a country. without that. It's a disaster. At the end of September, there had only been 158 IPOs in the US this year. That's a 78% drop from last year.

So how are banks and institutions managing their capital? Well, according to a recent McKinsey's study, major institutions typically have 30 to 50% of their portfolios in alternative assets. And, you know, listen, I invest in startups. That's an alternative asset as well. And I've also put a little bit of capital

dipping my toe here into blue chin. art and I'm using Masterworks, the largest investment platform for investing in contemporary art. What they do is pretty simple. They get a, you know, some legendary art piece like Picasso or Monet or Banksy. And you don't need to shell out 20 million. I'm not doing that. I'm not buying a 10, 20 million painting, but I have bought a tiny sliver of one of these paintings. And that's what Masterworks does. And they've delivered an average of 29% net returns to their investors since 2019, according to Masterworks. and they recently had an exit for a 33.1% return in August as volatility rocked the markets, right? So here's your call to action.

There is a huge waitlist to join Masterworks, but you can skip the line and visit Masterworks.com slash twist to do so. Once again, Masterworks.com slash twist to skip the line. They got the dot com. See important regulation A disclosures at Masterworks.com slash CD. But this what's happening in chips I think sometimes things have to break and I think it's such a good point like if you look at the chips thing like people in our government are obviously terrified whatever they know about what's going down in Taiwan or a dependency on this has really shook them and now they're doing this and then in Europe they're like what pipelines can we build to the Middle East is there any country we can get stuff from Biden talking about Biden's good week he's like okay who's a less. abrasive dictator who can get oil from. And it's like, the Venezuelans? I don't know.

They didn't invade any countries. They're not like storming the beaches. Slightly less bad than the Saudis. Right, exactly. Okay, okay, the Saudis are, OPEC was, you know, jerking our chain. Okay, find me another dictator. Find me another dictator who likes money. And let's give them some money.

Now, of course, you don't want to enable another dictator, but I would say, take the strategic reserves. And why are we not tripling them? we're rich. Why don't we triple the reserves? Why don't we have three times as much for the next time this happens? You know, and let's build some more nukes.

Stop shutting them down. So sometimes in a way, we are tripling the reserves by investing in renewable energy, which is going to be decentralized it, right? I mean, we are tripling of reserves in a different kind of way with a massive investment that's very exciting. I feel like, by the way, remember when I was like, did I come here at the worst possible time?

Turns out no. For once in my career, I have perfect timing. Your timing is, a time of investing. Chef's kiss. Chef's Kiss. It is Chef's Kiss timing because, you know, all this money is going to get poured into it on the road to resiliency. We need to be a real.

All countries do. This is the job of the government is to protect the citizens from, you know, unforeseen or things that take planning. You know, chips are going to take decades. Pharmaceuticals are going to take years. And energy is going to take, you know, years to decades, you know, maybe not. It's going to take both, right? There's going to be some stuff that happens in years and some stuff that happens in decades. And the decades is going to be like fusion, but we're moving a hell of a lot faster than we,

thought we were going to. Hey, you know, before we went out of time, we were, last night you sent me this threat. I was at poker and I saw this thread and I got very distracted at poker. Oh, sorry. Wow. I'm just like, oh my lord, you know, this is so dark. and we do need to reserve judgment, of course, on this, because this thread, I couldn't find it in the news.

But the threat has now gone viral, or I would say semi-vile, a couple thousand retweets. So maybe you could fill people in on what's going on with this Amazon lawsuit in the alleged 60 minutes spiking of a story. Yeah. Or CBS News spiking of a story. Yeah, this is one that, you know, full disclosure, we debated whether we should,

talk about because we don't know all the details. We know that this thread appeared from a lawyer, a pretty high profile lawyer who represents a lot of people against big companies. And she wrote an incredibly detailed thread last night about two things. One, how she is involved in a lawsuit on behalf of a family whose son committed suicide. On behalf of someone who committed suicide using chemicals that he bought on Amazon. And the accusation is that starting as far back as April 2021, this law firm started urging Amazon to stop selling what they are terming suicide kits because there's this chemical that, you can buy on Amazon and evidently it's, you know, Amazon's algorithm will recommend you should buy it with this and this and this.

