This Week in Startups - Wild news week, Bird overstates revenue, Chinese startups look to rebrand + WLITF | E1613

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

J+M kick off the show with some banter about Russia, SBF, and the challenges of being a journalist. (1:51) Then, they discuss the scooter-sharing industry and Bird being under the eye of the SEC. (13:52) Molly and Jason discuss TechCrunch’s article titled ‘The dilemma of Chinese startups going global'. (24:45) We wrap up the show with a We Live in the Future segment featuring Simbe Robotics. (40:57) (0:00) J+M kick off the show (1:51) Russian missile, SBF, and the challenges of being a journalist (12:24) Revelo - Get 20% off the first 3 months by mentioning TWIST at https://revelo.io/twist (13:52) Scooter sharing industry + Bird in trouble for inflating revenues (23:30) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist (24:45) Molly and Jason discuss the dilemma with Chinese startups going global + Where is SBF (39:29) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (40:57) We Live in the Future: Simbe Robotics FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody, welcome back. It's Tuesday. We have another great show for you today. There's way too much news. But we're going to start off talking about that New York Times puff piece on SBF and FTCX. Mm-hmm. And how it is not helping. It didn't help before and is not helping now. Then we're going to have a feisty conversation about a tech crunch story about how Chinese companies who are wanting to expand globally, specifically to America, want to rebrand. And how that's offered even included some VCs in China. now offering passport services to their founders. Yeah, China is dropping the ball on entrepreneurship, and I am here for it. We'll take those entrepreneurs, get them some U.S. passports.

And then we're going to wrap up with a little We Live in the Future with an really interesting robot in supermarkets. Anyway, it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in Startups is brought to you by 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.

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Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. Hey, Molly, it is. Tuesday? That brief pause caused a complete brownout in my brain. And I was like, I don't know. Is this a test? I'm not sure what the answer is. I have no idea.

It feels like we're, it feels like based on the news flow and the level of effort and work we're putting in and the amount of psychological, emotional, our emotional labor as hosts of a news program. You know, remember I was making fun of emotional labor? Yeah. I get it now. I get it. Emotional labor is real. The emotional labor it takes to keep up with the news cycle has reached a level.

That is even breaking this. I know. You know, chop busting Brooklyn kid. This is too much information. Like, we're freaking pros. We are literally lifelong news junkies. Lifelong. Producers, journalists.

All of it. And I like cannot remember. And also, I would just like to point out that as we went, as we hit record today. No. So I don't even know what's going to be happening by the time. Don't tell me. You're seeing this. But as we hit record today.

at an airport somewhere? No, but, oh, I was just reading the New York Times softball piece about, oh, we might have talk about that. The New York Times did this interview with SBF that's basically just... Let's start there.

Let's start there. What is everybody so upset? What I was going to say, actually, is that Russia just fired two missiles into Poland. What? Accidentally. Accidentally, two people were killed in Poland. There are no accidents. I know.

Freud. There's no accident. There are no accidents. So, like, I'm just time stopping that now as if we all die. today. I don't mean to laugh. Then the New York Times is going to wish they had a nuclear war. Exactly.

I was just looking at my portfolio before I got an air and everything was up into the right. And I was like, oh, J trading is back to par. It's feeling great. And now the market's going to crash after three days of up market. Oh, come on. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There's probably going to be a big sale at the stock store right before in the impending doom.

Jesus. You know, like literally I just pulled up Yahoo Finance. Stocks pair some game. after cool inflation data amid geopolitical angst. Come on. Stop with this, Mishugina. There was some geopolitical angs yesterday, but now there's more.

Now there's more. So anyway, that's happening. I just wanted you all to know that we saw it. And then I will drop this. I'm springing this on our, I just want to say it's new guy Brian's first day producing the show for us. Oh, great.

Congratulations. Producing and directing. Doing a great job. So I just want to say, I'm springing this on him. I did not send this article to anyone in advance. I was literally just alerted to it. so I'm looking through it in real time.

But because there's been this like, Sam Begman-free, you know, SBF is a big Democratic donor, and that's why he's never going to get investigated, da-da-da, and all this like BS, which is not, I'm sorry, patently BS, maybe. Wait a second.

I just took a red pill. What happened? Molly, are you purpling it? Then I read this fucking New York Times interview with the guy. And no mention of the donations. And they're just, no, it's just like. That's what I said.

are you so great? Yeah, I think no mention of the donations whatsoever, but like, let him get away with sort of not really explaining anything. It's like a little bit friendly. The, you know, the piece was a softball piece in the middle of what could be a made off level, greater than Theranos certainly. This is between a Theranos and a Madoff. And it feels like it's trending closer to a Madoff in terms of the sheer scale of it. Yes. And just extreme shadiness, you know, like extreme. So then there's this.

