This Week in Startups - Why Sam Lessin is using the VC model to invest in individuals + Jason funds a startup on air | E1328

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

First, Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures joins to discuss how he is applying the venture model to invest in individuals, he just placed a $1.7M bet on a YouTube creator (4:10). Then, Jason brings on Chris Niblett, who is going through Founder University (41:40). They discuss Chris's company Bizzly, which is a "Patreon for small businesses," what can be improved, and Jason invests live on the show!

Okay, we've got an amazing episode for you today on this week and startup. Sam Lesson of Slow Ventures is on the pod. He worked at Facebook, and he's an investor in great companies you know, like Roman and Airtable. He recently turned $500,000 into almost $2 billion by directly investing in Solana. Seed Round, the cryptocurrency that is taking the world by Storm. And he did that Seed Round back in 2017. It's going to make one of those slow ventures funds, one of the best performing venture funds of the last decade, of course. But he's making a new style of venture bet that I saw covered in the press in the fake news and people were dunking on him a little bit. But I thought it was one of the most creative and interesting concepts I've seen in a long time. Sam recently gave, I kid you not, $1.7 million to a YouTube creator, Marina McGilco, and he did that in exchange for 5% of her future earnings for 30 years. Now, of course, people said, oh my God, is this indentured servitude, which is a bit insulting

and crazy. No, this is an investment in a new style. of business, obviously, a YouTube creator. And what's brilliant about it is it takes into account that Marina might create many different businesses, an app, maybe she does like Mr. Beast, a burger, maybe she creates a product or like Kim Kardashian, a clothing line. Who knows what people are going to create? And so we talk about the math behind making a bet like this on creators and entrepreneurs. And he thinks this is a new category of investing. And I don't disagree with it. It's a really interesting conversation. He's super open about it, by the way, which makes

a great guest on this pod. And then after that, I have an incredible conversation with Noddy Gang member and Founder University participant Chris Niblet. Chris was making or was watching the live stream. And I mentioned Founder University, which is a course we teach for 12 weeks. And we do that because we want to meet founders and then maybe back their companies. You can apply to Founder University at Founder. University. But coincidentally, Chris was watching the live stream and he was commenting about Founder University. So I said, hey, would you come up on stage while we were live streaming on YouTube and talk about how Founder University is going. So I did this and I didn't think we'd publish it, but he had such a great idea for a business that he's been building called

Bisley. It's basically Patreon for small businesses. And I got so inspired by this idea of bringing reoccurring revenue in the form of membership to patrons that I was like, wait a second, maybe I should invest in this company. So I offered him some money to invest in his company. And he answered me live on the program if you would take that $25,000. You'll find out when you watch the interview if you took it or not. But what a great idea. Imagine your local pub saying, hey, for $100 a year, $10 a month, you get to be in our local pub. And maybe every time you come, every two pints you buy, you get a free entree or appetizer, whatever it is, or you get to come to the Super Bowl party and Mother's Day every year, maybe get priority reservations, you know, all these kind of

interesting things that you could give as a membership. And I was like, wow, this is great. They're going to take like the Netflix business model, the Amazon Prime model and bring it to local businesses, which could really use a stable source of income. And I actually gave him some of my product insights on his MVP. Really loved it. And it got me back to my roots. We got to have more startups in like their first year of building out their product on the program. So look for more startups on this weekend startups. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by disruptive advertising. Sign up for a free digital marketing audit at disruptive advertising.com slash twist. Plus, if you go into business with Disruptive, you'll receive a $250 gift card and a free

Friday to Sunday ski trip to Utah. Drada. Don't let request for Soctu compliance reports slow down your business. Use Drada to stay ahead of the curve. Go to drada.com slash twist for 15% off. And NordVPN is improving VPN services globally. Access content from over 59 countries and stay safe online. Go to NordVPN.com slash twist or use code twist at checkout to get 73% off a two-year plan plus an extra bonus gift. All right. Sam Lesson is back on the podcast.

He's a general partner at Slow Ventures. They've invested in a lot of famous companies like Airtable and Roman. He's a former Facebook VP. But I wanted to have back on the program. And so welcome back, Sam, because you're decided you would invest directly into individuals. And I saw a vice article, which is never good. I just saw a bunch of virtue signaling people saying, oh, my God, you're investing in humans and dead your servitude, yada, yada.

But this is specifically for creators. So I thought to have you on to talk about it because it seemed like a very interesting idea. And we've had flavors of this come up with musicians, like I think David Bowie, IPO, at some point, et cetera. Bowie bonds, yeah. Yeah. So tell me about what your thesis is here and you did your first deal. So let's unpack both of those things.

Yeah, we've actually done a few now. And we have to do it for both creators and entrepreneurs, which we can get into if you're interested. But the basic thesis is pretty simple, which is, especially in the era we're in now, you have all these people who are starting. You used to build a product and then use that product to build a brand. And then once you have that brand, maybe you build more products. Right.

We're moving into a world where there's a lot of people coming. from the bottom up. We're building great brands, communities. Someone would even call them cults, right, around their personality before they've launched a single product. And when you think about that shift, it's changing a lot, like how you think about, I think, investing and kind of supporting people and their missions. And so I think when you think specifically about creators and entrepreneurs, it's pretty straightforward. Right now, a lot of creators, basically all creators, work off cash flow, right? The dollars they have to invest or the dollars they made from whatever the last sponsored post they sold was or whatever thing. And it's a very inefficient way to build businesses candidly, right?

Yes. If instead you can say, hey, like, you're doing great. Let's put some investment dollars in early, right? Our view is we can help people grow much faster in their creator businesses, right? And their brand-driven businesses and their personality-driven businesses and whatever niche they're doing. And it's a win-win for everyone. And so venture capital doesn't do this right now, venture capital invest in companies. And so a lot of venture capitalists will say we love creators, go start a company creator and we'll invest in the company. And we're like, well, look, actually, we're not even sure what the best thing for the creator to be doing is, and it might be five things, and it might change a bunch.

Like, we'd rather instead say, hey, we'll invest money up front in you. We'll be aligned holistically with you over your career. We'll help you build it. We'll help you build your following. We'll help you build everything. We'll provide the capital. But, you know, we want to be long-term aligned, not just, you know, what you happen to be doing this moment.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's for us, the goal, again, with creators and everyone to say, like, look, let's do what venture capital is disposed to do, right? which is go into places where there isn't cash available, provide it, you know, be aligned, and then let the model work so that we say, look, the really big superstars, the winners, pay for all the zeros, right? Which is another way of saying we provide super cheap capital, right, compared to other options they have. It's basically the venture capital model applied to talent early in their career. And I think one astute point is that a creator might be doing great on YouTube.

They might create an app. they might create Mr. Beast Burger or Dispo from David Dobrick. There's all kinds of different things they should do, but they shouldn't stop doing the other stuff. They should do all of it. So the byline of this vice article, she gets $1.7 million. Sam, Lessons, a special firm gets 5% of her creator earnings for 30 years. Yep.