And they've sort of short-handed this to a suicide thing. All right. So here's what you said. Amazon was bundling S-N. This is the chemical. Yeah. It's a salt of some kind. And obviously.

Sodium nitrate. So Amazon was building. I was sort of dodging it because I don't want anybody to go and buy it. Okay. So just as a point of order here, trigger warnings. if you, we're going to talk about suicide, self-harm. And if you are considering making a terrible decision, please get help, call, you're loved,

and nobody wants to see you go. So just get help immediately if you have any kind of thoughts. Even if it's just in the periphery, you're worthy of talking to somebody, and we love you, and we don't want you to hurt yourself. But we need to talk about this because this is important stuff. So Amazon was bundling SN. This is a specific chemical with other products

to basically create a suicide kit. Okay, so now this is a claim. And we all know how that bundling works. You're buying guitar strings. And it says, hey, do you want these picks? And do you want this guitar tuner, right? It's a very nice feature on Amazon. It's algorithmic, I believe.

I don't think that they have, maybe they have a human look at it afterwards. Who knows? But I do think that those bundles are algorithmic. I think so. In this case, we should point out, they probably are. In this case, the recommendation was that the purchaser of SN also by Tagamette, which is to avoid vomiting up the poison. So a chemical to keep down the chemical.

A personal use scale to measure the proper quantity. And the Amazon edition of the Peaceful Pill Handbook, a suicide manual with an entire chapter on how to die by S.N. This was the bundle that people would be recommended when they go and search for this product. So they were like, you should stop that. According to this lawyer, again. I am, yeah. And the next piece of this is she's claiming CBS.

News was going to do a story on this and spite. So these are a legend. And, you know, we, so we just want to be careful here, but we want you to know about this news because this is obviously going to become a bigger story. Goldberg says Amazon lawyers from Perkins, that's a very famous law firm, told them Amazon would continue to sell SN because they can't be held liable if someone uses one of their products for suicide. Okay. I think she's saying this is a, that fundamentally that Amazon's lawyers, according to Carrie Goldberg, the lawyer for the family, determine that this is effectively like a content moderation issue,

like a 230. That if just because this exists on Amazon site and is algorithmically bundled with these other things, does not make Amazon responsible if someone uses it to commit suicide. Yeah. So. So then she says, yes, that they were going to,

they had been in contact with 60 minutes, that they were going to do a story about this, that she had, you know, sought repeated assurances from the producers at CBS that they would actually run with this because it's so painful for these families to talk about having lost someone to suicide, but that then they got to a certain point and CBS called and basically said, we're not going to do the story. And it seems like this keeps happening, allegedly again, you know, all this is going to be shaken out and we'll get the final truth here. And from the other side, directly from then, I'm sure.

And some press will probably cover this, you know, in detail and do some problems. research here. A few days after receiving a response from Amazon Goldberg says another person a 17-year-old named Tyler took his own life using this SN bought off Amazon. We did some, our producers just did some basic research on it on Amazon and reading the reviews. Seems like people are using it for reef tanks for coral preservation in the comments. Refining precious metals less mentioned than the things. And when our producers went to the page, its kit was for coral reef stuff. So perhaps there are actual uses for this. So I, this is one of these very tough situations where there might be uses for this that are justified. And then there might be,

you know, some other unforeseen technical ramifications like bundling things that shouldn't be bundled with it. And so. Primarily, we wanted to flag this. Because I suspect that this is not the last we're going to hear about this story. It is fundamentally a very similar question to many of the, you know, we talk about this in the context of social media all the time, but everything is content and everything is moderation. And if, and even AI generated content, if that, if indeed an algorithm generated this bundle that people saw when they searched for this is, is kind of up for debate in this way. And also, it's an absolutely horrible story, right? It's just got, it's, a very well-crafted and very detailed threat about something that is 100% going to get a lot more attention.

So we just wanted to like plant the flag that. Yeah, we don't know. We don't know. Yeah. And, you know, attorneys, you know, act as a backstop in society in some cases to find these edge cases and make sure that they're solved. Other times, you know, they could be chasing a payday. We're open to all possibilities here, but we wanted to talk about it. I mean, I do remember this happened with Google.

