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Alright everybody welcome to this weekend Startups you got to treat for you you know I've been doing the news program and somebody said hey why don't you have somebody come on and chop up the news with you and I thought you know Alex Wilhelm is the best person to do that is a senior editor at TechCrunch and he is part of the first name club on Twitter at Alex you can follow him right now and he hosts their equity podcasts formerly blah blah blah blah next web TechCrunch, Matt or Mark, CrunchBase whatever he's been around the block and he now lives in the Northeast still in Providence or wherever.
大家好,欢迎来到这个周末的创业公司节目,我有一个好消息告诉大家。我一直在做新闻节目,有人建议让有经验的人来帮我解读新闻,我想到了Alex Wilhelm。他是TechCrunch的高级编辑,也是Twitter上第一个名字俱乐部的成员,你们现在可以关注他。他还主持了Equity Podcast,曾在The Next Web、TechCrunch、Matt或Mark以及CrunchBase等媒体工作过,是一个经验丰富的人。他现在住在东北部,仍然在普罗维登斯或其他地方生活。
Yeah yeah still in Providence but when you start looking at my resume and going blah blah blah it makes me 30 second birthday land a little harder than it did last week so thank you for making me feel ancient. You're not ancient I mean you still got you still got some energy how's your energy level now in year two of this God damn pandemic.
You know I'm actually doing okay we've adapted to having the third dog who's actually racing around my office right now and yeah but dogs wake up at like five and so I've been waking up at like five and so I've learned how to just be kind of chronically exhausted Jason. You know what it's interesting you say that we got a pandemic dog we got another bulldog. So we have a 15 year old bulldog fondue and then we have a new one Maximus as in Gladiator Max and he's like nine months old now and yeah Max loves at five thirty in the morning to walk in a circle and do the PP dance which is if you don't wake up I'm gonna pee and you know that is great motivation to jump out of bed in terror that you're about to be peed on that's literally my life now. I'm just very lucky my my wife is studying for her boards right now so she used to wake up early and study before work and so that means I can usually pass off the the three dogs to her but it didn't work this morning and so at five a.m. there I was picking up dog crap in the backyard just a really great way to spend a morning I got so it used to be so nice to go to an office and be an adult and live in a society it was a really interesting society do you remember society I remember a lot of public transit in San Francisco waiting for buses that were full when it was raining standing on the sidewalk and then drinking bad coffee in an office that everyone had a cold so like I I dismiss your romanticism and I love working from home which I know we'll get to it a little bit.
It's interesting when you think about it like was there anything that you enjoyed about going to the office oh gosh I love I love working less it was great like because at the office there's so much stuff that looks like work. Oh so true yeah yeah right like a meeting for a walk and talk. Yeah yeah. We're getting lunch with your colleagues team building all that stuff now I just made the old 90 minute lunch with the 15 minute walk on either end you get 2.25 hours out of the 7.5 hour day fantastic. Jason I never worked for Google that's not how my life was. Holy on the roof.
Well listen it is a crazy news week where to begin. There's so much that was interesting this week I want to ask you yeah what to you was the most interesting part of the week not the most important but most interesting to you Alex the discrepancy in how Duolingo traded versus how Robinhood traded because if you had said the Fintech company will perform less well than the Edtech company I would have been like every VC is like to me if that's going to be true and yet here we are Edtech's looking great and Fintech took kind of a hit so I'm still digesting this kind of like post-unicorn IPO liquidity it's strange to me.
Yeah and so obviously I'm an interest or party was an angel investor in Robinhood they are trading today I thank you 36 dollars and 11 cents they went out at 38 dollars I think they hit 40 at one point yeah I'm looking at right now 40.25 is the 52 week back but some amount to this is I think due to the fact that they gave a third of the shares or something like that to their actual rabbit user base in their direct IPO product do you think that had some sort of impact here or the summer what do you think is going on here I think there's a lot of things that went into this but that's the most interesting one because when Robinhood announced they were going to open up IPO access for their users people were stoked like oh my gosh we finally get to have kind of similar footing to these large large investing groups but suddenly if you take away a big chunk of an early retail demand you really change up the supplied demand curve and I think you know frankly traders on platforms like Robinhood probably were pretty active in trading IPO's in general so if they have shares of the IPO price it probably reduces the frenzy around first trades and makes it maybe harder to have an expensive pop now you know Jason Bill girl is going to love this you know because all of a sudden doesn't seem to whine about on Twitter but Robinhood probably expected a little bit more after pricing at the bottom minute of its range there is does seem to be a big disjoint be a a big disconnect between what the press is reporting and what we as the investment community and we have both represented here and to a certain extent I represent both having been a former journalist there's this big gap between oh my god the IPO pop and that being the definition of success and then what we all experience as investors which is I invest in the company was like I think 30 million dollars so 30 million to 30 billion don't take a genius to do the math a little bit of dilution you know this is a 500x or whatever pretty pretty great return even with dilution because I didn't continue investing in my pro rata because I didn't do that back then yeah I mean I bought like another two houses exactly that's a costly bit of financial conservancy well you know it's one of the things about investing is you can learn from your mistakes when I started I was putting 2550k checks into companies like this and then just you know walking away in 10 years now we just did we had two companies in our portfolio that were raising at 300 million we own 10% of the company they're raising 30 million so our pro rata is 10% you know ballpark of that 30 million sure and we actually filled with our syndicate and our LPs with SPV special purpose vehicles those three million dollar bets to keep our 10% ownership in you know companies that were worth 300 and 600 million we had five to 10% ownership so we're actually maintaining ownership at those big numbers now so hopefully that pays off but what do you think that disconnect is about where you know on CNBC they're just like oh my god it didn't pop and it's like well aren't we supposed to price these things so they don't pop like what what does it say that it does pop
Yeah, so I talked to a lot of CEOs on IPO days. So, I've done just over the years dozens of these calls with people that are literally sitting there in the room watching their stock begin to trade. I managed to kind of learn around the edges how they think about pops. Every CEO taking a company public wants to see 10 to 15% gains in the first day. It makes them look really good. It gives their employees something to be proud about. All the investors they should have locked in for the long term. During their road, slow chairs to have a great first day, it really just likes moves butter over the entire piece of bread. I don't mind that, the mechanism.
Yeah, IPOs are an agronistic to some degree given how they're done, but the media and cable news I would not conflict because okay. I don't watch cable news at all because I don't have time to waste on that, and I would not say that you know tracking the views of different CNN anchors or CNBC anchors is the the way to gauge media sentiment because Jim Kramer is what very loud and I don't think he's indicative of what what I do or what you used to do.
I so I do think there is something to that nuance where if you're on TV and you have the ticker, you have something to measure. The entire point of CNBC or Bloomberg is up to the minute, and if you want something up to the minute, having a data feed that you get to feel the pulse on, makes it feel more live. Just like the score in a basketball game. Absolutely. You tune in, and it's on the screen, it's moving up and down, so you have a scorecard. It is one of the appeals, but I think there's this misconception that this would be a failure or you know a win plus or minus 10%. Actually, to the majority of people who own chairs, it doesn't actually matter. Certainly doesn't matter to me because the way I look at this now and I'm curious your thoughts.
Putting aside any of the trip-ups that Robin had had with GameStop, we could talk about those obviously, but putting that aside, when you look at the actual metrics of this company. It was 18 million when they filed their S1 in terms of accounts. 17.x% were active every month or something. And then you had this incredible revelation that now they're 22 million. So, maybe you could speak to the scope or the scale of this company and what you think is possible. Yeah, I think if you look back to the start of 2020 and then if you told us where we're going to be today, we would be very confused about what changed.
But there was during the pandemic an enormous boom in savings and investing activity amongst consumers. This drove Robinhood, it drove in one finance, it drove I mean a Toro around the world. I mean Coinbase got an enormous lift from this. Even Bitcoin began to be better people just had a lot of cash. Like Jason, you didn't leave your house for a while. I didn't. I spent no money. I went grocery shopping once a week, and I just ate bananas. Like I just saved money. And so, people put that to work. And so, Robinhood is enjoying this enormous boom, not just in the appreciation of the value of the stock market in crypto trading in general, but also just folks having cash.
So, Robinhood is just as one aside. Think about all the money we saved not going on vacation or business trips or conferences. I looked at those three, and I was like you know for me, I was doing four speaking gigs a year. All of that's business class travel and really you know, great hotels all that money just didn't actually flow during this. You know, Verizon never put me in business class. I just want to say, and then they sold me to follow. Yeah, I protest no. I don't know who to launch now. It's still Verizon Media Group until the Apollo deal closes, and then we'll be owned by it'll be called, yeah, yeah who. I think again when you'll be so. You'll be right. You're right, but I'm I correct that is it's a private equity firm now owns and gadget and TechCrunch.
