Board Talk Empire with GRIN's Brandon Brown, Founder Hacks & SEC Memecoin Clarity? | E2091

35:39Well, Joe writes over on X.com, everyone's ye old favorite Twitter. I'm excited to share. I'm bringing my designer brain and startup spirit into the government. My first project at Doge is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process. Since leaving Airbnb in 22, I've been looking for my next design challenge. I'm paraphrasing. And I think nothing's more important than improving our government. If anyone else wants to help out, let me know. This is at the US Office of Personnel Management or OPM. And I think this is exactly and precisely what I was hoping to see from Doge. Okay. I want the government to be more efficient, less inefficient, faster, less slow.

36:16And there's a lot of things that we can do. And I do think that having a perspective that the way we have done things might be the wrong way is a good way to approach the inefficiencies in government. Jason, you and I are on slightly different sides of the cost-cutting approaches and how that's going. But no matter what, we can all agree that taking a paper process that takes too long, digitizing it and making it beautiful, It's a great thing to do for our government and its workers. So I'm a huge fan of this. And I'm really, really proud of Joe. Good for him. Yeah. And more of this. Like, so to the Doge team, again, I'm just going to call balls and strikes.

36:47Everybody knows some of these people are my friends and yada yada and associates. And everybody knows I'm a never Trumper who is rooting always for the president to succeed. I've been very clear about my positions on all this. I was a double hater this election. Not that I'm the main character here, but I mean, on the show, I guess I am. this is my show but i'm not the main character but just to put it all in perspective i understand how people can be absolutely like shocked by how aggressive doge is being i happen to agree with it because i got to see it during the twitter reorg and i happen to believe in it but i do understand it's not everybody's cup of tea and you you might not understand how powerful it is to shut off every credit card and then watch all the sass subscriptions turn off and how good that is when you have fraud waste and corruption okay but this is great this is great and doge needs to do more of this tell more stories like this and i think doge is getting the message i kind of know they're getting the message leave it at that you did see them say they're going to give raises and promotions to people who are doing a great job in addition to the layoffs they're doing for people who can't even fill out an email that says what did you do last week we do that every day here at our company every company does a stand-up anyway uh we got a guest so let's uh welcome our guest to the program jason loves to just to swing by his play and drop like eight grenades out that i want to just that i want to swing at and then we could go all day no you're fine you're fine you're fine let's keep it moving i mean we covered a lot already i know i just meme coins epstein parmer lucky doge i mean we're cooking with oil now just just oh just don't let me start talking about poker we'll never make progress all right brandon brown so he is the founder and incoming board chair hey what's up brandon over at grin i know you guys have known each other for a while and brandon is transitioning away from his former role into being a board chair It's a great moment to talk about different roles at startups, why you might change up your role.

38:54CEO 10 years. Brandon, welcome to the show, man. Thanks. Yeah, happy to be here. Been fun watching backstage and be a good conversation. Yeah. For folks who don't know, Grin is a really special company. Went to our accelerator. I'm on the board. We invested in... I think we invested in the company three or four times, which is not normal. Usually we will do an accelerator investment, then maybe a seed investment, and then we're kind of done because there are Series A investors, B investors who are better at that. But we've been lucky enough to invest along the way. The company has done spectacular, gotten to eight figures in revenue.

39:30They do a great job managing social media campaigns at scale. And the big question when I met Brandon was, is social media going to become a channel? now let's talk about that you had this thesis that social media would become a marketing channel and an important one how many years ago and i would describe it social as a channel but also as like the new publishers are going to be people and not companies and so brands i need to understand that and harness it and that was i met you in 2017 we started the company in 2014 and this is a pivot for us. First thing that we did for the first three years didn't work.

