This Week in Startups - VCs hiring Twitter ghostwriters, Meta's XR plan, Netflix's ad tier & more | E1586

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Friday variety! First up J+M cover a wide range of topics, including VC ghostwriters (12:45), firms investing in public tech companies (22:29), and news lightning round! (34:51) Then, Producer Rachel is back with another edition of OK Boomer. (53:30) (0:00) J+M tee up today's topics! (2:45) J+M talk about happy hour, discuss some All-In topics, geopolitics, markets and more! (11:42) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (12:45) VCs are hiring ghostwriters on Twitter! (21:10) Assure - To get 20% off your first Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) visit https://Assure.co/twist (22:29) WSJ reports that VCs are investing in growth-stage public tech companies rather than late-stage private startups (33:25) House of Macadamias - Get 20% off at https://houseofmacadamias.com/twist by using code TWIST20 (34:41) Lightning round: Decentraland's usage stats, use cases for Meta's new AR headset, Netflix announces ad-supported tier launch date and price (50:22) Producer Rachel joins to tee up this week's OK Boomer! (53:20) Cliff Lerner joins to discuss his new social startup Saturdays

Hey, everybody, hey everybody. It's Friday. We're going to have a couple of drinks, Molly and I. It's been that kind of week, slash month, slash quarter, slash year. So why not? We pop some bottles. And we're starting off with some VC talk.

There is a story about VCs hiring ghost riders for thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to write their tweets. And then really interesting story, Molly, about VCs investing, VCs like Sequoia and Indracian Hart, investing in publicly traded companies now, because, hey, maybe it's a great opportunity. or they can't find great late stage deals for their growth funds. Yeah, use this bounce along the bottom to scoop up the companies you wish you had invested in the first time around.

Seems like it. It's some make goods. Yeah, some make goods. Very interesting. Then we're going to dive into a little bit of Metaverse talk with a possible warning for founders. It turns out that at least one highly capitalized and got a lot of press startup, Metaverse startup, Decentraland doesn't have that many daily users. Let's just put it that way. It's a little rough, a little rough.

And they, you know, these Web3 projects sometimes. they have incredible sales when they sell the land or the tokens of the NFTs and then they don't actually have user adoption and that's really put in the cart before the horse

you're making the money and then you're trying to get product market fit. It's usually better the other way around. Finally, Netflix has got their ad tier out and I think this might even

be worthy of a jay trade, dare I say. Dun, dun, dun, we'll know soon enough. And then Rachel comes on just got another segment of O.K. Boomer to talk to Saturday founder Cliff Lerner

and this idea that just keeps coming around of just using your location to find your friends. So simple. Yeah. Every two or three years, another company tries to take a stab bit at this, and we'll see if this year,

if it actually works, it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Odo 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 Odo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's ODO.com slash twist. Assure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5,000 completed transactions and $2.5 billion under administration. Twist listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at Assure.com slash twist. That's ashore.c.co slash twist. And House of Macadamias is the next big health trend.

Get 20% off your first purchase at House of Macadamias.com slash twist by using code Twist 20. All right, everybody, it's Friday. Molly and I are ready to get this party started. Cheers, Molly. Cheers. Plink. Yeah. We're having a little happy hour taping.

I have to tell you my man Chimov, he got me into this Vincanto. I like how you say his last night. We've heard of him. Yeah. We know who you mean.

This is Castellan Villa. It's an Italian Vincanto, which is essentially like a dessert wine. You know, fortified dessert wines, ports and those kind of things. I am a big fan of these. And he put me onto this one. And then, you know, like my friends are apt to do,

he sent me like a case of them. It was very nice of them. It's not absurdly expensive. and, you know, in terms of the Chamothalough seller, but, you know, very nice to get a case of those. And I like to sip it. It takes me a little while to get through a bottle, but since it's fortified, it lasts a little while, like a port bottle of less. Are you drinking something special or just like a $5? Just like, you know what?

Come on, it's like $14. I love a $13 to $20. Like, if you buy a California wine between $13 and $20 is going to be good. Yeah, that is actually true. Yeah, it's just a red blend. I love a red blend. Nice. I'm not going to buy a case of it, but it's just working great.

Now, I see you're not at home in the normal studio. Where are you? It's true. I'm having a digital nomad adventure. I am just a little bit east of San Diego. I'm in Southern California. I can see the Salt and Sea from here. Oh, wow.

What's weird about that is that it's a super like mountain cabin. We're in the mountains, like up a little bit high. It's like a girl's trip. I came here because I had read that it has amazing fall foliage. which I'm sure that it does a month from now. They got you. They got you. So I'm like, yeah,

it's beautiful Green Valley. I'm glad. You know, it's nice that we have this nomadic lifestyle and, yeah, nice. Get a little weekend for yourself and your girlfriends.

I love it. I just tape the 100th episode of the All In podcast. Quite nice. I think it's going to be a big head. It was good. We were like in a very loving, you know,

it was kind of like an anniversary. You're kind of thinking about all the good time. and one of my co-hosts there, David Sacks, if you've heard of him, Kraft Ventures. He's very passionate about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. God, I keep saying the. We were raised on it.

It's hard to shake. It's a hard to shake, yeah, thing. I am aware of it and I'm working on it, so I correct myself every time, like I'm sure a million other people do every day. But it was an interesting moment because I asked him three times, three, one, two, three, do you support

the United States forcing Zelinsky and Ukraine to the table in order to get a negotiate settlement before this becomes to World War III

and you haven't heard it yet it's being edited as we tape this and it was a you can handle the truth moment where Sacks says we're the daddy we're America these are our weapons

and it was like a real profile and courage of him saying like, you know, put aside how we all think about this. It's very hard to understand what's going on over there. There's a lot of history. This is a very complicated issue. Obviously, I'm no expert on this stuff. You know, and, you know, he's added some expertise,

but a very interesting moment in time where he put his foot down and said, that's it. You know, like, I think we have to force a settlement here and say, listen, by this date, you can do what you want as Ukraine. But, you know, we need you to. settle this, you know, and we're not going to endlessly fund this war through weapons. I think it's going to be a pretty interesting moment on the internet. Looking forward to hearing it. It will be many interesting moments on the internet.

I'm sure. I'm sure. A lot of chit chat on the internet about a certain collection of guys and their sudden expertise, let's just say. Well, you know, it's one of the things I encourage people is, you know, to start their own podcast. If they have strong feelings, I think podcasts are a great medium. And I also encourage people when we're talking about capital allocation on that podcast, markets, finance, macro economics even, startup certainly, poker on the margins to delight and absorb, take notes even on our expertise. And then for other topics, you are welcome to join the discussion as civilians and participate as you see fit.

Yeah. If you could get like a little sting, you know how sometimes we say, is not investment advice. Exactly. You get a like, this is not geopolitical advice, except that it totally is. Speaking of which,

you know, as a former market commentator, as co-hosts of Marketplace, feels like the market is, uh, bouncing along the bottom, huh? Big inflation print today.

It is, yeah, big, I know. That was disappointing. I think it probably puts the lie sounds harsh. I think it will probably prove any wrong. He said in a crypto roundtable.

He thought that the, the Fed raise would be. 50 bips instead of 75? No. No chance. No chance. That's off the table. It's 75, if not, a full point.

I see here, it's a one in five chance of that. Oh, my Lord. I do think this is like bouncing along the bottom. I think so too. I think we will have one to two years of negative impacts. My friend who I'm here with today is the big wig in the content and media space and has been saying, you know, she's like, I expect our business to improve roughly a year from now. spring of 2020

is when kind of, you know, like, I think you said advertising is like the first to go and the first to bounce back. Maybe you said that. It'll be first to go. Advertising first to go and then slow to bounce back. And then if you, there seems to be a series of, you know, capitulation in the markets, you know, and some things are a little bit sticky like housing we talked about here many times.

People can live in houses. So unlike their holdings in crypto or in a, the growth stock and Peloton. You know, they can get out of their Peloton stock. They can sell their Bitcoin. You know, your house takes a big considered sale. You got to find a buyer, all that stuff. So those things tend to take a little while.