因此,Robinhood只是一个旁白而已。想想我们节省下来的所有钱,不用去度假、出差或参加会议。我看了看那三者,我对自己说,对我来说,我每年要做四个演讲,这些都是商务舱旅行,还有非常好的酒店,但这些钱在这段时间内实际上并没有流通。Verizon从未让我坐商务舱。我只想说,然后他们将我出售给了一个跟随者。是的,我不同意。我不知道现在该支持谁了。目前仍然是Verizon Media Group,直到Apollo的交易完成,我们将被拥有者所拥有,即即将被称为是Yeah Yeah Who。我想,当你们真的理解时,你们就会明白。你是对的,但是否正确,现在私募股权公司拥有engadget和TechCrunch。
Well, the deal has been announced and agreed on but hasn't get closed so we're in that awkward period in which like you broke up with someone but you still live in the same house that's kind of where. Just as we're in this all on this tangent sure, what does that mean in terms of like management of your brand, is there some, are you guys just off on this island just doing the best you can or is there somebody like we have to hit these numbers and there's a sense of urgency?
TechCrunches culture this is my second time at TC, so I'm two different kind of blocks of time at the organization the ethos of TC has been preserved through all of the corporate storm and wrong, and so I'm optimistic that we're gonna hold on to it again post-pollum but you know private equity has a reputation for a reason.
So, I'm not gonna promise anything gassing but today I freaking love TC. I still have the independence and freedom and flexibility and support, and it's great. So, I mean, frankly, I'm happy.
I'm nervous because I'm being sold, but you know watch us that shakes. out I was hoping that's I mean I made a I made a salvo in between the a.o.l. and Verizon days of like hey any chance I could shake off and gadget or auto bug and they're like yeah we don't know who you would even talk to about that I'm like okay yeah like try to see like or even tech crunch I was like I'll take all of these brands like you know do you have a are they for sale and they're like we don't know I'm like who knows like nobody well it turns out the whole package was for sale and we're being sold and you'll love this Jason if we're roughly point five revenue that's our multiple is point five not 13 not 27 point five point five time yeah we're doing 8.4 billion run rate as of Q2 resume group now Yahoo and we're being sold for five billion that is the perfect private equity moment because they could split these things up and then sell them in packages and that's probably what will happen is Yahoo will go to somebody and you know the tech crunching gadget brands will go to somebody it's a smart move on their part.
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All right so back to Robinhood and you know this sort of what the potential of the company is now and then we'll back into doing go yeah actually I got a question for you about the season because one thing I've been really trying to figure out is what happens next because forget Delta let's just presume for the minute we're going more outside over time compared to last year sure on this is going to impact a lot of stuff like people spending time online could go down people's time trading could decrease and I'm trying to figure out how to think about Robinhood's growth in the back half of this year in light of the changing world because up to this point the results have been pretty much pandemic results have been looking at and they've been amazing.
Yeah what's your level of optimism that Robinhood can keep up this sort of like not just Europe a year growth but sequential quarterly growth has been so impressive yeah so when you go public the profile of the company becomes extraordinary and during a crisis you know the profile becomes extraordinary what happens during a crisis like GME or in Ubers case when they had search pricing crises is people go what's Uber what's Robinhood right and so this is a paradoxical they now not saying venture capitalists or CEOs or shareholders hope to have a crisis of course you don't it actually turns out almost inevitably that the crisis grows the company and so the more the company is put under the microscope and ripped apart or savaged on Twitter by consumers or virtual signaling people or anti-capital social people or correctly by journalists or incorrectly by content creators whatever it is all that does is elevate the brand
so I think the brand is now getting elevated people going oh how oh it's so easy to use and you get this what we call in the industry over the shoulder viability which is somebody is opening it and somebody sees it over their shoulder goes what's that oh and then they give them a little tour of the product which is how Snapchat and Uber and. DoorDash group is people would just hand their phone to somebody and show them the app
so I think that that's going to be the big thing and then you think about adding Roths 401k and you know mortgages all kinds of devices could be added here which the IPO access is one so you don't need to have the same growth in users that you saw during that crazy game stop stonk moment which is like a moment in time I don't think we're gonna see again but you can take the existing base and just keep offering them services
so if you're a young person who's never had kids and now you have a kid and you're like oh 529 I can put money tax free for my kid and it says click here 529 you're not gonna go find call your broker at Goldman or Alliance Bernstein or you know we're Morgan Stanley you're like I don't want to talk to anybody on the phone I just want to take on my app and have that product and so I think that that's going to be where you're gonna see massive growth 22 million members you open up you know some new product like Roth and now you get 1% of people use it now you've got two million people in that product so that to me is a really great bullish argument for Robinhood over the next couple of years
but I'm very close to the next couple of quarters because they said in the their last S1 a filing that they're gonna see a revenue decline or at least trading decline in Q3 compared to Q2 interesting to me because you know yeah I've seen a lot of companies struggle with kind of leaving the pandemic and I wonder if that was part of what the reason Robinhood didn't have quite the debut it might have again it reprised itself much higher raised much capital the IPO is a success but I'm curious to some of the declines where investors not willing to buy into a company about to post a sequentially if you're day trading and you're buying it in quarter so that could be valid the same way buying DoorDash or you know pure play food delivery at this moment in the pandemic would seem like okay we're all gonna go back out to restaurants so maybe is there something other than DoorDash to buy is there something that is part of the reopening like I don't know taking a lift or Uber there or Airbnb is a better example I'm gonna go for it take a couple days off and go somewhere post-pandemic we now that seems like that's off so I think in all these the markets are so chaotic right now this mushroom of Delta plus like partial reopening it does feel like a little schizophrenic it feels exhausting it's what it feels like I mean I keep figuring out what's happening and then three days go by and everything's different again and I have to call everyone back and I'm like all right remember that stuff you told me last week what's going on now and like that's getting tiring
I would like to know for like a month what was happening without having to reframe everything it was so clear that people were going to be going on vacation and all of this pent-up energy and money was going to be spent and now you're right I you know I really didn't consider that with Delta maybe there's another three months of staying in so that would argue that DoorDash you know and Robin Hood would have another boost because maybe people would stay home and spend less money
I think the ultimate trend here with all these companies is once you have a sticky product on people's phones I always ask like why would somebody stop using this product what's going to replace it what's going to displace it you know and you look at DoorDash or Uber or Airbnb or Robin Hood this like recent cohort I don't see anybody displacing them for a decade so I think you have a decade run when you get this kind of escape velocity in the same way Google and Facebook and Amazon got those decade long runs and then it's up to them to not screw it up in the second decade yeah
我认为这些公司的最终趋势是,在人们的手机上拥有一个吸引人的产品后,我总是会问,为什么有人会停止使用这个产品?将会有什么替代品?将会出现什么新的东西来取代它呢?看看 DoorDash、Uber、Airbnb 或 Robin Hood 这些近期的公司,我认为在未来十年内没有人能取代它们。所以,当你有这种逃逸速度的时候,就像 Google、Facebook 和 Amazon 在过去的十年里能够持续成功,然后取决于它们在第二个十年里是否能成功!
you know part of me is like well once these these Robin Hood users who are you know first-time investors as they love distress with their small accounts getting their feet wet buying shares and companies they love which is all good to me to be to be clear like if I told them you should move to fidelity or vanguard and I showed them those websites they would be like yo is this my grandfather's website are you kidding me like there's no confetti the button suck the UI is terrible I had to literally Google a fidelity feature the other day to figure out how to use a feature in fidelity I already use because I couldn't find it and Jason I get paid to click my mouse like I can find it no I had literally had a similar thing with the my Morgan Stanley account and I'm like why do I even have this yeah and it's the reason I have a more Stanley account is whenever there's a stock distribution from venture funds I'm in that just like the easiest lowest friction but I'm like oh now I got to move these over to Robin Hood and I'm like do I want to have this many shares in a Robin Hood account and you'll be Robin Hood star user though you be like you know there's a lot a lot of shares going back into there from Robin Hood but it does become I think really hard to go backwards with these paradigms like it would be like I'm trying to think of like a really what was the worst food ordering experience I think it's grub hub I don't know if you ever use I haven't used grub hub in college yeah it was terrible I mean it was just so arduous to just get to check out and then you use door dash or Uber Eats and it's you're just like here's your last order you're like yes go it would be like going from ride hailing on your phone back to calling a taxi company exactly that exactly what it would be like
okay now tell me ago was a 36% their IPO now it's a it's a smaller footprint it's a $5 billion market cap and they've been trading pretty pretty flat since they went out 31 times their 2020 revenue and then they had just under a hundred percent growth in q1 and then they had I think it's 45% midpoint growth in q2 based on their current estimates got it so it's a fast growing company tell me about dolingo you bullish on the company and I'm bullish on humans wanting to do better for themselves and I'm bullish on tools that helped them do that I don't know self improvement yeah
I'm big on that I think the world the world so much better than we think like right now thanks to Google translate I can read anything on the internet which people forget how awesome that is now different but I think these digital abilities are gonna stay popular and people travel a lot you know and the world smaller and flights are generally cheaper and I think I think language learning's key and they have an amazing consumer brand and fact your earlier point are you gonna delete it for something else and I think the company now with more capital and it's probably ever had after this IPO has lots of room to double down on products so I'm bullish on on the movement I don't know what the stock is going to do tomorrow but I will say raised its range price above its range and then had a killer first day big success I mean the company put up a lot of points for edtech Jason and for startups out there looking to price their next round here is some good news you know for that argument with your VCs yeah
Edtech has been a really difficult category historically and investing because every edtech company saw their customer as school districts. And school districts, you know, they basically will change software you know like they paint. You know, like it's probably on the same cadence, like every five years they painted or something so it's generous. Yeah, okay, so maybe it's kind of like when they replace the windows like every 20. Yeah, exactly. It really does not change that often. And I'm like, you're gonna run out of money before they even sit for a demo. Like, you just gonna take you a year to get them to demo.