So 1.7 million is 34 million over 30 years. So you're saying, hey, she's going to make at least a million a year in order for you just to break even. But investing that money for 30 years, you really need to do, what, five or 10 times that amount. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's what is venture capital, right? In the end of the day, like, Marina, you know, is not, who's the one you're referencing

was in the article. She's not at zero. Like, she's making pretty meaningful money already. She has a meaningful following. But she's an opportunity where she can take investment dollars from us and dramatically improve her business and like with the scope of what she's able to do. I mean, I think that's, you know, for a creator, this deal makes sense. it makes sense for her. If she's like, if I can raise my earnings by 5%, this deal pays for itself,

right? Like, in a sense. And then for us, we're basically betting like venture capitalists that actually she's going to crush it, right? That providing the right seed capital, the rights aim, can dramatically change the outcome in terms of what she's capable of producing in her career. And we want to benefit along with with her in that. So she's not Mr. Beast with whatever, you know, crazy tens of millions subscribers. She's got 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, which is really hard to do. but so she's definitely cleared like being a notable celebrity. She might make low millions of dollars a year or something like that. What is she in the business of currently?

What is her YouTube channel about? What attracted you to her business as the first one? She has a few. And I think that's partially what we look for is like some level of versatility, right? But like part of her brand is built around, you know, Russians learning American business culture and things like that because she's an immigrant and has a great story around that. She does, you know, some other stuff. on culture. She has a bunch of interesting audiences that she's built together, you know, with a few different channels. And our view is like, again, like, this is someone we want to

be aligned with long term. We think she's going to do a lot more really interesting work in her career. It's not necessarily about owning one specific niche or one audience. It's about, if you're investing with someone over a 30-year time horizon, you're really investing in their growth, right? As people, as leaders, as business people, you know, as creators in a lot of ways, shapes, their forms. Now, if David Dobrick or Mr. Beasts or someone came and said, hey, I would love financing. Would we do it? Absolutely, right? It looks more like a growth deal, right? It's not a venture deal. But there's no, I mean, in the end of the day, the basic thesis, which is, you know, businesses are getting smaller and smaller, right? You know, it used to be

thousands of people. Now it's 10. Now it can be individual creators. Finance should be able to scale down and flex, right, to support these individual creators. Why not? Right. And if she were to create five companies in that time, you would get five percent of those companies. as well, so that's fantastic. 5% of her equity in the company, is it right? Oh, sure, right. So if somebody gave her 20% of a perfume brand,

you would be getting one point of that 100 point pie, 5% of her 20%. Yeah, exactly. Which makes total sense. So tell me about what that negotiation was like. Did she understand it? Because this is the first time I think anybody's done this to the best of my knowledge, right?

I mean, I've never heard of anybody investing in a crater. People have tried forms of this. I mean, I think that, you know, one of the things I really appreciate about Marina and working through with her. She totally gets it from day one. And then actually was a really great, I wouldn't say sparring partner, but the person to work with to actually work out the kinks on how to do this, right? Because she's sophisticated. She has good lawyers around her. You know, this is the type of thing you actually, you know, especially as an investor,

if we came in and, you know, like bowls in a China shop and made up some deal with some creator didn't understand anything, right? Like, it doesn't serve anyone, right? Doesn't serve us from a brand perspective. We want to do more of these. Doesn't serve the creator, you know. But what was cool, about working with her and we did work very closely on several iterations of how to actually paper this and make it work and the details and how do you think about self-employment taxes and like really structuring it properly was, you know, I think that we got to a really great place where, you know, everyone's like, yep, this deal works. It's papered as we intend

it and we can roll it out and do way more of them, right, in a scalable way. So, you know, again, it was a negotiation in terms of like, how do we come up with fair prices? How do I have LPs. Like, I need to present them with a deal that makes sense. If it doesn't make sense for them, it doesn't make sense for that. She has to want to do the deal, right? So, like, we need to find a good space in there, you know, and a good model that works for everyone. So she's incented to generate as much revenue as possible. She gets to keep 95% of everything she makes, but she gets to get this big chunk of change now to deploy to build her brand, how she sees fit, right? So is it a company of her or how do you structure it?

I'm curious, is it an LLC or something? Yeah, we basically create an investment LLC, which she controls, right? We don't control it. You know, it sits kind of alongside and has contractual rights to basically a piece of her earn out. So, you know, most creators, even at this scale, even, you know, when you're getting going, they do have some sort of earn out or LLC, right, which they should, right? And like, we can, you know, and so we basically kind of sit alongside that as a separate

entity that she controls. We have certain information. rights that are pretty meaningful but limited. We try to make it super simple, right, so that we can kind of get some transparency on what's going on. But beyond that, our whole thing is like, we don't want to make money if you're not making money, right? If you are making money below a certain level, we don't want to be paid. Our goal is not to be paid on the marginal case, right? We don't want to be taking money you need. But look, if you end up building the next Mr. Beast brand or become the next Jeff Bezos, right? Or the next Elon, Elon, you know, the ultimate cult leader,

you know, the reality is, is like, if the upfront financing helped you get to there, that's a great outcome. And then the beauty of venture, which you know well, Jason, is that your super winners pay for all the losers, right? Which means the actual, you know, the irony is that it's the cheapest money available, right? Which is partially why people always like, 30 years is so long. Like, it's all about alignment, right?

As long as I'm aligned with the winning cases, there's no backdoor where I can bet on on Elon Musk, but not end up making that 5%. Then I can make the cost of capital so much lower. for everyone else, right? Because I know that. Whereas, you know, there's a lot of other products out there, you know, like people talk about ISAs, income sharing agreements, right? The problem with ISAs is they're pretty expensive because they're so limited, right?

They kind of cap out so quickly on the return. They do one thing, right? They'll send you to Lambda school or nursing school. And instead of you paying 50K for nursing school or 40K, whatever it is, they'll pick that up in they basically want you to return double for that. taking the risk, which seems reasonable over like a 10-year period. But you have to break a minimum, right? Did you come up with a minimum she has to make in order to take the 5%? Absolutely. The minimum on our version of deals, I'm sure, much higher than any ISA you'll ever find

out there. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, I would have said. Yeah, yeah, because we're not trying to monetize, you know, if non-winning cases, right? But I think, you know, again, I'm not against ISA. I think they're an interesting product and an important one. We've invested in the ecosystem. But I think the fundamental difference is, is always have a cap in them. They say you're not going to pay us more than 2x the value of the education or whatever. And I understand why. But what that means is that the actual cost for everyone's much higher, right? It's almost like, you know, whereas if you do our version of the deal, which is an uncapped upside,

and the average cost can be much lower, right? And then in fairness, you kind of can project what a nurse is going to make, you know, or a developer over a non-entrepreneurial nurse or developer, let's say. which is a whole different category. This is an entrepreneur. Okay, everybody, let's take a moment to talk about growth marketing and all the tactics and hacks that are out there with me today. Jake Badsgaard.