Right, exactly. People were typing into Google search, hey, how do I do this self-harm thing? And Google came up with, it became like a very intense discussion in the early 2000s. You must have covered it at CNN or remember that discussion. And what they did was this wonderful thing. The industry got together and decided, you know, it would be good? People typed this stuff in to put a suicide hotline up there. Exactly.

And then to put stories and direct people to areas where they can get help. Same thing happened at Wikipedia. People were looking for methods and techniques to do bad things. And they came together as a group and said, okay, we can't not have a page on the topic of suicide. So we're going to have a thoughtful way of directing people who might be at that page for a wrong reason. Because some people might be at the page for an academic reason. But there also might be people for the coral reef reason. And you just have to think it through.

also it's terrible and it's really heartbreaking heartbreaking but you know I'm assuming the people at Amazon have good faith I would just I'm assuming that like I don't know but they should definitely get out there in front of this and figure it out

and then also CBS like really they're I can't say I'm surprised about that at all yeah you worked at CBS right was CNET owned by CBS when you were there CNET was owned by CBS I'm not surprised I mean I will tell you I was aware of similar Amazon's,

Amazon is very aggressive with news outlets. Oh, really? Very aggressive. In fact, I, at the New York Times, know someone who was kind of taken off the beat because of sustained pressure. They didn't like the beat reporter.

Amazon used their influence to pressure, pressure, pressure. Hmm. Yeah. Very aggressive. Wow. Yeah. So I'm not, I'm not in the least, and CBS is a media outlet.

that's, you know, I mean, I'm not, yeah, I could see that happening. I could imagine that happening. And it's, it sort of ends up being this like doubly disappointing thing. Well, I mean, if you don't know the Jeffrey, uh, we got, weigand, uh, 60 minutes, right? You can look that up, but it was the, um, what was the movie? Uh, the, the insider. Really amazing movie about tobacco. And so, you know, this doesn't feel like a big tobacco level scandal, but it definitely

Um, yeah, the insider's incredible film. Have you seen that? Russell Crow? No. Yeah, maybe. Oh, you got to watch it this weekend. I mean, anybody, if you haven't ever, if you've never seen this movie, I think it's like Russell Crow's best performance along with Gladiator. Um, he put, he, basically he plays the, uh, person who did the research on how bad tobacco was for you. And then, you know, his research got canned and then. Oh, yeah. He was the, he was the original whistleblower. Yes, totally. I have seen that. Um, but maybe clearly I need to watch. watch it again. Um, so anyway, all right. Now Twitter is the, the, uh, the whistleblowing platform of choice in some ways. It is where, uh, yeah, it's a very important platform, I understand. And yeah, it's very important that we keep that platform, you know, operationally tight.

Let's make a, let's make a hard tone turn here. Okay, let's do it. Yes. Sorry. Um, because it is Friday, that is all the news we have for you today. We will be keeping an eye on that story over the weekend and beyond. But right now, we got okay boomer. We got, um, me and on to co-founders of this community group called Versi, joining Rachel this week on OK Boomer. Versi is this really interesting experiment that kind of goes back to our education conversation.

They're trying to build a physical space and community for college-age kids, age 18 to 25, who are not going to college. Listen, if you're a founder or an employee at a startup, it's critical that you become capital efficient. Fundraising is tough right now. So cutting burn is really important. And one great way to cut costs is to run all of your. your SaaS apps on one platform, and that's Odu.

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and Odo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. So go to Odu.com slash twist for $1,000 off. that is O-D-O-O-O-O-com slash T-W-I-S-T. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you so much, Ami and On for coming on this segment of OK Boomer.

Ami and On are two of the co-founders of Versi, which was the first place that has ever asked me to moderate, which was awesome. A ton of people I know have been talking about Versi. They've been talking about going to co-work at your guys' space. and I'm sure with New York City Tech Week coming up, you guys are going to be talked about a lot more. So I thought this is probably a really good time to have you on. So again, thank you guys.