40:12And then met you and pivoted here and you joined the board and we've been kind of on the ride ever since. And it's been fun. Just walk us through that, I guess. We have some examples of influencers and then maybe just for background, we'll talk about how the product works. Then we'll talk about you transitioning out of the CEO slot, which is a big controversial moment in any company. an intense moment. And we'll get all those great founder stories after we just sort of cue up what the product is and why it's important. Yeah. So a big way that consumer brands go to market these days is they work with creators on social.

40:52So they're doing ads, they're doing SEO, they're creating a lot of content, but a huge channel is they're sending product to Instagrammers, people on TikTok, YouTube. You can imagine that process once you start doing it at scale is just incredibly complex. How do you find the people? How do you recruit them? How do you contract with them? How do you report on all of that? And brands are typically in spreadsheets using a bunch of different tools. They've got a cobbled together team that's doing it. And so we built SaaS. Kind of like how an executive in an inside sales team would use something like Salesforce.

41:25But they use these marketing managers at brands use Grin to manage influencer marketing and manage these creators at scale. Yeah. So it's a software product makes that easy. And it's pretty crazy because it's kind of like a common thing in the zeitgeist and it's known now, but 10 years ago, this was an emerging thing and had a bunch of problems around it. And so we were one of the first to go solve those problems. So I'm curious how long it took, Grin, to go from starting this to being ready to help Uber, for example, build its global TikTok presence. Because that was the case study that I was most excited by that you guys have out there.

41:59It seems like a big project, big brand, lots of different touch points and controversial in some markets due to regulation. So what was the process like building the first product and then getting it to the point at which you were ready to help Uber go from zero to 60 on TikTok? Yeah. So I mean, the company stories, it's been, you know, like all startups, I think from the outside looking in, like you see the tech crunch headlines and you see the fundraising announcements and it looks like it's a linear up into the right trajectory, but we all know that's never the case. We started the company in 2014.

42:30We were working on a different product for a while, realized it wasn't going to work, pivoted in 2017. Actually, Brandon, pausing you there. What was the moment you realized that the first product wasn't going to work and then you had to let it go? Because I'm sure some founders out there right now are thinking, am I on the right path? Should I pivot? So how did you decide to make that decision? Well, for me, so the first product we had built, and again, it's a long time ago, but it was called Jumpstart. And it was big YouTuber, promote small YouTuber in exchange for money. So it was like a collaboration marketplace.

42:58And this was actually before I'd met Jason and Grin, as you know it today, existed. And what I started to realize was that the only creators who were trying to pay for growth in this paid collaboration way, typically were trying to hack growth. And they shouldn't be paying for growth. They needed to be improving their content. Because the core thing that was actually making them not grow is that their content wasn't great. And so I had this realization. I was like, oh, wow, this product that we're building has a bad customer. These are kind of hobby solopreneurs. They're not really investing into the right things.

43:33So we just didn't feel like it was going to be big. And so we changed everything in 2017 and looked at my background, our core competency as a team, where can we pivot and how can we go build something meaningful? And then transitioned into this software for brands to collaborate with creators, which is a pretty big departure at the time. And you've built what is effectively, as far as I can tell, kind of a two-sided marketplace. You have clients come in and you also work with a lot of different influencers. How has been the social media changes we've seen in the last couple of years? And how has that impacted Grin's business?

44:02Because to me, search has lost its primacy. People don't blog as much as they used to. People don't read the news as much as they used to. It seems that social media has become ever more important, even if it gets a little straining at times over on X. But I mean, has that been a major accelerant to the Grin business? Yeah, the way we think about it is, so I think a lot of it comes down to like, what do you think the atomic unit is? And if you think the atomic unit is the creator, so the person on the other side of the phone or the camera who's creating the content, and then the platforms are responsible for distribution, and you could argue this, especially on TikTok and with For You, like the way that the algorithms changed.

44:39But as long as brands need to organize around creators, then there's going to be a need for a product that simplifies that and products that simplify that. And so that's how I think about the changes. I think platforms will come and go. We've seen the wild ride with TikTok. We saw Clubhouse had their moment a few years ago. And so I think as long as brands have a need to stay organized around managing creators at scale, there's going to be a need for products like Grin. Okay. I have a question about that because to me, and I know this is me being an outdated, essentially boomer, but when I think about product placement and I think about influencers, I really had this like 2014 Instagram vibe in my head.