All the success I'm seeing are people who are just like you know what let's go direct to parents let's go direct to the consumer and charge them a price that's around the price of Netflix. And when you charge somebody the price of Spotify to learn a language or a musician which we're investors in our tone base to music companies we invested in our stezy for dance we're invested. in calm for meditation you look at those companies and fit pod for CrossFit they're all consumer subscription and they're all you know around the price of Netflix and I think that this is gonna be like the new cable channels that's why we have I think we have seven investments in consumer subscription today
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because they're giving you something for free out of you know how it goes so it's interesting one Netflix being kind of a price anchor or spotifies a price anchor because I know the amount of like value I get from those two products and I subscribe to both and so to me if you ask me for the same amount of money I have an expectation of like what you're going to give me for it
the other thing is it's funny to hear us be so bullish on consumer tech and subscriptions because if you go back like you know eight years ago VCs were saying don't tell the consumers they're higher churn as I'm selling to SMB's but where's your ACV is trash and here we are with Spotify doing great Netflix is still crushing it do a lingosho and this is a viable model consumers are really changing their behavior and I think that it's good to see that model at the respect now that it didn't get back when it was unfashionable and you got to attribute that to Spotify I think a Netflix saying if you pay us we'll give you something extraordinary without ads in it and I don't know about you but I am looking at my collection of streaming services and I've realized I am now getting pulled out of the advertising pool it's harder and harder for advertisers to reach me because I have the YouTube premium yeah you don't know if you pay for that or something yeah it was called YouTube red I don't know if they call it YouTube premium now wait a second they change your logo when you have it yeah pre they call it YouTube premium now it used to be red and so your logo changes to premium what's really interesting on premium I think it's 12 bucks a month you don't see ads which then has made my YouTube consumption go through the roof because I watch sopranos clips I watch sports clips there I watch all my sports shows instead of going to ESPN and trying to find Nick's coverage
I just typed the word Nixon and I can watch all my next coverage with no ads then I have Hulu Hulu has an option for no ads I elected for that for whatever it was for a bucks extra month I think NBA Lee pass for 40 bucks extra you can have no ads and what you see is the arena video yes and which is really great I love just for like watching what you want you're what you want and then Netflix and Disney and HBO Max have no ads so I think I'm kind of where do I see ads anymore I don't really I see them on social media I guess yeah I see them on Twitter I can't wait to pay Twitter to take my ads away but it's funny you bring this up because my spouse and I were watching Hulu the other the other I think last week and there was an ad play and I was like honey what is what is the differential in price between no ads and ads because I'm 99.99% sure if we should not be saving that money because I'm about to lose my mind if I see this ad one more time
我刚刚输入了“尼克松”这个词,现在我可以不看广告地观看所有相关报道,因为我使用了Hulu。Hulu有一个无广告选项,我选择了它并支付了额外的几块钱每月。我认为NBA Lee Pass每额外支付40美元也可以去掉广告,你所看到的只是球场的视频,这真的很棒;我喜欢看自己想看的东西,而且Netflix、迪士尼和HBO Max都没有广告,所以我觉得我已经不用再看广告了。我只在社交媒体上看到广告,我猜想我应该付费让Twitter不显示广告,这点很有趣,因为我和我的配偶上周看Hulu时,播放了一则广告,我问他无广告版和有广告版的价格差异是多少,因为我99.99%确定我们应该付钱去掉广告,否则我如果再看到这个广告一次,我会疯掉的。
and YouTube to be clear we're gonna get to I think Alphabet earnings in a little bit but like YouTube's ad load is excessive like if you ever use straight up YouTube like just no it's like there's multiple pre-rolls and then mid-rolls they have really they're going for it that they're going for it they did set let's just pivot to that sure it's really important and you do see the mid-rolls which are super annoying and then the pre-rolls constantly feels like every video has a pre-roll on it and I don't think you can opt out I remember when I was in the partner program back in the day you could opt out of having ads on your videos now if you're on YouTube and they store your video I don't think you're allowed to opt out of ads anymore which oh man Google just gets more and more evil I mean like the Google's need to increase its ad density of its products over time has made them a hollow out every experience they offered to the point of which I don't like to use their stuff in that ad block it's brutal I use an ad blocker and the only time I feel guilty about it is what I'm on like a journalist site and I will undo it on specific news sites where I want them to get the ad revenue but I don't I don't feel well
I mean I don't feel bad for another place and the solid I'm an ad clicker anyway but looking at YouTube specifically grew 80% year over year seven billion dollars I mean pretty extraordinary the growth is crazy it's getting close to Netflix and revenue scale it is exactly the same right seven billion both this quarter and what's really fun is if you look at the the Google network revenues so kind of like the offsite Google stuff the ads they run historically a big chunk of of Google's ad business it's now just six hundred million dollars more in the last quarter than than YouTube so YouTube is about to kind of surpass this critical old piece of of Google revenue but the the YouTube gains were very impressive
but I'm curious what you made of the Google cloud changes because revenue to good losses decline I was pretty bullish about Google cloud and I don't know how you yeah I think that they hit a key milestone which was the cost of providing the service was less than the revenue the service brought in right I mean I think they're still investing in it but it's really hard to display Amazon web services because Amazon has just got this relentless march towards how little margin they can have now we don't have insight into each of the product lines at Amazon but the scale of that business is crazy but Google's cloud is super important for them to win as well because if Amazon just has the biggest cloud in the world and Azure and Google cloud fall too far behind yeah you can't you don't want to monopoly in public clouds but you know here's a question for you Jason because you talked more started founders than I do which is saying something
I'm hearing tweets and I'm carrying some complaints about AWS pricing from startups and maybe even some growth stage founders. People are just a little bit dismayed at how much AWS can wind up costing them. Is that gonna help Azure and Google cloud or is that just complaints and it's not gonna change much?
I think this is sort of like you know ride sharing drivers complaining about getting paid where it's like it's never gonna be enough. Everybody always wants to raise so even when it's a double the minimum wage in the country or it's 15 or it's 25 or they give minimums people are always gonna ask for more. And in this case, they're always gonna ask for a smaller cloud bill.
They throw you know they're gonna be like this is too much. And you know if that if your startup grows but they're not this generation is not comparing their cloud computing costs to buying servers and racking them.
Yeah and just 20 years ago you know there was a line item when you were raising your three million-dollar series a three million dollars series a five hundred thousand in servers and co-location facilities and I did Mahalo we racked servers then at a certain point we're like the cloud you know in the cloud we had so much traffic that the cloud charged based on the amount of traffic you used and when you have your own fiber line you don't get charged for usage and so all of those I kind of things that are now competing with each other are gonna ultimately drive this down.
So it's I think it's much to do about nothing and it actually gives Azure and Google Cloud you know IBM and other people's clouds the ability to compete. Yeah it's a great entry there I mean it's the other thing that's going to be interesting is I don't know if you know about serverless but there's this concept of like you can build these little objects that run on the internet and when somebody goes to hit a website it fires it up runs it they run the execution and then it shuts itself back down yeah and so this can cut down for some tasks and computing 90% so with software, you're gonna keep seeing the software waste down the utilization on the network which then kind of games the cloud and the same thing with storage and other things getting cheaper.
So, well, the growth of usage of these public classes crazy so Google Cloud grew I think 54% year-over-year in Q2 Azure was 51% so very very close there I think AWS was I couldn't find the number I was just looking for it I think was 37% but I mean think about how much total spend we're talking about going to the public cloud just over the last 12 months in Q2 I mean it's billions and billions of dollars. And you know thank you VCs for financing all the startups that are currently living off of that because it's it's going great for the majors it definitely has changed everything in terms of the funding of startups you literally took out 20% 30% of the cost and the time and the time would have burned months of setup and runway.
So really you know you could have as much as a third or more of your startups cost being the setting up of your office space and your cloud. You start looking at that you're like wow you just put that towards developers or you can fund many more projects you know a 250k check with a two-developer startup can last them for two years.
You know they so this just came up I was talking to a startup actually here in Providence there are some proud reports in my new adopted more. Yeah actually that's what the founder told me he's like even in my the floor of the building, we have a little office and there are two more that are eventually back I was like okay good news but I asked him how long his two million dollar of seed ground was gonna get it's coming like how much runway is this and he didn't give me an answer in months he said 20 to 25 product cycles and I was like that's the coolest metric I've ever heard someone probably two weeks brand or something three weeks brand yeah who knows but I mean like that to me shows that they're not thinking about just running out of money they're thinking about where they're gonna get to in terms of what they're building and if I was an investor and I'm not I think that would jazz me because it seems like playing offense versus defense it is pretty amazing.
