#69 - Paid News, Burning Money & Solving Climate Change

This episode is brought to you by Superside, so Superside.com. If you need something designed quickly, Go to superside dot com, give'em a try. Mm. Humble and smart man can admit when he's changed his wrong. So I am humble and smart.

Ha ha ha. What up, Sam, how you doing? Hi.

You got a sweatshirt on that says it's only money. What are you trying to say? I'm trying to say that. Um, when I look at my Portfolio and look at my losses.

It's only money. Yeah. Uh, you know, I met this guy once and he was like he I don't know, doesn't matter. Uh met a guy And we were talking and I'm easily excitable.

So if you start talking to me and he starts talking a little bit of sense, I get really excited and I will triple down and make some kind of commitment that I don't want to make. But I did that with this guy where he was we were both talking about money and we were like, You know what? Fuck money, right? Like we need it fuck money. Um, and we agreed to do A money burn in San Francisco. We were like, Okay. $1,000, you bring$1,000, and we're just gonna burn it.

And so stupid. And i of course, exactly. Does money burn? Yeah, it's paper, right? It's not paper. It's cotton. What?

Yeah. So there's a it's like a riddle. What weighs more Uh all the money printed in a year. Or all the trains that have ever passed through Uh Grand Central Station. And the answer is

The weigh the same, which is they're both weightless because trains don't pass through Grand Central Station and Money isn't made from paper. Ah. Okay, good. I love riddles. Um Thank you for that.

So in fact it it does grow on trees. But I'm pretty sure money burns. I've I think I've seen this in movies, unless they're using fake Fake paper there. Um

But anyways, we didn't end up doing it'cause I pushed out'cause I was like, Do I really want to burn a thousand dollars? I don't think I do. And also I was like, this is gonna get so much blowback and no one's gonna care about the intentions behind it. It's just gonna come across as a douchey thing to do. So I didn't do it. So I'm sorry to my friend. I backed out of it. But I do like the idea of sort of letting go of the attachment to money, but Um anyhow, it's only money.

It's only money. And I paid fifty dollars for this hoodie. Eighty dollars or something. I bought it because uh Dave Portnoy. Have you seen what he's done? Uh what do you mean which part of it? We uh Barsto.

Founder of Barstool is Trading he put three or four million dollars into a an account and has been day trading and filming the whole thing. I think he's down six hundred K right now. Yeah. Um and it's awesome. It's so good. It's really exciting uh to watch. And he wore one of these, so I bought it. Nice. Uh his pl his plan is going according to plan, I think.

I love it. Uh it it it is he's losing a lot of money. Um you wanna get into this? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, I think I have two or three interesting things. Um, have you read what I wrote? I've I'm looking at it right now. So are we talking

Okay, we talk about three things on this podcast, right? Ideas. So like kind of You know, interesting ideas based off of trans observations, et cetera. We talk about people. That are doing interesting things or living interesting lives. And then the last one is that we

Talk about you know just cool stuff we saw or stuff we're trying ourselves. And so which one, uh this first one, which one is this? One I have I have number one and I have number two. So The the there's two of them. The first is

Let's do The Japanese one. Okay. So one of my favorite things to do And it's kind of a nerdy thing, is I love looking at and I've told you this, I love looking at what other countries do and figuring out why it's interesting and why we don't have it in America or the other way around. Um and

I know close to nothing about Um, I don't entirely understand if they have anything in common. Like I don't know if like the similarities between Japan and China is the same as America to China. Like I so I don't know. But what I've noticed that both the Chinese and the Japanese are wonderful at monetizing news apps. And One of there's a few reasons. The first reason is in Japan, I don't know if this is true in China, but in Japan it's still quite common to buy newspapers and to subscribe to news. That's still common. Um in China Mm.

I don't know why it's so much popular, but for example in China The uh people who have podcasts like this, they monetize significantly better with subscriptions. So Like there's like for example, cereal was one of the most popular podcasts whenever it came out. It had

Like fifty six million listens or something crazy like that. And it only made like a million dollars in ad revenue. It was shit. Whereas Um More to uh creators in China will make five, ten million dollars a year and with a significantly smaller audience. So anyway, I'm I got really interested in

These businesses. And The f The one that I think is most interesting is called Usebase. Have I ever told you about Use Base? Nope. Okay, so The only way you will likely know about them is because they bought quartz in

two thousand and eighteen for about a hundred million dollars. So the interesting thing about user base is they're public in China. So I could I went and found a lot of the reports, which I love doing and I w looked at their Decks and I also learned all about'em. So long story short. Not Japan. Sorry, Japan. User base is Japanese. Um, long story short, uh user base is before the Corona thing happened, uh, they were publicly traded at eight hundred and twenty six million dollars.

Uh market cap. Um, and they only raise five million dollars to start, and they're about ten years old. So they raised a a significantly A very small amount of money for how big they got. And the way that they mate they make money is they own a handful of products But three of them make the most money. Um

The first is quartz. That actually doesn't make s significant amount of money, and that was a stupid company to buy. I don't think they ever should have done it. The second thing is Speeda, which from my understanding it's all in Japanese when I go to the website, but from my understanding it's kinda like Crunch base. Um and then the next one is news pics. Now here's where I'm being long winded, but Have you heard of news picks? Tell me why I care about this. Tell me about these apps. I will.