45:17And I presume that that's really not the case. So Brandon, is it still as effective today in a more commodified social media era to go out and reach out to people that have followings and give them stuff to promote? Because to me, the juice has been squeezed from that lemon slightly, but it sounds like I'm actually behind and things are getting bigger than they were before. Well, I think it needs to be part of multi-channel, right? So I still think paid is extremely important. Organic owned social for brands is extremely important, but then organic social from creators and influencers and using that as a way to reach the consumer in a really honest and authentic way and then repurpose that content across paid and other channels, that's not going anywhere.

46:00That's extremely important in today's world. And I think this product and this company is at the bleeding edge of marketing. And so I'm a marketer. I've been a marketer my whole life. I sell a marketing product to marketers at Grin for a long time. And I think at the bleeding edge of marketing, there's always going to be these unproven experimental channels that if you can unlock them early, there's an arbitrage on the reach and distribution. And I would say arguably influencer and creator maybe has reached a saturation point there, but still is a really important part of the overall mix. Okay.

46:37So then Brandon, eight figures of revenue, companies growing, pivot successful, important market, bleeding edge, and you're stepping back. So to me, it feels like you finally reached the plateau of joy in the startup game. You've built something that's robust and is going to last. And so I guess, first of all, you're going from CEO to board share. So tell us why that's the right move for you. And then also the timing here just to me seems not in a bad way abnormal, but surprising in terms of what I tend to hear from CEOs in your position. Yeah, it's a good question. I think here's a crazy stat.

47:10And Jason, you were along for this ride. You were in constant communication about this, but we went from basically zero to a billion valuation in four years. So from 2017 to 2021, we went from zero to 480 employees. That was an incredible ride, especially from the early pivot, finding product market fit, scaling really fast. And then 2022, we started to hit real headwinds as a business. And I think it was macro. I think there was some execution missteps, but at the same time, we really started to see softness in the economy. The brands started to pull back. And then when brands pull back, where do they pull back?

47:48They go and they look at marketing variable, and then they look at experimental marketing variable. And so I think our category was affected. And so from 2022 to 2024, I led the company through three layoffs, three riffs. So like a triple riff. And it's pretty wild to have gone from that explosive growth to then retooling and then realizing like, oh shit, hopefully I can pass on here. Yeah, sure. Yeah. We didn't go deep enough. We got to go deeper. And so through that process, got the company to break even with a bunch of cash still in the bank. And I started thinking about succession, right? It's been a decade.

48:24Co-founder had left and moved on. We've built a category and an enduring business. But as I looked at what the company really needs, in the CEO operator seat, you got to be going 150 miles an hour if you want to build something really big and meaningful. And so I started to feel like the best thing for the company is to think about how we can get someone with this renewed energy, vigor, someone who can really lead the company over the next three to five years to create the outcome that we're looking for. Found that in the new CEO. I mean, he's extremely talented. And so, but it's bittersweet. You know, like it's, you build something, it's so close to you for so long.

49:04It's like, in a lot of ways it's your family and and uh but for me it's about like what's best for the business and then also just being honest about a decade-long journey there's that quote from from elon around you know building a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass like yeah and actually that comes from bill lee our brenda west coast bill on twitter and good mutual friend of ours you know just from a board perspective since brandon's being so uh honest here, I would say, you know, every startup year is like dog years, put seven years on your life. So, you know, if seven of his years were those dog years, that's 50 years at the helm.

49:44Or for any other employee, right? For the CEO, the founder, whoever's in that pilot seat, you're putting on that much mileage. And then you look at during a down market or headwinds, like we saw with the Silicon Valley bank collapse and the correction and peak ZERP going to peak, it's the end of the world. That was a great swing. And I have to say, some founders are able to assess reality. And there was this guy, Warren Bennis, who was on the program that a friend of mine had put me in touch with many years ago. And he said to me, I said, what's the nature of leadership? And he said, defining reality.