When the clock ticking down is not making your decision-making delighting customers is and it really it is why when we syndicate a deal to the syndicate dot com which was like our previously was on angelus and I would do it there. Yeah we specifically say we we will only syndicate you if you have a minimum of 12 months of runway but we're looking more for 18 to 12 24 months and the reason we do that is we tell them like we want you head down thinking about the customer for at least a year hopefully 18 months so you don't have to pop your head back up and raise money.
this sure we have over 300 I've invested in 300 companies in less decade I'm not sure how many of them are exactly active but let's say two out of three so maybe two 25 are still affect you know in effect we have 65 companies currently raising money we're in the process of closing out of the 225 out of the 225 one and three basically and there were people who are closing before that and people who are thinking about raising money but having that many in process I've never seen and it has broken our internal systems because when a fundraising happens you go to your existing investor you have to get them to sign off on it read the documents agree and then decide do they want to take their pro rata it with 65 that means every business day 20 business days a month I've got to be making 304 decisions a day and going over 304 sets of documents the lawyers in our industry are now saying like we need four days to turn around documents we need five days to turn around documents used to be like we turn around documents in four two days you know no problems give us two days maybe three and now it's like give us a week we got just wait I've never seen this level of activity yeah you think founders are doing well with ample secondary in the markets look at their lawyers because the lawyers are doing fantastically right now because everyone needs them right about now at the same time which means they have enormous leverage great place to be well I mean and attorneys are not getting a summer break and a lot of VCs are not getting a summer break I'm supposed to be going on vacation and it's like I'm scared to death to go on vacation I'm just like what's going to happen with all these deals and where basically we came up with a term that we step my new term of art the founders is standing pat which is the term in draw poker you know when you say oh I want two cards I'll take three I'll take two when you do draw poker like the old cowboy poker not hold them you would say I'll take two cards you give two cards to give you two new cards standing pad is I don't need any new cards we're just like we're standing pat we're good we're not adding to our position we're not you know gonna leave this round we're just gonna stand pat and I've had to tell companies that we may have actually participated in or led like we're gonna stand pat because we just can't get to this deal
are you concerned about your portfolios performance in the near future well JP Morgan Blackrock and others are projecting public equity returns I'm just three to five percent over the next five years analyst that bank of America urge investors to consider real assets as part of an inflation strategy so where are the major players putting their money endowments for Yale Harvard and other top asset managers are looking into alternative assets according to master works research endowments over one billion are investing 55% more in alternatives on average if you're looking for a very interesting asset class that's uncorrelated with the stock market it's blue chip art masterworks.io sells shares in multi-million dollar paintings by artists like Banksy Picasso and Warhol according to master works contemporary art has appreciated 14% annually from 1995 to 2020 outperforming other real assets like real estate and gold I just had the founder Scott Lynn on the program again episode 12 32 4 and alternative assets roundtable and he shared some great insights around inflation appreciation more gold listen to episode 12 32 masterworks.io is a fantastic idea and they're executing at a super high level I think it's really genius so sign up today at masterworks.io and if you use the code twist you'll skip their 30,000 person wait list see important information at masterworks.io slash disclaimer
so tell me a little bit about where it things are most busy so I'm curious I know that the kind of series A plus things to tiger is super active is the precedence stage just as busy as glider stages I would say yes but I would say it's close
So what's happened is anybody who's got a series B marketplace or SaaS companies good question anybody who's a marketplace SaaS company or consumer subscription that's growing if you're a growing company you're going to get a valuation that is double what it was three or four years ago so what would have been okay you're doing ten million dollars we'll give you five seven times that so we'll do a $70 million valuation and 80 million dollars valuation now all of a sudden it's 10 to 20 so you got ten million dollars in revenue you were going out for your series B you know between a hundred and two hundred million would be the valuation and they'll be people lining up to put in that 20 million dollar check and so what I've told them is you know if you were if you're planning on raising money at any time in the next 18 months do it now do it now do it now yeah because it's like there's a party people are popping bottles if you want champagne you know like you know like you know because someone will drop you off yeah somebody's gonna top you off like you should go get that get that champagne right now and then you don't deploy it slowly
And then what's happening at the earlier stages which is really weird that I've never seen is not quite this craziness at the at the series B level that was well document with tiger and other people participating now what's happening is somebody will close a one million dollar round you know at for 10% of that company and you know maybe they would have previously been a six seven or eight million dollar company but you know in that zone it doesn't really matter all that much because the outcomes are so much bigger so okay if you're an early stage investor you kind of get comfortable with a 12 million dollar valuation where it might have been six previously the round fills up people find out the round is filled up and then another two million dollars shows up and says oh you know this person or that person who's notables in the round we want to do your series say it's like we haven't gotten the money for half this round in the wires haven't hit yet we can't get the next one exactly and so what I say to folks is close that round give everybody a hard date your money gets in Friday if you don't get your money in Friday we've now open to note at 20 and I've had a dozen companies do this where they closed the 12 million dollar round literally the next week they open a note for 20 million and then they say to any other investor we close that round we were massively over subscribed we have a 20 million dollar cap note that we're gonna keep open for the next year for value added investors we consider you one of those if you want to be in that round we're happy to have you but or we can wait until we formally start the round and then those are starting to fill up wow so there's the amount of money being slung around in the startup world really does to me kind of mirror the amount of money we're talking about with these public company earnings because the numbers are getting to be almost out of my my ability to kind of reckon with them yes you know Microsoft and Apple both north of two trillion dollars I mean at some point I I begin to lose it like I think around a hundred billion I begin to kind of like lose the my feet on the ground and flow away and these valuations are very similar because I understand the math you're talking about you say well if it was six and now it's 12 post okay exits are bigger and it's it's pretty seed money and you know okay it totally but like when I was learning about DC you know 10 12 13 years ago you know people were talking about how they had to have price control and all this stuff and I feel like everything that I was taught is now just gone like I learned about the stock market when X on was the biggest company in the world that's a freaking different era like it's it's an entirely brave new world and I'm it's fun but my gosh
Well I mean if you think about the multiples the multiples are compressed even as big as these two trillion three trillion dollar companies are their multiple is compressed because people assume it can't grow like a startup but Amazon or let's say YouTube the better example 80% year of your growth that's kind of startup level growth you know like later state startup growth early stage you're trying to triple quadruple your revenue year over year from a million to three or three to nine once you get up to a hundred million you're trying to get to 150 when you're at 500 million you're trying to grow to you know seven fifty eight hundred you may not double year over year I mean you can but it's not easy and you look at Amazon 113 billion in revenue for the quarter just it's absolutely crazy but Jason you forgot the punch line to that particular joke what happened this morning to Amazon stock went down it went down now now now tell the people why because this is the funnest part of the show well I mean I they missed their revenue number by one billion I think it was a little bit more than that but essentially there was one 15 was the expectation they hit one 13 yeah I think from yeah so I mean but just looking at the run rate of four hundred forty three billion is insane and then you just compare that to you know GDP they would be the twenty seven in the world that's pretty extraordinary they would be right by Austria and Iran yeah so here's why I think Amazon took a bit of hit if you look at their Q2 or into port and you spend a lot of time going past all the bullet points they put our top about new Kindle features they announced that you're not going to use I love that I don't know why they still do that like why do they do that it's like really you you even produce the kindle once last time I even saw a candle okay I look well let's not erase ebooks here I own two candles and I'm a big fan but like I used to breed you know to be clear if you go to the financial guidance section of the Amazon Q2 report you'll see that for Q3 of this year compared to last year they're expecting net sales to grow between ten and sixteen percent so Amazon has kind of like reached the end of its pandemic growth surge and I think investors added at a higher expectations and critically it was priced like it was going to grow more quickly and so it lost some of that growth premium Amazon still had a great quarter like if I ever do one hundred and thirteen billion a quarter please put my head and and a center my hand but like compared to expectations and how they were valued it was a bit of a miss and so I friends who struggle with like great quarter and it's a miss and it's it's technical but like it it was a surprise I think to a lot of folks they saw the headline number and then what happened to stock so yeah there's also going to be this you know changing of the guard Jeff is no longer in charge so I think that makes some people nervous and there's got to be some profit taking going on I mean if he if this was like such a pandemic run up and everybody was getting their you know you know six months worth of remember that last year oh yeah six months on your shelves and like fighting for you know wipes and we were wiping our food down and wearing gloves and masks to unpack our cereal I was one level below that whenever the level of panic that was I was one step down but not not too far different I mean I literally remember a month of wiping my groceries down and like wearing my wife is like don't bring that into the house I'm like the tomato soup okay I can talk I can talk I can talk this though so we had we had a friend in town from college and she was in town for like three months we did dinners every week outside at her house it was lovely actually and she said that her family early in the pandemic were they would order food in you know and then they would re microwave it to kill off whatever and they were actually microwaving their salads before they ate them and I was like there is the peak the peak I've covered the sun I guess yeah I don't think your salad has that don't you want me warm salad Jason does lots of limp lettuce I like I'll tell you the free say salad with the warm egg and the lardon on it yes that's fine it's but that's wilted it's not it's not microwaves it's not yeah I don't think anybody microwave any of this well here's the quote from the CFO our customers are safe and healthy and ordering from us and we know there'll be more vacations or be more mobility there'll be things that probably people shied away from last year and that's all good but it tends to lead them to do other things besides shop so we're adjusting our run rates in the period that we see that I do think shopping was like I think a pastime as was wagering on sports or wagering on stonks or wagering on crypto and that is all coming apart what's your take on China banning Bitcoin and then some of these you know new regulations coming out I think
========== I think I think was it by Nance is now deprecating their service in Europe to a certain extent well are you watching all this and the and the news tightening and what are your thoughts yeah so tether yeah well look look let's do this in chunks so first of all by Nance it turns out if you get really really big and you're not actually following regulatory guidelines around the world eventually catches up with you it's like technical debt for a financial company it's called regulatory debt and it matters because people eventually start doing mean things back to you so by Nance cleaning up its act actually I like I hope they figure this out I've talked to CEO I I'm generally bullish on crypto exchange see see see see see see great I mean I've talked to him once or twice but I liked him so I hope it goes well selling to rip your products in Europe that's a lot of work you gotta have a big compliance team not a surprise China holy crap Jason yeah you're lying at clock to 2018 late 17 early 18
Chinese venture capital system blowing up everyone's talking about how with 9.9.6 is going to like take over the US tech world the US people are are you know the technical companies are lazy panic these these were just trying to get on the next plane to China to pour money into the space and then overnight China decided that a huge swap the venture back companies are now going to go non-profit can't list or raise capital it's it's like a thundercloth that we that we almost missed because we're in North America versus China but like it was an enormous regulatory turn after they went after D.D. and Tencent Music and so forth.