The thing that's very interesting to me is we had a million two jobs, I think, burn off in August. We'll see what happened in September shortly. Those numbers are trailing. But that was a big amount of burnoff there. And I think the Fed really wants to see jobs correct. And in order for jobs to correct, you know, where would you look for a bellwether for that I think you look to Microsoft,

Google, and Apple and other companies that have so much money, they don't need to do a Rift. And we've talked about the gentleman's rift here on this bottom many times. But you are hearing the saber rattling, right? You hear Sundar saying, like, hey, we've got to be more efficient. You got Apple

saying you got to come back to work, you know, knowing that 5% of people will quit when you do that. So it does feel like we're in the endgame. Chimoth feels similar. I think so, too. It doesn't, I don't, I mean, we should be clear when we say we're bouncing along the bottom that that the bottom is in some ways the beginning of the pain, right? It's the beginning on who you are.

The Fed is inflicting this pain now. The indicators of the pain will be trailing, meaning that the pain will get more intense. Like the beatings are not going to stop immediately. 75-bip or God help us, one, basis point raise, would be, would cause a lot, will cause a lot more pain. Either of those,

will cause a lot more pain. So it's sort of like, if we're at the bottom now, then there's going to be the plateau. I think that's right. It's a long, slow climb out. Low tide will happen. And when low tide happens,

you know, we're not going to be able to surf the big waves anymore, but it's at least not going to, you know, I think it's going to be prolonged bottom. I agree with that too. So I'm thinking about some J-trades. I was watching Amazon seems to, I don't know if you're sorry,

Andy Jassy some of his comments leaked I guess or some of his notes and he said listen we're going to do more with less and we're not going to have hiring freezes and we're going to get rid of people and I encourage you to think like a startup

and basically be more gritty I think that's exactly what the market needs is for those companies to say we're going to try to give people growth and show people we can grow and have great earnings even in a down market so as I told one founder today you are in the show me market

not the tell me market. You have to show good results or else you're not going to get funded. Because they were wondering, she was like, hey, how come I'm not getting funded? And I said, well, do you have a 10-week chart that shows increases of 2, 3, 4, 5% week over week? Yes or no, no. Okay, stop everything you're doing and just make that happen if you want to get funding or find a path to break in profitability. Are you sick and tired of huge SaaS bills? I know I am.

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Yeah, well, in all this chaos, there's Mushugina. I don't know if you saw this story. I love that. I saw this story and I was like, what? And then Matt Levine wrote about it and I was like, wait, is this real? I think it is. I think it is. Why don't you cue it up and then I'll drink my little Vincanto here.

Explain this, Mishugina to me. I mean, I will do my best. Okay, so an anonymous writer told business insider, that they made $200,000 last year ghostwriting tweets for venture capitalists. This ghostwriter claims that he can write a tweet that gets as many as four million impressions, can't we all? His clients accounts range from 2,000 to 200,000 followers. He says he takes on about 20 to 25 clients at a time and spends five hours a week on it,

notes that the smaller clients end up paying more because they're the ones who need the distribution and prices have ranged from a $100,000 threads to $100 single tweets, or this person claims some VCs just pay per month. It's like a retainer. They charge $5 to $10,000 a month to write 10 original tweets, and the rates go up from there because every VC wants to be you and me. Basically. Yeah, I mean, they always said Aaron from Box had a writer or a team writing his tweets because he's so funny.

It just turns out he's actually funny and witty. I don't think he has a writer. I think he might have somebody who edits with him, like on his comms team or whatever, Aaron from Box, who, by the way, just lets the producer's taken out. I saw Aaron the other week

when Molly and I did our side chat, we should have him on the pod soon. We should. It's not crazy to think that somebody would put a ghost writer on retainer for blogging. That's a thing.

And so why not for tweets? It makes total sense. 20-25 VCs seems like a lot. The $100,000 for one thread, I don't buy that. I don't think that's a correct number. Maybe the journalist transcribed it incorrectly. But yeah, I can see people paying $5,000 a month for a retainer.

Who cares if you're a VC? You probably have like $100, $200K budget to do content or to travel to events or whatever. I mean, it does. Let's assume it's true. Let's just like stipulate that we think this is true. Sure, it's true. What does it say to us about how important it is to have effectively a content marketing strategy, no matter what your product is,

even if your product is, you as an investor, you as a firm. Like, would this ever have happened before? If you're a new VC, if you're a new VC, you need deal flow. So how do you get deal flow is the question.

People have watched me blog, they watch me do podcasting. They saw other people like Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, and Bradfell were in that early VC investor podcasting, and then podcasting. And so I think people have said, you know,

it's kind of a prerequisite to have some social content marketing strategy. It's not. I think actually I would think it's kind of the opposite right now. I think since it's so flooded, I think actually just being old school, if I was going to do it, I would just do meetings with other investors constantly

to try to make deal flow and then, you know, tweet like maybe not that often. But sure, I think there's, one of the nice things about social media is there's a scorecard, likes, retweets, follows. And so you do see, you know, folks, we had Mac the VC, on here and he created a following and then raised a fund off of it. So it's definitely a strategy.

I look at Twitter as like the new, uh, you know, conference circuit. It's a new circuit where you would meet people, Bill Dilflow, meet LPs, and instead you don't have to leave your house. And so people now perfected it. The thread is like, for me, I don't do threads anymore because it's kind of like the thread of death. I find it like, oh God. When I see that thread logo, I'm just like, oh my lord, who wrote this? And like, what startup advice is this that it's commodified. I think there's a lot of commodified startup advice

and so when you're, the bigger important thing, Molly, for me is how should founders take all this advice? And I think they should take it with a grain of salt. Write it in a book maybe if it sounds notable,

but you know, you need to get advice from people who've actually done the job. Yeah. Built a company or done the SEO or done the whatever it is, the specific thing you're trying to do. It does make me wonder

about the use of other platforms like this. I actually asked you the other day. I was like, okay, I'm close to publish. You know, has been almost 10 months. I'm having some thoughts about thesis,

companies that are appropriate for me and us as a firm. Like, I think I'm ready to write up this thesis and this one page. And I was like, where should I publish this? And there's a real strong argument that I want to publish it somewhere that I can link to so someone can find it again, but really shouldn't it just be a thread at this point? I think a thread that will be a $100,000 thread people. I mean, a thread, a blog post, medium, LinkedIn come to mind. you can link to the fuller version.

You know, if you just take the headings of what would be your blog post, if there were eight headings, you could just do the eight headings as, you know, really concise TLDR, too long didn't read. Yep. But it has to be a Twitter thread, is what I'm saying. Like, you've got to have both. You can't do. Probably, yeah.

It's a weird world. My Twitter's been growing quite nicely. Yours has been growing quite nicely. It has. Twitter's still the water cooler for our end. I think certain industries are very sticky on Twitter. M.C. happens to be one of them. I think it has to also do with.

And journalism. Ironically, both. Those two probably more than any other, I would argue. Yeah, those both have to do with networking in order to get deal flow or information. And they also are industries where you are self-directed in terms of your time. Therefore, you can slide in Twitter and leave it up all day and participate in it all day and justify it. Now, if you were a video editor and you're freaking around or you're a salesperson and you're screwing around on Twitter all day, your boss is going to come to you and be like, shouldn't you be editing videos?

Shouldn't you be talking to customers? But when you're a VC or you're a journalist, it's like, yeah, I'm talking to sources. No, I'm sourcing deals. So really on a sourcing networking basis, it's really good for people who have to source stuff. And then I don't know if you saw Elon the other day, you know, tweeted about his burnt hair perfume.

He sold $10,000 in an hour. And now it's up to $20,000. So, you know, if you have a big, and he obviously has the largest following, but people with very big followings can, and that was a joke, you know, like you can really move stuff. I'm doing this founder university,

starting November 14th. I'm teaching it. I tweeted about it three times. And we're now at 400 people. And the record before was 200. And we're still weeks out. And I'm like, maybe we'll go for 600 or 800 people in the class. Founder dot university if you want to join the class 12 weeks.