And I mean, look, this is where like you could find yourself on Twitter being like, you know, his partner donated almost the exact same amount to Republicans. And really, if you look at like who has been the biggest proponent and who stopped this one person from becoming a regulator because they said they were going to regulate crypto, it was Republicans. However, when you see this kind of softball crap in the New York Times, you're like, I think maybe they did just like him because he donated a lot to Democrats. Like, I'm not going to lie.

there might be something to that. And it's very irritating to find myself in a position of having to say that. Get your shit together, Times. Well, I mean, here's the thing. You have to be self-aware of what people believe your biases are. And the New York Times is very much aware of this. So if they're aware of it, then there should be a boughtful decision. Hey, people expect us to give somebody who's left leaning a bit of a free pass.

we should be cognizant of that. Now, that doesn't mean we have to be extra harsh either, but you and I have been in on these discussions. If somebody at, I don't know, public radio committed a fraud, public radio would be sure, I'm certain, to double down on the reporting as a show of even-handedness. This is a classic reporting technique. Hey, if somebody in our circle, Jason Blair at the New York Times,

you know, was doing, just making up stories. They did a whole investigation. They covered their mistake, not covered up, covered it in detail. Yeah. And they said, hey, here's our Miyocopa. Here's, can I pronounce that correct? And here's our taking ownership of it.

So you just, I don't know who wrote the piece, but, you know, here we are. Like, they'll destroy the away founder over, you know, if we talked about many times. Right. over some, some, you know, push, some chippy, get your, get some chippy. Yeah, I was like trying to lay in, you know, I was going to say pushy, but what I really mean is tweets pushing people to work or Slack messages, pushing people to work harder. Yeah.

Like a tough exterior work ethic. And then they'll suggest to this guy, this is what the Times, the Post wrote about it, or quoted somebody is saying, it reads as if the Times had conducted an interview with Bernie Madoff after his Ponzi scheme collapsed and ultimately suggested he just made them bad investments. Yeah. Like it's weirdly, and and having come on the heels of like, you know, the Sequoia kind of in-house journalism effort where they wrote that 45,000 word piece about him that was just like so smoochy and he's going to be a future trillionaire. He's amazing. And then they kind of like just disappeared it. Like you've got this sort of who is even in charge here? Who's even asking skeptical questions? Question floating in the air. And then you discover like, well, it's not the New York Times. There's. not asking. And it's, it just is a little bit, you know what, like it's not looking good for anybody right here. This is the challenge with being a journalist in today's environment. Being objective and fair just requires a lot of self-awareness, thoughtfulness. And I understand that you also want to give color in a, in a longer piece. So when you're writing a longer piece, which I believe this falls into, I'm not sure how many words it was. It's a long.

It's a long piece. You might want to describe like the New Yorker does. You know, the clothes the person is wearing, set the scene, hey, here's the penthouse, here's the vibe, here's, you know, they're in front of, whatever is unique about it to bring the reader into it. Now, when you do those things, it does create the air of, you know, it's a profile, which was a magazine device. A profile is sometimes softer in terms of, like, setting the stage or whatever, but then hopefully it has some substance in it. And so that is the dichotomy and the writing style for those of you wondering. Okay, yeah, they're going to talk about

the shoes, the person walked in with. They're, you know, the beat up shoes, the leather's falling off. They're cracked. They're not tied properly, but the person's a billionaire. Oh, the juxtaposition here. Okay, we set the stage. Michael Lewis, you know, pick a great business writer, Walter Isaacson. They might set the stage this way. And that's okay. Yeah. But it must be a on a foundation of very strong, objective journalism. This piece wasn't, you know. I think it's like, that's okay when it is the, you know, like the outlet that I will let off the hook a little bit is Fortune, who has come under fire all week long for running that cover

story where they called them the next Warren Buffett. And, you know, Fortune, of course, put Elizabeth Holmes on the cover. And so people are like, you don't know what you're doing. Now, I think that is totally silly because no matter what, how these stories turned out, out, these are noteworthy, right, newsworthy figures. If the whole world is talking about SBF, you put him on the cover of your magazine. Yeah. That's not an uncommon thing.

If the guy appears to be on the run, there are likely multiple lawsuits and multiple legal investigations. Like, we've confirmed, I think, that the SEC and the DOJ were investigating him even before the collapse of FTX. So you have, like, actual legal questions swirling about the behavior. that is not the time to do a smoochie, let's get inside his head piece. Where it's just like,

well, maybe he just like got distracted as opposed to reportedly built up backdoor into his own system so he could move around billions of dollars of customer money without anybody working for him even noticing. Yeah, there's like, this is actual apparent fraud. Right. Layered with substance abuse, layered with stolen funds,

you know, and, you know, hacks and political donations. I mean, there's so many layers of insanity here that, you know, yeah, I guess it just shows you you can frame people, you know, however you want as a writer. Let me like, this is amazing. FTCS and Alameda were closely linked.