Have you heard of news pics? I have not heard of it. Okay, they only have a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers, but they do something like fifty million dollars in revenue. And here's where the opportunities are. Is you know pocket you know flipboard?

Yep. They have something like fifty million dollars or fifty million users. They don't make shit. They lose money, they don't make shit. And so what I want to ask to you is why how do you think you would monetize flipboard and pocket and these things better? Because We like now's the golden opportunity for new stuff. And I guess I'm just excited because I'm a news junkie. But these companies are significantly better. They make something like a hundred dollars

per user in revenue versus pocket, which is probably like fifty cents. Right. You know the I think One way to think about this is who who is successfully replicating that model here, right? So you have the athletic

Which has built a pretty large um revenue business off of subscriptions. And then I think one of the legacy I don't know New York Times or wherever is doing really well, right? Isn't isn't that the case in New York Times or Wall Street Journal, one of them is like doing well. These aren't the same. These aren't the same because user base isn't a publisher, it's an aggregator. Sure. Which is a wonderful. More like Flipboard. Yeah, which is wonderful'cause you don't need a significant amount of people and the market size is like everyone in the country.

Yeah. So I'm not sure why people would uh why people would pay for that. Um I don't know what the cultural difference is. I've heard the same things about podcasting as you have, which is that the podcasting industry in China is like worth multiple billions. Uh whereas You know, in the US it's uh you know, hundreds of millions type of thing. And um

So I'm not sure what the cultural differences are. In fact some of these things are pretty nuanced. So for example Live streaming the same thing happened where In China, live streaming is like so crazy huge. So I'm at Twitch now. Which is a big network, but we're just in gaming.

And you know, average American doesn't use Twitch. But In China, the live streaming apps are on par in popularity with like a Twitter, an Instagram, a Facebook. It's like part of the mainstream culture. And people wondered why. My theory on why, for live streaming at least, was that

In China Um a lot of um I don't know, sexuality or something like that, where porn porn sites are often blocked or firewalled out. And um there's just a crazy ratio of men to women.

Where there's way more men than there are women because of the sort of one child policy, I believe, um that was in in effect for many years. And so people valued boys and so they Uh have more boys. And so I think what what the reason live streaming is super popular in China and not in the same way in the US is because of those cultural factors. So people will watch live streams because It's sort of like this weird flirting softcore porn thing where you're watching a cute girl

from a distance and you're able to chat with her and off you know, send her tips and give di uh virtual gifts. And so a lot of people in the US just look to China and they're like, How do we just Oh, it's happening in China. It's gonna happen here. But they missed that. the underlying reason it worked in China and why there was demand for it in China, where there's less demand for it here.

So that's what happened in live streaming. I wonder if the same thing's happening in podcasting where Why is it so much more popular there than it is here? Um and then the same thing maybe in in the news apps. What is it culturally? And I don't know. What is it culturally that makes people Either value this more

Or pay for this more. Um like for example, in India we've talked about Indian education apps. and how uh valuable they are. So an app like Biju or there's a bunch of different Indian apps that uh are are very big subscription businesses. For education. you know, multi billion dollar companies and you don't really have the equivalent here in the US.

I know you don't and and I think there they're all the creators out there, I think they can do this. And can I explain to you how I would do this? Okay. And and this is interesting because it's it this involves news, but involves all types of paid information. I think paid information is can be should be significantly larger than it than it is, and I think it's gonna get more popular, actually. I think the Uh anyone who's doing paid Stuff.

that is normally free. Um it's gonna be much larger. And so here's why I think here here's how I would do it if I was starting from scratch, which I kinda am, I am in this business. Is the first thing is You'd be surprised that shit that's free or is mostly free, if you package it slightly differently. Um People

will pay for it and they will like it more. And so what I've seen with our NPS for trends versus the hustle, which is free, the trends MPS is significantly higher. It's like fucking ninety. Which is crazy high. And it I I believe that the content is great, but also people enjoy it more because they pay for it. So I think people Builders out there need to think to themselves.

Man, there's this weird mind fuck that I can just literally charge for something that normally is free and people will like it more. The second thing Is I think people need to charge up front, no freemium. I think if you charge up front and don't do any freemium, you're gonna get significantly better results. The third thing is I uh things that uh a lot of times companies like doing this low density with a lot of white space. on their um Pages?

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Get rid of that beauty beautiful stuff. That's not right. Have you been to jerk Drudge Report dot com? No. You don't know what Drudges?

I've heard of it, but I've never gotten it. Okay, so it's political? Yeah. Uh is his name Matt Drudge. J I I could be saying it wrong. Drudge is a hard way to say. Um It's just like one guy and he's this like pretty right winged guy.

And I went to the website just now and I was like oh I must have typed it in wrong because the website looks like, you know it's Craigslist garbage. Dude, that website gets a billion Uh views a month. That's crazy. Is this con conspiracies? Is that what this is? Uh I would say it It depends who you ask.

I don't think it's conspiracy, but it is For it's for sure. biased and right winged. Just like Like

Uh The founder of Huff Poe. This literally gets a billion are you joking? Or this literally swear to God. Like literally one billion. It could have declined recently. Dude Fucking do you know Drudge was the one who broke the story about the Clinton? Um

Uh when he slept with Monica Lewinsky, like he called it. Oh well. So anyway, he it's really just an aggregator of Other links and every once in a while he'll do something original. And does he retitle the the headlines or a page that you click off. And every once in a while he does stuff Yes, that page was designed in nineteen ninety six and it's never changed.