I'm teaching every Monday night at 6 p.m. Pacific. $500. Same with our public race. Right? Like we've talked to several VCs who raised their entire funds on Twitter. We're going to raise a not insignificant portion of our funds. of our funds from these webinars that you tweeted about.

Precisely. So it's awesome. Makes subtle sense. I don't know if it applies to every industry, not sure applies to every person, but there you go. And should we pay for it? You know, sure, maybe.

Why not? I mean, some people are introverts. Some people are not good at writing. Now, Matt Leapine did raise the point that like, what if you, you got to have, your persona on Twitter, even if it's ghostwritten, cannot be that far from your real personality.

Because if people then meet you or invite you to conferences and you are nowhere near that, charming and funny, it's going to be a problem. Yeah, that's probably true. You've got to modulate. You can't like put, you know, I'm trying to think of someone hilarious. You can't put Wanda Sykes out there and then B. Bill Gates. Like, no, no. It has to be brand. Yeah. It has to be related to brand. And if you're a writer who understands capital allocation, you understand tech and you have just a little bit of wittiness

or cleverness, for sure you could do this. What I want to know is, and I, uh, if whoever this writer is, I'll give you $500 to give me the proof of who you did this for. So I was saying this, whoever has this information, I want to know the list of customers. I want them to out for me

who's not writing their own tweets. If somebody gives me that list, I would ship you $500 on VEMO or whatever you're using. In private, you mean, in private? I'll totally do it. Yeah, somebody leaked this information to me.

I'll give you $500 cash, no questions asked, just leak it to me, and just prove it somehow. Like, give me a screenshot of you, DMing with the person or whatever. But yeah, give me the leak. I want to know who it is.

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deals and saying better than some of the late stage private companies. I'll just put my money in a public company. We've talked, what I feel like is happening with this Wall Street Journal story is something that we've talked about now several times, which is that you have really big firms spinning out a public equity arm, you know, or allocating some of their capital toward buying public companies and kind of scooping up, like taking advantage of what is really like a big sale in the stock store. And maybe you missed out on a deal the first time around, but you have now this equity fund alongside your venture fund, which is a trend in VC that we've talked about before. So I wasn't, I couldn't totally tell what about this was exactly new, although I do think

it's an interesting part of the kind of like, how do you deploy capital? And if you're maybe thinking to yourselves, there aren't going to be that many private companies at the stage we're at when I got a shove $100 million into something. Yeah, when on going public seems like the right bolt on. Yeah, investing in a publicly traded company already, that's undervalued. You have all the data. You know, a number of firms are now registered as investment advisors as opposed to under this venture capital exception.

in the venture capital exemption, you can only put like 10 or 20% of your funds capital into non-traditional public market equities, whatever. It had to all be private companies under a certain age or something.

It's kind of a wonky rule, but I know that Sequoian and Andreessen went through this. Specifically, Adreson did it, I remember, because they wanted to be involved in crypto, which didn't fall under this and the tokens and whatnot. So this is for me, I'm thinking about doing some J-trading now. I am, I said when I

started the J-trading process is going to be like a bottoming out process. So I want to pick some names, maybe double down on some names. I think it's to be an interesting place maybe to look for ideas. So I would like to find out who Sequoia is investing. And I see that they purchased over 2.5 million shares in data analytics firm Amplitude. And then they bought 575,000 new shares of DoorDash. And Sequoia was large a sharehold in both of those companies, before they went public. So this is very interesting for me to watch happen. I think that this as a trend could be a super interesting way for public market investors.

I don't know, just to know smart people are looking at that. So now if they bought Amplitude, I'm looking up their stock here, Amplitude Stock. If they bought that in Q1... What do we think about the fact that before they went public? Sequoia was the largest shareholder in these companies and then now they're buying a bunch of stock. Like, is that a prop up? Well, I don't think they would use investor money to prop it up.

No. Because these companies, you have to drill down how much cash they have. Well, that's my other question. Right. My other question, too, in addition to, of course, they've drilled down on these companies. They probably have better, hopefully not better public information. The information part of this gets tricky because Sequoia, the front, right? What kind of firewall do they have?

They have historical information. And then. They know the founders. They understand the business because they've been in it for five or ten years. Totally. And so it probably is like a vote of confidence. But my other question is, is it the same LPs? Could you, can you do this with the same LPs? Like you have a public equity fund? Well, they said they're going to do the Sequoia Fund where if you're in the Sequoia Fund, and let's say you had, they invested in DoorDash and then that one public, you could take your

money in and out of the Sequoia fund every year or something. Yeah. And a redemption period. And so, yes, they could be taking that investor money and just increasing their position in it. And if you look at this company that they mentioned, if I have the right one here, Amplitude. Amplitude was trading January 3rd at $52 a share. And then it came crashing down. And they had a 60% stock drop in February. And it's been bouncing along the bottom at $14 a share since then. So it looks like, yeah. Yeah. So they were like, we know these guys that we really like them. We have great historical information on them. And so we're making a bet now that there's a discount.

And they might even be on the board of this company. You never know. So, you know, this is the really interesting. Well, that's where I feel like it gets tricky. Like if you're on the board, can you do that? Well, I guess if you're on the board, you can still. Well, yeah, no, board members can increase their positions. There is a process for doing that, right?

They have to file that they intend to do that. So if we look at the board of directors of amplitude, about us, Amplitude, let's take a look and see who's on the board. I'm going to guess, here we go, board of directors. Let's see. Anybody from Sequoia? Yep. Pat Grady from Sequoia is quoted in the article.

There you go, boom. So this makes sense to me, you know? Yeah. And I like it. And this means to me that I'm going to put a J-trade in, I think, on Amplitude. I think following into, I mean, it just seems, I'm going to do some research on it before I do,

but I'll put it on the docket for Monday. So if we could, producer Rachel, can you put it on the docket just to go over Amplitude and do a deep dive on that? DoorDash, I, know, they're doing great. And I understand that. I wonder if Indrisen Horowitz made, in the story, did they talk about

Indyston Horowitz making any, um, they did? I mean, here's the thing, Molly. We know that the growth stage investments before IPO last time were, in some cases, not great investments and the stocks went down from their last private company rounds, right? So before the IPO happened and the, and you could buy public shares, the private rounds were higher than where they're trading now. And so if you believed in it then, why wouldn't you believe in it now? And if you're looking for a place to put money, why not?

As an example, oil birds raised out a $1.7 billion private valuation in September of 2020. He's got a $4 billion market cap. Now it's worth $478 million. I don't know if I want to be in that. But it does show you that it's trading out one quarter or one third. This is interesting too. It looks like Andreessen in the first quarter bought a minimum. million new shares of block out of its $5 billion growth fund,

Square, previously square. And Mark Anderson has once, has apparently said in the past that failing to back square, which it was known as then, as a private company, was one of his regrets as an investor. And then Andreessen also purchased over 1.4 million shares of DoorDash out of the same time. So DoorDash seems to be the winner here. People are triangulating on DoorDash.

Just run there. Well, if you look at people have been talking about DoorDash. I'm team DoorDash. we have people looking at both Uber and DoorDash as undervalued. They've become kind of like they are the Google Yahoo, whatever the cohort is here. I mean, you know, Google Facebook would probably be the better analogy with, you know, Uber obviously having two businesses and being much larger. But Facebook having like a really carved a niche for itself, that became a doopoly in advertising. And this seems to be a delivery duopoly.

Yeah. That's forming. It's kind of interesting. Like historically, nobody would have looked back at that, I think, four years. ago and thought Uber and DoorDash would be head-to-head competitors. Maybe you and Travis did. But other people did. Well, we knew that and Uber almost bought DoorDash.

I don't know how public those deliberations have been, but there was a moment. Interesting. Where they could have got it done for about $10 billion from what I understand. I don't, don't re-aggregate that. But that was my memory serves me correctly. There was a $10 billion number. Probably would have been a good idea for both companies.

