This Week in Startups - Wave of tech layoffs, Robinhood earnings, what makes a great CEO & more | E1603

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

First, J+M discuss the recent wave of layoffs at Stripe, Opendoor, Lyft, and others. (1:54) Then, they dive deep into Robinhood's impressive Q3 (21:51), and what other companies can learn from RH's shrinking losses. Then, Producer Rachel joins to break down monetizable mood boards! (52:36) (0:00) J+M tee up today's segments! (1:54) Significant layoffs all over tech in the last few days: Stripe, Opendoor, Lyft, Dapper Labs, Chime, and more; Meta and Google's massive opportunity for profitability and share buybacks (9:42) MicroAcquire - Sell your business with no fees at https://try.microacquire.com/twist (11:11) Macro outlook, spending discipline in private and public sectors, Stripe vs Adyen (20:40) Babbel - Save up to 55% off your language learning subscription at https://babbel.com/twist  (21:51) Robinhood Q3 earnings: diversifying revenue, subscription vs advertising (36:14) Revelo - Get 20% off the first 3 months by mentioning TWIST at https://revelo.io/twist (37:42) Key takeaway: Diversifying revenue at scale makes businesses anti-fragile; investing in battle-hardened CEOs (41:58) Robinhood earnings: MAUs down significantly from peak, net loss shrinks 87% y/y (52:36) Producer Rachel joins to discuss monetizable mood boards FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody, welcome to Thursday. Thursday, Thursday. We got a big show today. The machetes have come out in the tech world. There have been a lot of rifts. Reductions and force happening across tech. Stripe, open door, lift, and several others are all cutting stuff. And then Robin Hood, one of the companies I angel invested in, and I'm still a shareholder in, reports are earnings.

And there's a lot of lessons in here for what's going on in the macro environment and for startups and founders. Yeah. It's a lot of the cut in the costs there. They're getting multiple revenue streams online. Always a wise idea. I'm really starting to see the stratification and the companies who are going to come through and the ones who are going to have a rougher ride. After that, we have a new segment.

Rachel Reporting is out cool hunting for us and she comes on to talk about a new product, monetized mood boards. Love it. Very nice. Yeah. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Microacquire.

The Startup Acquisition Market place. Start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace. Get free and instant access to over 100,000 trusted buyers with total anonymity. Say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today. Go to try.microacquire.com slash twist. Babel. Start your new language learning journey today with Babel. Save up to 55% off your subscription when you go to babble.com slash twill. twist. That's B-A-B-B-B-E-L.com slash twist. And Revello. Looking to affordably scale your product development with global tech talent in U.S. time zones, hire vetted remote developers in Latin America with Revello. Get 20% off for the first three months at Revello.com slash

twist. Hey, Molly, it's Thursday. What's new in your world? Oh, hi. Hey. Well, I ran out a half and a half. So you did. I think that's pretty big news. That's pretty big news. I was getting a tweet about it. Just put it out there. Oh, cool. Yeah. I got to update the new. I saw Twitter had a new update. I got to update that app. Yeah. So I got on Twitter today, actually, paradoxically. And I was, yeah, it's a good app. I mean, a great place to get news, share your ideas and thoughts, have conversations with important people in the world. Just an exceptional, like, product or service in the world. It's just, I mean, honestly, you know, when you try to think

about where else you might go, if you were having that question or other people around you were having that question, and you really can't come up with an alternativeist thing. Pretty great place. The town square. I mean, so many things could get better over there, too. I mean, there's a lot of ideas swirling around. But when I was looking at my news stream,

one thing I saw was Stripe, open door, and lift. I think all announced to this morning, a round of layoffs, which is not uncommon. They typically occur at the end of the week for obvious reasons. But maybe we could go through this and what percentage and then maybe unpack what we think is going on here. Yeah, this seems to be the, we were sort of doing a little bit of historical analysis and there was like a big wave in June and July.

And now it does appear that a big wave is starting and already occurring in terms of these rifts and reduction. So yesterday and today, we had Stripe do a 14% reduction in force, a RIF, let go of 1,000 employees. So they had had a 8,000, cut that down to 7,000. In March, 2021, Stripe had raised $600 million at a $95 billion valuation. In July, Stripe reduced its own valuation to $74 billion, down 28% as part of a 409A valuation that we covered at the time. So they let go a thousand. Lyft did a 13% riff and let go of 700 employees, 700 of its 4,000. Open Door did an 18% riff, let go of 550, Chime, the NeoBank, the mobile banking platform,

let go of 156 employees. That's about 12%. And then Dapper Labs, which is like the flow blockchain thing, did a 22% riff and let go of 134 employees. Yeah, we had Rojom on episode 1197 from Napper Labs. So this is interesting. There's a website called layoffs. FYI, I guess somebody just put in, you know, like a notion table or something or Coda table out with all the different layoffs. And you're correct, 192 were recorded in June.

I think that's when they started recording the stuff, 158 in July, 154 in August, September and October, 88. This is just like major layoffs kind of situation recorded in the press. It went down and 18 in November. Yeah. But these are significant, and they all fall into this, what Bill Gurley says is the mistake, only doing 15%, 10%, because it's not enough to actually see the gains, and it means you're probably going to do another one. So I don't know if Stripe, and I think Lyft had done, wait a second, Lyft laid off people back in July. So they're doing another Rift. And this is where this becomes like super challenging.

You know, Bill Gurley, who has, you know, been through this a number of times. his advice is always, you know, you want to make the cuts once and then get culture back on track and make the cuts enough that it is material to your balance sheet. And as we've seen, the public companies that are not doing this, are getting smashed by investors for over hiring. Notably, I think Google and Facebook, right? Yeah, I think so. I mean, and what we've seen from those companies is a freezing of,

hiring. They claim that, right? They claim that. And we don't really know. But yeah, it's a... Well, actually, they did, in the last quarter, they did release that they had hired more, but they keep saying they're freezing. They keep saying they're freezing, but then they keep hiring more. Yeah.

I mean, the, and these are the, this is when, this is when the wormwell really start to turn. Like, we're kind of looking. I was sorting by number laid off on layoffs. FYI to sort of see like how it crossed over with recent like booking.com just had a big one. But I think we will know like certainly this is a sign of the tech sector feeling this pain that if you're a public company, you're going to be punished for not doing some version of this. And that price discipline, I'm sorry, budget discipline has hit the tech sector. Yeah. And it is to the good of some companies like we talked about Uber's earnings yesterday.

And other companies might be trying to dip this toe. And then we will know. know that the zombie apocalypse has really arrived when Google and Facebook either actually freeze hiring because they don't seem very disciplined with their freeze right now, right? This is like, I'm not eating any more Halloween candy, but clearly you still are. After these two Reese's peanut buttercups, like those are the first to go. I know everybody goes right in there and gets those freezers peanut buttercups. Yeah. And then butterfinger and then snicker.