It does. If you haven't gone to this, go to it right now. DrudgeReport.com This is so weird. This doesn't even like literally there's like Or or if you go to Drudge.com, I think. There's like twenty links that are b it's a black and white page, twenty black links, and then there's just a giant picture of an astronaut, uh because it's like related to one story with a huge headline, and then there's again One thousand links below that. According yeah, it I Okay, so according to similar web

It gets Close to a hundred million unique visitors. So ten page views a month. Probably a billion. It's very influential this site. Uh

And it's interesting. And I think that if you just like paywalled this, he would crush it. So who's this guy M Matt Drudge? What's his story? He's a former journalist. He um He's just a guy, I don't know. He's just a he's just a guy who created a cult following and people love it.

And when Ken Lear started Huff Poe, he said, I'm gonna make the left wing version of of Drudge Report. And so if you go to the this website, it does a really good job of big bold headlines. That's like a uh c yellow journalism that was invented by Purst in the um What does that mean? Yellow journalism. Uh basically this has been around forever. People think clickbait is new. It ain't. Um

Hurst was a pioneer of this, so uh he would have these huge headlines Um And it would it would always it was always it was mostly about like blood and scandal and uh you know, if it bleeds it leads type of thing. And then Ruper Murdoch also did it with his newspapers and that's how they got popular. So if you go to Huff Poe dot com It's it's very similar to this. It's a huge headline right in your face. And that kinda what that does is in your brain is it triggers a little bit of addictiveness. Business insider's just like this too. If you go to business insider

Big ass headlines. So they put their stats on the site. It says visits to Drudge today. thirty four million in the past twenty four hours. one point one billion in the past month. Ten billion in the past year. Dude, I'm telling you, it's fucking crazy. This is like this is happening. This website is like the Craigslist of of of news. Like it's a tiny ass staff. It it literally could be five people.

And it could make fifty dollars a year. And he monetizes anything? He has any ads, or what does he do? Um so he monetizes it with a couple ads. And I knew guys who were the ad sellers, like he uses a third party so it probably has Google s Google Ad Sense and things like that in there, but he also uses um like some uh like a third party direct seller, like a company that sells ads on it. And they said that it was like the best

the best uh Like the biggest site ever. Yeah. Dude, I'm s I'm on their site right now, I'm asking to advertise because I want to get their info. Great hack for anybody who wants to know how many How much traffic does something have? How many users does it have? How many listeners does this podcast have? Go to advertising.

You inquire? They'll tell you the info and you'll get a sense of it. So I'm gonna go. Right. Um, so anyway, is this not like fucking fascinating? Uh uh maybe I'm just a d idiot and everybody out there's like, dude, of course I know Drudge. I'm one of the ten billion visitors. But I've been young people don't know this. I've literally I've heard the name I never even looked at it. Alan and Ubrady have you heard of this?

Yeah, give us a F in the chat. If you know it. If you don't know it, give us something else. Oh, okay, he knows. He doesn't know now'cause we're talking about it. All right one said yes, one said no. Gotcha. He says y'all sheltered.

Uh nice. Okay, good. Good comedy from the Super Interesting shit, man. And um So why doesn't the hustle have more visitors, dude? Look at this guy. This guy's, you know, killing it. Well, a few reasons. One, it's it was definitely easier to to build a cult following and Nineteen ninety eight when he launched or Sorry, he launched in uh Uh, I don't know when he launched. It could've been ninety eight. I mean it's like why why doesn't

Lego be Craigslist. It's like, well, because Craigslist has been around since ninety six and they just gained market share real fast. Dude, there's a part of me that wants to just like create some ultra ego that just does some Sean Hannity Milo Yanopoulis style character that just says outlandish shit. I just want to see, could I do it? Could I Could I s you know Um, market my way to the top through. The answer is yes. I one of our friends did this and he got a lot of traffic and then he

Yeah. Canceled it. And uh he like ended the site because he's like, I just can't do this. This is stuck in my soul. But it worked really well. Typic and by the way, typically conservative websites get way more page views and traffic than non conservative. Yeah, this is now a conservative podcast, just so you know. We don't talk about politics, but if that helps the downloads go up, we're conservative and we appreciate your support.

So my point in all this was I think news apps actually if you charge money and you offer a similar offering is Free one free ones. You can do uh you can actually make way more money than Uh not. And to your thing earlier, um, so this also happens in China, like you said. So I think I don't know how you say the name exactly, but it's like Tu Tiao or something like that. It's the So

Bite Dance, which owns TikTok. Yep, that's another w example of that's just like user base in Japan. Yeah, they own T it's T O U T I A O. I don't know how you say it. But Um and it's the same thing. It's just giant news app with like twenty million DAU or whatever. I don't know. It's like some like uh like it's it's just like very big for a news app, right? Like there's not

The US doesn't have n I don't feel like news apps that are doing those types of numbers. Um And I actually I'm gonna look up there. I think it and I think it went public for like twenty billion dollars. Um So okay, I was way under

DAU seven hundred million. MAU one point five billion. I knew I was under because I said twenty million DAU and that's not that much. Seven hundred million DAU, which is just insane. Um So yeah, and they for ticks and giggles. What yep.