I'm reading for the New York Times. Alameda traded heavily on the FTX platform, meaning it sometimes benefited when FTC's other customers lost money, a dynamic that critics called a conflict of interest. critics call it a conflict of interest or it is a conflict of interest. I don't think you need a critic to come in there. I think you could just say that is a conflict of interest according to any standard objective measure. And also using your customer's deposits to prop up your other company is in fact under some legal definitions fraud.

That's not like a critics say to do it. Like it's just like what it. Speechless. Yeah. Speechless. All right. Well, there it is, folks.

So, good text. New York Times does a follow up. 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,

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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 Revee-E-E-L-O-com slash twist and mention Twist to get that 20% off. You know, I've been watching this

Bird Corporation, which a lot of my friends were investors in, collapse and it's really sad to watch. I just really, I'm so sorry, not the one that you might be thinking of, people. I just, because Bird.

He means the scooters. Oh, yeah. No, that other company is doing great. I know. Bird Global is the scooter company. Yes, we're not talking about the company with a bird logo. No. Bird shares are down, Molly.

97%. Um, yeah. Market cap is 73.6 million. Oh, dear God. That's an actual flatline. Yeah. I mean, this is this is dot-com era like, you know, game over. I shouldn't laugh, but it's just so startling.

I'm sorry, the chart came up. And it just, is a flatline. You know, this bird went public via SPAC and they had raised, I think, billions of dollars and now they're worth 70 million. I think the issue here is the cost of these scooters

and the maintenance of them and the utilization of them, the unit economics just never worked. And so we suspended disbelief in unit economics, and we thought everything was in Uber. I remember when this came out, the people who were investors in it are kind of coming at me a bit saying Bird was going to disrupt Uber, and they were giving me all kinds of statistics, like the average Uber ride is under a mile,

you know, Lyft ride is under a mile, you can do that for four bucks on a bird, you know, Uber and Lyft are charging 12, why wouldn't people take this? This is going to steal the micro mobility market was going to, to kill Uber and lift. And I thought about it and I was like, I don't want to ride a scooter though. Like I'm an adult. And I don't want to touch the dirty handlebars or die.

I don't want to break my elbow. I'm not, if I was 26 and I was riding my Vespa around New York, sure. But not now as a father of free kids. I don't want to wind up in the hospital. I'm not going to wear a helmet. I look like a dork and wear a dirty helmet. I'm not going to carry a helmet.

I just do just for too many frictions. And, you know, I kind of held to my belief that this was not going to be like some breakout business. But, you know, a lot of people who are very smart thought this was going to make it. And I think the reason I heard was they were going to make their own hardware. That would resolve the issues. And future versions of the hardware would be so strong that they didn't have the maintenance issues. And, yeah. But it's interesting.

Yeah. So this has precipitated this conversation by a piece in Bloomberg. today noting that the electric scooter apocalypse may indeed be on us, upon us. Bird replaced its chief executive and chief financial officer in September. And then Monday actually warned that it might not make it, that it needed to restate its financial accounts for the past two and a half years due to improperly recognized revenue. Yep. So that's an issue.

And then there's this kind of ongoing question. you know, Lyme, its main competitor raised more than $500 million last November, but has also seen a massive drop in value. And like, it's really interesting because on some, in some ways, this is a growth at all cost story, right? Uber did not have good, you know, economic for a really long time, but I had really strong growth. And so I could totally imagine that argument, like, well, if we get a critical mass of people use it, right, this has been the playbook. This totally works. And people will. want to do this. And all of those things are true about last mile mobility. And everything you just

said is also true. It's like every time I remember feeling this way about the Segway, the same smart people got so excited about the Segway. But modality matters. And there are modalities that people are used to and comfortable with and that are very common. And those modalities include bikes, walking, and cars. And this was none of that. And it was like, you have to be, be. Buses and subways I'll throw in there. Right.

Buses and subway. Occasional ferry. Some public transportation, the occasional ferry, something like that. This is like, you have to be like willing to ride this, embrace your inner nine-year-old.

I'm not saying it wasn't fun sometimes. Sure. It'd be a lot of fun. But as a way to get to work. Not for everybody. Not for everybody. It's almost like asking people to put glasses on their face. Like you are asking them to do something that's totally outside what they do.

And PS, you pissed off every. city and every cyclist and every pedestrian in the interim. It does feel like, you know, the warning signs were there. I like the idea of people giving it a shot. And I do think this would be perfect. I always thought the campus version of this. So you've got, you know, whatever, a college campus, a medical campus, you know,

whatever, having some of these laying around that anybody can pick up, take from point to A to point B, but they don't work when you leave the campus. So you can't steal them. Google threw a bunch of Google bikes everywhere on the campus. You could just pick them up, drop them off, didn't matter. And I think city bikes has been a huge success in New York. People are out absolutely over the moon with that. I just think these things, you know, the execution really matters.