He is the CEO and founder of Disruptive Advertising, which you can visit at disruptive advertising.com slash twist. So some questions for you, Jake. When is too early to start marketing your Cyber Monday or your Black Friday? What's the right time to engage people and how do you engage? Yeah, you know, that's going to depend on the audience. But the cheapest customer is the person that's already bought from you before. And it's time today to start warming up the audience that bought from you last year. With custom audiences on social or email, it's time to get on top of those

right now and getting them warm and ready to engage. As far as new audiences are concerned, there's a lot of opportunity to explore new platforms outside of the traditional Google, Facebook channels like Instagram, TikTok, some of these other ones, LinkedIn, YouTube. Let's get some new audiences in place and test those out and find what's working so that we're ready to scale when game time comes. All right. That's great advice. So if you want to sign up for a free digital marketing audit with Jake and his company,

Disruptive Advertising, just visit disruptiveadvertising.com slash twist. And if you go into business with Disruptive, you will receive a $250. a gift card and a free Friday to Sunday ski trip in Utah. We'll see you on the slope. It's going to be a great season. Yeah, these types of deals, whether for entrepreneurs, we've done with a family called the Liebermans who are amazing or with Marine or a few other coming, anytime when you're not sure and there's a huge variance in outcome, equity is a great way to align incentives and invest. If you know what the outcome's going to be, to your point, right, you're going to be a doctor. It's going to be this to this. That's actually usually much

cheaper, right? That's not a great way to... You don't want to finance a business with equity if you know exactly what the curve is going to be. You finance a business with equity when you don't, right? Which is they... And the reality is that's where the world is largely going. I mean, if you look at the future, people's predictability on their income and their careers, it's not going up, it's going down, right? And there's more random extreme outcomes, which I actually think it means, broadly speaking, the more we can align humanity around equity-based financing rather than debt, right, for the coming years, the better off would will generally be, although we are obviously starting into creators.

Yeah, people going into debt are not going to be able to take risk. People being invested in are going to have capital to take more risk. So when you, once you've got $200,000 in your graduate degree or undergraduate degree, got forbid, in debt, you're basically paying a mortgage out of school, which means how are you going to start a company? You're screwed from day one. 100%. Yeah.

And this was actually the thing, you know, hilariously. I've been trying to get this done for like 20 years, right? Like, I wrote my college entrance exam essays partially on this. So I was trying to cut a company 20 years ago called Life Capital. And this was exactly the thesis then, which is, you know, I grew up in a privileged household, which was amazing. And you think about what that actually did for me, the number one thing it did for me is allow me to be risk neutral, right?

I didn't have to take the safe path because I knew I would be well fed and cared for no matter what. And I think the more as a society, you can talk about UBI, right? You can talk about a lot of different things. If we can neutralize people's risk curves, right, I think in an entrepreneurial technological age, we'll see way better stuff come from people, right? Because they don't have to, you know, do the thing that's just safe to pay a mortgage. Tell me about the entrepreneurial side.

That sounds fascinating as well. How do you find an entrepreneur and then back them? And has that deal been announced? In this case, we have, well, it has, you know, we talked about a little bit in the information, which is my wife's publication. But, yeah, the other one we've been talking about is the Liebermans. This is a family of entrepreneurs that sold their last company siblings to Snapchat for quite a bit of money. And they were very senior executives there.

And they left. They love this thesis, as I do. And we have been financing and we were the first investors in a setup called the Lieberman's company, right? Where we said, rather than investing in one thing, we will invest in everything you do for the next 30 years. We'll give you a check up front. It's your money. It's basically an incubator that you own. This is different because it's a C-Corp, not an LLC.

So there's shares. It's not just distributions, yeah. Exactly. And we don't get an income kick back on it, obviously, right, the way you wouldn't in LLC with flowing through. But for the Lieberman's code is very simple. We'll give you money up front, right? And skip all your C rounds forever.

Own more of your companies. Why take the dilution, right? So I think the reality is we can, because we can assign a much higher value, right, to everything they're going to do over the next 30 years, maybe we can give them more capital up front for a lower percentage. Was it disclosed how much you gave them and what for what percentage? You know, I don't think it was disclosed

And I won't disclose it here Because I can't remember But the Also good to get permission That's why I asked you Well, I think they're very open people So I wouldn't I don't think they'd mind We could assume millions of dollars

Or something in that range And these are proven entrepreneurs Who've sold their last company I think that was dying We're 60 million dollars Of Snapchat and things like that So it's not you know They have real

Studios exist Like we have Freedberg You do Freibur from Allen Pockest Has his the production board We would see that science. Yeah. They exist, but the difference here is that we're basically buying in with a 30-year commitment, right, to specific entrepreneurs, right, as opposed to being whatever the studio creates and things like that.

And again, I think the pitch to them is, and I think what makes sense for them financially is just like, look, when you do the math, if you can give up a small percentage of everything you produce over the next 30 years in return for up-front financing, so you skip every seed round ever, right? which is like we're seed investors or what we do. We're kind of putting ourselves out of business here, right? So you can go to Series A every time. You own 20% more of every company, right? And that actually more than offsets, right?

You know, any sort of small impact on the other side. So you knew you get some criticism for this. You must have thought it through and you've been thinking about it for 20 years. So what is the obvious criticism, you know, kind of the weak criticism? And then I guess what's the valid concern that people, people could have here and then how do you address it? So, look, the weak criticism, which referenced in the article, and I mean, it's kind of like a meme at this point, to me at least, because I've been hearing this for a long time,

is, oh, this is indentured servitude, slavery, how dare you? And I'm like, that's literally the opposite of what this is, right? Like, if you want, you know, I'm giving you money with no strings attached. I don't own any of your work product. This isn't a record laboral deal. Like, I control nothing. Kind of insult to all my Irish ancestors who were actual indentured servitude. Well, I don't think people I guess to understand.

I think people's grasp of is history, if we haven't figured it, it tends to be fairly weak. But the, you know, it's, I mean, I couldn't, I understand that if you don't think about it, you might jump to that conclusion very quickly, right? But it's actually exactly the opposite of what this is. If anything, if you want to be political about it, I make the argument that debt looks a heck of a lot more like indentured servitude than what we're doing here. Yeah, I mean, it basically is the same device. Indenture and servitude and debt were the same device.

You owe me money. In one case, it was massively predatory. And I guess if we argued higher education, it used to be cool, like in our generation and that it became pretty gnarly today. Yeah, I mean, look, again, I don't, I think these things are all products that have their purpose and time and place.

But I think they're really important to understand what we're doing is we don't own any work product. We make no decisions. You know, people have talked about, there have been some experiments before that I've seen on the internet of people being like, oh, I sold shares of myself to my friends and they vote as a board on whether for I date or something.

And you're like, that's like the opposite. That's ridiculous. You know, you don't, you don't have to do anything under our deal. Like, we're just doing a long, you know, long term, you know, arrangement, you know, that is completely hands off. So I think that's like the weak criticism. Look, I mean, the stronger criticism I actually say is economic, right? And here's, here's some of the problems we face.