But yeah, like. There is a process here. I go from Mr. Goodbar early. It's completely unrelated. Where are you in your candy? Well, you know, when they have those minis, they hurt. I heard she's minis always have those Mr. Good bars or the special darks. I kind of, I fished those out for myself.

I like them. I'm a little weird. But here's the alphabet and the meta, aka Facebook. So here's your Google and your Facebook on the screen here. And you see, they're still going up. They are doubling their number of staff. You know, if you go back two or three years, they had half the number staff. So this is crazy the amount of hiring.

And they have tons of cash so they can do it. The problem is if you have headwinds against earnings and your continuing to spend like this, well, how do you make the earnings increase? You've got to cut spending because your revenue is not growing as fast. So we saw Google Cloud and AWS and Azure that slowed down. They were growing 40% or whatever, and then they went down to 30s. And you'll see advertising have headwinds, and that growth will go down as well. So that will be when we know that this is, we'll be in the end game when I think they actually make cuts.

But they could also tell Wall Street to pound salt and just keep hiring. and maybe that's our strategy is to grow into this. It clearly is taking that approach. Google, remember, like, we were talking about Alphabet hiring into a slowdown. Yes. But just a few months ago, we were saying, like, oh, you know, they're going to cement their position of strength here. And so it's interesting how, like, the narrative might be shifting a little bit because

of peer pressure. So lots of companies are doing riffs and layoffs and Alphabet either could be growing into this downturn in a smart way that lets them lock up talent, or they're eating too much Halloween candy after promising that they were going to stop because it's November 3rd now and we need to slow it down a little bit because the holidays are coming

and the gut will just keep expanding if we're not careful. It's a bit crazy. It's almost like, it's weirdly still, I think, too soon in the downturn to tell, right, if Alphabet and Meta are making a mistake by continuing to hire in a downturn. I haven't been watching the stock market

all that much except for Uber, go team. But I'm just looking at meta. I didn't realize it went under $90. Oh, dude, meta is on fire. Oaf! It is just, it's an ocean's rise, empire fall situation. Meta is in free fall. In a bad way, yes.

It's $89. In the boomer way. Yes, on fire, yeah. Not on fire like he's on fire. He's shooting a lot of threes like Steph Curry, but this is on fire like the building's burning down. Like the building's burning down. Yeah.

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go to the same URL. In the case of meta, this is going to be one for the ages. Like, can he ignore, how long can he ignore reality for? Because their PEO ratio, according to Google right now, is 8.5. It should be 15. This company should be worth twice as much at a minimum. Yeah. They are worth $236 billion. They've cut off $700 billion in market cap, which is the market cap of like Tesla or something, like, woof. I mean, this is like the Brooklyn Nets here. This is coming apart like the Brooklyn Nets. Hoo-ha, do the Brooklyn Nets of equities.

Yeah. Talk about telling investors to Pounce Ant. Like, it's just... Yeah, yeah. Here's what's going to happen. He's got no interest. I predict. Yeah.

Smart companies who have big cash balance sheets. And I don't think this is a strategy, but you can never tell. If they were to make the cuts, have massive amounts of money, and then do a stock buyback at this low level, They could literally reduce cost, increase earnings, while buying a depressed stock price. There is no world in which buying, you know, Facebook stockback or Google stockback at these prices is a bad idea. So there is a clear playbook here. If these companies want to make themselves more attractive to investors.

And the other thing I have to ask is, what is Stripe doing? They didn't go public. Yeah. When they could have, they would have been worth $100. billion or 70 billion something in that range, you know. And had a lot of capital to play with. I know. It would have been the Ruby Airbnb Club, right?

Like somewhere in that 50 to 100 billion and their employees would have gotten all that equity? Just a very short time ago. It's like Stripe was the everything. It was a money printing machine. It was totally unstoppable. It was inexplicable that they didn't IPO. And you can only assume that they just thought they could sort of keep growing and then

IPO even bigger, maybe. The Collison brothers wrote in an email to strike employees, yeah, quote, we were much too optimistic about the internet economy's near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown. We grew operating costs too quickly, buoyed by the success we're seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in. I like the ownership. I'll be totally honest.

You saw this ownership, I think, from Brian at Airbnb. You saw it from Toby at Shopify. So taking ownership, treat employees well on the way out, you know, a couple of months severance, whatever you got to do. You know, it's tough to do this kind of stuff. But the company has to be healthy. The good news is we saw the jobs print. We added a million more jobs or something. Wait, we had cut a million jobs in August and then we added a couple of hundred thousand.

So there are jobs out here for these folks and they'll land on their feet. These are tech workers. They're going to be fine. If this was happening at Walmart or Starbucks was shutting down, you know, lots of stores, I would be really worried about society economy. We still have this record low unemployment. I mean, I know people hate Joe Biden or some percentage of people who hate Joe Biden and are attacking him for being up there in years. But the fact is the recovery is astonishing.

GDP growth. Yeah. Job growth. I mean, I mean, I know the fed's a mess and the inflation's a mess. but that's because we printed so much money. The other stuff in the economy seems to be going gangbusters. You had today in the financial times, the chief economist for UBS, like not a firebrand, by the way, writing that like, hey, you know, it turns out that corporate profits also are a big driver of inflation. Like, you know, you want to, it's just such a bizarre thing that everybody wants to blame presidents for inflation, and that's not, anyway.

Well, you learn that as a whole side brand that I've had. after years at Marketplace and watching this through administrations, like you kind of can separate out what is the current administration, what is the behavior of the last three administrations, or let's say, terms, which do seem to be like whoever comes into a booming economy is really like going to probably catch a knife. And if you're coming in when the economy is down, you're going to get a lot of credit. And the fact is, it doesn't matter, Republican Democrat. Except that we're all wild spenders. Right. And like Biden's not getting credit for this recovery, which is astounding.

And combine, the thing is, too, it's combined with these legislative wins that, I mean, he's the most legislatively effective president we've had in like the last three, I think. And all of those things are investments that will take 10 to 15 to 20 years to play out. Like, literally, unfortunately, Joe Biden will probably be long gone when we're like, oh, wow, that investment bill, that was like a really big deal. Well, the Chips Act looks like a pretty savvy move. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things in here that look really like could be in the best interest of America.

Right. I'm just putting aside politics or whatever just for Americans and America's future. Like that's what I judge people on is like, are these decisions good for Americans for the next hundred years? Where we look back on these in 50 or 100 years and say, yeah, that was in the best interest. Forget about party. Forget about the climate at the current time. But yeah. But we will say we tackled the literal climate challenge.