So to me there has been an enormous tenor shift in the Chinese market that should a lot of time totally freaking stupid slow VC investment in the country. I gotta think VC investing from the West in China is over. I would think if I'm an LP and a fund comes to me and says hey we got a China strategy I would look at them and go okay Jack Mahatat China strategy to Tencent had a China strategy all these education companies had a strategy and I'm sure the Bitcoin miners had a strategy how's that strategy working out for them because whatever your strategy is as a VC it's dependent on entrepreneurs to execute on the ground.
Yep those entrepreneurs are getting sent to re-education camps if you know if they can disappear Jack Mahatat for several weeks kill off the entire PO and then make D.D. Rubetz apps three days after when public in the US exchange if I remember my timelines correctly. I don't care about your China strategy there's one China strategy and it comes from the top and that's not you so like in terms of risk it's terrifying.
Yeah and if you have this would if you have risk capital yeah you're going to look at what is the spectrum of risk to return and where can I put that money to work if it felt like you know China was trending towards transparency and engagement great.
I think people made the right bet in twenty you know ten yes actually you know who the guy was who actually did this more than anybody was the Pat McGovern from IDG which I will know he opened IDG in China before anybody he was the OG in China he created all these publications there and then he was like wait a second I could create an adventure firm in China and that's how he made all his money people don't know this but he rest in peace Pat McGovern came to the first tech crunch fifty slash disrupt with Mike and our partners and sat in the first row in like a four thousand dollars suit and Mike and I were like holy shit this Pat McGovern and we're like how did he get in here yeah and they're like he bought a ticket you bought a VIP ticket he's gonna be at the party tonight oh my god so I walk over he's like I'm like oh Mr. McGovern is great to see you know that thanks for coming and he's like I follow everything you do Jason that's not creepy at all that's okay Pat McGovern and it wound up because people don't remember he owned the demo conference yeah and Mike and I fifteen years ago were like we're gonna kill the demo conference that charges twenty grand yeah we're gonna sink that thing and then what does this guy do he's so gangster he buys a VIP ticket it comes to the event and sits in the first row yeah how's that for some some reconnoitering of the of the opposition by the way the tech one's fifty which is the one that being sponsored all those bars and lobby was that the four year fifty I think that was forty.
Bing Bing Bing that's the time that you guys got me so drunk that I put some side of your venue and then I also threw up in my badge and so when I woke up the next morning in Palo Alto I was supposed to be to be clear my badge knelt down I couldn't figure out why and I was like eighteen or something so oh my God that was this years well you know that was when San Francisco in the industry I think it was a little more fun and you know less content it was less contancorice between all the parties involved and the scale was still tiny right like Facebook didn't exist or if it did yeah Facebook small yeah and the things that did exist were ten million users there wasn't this discussion we're having today about these things are so big should they be that big.
Okay so China tightening the news game over wearing charge and Bitcoin happened right before that so what is explain to me your thoughts on Bitcoin getting banned in China and the matter is getting kicked out before they do this crackdown on IPOs because this they don't do anything without a plan yeah China they have a hundred year plans 200 year plans that they're kind of like Putin in that regard so what is the plan here if you had to guess so the plan is to eventually roll out a digital you on as they're currently doing and why why does that matter why do we care why not use a crypto well it's all about the opposite of decentralization it's all about centralization if you have a digital currency that the government controls you can set effectively negative. interest rates against it you can have people's money go away they don't spend it so if you want to induce consumer spending you don't send everyone a check if we do in the US and hopes that they'll spend it on something you just tell them that money's gonna go away they don't use it and so suddenly the government has much much more control over the local economy now if you're going to have this digitally long people have to use it and if there's an alternative say I don't know cryptocurrency like Bitcoin maybe they have a way out and you can't have that.
And there has been constant saber-addling about the banning of Bitcoin in China for so long and the mining they're off that everyone in the crypto community just viewed any China news as fun to ignore it yeah it's fear and thirty-da you guys are haters have fun being poor poor we're gonna run siops on your replies because you Alex and Jason criticized cryptocurrency in some mild way yeah crypto is fine it doesn't bother me at all but you know and then finally after several minor things over the years the big one happened and now you can't mine crypto and China and they're there seem to be very serious about it uh big coins fine because it is relatively decentralized I'm more of an ethereum fan if I had to pick one chain to rule them all um why don't you have more contracts well I think I think it's a programming platform and that's very exciting to me because platform is going to be worth quite a lot of money Bitcoin it's the main argument for its existence is there's not that many of them I don't care and it's the oldest one and I don't care about that because IBM's older than Google and Michael.
what's I think Michael Seller uh I don't know if it's a insult or a compliment Michael Seller is the guy who owns micro something micro strategy he took his entire company which was providing research or something yeah and then pivoted it to being basically a holding company and he just he is like when I say Bitcoin Maximalist I mean to be nth degree um but I it does seem like China is now saying hey if you have our digital one your key insight there I think is 100% correct and it's due which is control control China wants control of everything the data their citizens their monetary supply entrepreneurship new products and services and completely where where capital it goes if you go back and read the english language and translate versions of the Chinese government bulletins regarding the crackdown on edtech I know that's kind of that's nuanced but it was a big chunk of the stuff we're talking about one thing that was mentioned was excessive excessive capital flowing into the space and the way this is being read by everyone who's a china watcher who knows much better than I do is that China wants to take the direction of its investment away from what it's been so good at consumer social fintech all this stuff and point it more towards hard tech like semiconductors and so forth uh I don't know if you can shift in economy by fiat like that I don't think again but that seems to be the overall uh read of the situation
but like to me Jason if you think of the most impressive chinese companies you're thinking you know made one by dance tencent you know alibaba you know these these big big names that you know yeah it turns out these education ones are huge well and they were valuable until recently if you if you want to get a sample of this look at the stock chart if you're listening to a tall education ta l space education and you'll see how much ground is lost in cyber right it's like 90% of its dollar you were something crazy yeah it was 143 down to three dollars it's just unbelievable and that's really interesting when after education because they also sort of indicated in their language that you shouldn't profit off of education this is a state run thing which dovetails with exactly what I was saying is control our education system here in the united states is broken we do such a terrible job on a on a public basis that people want to route around that and have competition of buying apps actually the other one ran is brilliant dot org which does math and stem and that's an affordable subscription that people are going crazy for um so this to me seems like the central control of the currency of education and of communication platforms
uh yeah goutou goutou te cedo i think is how it's um the one i'm talking about is goutou te cedo which is gato te you tal is a separate company both are down 90% but if you have the digital one i don't know if you heard about this but the real cynical case with the digital one is it provides even more control than print money in china because let's say you say something about g singping like i think he could do a better job oh and then we like spicy yeah i i think that uh you know he could uh be a better listener you say that they could literally be like huh Alex Jason having that conversation on your podcast beep your money is frozen yeah and we like they know yeah they can just freeze you on the blockchain okay we've got all your money um why did you ask come down to the office and talk to us okay my money is turned off okay oh yeah by the way we put all of your homes on the blockchain boop now we have we own your home and come talk to us and then we'll put you in a reeducation camp and your penalty is the house we just took for you in your home and then they know every transaction you've made with every person and if you they'll basically move to the point where they say you cannot use real money you must use blockchain money think about you know we opt into using apple pay but we can if we want to do transactions anonymously using cash or whatever we want um they will know every single thing about you on a communications platform basis and on a monetary basis yeah and there's no room for dissent and so the interesting question is where does this take them economically and where does this take them in a technology perspective i i think i mean call i'm gonna come out of the capital so once again on the show but like as a capitalist and who's in favor of liberal democracy i don't think so probably you're gonna get canceled i just i just i just do you're meeting it oh no i'm a vehement capitalist but i'm very loving one i'm a kind of a Danish capitalist if you will okay i'm a big fan of progressive tax rates uh but as a capitalist and a liberal uh democrat with a small amount of small d you know to me this just looks like the long set up to a series of misallocations of resources like i mean Jason why why does he know better than the entire combined wisdom of his economy where this money should be deployed and so forth and also it's just an enormous human freedom catastrophe to irrigate to one person who's humanity by people to ask your faith yeah and it's happening in front of our eyes yeah and this is not the number one story in the world we're talking about all kinds of other things the largest country in the world yep yes you know basically tied with us for the most influential economy in the world has now shut down cryptocurrency public market companies take it over hong kong sabarattling at tywan building more nuclear silos building more nuclear reactors and the god king said i'm in charge forever and he just took control of everything like what could go wrong here yeah so i should you know how about seriously i'm trying to take this i'm actually going back and rereading old z gping speeches from earlier in his in his tenure to get a better vibe for his politics and i added a marks novel novel a marks novel a marks book to my my book with my dad because i need to go back to my college days and figure out what what what some of these phrases are because i've forgotten some of my basic marks and so i i feel like that's how important this is but apple had earnings this week did really well makes them all in china for makes the lot of china how do you feel i mean like i'm not gonna lie i feel kind of i feel a little kbgb about that you know for me it's a little nervous yeah i think what we're going to see is the great disengagement we have this great engagement policy for decades if felt like china was possibly going in the right direction on human rights on open markets on free trade and i think we got walled into thinking hey this is just going to be a straight train to democracy and you know when they go into hong kong i'm sure they'll have kid gloves and they'll be reasonable they don't want to go into hong kong and just you know just tear up tear stuff up and they're just like yeah what's the newspaper apple okay yeah that's shut down you're all in jail okay who's on book you're all in jail great and by the way the court system is now not in hong kong it's on mainland so whenever you guys get a speeding ticket you're gonna cross the bridge and come to mainland china we're gonna talk about it over there yeah and no even more even more than this Jason like i forget which american clothing company was but they decide you not buy cotton from the i'm gonna butcher this everybody that john jing reason region where the where the we're the we're the we're sorry because they literally have the we're girls going into fields with zero sense of history irony uh or anything they literally have three million people
Paragraph 1: The speaker discusses two companies, goutou te cedo and gato te you tal, both of which have declined by 90%. He then goes on to discuss the control provided by blockchain in China and how it can lead to freezing a person's assets and seizing their homes.