One, there's no data to backtest this model on. So you say, what is 5% of Marina's earnings worth, right? Really? We have to come to an arrangement and have eight. model we run, but until we've done this a bunch, pricing it properly is very hard to know, right? And that's like a legitimate criticism. Second, we're legitimate criticism. There's no downstream market, right? So you and I, you know, you and I are early stage investors. We invest and then someone else comes and marks us up and someone takes it public and there's a whole ecosystem right. There's

no ecosystem here, right? Yeah, I mean, she's one of one deal. Right. So there's no ecosystem. So until there's an ecosystem, there's actually in some ways a financial penalty to that, right? Like from you think from a strict financial perspective in terms of how you can price these things. So look, I'm not afraid of the criticism. I have to admit, I kind of thrive on being told I'm wrong. So I'm happy to be told I'm wrong about all these things. I do think sometimes you just have to go act. I mean, if you're doing something innovative, like there's going to be questions. And so just thinking this through, if she became the ultimate, you know, social media star, they tend to generate 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollars a year in revenue. That is like what YouTubers do. And then if you had

Kim Kardashian, maybe on the margins, it could be $100 million a year. That's today. Yeah, I think the reality is, I think that's today. And I think the reality is when you think forward, I think there's a strong argument that the power of the best personalities and brands will only increase in the coming years. So, you know, we'll see what this looks like in 10 years or more. I mean, I think, you know, we'll say, I believe there should be a whole financial

ecosystem around this. I believe that actually, you know, crypto will help accelerate our move into that much faster, right? You can think about how. How so? Well, I think about like, how are we going. Let's pretend someday, not to. today in 10 years, we want to IPO Marina, right, or to sell our shares in Marina in some way, shape, or form for liquidity for our investors. You know, is Marina going to be listed on the

New York Stock Exchange? Hard to see that tomorrow, right? Yeah. It did happen with David Bowie, right? He sold, I think, the rights to his music, yeah. Yeah, and the Bowie Bonds is different because it was Bowie Bonds, but it was actually secured by his catalog, right? Which is the opposite of what we're doing. So, like, slightly different. It was backward-looking instead of forward-looking. Yeah, exactly. But it is possible. I think, you know, with, you know, you think of the Lieberman's Co, like, could that ever go public? Absolutely. Like, and we'll see how that works. But I think, you know, the reality is crypto just allows you compose new financial markets much more easily ever than before. And so, you know, when you squint, because we were long term investors here, you know, slow ventures. We think in the long term. It's like, in 10 years, how do these things intersect? Do you get new pools of liquidity? Do you get new pools of interest in it? I mean, I think you can see how these things come together, if not exactly, at least thematically. And if she creates a company and she winds up owning 50% of it, which is possible as a solo founder, even 40%. Hey, you could wind up owning 5% of it.

They own 2% of it. And if she creates the next skims or whatever, LinkedIn, you know, you could have. Or multiple of them. I mean, yeah, or multiple. I mean, I think the thing you can mind is just the tailwind is towards creators in these kind of communities being more and more powerful. And look, as early stage investors, we always just want to be aligned with the founders anyway. Like, what are you really doing?

Like, you're investing in a company. the time as a seed investor. And you think the thing is going to pivot 10 times before you know you've invested in any way. You're fundamentally backing the people, right? So when you kind of mish these ideas together, it just seems logical to just directly invest in the people. Committing to security and compliance is vital for startup growth and proof of security has never been more important. As you scale, you might start to receive more SOC2 requests from customers, of course. And that's where DRADA comes in. Trada is a compliance automation platform used by some of the world's leading CISOs. CISOs, you may have heard of it, Chief Information Security

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D-R-A-com slash twist. Do you see a moment in time where, let's say, she goes from her 4 million YouTube subscribers to 40 million. She goes back to the market in three years. Having deployed your capital, made this incredible 40 million subscribers. She's now in the top 10 on YouTube. And she says, you know, I'm going to raise 10 million now for another 5%. Yeah, why not? And now here we go. Now there's a follow-on funding. For what it's worth, we've already done this with the Liebermansco, right? Which I can say, which is we've backed them multiple times at him multiple times at increasing prices as they've proved more, right? And so I think the reality is, is like,

no question, there's no difference between, you know, how this happens for companies and how this should happen for brands and people. If she's making cash every year off of various activities, do you want to get a dividend or how do you deal with that? Because in our business, our LPs don't want a dividend. Yeah. So traditional venture LPs do not want cash, right? And they don't want profits. They want everything to be reinvested in the business. You know, I don't, long term, you know, right now, what I'd say is this is a small part of what our fund does, right? And so we're able to experiment. It's a little more an experiment, but it's a, it's early and like we're being experimental, whatever, convince words.

These will end up being different funds, right? Like, there are plenty of investors who want this return profile. There are plenty of investors, you know, LPs. There are other ways to do this. But I agree with your fundamental point, which is this is, this actually doesn't, the investing in creators part does not look exactly. exactly like the signature that VC investors usually look for. Not yet. I agree with you with the squinting and there could be shares in a person and they could sell shares over time.

And then I do think that people in Hollywood, like the agents, you know, the CAAs of the world, I don't know if you read Mike Ovitz's book. Do you ever read who is Mike Ovitz? No, but I recommend this book. You know, Michael. He hangs out here. Listen to that book on audio because it's pretty. great or read it, a fantastic book. But he basically tried to corner the market in Hollywood

by having Michael Crichton write Jurassic Park, having Spielberg directed, putting his actors in it, the whole thing, and then doing the theme park stuff with Universal. And that all came together synergistically. I got to think the agencies, you know, the William Morris's and the creative artist agencies of the world, they're going to look at what you're doing and saying, huh, we have pools of capital. We have the other side. I don't know if they're allowed to do that. But this seems You know, I think you're right that there's interest there. I mean, I think the thing that keep in mind, though, is that that model, and there's a very big difference in my mind between investing and being a service provider.

And, you know, there's some firms who disagree with me. You know, there are plenty of venture capitalists who see themselves as becoming service providers and selling themselves on services. And I don't need that person. We're going to do your recruiting. We'll do your marketing. Yeah. You know, look, I'll be honest.

I started my career at Baining Company. I know what service firms are. I know I don't want to be a service firm. And I also believe, and I also would say, like, I actually don't actually think that's a great strategy because I think ultimately over time, the value that you get ascribed becomes the marginal value of services, which is not that high, right? There's a big difference between- marketing firms out there who do a better job than injuries in Horowitz, right?

Like, they're not specialists in that. The Hollywood people and like kind of figuring out how this all plays out have to think about, right, is are they investors or are they service providers? And those firms all legacy is service providing, right? Now, they know that service providing broadly is not a very good business also, right? So are they interested in these models, of course. But, you know, people do ask us. I mean, when we talk to creators,

you're like, well, what services we provide? And I try to make it very clear to them, nothing, right? Yeah. Like, now in practice, well, we help, though, of course we will. We're like aligned with them. But like, don't come to the deal. Don't do a deal for services. That's a terrible deal.

Do a deal because the capital matters to you. Yeah, I always thought it was a weird thing to ask your, what a negative signal if the founder of a company needs their venture firm to hire for them or do their PR marketing? like just, you know, not to single anybody out, but like, if you look at Clubhouse, like Mark and Driesen and, you know, Ben and, you know, pulling a lot of people into the platform, and then they suddenly stopped doing it. And so it's like, well, I mean, do you, that I started, I don't know if you had this happen, but I had another founder say, well, after watching that, we want you

to move this week in startups to our platform. We want you to do this appearance. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this isn't like a, this weekend startups is not part of your startup. But like to, no, and I just passed on the deal because they had these requirements for my marketing. I try to say this jokingly to people when they ask. I think it's a fair question even. Very frequently founders will ask you, well, what service? What do you do for me? Yeah.