But even still, both companies are making money now and they both have significant user bases and people are addicted. The product market fits there. Now people are looking at the union economics saying check, that works. And now we're out of the, you know, burn money free market environment. So there's no choice about to be profitable.

If you've got to lose 10% of your top line or customers to be profitable, those businesses are going to do it. And they seem like their top line and bottom line is growing at the same time. So anyway, it seems like a really interesting way to go about it. It's interesting signal. I think it's also going to make them better private market investment. about you and I as private market investors, we have to think about it.

Every company we have, how is this going to fare as a public company eventually? And, you know, unit economics and the quality of the revenue is super important. In the private markets, you can kind of not worry, or you should worry, but you can kind of suspend disbelief. You're like, well, it's growing the top line. Eventually, there'll be a bottom line. With Uber, Bill Gurley-I and a couple of other people, Travis, we had looked at the numbers was like, yeah, if you add a dollar to every ride, this thing prints money.

If we lose a dollar per ride now, that's a $2 swing. Is anybody going to not take an Uber or a Lyft or a DoorDash for $2? Yeah, 5% of the market is probably that price sensitive. The other 95% isn't if they become addicted to this. And sure enough, that's what's passed. Prices went up. Things became profitable and, you know, the end of story. But, you know, in private markets, we see a lot of companies who only focused on top line.

Is Uber profitable? They are cash flow profitable now. You have to, you know, there's a thing with the stock compensation and then special one-time things, either write-downs of, right-downs of holdings like Diddy. You know, a lot of those things cost chaos. And so there were write-downs, write-ups, and write-downs, and cashing outs that were occurring. And then there's a stock-based comp. But on a cash flow basis, I believe the cash position is growing. Don't quote me on this, but I think, and I don't have inside information, but yes, both of these businesses are

now in the profitable kind of phase, I would say. Awesome. Depends on if you believe, this is another issue, if you believe stock, stonk compensation for employees should count, you know, stock compensation does impact the shareholders of the company. I kind of don't care. I kind of care about the actual revenue of the business or whatever. I don't care.

Right. You probably do at some point have to rein in crazy Silicon Valley sock compensation, which got out of control. And that's actually happening. I don't know about Uber, but other places are like, yeah, you're lucky to have a job. We're going to, you're not getting, you don't have four offers. I mean, remember the days of like, you know, hey, I have an offer from Google, I have an offer from Facebook, I got an offer from Apple. Yeah.

And I could have offers from Airbnb and Uber, but I have too many offers to even consider at this moment of time. Therefore, I'll work for your startup if you pay me like half of the money you just raised. And it's like, yeah, go work at Apple, please. we can't, I beg you. We can't absorb you. Please, I can't be having this. All right, listen, this brand has a special place in my heart. The founders, Brandon and Carmen, are twist listeners.

They've been for a long time. And they told me they started this company. I kid you not, after listening to the pod and reading my book, Angel. Oh my God, that warms my heart. In fact, their first angel investor wound up being a big hit. What do they do with the money they made? They use the returns from that investment to start a macadamia nuts business. I am crazy.

Happens to be my favorite nut. I love it with dark chocolate. And you can see this graphic on the screen, not all nuts are created equal. This is why you need to get out of macadamia nuts. Compared to peanuts, almonds, cashews, and walnuts. Macadamian nuts are higher in omega-7s. That's what's been linked to fat loss and natural collagen.

And they have more healthy fats. They also have less carbs because, you know, listen, I'm trying to lose a little weight here. And the product is vegan, keto, and paleo. Take it for me. I eat these macadamias all the time. They're totally delicious. And I love the bars.

They have spicy ones. They've got dark chocolate. covered ones. Here's what I want you to do. Here's your call to action. Get in on macadamias. I'm all in on them. Houseof macadamias.com slash twist right now for 20% off just for being a listener. The nuts are delicious. The bars are amazing. And of course, the dark chocolate dip packs are my favorite. House of macadamias.com slash twist. Friday variety show goes on turning to the world of Web3 and the metaverse. Yeah, just a quick little update on a drama throughout the last couple of days. central land, which is a blockchain, what is decentralal land? Oh, it's virtual land, a virtual land

metaverse that I believe they spent like $2 billion on. Disputed claims that it's billion dollar virtual land metaverse had only 38 active users in one day. They said that's absolutely not true. For example, from October 6th through the 12th, the platform average 7,000 unique visitors per day and put a dashboard out. But I would say even though there's a large delta between 38 and 7,000, if you spend a billion dollars on a product and that's where you landed, it might be a slow grower. There's a thing called DAP radar. This shows you like the sales and stuff like that.

It's worth pulling up the chart here and looking at it. If you put it at 30 days and you look at the transactions and historical activity, my lord, the volumes and transactions have just hit the floor on this thing. and yeah it's just going to be rough on all of these things that don't actually provide value in the world now if it was a startup

and the startup failed to get traction you'd be like okay no problem but if a startup has sold whatever amount I don't know what the actual amount of real estate that they grifted onto consumers is

but people bought a lot of this stuff you know and just like people bought a lot of NFTs and so that's really the challenge here is people bought so much into these systems, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases, you know, maybe even a billion. I think what it really comes down to, too, is like, if at this point a founder came to us, let's say somebody, you know, we've asked people to come in founder university and

like, bring an idea. If your idea is, I am going to build a virtual land company in the Metaverse, or I'm going to build anything for the Metaverse at this point. Yeah. we're going to tell you, why don't you see how this thing shakes out? Like, it's a little too early

for you as a founder, probably, to get the kind of traction that you're going to want. I mean, people are looking at, we didn't really, this week,

get into the Facebook, Oculus, the new lens. We were going to have Alex on. We just couldn't make it work. We had such a busy week. But, you know,

I kind of feel like it's still DOA. I feel like people don't want these headsets. I feel like there's no use case. I think across the board they're increasing the fidelity they're making it faster but to what end if there's nothing for people to do

and then there was some memo earlier in the week where Facebook was like listen you guys got to use this product we're building it you know I need you to use it and that's like when you know Google was like

please use Android phones people are showing up to work with iPhones we need everybody here to use a Chromebook we need you all to use Android phones and I'd be at a party and I'd see you know Google executives and like two out of three would have an Android and one out of three would be like,

yeah, I got an Android in my backpack, but I use my iPhone. When I'm at the office, like literally somebody told me, when I'm at the office, I don't take out my iPhone. I take on my Android. When I'm out of industry event,

I take out my Android, but I'm using my iPhone, but I'm not, you know, whatever. And now global market share of Android is much, much, much larger, right, than iPhone like that. It's, so it's not to say that the Metaverse won't ever get there,

but if I were going to start a company now, it would not be based in the Metaverse. The problem I have is, the metaverse has been here for a long time and it's boring and there's no use case and people don't get any value from it I did watch

uh, Boz, uh, the CTO over Facebook tweeted a couple of the videos and I watched one of the videos and it showed a woman at her desk with a keyboard and mouse wearing the headset and just like we have these multi-monitor setups that we love with rigs and floating monitors she had the three

floating monitors and she was typing on a real keyboard I think or could have been a virtual one it was hard to tell but she did have like three screens up and I was thinking hey, you know, you're at your Airbnb here. What if you could bring your headset or you were on a flight and you had three giant screens and you were, you know, a day trader or you got your slack and you're Spotify and you're just rocking out without having to have a setup, you know, that's kind of dope.

You know, if you were on the Google, if you're on the Google bus or an airplane or I don't know, you're sitting in like a park and, you know, you're on this, you're on the ski lift going up for 10 minutes. You're in a gondola. You put this thing on and you can pop up your desktop. I mean, it's kind of trippy. I don't mean. If I want to do that, I think I'd want to enjoy the view, but as much as people, you know, it's funny because everybody dumps it.