And I think that that they spun that news out. Um They spun that news app off. So opportunity here. Is I think that news apps in America are way, way, way under monetized.

And Right now we are the demand in news is crazy high with Trump being elected, every all everyone experienced what was called the Trump bump, which uh which everyone doesn't Trump have his own news network or what is this thing that he promotes? This uh oh oh have you seen this thing this news network he promotes instead of Fox now? No, what is it? He has this um So so somebody back in the day had said like one of the sort of

One theory was that the reason he wanted to run was because Yeah, that was a rumor. But he promotes this thing instead of Um Fox News I have to find it. It's like O something. It starts with a O It's a four letter domain for the news, and he like promotes this as like, Yeah, this is the good news or whatever. I never heard of this network before. It's probably one of those right wing

uh news networks that's like massive and I've never heard of it and no nobody on my Twitter timeline talks about it. So I just never see it. A lot of people have tried this. Um it really hasn't worked that well. Um Ash and Kutchard did it with um It's called A plus, I believe it's called.

And A is it A plus it's it's something involving his initials. A plus K, is that what it is? And they and they got to like forty or fifty million monthly uniques, but then like Facebook and Twitter said, All right, we're gonna um if you post links, we're actually not gonna show you to a lot of users and so it basically crashed. Lil Wayne tried to do the same thing and then that this is actually how Bjpen.com, which is something you and I probably both read started. Yeah, okay. Alan just posted in the chat, so uh it's called

One America News network O O N And uh I've seen Trump posting about this. I had never heard of this before. Had you ever heard of this thing? No. But it looks like uh owned by a larger company.

A hundred to two hundred fifty employees. Yeah, I don't know who owns this thing, but Anyways, there's something there to dig into, but okay, news apps, we like it. Um I I'm personally more interested in this like drudge. thing than the Japanese aggregators.

Uh because the Dr thing blew my mind. But But it's the same it's it it's the same thing. This is my point. It's quite similar. Right. Um okay, cool. What else you got? You wanna talk about Neil Patel dot com?

Okay, let's do it. So Neil Patel's this marketer guy, right? Yeah. He's been around forever. He's only thirty five. He's kinda crushing it since two thousand two, or uh he was twenty two. He started Quick Sprout. It's a it was a really cool blog

And one of the ways that's quick sprout made money is they would Google or they would write about SEO best practices and things like that. And then um Send leads to consultant consultancies who would then help you with your SEO. So he eventually sold Quick Sprout and then he started Neilpatell dot com and Neil Patel Digital dot com and he kept blogging about the same shit and then he goes, You know what, fuck it. I'm gonna Well first of all, he tried to launch his own software

Um and then he said, Fuck it, I'm just gonna do my own consultancy I think it's pretty fucking huge. And all it is is an SEO consultancy. And I was doing research on it and the way that he made this and and this is why it's interesting to people is Everyone has ideas for agencies and they're actually relatively simple businesses to start. You're just offering a service, but they're real shit to run. Um and they're hard to make a profit if you do it incorrectly. And what he did that was interesting is A, he p opened up offices in Utah and San Diego, which are relatively cheapest cheap places to live.

And second, he hired a CEO right off the bat, and all he does is he goo uh blogs in order to get get leads. And he it took like a million bucks to start the thing. So he definitely had money up front. But it's really interesting. And the way that he's doing it and his insight was he read Slack's S one. So that's the document that they That they um Published when they go public.

And his whole shtick was he goes man Slack's S one, the majority of revenue uh it came from bigger companies. So the majority of revenue came from like six hundred companies that were huge. And also the margins on maintenance and service revenue were significantly larger Than the actual software. So you are you familiar

Familiar with those? You mean the enterprise contracts where they say, Okay, yeah, you know, w there's a services, a professional services component to it. Yes. And so a lot of people, including myself, because I not in enterprise software, don't know this. But Like at at at Lassian, which is a large company, half the revenue is from maintenance and service.

Yeah, there's Crazy. It's crazy. AWS does this too. You you spend whatever thirty grand a month and they're like oh you need priority support. You need enterprise support just in case. You know, you have a you have a good business, so you you don't want to ruin this. And so you're paying five K a month, six K a month, and just uh Just to have the ability to ask questions if you need to ask questions. It's mind boggling. And so what Neil uh appears he has done And see because Yeah, like we're not actually gonna sell the software because maybe it one day we'll build something. We're actually only gonna like but we're gonna like kinda run it a little bit like a software company, but we're gonna make all of our money from that those service that service fee. And so they do a little bit of work, but in in reality they actually have software on the back end.

But they're doing SEO work. So he's not selling leads, he's actually doing the SEO work. Yes. But the inter but why this is interesting to me is Um, if you look at like I I just maybe this is not interesting to people who know what they're talking about, but I didn't and I was like wait Most of the margin is in the maintenance revenue. And so that's like where they're making all of their cash.

Uh this could uh it's a consultancy. And that's super interesting and it got me wondering like Man, if you just sell like relatively cheap software and s a lot of the software's not hard to get And you just add on a layer of service and maintenance, it's like holy fuck, that's the way you do it. Alright, this episode is brought to you by Super Side. So here's the deal.

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Yeah, that's one way it I I first heard this because there's this guy on Twitter, I think I've shout him out before Um, I grabbed dinner with this guy once, but His name's uh Chain. Chain P is his uh his Twitter. So C H E T A N I think something like that. And he's a he's an investor at Benchmark, which is probably, you know, one of the top five venture funds in in the country.