演讲者谈论了两家公司,分别是Goutou Te Cedo和Gato Te You Tal,它们的股价都下跌了90%。然后他继续讨论了区块链在中国所提供的控制方式,它可以导致一个人的资产被冻结并且他们的房产被查封。
Paragraph 2: The speaker expresses concern about the economic and technological implications of this control, particularly from the perspective of a capitalist and democrat. They worry about misallocations of resources and the violation of basic human freedoms.
Paragraph 3: The speaker notes how China has taken over public market companies, and expresses concerns about China's ongoing power grab, which includes sabre-rattling with Taiwan and constructing nuclear reactors.
Paragraph 4: The speaker expresses concern about the disengagement of China from previous policies that supported open markets and human rights. The speaker also notes their reservations about China's policies towards Hong Kong and other matters, and suggests that engaging with China may not be as effective as previously thought.
Paragraph 1: The speaker begins by discussing the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the media, stating that it is important to understand the geopolitical implications of the outbreak and its handling by different countries. The speaker notes that the pandemic has highlighted the power and influence of the Chinese government in global affairs.
Paragraph 2: The speaker suggests that the Chinese government has used the pandemic to further its own interests, such as by providing aid to other countries in exchange for favorable treatment. The speaker argues that this should be seen as part of a broader effort by China to expand its global influence and assert its dominance.
Paragraph 3: The speaker discusses the role of technology in enabling China's rise to power, particularly through the development of 5G networks and the use of surveillance and censorship to control information. The speaker argues that this creates significant risks for other countries and for the global order.
Paragraph 4: The speaker notes that many companies and individuals are willing to overlook these risks in order to access the Chinese market, which is seen as a major source of economic opportunity. The speaker argues that this creates a moral dilemma, as it requires complicity in the Chinese government's human rights abuses and other actions that undermine global stability.
Paragraph 1: The speaker begins by discussing the recent controversy around Subway sandwiches allegedly containing less than 50% real tuna. The speaker notes that this controversy highlights the complicated issue of traceability in the food industry. They argue that it is difficult to know where the ingredients in food products come from, which makes it hard for consumers to make informed choices.
Paragraph 2: The speaker then transitions to discussing the recent heatwave in the Pacific Northwest. They note that this heatwave was unprecedented, with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in many areas. The speaker highlights the climate change as a contributing factor to the extreme weather events that we are seeing across the globe.
Paragraph 3: The speaker goes on to talk about the recent G20 summit, which was held virtually this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The speaker notes that one of the key topics of discussion at the summit was the global vaccine rollout. The speaker argues that access to vaccines remains a critical issue, particularly in low-income countries.
Paragraph 4: The speaker then discusses the recent protests in Cuba, which were sparked by the country's ongoing economic crisis. The speaker notes that the Cuban government is blaming the protests on outside forces, but many believe that the Cuban people are simply fed up with the government's mismanagement of the economy. The speaker also highlights the role of social media in spreading news about the protests and helping to mobilize activists.
Paragraph 5: The speaker discusses a clothing company that refuses to buy cotton from a region where there are reports of forced labor and human rights abuses. The speaker notes that this highlights the ongoing human rights issues in China, particularly related to the treatment of the Uyghur people. The speaker argues that many companies and individuals are willing to overlook these issues in order to profit from the Chinese market, even if it requires turning a blind eye to cultural genocide. The speaker argues that this creates a binary choice between complicity in human rights abuses and speaking out against them. The speaker emphasizes that there is no beef with individuals in China, but rather with the Chinese government.
Paragraph 6: The speaker discusses the use of iCloud by Apple in China and notes that while the company outsources the cloud ownership to a third party, they are still complicit in the Chinese government's human rights abuses. The speaker criticizes Tim Cook's public statements about human rights and argues that the company's actions tell a different story. The speaker also notes that while Apple may be privacy conscious in the United States, they are willing to hand over dissidents to the Chinese government.
Paragraph 1: The speaker begins by discussing the recent rise in the price of Bitcoin. They note that Elon Musk's tweets and other factors have contributed to the increase, and express skepticism about the sustainability of this growth.
Paragraph 2: The speaker then shifts to discussing the threat that cryptocurrencies pose to traditional financial institutions. They argue that these institutions are now investing in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in order to stay competitive.
Paragraph 3: The speaker continues on the topic of finance, discussing the recent GameStop stock surge that was driven by Reddit users. They note that this event exposed flaws in the stock market and questioned whether the regulations around it are effective.
Paragraph 4: The speaker then shifts to discussing the tech industry, specifically the recent controversy surrounding Facebook's decision to ban Australian news outlets from their platform. They argue that this move highlights the immense power that Facebook wields over the media landscape, and question whether this is good for society.
Paragraph 5: The speaker then discusses the broader problem of misinformation on social media. They argue that social media platforms have a responsibility to address this issue, as it can have real-world consequences.
Paragraph 6: The speaker then discusses the recent controversy surrounding Apple's cooperation with the Chinese government in suppressing dissent. They argue that Apple's actions are morally questionable and suggest that consumers should consider this when making purchasing decisions.
Yeah let me get the Macbook M1 and it is unbelievable how long that god damn battery lasts and how fast it is with uh your browser. Yeah, so I run a lot of tabs so that's pertinent to my interests, but if you're part of the 50 plus tabs you know and multiple monitor club, oh yeah, it is so amazing and it never heats up. You never have the fan come on where your sounds like it's like a v-tall taking off like it's a joby. Literally, the fan on this thing runs whenever I don't have the AC turned on my office but I can't have the AC turned on my office because it blows onto the microphone so I have to literally just sweat it out on pods. It's terrible, it's brutal. That new one you get zero of that. The battery lasts forever, uh, it's just extraordinary.
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The speaker then shifts to discussing Apple's recent earnings report, which they describe as "fantastic." The speaker notes that the company's Q3 sales were up 80%, driven in large part by strong iPhone sales. The speaker questions whether this growth was partially driven by stimulus checks and argues that the company's success should not be overlooked in light of their complicity in human rights abuses in China.
I got a question, how did this happen because Intel has been making chips since before I was born? Yep, Apple newer to the semiconductor space and yet they come out with the M1 chip and it's like all the things you just said. I can't recall last time I got hype about a process here. It was the Pentium is three when I was like 15, you know? This is how did how did Apple do this and not Intel? Okay, it's a great question. I think what happened was Apple got very interested with the A series of chips in the iPhone of, we need to control our destiny and the chips we're getting from other people are not going to get us where we need to get in terms of a competitive advantage.