Like, there was a big announcement with Microsoft that like teams and all these in the Microsoft productivity suite is all going to happen in the Metaverse. And, you know, Satya's like, I'm all in on this. And it's funny because it's easy to dunk on it. But the best use case for VR right now is work. And that may be boring, but it turns out it's made Microsoft, Jeterreid, a lot of money. And so I like, fine, right? that's okay if it's kind of boring and it makes work way cooler and you can actually collaborate on stuff and you can do designs together in a space and like there's some awesome

work possibilities that can be done it's just that you know when you get up and you have like this big event and you show it off and you got Mark doing his god king dance and whatever it's like just make it for work like you don't have to sex it up it's how much of their how much of their lack of success is attributable to or I don't want to say the people making fun of it because that's obviously in large part due to Zuckerberg's personality. But somebody asked me this. Do you think that they would be, people would be rooting for it a little more? People would be more have to try it if it wasn't Zuckerberg and his bad reputation.

Do you think it has any impact on the adoption of the product itself? I do. I 100% do. He has fallen into the, I mean, it is not the case that everything that is being built in the metaverse and for the Oculus Quest is actually just a universe where Mark Zuckerberg gets to be the god-can. but it's way too easy to come away with that impression because he has made himself. I'm not even going to say there's no they here. He has made himself the face of this thing.

He is sitting here saying, I'm the Steve Jobs of this whole universe. And presumably some version of him thinks that people like him enough to want to buy what he's selling. The best thing, like Facebook has a narrative problem. The best thing they could do is get him the hell away from me. this. Totally. Put somebody else in charge. Instead of trying to make him the Steve Jobs of it because he's not.

I mean, they just never, I don't think they understand the product market fit here. What they should be doing is they should have somebody who's like a real expert at productivity, you know, and workforce stuff. And then somebody who's a real expert at art and then somebody who's a real expert, this is what I would do if I was suck. I'd have somebody who's an artist and really good at art, somebody who's really good at education, somebody's really good at work. And I'd say, listen, I, you know, as a technologist, I'm obsessed with the screen,

and I'll tell you all about, you know, how we are investing in the hardware and the platform. But let's be honest, the apps are what are going to define this. And I would like to introduce you to the greatest artist, and she's going to show you the art she's using. And by the way, MIT has some of these great courses and Stanford as well. They're going to be doing their biology. courses and they're going to be doing their engineering courses now inside of this. Let's let the

teacher speak for themselves and the artists speak for themselves. And in terms of productivity, you know, communications is everything. You know, here's Zoom. And they bring Zoom on and say, you show it. Here's Satya. Here's Satya. Yeah. That guy has brand using, yeah. Right. He's got brand value. Like if he's up there, I'm like, oh, okay, this is real and I'm into it. But just don't have Zuckerberg do any of it. I know that sounds kind of harsh. It's his baby or whatever. but the more, the further you get him away from this, the better, specifically even from a public shareholder perspective, because if that's all you see is him just only caring about this

instead of the money printing machine, pretty soon you're like, is that thing going to keep making money? This thing is going to fail so bad because of his leadership, I think. I think his leadership is really bad, and he doesn't have people around him to tell him like, this isn't going to work, dude. Education is the most impressive thing you'll ever see on this stuff, and he keeps thinking

that it's walking around talking to people and he thinks what happened on Facebook is now going to happen here. I don't buy that. None of us buy that. None of us want that.

There is not a Facebook equivalency to the metaverse. The metaverse is going to be, I want to learn how to do open heart surgery. I want to learn how to, you know, do mechanical engineering. I just want to understand biology

because I'm taking a biology course. Man, when I'm in there, I'm learning faster. Okay, I want to travel. I'm going to be traveling to this area of the world. I aspire to go to Paris and Europe. I'm going to do a highlights and then I'll plan my trip to Europe based on the places I visited there that I actually want to see where I

want to visit the Louvre. I'd love to walk around the Louvre or Pompeii. You know, there's places you're not allowed to go through anymore, right? I don't think you're allowed to go on all the parts of the Acropolis. But you could make a digital Acropolis where you could spend time there. I actually start a startup that was doing its own version of a digital Acropolis. You could actually really spend some time in the Acropolis and then go back in time and hit a slider. Hey, show me what happened in the Acropolis a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago. This stuff gets really fracking interesting.

And he doesn't get that. He doesn't understand what this is going to be used for. His use case, he's so blinded by the use case, and he's going to sink this company. They need to split it into two companies. Put $50 billion in cash into Oculus and spin it back out and let it sink and swim on its own and then bring Cheryl Sandberg back and let her do the collection of advertising-based stuff and make her the CEO of the Facebook Corporation with herons. Instagram and WhatsApp.

And split them. Split them. They're not the same thing. And you need to have an app developer community that trusts you. And he burned that bridge so many times that no developers are going to build for him because they know what's going to happen. If I built that Acropolis app, you know what's going to happen. He's going to lord it over you.

He's going to cut your throat. He's going to replicate it. He's going to copy it. And he's going to take 50% of your revenue. At least with Apple, you know, like, yeah, they'll copy some stuff every six, seven years later, they'll steal some WhatsApp feature or snap feature to put an e-message. But they kind of give you a seven-year window to exploit stuff. And they only add it to iMessage when they have to because people are like, why doesn't

this thing have gift support, you know? Anyway, end of rant. Yeah, no, 100%. You got me on the Vincanto. Endorse. Vincenta. All right. Last thing in the lightning round, we have a follow-up from a thing that we have been

watching for a long time. Breaking news today. Beepy-boop. Netflix announced. pricing for its new ad-supported tier called Basic. Okay, so let's call you basic. Literally called Basic. Basic.

It's for basic beats. I know it's for basic bees. I know you're dying to buy this already. I'm not going to say it. So if you know that Netflix's lowest tier currently costs $9.99 and it's like the resolution of a VCR, it's like 480P or something. It's 720. Super embarrassing.

$9.99. It's already, I think, yeah. How much do you think Netflix is charging for its ad-supported tier called Basic? Well, because I think they're stupid about pricing and they don't get it. They're going to charge $7.95. I don't know, but I'm guessing $7.95? $6.99. You're close. Okay.

Yeah. $6.99 is pretty cheap. I mean... Is it? Compared to $99 for no ads? I mean, granted, with that's... What they should do is. I have an idea for them.

Okay. Make it $39 a year. Screw it. Just let people buy by year. If you want this, you have to buy it for two years for $99. Boom. Done. Pay in advance.

They get all that cash up front. Even basic is capped at 720B. I don't mind it so much. I don't know if people can change. But you got to get people something for upgrading, I guess. So wait, we're at, you got basic Bs. You upgrade to get no ads. Right.

Okay. But if you're a basic B, you pay. seven bucks. You pay seven bucks a month. If you're a mid, what do you pay? You pay 9. 000.

If you're mid, you pay 999. Assuming they're going to keep that tier. Got it. I don't think they announce that they're going to change the rest of the years. I'm dopey, I'm luxury and I pay like $17 for shit I don't even use like 4K. Yeah, same.

I'm an idiot. I was paying, no, I was paying the 1999 a month and then I realized that's ridiculous because there's like hardly anything even in 4K and it's not like I can see it. I can't see it. I'm almost 50. So I dropped down to 15.

I got to tell you right now, this is going to work big time. I might need to j-trade. I'm going to j-trade some Netflix. I can see so many people who currently are on Netflix and they're going to just be like, oh, six bucks a month. You know, they don't even put the 99 in there. Your mind just so six bucks. That's like a latte and a croissant.

You know, even if you're a Dunkin' Donuts person, you're like, yeah, it's two Dunkins. I think if they're going to do this, they should get rid of the $9.99 tier. Because the thing is, if I'm thinking $6 or $9 and the difference in resolution, is exactly the same, but one has ads and one doesn't. Like, it almost feels like a trick to just get me to pay the 10, you know? You know, this is the Dunkin' Donuts. I see, we have to use the proper coffee here. This is the Dunkin crowd.

I love a good Dunkin' Donuts. I don't know about you. Dunkies. This is like for a Dunkin crowd. It's like the Boston guys and Dunkin' like, you know. You do you like all the sugar. You want all. I get like sweetened it off.