50:23and i think he had been in world war ii or korean war or something he'd been in of service and um other people had said this and you know what you did really well brandon was you know in our conversations and your conversations with the team is you accepted the reality and the reality was you're not gonna like beat that valuation that we got and the valuation was incredibly rich when we became a billion dollar company and that the only thing we could do was not say hey there's another around coming that's going to one-up that we can look at the amount of cash in the bank wow that's a lot of money we can look at the revenue okay there are people who are customers who are cutting back they're cutting back the number of seats they spend on salesforce because their sales team went from 50 salespeople to 25 and so the whole industry was watching this sas contraction and then of course if you're looking at marketing and this is an experimental new product line okay what's going to go first?

51:20Well, there's a retreat to what you know and what's the most effective. The experimental stuff, you're figuring out. You're figuring out, do I give Kim Kardashian a million dollars or do I give 20 influencers 50 or do I give 200 influencers five or do I give 1 ,000 influencers 1 ,000 or 10 ,100 to market my watch, my glasses, my sneakers? All that was being figured out. And of course, in a down market, that gets constricted. We saw that in the venture space the number of venture firms went down a third i had to look at reality and say okay is every venture fund going to be easy to raise and double the last one or quadruple the last one this is what great leaders do and i think you did a great job brandon you were always very sober about things even when things got overheated and uh you know i hope as a board member you know me having a couple of years experience on you and maybe one, I basically saw probably one extra cycle than you did from the dot-com era and the great recession.

52:20You were, how old were you in 1999, 2000? Well, I was born in 85. So what? 15 years old. Yeah. So I was 30, right? I watched it up close and personal and during the great recession in 2008, you were 23 or in college, right? So I had actually experienced those as an adult in the workforce. us and so when you did things like oh we have a little bit of venture debt and oh people really want to push us to take more venture debt to spend the venture debt i just said you know i remember pulling you aside at one point i was like things don't grow to the moon sometimes things can get bad like we should not be using this for runway we had like a really thoughtful discussion of it i could tell you some founders who i was working with alex at the time brandon they were just like whatever jay cow old guy i'm i'm maxing out the venture debt and i'm spending the venture debt that is what will take you out for sure and here's the truth yeah it did take out two or three of your contemporaries from that time period and man i was just like why don't these people listen like brandon did yeah and you had a little bit of venture debt but you didn't go spend it on an office or some cockamamie third product before the first one actually had product market it fit.

53:32It's a great thing to do to say, you know what? Somebody else has more energy. I put 10 years into this. I mentored them. I'll move up to the chairman position. Reid Hoffman did it. Many other folks have done it. And what you'll see is the company will do better and you'll come back even stronger. I want to ask what the venture debt thinks. A lot of founders are watching this. Brandon, you said that venture debt will take you out. Can you just explain to people why it's so risky for the founders out there? I mean, well, you have to pay it back. So I know that's obviously on AppBlush, but it's like, all of a sudden you have a correction and revenue isn't just flat, but reverses your tripping covenants.

54:06And then you don't have the cash to pay it back. They have a DACA, so they control your operating accounts. And then they sweep the account. Wake up one day, you have no cash and your company's gone. Another person on the board was, I liked this comment he would use every now and then, and it wasn't you, Jason, but it was one of the other directors is, that's how you lose the keys to the kingdom. So there are certain things you can do that if you're not careful, will wipe you out. And too much venture debt, especially... The other thing too, I would say is the equity investors. So the venture investors and your equity partners, they have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed.