Howdy, howdy? Thanks for having us. So first things first, what is Versi? Because I know it's not just a co-working space. Basically, short TLDR is that behind every progress-driven dynamic society has been a library-like institution that serves as kind of like a cultural, Collision Hub that ends up

catalyzing a lot of this debate and learning and community and academic growth. So like examples of this have been the Greeks with Acropolis or India with Nalanda the Bauhaus Library in Germany. But currently

there aren't that many kind of library like institutions. Today, universities and schools are not really able to fulfill this role in society as much. and we're in the age of a lot of self-directed learning, a lot of dropouts, a lot of entrepreneurship, there's a lot of free information that's being democratized. The classic example that On gives a lot is kind of like MIT courses

being available to a lot of people now, which is before they were only available at MIT. And so we kind of want to build libraries of future where we have kind of a new learning environment that blets community with physical sports, resources and digitalized programming and kind of be able to build these libraries all across the world, basically these cultural collision hubs in every city. So I have a question about you're talking about libraries here, right?

So when I think of libraries, I'm a part of the New York City Public Library. It offers like a ton of things outside of just renting books. I rent audiobooks through their app. They host like events that you can go to. They offer free resources. is what makes you guys different than somebody wanting to be a part of something like a community library in a city? Yeah. So like for context, Amman and I both kind of dropped out.

All of our friends dropped out, but our own companies, built her own sort of like successful projects, organizations on the side that grew into our entire careers and livelihoods. And one thing that we noticed we were missing was just like this, the kind of support, the kind of like socialization, in the kind of community that exists within something like college or something like,

basically like a community of like like minded people that are all working together to achieve something, right? Like we had no resources to, I guess, drop out or chase this like unconventional path. Whereas in college, if you're on a conventional path, you have teachers, you have tutors, you have peers on the same wavelength and try to bounce ideas on each other to go reach the same goals. But if you're someone that wants to start their own company, what do you do? Like you go to an incubator, maybe.

But a lot of the stuff that I guess college provides could be reshaped and reformed in this new age of like infinite learning, infinite information of individual career paths, right? So instead of a library where you just get books or where you get like maybe some programming, you get, say you're starting a faster brand. The ideal version of diversity is like you have a vision or a goal of your life and a passion and mission that is not catered to you via traditional means. but you still want to pursue it. So we'll help you with basically the infrastructure to drop out to chase that dream. So examples like a fashion brand. We'll find you fashion mentors or find you, help you build like a manufacturing base,

help you do all these things that are aligned. And we can help you on an individual basis rather than like a cookie cutter. Like you go through school, you go through a curriculum. What we have the most experience in is like startups and like tech entrepreneurship. So like if you come into our program, we'll help you find investors. will help you find talent, we'll help you, like, coach you, like, all of us to build tech companies. We can all help each other build tech companies and kind of like mentor each other. It's much more like the infrastructure to chase your own path rather than it's just like

another building of books and some social life program. Yeah. This is such a good idea. I did graduate from college. I feel like I'm an anomaly in the little tech world. I don't meet that many people that go to college, nor do I meet that many people who went to state school. I went to Penn State. I loved it. And one of the big reasons why I liked it was that community factor that you're talking about. Because the school really is kind of in the middle of

nowhere. There's not too much happening around it, except for the beautiful talent of State College, Pennsylvania. You really do have to like engage in the school. Whereas if you went somewhere like NYU, you're surrounded by the city. So your community looks a little bit different. I think having these like focused communities. First off, I think they're motivating. I was around a bunch of other people. It also really enjoyed their time at Penn State. My college was called IST, and a lot of people aspire to do things like in the tech industry. So that's really nice. But also kind of like you're talking about with the infrastructure of like the mentorship, you have that in a college. And I never really thought about that how, of course, a ton of our friends have been

able to drop out, start companies. But finding that mentorship is a ton harder when you're surrounded by kids that are our age and not people that have had experience. Are the people giving this mentorship and this advice, people that are our age or are they people that have maybe like a few more years under their belt? Like, where are these mentors coming in apply? It's kind of both, right? So when you think about college, like, I think you get the main value of like instruction information from two different sources. One is like the professors that are just like, this is their domain expertise, right? People that have seen a million iterations of the subject and they can guide you along like the broad strokes. But then the second

value of college and like, I think the main value proposition of college is actually the community in the network that you build. It's just people, the peers you learn from and, like, the people on a similar ambition and path that you can kind of align and go together with, right? Like, Ami and I have been in hacker houses where we're all just, like, building together. Like, I don't know how to, maybe like position its widget or something. And someone that's sitting across the table with me is like, oh, I know how to do this. It's a very easy fix here.