We onshore manufacturing. in a way we haven't before. And we freaking rebuilt our roads and bridges. Yeah, some of that's good. I mean, literally, bridges fall down in America. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. We, the somebody, I hope in the next administration, if it's the same one, or just as we go forward here, whoever's in charge, we just start to get a little bit of discipline around spending. Doesn't mean not spend. Just means increased discipline so we don't go more in the whole, because these interest payments are going to get bonkers. And, you know, there are variable interest rates from when I understand. There was a tweet storm somebody did. I forgot.

who did it, so I want to give them credit. But they said, you know, Adyan, a publicly traded company out of Amsterdam, who is Stripes contemporary. It was Jor. Gurgly Oroche. Gergaly. I've never actually heard that name. GERG-E-L-Y.

Gergling, thank you. Urgaly? I'm assuming. Listen. My, that's like really making my dyslexia. Yeah, there's a lot going on. When you have dyslexia, you look at a name. Yeah.

Like that one. You're literally, it's like, looking out a slot machine. You're like, whoa. But anyway, Gurgley. Yeah, Gurgly did a good tweet storm. Adyen had 274 million of net income in the first half of 2020,

up 38% year of year. They also had 300 million of free cash flow in the first half. And they did this on $593 million, or revenue in the first half of 22. And then what's most important about this tweet storm is the number of employees compared to Stripes. So what? So,

Add in, we should clarify, by the way, is a direct competitor to Stripe that's a publicly traded company in Amsterdam. So we have this data so that we can say, here's what they did. Speaking of operational inefficiencies, right? Okay, so he says, Stripe posted the message they sent to employees, and it's hard to avoid comparisons to Adyan, which processes a similar volume to Stripe, but employs about half the people, then Stripe in lower cost regions, Europe mostly. And so he writes, which is a better positioned business. It's rare to see, yes, this reflection on where did leadership make the mistake. This is, I'm quoting from this tweet storm. In addition, writes Gorgly, Adyen employs 2,200 people, roughly, so a third

of stripe and is processing similar gross bookings. Clearly, we are seeing, yeah, that's the key there. And he says, clearly we're seeing the higher first, get to profitability, later strategy, backfire in the current economy. This is like a weird, is this a weird American consumption thing? Because I, there are a ton of companies. I have friends. in the media space who are grappling with us now where their companies massively overhired because times were good. Yeah. And then now we're having to go like, oh, crap, we massively overhired when times are good.

But it feels like the grasshopper and the ant story. Like, isn't this, markets go up and markets go down. Yeah. So if you massively overhire when times are good, aren't you logically always making a mistake? Here's the thing. When you have free, when interest rates are low, as we've, learned, you know, you can borrow a lot of money. Everybody starts looking at the top line and nobody's looking at you in economics of the bottom line. Now that's flip. Everybody's looking

like, okay, how much did it cost you to make that money? And this is quality of revenue. And again, Bill Gurley's been shouting about this for a decade. He's literally been like, you know, shaking his fist, you know, at the moon. I shake my tiny fist at God. Well, because it's not very fun, right? It's not very fun to be the buskill and the grown up in the room. I'm very familiar. It's literally like he's like, you know what? 3 a.m. Maybe it's time to go to bed. You know, and maybe drink an alka-seltzer or something and, you know, have a glass of water or two and go to bed.

We'll have a little breakfast later. And, yeah. It's most important meal of the day. Now we're in hangover territory because we watch the sun come up. And so, yeah, not wise. And here we are. But this is what the conversation is going to be for the next three quarters. I'd say Q4 on.

what's the least amount of people you could have to make that amount of revenue and still grow and grow 20% a year over year, 30%. And we're just going to try that experiment. That's why you're seeing all of these cuts. For most of us, learning a second language in school, it was a joke.

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Babel, spelled B-A-B-B-B-B-B-A-B-L, Babel, language for life. Robin Hood, which, full disclosure, I was an angel in. If you haven't talked to me for more than five minutes, you wouldn't know that. But it's just getting self-aware. He wears his wins on his sleeve, people. You would too. Absolutely. You would too. Well, I'm, you know, I'm ride or die. I like to, I mean, I just as a side, if you see me like supporting my friends' companies, I, in from where I'm from in Brooklyn, that's what we always did is we supported our friends. and we were like hype them up and give them a high five. And when it's, you know, tough times, you're kind of trying to do that a little more.

So I know that not everybody, not everybody's ride or die or like support your friends in hard times. That's just who I am. It's not being a suck up. I'm not trying to curry favor with my friends of 25 years or 30 years if I'm supporting them. Been friends with people for two or three decades. You're going to support them. That's it. What am I supposed to do?

Dunk on my friends if they make a mistake. It's not going to happen. The end. I'm sorry if like other people choose to dunk on their friends or, or, not show up for their friends, you know, when Travis was making mistakes or Uber was stumbling, you know, and there's plenty of mistakes. You know, I actually watched some friends of mine in our circle say nothing. And I watched other ones literally publicly, not close friends, but, you know, other folks who were investors like publicly dunk on them. I'm like, well, that's not

helpful. Like, go see your friend and sit down with them and talk to them about what they could do better, which people don't see me do that, but that's what I do. I sit down and I'll talk to my friends, you know, if Sacks did something stupid or I did something stupid, Sacks would tell me I would tell Sacks. Yeah. That's it. You know, yeah. The end. But anyway, Robin Hood, which had a lot of problems, obviously, I had their results come out. And I was delighted, looking at my portfolio the other day, because I'm holding my shares forever. I said that. I looked at my Robin Hood shares. And they were like just booming in the last couple of months. So what's going on with Robin Hood? They reported their earnings. Discipline. Seems to be what's

going on with Robin Hood. Yeah. Robin Hood cut its net loss to buy 87% year-over-year. 87% year over year. That's what we're talking about, right? Like, focus on quality of revenue. Exactly. Bananas. The stock is up around 10%. We covered Robin Hood cutting 23% of its staff in August, so doing a significant riff.

Oh, good point. The hopeful drib drab. Yep. So we'll get to that in a minute. Yeah, 5 to 15% doesn't move the needle, as Bill Gurley says. And here you have a 23% moving the needle number. Yep, definitely. Robin Hood's market cap is $11 billion.

That's down 66% over the past 52 weeks, down 32% year to date. But we will start with the top line. Q3 total revenue, $361 million, down just 1% year over year and up 14% quarter over quarter. So that even though on the surface, the flat revenue year over year doesn't look great, there are some positive signs in here, especially around that financial discipline, actually. The revenue breakdown by category, transaction-based revenue, $208 million. That's down 22% year-over year. up 3% quarter over quarter, net interest revenue, 128 million, up 103% year over year,

and up 73% quarter over quarter. And then other revenue, $25 million, down 29% year over year and down 40% quarter over quarter. So they're making the most growth in that net interest revenue, which is revenue generated from lending transactions and margin loans. Savvy. Savvy. You never want to be dependent on, one revenue stream. There are many businesses that are advertising based, and they make a lot of

money on advertising. And what happens if you have a lot of revenue from advertising, and you have a down market, you have significant headwinds. So you probably want to have a subscription business as well. Right. And that's why you see some companies. I'm not going to mention any specific ones. I just literally like stumbled right into that. Like, yeah, totally. You do want to, oh, I see where you go here. So if you were just to come up with but one example of a company, the New York Times. to you, by the way, do you want me to say nice things about you on Twitter? I mean, I will. Nobody's saying nice things about me right now.