54:42Their shareholders, their owners. Debt, maybe they have some warrants, but it's a small amount. And so they're typically not working with you. Maybe some of the venture debt providers are, but especially the banks. the banks are extremely conservative and they're wiping the accounts if push comes to shove. And the covenants part of this, as far as I understand venture debt terms, is that you can borrow money when you raise money. Silicon Valley Bank would loan you another five if you raise 30. And as long as your ARR was growing at some percentage, they wouldn't demand the money back immediately.

55:15Is that a fair explanation of covenants? Yeah. And so there's something like EBITDA, covenants, growth rate hurdles, like MRR to certain KPIs in the business. And it's fine when you're growing. But then I think in certain situations where if you flatline or if you decline, yeah, it can be risky. The other thing too, I want to comment on Jason, I agree with you about just the pattern matching and cycles. Like I think, you know, I heard a mentor told me this quote, I just love it is in any 10 year business period, you have six good years, two great years and two terrible years that could put you out of business.

55:52And so you need, you need to prepare. And so, and I think it's right. It's like, don't get too high in the good times. Don't get too low in the bad times, but know that these 10-year cycles repeat. And I think for me, it's like, man, it's so valuable having just gone through that. I wasn't a part of the.com or the 08 as we described. And I think as I go into the next 10-year cycle, because I'm an antsy person, I'm helping at the board level, but I'm going to be doing new stuff. I'm just grateful for the experience because I think the pattern matching is real, but you have to live through it. No matter how much someone tells you, you know you have to experience it i mean i agree with that you in order to really take the lessons in you have to experience it that's part of alex like playing cards like we talked about if you see your pocket aces lose you know or you see your set you know lose to a bigger set or a set lose to quads or a set lose to a you know i don't know a runner runner flush or straight this is in poker analogies here because you can feel invincible at one point in time and you and then you know you get wiped out but statistically when somebody like nate on 538 said nate silver said oh listen this person has a one in three chance of winning the election people thought well that's not possible for them to win the election and then the poker players were like okay so it's like you know you have you know uh an over pair and somebody has you know a lower pair, like, or you have a flush draw.

57:19And it was just obvious to people. But you do have to have reps, you do have to see it yourself to really understand it. But it's also good to have mentors who can tell you because you will learn the lesson fasters. And you can learn these lessons faster, more efficiently, and be aware of them and take them in if you do a little bit of research. Brandon, great job bringing the company. Thank you for your efforts and look forward to being the first check in your next company. You told me you promised me and you'll promise me hear again on the air that I am your first call when you have your next idea and I get to put the first check in.

57:50You agree? Piss that arm a little more. You agree? Yeah, we'll see what happens. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I've had founders do this to me. I didn't commit to that, everybody. You have to commit that I am the first investor in your next company. But what a time, like even as an operator, an entrepreneur, what a time to just go experiment. Like, you know, I think just the pace that things are changing, it's innovation and opportunities everywhere. And I saw the growth rate graph you guys put up earlier in the show. I think the pace at which these companies are getting to like 10, 20, 50 million ARR is just crazy.

58:29Yeah. You don't get there by accident. I can tell you, 99 % of startups that are funded do not get past 10 million. And the one that does, like you did with Grant and other people have done, it really does take a tremendous amount of discipline, effort, a little bit of luck on the margins. But generally, I think, you know, building a great team, being obsessed with your customers, and then refining that product incessantly is a pretty good playbook. Team, product, customer. Brandon, great job. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Appreciate you. Talk to you soon. Just a great founder. you know there's some people when you meet them alex i tell people there's like a neon sign above their head i see it it just flashes winner winner and so when i meet people i am always astounded when i see that neon sign and uh with brandon i saw it so it was great we have pulled the clip from the i think episode twist 219 you're kidding me this is now when i know we're doing great on our production ability.

59:32Yeah, this is good stuff. The first primary task of a leader is to define reality. Define reality. That means being very clear-headed about what we're up to face. Now, actually, if you really feel this is in, that you've been ordered, let's say you've been ordered by the regimental, by the company commander, I'm a platoon leader. And it's a platoon leader who leads, it's two platoons that lead the charge. And you've been ordered, you're in the army. This is not like in a corporation, this is wartime, so you can't say, well, I don't know if I agree, you know, it's not a time for a dissent at that moment.