And um He does enterprise he's specializes in enterprise. He just made the Midas list, which is like the you know, V C um like whatever, thirty for thirty or thirty under thirty list, basically. And um So anyways, he tweets out these little summaries about enterprise companies.

Where it's like Seven bullet points and you understand how this company makes their money and how fast they're growing and like what he highlights. Uh no no, I'm saying the Midas list is like a bullshit like the forms twenty to thirty. Oh, um But anyways, he he often posts these like hey, counterintuitive, people think it's all about software. Look how much mark look how much of their contribution comes from services. hey, you know, everybody thinks you should be adopted bottoms up. Look at this company. They do the complete opposite. So he's very good at pointing out they like

Many ways to win. And uh that goes against sort of the conventional Silicon Valley wisdom, which is like Silicon Valley wisdom is like Oh, technology gets adopted bottoms up now, you don't have to sell. Um you know, you you sell in later. No, that's bullshit look at Oracle.

It should be a software play. You don't wanna have, you know, this heavy OpEx component and it's like you know, and so he just walks through a bunch of different examples. Of companies that are doing it very differently, like Pivotal and other companies like that. By the way, I bet most are doing it that way. Even if you look at Slack, they've got a fucking sales team. Yeah, w of course they have a sales team, but like, you know, they're they're the example where it's like they grew like crazy from this bottoms up thing and then they hired a sales team. But like Many companies do the exact opposite. And succeed. I don't think that that's true. I bet if you learn about Slack, I bet you most of the revenue came from sales team people.

Uh I don't think so early on. I I mean they didn't have any salespeople early on, so it couldn't couldn't have been that way, right? But I think the the revenue then pales in comparison to where they are now, so yeah, whatever. Who cares? Um okay, so this Neil Patel guy, you think he's interesting'cause what'cause okay, so you th you thought the interesting part was that

Surprise, surprise. These software companies actually have a significant amount of m of money that's coming from this um client services. Uh that's interesting. Th uh is there anything else about this Neil Patel guy that you think is interesting or that could be sort of replicated in some way? No.

Okay. Cool. Well You know, shout out to the Indian. There is one thing which is

Um, his business the way that he came to discover this business is really interesting. Whenever people ask me what company they should start, if they don't know what I'm not sure what to start. Start a blog And the reason why is his insight He's probably I bet you he's made a hundred million dollars, this Neil Patel guy in profit over the last ten years. I bet I bet he's rolling in it. I'll take the under, but okay. Um Dude, I I'm almost positive like

Clear the air. Neil, you hear this, clear the air. So Neil's uh I think he's cousins with this guy Heat and Shaw I think that's why they started Kiss Metrics together. Yeah, they're cousins. Um I bet you that he's probably done

Anyway, i I bet it's quite large. And anyway, the way that he did this was he qu created quick sprout and then he looked at what sold well. And um just launched it. And there's two companies that have done this really well. The first is WP I mean there's probably a ton. The first one that I can name is WP Beginner. It's WP Beginner.com. It just blogs about interesting WordPress stuff. Uh his name's Syad. I bet you Syad, um I bet and so what he did was he looked at which

WordPress plugins did best. And then he just launched his own and then put his links in there. And I bet I bet you he's got a little empire that does forty million in recurring revenue. Um I've talked to it like people who claim they know and it's around it's like in that ballpark. And then the second one who's who did the same strategy, which I am emulating is South Bank. Do you know South Bank started this way? Yep. Uh the news information, then conferences, then Yeah. So they just started a magazine and they looked at which ads did best and then they started or invested in those companies.

I like it. Um okay cool. Interesting to me. I got a couple topics for you. Um tell me if these are interesting. So Um There's this thing called uh your mouse is covering on this, I'm gonna talk about it. It's called it.

Book a Y C team. Uh, so what this is, is there's two guys who were in the YC batch and they weren't able to raise money. Their startup didn't work out. And so they created this website called Book a YC team. It's like, hey, you wanna hire like A product and engineer from Y C like two founders were badass. We got into Y C That's like Harvard.

Um you can just hire us and we'll just be like a little two man demolition crew for you for some price for some period of time. And so it's like the It's the extreme high end. of like the Gickster upwork. Fiverr like right, like that's the low end of like hire a remote d like just hire a developer to build your thing.

And this is the extreme like top end. It's like uh And so I actually think there's a better product idea than their their product was in in YC. If they can get more failed Y C startups. to do this as an interim thing of like, hey, yeah, I do this while I'm in between figuring out what my next startup is. I think that's a very smart idea. So Uh I thought that was cool. Any thoughts on that? Uh amazing. I wanna

I wanna sign up for this. My my concern is that if they're from White I'm just gonna be a hater. If they're from Y C it means that they're soft. And care about the wrong stuff and don't move fast and they're just Weak. Um

But great idea. I like it. Okay, I don't agree with that at all, but all right. Um neither of us would really know. That's just like funny. Um okay. Dude, I just my point is just like silicon a lot of Silicon Valley people who make shit, they just launch slow, they do all this user testing versus just like fucking do it. So my favorite thing is actually um Is it Y C is funny that way? The people who go into Y C they're often extremely scrappy, you know, whatever, hardworking. They're just one or two people who are building a whole thing on their own and ambitious. Then they get into Y C And then they drink the Y C Kool Aid and it's like, Oh, now by the way

Um oh you were helping me before? Fuck you, I'm NYC, I don't need you anymore. Uh oh, you wanna ra you you wanna invest in my company? It's a fifteen million dollar valuation. Right. It's like what do you have? It's like well, we haven't launched yet. Or like we have like two customers. And um You know, it's a like m the minimum buy in is ten million dollar valuation.