I know. That's what I mean. Why should today be any different? Send it a player, Matt. I'm here for you. Ride or die. Listen, people can dunk on me all they want. My life is so great that when people dug on me, I'm like, I was going to be, I was like

this close to joining the force. I was going to be on the job. and if I had just made that one little decision there might not have been any coming back from that I might have just gotten into that gig and I'd be a lieutenant right now fine great I probably would have loved that gig and then just fate set me in another direction

the internet happened I happen to be good at a computer I'm super stoked with this life don't get me all you want it doesn't get any better than this for me but back to this the New York Times Molly has focused suffering DJ. Thank you for that DJ Callad drops. I mean, I do feel like a rap artist.

And that's what happens when you hire family right there. Is they just... There it is. Just like... I love it. I'm dead. Exactly. Thank you, Rachel.

You know, people don't know producer Rachel reporting. She just drops emojis when a joke lands, she drops a dead emoji. In our Slack chat and I just, I lose it. It's very distracting. Let's get back to it. Let's get back on track here. Okay. focused. New York Times. New York Times. Tried unsuccessfully multiple times. You were there, Molly. You were an

employee of the New York Times Corporation. They tried unsuccessfully over and over again to build a subscription business. Because the ad business, they were so good at it. And their audience was so coveted. But at a certain point, they said, you know what? This ad business is a roller coaster. We want to have, we want to smooth out the roller coaster. Make it a, you know, I don't know what's an analogy here, but of a roller coaster that gets smoothed out. But if you think of a roller coaster, all those ups and downs and you were to just pull the tracks out a little bit and make it like a nice little smooth ride, maybe less volatile, that's what

descriptions do to any business. And it gives you two swings at bat. You know who else is doing that right now? You know it's a company that's pursuing the same strategy, Molly? I don't want you to guess. I'll tell you. Netflix. That was the company you were thinking of, wasn't it?

Yes, abs. You think of the New York Times and Netflix. 100%. You look at Netflix. What did they do? They were all worth subscriptions, ride or die for the end of time. Yeah. They edit ads.

They added ads. So that they would have stability the other way. If you want to have a great business, suggest having both of those. I can't think of any others right now that would be doing that. No, uh-uh. But subscriptions definitely great add-on to lots of, lots of companies.

And you don't need everybody. That's the other thing about subscription. If you get by 18%, just picking a random number, if only 18% as a potential target, let's say. If 18% told you, yes, I would pay for a subscription, and you get half to me at 9%. Hey, that's a heck of a start. Where's Spotify? How many people, what percentage of users pay for Spotify? Like, that feels like a good.

We have crack researchers. Spotify would be a good one to look at because they do have a free product. I'm going to guess right now, because I think Spotify was, I'm going to guess it's 30%. So one out of three. I'm going to say one out of three. And hey, that's a heck of a product. That's a heck of a product. You pay for that product.

You get all the music in the world, essentially, at your fingertips in a beautiful interface that you use it for an hour a day, half hour a day. I mean, I think any product you use more than 30 minutes a day, you'd be willing to pay for. That's for me. But Spotify, I will say, I think the key is the specific desirable value proposition. needing to be well defined.

So like in the case of Spotify, I happily pay for Spotify because I can download music on the plane. That's a great reason. That's it. And it's concise, super easy to understand. So if you are a company

that's trying to roll, for me, so if your company is trying to roll out, oh, see, I've only, that's hilarious. I have only ever paid for Spotify and I didn't even know it had ads. Yeah, that's,

I think, see, I'm the same way. I didn't remember that. It's, it's sponsored radio. That's, know. So 59.8% were ad support of 42.7 of Mao's. Holy crap. Almost half. Yeah. Yeah. So. There's, ads must be really annoying. Well, here's the thing about doing a subscription. You, uh, what drives one person to do it?

It might be different than the other. And you're going to want to have a collection of features, you know. And for one person, you know, it might be not having ads for another person. It might be downloadable for another person. You know, like, uh, I pay for YouTube premium. And you didn't. I think I may have talked you into that. Did I not? Yes. I now. pay for it and then now I paid for the family one and then they raised the price of the family one like 30 percent double barrel it was 15 and they went to 20 oh whoa whoa okay you got to pixelate though it's a family show double barrel CP of the franchise is CP the franchise says it's family show I was family show mad about that because that's not even like that's not even like I'm paying for YouTube TV I am just literally paying for this to not have ads and you jack it up 30 percent like um-uh cowgirl Oh, take it easy, cowgirl. Take it easy.

I got a solution for you. Yeah. Create a Gmail account. Get rid of the family plan. Create a Gmail account called our family, one, two, three, four. I see where you're going on this. And then you can log into two or three YouTube accounts. When you want to watch YouTube, it's a little pain in the ass.

You're not on your personal account. You don't want to be on your personal account anyway. Right. And yeah, you and the two people in your family who are going to get a weird recommendations engine. Who cares, yeah. But who cares? Smart.

Also, YouTube, please just roll premium into the YouTube TV bundle. Like, YouTube TV is already really expensive. It's just confusing. Boom. And that's what I mean

about the like the specific value proposition just has to be well articulated. Ideally, your subscription is not duplicative of a thing that you already get for free. Right. You have to add things to it. You have to add things to it.

Right. And then maybe three things. Maybe like three things. Three things. It's great. Three really good ideas. Really good ideas. Okay.

Yeah. That's exactly. Anyway, Robin Hood, I should pursue more subscriptions. I know they have a subscription service. I pay for it. I don't know what it's called. And I don't know what I get. But I pay for it.

Because I'm right or die. That's the bad kind. Exactly. That is you have to be right or die to want to pay for that. Is it called Robin Hood gold or something? I don't know. That's adorable. It's gold.

I pay for gold, but I don't know what I get. Yeah. I'd like to know what I get. I'd like to know what I get for that. I pay for Uber one. I can't remember what I get for that. You get like a 5% discount. Yeah, 5%.

Like free delivery and stuff? Yeah, you get lower delivery fees. You get priority delivery, better drivers. And the thing that's best in Uber 1 is customer support. You know, there's some Uber drivers who are like, I don't want to say bad actors, but they hacked the system. I called an Uber driver. You know, I listen. I order an Uber black or whatever SUV because I get car sick.

I'm not, you know. Same. I get car sick. So I treat myself. I order this Uber black SUV comes. And the SUV come, it says it's going to be 15 minutes at SFO. And what's nice about SFO is they'll pick you up curbside, not, you don't have to walk to the lot. Yeah.