So I think it's two-fold, right? Like, if you assemble the right amount of people together, that's already miracle in itself and you can already create a lot of magic. It's like Spark at SC or like Stanford's Archerynomerate Club. If you put the right people together, they'll make a lot of magic anyway. And then the second form of that is like, while that's super valuable, you also would benefit a lot from people that have just like seen a bunch of reps. Like just like like VPs that important companies that just like want to show you like the,

they've just seen enough. You know, it's a different kind of mentorship that someone's super experience like that offers. So I would say both. got you that's awesome and with these like spaces it almost reminds me you already mentioned hacker house it's about to say this reminds me of like an extended hacker house but it also kind of reminds me of like co-living spaces so we recently had on ben from goalhouse and goal houses this really awesome like co-living space do you guys ever see like first in the future getting even into like co-living or do you think these libraries and these like communal working spaces are really where

your focus is. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, like lifestyle is something that we're focused on. So like right now, we're really not focused on co-living, but eventually maybe we'll think about it. I think what matters most to us is creating these collision spaces. So whether it be in living scenarios or whether it be in working or, you know, while you're reading or while you're just meeting other people, we just want to create those kinds of spaces. And the best way to do that right now, in our opinion is to be able to build these kind of library like spaces for other people. And so we're not kind of like crossing it off. And I have a huge background actually in their living.

But for now, we're not. We're not also pursuing it full time or not. So I guess that has to, I can bring up the how you and I met actually. I met Ami in a really cool way. I was at Miami Hack Week and Ami had a house of people, which was really awesome. And I was like, who organized this? And I thought going into. your house. I was like, oh, this must have been like, I don't know, like a company and organization.

I didn't know that it was kids under the age. Like, some people are teenagers by, you know, when they're setting up these houses at Miami Hack Week. And I'm not sure if it's just that hack week where in particular, where it's people that young setting up houses. But you, you have a ton of experience. And not only setting up co-living spaces, but setting up events. And, you know, now with Versi, like, this really does seem like such a natural path. So it's really cool seeing you get into this. I think this is a really cool time to mention your background and on's background, because you both have really, really cool things behind you. And this, I don't want to say Versi seems like expected, but it really makes sense that you guys are part of, you know,

making this happen. Yeah, I can give like a really brief background. And also I think, some other team members and some other members on our team also have like a really interesting background. So I want to highlight that as well. But, I grew up between Tokyo and New York, attended actually public school in both places. I actually didn't really touch tech most of the time. I went to music school and to talker, and that was kind of my main focus for most of my life. I then kind of emerged into tech, end of high school, beginning of college, and originally started working in startups just to pay the bills.

But then kind of started building a lot of these student entrepreneurship communities. communities, help build and scale a bunch of ed tech SaaS startups and kind of getting into the group of these growth in community roles. And then for the last two, two and a half years, I've literally just been doing a lot of these like community type roles. What does it be launching digital communities for like politicians or celebrities or setting up like a bunch of hacker houses like you mentioned or content houses or working with a bunch of consumer companies, it's all been kind of around, like, how do we empower young builders and creators and just people who are ambitious and are dreamers.

So that's been like the last two years, three years from me. And I dropped out of school at some point while I was doing all of that. Very cool. And on, how about you? Did you have any time? Mine, very abbreviated version in high school, I started to mention a program for, low-income students, about 100 people, starting about 1,000 or so low-income students around Kansas, Nevada, then went to Northeastern kind of studied like five different things at once.

And I actually went on a co-op program. So Northeastern has this really cool thing where it's like, it's very experiential focus. Like every student goes on like two to three co-ops, which are like six-month internships instead of going to school for a semester. And I ended up going on a co-op at JPL in L.A. And instead of going back to school, I just dropped out and started my own company. And I started the company online on Discord and I had to learn all that other stuff on my own. It was really fun. So I recently left that company because I didn't find a sense of a community of like young people to build with.

