Tesla and Uber team up! Plus Weave Robotics’ Isaac and $OPEN bull Eric Jackson | E2180

27:55I think initially we will kind of rely a bit on our customers to kind of like make sure that like whatever is in this hamper is whatever you want to be folded together at first. But at the same time, we haven't shared too much publicly, but we have been working on kind of like the flow of interacting with the robot and what the app looks like what onboarding is going to look like and how you're going to assign different articles of clothing to different people. We'll have more to share on that soon, but it's definitely on our minds. But we're starting with a more simplified version of the problem.

28:32Yeah, here's the hamper. This is Johnny's hamper. This is Jane's hamper. This is dad's. This is mom's. That just totally makes it easy. But of course, if it's in dad's hamper, then, you know, you start to learn dad's sizes, you learn his brands, so many different ways to just have this become automated. What a great idea. You've picked a really hard challenge, but an important one. And we wish you great success with it. Thanks for coming on the program. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you. And if you're listening to this and want to take a look at it, it's WeaveRobotics.com. Though, Jason, I have to say, it'd be great if I...

29:06WeaveRobotics.com, if you want to put in a pre-order or sign up for their email list. And people always ask me, how can you support a startup if you're not investing money in it. Yeah, just giving them a shout out on social media or signing up for their email list, giving feedback, and then eventually buying the product. If you're a fan of startups and you want to see these things continue, that's why I always have no problem buying, you know, the 1.0 of a product, using it. And even if I don't wind up using it, I feel good that I contributed to the startup's, you know, iteration. The Roadster, when Elon started selling the Roadster, He said, you know, if you buy this car, is it worth$150K?

29:44You have other options. You could buy two cars. But if you look at it as an investment in the future of Tesla and eventually getting to a Model 3, you can also feel proud about that. Yeah. Buy early, buy often. Support your local startup. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it helps the overall ecosystem.

30:05Obviously, lots of people are worried about AI coming for their jobs. And, you know, it's not entirely unreasonable, but that's not the only story. For some people, hey, AI is going to make them a lot better at their jobs. And these individuals are the ones who are going to thrive in the next wave. And they 10x their productivity. Enter Miro's Innovation Workspace. From a company that's been helping teams collaborate and brainstorm for over a decade comes an AI-powered workspace that is not just going to take your ideas to the next level. It's going to help you progress from untructured data and a bunch of random notes to product briefs and prototypes in just minutes.

30:41It's a solution that will keep us all organized. And it isn't just moving these things around. It's turning them into polished charts, slick diagrams, well-designed slides. It's a massive time saver. Quickly start developing your next project without spending hours perfecting the ideal question or prompt. No, your whiteboard is Miro's prompt. So help your teams get great done with Miro. That's Miro.com to find out how. So I think probably the biggest news story out today is that it appears that TikTok is going to survive. We got a lot of notes recently about how this deal is coming together. So in the next 30 to 45 days, Jason, we're expecting to see a deal between China and the US that will allow for TikTok to continue operating here in the States.

31:27It appears that Oracle, Silver Lake, and Anderson Horowitz will end up with about 80 % of the company. I presume Oracle will remain its kind of cloud host here in the United States. The interesting thing, the thing that surprised me, and I'd love to get your take on this, is that the algorithm is not being fully sold to the future US entity. It's going to remain in Chinese hands. Now, as I understand it, the US company is going to have some say in how it's used, but there used to be a red line in which the algorithm had to be fully sold, and that does not appear to be the case in the final accounting.

31:59So your thoughts on this? Did we blink? Did we find the right deal here? It has to get divested and the algorithm needs to be eventually replaced so that something this powerful in terms of influence has some accountability. I think we're going to look back on this era and look at algorithms as something we should have regulated. And I'm not a big, huge fan of regulation. I know. That's a big statement. Yeah. I think they're so powerful in their ability to steer your belief systems. And that was my main objection to China owning this, is that if you want people to have a certain position on an international conflict like Russia invading Ukraine or the tragic situation in Israel and Gaza, you could, just with the most convincing thing in the world, short video clips.