And I do have an answer to that. I actually would like to think I do help companies. However, my always default start answer is nothing. Think of this as capital, right? If you want, you know, services and handholding, to your point, I think it's a very, very negative signal, right? of like people understanding what they're getting themselves into at the early stages, right? So we have our head pattern, which I believe, I think are, we have a very high MPS. I think our founders, we do do a lot for them.

But like the people who come in with that, what are you going to do for me? You know, what are your services, I think are not the people you want to be investing in. What do you think about this market? You and I are early stage investors, just watching the valuations. I don't know if so Fred Wilson did an interesting post today. Did you happen to see that one? I actually did. About $100 million, you know, seeds or whatever.

doesn't work. Here's a spreadsheet. You're starting to see, I don't know if you've seen 100 million pre-launch, but I've certainly seen 40 and 50 the last two or three months. I don't know how this model works. Do you think the model's broken right now in the early stage at these valuations pre-launch? So here's what I think, I mean, I wrote a piece about this information about kind of the future of venture capital. I think what's happened is, which I think is fine, is for a while now actually seed investors like this huge benefit, which is growth investing from Series A on a metrics become a very efficient market, which means that there's this huge step up between seed and A, right? Because if you get the right seed bets, then all

of a sudden, by the time you hit the A with real metrics, right, that you can look at and everyone can evaluate you, these massive step-ups because everyone's playing and fighting each other for those deals. Now, those firms have realized, oh my God, wait a minute, I'm paying these huge A prices. Why not as a marketing expense, just pay more at the seed, right? Just to be in the game, right? It doesn't matter. The dollars are so small, right? like, why not trickle it down? That's for sure happening. And I think you have to be careful about, you know, where those deals really work.

I mean, for instance, you know, we were talking before about like Solana, which for us is currently like a 6,000 X return plus, right? Graduation. Thank you. We're very excited. You guys were one of the three seed investors. I know I had multi-coin capital on recently. Yeah. They were one of them.

But you weren't in multi-coin. You went directly and you were directly in a one. We were not, yeah. It was us and multi-coin and foundation. I heard it was close to a $2 billion position for your phone list. Yeah, approximately, right? on a less than half a million dollar check, right? Amazing.

And, you know, we're very big believers. We think it has a long way to go. But what I'd say on that one is interesting is part of the reason that's such a great return for us was because they weren't the cool kids at the time. The round was being done. So the A16 Zs and all the cool kids had other bets and they didn't believe in Solana, which meant that it wasn't a very expensive round, which is how you get those types of returns.

Had it been priced the way some of these products are priced today, it still would have been great, but it would not have been what it is for us, right? Yeah, we'd be muted big time. Yeah. We'd mute the multiple incredibly. I mean, if you look, when I invested in Uber, it was $5 million, Thumbtack, $4 million, $4.5 million. I mean, those were the incredible days. But I think the thing that keep in mind is like, I don't think it's bad. I think this is actually how venture capital should work, right? Which is we get paid to go invest in things that other people don't want to invest in. Right. The second everyone's investing in something, it's an efficient market, it's fine, you can still invest in good stuff,

but it's a completely different ballgame. So I like, I mean, when you talk about creator investing, investing people, we're doing more Dow is like, we're going to keep pushing the envelope with capital to places that aren't overcapitalized, right, where those evaluations do exist. So I actually think it's just a sign for smart speed investors. When you start seeing 100 preys and you know the model is not going to work for you, you can still play, like still learn, be involved, make seed bets, but your real investing needs to move on, right? And that's actually your job in capitalism, right? Your job is to go find places to fund.

Exactly. If everybody's funding it, it doesn't need funding. It's overfunded. And that's a recipe for disaster. You could have just a boom bus cycle where there's just too many fish and gone. Just go find other, you know, use capital better. Go find stuff that needs money. Don't just like invest what everyone else is investing in.

Let me ask a technical question. Where you have LPs and we're used to when we have shares that go public, We can distribute those shares to our LPs. There's a little custodian service that does that. What do you do with Solana? Like you have a bunch of LPs. They probably don't have a crypto wallet, maybe some of them, or maybe there's some endowment that's like...

Here's what I'd say. You want to give the Ford Foundation like $100 million in Salana or something like that if they were an LP, yeah. This is not something I think I can discuss in front of a lot of people, but I always say it's a great question. I'd also say that the infrastructure for doing what you're talking about is coming online very quickly. That's what I heard. And it also said you'd be surprised at which large endowments and things like that are extremely interested in holding the right cryptocurrencies in

the future. So great question. So they're catching up to it. I did hear on the back channel that somebody's building a custodian service to manage this kind of stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff going on there. It's it distributing crypto assets will look in my mind very much like distributing shares in public companies very soon is what I would say. The only difference that I've been thinking about as a fund manager, because we do have to make decisions when we distribute it. And like Sequoia, as Rulov talked about, they're going to be holding on to their shares longer with the Sequoia fund.

They were talking, he was talking specifically about Square, which he's still on the board of when public got 15 or 20. They distributed some to LPs at 72. Now it's at 250. They're deciding when they distribute those public shares. With a cryptocurrency, it's automatically. radically distributable. So what year did you distribute it to your LPs? Like after a certain run-up, like you've had this crazy run-up, it's only been, what, three years since you invested in it?

Four years? Do you hold it for 10? Do you hold it for seven? Look, we have answers to these. I think it's an evolving thing. But I don't think it's a new problem, right? Like, the reality is there always been a question of when to distribute. There are plenty of funds that distribute things. Yeah. Yeah, too early, too late. I mean, people, so the answer is a great question again, but I think the answer is that I don't think it's like it's not a new problem. It's more just a how do you think about these things. I mean, I think we're long term, very fundamental believers in Salana and a lot of the crypto projects we invest in. We believe in holding. But yeah, I mean, you're right that that is a question. I just don't think it's that different between public listing,

right, whether it's on NYSE or on Coinbase Pro. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, one of the great features of private market investing is that you're not liquid. because people can't triple their money and sell and then miss out on the 3000x, right? Which is what human instinct does. People double their money. They triple their money. They're like, oh, my God, I double my money. I'm going to go buy a home or whatever.

Instead of realizing, like, well, if it tripled, do you not think that could happen five more times? Of course it could. And it's just hard human psychology. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think it's part of becoming a more mature investor is learning how to manage that, right, emotionally. It is.

You know, I think for instance, you know, thank God I held on to a lot of it. But I also, I sold some Facebook stock way too early, right? Even though it was a fundamental believer in the company. And like, that was a huge financial mistake, right? And so I think you kind of like learn these things over time. I don't know if you were you there when the mobile stuff wasn't working and it went down to 15 or $20 a share? Yeah, 100%. And that's where everybody got jittery.

I know a lot of friends were selling their Facebook shares at 15, 20 bucks instead of it very quickly got to 100 when you guys figured out mobile. and then, you know, obviously on from there. So, yeah, I mean, holding is hard. Selling is easy. Holding is hard. Well, that's what I call it diamond. Diamond hands, man. The people of crypto understand this.