And then are they a scalable business like Uber or DoorDash? That is a big question. And once you start segmenting and saying, okay, well, it's only for cities where it's between 50 and 90 degrees most of the time. It's only for cities where it doesn't rain. Yeah. It's only for cities that have sidewalks. It's only for cities where you have X, you know, type of density.

Like, it obviously doesn't work in the suburbs. You're not taking this, you know, down to Aunt May's farm seven miles down the road, but, you know, you may take it seven blocks or 17 blocks, sure. So I know people in L.A. in Santa Monica who love this. It's like a Santa Monica product, but it may not be like, you know, a Manhattan product. It's also only for cities that allow it. I think Paris is talking about banning it.

There were some, didn't Austin ban them? I think there were just like, a lot of them were in the bottom of the lake because people were just like, we just light them on fire. We're just going to throw these in a dumpster and then, yeah. So anyway, I applaud everybody who tried. I think you should give it a shot.

There's going to be tons of lessons here for founders. I think the number one lesson, is you can't look at other businesses and say just because they're figuring it out and growing, I'm going to figure out and grow. You have to think from first principles. These scooters cost whatever they cost, $500. They break. You know, the maintenance is going to be $500 a year. You make $4 per ride. You're doing 20 rides a day for 80 or 15 rides a day. You just have to do the map. You have to think from first principles. And, you know, it seems like people suspended just a wee bit too much here. Yes, totally. And I apologize for interrupting. Do people want?

to do this is the other question. Right? It's like, yeah, it's another first principles, which is the first principle. Do people want to ride a scooter, like where you started?

You can change, but you can change consumer behavior. Like, taking an Uber X, if you lived in the boroughs, you know, you didn't take cabs because there were no cabs

in Brooklyn or Queens and forgot about South Island. You took what we call back in the day a gypsy cab, I don't know if it's politically correct to say that anymore, but you took an illegal cab. Right.

Dollar cabs, as Jay Z would say, cab, shifty cabs. It's like the famous lyric. That's what people took. A dollar cab was you paid a dollar to go a couple blocks, but they might pick some other people up on the route, right? And you just, you give a dollar or two. These things were like cash-based little no insurance kind of situation. But they did change the behavior of getting people to use an app to call a car. Yes. They didn't have to convince people to take cars. Exactly. It's not a fundamental change. It's just a like a slightly different way to do the same thing you really did, which was being a car.

It's evolutionary. It's evolutionary. How you ordered it. You still used your phone. You just didn't talk. And I think there's something on the phone, especially calling. Exactly. I think there's still something very strong and powerful about micro mobility. No question,

especially as a climate concern and a traffic density. But I would predict that the areas where it's going to work are e-bikes. E-bikes when? There's a freaking modality that people already use. They ride bikes. And an e-bike. And there's infrastructure for it. Yes, and here's the thing.

The e-bike isn't a change in behavior, but it makes the experience 10 times better because you don't have to exhaust yourself to go to dinner. You eat a big meal and you've got a bunch of yoki in your belly. I'm not saying that I'm pounded in the noki, but yeah, I'm like, oh my God, I got a noki belly here. I mean, chicken parr.

I'm an animal. I'm savaging this Italian meal. And you're like, and I've got to ride my bike? Oh, my God. I'm going to be sweating and exhaust. I'm going to just pull over to the side of the road and heave. You're an electrical bike. It's like, all of a sudden,

your bike that you got a little exercise in the way there turns into a Vespa. Maybe you use 20% of your energy, 80% of the battery, whatever your mix is. You can just pound these uphills, you know, and you don't have to worry about like breaking a sweat. So anyway, I think electric bikes win the day. It's my... Agree. All right. Hard agree. Listen, I have been dealing with business insurance for three decades. And switching providers, always a nightmare. It's too expensive. It takes so much time. Often, you don't even get better coverage. But now, you don't even get better coverage. But now, you can make switching radically simple with Embroker. Mbroker is the radically simple destination for industry-tailored commercial insurance.

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chef's kiss. I give them my highest rating. We love inbroker. Inbroker.com slash twist. Interesting tech crunch article from earlier this week that I just wanted to highlight because I thought, I think rightly that you would have some thoughts about this. Okay. This piece was about the increasing number of Chinese startups asking journalists to call them American.

Hmm. Basically. That there is this kind of ongoing tension now. with Chinese startups wanting to go global, but fearing that being seen as or referred to as Chinese startups will have a chilling effect on their ability to raise money. Yeah, as it should. So sorry that you want to be called an American company.