And easily we can get to fifteen or twenty. It's crazy. And so then they get really r like uh you know, high and mighty. And then my favorite thing to do, and and also all the investors are talking to them around that same time. And it's definitely decreased'cause of this problem, but like still there's a lot of demand. The b absolute best strategy I have is

I shouldn't even say this, I shouldn't even give this away because it's such a good it's such a good system. Give it three months after Y C. So I don't care about demo day. I wait three months after Y C and then I go talk to all those founders. At this point Nobody else is talking to them. They've either already raised their round or they failed to raise their round and they're like humble, but they're they they're and now reality has hit. where they're like trying to actually grow their business and the Y C hype is off and like

the YC short term gains that they were getting, where they were like just trying to make a nice chart for demo day, it's over. And so When you meet them in the reality zone that they hit three or four months later It's such a different conversation and so you can invest on way better terms. You have way more real data to use'cause you're not just in the

Y C hype engine where you have one minute to hear about the business. This is my this is my point. And so this whole like Y C book a team thing, they could it could be cool because those people are generally very smart and a lot of their design's great But like if they're like soft and Madonna's then or Well, I think what will happen is these are the Y C teams that have gone through it and failed. And um you know, by then they are are in a very different like I don't think they're soft. I think they're uh You know.

Hardened. By the opportunce and uh I would bet that they are some of the best talent you can pick up at that point in time. So if you I like this. I think this is cool. If I were these guys, I would not raise any money and uh this would I would just make Just fuck loads of cash off this. Yeah, exactly. I I agree. Um, you're just farming the Y C uh talent pipeline.

Okay, so start an agency just for Y C companies to be like Guys we'll build their ship for you. Right, exactly. Love this. Um okay, so another cool thing, uh okay, so this one's super quick. I just I don't even know why I wrote this down. So there's this company called remote, remote.com. Yeah, they just uh raised a lot of money. Yeah, they just raised eleven million bucks, I think. And um They uh they're doing something really smart, which is if you've ever tried to expand internationally, one of the biggest pain points is

starting your own entity in the region. So like we have this problem at Twitch all the time. It's like hey We're interested in this country. It takes like a year to spin up a legal entity in the country. Now you have to maintain that. There's a whole bunch of cost, a whole bunch of red tape. And you need it to be able to do Like some countries you need it to operate.

Some countries you need it to be able to do ad sales, for example, in that region. So there's all these reasons why you need a local entity, but having a local entity is really hard. And so uh to employ people and whatnot. So what remote's doing is they're doing the hard work of opening up legal entities everywhere. And then they are

Figuring out ways for you to use a entity to hire your remote staff uh as employees on the ground in that country. Okay, let's rip let's rip on that'cause I have a few cool insights. The first, well this is everyone probably has this. You know, it's still hard to hire state over like over state line like state to state it's hard. And I've got I've had to pay hundreds of dollars in penalties because I didn't I wasn't I have people now who handle this, but when I first started I handled it. You have to like keep track of like all your licenses for Texas and like I had one remote employee in Washington, I had like register there and shit and I just didn't do it and I didn't do it the right way. I had pay hundreds of dollars in fees for penalties. It's quite hard to do that state to state.

Um Have you done that? Have you hired? I've hired across states and I'm like most people where you don't even realize there's other shit you need to think about and I got like a letter from later. Yeah. I just got like so and then I'm like, where do I organize all this? So yeah, that's interesting. Another thing that's kinda cool is I wonder if so there's a a whole bunch of companies

Or industries where you have to have a license to uh Practice. But if you only have one person who works at your company who's licensed, then you're okay. So for example, if you sell health insurance, if you sell like so if you sell any type of benefits, you have to be I believe you have to be a broker. If you want to sell certain types of real estate, you have to have a broker's license. And oftentimes getting those licenses in every state can be challenging. So for example, him uh Did I actually tell you about this? Hems when they want to sell their Viagra state to state, they have to have a registered

Yeah, you can't like uh uh ship medicine across state lines. But that uh th this is a totally different topic, but that law actually has been suspended currently so doctors can Yeah. That loophole might be closed, but that just happened a few weeks ago. But uh I guess what I mean is if you're saying that they like are a registered agent in a certain state to practice a certain type of business, that's kind of interesting. You could do that for loads of different things. Right. And so I think what these guys are doing is cool. reason I initially liked it was'cause the the founder's name is Job. And I was like, What? Your name is job and this is what you do? He's like, Yeah, I was like, Well, this is great. This is like

You know, a small little glint in my eyes when the fastest man on earth is named Usain Bolt. And I'm like oh Wow, that's that's how the world is. It's amazing. The world is amazing. Are you sure it's not Job? It's spelled J O P so it's job to me. Um and I was like, dude, your name is Job and you're about hiring people remotely? Like this is fantastic.