33:05Like video clips are incredibly persuasive. When you see a video clip, your mind, because we're visual beings, are incredibly influenced. This is why documentary films have been known, for better or worse, to be so influential. They can change an entire society. Just people see a 60 Minutes piece or about tobacco companies, which maybe the Insider was based on, you know, it can change how the entire country views the cigarette companies. And so who controls that algorithm and to what end. I think a lot of the political division we're seeing in our country today is because of social media and mainstream media.

33:51Mainstream media learned early on, if you pick a side, you lose half the audience, but the audience you gain can become so rabid that it's worth just picking half the audience to get 80 % of it. see MSNBC, Fox, NPR, or, you know, any of the classic GOP, you know, radio hosts, Rush Limbaugh. I was thinking Rush. Yeah. So then you take it another step, which is, we're just going to tickle your outrage. And that to young people's brains, you could make them think anything. And in fact, adults could be swayed. Every time I watch a documentary, I just have like a massive warning signal up where I'm like, this director is manipulating me to some end.

34:45They're either trying to make this incredibly entertaining, emotionally provocative, whatever it happens to be. And so I think algorithms should be removable, swappable, and transparent. There should be a required time series feed that you can opt into to avoid the algorithm and feeding you things. But I think you make a great point on documentaries and their ability to influence, because one thing that I've also seen that worries me in this broader vein is things that look like documentaries that aren't. My spouse is a huge fan of things on Netflix that explain a topic. And I had to be like, OK, but this was all approved by Billie Eilish's team.

35:24This is not a third party group going in to try to understand her. This is her presenting herself to you using clips and voiceover and things that make it look like Ken Burns was somewhere in the room. But it's not a documentary. It's a hagiography, right, which is different. So that's another thing that scares me. But yes, in the case of TikTok, though, I think that algorithm, the transparency would be huge. So I'm hoping that, you know, Oracle and Jason and Silver Lake step up to the plate and build something that we can take a look at. And then I hope YouTube and X and Reddit and everyone else kind of follows suit.

35:55Transparency here would be huge. X has already done that. They released their algorithm and - Did they keep getting updated? That's cool. Yeah, they released it just 10 days ago, I think. And when Elon released it and he open sourced it, he said, I'm doing this because I think our algorithm kind of sucks and I want it to get better. And I've had conversations with him about, publicly and he's talked about it. I mean, I've had these conversations literally on X of would be really great to BYOA. bring your own algorithm. And then when you then have an algorithm store. So this is what I pitched the social media companies on is create an algorithm store where I can buy, you know, for five bucks or a dollar, just like I could buy an app or a ringtone, an algorithm.

36:43And I might want an algorithm that is world positive, that is fact checked. I might want one that's chaotic. I might want one that's the trending news. I might want one that's the most engaged news that doesn't have a lot of views. So lots of comments, lots of back and forth, but not a lot of views, right? Those would be like emerging conversations, all kinds of interesting things you could do. But I think these things are evil as constructed today. I'll put them in the category of evil because I think the people making them and who are deploying them, the Meta Corporation across their different platforms and TikTok are doing it with absolutely no conscience.

37:28So anyway, it all comes back to these algorithms, which are dangerous. And I think they're polluting people's minds in a way that is super dangerous. We need to have a regulation that the algorithm breaks the 230. Section 230 protections. Yes. I think the algorithm should break Section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it because it's micro-targeted and it never sleeps unless it breaks it unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in. Just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice.

38:12So when you load certain browsers, they will say, which search engine do you want to use? or at least give you the ability to go into the settings and say, I want Bing, I want DuckDuckGo, I want Google, I want perplexity, I'm going to pick it. That's like a very common sense solution here, which is every 30 days, it shows you your algorithm. It shows you how, what the, what, it gives you a report card of what the algorithm thinks you like. You like Corvettes, you like heavy metal, you like full self-driving, you know, whatever, you like Sopranos clips, It should just tell you what it's doing. And then they pretend like, oh, we can't tell you what it's doing.