Like I kind of miss like being at school or being with like my group of like hacker houses. I just like building with young people. Like I need that energy. I need that ambition and drive. And it's just like it's different. And it's like a lot harder to do alone, especially like COVID was happening. It was a lot harder to do alone and with like, I guess, older people. And so I kind of just like focused on building with my friends after leaving that.

And on me was working on this thing. And I was like, hey, like this sounds really interesting. I want to help out. And we kind of found ourselves kind of like facing the same problems. Like young builders are not properly networked. They have no idea what to do. It's really easy to help them. You just connect them and kind of show them what we've learned in the past year or two,

give them really cool experiences because, like, we're young. Like, we're all broke and, like, it's pretty easy to the police. Like, if you put us all in a hacker house in Miami, like, that's sick. Like, that's, like, a lot of value. And a lot of magic happens there as well. And so that's kind of how I came across. And I started working on podcasts of, like, young builders. And nowadays, I just, like, focus on how to help young people work on stuff that really matters

instead of the more traditional paths that they are, I guess, forced to do, usually. Yeah. Very. And you, I have to say, you have one of the coolest websites, personal websites. I always joke that, you know, the easier, like, not even joke, this is pretty serious. I'm like, yeah, the more simple, the website, the easier it is for somebody to, like, go and remember it, obviously. So it bugs me sometimes when I see dot XYZ. And I know now it's pretty popular, but at the time, like two years ago, when I,

first really started seeing people use XYZ, I was like, oh, use use.com. Yours is just on a.n.com, which is nuts. Yeah. And you guys have versi.com. How the head? How did you guys get that URL? No people. Like, that's crazy.

Do you have to buy that off somebody? Yeah, we did buy the Versa de Man on so on, but the It's not versi dot com, is it? Yes. It is. That's true. Oh my gosh, that's nuts. But it is an award. So, like, it's a bit cheaper. Like, it feels like, I don't know. Universe.com, it'd be a lot harder to find.

But since it's not an actual word, it's like sounds like a officialish word, it's a lot easier to get. And actually, on. Doon.avu is like from some, like, island country that I've no idea existed before this. I just look at dot view, see if it existed. And it was like, when I first signed up for it, it was like, the domain register page was like in pure HTML, like, Vino HTML and not styled at all.

I was like, this is the sketchiest thing, but if I can get on. dot Vood, that'd be that my life would be made. And so I put my credit card in and like hope for the best and it actually, it actually penned out. So I'm like looking right now to see if there's rachsh. . . Like, EL, that sounds like it might be a domain. All right after, but like that is really cool.

So very cool that you guys got the domain for, for Versi, but you said this already, Versi is not a real word. I did some research before and there's some stuff that's like kind of correlated with it but I'm like okay like what is why versity what does it mean and why did you choose it? Yeah I can there's there's two

thoughts around this one is we were really shooting for like thinking about a lot of universities and how can we innovate on traditional higher education and so universities and cities is something that we're like thinking about a lot as well in networks it's and so the combination of the two was something that like we thought might be interesting.

So we see is kind of that natural progression. The second funnier part of that story is we actually cross-checked with like SEO. And we also cross-checked with a bunch of other things, but essentially used GPT3 to generate Versi. No way. And yeah. That's so, okay. That is so 20-22.

Yeah. So we just like, yeah, literally use GPT3. and versus you is one of the results and it made the most sense in terms of like branding and also SEO and also the domain was super cheap for like dot com and everything else as well. We were able to negotiate

that down and yeah but it also just made sense in the broader sense of kind of tackling this non-traditional pathway for higher education. Yeah so like what next thing you're going to tell me is like Dali made your guys his freaking logo out here.

How many people are actually behind your company? So we have four full-time people right now and just an amazing team of part-time people as well. So we're around four people. And then just like amazing community members and amazing friends and just a village of people who are just empowering us and empowering us

and in the space all the time and contributing. So yeah, can't do it without them. I'm super grateful for that. Thank you. Yeah, I love going to your guys' co-working space. I've been there now. Like I said, you guys were the first people that ever asked me to moderate anything,

which has been cool. Love seeing people that come out to, to listen, like this last time. Okay, Boomer guest previously, Jules'rpec, she's come on twice now. I was a really good friend of mine and really knowledgeable in this space. And one thing that I noticed about the people

that even came and listened is nobody was on their phone when we were talking, which felt really, really cool. So you guys are obviously bringing in some pretty engaged people. Or maybe Jules and I and Clio had a lot of good things to say. But regardless, I think you're just so interesting. Yeah, that's it.