That you were born where you were born and you live there and you want to start a new company and you want to like incorporate in the United States? I mean, I would love to be considered a Japanese podcast. or pop star, but I'm not. Because you're not Japanese. I'm saying if you started a company in China and then you were like, I am trying to expand to the U.S., maybe I even want to incorporate in the U.S., maybe I am a Chinese immigrant, but my company first started in China, then isn't it fair for, because of the reaction

you just had, wouldn't it be fair for them to be like, we're an American company? Well, okay, let's figure out why they want, okay, again, back to first principle, why don't they want to be called a Chinese company, because it's keeping them from getting funding. Why is it keeping them getting from funding? Because the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, decided that they would take DD off of the public exchange here and then move it to Hong Kong, and then they would take them out of the app store. And if they didn't give them all their data, I think is the story, and let them do data audits, aka the CCP gets all your data and gets to track everybody. So the reason investors don't,

want to invest in Chinese companies, and Chinese companies subsequently don't want to be called Chinese companies, is because your outcome, the IPO is at risk, your exit is at risk. In fact, the fundamental business has risk. I said this years ago when people were like, are you buying Ali Babasock? And I said on CNBC, I would never buy any company in China. I would never risk my capital that way when I have options to invest in American companies where we have the rule of law, we have accounting firms. Hey, is it perfect? Does an Enron happen? Does an, you know, FTX happen? Of course, all these things happened made off they were in the Bahamas

but when those you know that's true actually there's a red flag but when these things do happen Molly yeah there are outrageous you know aberrations that lead to huge investigations and people going to jail

in China they just said no education startup so every VC who invested in an education startup lost all their money instantly imagine you took my three biggest winners in my career and then I don't know Trump or Obama or Biden and just waved a wand and was like, you know what, those can't be winners anymore.

You're, you know, your 2000 X, your 200X are now 10 X's. I'd be like, okay, I quit. I don't want to be a VC anymore if you're going to take my big wins. Like I win some huge hand at poker. I took a huge risk on that hand. And then as I'm sweeping the chip, somebody comes in and goes, oh yeah, you know what? CETAAS is now the worst, you know, hand. It's the least value.

Give your chips to the dealer. The dealer gets the chips. The casino gets the chips. What? Why am I playing in a rig game? That's what's happening here. People don't want to play in a rig game. Well, so the end. Is there ever a scenario that were like,

I think what these companies, some of them are, like, for example, Binance started in China. Yep. Now has no headquarters, officially speaking. Now, that Binance might not be a great example. Let's think about, let's use, they actually in the piece, use the example of, what did we decide? We call it, Sheehan, the clothing startup.

Yeah. S-H-E-I-N-S-H-E-N-C-N-C-N-E-N-E-N-E-N-E-N-A, which was used to bill itself as being founded in L.A. When, in reality, it started out in Nanjing and Guangzhou as a typical Chinese e-commerce exporter, leveraging the country's robust supply choice. But now it has, it's planning to open warehouses in North America, it's moved most of its assets to Singapore, and is trying to effectively have its cake-and-a-to with respect to branding. But it's not a company that's going to go public in China.

it's not a company that's like using Chinese infrastructure. So, but it sounds like what you're saying is exactly the reason why any company would be asking tech crunch to please not say that they ever had any Chinese origins at all. Because it sounds like you're saying if they ever had any Chinese origins at all, that company is dead to you. I suppose if they had no Chinese ownership, no Chinese headquarters, the CCP didn't have the ability to shut them down and they had sold the assets. assets into a Delaware C corporation with a board of directors in America and the company could not

be repossessed or taking control over by the CCP or the government there? I guess I'd take a look at it. Sure. I don't know if they can get there. I guess that's the question. It's like, if this person is a Chinese citizen, can a Chinese citizen take that asset, buy out all the, I'm assuming they have Chinese investors, have Chinese employees, you know, have filed Chinese taxes, whatever those are, incorporation documents. If they could sell the asset and then build a shell here, sure, which is what I think Bight Dance's only possibility of survival

is. It's like to basically do all that. Have the Chinese divest. So if there was a full divestiture or like it was owned under 10% by Chinese funds and the board was 100% non-Chinese and it was

100% accounting, revenue, everything went through America, AWS, everything, sure, I could look at it. Skyshu, the founder and CEO of Sheen is reportedly seeking Singaporean citizenship. Several entrepreneurs told TechCrunch that the top VC firms in China now provide passport shopping as part of their post-investment service for founders targeting overseas markets. Right. We can help you with your content marketing.

We have a recruiting arm and we have passport washing services. Here are. Not something we have to do. Tell you what, that's not part of BC Sunday. day school. I mean, the second you're trying to get a passport, that's a bit of a red flag. No, it's not. It's not a red flag if you're trying to. Like, I'm sorry, we should, we should support entrepreneurs no matter where they come from. Okay. And if you are able to start a company and then you want to take that company global and not have it shut down by the

CCP, then I am not going to say to you, sorry, you're dead to me because of where you were born. No, no, no. It's not dead to me, but I'm just saying like that. We support entrepreneurs. If your VC firm is providing passports as a service, that's what you have to do in China if you want to fleeing as a service fleeing as a service so that an entrepreneur

can have a business like probably just ask them to do a do a bridge round I'll give you guys some really sweetheart deal 10% of the company for $10,000 and seven passports to the

if I'm a VC and I know that in China and I know or have a China operation and I know that the only way my entrepreneur is ever going to succeed is to get the hell out of China that's going to be part of my services

because I want my money. I'd like to congratulate SBF on his new roommate and his new passport. I think Snowden and SBF are going to get along great. You're going to enjoy the parodies. Russia's.