Well he's from I think he's Dutch. I think he's from the Netherlands. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Sorry. I talked to him before. I thought about investing in this company. And I liked everything. I talked to the guy, liked it, liked the premise. He had a uh s a win under his belt from Git Lab before this. He was like Super early there, number four or something. And uh

And then I didn't invest'cause I got busy. You should have. You missed out. I'm looking at him now. He kinda looks like the terrorist from Air Force One, like the Like the r he looks like the Russian terrorist who wears like tracks suits. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. And moving on. Or from or no from uh uh Uh Die Hard with the Vengeance. He looks like one of those guys. Yeah, dude, he's not soft. This guy's hard, dude. He's uh hard as a Russian terrorist.

Dude, Google his name and look at his head shot. He looks he looks like a terrorist in Call of Duty. I can't even Google, I just googled job remote. I got a bunch of job boards uh to work with. His name's Job Van Der Voort. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Uh all right, let me take I've talked to this guy on video chat. Look, he's a handsome guy. What are you talking about? I'm not I didn't say he's ugly, I just look like he'll f like he'll fucking kill you. Yeah, he looks like he'll fuck you up.

Which I think you need to do international business like this. So okay. Yeah, no, I like this. He just doesn't he just look like he's selling nuclear arms, not like You know Recruiting services. Okay, I got an idea for you. Um this is a boring idea, so you're probably not gonna like it, or maybe you'll like it. I don't know. Um

So right now, uh one thing I'm learning, this is part of my export uh my import list from a big company, which is basically Um At a big company, one challenge is that you uh like headcount is like oil. And so you like kind of your o every division wants more headcount. Um The company raises money so that they can or or or you know, decides every year how much headcount they have. Is it it's like a magic number.

And um And so you know but then the problem is that you know, that's like It tells you, hey, you're gonna hire twenty five new heads this year. That's your department. That's what you've got. But the problem is some people leave, right? So you have attrition. But the problem is nobody knows how much attrition there's gonna be. And so I'm learning right now

How big of a problem this is, which is There's like HR people who are m trying to model in Excel and trying to go back through this stuff and try to figure out, okay year over year, what's our percent attrition? How many how many people leave the job? 15% a year. How many are gonna leave this quarter? And you need this to do financial planning. So you know how much you're gonna spend. You also need it to figure out how much to hire. Because you don't just think about okay, if we're gonna do this amount of work, we need to hire this many more people.

You have to take into account that you're gonna also lose people. And nobody knows how how much you're gonna lose. So I think there's something around attrition. for big companies, which is either A a much better modeling system, an automatic

projection system, forecast system for attrition. It takes your historical data. It can take the job other company's job uh other company attrition and tell you, hey lot of people are switching jobs right now. Or like for Covid. We predict. that a lot of people are not gonna switch right now due to the uncertainty of the of the economy and like How isn't isn't that aren't these uh isn't this a thing? Isn't this what PeopleSoft did?

Uh maybe I don't know. I don't use PeopleSoft, but I know that like we use workday and other things like that, and this doesn't come baked in for that, or at least we don't know. So like if I wanted to get rich and I liked software, I absolutely would do something in that field. Uh there's an another version of this which is just if you can f help companies figure out who's gonna leave So like One um thing that happens when I open up my computer sometimes uh is Amazon has this internal

what they call a pulse survey. It's a quick one question that pops up. And you just answer it? And it's like very lightweight. And it helps them collect data about like, you know, how employees are feeling or whatever, right? And so

I think it'd be interesting if you could find a way to make it where co employees would feel comfortable saying If they're thinking about searching, if they are job searching, and they they know it's totally anonymized and protected, but it helps the company figure out Oh shit, you have this many this percentage of your engineers that are thinking about leaving the company. So map that to potential attrition. Um so so I think there's something

There's nothing to solving this attrition problem for companies. Um, I think there's a business there. I don't know too much about it because I just go I just Googled it. I just Google it. And there's a few headlines. IBM's AI backed employee retention software can predict within ninety five percent accuracy which workers want to leave their job.

or are are going to leave their job. This is cool. This is a great idea. Um algorithm um can tell you uh Wan they wanna hear uh what's going well with employees and what isn't, and they will tell you uh within ninety five percent certain teeth if they're gonna leave. Hm.

That's pretty cool. Um, okay, and then there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is Um, do you know who this guy Yishong Wong is? Have you heard this name before? Yeah, he was the CEO of Reddit. Yeah, his CO Reddit uh in two thousand five, he was at Facebook, so he's very early at Facebook.

Um, seems like a super smart guy, to be honest. And uh I've been reading his like blog for a while. I think it's case Mark. But I didn't know what he was doing and I just heard he's up to like a new company. And so I was like All right.

S anytime there's somebody who I think is really, really interesting and they're doing something, I wanna know what it is. And it's pretty ambitious and I wanted to talk about it. So He's literally trying to solve global warming. By planting a bunch of trees. And um okay, so w what does that mean? You're you're really gonna solve climate change? And so the he has this blog post called

A massive refor a massive global reforestation project. Is how we fix climate change. And he walks through just sort of his logic one by one. And this reminds me of like I remember reading Elon Musk's secret master plan that he published. back before Tesla was famous.