38:48Of course you can. Of course you can. That's where regulation, common sense regulation would be very helpful here. Well, I hope we get some of that when the TikTok deal winds down. But Jason, we do have someone who's very good at taking advantage of social media algorithms to get attention to their efforts. So I want to bring up our next guest. I want to bring up Eric Jackson from EMJ Capital. Now, we've talked about Open Door on the show before, Jason. We've talked about so-called meme stocks on the show before. I don't think we've yet had an activist investor perform their campaign in the streets.

39:19So Eric Jackson is here. He's protesting outside of Drake's house every morning, trying to get to the Canadian entrepreneur and rapper to buy a share of Open Door, talking his book in the best possible way. Eric, welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Great to be with you. Eric, how would you describe what you do for a living? This is a full-time job. What do you do for a living? And, you know, I'm obviously running into you now on the socials because I YOLO'd into Open and quite publicly did it. So tell us, what do you do for a living? Who are you and how would you describe your job? Well, I would describe myself as a hedge fund manager.

39:59So I kind of got my start 20 years ago with Terry Semmel at Yahoo. who? Um, basically, um, I had been, I did a PhD at Columbia business school and strategy and management. I decided I didn't want to be an academic. Uh, I got a job that was like during dot com. So I got a job offer to work at a software startup in Toronto, like in March, 2000, uh, to, and loved that for four years, did management consulting after that. And then, But I'd heard of activist investing when I was actually a PhD student. And I'd kind of always been intrigued by it. And I was living down in Naples, Florida, living in this condo and reading the Wall Street Journal one day.

40:45And I read about this guy, Brad Gerlinghouse, who wrote the Peanut Butter Manifesto. And how Yahoo was so kind of screwed up. It was all these different directions and stuff. And I thought this would be a perfect company to do an activist campaign on. But I don't have an activist hedge fund. So, but this was 06, 07. So like, you know, Facebook was just getting started, YouTube and blogging, you know, Web 2.0 and all the rest. And so I said, well, maybe, you know, like I as this like retail shareholder, I could start, I could leverage social media and actually conduct my own activist campaign. And so I went to the office depot in North Naples.

41:22I bought like a$35 webcam to stick into my like brick of a laptop. and then I got up on a Sunday morning when my wife was still asleep because I was embarrassed she was going to catch me doing this and like on the guest bed, like recorded myself making a YouTube seven minute video, like my manifesto for turning around Yahoo and uploaded it to YouTube. That was on a Sunday. And like by the Thursday, the New York Times had written an article about me, you know, basically saying this is like a man bites dog story, you know, and, you know, everybody loves a good, you know, topical company like Yahoo was.

41:57I was kind of like going after the Kardashians at the time in tech. And so. But did you wind up making money from that trade? Did you know you just learn a hell of a lot? I just well, it kind of became 10 years of my life because it went on and on. I mean, first, I was like lobbying for them to accept the Microsoft deal, which they did. Forty billion dollars. Yes. Yes. And then but then, you know, we went through like this cavalcade of CEOs like there was Jerry Yang and Carol Bartz and then Scott Thompson. You remember him? you know and like he got fired for fetching his uh computer science degree from stone hill college and all this kind of stuff and then dan lobe you know and meanwhile we get carl icon rides into the rescue apparently the smart guy is going to figure it out he failed and he was gone then dan lobe comes in was a smart activist smart money you know from well street yeah hire appoints mercer mayor um not not not the best choice i mean she was like buzzy at the time but obviously couldn't run a company she knew she had some ideas around product that she had learned at google um but yeah which led to what was the big acquisition she did the tumblr tumblr yeah a couple of billion dollars and then they told her famously a couple of like months into it like by the way do you know this thing is filled with porn she's like what right turn that off and then they turned it off and then that was the end of tumblr they're like there's adult content on this open publishing platform shockingly enough but uh and if you don't know what happened there here's a headline how tumblr went from a one billion dollar yahoo payday to a three million dollar fire sale which is a 99.7 percent i think uh reduction in value disaster so okay you learn a bunch there so i learned a lot i had a friend in naples who was like he was a 51 year old retired hedge fund manager living in naples at the time and he said you know what you've got to start your own fund you know here here's how you do it and so forth and so i did and friends and family and put a fund together but i thinking i was going to do activism but it's pretty tough to do activism with like a two million dollar hedge fund or a 20 even a 20 million dollars hedge fund right as i soon found out because the press attention with yahoo was as important as the dollars that were behind me at the time and so um i eventually like i latched on to some guy in new york who had like a smallish activist fund and did a kind of Yahoo round two with Marissa, 90 page like PowerPoint, you know, kind of campaign against her and then one against Philippe Daumont at Paramount.