You get two donuts and a nice coffee for like, you're in and out for six bucks, five bucks, you know, and you go to Starbucks. You get a scone, right? You go to Starbucks, you get like a $4 or $5 coffee, and a $3 or $4 scone. Because you're paleo. And I get the suvied egg bites. It's a little fancy, you know? Boston guys don't want suave nothing.

And they don't certainly want a scone because they're not British. They're getting like a scone and a flat white. That's not happening. No, that's like $9. You know, if you go to Dunk and you're in and out for $5.6, this is for the Dunkin' crowd. That's what I'm convinced. It's great pricing. I think it could be six.

if it's going to be 720p and it's going to be ad supported, you do 599, because then aren't you in the, isn't Disney Plus still in something insane like that? No, they're going up. They were seven. They were, I think when they started,

they were seven and changed. They launched at like six or seven, yeah. Yeah, but that's going to be their ad tier now. So that'll be their ad tier. And, yeah, the pricing is now. So if it's right in line with Disney. Premium. Yeah.

Basic with ads, basic standard and premium. I mean, can somebody just give us to, let me tell you something, anything that's more than two, choices is two choices too many is one or two choices too many yes they got to simplify this just make it premium make it ad and premium oh it was it was apple tv that i was thinking of okay so apple tv plus is still 499 well that's because they do two shows a month that's insane they're dabbling they're just dabbling apple's not even 49 i mean they are right in line Disney plus without ads is

799 so then netflix is saying pay me a buck less for ads I just think it could have been a little cheaper or they get rid of the $9.99 tier. But you know what? I'm just, I'm nitpicking at this point. The good news is they launched it. Now we see if they write the ship on it.

Yeah. All right, there it is. Yeah, there you go. That's our lightning round. Now we got, what do we got? We got OK Boomer. Right? Oh, yes.

Okay, Boomer. Rachel, what do you got? This week I got to speak with Cliff Lerner. So if you guys don't know, it is New York Tech Week. And during Miami Hack Week, I spoke to the creators of DiveChat, which is the chatting app that we used there.

Now there's a new chatting app. It's called Saturdays. And I like this one a lot because it has a map feature in it. So any group chat you're in, you can see where people are on a map, which is really, really convenient during weeks like this. I turned my map off.

I'm in ghost mode for everything, including Snapchat. And we discussed the safety features and everything like that in the episode. But Cliff has experience building social apps in the past. And I, I'm really excited to see other community managers kind of jump on this app because I think this has been my favorite one that I've used for an event so far.

I cannot wait to see this. And I'm so excited to see this idea come back around because J-Cal, I'm certain that you remember the South by Southwest. There was like one infamacyer of South by Southwest where was it Foursquare? There was some app that was doing this. Foursquare broke out there. There was another one called Submarine or something. Right.

And so there was a bunch of different ones. And everybody was like, oh. It was four square. People were ding-ding, ding. Then it was Twitter. And then there was like a periscope one or something. Not periscope the video, but there was another one. And it's basically all the same concept.

You have your location, you chat, you see it on a map. And, you know, you can then triangulate and find people. And it's kind of fun. And I think people should bring these back. There was one called Twist, actually, twist.com that my friend Billy had backed. That was really cool. If the three of us were going to go to a music festival, we would all load Twist. or if we were all going to a destination.

So you know how Waze you can send somebody or a thing? Yeah. Imagine if Waze allowed you on a group trip to just say, hey, leave this on for the next 48 hours, 72 hours. And this has been built into I message now, I think. You can share your location to the end of the day. And that's what this is, right, Saturday? Same thing.

It shares, I believe, for the duration that you're in the group chat and you're allowed to turn on and off your location. Yeah. So I live in New York City. So I don't really want people knowing, you know, what I'm up to and where I'm staying and where I'm living and I'm not going to too much stuff for Tech Week, but it's really cool. I kind of want to use it for like a pickup soccer league is like what I want to try to do.

Because we've seen these apps just die out time and time again with the pickup sports because they're really, really difficult to scale. So I'm like, you know what? A group chat like this might be a little bit of a better use case in the city. It's a good idea. And people could post where they're having a pickup soccer game. Exactly. And then you could just navigate right to it.

This would be great for a bar pro. Yeah. good for a part. It's good for a bar crawl. You know, like if you're going out with your friend, you got a bar crawl. You trust all 10 people. It was used for the Lower East Side bar crawl that I missed out on. I was gone on the weekend, but they, it's exactly one of the use cases that actually a different OK Boomer guest, Andrew Young used the app for. So it's already started in a leak. Yeah. We're going to go out. We're going to get some nachos, whatever. Everybody enjoy this. Awesome. Thanks, thanks guys.

Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you so much, Cliff Learner for joining today on OK Boomer. If you guys don't know and aren't in New York City right now, the app Saturdays is totally popping off for Tech Week and Cliff is one of the co-founders. Awesome, thanks. I'm super excited to be here and share the story we've been up to lately. Yeah, so you're a little bit different than people I normally have on. This segment is called OK Boomer.

So I normally have people around my age that just graduated college or even younger, still in college that are founders or VCs. you have a really awesome history in the social space and a ton of people my age are hopping on the bandwagon of using Saturday. So I was like, okay, I still really, really have to have you on because you've absolutely just, like I said, taken over New York's really big event circuit in tech this year. Thank you. Are you saying the gray in my beard is showing my age?

No, no, no, no. I sometimes like to fancy that I'm still in college. Not at all. I think it's really, really cool. how you obviously have had a pretty long history with creating different platforms that people are using. And I think you need to explain your background. I'm just very, very impressed. You're not a one-hit wonder.

You've created like several different platforms that are really taken off. And this one is, in my opinion, going to stick around for a while. And I'm excited to see where it's going to go. But for the audience, why do you give everybody just who are you? And what was your background, I guess, before coming and creating Saturdays? Thank you. You're too kind with those words. And you know, you're not wrong. I'm not Gen Z, which has kind of made this really interesting to build a lot of pros and cons. But my background is after college, I worked on Wall Street, realized I did not do well taking instruction from

other people, needed to do my own thing. And I thought life's short, let's have fun, let's build a product that I would use all my friends were using in a space I thought would grow really quickly. So I started a dating app many years ago. And it was doing okay. And And I read this article about Facebook launching a platform. Facebook wasn't Facebook yet. They were launching their APIs. No one knew what this was. And you could tap into what is now known as a social graph.

In the real world, people met through their friends in dating. Online back then, if your friends knew you were using a dating site, you are an outcast. No one would talk to you. And I like weird ideas. And my product view is, as an entrepreneur, look for something people are doing the real world and see if you can use technology to make it faster, better, and cheaper. So I thought, this is interesting. Let's build an app on Facebook, a dating app, where basically you can go through your friends and find out who likes you.

This was so taboo. And we put it out there and at first it didn't work. And we quickly iterate. I'm very data driven. And I looked back in history, what product really would make the experience super fun, super easy, super quick? And what you now see today as what's known as Tinder and Bumble used to actually be hot or not. That was actually really the first true viral product. and we introduced the how to not experience, browsing one photo at a time,

and we introduced what's called a double blind match. And it would be, hey, Rachel, some of your friends like you, but you have to invite friends to figure out who. And we woke up with 100,000 users the next day, a million by the end of the week, 10 million by the month. Long story short, that grew to 100 million users. We were actually the first one to do swiping, Tinder and Bubble get the credit today, and ran that for many years.

And during COVID, really started to get the itch again to build social. You know, everyone was kind of bored, not much to do during early COVID. And I started to notice a lot of the social dynamics breaking down and how people were connecting. And I always had this itch on location. Nobody had cracked the location problem in social. And I called up my brother, who was my co-founder on the first company, Darrell Lerner, and he agreed. We were both getting older and connecting with our friends and lose connections just becomes harder.