So he picks me up curbside. I go out. It says 15 minutes. So I'm making my way. I say, hey, I can hit the loo. So I hit the loo. Yeah, it's a good excuse to wash your hands. And I get outside within 10 minutes and he's gone.

And I get charged 25 bucks. Cancellations. And I said, what? And I realized what he did. He got there earlier. He knows I'm not there. he you know it's at nine minutes and I look at the um I look at the the log because it shows you the log now I see like this okay the guy arrived too early so I put in like I don't want to pay that $25 fee I can't

I could afford it but I know I know he was scamming me he was counting the minutes right to just bounce to get because they know the cancellation fee and I guess for him it's like the cancellation fee I'll get another ride this is like a free 25 bucks or whatever that's yeah customer support for Uber one you you click it before Uber one you know you had to like email and you would wait and you'd get on this like Zendes ticket or whatever. Remember the back and forth on email? No, but I believe you. Yeah, you would get, you would get into an email thread with a customer support person, you know, likely in Manila or something. And you just are trying to beg them to explain your situation. You don't get here, it said car arrived early and canceled. They literally had it as one of the choices.

A category. Wow. Instantly refunded. So they, if you're Uber one, I think they just instantly refund and they just take your side as the passenger. Like, you're right. Now, I don't know who then pays the fee. if they take it from the drivers or they split it with the drivers or Uber eats it, so to speak. Right. But anyway, Interesting. I'm all about sublife.

I'm all sublife. Subscription life. I mean, I subscribe to not use come a different term for that than sublite. Yeah. I would back away from that one. It's a little bit of a... Just, you know what?

As the words came out of my mouth, I was like, yeah. I'm into subscription. Yeah. I'm a fan of subscriptions. I'm going to leave it at that. There we go.

That's a easier way to say. Precision in language. It's better to be clear than clever every time. This is a really important product question. Because I, like my mom is flying in today. And so I sent a car to her for the airport. Yes. You can schedule.

You can schedule. Can you do? I didn't use it though because I needed someone to go get her. She's not that mobile. And so like I use my regular town car service where I can schedule a meet and greet and they will meet her with a sign with her name on it. Yes. I think it's a meet and greet product feature.

They might do that actually. They might do that. I think they do with, yeah, the other thing you can do now with Uber, which I remember Travis talking about in the early days, and they just never got to executing it is you can rent an Uber by the hour. So you know you got like an event going on. Yes. And you're like, I don't know when I'm going to leave this party, but I know it's going to be hard to get an Uber. So, okay, I'm leaving the Warriors game. I just want an Uber for two hours. I'm going to park him at Miller and Lux. And when I get out after my stake, I'm going to just hit that, you know.

Good to know. Hit that Miller and Lux. Get that Wagu that we get. How great was that? So great. Molly and I have gone to Miller and Lux twice now. I know. Both, second time even better than first. One fact about startups, finding engineers is time-consuming and expensive. It's a pain in the neck. It's one of the hardest things you'll do as a founder. Well, if you're looking for qualified international developers without the crazy time differences,

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You're going to get matched and vetted with candidates in just three days. And Ravello handles all the annoying stuff, payroll, taxes, benefits, all that legal stuff, all of those regulations. They abstract that away and they let you hire internationally without the headache. Revello's engineers are full-time and embedded in your team. just like your normal employees. They're proficient in all the important stuff. AWS, Rust, Ruby, React, Python, Node.js, and more. Revello's customers include, oh my lord, look at this list, GitHub, 4Square, carda, indigogo, and Kickstarter. Go to Revello.com slash twist and mention Twist to get 20% off your

first three months. Plus, they offer a 100% risk-free, 14-day trial period. If you're not satisfied, you pay nothing. So go ahead and go to rev-e-e-el-o.com. com slash twist and mention twist to get that 20% off. The key takeaway, here, it's Robin Hood is diversifying revenue. Hey, payment for order flow. If you don't have a lot of order flow, because the market's down and maybe people don't want to trade as much and you go from whatever, 20 million monthly actives down to 12, I believe.

You get a little pullback in the retail sector. Yeah, you know, having some other products and other revenue streams, absolutely fantastic. And I think this is why I had a real advantage when, Robin Hood had all these troubles in the down market. And obviously they got hit quick because who's going to get hit quick in a market like this, crypto trading and then maybe retail trading, stock trading, all the stuff. I said, that's not why I invested in Robin Hood as an angel. And that's not why I own the stock as a public company and J trading it. I'm just going to hold for a decade because I trust management. I trust Vlad. I think he's smart. I think he's going to figure

it out. So when people told me when we distributed, what are you doing, J-Cal, what do you suggest I do? I said, you have to do your own research. However, I will tell you my thesis. I believe in the management more than I ever have because they're more seasoned. They're battle tested. Vlad is a wartime CEO now. Whatever he does for the second decade is with battle scars.

He's been through the war. He really is. He's going to make better decisions. And the same thing with Travis after getting through Uber and now he's doing Cloud Kitchens. Like when people go through that, Steve Jobs, when he got kicked out of Apple and came back, Elon with the Model 3, you know, in that disaster, that almost killed the company.

When people go through the near-death experiences in their companies or they just get demolished, that's what makes the entrepreneur. What makes the entrepreneur is not the upmarket and the flowers and the high fives and the IPOs and the stock records. What's going to make Zuckerberg into a real CEO right now is this meta situation. If he gets out of this, that's going to tell you something. If he turns out to be right or even just survives it, yeah. I think he's driving this thing off a cliff, but... Absolutely.

And he's going to have to shut this... I think he's going to wind up. I don't want my prediction here. Nobody asked for it, but I'm going to give it anyway. I think he's going to wind up scaling back in another year. The stock's going to go to 75. People are going to start quitting. And he's going to take the spend on meta down two-thirds.

Literally two-thirds, half to two-thirds. And he's going to put somebody in charge of, you know, the Facebook assets and do a massive riff and run those for profitability. And then he's going to buy a stock back. I think he's going to... he's going to hit that cliff. Like, he's going to have two, he's going to have one of the wheels over the side of the cliff.

And he's going to say, I'm going to use these other three wheels to get this car back on the road. I was wondering about that. I mean, I was having a lot of thoughts about meta this morning, too, and just thinking, like, you know, he had much like Stripe had an opportunity to IPO and probably really should have. And it was over, kind of that overconfidence and maybe even youth that kept them from doing that. He should have taken his company private. Like, they had the money to. do it. They had the market cap to do it. He had the money to do it. You know, it was like,

if you were going to do this meta thing, doing that as a public company, that level of invest, like nobody, I mean, just going even back to our inflation conversation just now, we're like corporate profits are driving inflation. That's how the, you know, I hate that. That's how the market works. That's how Wall Street works. Shareholder value is the North Star. And this guy lit shareholder value on fire on purpose. I think the biggest take private was Dow. And that was tens of billions. Yeah. Hundreds of billions, I'm not sure if it's possible, but, you know, when I had Michael Dell

on this week in startups, he said, uh, doing an at-scale pivot, like we're talking about here, you cannot do. It's impossible as a public company. You just can't do it. Yeah. You're under too much scrutiny. If you really want to change a company dramatically, taking a private, I'm trying to think of other examples.