All right. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Sam, Lesson. It's super nice speaking with you, and I appreciate you giving an audience for these ideas. Do you want to increase your online security? Well, don't we all? If so, you need to hear about NordVPN. NordVPN offers a VPN that stands for a virtual private network. with benefits such as helping customers stay safe online,

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slash twist. Okay, what a great chat with Sam Lesson. What a smart cat. Super honest. And we're going to have him on again in six to 12 months to check in on this investment thesis and see how it's going. And now we get to move on to my conversation and my investment offer with founder Chris Nibble it. Stick with us. We started something called Founder University years ago. It was a two-day intensive course. Now it is a 12-week course. And we hired somebody just to do the curriculum because one of the things I realized Jackie was running the accelerator doing a bunch of other work for me, running the podcast and doing Founder University. I was like, hey, can we produce a curriculum for that? I didn't realize producing a curriculum is kind of a full-time job. So then I just hired a full-time

curriculum producer. This concept is called the single-threaded leader in the Amazon books. Basically, if something's important, put somebody in charge of it. So meetups are important to me. Rachel's in charge of it. Founder University is important. Say, Jackie being in charge it, we put Charlie in charge of it. And now it's going amazing. We're going to have 50 people in that first one. Now we have 100. I'm going to invest in one of the companies, 25K or 35K, I think I said. And that's in week three or four. And everybody's showing up for everyone. And, oh, Christopher, are you in? You're doing it? Oh, great. Can I bring Christopher on a lot? Is that possible?

I would like to bring people on live for this. Yeah, I mean, we could send him the link. Christopher, you want to come on the air? Oh, wow, we've never done this before. Hey, is that Chris? That's me. Hello. You're in Founder University.

Correct. Yep. So tell me, how did you find out about Founder University? So following you, I think, from the podcast. Yeah, so I've always known that I wanted to have my own company and do my own thing, but I liked it because I looked at it as sort of a pre-accelerator. It's like, hey, there's a certain skill set that you need to do. one of these highly speculative novel business companies.

And I really liked that it was like, if an accelerator is maybe step one or two, this is like step zero. And it's been great so far. So tell everybody what the deal was and your reaction when you heard the deal structure I put out there. For the founder university? Yeah. Like what it cost.

Yeah. So I'm curious, be candid as possible because I was concerned about the messaging and we struggled over how to do this because we wanted people to show up. And we know when we don't charge, people don't show up. But I don't want to charge because I'm rich and charging founders is like the antithesis of what I stand for. Right. Of course. Yeah. So it's $700, but if you do the work, you show up to all of the classes, you participate, you launch it MVP, you get the money back. Yeah, I mean, I'm in a position where $700 is, that's an amount of money that I'm concerned about. So there is a motivation for me to do the work. So getting the money back. I will say that

from a content perspective, from networking, from education, if I didn't get it back, it's still worth it because it's kind of like a mini MBA in startups in 12 weeks. So that's fantastic. Is it week three or four this week? I think we just did week three. We just had, I can't remember her name, I think Mariel or Muriel from bubble.I.I. was owned. Oh, great. Yeah. So Bubble is a partner of ours. We were looking for a no code partner. So they sponsored the event and helped us underwrite it, kept free for everybody. And we just thought, you know, people should learn how to do no code because so many non-technical founders joined. And then the other thing I'm finding out is that people are

finding co-founder. So you're currently just a founder, your solo. Have you launched your company? Do you have your idea? Dial-inion? Yeah. Yeah. So we're in a little bit of a weird place. I have, we're maybe a little bit further along than Founder University, but I have two other co-founders. And so we're building what's essentially Patreon for small businesses. Wow, what a great idea. Yeah, so you can subscribe to your favorite local taco place, $9.99 a month, and now you get Taco Tuesday pricing every time you go in.

What? Yeah, and so it's just finding. This is a killer idea, dude. Yeah, yeah, that's, we're really excited about it. How many establishments have, signed up for this? And of those, how many had some level of success? Yeah.

So we are talking to, we have four or five that have, that we have actually went and met and sat down with and have worked out sort of what their special look like. And so we had one who was like, hey, we're ready to do this yesterday. So we kind of had to back up from our process. And so we're launching just the skinniest little MVP building it. That's the way to do it. Yep. We're doing an angular front end because I have a lot of,

of Angular experience for using Bubble as the back end because you can make API calls and it has the database and everything. And the goal is to turn it on and to have money flowing through the system on December 1st. We have, yep, we've partnered. There's a local brewery that's a brewer's co-op. And they wanted to do memberships. And so they're going to open up December 1st and we're doing the memberships for them. So yeah, we're.

Let me. And just to clarify on the $700, you just have to show up for. 12 weeks. You don't even have to build an MVP. If you show up for 12 weeks, you get the 700 back. What we didn't want to do is have people burn spots and not show up. And I tried to pick a number that would be, I felt 500 or less people were like, whatever, I could burn 500. But once it goes above 500, even for me, I start thinking about things. So if I order a gadget that's under 500 and it doesn't work out, I don't use it, I'm not like, I got to return this, right? What's the return window? But if it's over 500 and I don't like it and don't get value from it,

I'm like, I'm going to go, I'll take the time to print a label and go to the post office and return this thing, right? Or somebody to do that more likely. So let me, have you raised any money for this vision? No. Have you incorporated? No. So I have an LLC that I've used for other things, but I've not really used it for this. So the short answer is, you know.

Yeah. What would $25,000 do for you guys now? Have you had $20? Yeah, that would be incredible. We would love to be able to grow to have the time and the resources to go get more restaurants, get more businesses on board, and then especially on the consumer side also. Yeah, that would be a game changer. Okay. So here's the deal.

I told everybody during the 12-week course that I'd pick my favorite startup and give them 25K. So I'm going to keep that in for the last week. But how about I give you 25K right now for 1% of the company? So 25K for $2.5 million valuation, we're saying you convertible. note, you incorporate in Delaware properly, and then we just ship your 25K. Is that something you might be interested in? Yeah, I'll go ahead and yank your hand off on that. Absolutely. Okay, folks, do you have it. I just put 25K into this company. I think your idea is brilliant. You obviously have hustle. So I got a pile of cash. Let me take a 25K bet. If you're that passionate

about cars and you know Angular and you're a builder and you got two other co-founders, checkbox, checkbox, checkbox. So let's fucking roll. Here we go. Okay. Awesome. 25 dimes from J-Cow. Yeah, we're excited.

Awesome. Thank you. Okay. So just somebody cut this clip and give it to my team and just so they know the terms. Just a quick, easy, breezy note, 2.5. This is real, right? This is not like. I'm not joking.

I'm rich. It's what I can do it. Oh, wow. Jason. I haven't placed a bet. And I feel like you're, I feel like you're going to win. I feel like you're a winner. The idea is a winner.

Thank you. Okay. Yeah. That's, you know, the thing is at this point, with the amount of money I invest every year, you know, getting close to, you know, tens of millions of dollars, you know, probably be 100 million deployed next year. You know, making a 25K bet is something I can do on a feel just to see and build the relationship. And that's why I'm doing Founder University is I kind of want to get a feel for folks and be able to make a quick 25K bet or then have them come to the accelerator and do 100K bet. but as long as you're not a criminal or as long as there's not something really

heft up here. Yep. It's a lock. No criminal history. So what you saw here, everybody, just so you know is what I'm also trying to do is I want to be the first, I used to be known as being like the first guy or second guy on the cap table. And then I had so much deal flow. I started saying, hey, here's our Goldilog zone.