And I remember reading that and being like, Wow, this is like really audacious. Who's this Elon Musk guy? Okay, he did this PayPal zip zip to you know He did this other company, I should pay attention to this'cause this guy This sounds pretty a audacious and uh You know, I can't disagree with the logic here. And that's how I felt when I was reading this. Now

I think this is Out of my depth. scientifically, so I don't know if this is legit, but He's a legit guy and so I respect that he's looking into this. So Is this a business? It's a business.

So how does it make money? Um, I don't know yet, but he'cause he hasn't released too many details. In fact he hasn't like announced that he was really doing this. He just posted one blog post about theoretically how would you do it. So He just walks through look. We produce you know, forty five gigatons of carbon dioxide every year.

And the best way to get rid of carbon dioxide is forests. One four how much one acre. Uh absorbs. So that means we need three billion acres of forest. Where are we gonna get that? Well

Turns out we know how to turn deserts into forests. And we've been doing this in in China and Israel and other places. And so he's like, All right, there's four point seven billion acres of desert available. We need three billion to solve the climate change problem, to absorb all the CO two we're emitting. And he's like, Okay, so what's the problem there? Well

To turn a desert into a forest, you need irrigation. To do that, you need solar energy. To do that, you need this. And so he's literally walking through and now he bought a little I think he bought a plot of land in Hawaii. Where he's doing a proof of concept for this. Yeah. I'm reading about it in August seventeenth, two thousand nineteen he launched this or he uh announced it. So if you Google

Yi Shan Wa Wong, so Y I S H A N Wong W O O N G trees And then just the word trees, you'll see two posts on medium Dude, this is fascinating as shit. This is awesome. I don't know how this is bad. I don't know how it makes money, but it's cool. Yeah, but if he says the world fantastic, I don't know if it makes money or not, but Um It you know, he he talks about like okay the cost of this solar project, you know, obviously this is a lot, it's like I don't know, X It's like a single digit trillion. He's like but the global

GDP is this much that you know, if could we dedicate three percent of the global GDP to solving climate change, I think we're gonna need to. And um And amazing. So I think it's amazing and I love that like, you know, he didn't come out on Tech Crunch. You know, you don't read about this on Tech Crunch. The reason I found this was because

a local Hawaiian newspaper was talking about hey this guy's tryna Plant a forest over here on this little area. And I was like, that's legit that he's like actually doing the work. So like respect for actually going and doing the work and working on one of the biggest, hardest problems to solve. So that's why this guy.

How d how rich do you think this guy is? And do you think he's able to do this because he's rich or is he Like what do you think is going on here? I would guess, you know, if you're at Facebook two thousand five. That's a hundred million dollars. Really early. Yeah, he could be easily be worth a hundred million dollars. I don't know what his role was there exactly. He worked as a senior engineer at PayPal from two thousand and one to two thousand five. Right. He joined Facebook as a single digit millions. He joined Facebook as a senior director of engine as a director of engineering

In two thousand and five. So any tens of millions, I think, in the IPO. Yeah, definitely I mean, if you said he has a hundred million dollars in the bank, I would not be surprised. Yeah. Um so anyways, I think this is this is badass and uh I don't know, pretty inspiring. It's called inspiring and

My takeaway from this is Um Yeah, the climate change uh awesome. I'm not like crazy passionate about it, but I support it tot totally. I think it's neat. My big takeaway though is like The type of balls you have to have in order to have these ambitions and then to follow through with it, I find that to be the most inspiring. Exactly.

Um there's also this meme I saw which was an Yeah. I'm gonna describe a meme on a podcast. It's hard to say, but like It's basically two scientists and they're looking at the coronavirus two two little humps, like one that's a

You know, we've all seen this diagram now of like one uh curve and then the flattened curve. And so they're looking at it and it's like the h height of their shins, and they're like they're looking at that. And then behind them is the climate change hump, which is like ten times their height. And it's like, Yeah, I hope we get through this and it's like Because there's a much bigger problem coming.

And I think you know. I could have never imagined there's a world where Oh, all businesses shut down, everybody has to stay in their home. Like I thought that's a nuclear bomb. Like I thought this is the only way that this is the case is like There's a nuclear bomb or like, I don't know, some crazy terrorist shit.

And you know, coronavirus did this to us in like a month. Um You know, when when we hit the tipping point for climate change You know, who knows what the world is gonna look like and what's gonna happen. Um it's pretty pretty scary. Uh do you think that

You're gonna go work from the office again? No, I I actually told my company I was like, I don't think I'll ever go commute to the office again. Yeah, our lease in the our Or lease in San Francisco is like

fourteen K a month. And I think it ends in May. And uh I don't know. I mean, And everyone in their head's like Yeah, it too it's as like there should be like a service where you can like rent it and like only go some of the time.

And I'm like, Uh, you mean we work? Like Yeah, that's a thing. And it's great. I don't know why like everyone hated on it a few months ago. So I I think we're g I I imagine us doing a wee work. Um Dude, that's interesting'cause at the beginning of this you were like, dude, I hate remote. I hate this. I w I don't believe in this. Yep.

And uh My opinion changes. A a a humble and smart man can admit when he's changed and is wrong. So I am humble and smart. All right, we gotta end on that. Uh that's great. You got anything else you wanna shout out?

Mm. No, maybe we will have things to shout out soon. Uh we're gonna be w we're gonna start well I wanna some projects like um Some private Q and A's. Okay. Nice.

But we'll shoot shoot we'll shoot those out shout those out later. All right, sounds good. So yeah, thanks for listening.

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