There's Dell. Mm-hmm. Trying to think of another example of a company that was public one day, going private and then making a lot of decisive changes. Yeah. Anyway, if something comes to my mind, I mean, that might be like, I don't know. Let's move on. All right.

You know, I mean, it's like, I'm just saying it's an option, apparently. So just two quick charts, Molly, if I may. Yes. For you to react to. Here is the monthly active users for Robin Hood. And what you see here is Q2, 2021, the height of, COVID market, meme stock, crypto, frenzy. Everybody wants to get in on it. 21.3 monthly active users. Now, 21 million might not seem like a lot when you compare

to like, say, Twitter, Facebook, Google, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of monthly actives. But these are people who have funded accounts who are transacting. This is a whole different ballgame. Right. Every one of those users directly, if they're active, makes money for Robin Hood, right? As opposed to just like kind of showing up and leaching off it and maybe seeing some ads. They're worth,

these are the equivalent, I kid you not, of maybe 50 to one of an advertising-based user, right? So if you were to think of the value of a trading, whether it's crypto trading, e-trade, Robin Hood,

whatever, but somebody doing financial service, banking, Bank of America, whatever, you can put these at 50 times the value, right? So these would be the, these 21 times 50

would be the equivalent of having like a billion. That's why Robin Hood is an important company. But then you got the Great Recession, or no, I don't know what we're to call this recession. The inflation recession? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. The Rando

maybe slow down. Crypto recession? Growth recession. There's going to be something. Irrational, exuberant. Crypto recession. Yeah. Crypto recession. Yeah. Let's call it the hard reality period. Yeah. Yeah. That's not bad. No, it has something to do with speculative asset. It's the

speculative asset recession. That S-A-R. It's S-R. That's perfect. The speculative asset recession is upon us. Can we tweet that, Nick, producer Nick, and let's get that going. This was really a speculative asset, right? People wanted to be in spacks of companies that were pre-revenue. They wanted to be in pre-revenue growth companies that were private.

They wanted to be in crypto assets, NFTs, yada, yada. So I would say that Q320 number of 10.7 million, if you're looking at the chart here, YouTube.com, such this weekend, that's the real number. And then when it's kind of disconnected from reality, it would be Q1, 2021. So if you think of continuity of Q320, 10.7, Q420, 11.7, and then Q3, 2020, 12.2, that seems to me to be the baseline case of Robin Hood users, the reality. Everybody above that line, we're probably a looky-lose speculators. You know, some number might get reengaged over time, but they were probably in it for the lulls and GameStop. And Bitcoin. Yeah. Two thoughts on this. One, if Robin Hood is diversified. away from sort of transaction-based revenues and becoming a trading lender and diversifying

revenue into margins, there is risk there. The interest rates are higher, so it's going to be a better revenue stream for them. But it also does lead to potentially more scrutiny, right? All of the people who were like, oh, you're inducing these traders to make bad decisions by making it so easy and free are now going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're turning around and lending and letting these same traders do all of this on margin, which is an even riskier behavior. Good point. So just a little like note there that they will want a story. Well, they will want to to counter that narrative.

I think, no, absolutely. And I will steal a man it for you. Like should these, are these people educated enough to have margin loans, yada, yada? They have greatly reduced and tightened that. And now like I was going to start doing, I guess, puts and calls and stuff like that. And it gave me a roadblock. I had to go through some process. I just gave up. I was like, I was just going to, you know, start playing with them, like with very small numbers, like a video game, like 100 bucks or something, flipping a coin. I was going to do flips. And it gave me a roadblock. And I was like, oh, you know what? I don't have time for this right now.

Yeah. So when you think about that, I'm, I can afford to flip coins for 100 bucks. And actually, I've done that. Like literally after a poker game one time, we played a game where we took our shoes and we threw it against the garage door. And whoever got closer to the garage door, would win the hundreds. We had three guys and we're putting a hundred dollar bills on the ground. Like, you know, like people play dice. Why am I not at all shocked to hear this was three guys? Three guys. We just literally taking our sneakers off and throwing it. We whipped our shoes at the garage.

It was a fun game, man. You have to throw the cash on the ground. And then whoever gets the shoe closest, you know, you grab the 300. It was, and then we, if, my lord. You know, and then you double, double or nothing. It was, it got sick. Okay. Second thought, though.

Second thought on this. But anyway, so my point is, they did rein that in. And so anybody who's training on margin now, it's a much smaller amount. It's been rained in. Right. And they've kept it very safe. And interest rates are higher. So it's a smart time to make money on lending and make money on margin loans, right?

Like that's I'm, I, my, my mo trade. Oh, this week is that I'm buying three months CDs. Nicely done. Because it's at 4%. Yeah. Like if you just sort of flip three months CDs as interest rates rise over, you know, a year, like that's a pretty decent little return. But the other note I was going to make on this is, I think coming up this week, right, are Coinbase earnings.

And we have talked about Coinbase and trading volume being the way that it makes money. Yeah, it's reporting today after the market closes today. So I think Coinbase earnings have been all about trading volume. And I'm going to be watching these very closely to see if it has figured out, much like Robin Hood seems to be doing, how to diversify. It's revenue. Boom. Marketplace-ish. Yeah.

So here's the thing with Coinbase. If this is the speculative asset recession, which I love. I think that they are the last to recover. The headline, yeah. So they were first to get hit, Filo, first in, last out. First into the party, last out of the party, right?

So if everybody comes into the theater and they get that first receipt, you're the first in, you're the last out. I do it on Subways. First and last out. So they're first in. They captured all this value for the speculative asset boom. They're going to be the last out of this party and it's going to be hard.

So I would not want to own Coinbase right now. They're going to bottom out in two quarters or something, I would guess. Three quarters. That's going to be, and it could be 50% down from here. You know, like I'm... Another one, Peloton, right? We've been watching this one, Molly. Yeah, they had our names this week too.

Right? To this boom during COVID boom. COVID boom, they'll be the last out. Sadly, and I don't know if they make it out. Peloton, I am not really sure. They offered a week, holiday quarter outlook. Peloton sank 14%. Investors do not buy that.

That's all happening this week. This earnings week, by the way, is bananas. Telling. Other stuff going on that's distracted everyone from it, but a lot of earnings stuff happening. Some other trending story? You know what we're supposed to talk about the trending stories here on the show, but I guess we'll take a pause for the cause. And then here's the bottom one.