1:00:10Later on you can complain about it. But so you've got to say, guys, this is going to be a rough one and we're going to do our best and we've got a good battle plan and here are the issues. You know, you're going to have these are snipers over in a church steeple. You've got to define. This is true of any institution you're leading. Now, it doesn't mean you sound hopeless because I remember when I was. So I think that's a useful point. I like the military analogies. Jason, I want to rewind here and point out since when is there Alex 1.0, another bald white dude? Who's that? That's Tyler Crowley.

1:00:46Tyler Crowley was co-hosting and Lon Harris was the newsreader. And that was the trio in the early days. that's in our i don't what do we know what episode this was i believe this is 219 so if you want to go look it up probably year three or four uh and uh you can see i got 10 more pounds of fat on uh and uh yeah we did that in santa monica and this is the early days of podcasting that was probably in 20 i don't know 14 15 or something who knows but that's tyler crowley um who was kind of my chief of staff and but was the original engineer producer of the show lon harris who's now our editorial director here.

1:01:23He was the original newsreader and worked with me at Mahalo. And so that was the old school crew back in the early days of podcasting. I wanted to do a founder lesson today. I think we can get one in. We can. And then any other lightning you want to try to get to here as we wrap up the week. Okay, so two options here. One from our dear friend, Fresh, formerly of the Launch Team, and one from Matt Turk about where you should build a company. Jason, pick a direction for us. I mean, you can't go wrong with Presh. All right. So here is a tweet from Presh, and I think it does explain a very important concept.

1:01:59So Presh writes over on Twitter, take every one-star rating personally. Don't take every five-star rating personally. And then Austin Petersmith, someone that I've known on Twitter for ages, summarized this and says, negative feedback straight to the heart, positive feedback straight to the team. Perfect. This is just great leadership. These are two people I've worked with for a long time. Presh came to work with me. He dropped out of college to work for me here at lunch. And Austin worked with me on Inside. And I'm an investor in his new company. Yeah, just two great entrepreneurs out there getting it done.

1:02:33Negative feedback, very important. The detractors in NPS world are people who give you a six or less on the question, how likely are you to recommend this product or service to one of your friends? And what we're speaking to here is the value of detractors. haters the haters usually have now there are drive-by haters and there are drive-by people praising you and that's what they're sort of getting to here i think the lesson at the end of the day is you have to not get too high on your own supply as brendan just said in our previous segment you know and not over index on the lows but inside of hater comments will be you know um uh you're fat you're ugly um you know you could um uh do a better job on x y and z uh reminder you're a fat bastard and you have to be able to parse through that feedback and find the actual kernel of truth the haters will make you greater is what i always tell folks and then in terms of praise yeah i like um austin's feedback which is hey just send it to the team team uses praise and somebody told me you know the job of leadership is to repeat the same things over and over again and make people feel 12 feet tall and so that's an actual you know it's impossible to be 12 feet tall but you want to make them feel that way no no i think it's i think it's well said because i mean there's various little little acorns or co-ends or you know nuggets of wisdom that we talk about my favorite is the job of the ceo is to make the secretary rich and i You know, that's a slightly dated bit of phrasing, but I've always held onto it.

1:04:11But I really do like the idea of parsing out positive and negative feedback and portioning them to the right things. Because the least effective leader takes praise for the team, gives it to themselves, takes criticism of the team, and gives that to other people. Or as I put it, you know, criticism should roll up and praise should roll down. Basically. Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty good advice. I want to point out that this discussion of haters brings me to my favorite meme on the internet. so i'm just going to bring it up because i can't help myself okay this is an old historic tweet and it reads the haters said i couldn't do it and they were correct honestly a great call from the haters that's so great i mean there is something to it you know i mean yeah sometimes the haters are right sure or as i call them the jaders shout out to my guy i'm like oh sorry stray bullets everywhere you brought that back all right so just a couple of really quick things everybody um way Waymo announced that they are now at 200 ,000 paid rides per week, up from 150.