Moscow is absolutely fantastic this time of year. Negative 20 degrees, cloudy, with six hours of kind of sunlight a day. Enjoy your time. All they ask is your soul. I mean, I just keep... Listen. Thinking about critics.

Critics say. Some ice cold vodka, some great chess games. And Putin will meet with you now. I mean, literally, I would not be surprised as FSBF winds up. I mean, I can't believe this guy did not have a plan, given how this was going, to get out of Dodge. Oh, well, they think he's already out. Remember, they were tracking his jet. That jet tracker service was like it took off and went to Argentina.

and then he would not tell the times where he was. Where is he? Where in the world is SBF? The internet thanks he's in Argentina, but yes, I would be very hard. Argentina is going to give him up immediately. Argentina and the U.S.

We got tons of stuff we could trade. He's, they'll flip him immediately. Argentina is. Hold on them looking on our ex-critition treaties. I think if he really doesn't want to get given up, it's Hong Kong,

which I think is where his partner was, at some point. I think Kong Kong's a good location. Russia's the that's the best location. His jet is in Argentina. We do have an expedition treaty with Argentina however, so yeah.

We do have one. Yeah, we do. Maybe Argentina's like the layover. I could see Argentina's got like an Indiana Jones kind of quality. You land the plane. You put on the tarmac, you know, like the luggage handler outfit

and you just come out of the back of the private jet carrying the bags. but you look like a baggage handler, then you drive, and then you get in a prop plane, you get the prop plane to Columbia, Columbia you get on a boat, the boat takes you,

you know, to some island, and then you take another plane from there, and you wind up in Hong Kong. I mean, and then you just leave your jet. Absolutely, that's a great call.

Yeah, who cares, man. A little romancing the stone situation. How many coins does that guy have memorized in his head? What did I see that? There was a funny, Vinny Lingam from the Crypto Roundtable. I think tweet, he retweeted himself from 2021,

where he was like, I'm just saying that when these exchanges given accounting of all the Bitcoin they seem to be holding as collateral, it adds up to more than

21 million. Just throwing that out there. I was like, my God. This is a whole situation. It's just, it never stops. Yeah, it's crazy.

Let's see. What would I put the odds that he gets out of Dodge? He's clever. The kid's clever. The plane's in Argentina. I think he sent his lookalike. I think he's got a look-alike.

with a wig. He sent a lookalike to Argentina, who is now walking around Argentina, and then I think he got on a, you know, like a scorpion, like one of those high-speed boats, like a James Bond kind of little inflatable naval craft, got out to sea, and it gave some North Korean shipping lanes, and I think he's with the North Korean shipping lanes right now. Give them a couple of Bitcoin. I think probably 100 Bitcoin gets the job done. Two million, something like that. Mm-hmm. Give him 100 Bitcoin on a disc, on a thumb drive. Kids in Hong Kong right now eating, peaking duck, shaved his head, dyed it, wearing a wig.

Yesterday you were like, help him the parents. Now you get what I was saying, which is, I'm appalled for this. This is not a cry for help. That tweet storm was disturbing. I'm sorry, man. And the kid then admitted, I guess, we found out he admitted he was on speed. Like you start putting this stuff together. I could see the kid killing himself.

And listen, I, no matter what crimes he committed, I do have, I mean, I don't want to, I mean, I understand some people consider like honorable suicide in some society. You know, like, Sapu kind of situation. Like, you did say something similar about, about Do Kwan, because he also had some disturbing sets of tweets. And he apparently has just been maybe goofing off in Singapore and has now run somewhere else. he's out I just looked at because I was like where's he

you know the Legion of Doom these guys were like the Legion of Dorks round these guys up and put them in a maximum security prison and then I want to watch a reality show

as they try to escape from it and like just get tased the Legion of Dorks GoQuond SBF who else is in the Legion of Dorks Elizabeth Holmes she's totally Legion of Dork

Oh my God she is not three of them in a She's totally a Dork Did you see that scene with her dancing? Yeah. I mean, to be fair, that was television. I know, but you know that that's accurate.

It's like Legion of Dorks. Legion of Dorks, the Lady Queen. She would definitely be like, you know, she's like the storm of that. Queen of the Dorks. Yeah. Legion of Dorks. Who else is a Legion? Snowding kind of fits into the Legion of Dorks.

He's kind of like, I put him in the Legion of Dorks. They're all on the Lamb. Yeah. Legion of Dorks. I mean, And in SBF currently doesn't necessarily have to worry about being in or not at this moment in a non-extradition country because he has not formally been accused of anything. I mean, this is one of those things where, like, formally accusing him is going to take so much warm. Yeah.