I'll tell you in the green line. I'll do the checkered flag when it's time. Folks, but for now. So here is the bottom line. This is important. Remember I just, I discussed, we've talked about this a couple times in the show, hey, if Facebook were to make these riffs, cut costs like Airbnb did, like Uber has, like other companies have, they've seen their stock go up. If you take the medicine and you cut your expenses and you show a path to profitability, Uber would be the canonical example, I think. I don't know what the word canonical

means, I just use it. But I think it's like the best example. It's the one that everybody turns to as a reference point. Great. Okay. So I'm going to use a fancy word. Thank you, Molly defining it for me. But I think it's the canonical example at this moment is Uber. I'm not saying that just to talk my book, but maybe a little bit. 71% growth year of year, getting to that free cash flow from a position where they weren't in that, right? And they were spending too much money and they weren't making enough. Here's Robin Hood, same playbook. Burning cash at an alarming rate in Q1 of 2021, 1.4 billion losses. then 500 million in losses, then 1.3 billion in losses. And you're like, oh, my God, if you were in there in 2021 and you own the stock like I did,

you're sitting there and you're drinking pepto from the bottle because your stomach is flipping. And then all of a sudden, oh, flag gets the message. Management gets the message. You want to see us be more disciplined. Okay, we're going to cut these losses and we're sitting on tons of cash. So if you want to own us for the long term, it might be a great time to get on the train. And that's what this chart shows you. And that's what the chart from Facebook doesn't show you. So for people who are capital allocators, J-trading or otherwise, not investment advice, there's a flight to

companies that are being mature. Mature. I love it. Yeah. No, absolutely. That's what you should be looking for right now. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Who could be more mature? Sorry, it's not going to be me. But Robin Hillick-Lick-up 23% of its staff in August again. So they're going to get there. Great job to my friends. There. Congrats. Plenty of runway now that they're not burning a ton of cash. They've got $6.2 billion in cash and cash equivalents.

They're good. They're good. They can be acquisitions. That could be a big move for Robin Hood. Start buying some stuff. Things are about to get interesting in that space. I'm into it. All right.

Next up, you know what I love about our group chat, Molly? Is that producer Rachel. That's like one of my great discoveries, I think. Producer Rachel always has like interesting things she finds. I know. She's the most interesting woman in the world. Wow. She legitimately is out here just doing like cool stuff

29 hours a day. I don't know how she does it. She die their sleeps. I'm a little worried about that myself since I pay her salary, but okay. Rachel finds interesting. So I ask, instead of just OK, Boomer, that when Rachel reporting, that's how I'm branding her,

I'm good at the branding, Sultan of Science, Queen of Kimwa, dictator, all these things, sasshole. I'm able to brand a person in the way Donald Trump is, you know? Or Howard Stern, Baba Booie. Yeah, you own that comparison. Get in there. I'm sort of like Howard Stern and Trump in that I can name somebody for better or worse. I have dubbed her Rachel Reporting.

I think this is going to last. Like this could be like a career thing. I would change all social media if I was Rachel to Rachel Reporting. Because it's, you know why it sticks? Alliteration. Boom. Correct. It's good having a smart co-host.

So Rachel reporting, I said, you find something. I want to break in like we do for a J-trade. J-Tray. I want to have a Rachel reporting stinger. So if a fan wants to make a stinger or an audio drop fine, but let's bring Rachel on because she found something interesting. Mm-hmm. All right, here she is.

Hey, Rachel. So when you find something that's awesome that fans of the show would love to download or try, just break in anytime you like. All right, I'll send it. I feel like I'm constantly on my own stuff. We'll call it the download with Rachel reporting. Oh, I like it.

Okay. So send it. As the kids say these days, send it. Okay, so I guess I have to go back a little bit to a few weeks ago. Back in August, Pinterest launched this new invite-only collage-making app, and it was really similar to the product that I'm about to talk about. So to understand it, though, first, I think we're going to have to talk about Pinterest's shuffle. Yeah, I did not get this invite, and I'm a Pinterest power user.

I am mad. I actually just got an invite. I'm not going to lie. I saw somebody commented on another tweet with their invite code. and that's the code that I used. So for any, a hack, it's an invite-only one, but it doesn't seem like it's gated that much. And it was a collage-making app on Pinterest

that you could use off of your own tweets, and you could only do it on your phone. And I was like, oh, you know what? Making collages is super fun. It's super crafty, a great way to kind of listen to an audiobook and to do something with your hands. But I spent a lot of time on my laptop. So I went to my computer and looked for something,

like a similar platform that I could use other than can. and found the landing. And it's awesome. It's really cool. What do you do with it? Yeah. So it's a mood board platform, just like Shuffles was. But the thing that makes this one a lot cooler is I'm able to go discover other people's mood boards, I'm able to share mine, and you're able to monetize and shop the things that are into the mood board. And I think this would be so cool if you had, for example, like a themed party and you wanted everybody to maybe, like, for Halloween, dress kind of similar, make a mood board and tag a bunch of different stuff in it would be cool. Add this link into like your email invite. So first thing, I understand this.

Yeah. I like, I do this for every party. I think I have a Halloween party idea, Pinterest board, pinboard, whatever we call it. And all of my friends contributed to it whenever. And we're like, we literally just did a cute foods party over the weekend. But it's hard, but it is kind of hard to shop like Pinterest doesn't have. I know you do your fun things, but I do my fun things. I made these deviled eggs with little spiders on top out of olives. Like it was amazing. Yeah. But it is hard to shop and it is not super shareable. But are you saying that when you say monetize like you can actually be a style creator here, like a collage creator where you make something beautiful and then you get a cut if people buy it? Yeah, I believe so. But I think

in order to do that, I'm not sure if that's actually in the platform, but in order to do that, super easy, you could just make your own Amazon storefront. Like I've done that before. And then on your Amazon storefront, you get unique links. So that's kind of the workaround that I would probably do. And that's actually how this whole thing started. Two founders of the platform created it to have like a virtual apartment furnishing platform. But they noticed, I believe, after they got funding, you know, that's kind of like a niche. So I imagine what happened is they expanded. Now, it's for a bunch of different things and not just furniture, but what an awesome use case. I feel like a lot of times I see on Pinterest already, those mood boards of what can

kind of create like a certain aesthetic in your house. So I think this is going to be a really fun thing to play around with. This is really interesting because I was on the board of a company called This Next, which was doing social commerce. It was a whole social commerce boom 15 years ago. I mean, it was it was kind of a little bit pre-mobile. It was pre-mobile and you would basically make collections of things. And yeah, it was kind of like Pinterest. And what's really interesting about this is when we did the All In Summit, I came up with three themes. We had like the good besties theme. We had the Miami Vice theme. And then we had the Havana White Party. And not only did we have to make this, people asked us for it. And I think, Rachel, you might have been involved

in helping make the mood board. So the first thing people said when we invited them to the things, do you have a mood board? And then we, I think you made it for us. But this is you make it. And if you share it and you're good at it. Every time somebody clicks on something, you make a little Vig. Yeah, exactly. And I think this is, it's cool that you said social commerce, because when I saw this and I saw that, oh, like, this would be a really interesting way to make money, is I absolutely hate this and it's getting super, super popular, but it's almost, I'm not sure what that station was because I'm a little too young to even know it, but people used to like sell stuff on TV. And now when I open up certain apps, like, I'll go to somebody's like live stream and they're

trying to like sell you stuff. And I'm like, that's so weird. Like, I don't like that. And a bunch of different platforms are, uh, I know TikTok's adding that. It's a QVC, right? I don't like that. I mean, that's just a great. Okay, boomerone.