1:05:11Keep in mind that Uber did 33 million a day in its last quarter. So Waymo is growing, but remains an absolute... It's 200 a week, right? So that would be... 20 ,000 a week, yeah. So you divide that by seven, it'd be 30 ,000 a day to 33 million. It's, yeah. One thousandth as many. Here's the thing. It's going to take time. Everybody wants to talk to me about this because I'm the early Uber investor, which is totally fine because i bring it on um and i'm not talking my book here but i'll tell folks once again uh you know if you just build a model and you can ask gem and i to build a model we did that here one time with their deep research product it's a billion rides a day in the united states around the world it's a much larger number obviously the united states is but five percent of the global population it's going to take a long time to get to 10 or 20 autonomous rides i think in the next 10 years we could see 20 of rides be autonomous and at the same time i think people will take more rides because it'll get cheaper you'll be able to drink when you ride yep you'll be able to sleep when you ride so the idea like flight you know airplane rides used to be for the rich and you know you they were a bit dangerous in the early days and then eventually it became safe and cheap and ubiquitous and routes were everywhere and so just common folk anybody could afford you know a 49 to 149 anytime fair on southwest or jet blue and it became more common so imagine that and cars used to be something only for the rich and the elite and then you can buy a car now for a couple of grand uh so we're going to see number of rides go up and we're going to see four or five players because the number of cars that will be necessary when we did the calculation is you know somewhere in the range of tens of millions of cars per percentage point give you an idea you know as big as uber is and the ride sharing business is and to the delivery businesses it's less than one percent of rides ride sharing is less than one percent of rides it might be like one you know point a 1.2 depends on the country obviously and the density so the pie is getting bigger the percentage is tiny there it's going to take i think just in the united states millions of cars being produced every year to just get in just to get that to two percent let's say so what will the cars cost i think elon's been pretty clear it's going to cost them 30 40 thousand per car yeah maybe they get it down to 25 they did 1.8 million cars two years ago 1.75 i think last year so let's give them the benefit of the doubt they do 2 million cars and i don't know 10 of them go to the self-driving effort so 200 000 quarter million it's a lot of money and well that's the other thing people are you got to really think about that so let's take 1 million cars and how many rides they could do.

1:08:01They could do 20 rides a day, you know, 20 million rides a day. Okay, that's incredible. Okay, that's what Waymo's doing right now with their 200 ,000 cars. Oh no, I don't know how many cars they have, but that's what they're doing with their 200 ,000 rides. Long story short, if you put a million cars on the road, which Tesla's capable of doing and BYD is capable of doing, Toyota's capable of doing, that's$30 billion. It's$30 billion for 1 million cars. We're going to need like 100 million cars. this is trillions of dollars worth of cars folks and batteries so i think one of the other issues is you know and travis brought this up the founder of uber co-founder um i'm like gary camp he pointed out like there might not be enough electricity in california right now to charge all the cars to do all the rides so we got to upgrade that and how many batteries can be produced this is not to say it's not going to happen oh yeah no no it's going to happen but it's going to take 10 years to get to 20 % ride sharing.