我有一个问题,因为英特尔在我出生之前就开始制造芯片了,这是怎么发生的?没错,苹果相对于半导体行业来说还比较新,但他们推出了M1芯片,就像你刚才说的那样,我已经忘记了最后一次因为处理器而狂热了。我大约15岁时是因为 Pentium III 巨大性能互联网就这样。这是苹果如何做到的而不是英特尔呢?好的,这是一个很好的问题。我认为发生的是,苹果对 iPhone 中的 A 系列芯片非常感兴趣,我们需要掌控自己的命运,我们从其他人那里得到的芯片不能为我们带来更有竞争力的优势。
Once they start, we'll start realizing uh graphics and battery life are two of the key features of the phone. In other words, if your battery lasts longer, you can do more intensive processing. If you can do more intensive processing, you can do take better pictures, do better picture software, you can play better games. That combination of needs said purpose-driven chip. Okay, we have unlimited money, we are selling billions of these devices, and then the engine in our car is made by somebody who doesn't understand what we're building in the scale of this effort we have to do it now.
You start doing that and you start realizing wow, the margin on these things, right? Because when you would buy a Dell computer, whatever you remember, they would offer you an arm chip or the Pentium or whatever it was, the Ampd or until. Yeah, Ampd or Intel and you're talking about what was the different two hundred dollars on the cost of the computer.
当你开始这样做的时候,你就会意识到哇,这些产品的利润率很高,对吧?因为当你购买戴尔电脑时,无论你记得什么,他们都会给你提供一个 ARM 芯片,或者是 Pentium 或者其他的 Ampd 或 Intel。是的,Ampd 或者 Intel,你正在讨论的是这些电脑在成本上的不同价值高达两百美元。
It was all steep to get the Intel chip, yeah, so you're like okay and a twelve hundred dollars nine hundred dollars or I can get a twelve hundred to twelve hundred but I can get 32 gigs of ram versus eight gigs. of ram we've made those trade-offs and i think that's why purpose driven silicon came to the phones and then they were just like you know what what is good how do we win laptops batteries yeah and these stupid fans going off and then once so i think the the i phone gave them the dexterity in the muscle memory well you know to do it and then they just got emboldened like imagine if we had one chip for the iPads and for the desktops then we recapture all that margin and then we can make it specific to the use case well what's the use case they could just look at the data
people people people use their laptops to surf fucking web that's it it's 90% of what people are doing they're in a web browser all their software is in a web browser even the software they download that's not a web browser it's just a wrap the web browser in a lot of cases so which is why tweet tick runs out of ram yeah exactly and so i think purpose and then i think that's why you long put hit made his own chips for uh the testless like he's got his own circuit board that they made specifically for that use case which is real time processing of you know visual data across x number of cameras so that that seems to be the beginning and the end of it and yeah i mean intel is over i mean do not actually really mad right now is sautie and the dell because he inherited windtell right this this this union of intel and and windows and then apple just came along was like oh you guys are terrible at this and they just made a much better chip on its first it's the m1 that's so good yeah i can see the m3 is gonna be yeah i can see the m1 like the a 15 whatever yeah because they're up to i think they're up to 14 or something with it oh it's been that many gosh i'm gonna do it yeah it's been a lot i'm trying to look the the a4 was march 10th to september 2023 that's the a4 wow in the series so and the a14 bionic is september 2020 so i mean they're doing it every year they come up with a new a processor and that that's the soup to nuts you know experience that i think elan is doing with tesla's like he makes every part not being dependent on anybody in the supply chain is i think tim cook and elan came to that observation at the same time yeah
it's interesting actually tesla is working to secure different elements for its batteries from direct from mining companies now yeah going back to the going direct thing i mean they're literally saying look let's just we're buying a lot of this stuff we don't need to go through any matter i literally have talked to elan about this many times over the years and he's like materials come in this side of the building cars now that's a cars come out the metal and then in the middle there's a battery pack being made that goes into the car but basically you know he said some i remember when he was building the giga fact i usually don't talk about my conversation elan but this is public knowledge now the giga factory out in novada we he showed it to me when he was just building it and gave me a tour and he's like this is the company the company is the factory yeah it's not what comes out the factory itself is the product that was like oh my mind is blown out the famise on and warehouse tech exact analogy yeah amazon amazon when no one was looking was building robots for its factories and building these hyper efficient logistics set ups and everyone thought it was just like this bookseller it turns out that the warehouse is amazon and the so they put that company server right they put that robotic company that does a couple more than one yeah they bought the one that's like the flat one that zips around and yeah looks like a hockey puck with the little yucky puck zipping stuff around
it does seem like this the super cycle of tech combined with the pandemic is this like perfect um super storm if you will of adoption of this technology because i don't know what it's like in providence but i'm assuming when you go to a restaurant there's no more waiters you just take a picture of a QR code you order from your phone on toast or something and then they bring you the food with a runner
It depends on where I'm going. Um, I live in a kind of small business part of town, kind of one of those collegiate streets but let lots of little shops, so those are still pretty hands-on. But even at those now, the QR skin thing, pull up the website is happening. Uh, even in those places and, a lot of restaurants are still mostly, you know, pickup. Like there's this little cafe in my house called, it's fantastic. I eat there like more often than I should because it's around the corner, and uh, you know, they just have a whole table now set up permanently for pickup and like that's just now a defective thing. So it's all digital for me essentially.
Yeah, and I think that if you think about the economy post-pandemic, whenever post-pandemic exists which I thought we were in the post, I'm so depressed about unfurled rated, I have a lot of emotion about like how we screwed up the reopening because I thought this was the yellow time we start going to concerts again. I want to go to Broadway. I wanted to do everything this fall and summer, and I think the lord the selfish people who will get vaccines we have to figure out a way to get them over the uh, but before we go to Pinterest and we wrap up like let me just make a point about that.
I haven't seen my parents since December of 2019 and if delta blocks me if you know to fly them out here, I don't see them to the Christmas because some of you won't get vaccinated. I shall be mad. I missed them. I like them a lot; they raised me. I would like to get them a hug, but they're vaccinated, I assume. Oh yeah, yeah my whole family is full of rational scientists so no worries, it's fun. Yeah, I mean and then people are like, oh my god the people who are getting vaccinated, the people who are in the hospital in this town are vaccinated, it's like the town is 90% vaccinated and you're of course the people who do come summer going to have covid but they're not dying.
But anyway my point of this all was, yeah I think a lot of that's one of the things that's going to stay and the idea that being a waiter or a server, I think we're going to just get rid of millions of jobs in this country that were hostess, server matrady uh, and register whatever cashier I think those are just everybody is applying that technology and there were restaurants who did not ever think they would let people order their own food from their smartphone who are like this is so much better oh chasing this is so much uh, uh near-ish to me that's big enough that's it naked doesn't have to bleep it out.
Called Alphornos, and it's a relatively well-known Italian restaurant if you live in the northeast you've heard of. It's fancy and lovely, and uh, they came up with a really amazing takeout strategy during the pandemic. Like this is the restaurant where like it was like only a valley of parking and like fancy people go there for like yeah, you know like birthdays. You know it was it was. It's now they're like parking slot for it we'll bring out your Italian food like everyone adapted so quickly; the economy has been a real human story of uh, of flexibility in the last 18 months.
Alright, should we add on Pinterest or going back to work in offices and the device? Let's do, let's do going back to work in offices. Time I read your notes about this, and I want to hear your thoughts. Well, I think we talked about this on the island pod. You know we predicted a couple of episodes ago like of course if you're in tech and you're going to reopen your office or you know uh, you're going to force people to be vaccinated or they can't come to your office, especially if you're doing hybrid.
Why would you allow unvaccinated people in the building and so of course, I guess Netflix Google and a group of people are now going to force you to be vaccinated if you come to the office and I think that's the carrot. And I think that has to make its way to sporting arenas, restaurants in San Francisco, there's a movement to force uh if you want to go to a bar, you got. to show your vaccine card at lawla paulusa they said uh you have to show your vaccine card and if the FBI put out a notice if you uh make a fake card you're going to go to jail and you're going to get a huge fine so like there will be enforcement of people doing fake vaccine cards so i think that this is the only choice we have to keep the economy going is to have vaccine.
you know i hate to say it but you know like the carrot didn't work and now there's going to be a stick like you're just not going to be able to participate in certain things in france israel and now the united states period which is which is reasonable given the vaccine is safe and it's free and it helps protect other people and stopping so selfish now to be clear if you can't take it because you're immunosuppressed or so forth we're not talking about you we're not going to be people who can get it and won't those people are the problems not not three year old two can't get it yet i'm talking about the people who are thirty seven and you deluths who are refusing i hate you everyone's fine.
uh question though so i'm you're you're not at the office right now i can tell them actually i've been to your office i've not been to your house and that works more like a house uh i'm at home and i'm feeling great nick uh run in the pod with uh with charles here at the at the at the at the office and nick is at home yeah yeah but i mean like you know we i used to show up to do this with you and now we just do it like this and i feel fine and it's better to me to me promote work is uh as saved my life as an individual way before the pandemic so let me do stuff row you know and support my spouse.