It was just crazy. On TV where people sold things on TV. Well, this is a live streaming. It's very big in China. It's huge in China. Amazon tried it as well here. Yeah. Yeah.

But I think it's a lot better. And it reminds me of the MyPellow guy is the only one person that I know. It's still like a lot. lot of this is still happening the whole sell stuff on TV thing, but this is, this is way better. This is delightful. And yes, basically, Rachel, our roving reporter of the internet and the world at large is out here finding all this cool stuff.

But I was going to say, I am so, like for so long, social was just sort of dead, right? It was more abundant. It was like, you just have these platforms and you're never going to win. There's always going to be, there's just going to be YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, then TikTok, which was super disruptive, but now feels so entrenched. And like, there is so much happening in the social space. And we are ready for it. It does, though, kind of make me a little nervous when I see stuff like landing,

which just popped out. And it's awesome. But it's kind of like what Jason has said before with Be Real, where it's, is this a feature? So is landing going to like stay around for a while? Or will this just become a feature that Pinterest like fully adopts? So I think that's one thing, I guess, that I'm looking for it to seeing in the future. Like, are there going to be big players, like you said? or is everything that's a smaller plan

and trying to build themselves off just going to end up getting eaten by one of those big companies and become another future. Yeah. This is a big deal. Here's 2006 in the New York Times, Gordon Gould, a former partner of mine,

a good friend, talking about this next and social shopping. And so this is when social had just started and there were a series of companies. And one was called, the other notable one at the time was StyleHive.com. There was also whist and caboodle, but a lot of people were trying to figure this out

because it was sort of, they were evoking MySpace. So MySpace plus commerce. So MySpace plus Amazon, this idea was out there. This is just an important lesson for founders listening. Sometimes it takes a decade or two to get the format right, right? And the why now, you know, back then the why now was commerce and social existed, right? But really, the why now that accelerated this is the mobile option, I think, right?

And yeah. And I think just the visual communication, right? The nature of visual communication. Like people are much more comfortable now, I think, communicating in, images and and also the manipulation tools are way easier. That's it. You got it, Molly. Yeah.

People are, it's actually, it is, I think you just nailed it there, Molly. The why now of this vertical might be people know how to do creative tools like Canva or Instagram. And back then, they didn't even know how to do that. Like, to ask customers to make a mood board, they'd be like, what am I supposed to do? Get Photoshop out or something? Like, do I need a designer for that? And now it's like, no, you need an iPhone.

And you would literally have to like, even if you had an iPhone back then, you would have to, you'd have to like take it. Well, the iPhone didn't have a camera for a launch, right, when it launched or something. Like, you'd have to figure out how to take a pay. Anyway, yes, there's all of that. Plus, as Nick points out, there's one click payment. How do you guys feel about, so this morning, I had the wonderful privilege of meeting up with a little celebrity of the Lower East Side, which is the location of Manhattan that I shopped a lot. And she has this shop and it's called Rogue. And she started off as a Deepop influencer. And now has a storefront.

And famously, this was first done, I believe, by somebody that Jason knows, the founder of Nastygal, where she started off doing T-POP or eBay, maybe. Yeah, yeah. So I think she was the first one that did this. Yes. She started online. They made Nastygal. But I'm starting to see now a lot of people start killing it. Is it on Stanton?

Yeah, I think it's on Stanton. It's around Rivington is where Rogue is the name of the store. There's another one called Funny Pretty Nice. I'm going to plug that one too by a creator named Natalia. but it's so weird seeing people start an e-com, kill it in e-con, basically making these mini-media companies and then make storefronts,

like retail storefronts. And I'm like, why is that a goal? Like, it seems so interesting. Like, why is that the pivot now? There's a real reason. Why? Real world is an incredible way to bring a community together.

And so it makes some, it acts as what I dubbed a long time ago, monetized marketing. The real world manifestation of what's happening online, give something for people to do in the real world, and then what are you going to do

when you go to one of these stores or you go to Mr. Beastberger, you know, his new storefront? You're going to take a picture. So this becomes a virtuous circle. You have this audience online. This is why I want to do this week in Startups Meetup so badly

and you did a great job on that. We're going to reboot them, everybody. Because I want there to be a real world manifestation of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to every episode here. Here you can go hang out with other founders. Go to this week and start a meetup in your city. Boom.

All right. Great job. Awesome. Yes, guys. Find. Good find. And we should note, by the way, that they recently raised money, too. We didn't talk about this. But the landing just raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures, not just in February 2021. A lean Lee. So maybe they'll call us. Maybe they'll be raising suit. Don't. Who knows? I didn't mean to. Paradoxically. This is a true story. I was working late last, over the weekend, working on some, you know, special projects. Making cute Halloween food? No. I was literally we're taking 20 meetings a day. Anyway, I'm coming home at 10 o'clock. pocket night, I'm exhausted, having eaten, so I stop it in and out, you know, here in the Bay Area. So I get my double, double, I got my headphones in, because I know what's going to happen,

you know, so I'm going to recognize me and start talking to me. And so I got my headphones in as like a little self-defense. And I see the guy out of the corner of my eye. And he's just like, I hate to interrupt you. I was like, no, it's probably, take my headphones out. And he says, big fan, blah, blah, blah. I know, what do you do? He says, all right, I work at Pinterest. I said, what do you do there? He said, I work on a collage app on Android. No way. There it is. So it's definitely a simulation. Yeah. Interesting.

Just talk about a random moment, right, that it relates to something you found. So there's something going on here in the world with social commerce. Rachel, well done. Any time you find something interesting like this, whether it's rogue on the vintage store or anything, just break in and make us feel 20 years younger, trash, old. You're a trend spotter. Love it. All right. Thanks, guys.

Trend spot. Thanks, Rachel. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. Stay tuned for tomorrow. We're going to do a really in-depth breakdown of the Airbnb. earnings among other things. That's right. And of course, Rachel is back again for another awesome segment of OK Boomer. I'm really excited about this one, actually, mom fluencers. It's going to be great. Mom fluencers, yes, on TikTok. See you then. And so two days of Rachel in a row. I know.

Aren't you lucky? Audience is going to like that. All right. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.