1:08:58And that means the market grows 20X. And I think there's three or four players, just like in e-commerce or commerce generally, it's not a winner take all market because it's the real world folks. It's not one airline. It's not a network effect digital business. It's a network effect real world business. Yes. That's a very distinctly different XY matrix. And if we were to make a four quadrant, is it a network effect business? Yes or no. Clearly ride sharing is a network business. is it atoms or bits it's atoms and you can just look at that to understand the real world yes and i agree with all of that but i'm more optimistic on the timeline because we're seeing other companies advance so quickly so uh tesla which you mentioned just two quick little news items um they're doing some fsd in china we're still figuring out exactly what that is but seeing that pop up for the first time and also tesla is working to launch a free self-driving taxi business in california which is the step you do before you start charging for it so i think that's the big win i think immediately tesla should partner with lyft and uber and put teslas with safety drivers in them for a year or two in each market with their hands off the steering wheel and prove like waymo did nothing to worry about folks and then you just can record for people hey look we did a thousand rides today and we had two interventions per thousand so it's like you know 500 rides before we have an intervention and of course they have some of these statistics from me driving my car but i'm not a safety driver safety drivers are clearly the first step now he did say elon that in june there would be people in cyber taxis without drivers so i think they're going to have this is a prediction i don't have inside information i think they're going to have a constrained route like they did for the cyber taxi launch in a constrained area like they said they picked downtown you know area of austin they could very well make that work very easily so if they pick like a two mile by two mile area and they just really nail that yeah maybe they don't need to have the in-car safety driver they could do that with remote drivers and just have one person watching it like people say waymo has one what do they call them that's not remote drivers that had another word for them operators or something had some i think it's i think it was operator but i'd want to go back and fact check that but someone who's overseen what's going on over i would that's what i would if i was running the program um i would have 10 cars with 10 operators remote in in austin maybe in a small area and then i would have a thousand uber drivers and just give them the model y with the 4.0 package and i think actually my feedback on fsd is now outdated because I have the hardware three package.

1:11:44And Elon said the hardware three package is probably going to have to be replaced. And he's kind of been warming up the shareholders to that. So my prediction right now is Uber Waymo number one, Tesla number two in the short term, then maybe tied, and then maybe Tesla wins the number one spot because of their production ability. All I care about is that they're going to be competing and me, Alex, as a consumer does well. And one last note on this, WeRide is expanding, which is the public Chinese self-driving company that listed here in the States. They're expanding a bit in Europe and China. So to me, we're seeing competition internationally, definitely here in the US.

1:12:17It feels like it's accelerating. And so the Waymo milestone of new number of paid rides per week is just indicative that I think they're trying to stay ahead of Tesla, which is great. We want them on their toes. We want everyone fighting. April 23rd, New York City, you and Mike Savino are heading down for Angel University. This is a great course we do. I think we'll have 200 seats. We're going to do it at a dim sum place or peking duck place we teach people how to angel invest we do some live pitches and all the money goes to charity or i should say any of the proceeds go to charity because you know uh we do a little marketing on this and we uh spend a little bit on the uh dim sum but uh we have donated a large amount to charity i'm very proud of this and uh we do our workshop we try to teach people how to invest in private companies more intelligently we put you into a private Slack community.

1:13:08We give you some models and you can question us and tell us what you've learned in terms of the areas. You come to it, you meet another 200 people who are accredited investors. Angel.University to sign up. I think we're charging a thousand bucks and it includes lunch and we'll probably have like a little after party, but a fun thing to come to if you're independently wealthy, accredited investor and want to hang out with me and Mike in New York. It's a lot of fun. We do it once a year. join us if you want to learn from each other and us we also have the founder fridays city competition coming up all right we're going to do a city competition we did this in the early days of the show basically if you're part of founder fridays go to founder fridays.tech which is meetups for founders we're going to have each city do their own little competition so you do a pitch competition between your eight to 16 members in your community you tell us which one one your community so san diego will battle seoul will battle sydney will battle san paulo will battle sauganese new york the end and we'll make a lot of fun about it it'll be here on the program so your city will get some promotion and that startup will get some promotion go to founder fridays.tech to start your own chapter we do this just to help founders like everything we do it's just to support founders and inspire innovation.

1:14:29It's not a complicated formula here. Thank you so much, Alex. It's great to have you back. Thank you, producer, Maddie, Port, and Chris, and the sales team, Matt, Hannah, and Jamie, and of course, our co-host here, Alex Wilhelm. We'll see you all next time.