I mean, they're so long. The shell game here seems to be, I mean, listen, allegedly, I'm going to put allegedly in front of everything we've said right now because half of this stuff is things he says. said he did. I mean, honestly. Like, honestly, Matt Levine. Also, the fact, back to the New York Times, the fact that Matt Levine did an interview with this guy in which he literally was like, you have just described your own business to me as a Ponzi scheme. And Sam Bankman-Fried was like, yeah, that's fair. And Matt Levine never let up on him once. With that as your template, how is it possible for the New York Times to have done an interview

with this guy where they were like, well, perhaps his most ambitious effort was to try to rewrite crypto regulations. Like, no, I think his ambitious effort, most ambitious effort, allegedly was to steal $8 billion. Like, what the hell? Anyway, I'm sorry. Let's move on. I hate it when I see this stuff. So anyway, that's the Chinese startup story.

I do have sympathy for the founders. And this is China's great misstep. They tried to emulate capitalism and then they learned the hard lesson. that capitalism creates celebrities and stars and people who have influence and competition because they created things in the world

and then politicians then don't get to lord it over those people they have to, you know, debate it out and build a society with them. And thus, capitalism and democracy is messy. It's messy A.F. Mm-hmm. But it's kind of better

than living in a dictatorship. We'll stop. It's the worst system I've ever seen, except for all the rest. Listen, lots of founders are Lucy Goosey with their personal phone numbers, and that causes tons of downstream problems. You start putting your personal phone number in company documents, you start using it for sales calls, and that makes things messy.

You won't know who's calling. Is it a sales prospect? Or is it someone from your kid's school? You don't want to get random calls. Open phone helps you create a business phone number for you and your team in minutes. It's very simple. You download the smartphone app. You download the desktop app, whichever one's your jam, or both, if you're like me,

just install the app. You get a number. You're done. No need to carry two phones anymore. And by the way, we use this at our company because we wanted to have customer support phone numbers. We wanted our sales team to have numbers. And Open phone is really good at filtering out all the spam and the scams. And you can do all kinds of interesting routing things.

If you got an existing phone number, they'll port it over. No problem. It's their pleasure to do that. Open phone, they say it's affordable. I say it's too cheap. Based on the product I'm getting, I would pay triple. But hey, listen, it's their business. They can charge what they want.

They decided to start at $10 a month. Twist listeners, on top of that, since OpenFone, love startups, are going to get an extra 20% off any plan for the first six months. But you have to sign up at my URL, openphone.com slash twist. And if you've got existing numbers again, just pour them over and start saving money. O-P-E-H-O-N-P-H-O-N-E.com slash twist today. Openphone.com slash twist today.

Great job. It's a killer product. Exactly. Exactly. They did. They tried to have it both ways and eventually had to kill off the competition

to the government itself, right, to the party. And so, yes. But I, again, as you just said, that makes me feel better. Sympathy for the founders, yeah.

I want to do something that makes me feel better. That's world positive. You know what's world positive? We live in the future. So fun. It's just more fun. It's more joyful.

Give me some. It's like our little chaser. It's like our little chaser. It's like our little chaser every day. Yeah, a little. And what says we live in the future? Well, they give you sparkling water after you have that dark, rich espresso. You know, like some of those fancy shops?

And they give you that really nice sparkling water. So you drink that espresso leaves a little bit of the grit, but you like it on your teeth. But you have the sparkling water chaser with a little lemon in it. Man, I read about that. I'm not trying to bring us down. But just like prayers up to Istanbul, one of my favorite cities that I've ever been. I just could not believe how at home and happy I felt in Istanbul of all places. Everybody was so warm and, like, kind of sly.

like everybody like Turkish people are just funny and that coffee is so good and the food is so incredible. And I just, I heard about that bombing and I was just devastated. It was just devastated. But anyway, I got us off the world positive. Please, just give me something. I just wanted to shout out Istanbul and how much I love it. And I want to have my, I'm still planning to have my 50th birthday party at the Basilica Cistern. Can't wait.

Oh, my God. Do you know about this Basilica Cistern? I don't. I hope I get an invite to the 50th. Oh, yeah, you're coming. It was like lost for centuries. It was literally lost. It used to be the water supply

for the whole city and it was lost. And then in the 70s this like Danish explorer got lost underground and then discovered it and it's this underground like water cavern

and they turned it into an event. It's the coolest place ever been. I'll send pictures later. Okay, back to robots. Let's talk about robots. We live in the future. We need a stinger for this.

Can somebody make us a stinger like a little graphic? Thanks. Yeah. Some like sci-fi sounds. Okay. So like robots in stores is becoming increasingly

common. Like we used to have this store decathlon, which is a French, like the French IKEA. It's sadly close. It was an memory valve. So awesome. Incredible. It was a big, huge sporting superstar.