So you know to me the whole whole of blue about companies wanting people to go back i just think they have big leases they don't want to fill i can't figure out why um these progressive companies in the work management sense uh are are turning into the the most boomerie sounding companies like come back three days a week no i won't i wish yes absolutely not i think it's a great rotation i mean if you were forced to come to an office you would look at other options the at instantly yeah instantly and so i think that and i was predicting this which is you know if you want to keep the most talented people and some number of them want to work from home it's so hard to find a game changing employee talented team member you're just gonna have no choice i mean if you're Netflix if you read hastings if you're a tim cook and you're top person in PR in marketing in engineering and design whatever it is yeah whatever if they say you know what i'm.
对我来说,公司希望员工回到办公室的整个想法只是因为他们有很大的租赁面积需要填充。我想不明白为什么这些在工作管理上非常进步的公司变得像最老派的公司一样,要求员工每周回办公室工作三天。不,我不会这样做,如果我被强制要求去办公室工作,我会立刻考虑其他选择。如果你想留住最有才华的员工中的一部分人想在家工作,你就必须做出选择。我预测过这一点,如果你是 Netflix 的 Reed Hastings,或者是苹果公司的 Tim Cook,在公关、市场营销、工程或设计领域拥有顶级人才团队中的首席人员,如果他们说:“我想在家工作”,你就必须接受这一点。找到一个具有颠覆性的才华员工,组成优秀的团队非常困难,你别无选择。
working from Tahoe or i'm going to work at a startup what are you going to do you're gonna let them work from Tahoe and probably subsidize they have a gigabit internet because that's the most efficient thing to do but going all the way back to the first part of our conversation i would go to the office and i would do social things i would i would stand in the kitchen and i would talk to people i'd make a couple of connections and to be clear those would occasionally be useful and work sense but when i was doing 50 50 sf and and and Providence i would like go to sf and do companies after two weeks and then i would go home and work for two weeks right and like my output differential as a writer was so extremely different because yes here the only distraction is my puppy when she needs to pee two minutes and then i'm back which is actually kind of a nice break take to if you're a writer to get that little fresh air break is actually a creative to your performance yeah and she's been great for that but i mean like if you told me tomorrow that i have to start driving to the train station taking the commuter rail to Boston by any small muffin somewhere along the way and then walk across Boston to the office and then shake hands with it key people and then like sit down at a desk that that's that's a two hours of my day you better be paying me like a hundred percent more if you're going to take a short four hours my day because what yeah i think you can't put the genie back in the bottle no i think that what could be very interesting is and i've been thinking about this like if i move to Austin if i move to Austin i could find an area where people could afford to live and walk to work in one of these small towns there and i was like you know what that could be quite charming if i had my own event space slash you know there was affordable housing i think actually people would love to go to work three days a week or for four hours for a day and get out of their house like if i said to you hey we're gonna on Wednesdays we're gonna tape the show and have lunch and we're gonna do you know a meeting about the editorial for the week and we were working at the same company but don't get out of the house one day a week to get to see everybody so that seemed like that hybrid model will become the default yeah back in the my first assistant at tech wrench we had mandatory fun time which was i think like four p.m. on Thursdays and everyone was supposed to come into the office at four p.m.
on Thursdays and have a beer and then it was a way to like engender camaraderie and make sure i knew where their badges were and and you know what it worked reasonably well i have a bunch of people working for me i've never met and that is the thing i miss most about this and i and i hope we get back to and i do think it's a boomer thing like you you invest in a an apple star ship four billion dollar campus or your google i do think that those folks think great product is made in a space and that that space is going to be a competitive that i believe they believe that i believe they're probably wrong yeah yeah that it's necessary for all employees it's probably i'm wondering do you think the iPhone and the design of it could have been made remote today with today's tools i think small physical product teams are always going to have a difference that of requirements and the information workers that were discussing yeah you know what i mean like developer different than writer and writers and developers different than johnny i've been steve yeah like if you're if you're literally inventing a new like like category of device you're gonna want to sit in a room with mock-ups and touch them yeah good johnny i even go to the office in the meantime i won't be uh last question with a lot of question for you yeah uh middle management and a lot of people that that thrive in the office environment um feel increasingly spur-flawless to me and in this in this moment of hundred percent you're going to work so does this thin
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No more text. Out the leadership ranks of companies okay two great things that people will not talk about publicly but is that it is being talked about privately on boards on walking talks between investors and management which is dead weight middle management that you know set up the meeting set the agenda for the meeting and basically loaded over people and made sure they were at their desk on time all that bullshit is gone because we're just looking at output.
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And it's hard with remote workers to judge output but if you're forced to figure that out which everybody has just like the restaurants were forced to figure it out that what you eventually realize is okay those middle managers were doing nothing they were just really performative and maybe they wrote great tps reports but you don't need a tps report if your team is keeping track of themselves unnoted so self reporting is something i worked on with my teams.
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And the investments is just have people write in slack what they're doing at the start of the day and at the end of the day reply to their own start of day with their EOD and i wrote this whole article which is my whole teams at inside and at launch right s o d closing this dl doing this you know clean up work reviewing these legal documents at the end of the day they reply back to and say what they did total transparency you manage yourself and then when you leave the company we can look at your end of weeks and what you did and we say okay reviewing legal documents will outsource that that seemed to be 30% of what this person was doing.
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And the other two thirds okay you're gonna do one third and you're gonna do the other third or we're gonna deprecate what we're doing we don't need to refill that position so it actually makes you understand exactly what everybody in the company was doing yeah that'll scale pretty well and there'll be some other model for something else but i mean the idea of having like 13 layers of management between x and y y york shard i mean and god i mean those people were annoying.
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They was through the people who would come by your desk and talk to you take you out of your rhythm no no yeah let's go and go for a walk talk and you're like hey no i literally you're stealing my words yeah you got you got a minute no i don't because it's one of 15 and two it means i'll have to leave late yeah i don't you have anything to do you know like and then you think about the cost of the space then you think about the cost of reception oh yeah all this stuff.
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I mean i think companies are gonna save 30 to 40 percent on top of a 30 maybe 20 or 30 percent savings and salaries because when you are hiring i mean we know at tech branch writers in san francisco and engage at writers in new york we're getting paid it was double or triple what people working from home we're getting paid.
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Vosh's average salary is 45 to 50 k i think and there i know i think actually i was looking at vox because i was comparing it to insides where we're paying $75,000 for our analysts but it's you can work from anywhere so i'm hiring people in canada in europe from anywhere and i thought 75k is pretty good for an analyst before five years experience to write and host events uh and then if you look at vox they're starting salaries 52k so i think that's the minimum that's the minimum.
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Is 52 and i think the average is 6570 and i was like okay well we're beating them uh but tech branch writers were making a hundred k or whatever and guys your writers in york are making a hundred k and it was you know i think that those salaries don't get reversed but i think over time you'll see salaries average out from cities and if if you were forced to you know take a pay cut or whatever it'd be like um take a pay cut stay in providence or move to a city like uh oh i mean gun to my head i'll take i'll take like i'm not gonna say it all out but a relatively material pay cut to stay here because i i like it here um but like yeah i think you're right about the.
average in the salaries i think we're both right about middle management and to me just uh i actually have to go right a newsletter for tc uh i think it's a better future i think so like i this is it's gonna be painful do you know there's gonna be repercussions and things we don't expect to happen but i think generally speaking we're moving towards a more healthy conversation about work and and work life balance uh and you know thank god more choice yeah i think it's really about choice there'll be a group of people who wants to go to that office and be part of that and there'll be a group of people who prefer to stay home and a group of people in the middle and i think it's flipped power now it's like you don't get to lord over employees this is how it's gonna be it's gonna be a negotiation um and you'll just you can't dictate anymore and you have to get comfortable with that employees are empowered and the best ones always have been they just didn't know it yeah those top employees didn't realize that if they said i'm working from tall at the lake and i want the same salary that soccer bird would have caved you know and the world used to be run by vcs and middle management now it's run by founders and ic so ha ha ha ha the world has come towards me well it is it is the
the virtuoso's the people with the actual skill who actually move the needle forward and you've done it a company they are now absolutely recognized and all the performative nonsense is sucked out of the system so i think you're right and and that's that is ultimately healthier and it gives everybody a path just work on your skill provide some specific tangible benefit to the company or organization you're working for and then you get all that time back you get ten more hours back a week and you don't have to take a shower if you want to see your kids or your dogs during the day mausletov go for it you start to take a shower don't listen Jason shower twice a day be sure please show please show yeah thank gosh all right listen great job Alex love having you on the show and everybody follow Alex a l e x on the twitter and then for the podcast you're doing are you doing the podcast regularly yeah yeah we do a couple of every week yeah yeah yeah so which what is the name of the podcast that people should subscribe because there's like ten of them over at tech branch yeah it's called equity we've been doing it since uh two thousand seventeen it's uh it's a it's a show if you like startups in vc and bantering about revenue multiples it's the show for you um like because it's it's it i've been honest forever and it's uh just it's how i kind of like digest what's happened during the week and we should have a good time it's about 30 minutes long so it's not too long and perfect good times everybody go to uh your podcast player and search for equity or tech crunch and you'll find it and subscribe we'll see you all next time bye bye