But I kind of get a rush out of making a quick 25K bet based on a feel. So boom. Anand is like, I'll give you 10K for 1%. Get the fuck out of here. And I put the valuation at 2.5. What are you trying to do? Stop trying to draft off my deal flow. You don't get terms like that.

Those $2.5 million valuations reserved for somebody like J-Cow who brings something to the table and a team. No, you're not being punked. All right. So congratulations. Heidi is spinning up the docks now. Are they spinning up the docks now? Great.

All right, there you go. Maybe I didn't sleep enough last night, but it is what it is. I need to place bets. Every time I place a bet, I get a rush. That's why I like to gamble. That's why it's good that I do venture capital. And just so people know, this is not like a silly bet here. We vetted Founder University from hundreds of people down to 100.

And then I know, you know, people have been doing a really great job in there for the three weeks. The only problem is your co-founders don't get to come, right? Correct. But I am keeping notes as I go. And so we talk about things. You do like a post, yeah. Yeah. And there's also a lot of, so like the network's really valuable.

And I don't know if you guys thought about that. But there are. So I had a call, I think Thursday or Friday evening with another founder in the group. She's now technical, but she's a former digital marketing person. And she, so we've done like a skill swat where she kind of coached us on what we should do in digital marketing. And I had wrote a bunch of code around basically like a web crawler for car search engines. and she's kind of doing something similar. So I did some time with her, and we kind of swapped skills around.

So the networking has been great. That's fantastic. Yeah. This is my other crazy idea. Tell me your name again, your full name? Oh, Christopher Nibblett. And it's N-I-B-L-E-T-T-T. But you go by Chris, I take it.

Chris. So here's my other crazy idea. I was going to make this that it was going to be like $1,000 to come or maybe $2,000 to come. and then let's say 100 people come and it's $2,500. Now you've got a pool of $250,000. Right. That I was going to say, we'll have the people who are in it, the hundred people,

vote on what the five top companies were. And then we invest the money in those five companies and everybody's $2,500 is an investment. Problem is, accreditation. So if the accreditation laws weren't there, I could charge. But it might negative. signal, $2,500 might be too much. People wouldn't do the course. So, but anyway, if it was a 700 and there were 200 people in the class, it would be

140, maybe you give a top three people. But everybody votes it. And so your $700 would be an investment in one of your classmates. Yeah, no, I really love that. Yeah. So I don't know how to do that technically. Well, maybe they'll change the rules shortly. You're in the process of doing that.

Anything we can be doing better in the course or anything. And tell me about the amount of work to courses, because there's two weekly sessions. One is like the formal session, one is the less formal catch up one. What is the total hour commitment been for you? It's probably five hours a week, maybe. That's easy breezing. Including the actual sessions. But it's really not like super taxing because it's all stuff that's top of mind anyway.

So it's actually like it would have been doing it anyway. Correct. And so now we sort of have a framework for how. how to think about things and where to go and great resources. That's awesome. And this is the first time we're doing the curriculum, and the curriculum is here. So can somebody in my position sponsor, founder and get my 700? Nick, that is incredibly nice of you to do.

I can give the scholarships myself. What I'm trying to do is have people have skin in the game. I've only had one person complain about this. And they were like, it's a lot of money for somebody like me. And I didn't want to be a jerk. But I just thought to myself, Uber drivers making $30 an hour right now. DoorDash drivers are making $30 an hour. you know, in the peak hours.

So I was like, well, why don't you just work 20 hours? 30 hours, like, do 30 hours over the next 10 weeks, which will be three hours a week. Right. So I was going to kick it back to her and say that. But then I didn't want to get into it. And I had one other person tell me like, this is too expensive for poor people. And I was like, which poor person is it too expensive for?

Please tell me, because we didn't have anybody email us and say, we literally had one person email us and say, this is, I can't afford this. Right. And it was pretty clear they could afford. it. So then it was like, okay, then it's not a priority or you don't want it enough. Right. If you can't come up with $700, Chris, in today's world to do this, what does that tell you about the person?

Yeah, I mean, so I'm not going to lie. Like, every week I've been watching the numbers in the call for like, because I've been curious as to how many people stick around. And for the course last night, it was over 100, which means that it's... Wait a second. I think we had 100 people start. So... Yeah, I mean...

Maybe that was our team. Maybe a couple of people... I think Press was in there. and a couple of other people. But basically, the numbers, it looks like, and this is anecdotal, have not dropped down. So people seem like they're sticking with it. At least that's how it looks from my perspective. I don't know.

They are. Yeah, I think the attrition. I think what we also said was just if somebody has an excused absence, I don't know, kids' graduation or they got COVID. Obviously, we're not going to be like, ha-ha, you got COVID or kids bar mitzvah. We steal your $700. $700 is to get you to show up. Right. Yeah.

You can have the commitment to do it. Chris, I love your idea. I think it's brilliant. Thank you. I think doing it in the minimum viable is great. And then coming up with what the membership gets you is really a great idea. I think I'm going to give you a couple of product ideas here as we rest because I hear all these ideas. One thing people like is to be part of the first X number of people to support something.

So when the roadster came out, they made 100. of them that were numbered and signed by the team. There's a little plaque in my Roadster. This is Roadster number 16, Jason McCabe, Calacanus, and it has Elon's signature, and everybody else is on a little plaque. And then I have signature number one, famously of the Model S.

Those two cars are worth twice as much as non-signature cards. So if I was, you know, I'm going to just come up with like McCabe's is a pub who's on this. Okay. You could be, and if was McCabe's was the name of the pub, you'd be McCabe's

VIP or McCabe's founder or McCabe's 0-01. And you would say we're going to have a thousand members or the first 100 or the first 250. 250 sounds like a good number

for an establishment. And you're just going to count up. And those first 250 are going to have this set of rights and we're going to ask the 250 to pay for the year. Nice. Everybody else comes after 250. So it's a way for them to pull in money ahead of time. And they get to come, let's say, you know, I think having hours of operations where they can come, one of the great things as a parent

is I have a couple of restaurants where I know them. I show up 15 minutes before service sometimes with my kids and they seat me. Yeah. So here's an idea. Whatever time the restaurant opens, they're allowed to show up for the setup and sit first before the line starts, etc. So they get to come at five. Now, I know this sounds like, wait, okay, Boomer, like, who wants to come at five? If it's a popular place, being able to come in a half hour early or conversely, stay a little later, it's pretty great. And then to come up with like three signature events a year, you get to book Thanksgiving and Mother's Day and Valentine's Day. These three holidays sell out. So you get a guaranteed first shot at those three. And you get the, and those are

typically our prefix, you know, you pay per person. So that would would be a really cool thing because priority on the most active days people will pay for. As an example, the reason I didn't do a Picasso when I was looking to get a second home, I think it's because I needed to have a place to ski with my daughters over Christmas. That was like our big goal was to take the Christmas break, the holiday break, and be able to ski. And you're rolling the dice if you buy a Picasso if you could actually ski that week. And it's impossible to get homes that week. It's just impossible. So I think it's impossible to get Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Thanksgiving. Boom, if you make it that. And then also people love access. So a cooking class is

another great one. So I think if you had a Thanksgiving cooking or a baking or whatever it is, those kind of things are great. Delivery priority is another interesting one. So again, being able to order your food by texting a phone number or text the manager is another one. So you can build Twilio into it. If you had like a VIP phone number, people love a VIP phone number. Or even have the driver, and I've heard you talk about it, and I have the same problem, you see the driver leave with your food and then they make three other stops. And it's like, I would pay extra to have them come straight. You can. Uber Eats in the Bay area, they have a $1.99 or $1.50 you pay to have them come directly to you. Okay. You can always tell when they're not

doing that because now what they do is they don't show the drop off at the other location because I don't think they want to reveal other people's homes in case you like knew the home. You're like, oh, you could call somebody to be like, oh, you got chicken wings too? Right, right. Kind of situation. So anyway, that's just a couple ideas. Anybody have a great idea. Think about a business that you've owned or that you patronize.