And they had a, like, a robot that would go up and down that. And you could boop, boop, boop, bo look up skews or whatever. And I had never seen that. I was like, this is amazing. But now the robots are actually getting like pretty real and pretty freaking useful. Like they don't just roll around and look goofy and you kind of want to kick them. There's this company called Simbe, I think. S-I-M-B-E

robotics, providing retailers a solution for what Forbes calls a trillion-dollar problem that being inventory management. Sure it is. Yeah.

So they just announced a new version of their robot the Talley, get it, because inventory. It looks like a stand-up mop, but good-looking. I mean, actually looks

freaking awesome. Yeah, Schvelt. Looks like Apple made it. Yeah. Simby. Sim-B-E. Let's go. It's got all these cameras on it.

You can see it's festooned with cameras, and it just rolls up and down the aisle, unobtrusively looking super cool. Ooh, look at the heat map there. Yeah. And so it can do its 3D cameras and RFID, and it can analyze and record store inventory. So it can figure out like shelving.

It can figure out if things are misplaced and miss. There it is in DeCathleton. Oh, my God. There it is. Yeah. That's DeCathlon. DeCathlone. Oh, nice.

I miss that store so much. It was like super cheap sporting goods. Wow. Wow, it's really cool. You know what this is really? The computer vision is the key piece. If you're not watching this, YouTube.com slash this weekend or Spotify has the video version of this weekend startups.

There's also a video version on Apple. You just have to type in this weekend startup's video. Yeah, it's really cool. It's like a thin little stick with cameras on the side. Cameras obviously have gotten incredible because of smartphones. Robotics has gotten better because of batteries, Roomba, self-driving cars, yada, navigation of space has gotten better because of the self-driving car revolution.

computer visualization has gotten better because of Google do Google search, trying to do image search. All of this stuff, the libraries of understanding, this is like standing on the shoulders of four or five different technology verticals. And yeah,

why would you send a human to go up and down shelves to take notes? This thing can just walk around and just tell you what's going on in your facility. Yeah. And it can do three inventory checks per day with 99% accuracy. what's the accuracy of a teenager

who just took banged a 10 milligram indica edible I don't think it's 99%. So Brian, producer Brian reports 65%. I don't know if that's from personal experience but he came up with that number real quick. 65% According to the, I'm just joking.

According to the Talley website, the accuracy of a human is 65% versus the robots 99%. 12 cameras on this bad boy, 30,000 products per hour scanned. You can also read the price tags and everything. I mean, that's amazing. So it can be like, oh, you have the wrong price.

So none of that. Like, I'm sorry, it says 99 cents right on the can. That lady in the grocery store. Always. One robot can handle 80,000 skews. That's amazing. It's amazing. Makes sense.

The thing it doesn't do is reshell stuff in the retail location. Right. That would be like the next step of this is that, They put an arm on it. And we're out of Campbell's soup. We got no more chicken soup here. Go to the back, get five cans, and put them on the shelf. So they should be really two robots, one that scans and one that restocks.

Or, you know, they should have, I had seen this other robot. And I put it in the chat, by the way, before. So maybe we just got a screenshot of it. A robot, now when you're looking at a, you know, a frozen, you know, retouching. display. You know, we have ice cream or, you know, soda pop. There's a robot that tracks, you know, where the doors open, the glass doors where you reach in and grab your Starbucks latte, glass bottle with 8,000 calories in it. Now, imagine those vanilla lattes are running low. This robot could run to the back,

grab three or four, and restock the shelf. So if you were to build it custom like that, you could actually have it on a track, which when you can control a robots, movement, you know, in space, the free robots are very challenging, like the one Tesla's building or Boston Dynamics, those freestanding robots, they have a mission of just operating in the world, very hard to do. These other ones that zip around on a track, very easy to do, because you can train, like the CafeX robot that we invested in as a firm that you can see at SFO in Terminal 2, and that's doing like a million dollars a year between two of these robots. Yeah. And they can just, when you constrain the mission,

the mission gets completed. And this is an example of like a very constrained mission. So that's what we're seeing now. When general AI comes out, Molly, you're going to start seeing these general purpose robots. And it's like, okay, we probe them to do the skews. Now we're going to program to replace stuff. Now we're going to program to carry groceries to your car.

And so that's what you'll see over the next 20 years is when that same robot can carry your groceries to the car, now it's we've kind of crossed over to the real the real tipping point is like hey robot and then if it can do a mission that it has previously not been asked to hey robot we just had car accident outside can you go lift the car and get it out of the front of the you know crash into the front of the store can you just go

four robots go move that out of the way and help get the two people out of the backseat who are stuck in there rip the door off that's when we'll be that's probably not our lifetime Yeah. You're talking about the I-Robot movie. Yeah. All right, everybody. That's a show for today.

We'll see you all tomorrow on this week and start up on Wednesday. Next unicorn day. Oh, yeah, next unicorns. Yeah, wrapping that up. Okay, everybody, we'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.