So we kind of had a shared vision and said, you know what? let's do this. And we started building two years ago. It's all kind of come to a head in the last few weeks around New York Tech week and taking a life of its own. Wow. So this has been in the works for a while. Yeah, it's a problem I've been thinking about for a long time. I like to sit on a problem for a long time and think and analyze. And I literally studied every social product, every location-based product in the last 20 years. You know, the most famous some people might remember and, you know, my age will come out here's four square. Goala, bright kite, lute, was Sam Altman, and there have been a ton of course since.

And they all failed for various reasons, and I studied them all, asked a lot of questions from users who used those products, and it became pretty clear to me where the pitfalls were, where the problems with the products were, and they weren't solving the right problems. So we kind of went with a blank slate, and so let's give us a shot. That's super interesting. And I've noticed, like, the MAPs sector has gotten pretty big, not over the past two years. I guess I'm not that tuned in. But over the past probably year, especially since the pandemic has hit and a lot of my friends work from home, sharing your location with somebody,

especially on maybe Find My Friends, almost feels like a form of social currency. And obviously, Snapchat has the Snap Map and things like that. But Find your friends is something that is super duper accurate, whereas the Snapchat map wasn't crazy accurate. I think it only refreshed when you opened the app. And with Saturdays, it gives you an extremely, extremely specific location. And how the app works, like when you open it is basically that location is shared with other people in the group chat, correct? We've changed things very rapidly. I actually, from building many social products, I've probably built four or five social apps over the years, mostly dating that grew

to millions of users. And wanted to build a social product. And one thing I've learned is the female experience is everything. Guys don't, need specific features and nuances around safety and privacy as much as women do. So my advice, anyone building anything in consumer and social, make sure, especially if you're a guy, you're focusing on that female experience. It's very different. You've got to get it right. So we actually interviewed over 100 females asking them, yep, yep, focus sessions, mostly in college, what do you like and not like about whether it was nearby friends on Facebook, Snap Maps, life 360, you name it.

The responses we got were fascinating, something we never would have imagined. And it really started to paint the picture why none of them have solved the problem. And let me just take a step back. To me, the problem is the day you leave college, you need to recreate your social circle. And we frame the problem as, who do I know that's around and who should I know? We want to engineer serendipity. All the time, you're saying, I want to grab a beer, go to an event, find people I know. and this is similar to you look on Instagram when you travel, you share a post.

What you're really saying is, I'm in London. I kind of want to brag about it, but I also want to see who I know is here, but I don't want to feel obligated to hang out with you. That's what people are saying. It's the post, I'm traveling to San Francisco. Who's around? Who should I meet? I'm moving to New York City.

Who should I know? All of these, we kind of think about as. who do I know that's around and who should I know? And what we discovered actually is we built at first our product like you described, like all these other location products around this concept of precise location. And we spoke to actually probably 200 females. And 90% of them were in what's called ghost mode on Snapchat. And what's fascinating is we kept asking why.

I'm the big believe in the five why's because you really have to keep asking why to truly understand what their pain point is. And there were two things that came out. Women go into ghost mode, one, because if they're not in ghost mode, it would be interpreted as kind of a beacon, you can message me. And they would get all these text messages and it would be overwhelmed. But two, it's just creepy for people to know where you're sleeping at night. It's just creepy. And there's no need to know most of the time which Starbucks are at.

And what we did is we said, that's really interesting. Every single location-based product has put you on a map exactly where you are. And a lot of them have actually forced you to tell us where you are all the time. And I'm a big believer in building consumer social products. You really have to focus on the user experience at all costs. And I can get into this. You have a lot of entrepreneurs now from the younger generation who are obsessed with growth hacks. And there's no product in history that started with a growth hack.

All of the products that you read about that had these quote unquote growth hacks first had an absolutely incredible user experience that was supported by data that people loved. And then the quote, quote, growth had presented itself. So we've really focused on what is the great experience. And for us to engineer serendipity, and us meaning me and you, Rachel, right, it would be weird. We met a month ago through, you know, the amazing Andrew Young, which we'll talk about. And it would be weird if I texted you. What's the context?

Is he trying to deem me? This is too formal. I don't know him that well. But if we both happen to be in the same area, clearly active on a product, then it wouldn't be weird to say, oh, what are you doing in the neighborhood? So the long story short is, I think a lot of these products have just gone it wrong. People don't want to share the precise location a lot of the time. So we really actually changed the experience, which made the app take off about two months ago, where we put you in a neighborhood. It's not creepy for me to know you're in the West Village or Andrew.

is in Williamsburg at all. And people want to share that. Now we can engineer some serendipity and magic. So that was one of the kind of killer learning experiences over the last two years. It took us two years to get there, but it's been a game changer for us. Yeah. I am definitely one of those people that's in ghost mode. And that was one of my issues when I first actually used the app Be Real was,

I don't mind having my, I think my location on Twitter says Manhattan, right? So if I tweet, I don't mind people knowing that I love living in New York City. I think it's pretty evident. I talk about living in New York City. I talk about living in Manhattan in particular quite often. So I don't mind that. And then over on Twitter, but would be real whenever I posted,

even though it's only to a handful of people, granted, you were able to get that really specific location. And I'm somebody who lives around a bunch of bars and restaurants, right? So you could see the locations of any of those bars and restaurants that they would think that I was at. And I was like, you know what? That's just way too particular. So I like the idea of having like a vague idea or maybe say like somebody like lives in, I don't know, like Soho or in Gramer Sea Park.

Like I think that would be really, really helpful just the same way. Like when you're in college and at Penn State where I went, we have like East Halls is where all the freshmen live. South halls are where all the sorority floors were. So you kind of knew where people live like in that way and like that almost like your little community. And I think this app in particular is amazing. for cities like New York, where everything is fairly accessible, but things are really spread out. So you can get anywhere, but it would be really convenient if you could see who's in the area. Because I definitely have had issues, even like very recent, where there's this girl, and I met her when we were out at a party and we had a lot of things in common.

She was like, I just moved. Like, I'm having a really hard time meeting other girl friends. It's really easy to meet guys because dating apps, but girls are hard. And we found out she lives an hour away really deep. into Brooklyn. She's like, I really wish I could meet more people in my area of Brooklyn because they come to Manhattan, we're all, like, the area that we were out in, she's like, and I see all these young people. And I know there must be people like in my area of Brooklyn, but because it's more suburban and there aren't as many places to go out. She's just like not meeting them.

Is there like a certain demographic of people that like Saturday is, is specifically targeting? Right. And it's interesting you describe that. And wouldn't it be a magical experience if an app just sent you'll push notification or you opened it and it said, look, that person you met a few weeks ago is actually in the same neighborhood. And one of our big learnings, we actually tested on colleges and that's where we learned a lot and it didn't work well at first. You think about social apps, you think you need to target your best friends. And we started to try to get all your besties on here.

And it took us a year to learn this. People have perfect information about their best friends. They know where they are. They know what they're doing. the app wasn't working. And what we realized is there was a core set of users who were hooked on the app and they didn't have many friends and I started calling them up. Gotta really always ask your users, why, why, why?

And they said, I don't know this person too well. I haven't spoken to them in six months, but I feel connected knowing what city they're in. And what we realized is, especially during COVID, you know, normal social constructs broke down during COVID. And just by knowing the location of these loose connections kept you connected. So we shifted the product to focus on these groups. We realized the magic in your life happens in what I'll call friends 10 through 1,000. These are the loose connections.

And there's no good way to contact them. You meet them. You add them on LinkedIn. You add them on Snapchat. You end them on Twitter. You get their phone number. None of them are right. The only way to actually connect with them in real life is if you're looking at,

information. And that's where we completely shifted our mindset and said, okay, if we can get most users willing to share us, share with us their passive location, general neighborhood vicinity, we can create magic all the time. And if you think right now, let's say you want to grab lunch, right? There's probably 50 or more people you've met over the last few years, whether it's from Penn State or just through podcasts that are within a mile. of that would grab lunch with you. But how do you reach out to them? There's no good way. And that's what I think we're trying to solve. And it came together, New York Tech Week, Andrew Young, who I think is the most influential Gen Z community builder. Actually, a fun little story. I went to an event

at the Williamsburg Hotel and the energy was just incredible. Everyone was so nice, genuine. And I said, this was a couple months ago, I need to meet the person who put on this event. I've been to a lot of events. It was different. And Andrew is sort of like Kaiser Sosa. Nobody knows who he is, but everyone talks about him. And I couldn't find him at the event. And I kept cold emailing him. And then finally one day, he gets back in Sivcliff.