What would be three things, everybody in the chat room right now, three things or in the chat and we'll leave this video up for you, Chris. We could leave the video up for Chris on YouTube and then in the comments. three ideas, what would be some super value added that Chris could offer for your dry cleaner, for your coffee shop, for your co-working space, for your, I don't know, I said cleaner already, a gym, like a gym membership. They already have a membership, so maybe that doesn't work. We've been talking to a lot of, so we have a strong community of breweries here.

And so the breweries are all really excited because it's like maybe as part of your monthly membership. And we have tiers. So they, and so like the tiers stack. But you can come tour the brewery or actually take a class with the brewmaster or you get access to certain beers that aren't out yet. Oh, I got a great one for the beer one. They're letting people take to go beverages. So I don't know if everybody does this. But imagine if with your brewery, every time you come in, you get two pines for the road.

On any check of over 25 bucks, you get a $1.25. a pint for the road. You know, and they seal it or whatever. So some of them are now doing that way you can get like a canister of beer to bring home from your brewery. So there might be something like that to give you a like that. Priority service. Also, mug club.

Some bars already do that. Yeah. So basically. What's that? So one of the bars in my hometown, they, you pay them, whatever it is, 50 bucks at the beginning of the year. They give you a mug that instead of, you know, you pay for the 14 or 16 ounce drinks, but you get an 18 ounce or 20 ounce.

drink. It's bigger and you're paying the price for the other. And then it has a number on it. So your number, like my dad is number, you know, 242 of the local bar that we're at. That's like a very old school type bar. So they're all hanging on the roof? Yeah, they hang and they clean it for you when you order and then they give it to you. It's and they're, um, the mugs are all hanging up all over. They like decorate the walls. It's pretty dope. I like that. And when you go to join a cigar club, you get a locker, right? Is one of the kind of benefits. I love that you get the mug or the swag if you buy the year. And I think buying the year is the key, Chris. Because then you don't have to worry about the monthly over and over again.

So if the year package, they get that cash up front and they get a bunch. And then what's great about your concept is it's going to increase patronage to those places because you're... Exactly. Exactly. And then people can choose to be a public member or a private member. And what a great idea. And then if they... The other thing I would say is if they had a mailing list, easy to use mailing list and SML's list. So if the owner of the pub, McCabe's,

could take out their phone, go to your website, and type in a message and hit send. And it sent a text message and an email to all the members. And it just said, hey, the Giants game is on this Sunday. We set up the back. We're going to have a Darts tournament and it's free nachos or whatever. I just wanted to let you know. If you want to reserve, members get first shot at the seats. We have eight tables available in the back room for the dart tournament.

You know, just that kind of alert, I have this. I was usually, I was doing some archery with one of my daughters. And I signed up for one of these, like, they had this like a little kia not kiosi i'm a little um iPad at the exit and you can type in your phone number and then one time they were like buy one get one free archery you know this weekend and i didn't need it it's not that expensive anyway and it kind of didn't want the discount to be honest on one it's paying the guy to make sure he stays in business but it reminded me of the service and I said to my daughter hey you want to do archery this weekend it's like great so I think that

mailing the service is going to be one that they would really like what I love about your idea is that it builds loyalty and you're building reoccurring. It's like stats for the real world. That's exactly the idea. Yeah, because you go talk to these small business owners and restaurant owners, and it's been tough, especially through COVID. My wife and I have been very fortunate in that we didn't lose anyone. But the worst thing that happened is some of our favorite local restaurants closed down.

So it's like, I wish there was a way that we could support them that doesn't turn into the Groupon problem of like a race to the bottom. This is like a one of a Groupon was brilliant for getting a bunch of people to a place but then there were these discount. There was a word for them like discount plus like a hole and they somebody can come up with a truck for this but there was the problem was the people would come only cared about the discount

and then they would do stupid stuff like you know take more water bottles or steal a towel or complain or ask for a refund and then they disrupt the experience for all of the other customers who don't come back So, yeah. It's the opposite of what you want. You want the loyalty of the top users, not the transient, you know, bottom feeders. My dad would never, I always remember when I was a kid, I was trying to figure out this. I was like, why don't we do a two for one special?

Why don't we give this? I don't know. It's like, those people are horrible. They don't tip. Right. The way they take space away from the people who do a tip. They send their food back. They cost you more money than with the discount.

You lose money and they'd never come back. So all right, folks, so you have it. Thank you, everybody for putting in great ideas. I see free protein powder is a really good one for gyms, I think, actually. I think the one that gyms need to, if I was ever going to do a gym, my number one thing was going to be laundry service in the locker. So when I worked at Sony, they gave you a bag with a number on it and you would put your dirty clothes in the bag, throw it in the laundry. It would seal the bag. And then they'd wash your dirty, sweaty clothes with everybody else dirty, sweaty clothes with a ton of bleach or whatever.

your clothes would get destroyed, but, you know, who cares? You just had clean clothes there, and they put it back in your locker. Right. And you're like, this is great. Keep it simple. Make sure you go for yearly because yearly's great. It's such a great idea. Thank you.

Like, fast pass for, yeah. I love the idea of the extra ounces, too. That is for beer drinkers. Yeah, beer is a really good one. All right, everybody. Wait, Jason, before you wrap, Chris, or Christopher, can you say the name of your business? Yeah, it's Bisley, B-I-Z-L-Y, and it's Bisley. Not bad.com. B-I-ZZR-I-I-G-O-I-I-G-L-I-N-A-R-I-D-C-L-Y.

And we also have the B-I-Z-Z-D-L-Y, the three-letter domain. Not bad. I don't like the app design. Yeah, that's the old one. So that's all old back when we were just calling it, hey, it's Yelp for Small Businesses. And then through the feedback process, we refined it into Patreon for Small Businesses. And then just having the easy. SMS email is going to be so powerful. People don't like downloading apps. They don't keeping apps up to date is hard. People just want to get this information by SMS and email.

That's my belief. I've been taking notes this whole time. So I've got mine. And you know how much work it is to like maintain an app? It's like it's going to take a quarter million dollars a year to maintain and build a world class app is my estimation. And it's going to take you $25,000 to maintain email and SMS. Chris, congratulations. I now... Thank you. One percent of your company and you will be getting emails. Okay. But conversely, if you have a question, now I'm a shareholder.

Okay. Good to know. All right. Great job, Chris. I'll talk you soon. Any closing comments, Chris? This is incredible. That's all.

Just really excited.