Maybe you're just a killer of moderation. Maybe it's like an amazing moderator. You guys have great people coming in. They're serious about what they're doing. They're really respectful. The space is awesome. It almost gives me, I would say, like, we works give off like millennial vibes. Like you go and I'm like, oh, man, this gives me like, I don't know.

it's obviously different. If you're younger and for me, like I graduated during the pandemic, so working from home and it is nothing crazy because I've never worked from an office. So when I go to a we work and I see people that are going to Weworks because they, a lot of them miss, you know, going into the office and this is pretty broadly speaking, I don't feel that. Like I like working from somewhere that's not my bedroom, obviously, but like I don't have that need to like go into an office.

So a lot of the things that are catered in WeWorks to like replicate that office feeling, I never had. So going to Versi in some place that people understand that. Like I never worked like I had like a call booth but other than that like I don't really know what I want in an office space. You know, you guys really are awesome with hosting

events and doing game nights and other things and for tech week coming up, do you guys have anything planned? Yeah, a lot planned. So we're doing like co-working every day and so we're opening up our unique Squarespace for kind of broader community to be able to come in and use it doing kind of off times or times they need

to work in between events and stuff. But yeah, we're also doing like a bunch of events. So doing like a panel with GC and TMV. We're doing like a salon about network states and community calling it Citizenship 2.0. We're doing like a lunch with Brex and Republic and dinners and everything in between. Yeah. Yeah, so we're excited about it. Are you going to be there? Oh, you know it. You know I'm going to be there. And where is people? wanted to sign up for Versi or see your events. Is there a Twitter page or a website they can go to?

Yeah, so Twitter is Versi at Versi social. And our website is Versi.com. So that's V-E-R-C-I.com. And on the top left, you'll also see New York Tech Week. And so we have a whole page around New York Tech Week, but also our season zero that's launching soon. Your season what? Zero.

Oh, that's kind of cool. So what's season zero? Essentially, we're experimenting with a few months season. So it's kind of like a huge founding membership season where people not only kind of get access to the space 24-7, but we're really kind of honing in on a lot of the programs that we're speaking about a lot of the mentorship resources and capital portals and everything in between that we've spoken about.

So building that out and building that out with our community and with people is kind of what season there is mostly focused on. Oh, that's so exciting. So really pumped to see you guys during an on. I know you are not based in New York. You're based out anywhere that's not New York, L.A., so you bounce in Asia. Where are you right now?

You're in New York right now? Oh, but you'll be in here. L.A. right now, but yeah, I'm in New York all the time, so I'm sure I'll see you guys. Awesome. And if people wanted to connect with you two about events or, you know, checking out the Versi space, where can they find you guys?

My Twitter is on dot Voo, but the dot is bowed on. So, A-N-D-O-T-V-U. Versi is that Versi social? And then Ami has a... Yeah, my Twitter is just mindful name. So it's Ami-Y-O-S-H-I-M-U-R-A, that's A-M-R-A, at the underscore, I think is at the end. Amazing.

Well, thank you guys so much for coming on. super excited to see what's up with Tech Week and can't wait to go see at the Versa Clubhouse again. Amazing. Thank you for having us. Oh, one more thing. Let's hear it.

If this sounds like you, if you're a young builder looking for some of these resources, this kind of community, our website is versi.com, V-R-C-I.com slash apply is where you can apply to join season one or season zero right now. So is there an age gap or anything?

Oh, yeah. we're just getting younger. So 18 to like 24, 26-ish. There's like, there's still a lot of magic in the young builder that isn't, that kind of gets, gets messy when you have older and different life situations involved. Got you. So young people, 25, 26. Okay.

Yeah. Awesome. Also, our DMs are open. Our DMs are open at any time. Of course. Amazing. So, yeah. Hi.

Great. Thanks, guys.