I checked out Saturday. This is the app I've been waiting for. I moved here a couple years ago. Couldn't meet people. Let's partner. And we've partnered for New York Tech Week. There's 7,800 people in the chat room now. And the feedback has been incredible.

and what I'm most excited about. When New York Tech Week is over and everyone starts spreading out going back to their cities, they're going to open the app and instantly be able to have what I hope will be a magical aha experience say, oh, there's actually 15 people

from New York Tech Week that are within a few miles from me. I now have a way to stay connected to them. And anytime you go to an event, and even when you graduate college, you're always asking, how do I stay in touch with the people I've met over the years. And as time goes by, people move away.

And how do I know when they're nearby? And that's really what we've been trying to solve. And it's been pretty cool. The last month through New York Tech Week and working with Andrew, things have taken a life of its own. The feedback has been incredible. And we'll see where it goes from here. Andrew was able to join us on the podcast previously on episode 1551 for a segment of OK Boomer,

which was awesome. And I think this ties really well with Andrew because as somebody that works completely remote and for the company that I work for, it's me, Nick. We have two editors and our host, Jason and Molly. And there's the launch team, but basically those are the people that I'm interacting with on a day-to-day basis online. And only Nick is based remotely close to me. And he's not that close. He lives kind of, you know, lives. He doesn't live in Manhattan. So I don't really have coworkers that I'm meeting in person. So when I moved to New York, meeting people and going to events, like ones that Andrew put on, were awesome.

Because it really, like, especially the age of remote work, going to events like that and putting yourself out there, even if you're not the most social person, that's just how you're going to meet people in a city. Like, we're not going to an office anymore. And unless you're somebody that's really good about walking up to people in like a we work or are somebody that, you know, it's going to a bar a lot, and able to keep up making those relationships at bars and texting people, like you said, that follow-up, I think events really are the main way I've been able to meet like a new group of people.

But you're totally right. I default, the most awkward thing too is going to one event, especially the ones that Andrew puts on, where it's a wide variety of people, which is lovely. But you go to one group and they're like, oh, add me on Instagram. You go to another group and they're like, oh, let's connect on Twitter. You go to another group and they're like, what the heck? Why aren't we just texting? Like, that's really weird.

You know another group and it's like, oh, like this is a professional setting. like I'll give you my email. So Saturdays I found is not only nice because of the map location, but it kind of gives like every person, no matter their background at his events, like a singular place to go. We need that. Like that, that is definitely something that I think Andrew, he's been trying really hard to use his presence on Twitter and on Instagram and through his newsletter, but having Saturdays keeping everybody in one place, that is definitely something that I hope more community managers get on the band of mygan. Right. And going to to event is still very intimidating for a lot of people.

There's 5% to 10% of people have no problem walking up to a stranger. But if you don't know people going and I'm actually an introvert, you don't love going to events because you've got to talk to strangers and everyone's trying to size everyone up. When we launched this on colleges, I mentioned I did 200 interviews, college students kept saying it would be amazing if I knew where the freshmen were, where the seniors were if you're a senior, which bar was hopping, where people were watching the game, which library the engineers were studying at. And we actually built those features,

similar to a dating site where you can add tags. So for you, it would be, maybe we put startups. And we would let people filter the map. And it was a massive fail, right? Imagine there was the map right now, and you filtered it for startups. And you saw me,

what do we actually have in common? What we realized is what people truly want to connect around is trusted connections. So we recreated a product around groups and introduced friends or friends. So imagine the next time you're thinking about doing something, whether you're bored, whether you're going to a event, and you can in the room instantly see, oh, there's 14 people who are connected to Rachel.

Let me now message them or at least I have a reason to talk to them. That's not weird and creepy. And there's a trusted connection. So one of our big game changers about a month ago is we launched friends with friends on the map. And this specifically goes to our vision of answering the questions, who do I know that's around? who should I know, who's in San Francisco. People don't want to meet strangers.

They're not good at that. They want to meet through trusted connections. You know, similar, a lot of clues from the dating days hinged back in the day, really now did with friends of friends. So, you know, that's been very powerful. And everyone who's connected to someone like you, someone like an Andrew, you know it's a trusted connection. They're going to be genuine.

They're going to be kind. You want to meet them. And the relationship just builds very quickly the right way. Yeah. Well, I'm super excited to see where Saturdays goes, especially after New York Tech Week. Like I said, if anybody is a community manager or is hosting an event or honestly, just as a friend group that is new, it's not that close, I recommend. I think this would also be cool throwing this out there. I recommend Saturdays, but I also think it would be cool if maybe somebody wanted to start a pickup soccer league or basketball league.

I see a lot of apps that fail with this because they can't tell who lives in the area. I think it would be nice if a pickup sports league. I don't know. Maybe joined this because this might be kind of cool. And his friend Simon actually created a pickup basketball group. And a few of us met, including people. We met on Saturday and we played pickup basketball. That's funny.

Dang it. I thought it was coming up with something new. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this segment of OK Boomer. Where can people find you and where can people find Saturdays? Awesome. Yeah. You can find in the app store on this Saturday. But it's really much better when you're on.

board through a group. So I'd say, follow me on Twitter, Cliff Lerner, C-L-I-F-F-L-E-R-N-E-R, and give me a DM. And we're kind of testing a bunch of groups sort of under the radar to avoid the stranger danger. And I'll invite you to some groups. And, you know, instantly you'll have a few hundred new best friends. Awesome. Thank you so much, Cliff. Thanks. All right, everybody. That is it for a variety show. Happy Hour Friday. We're just putting the drinks down and going to bed. But we have an awesome show coming up on Sunday. We're not done. This week is not done. Mayday. Mayday. Sorry. He's just topping up. He's just topping up. Keep talking, Molly. I'm, um, yeah, I got you.

I got you. I got you, boo. We have BC Sunday school coming up on Sunday. Like always. And we're using, we're doing our new thing where we use a thing in the news to kick off a conversation. Yeah, exactly. The kids call it a newspeg in the industry. We talk about the wing, which announced that it was shutting down for good in August and have a conversation about when you might want to intervene. as a BC, if you see a founder going off the rails, when a project is about a founder more than it's about a business. And what are some of the moments that we can step in to keep you from driving your convertible off the PCH?

I mean, just guidance, you know, during times of trouble, is a great role for a board of directors. In fact, it's why they're there. And you have to wonder with the wing, what went wrong here? Because this was such an amazing, product, I think. And I don't know if you saw, Molly, there was a little breaking

news, which came out after we taped this segment. We taped the Sunday school, we don't actually get up on Sundays, too. The founder being sued for like a million aid or something, for a background. She signed a personal guarantee. And he signed leases, I mean, another piece of advice, you could never let the founder sign a personal guarantee because in the case this happens, this founder

is going to go bankrupt personally. You're going to lose everything. This is 100% a thing that we would have intervened on. 100%. As board members, yeah. And then who do you have for your, who do you have for the founder's CEO discussion on Sunday? Yeah, for this week in climate startups,

I talked to Alan Chang, the founder and CEO of a company called Tesseract Energy. This is super interesting. The goal is to generate affordable, renewable power and solve climate change, no big deal, by financing and building the creation of tons and tons and tons of renewable energy via token sales. Okay.

Interestingly enough, this is like my second token conversation that I didn't hate. But also they're selling in markets where they're allowed, they're selling energy direct to consumer. We add a huge, huge discount, which you can imagine in the European market where they operate,

kind of a big deal right now. All right. It's going to be a great show. So we'll see you on Sunday. Have a restful Saturday, everybody. Bye, bye, bye.