44:25But then I kind of clashed with the New Yorker who didn't like the fact that I was getting asked to go on CNBC more than he was. And then I met a billionaire who had like I'd come to know through Yahoo. Like he wasn't a billionaire when I first met him. But he was like, Eric, I love what you're doing. You got like an interesting point of view on on public companies. How about I give you some money from my family office to manage? But just one request, like, can you not do the activism? Because, you know, what happens if some intrepid like Wall Street Journal reporter figures out that I gave you money?

44:57And then Eric's coming out and saying, like, Marissa is terrible as a CEO. And it turns out I've got a partnership with Marissa. It's just a bad look. So how about you just do pure passive investing? So I said, great, give me the money, sign me up. And I started doing, you know, investing in the Twilios of like the last decade and the Rokus and the Carvanas and every hot news, you know, tech startup that came public. You know, I was in and I was shooting the lights out, killing it. And then 2021 comes along in 2022. And I realized that, oh, the macro is important. Oh, I guess like Twilio just doesn't go up forever.

45:34and uh i got my sort of head handed to me kathy wood style in those years and unfortunately the the billionaire took his money out at the end of of uh 22 and so he was like 99 of my aem so like i was sort of uh figuring out what i'm what am i going to do i got four kids i got two dogs i got you know my wife the support and everything what's going to happen so i i but decided not to shut down my hedge fund though. So I had like lawyers and all these people I was paying telling me, Eric, you know, you got to shut it down. It's, it's hopeless and stuff. And you know, it's, it's sort of, you built it, you paid for this infrastructure that you're supposed to be managing millions and hundreds of millions, not just like scraping by, but I didn't want to do that.

46:18Oh, I also had this like up and down performance and they said, you know, you know, the good way to, uh, you know, get away from your back, you know, choppy track record, You just shut your hedge fund down. And then like six months from now, you know, start a new one. And then you don't have to show your track record. And no one's the wiser. And that's what everybody does who's got like terrible performance and stuff. And I was like, ah, it doesn't feel right and so forth. And so I just sort of like I started building an AI team at my fund. I mean, it started with one guy and then two guys and three guys.

46:47And I felt like, you know, eventually AI is going to, you know, revolutionize hedge funds just like it's going to revolutionize every other industry. I might as well try to do something unique and different here on my little hedge fund and try to figure something out. And then I'll market myself and so forth. And but we had like, oh, ups and down months. And, you know, again, like all these the fund directors in the Cayman Islands were like, what is going on? You know, you're up 40 percent one month. You're down 60 percent one month. What's the point, Eric? But I just sort of kept on, kept on.

47:18And then, you know, like my big hit was that I got into Carvana in May of 23 when it had gone from 400 bucks to$3.50 in December 22. And now it's come all the way back to 400. And I... What did you see there? Like just concisely, what was the big insight of buying something that had lost 99 % of its value and was in most people's minds circling the drain. To be honest, when I was back as a PhD student at Columbia, I'd done this like big study of corporate governance and all, you know, at the time McKinsey had paid my professor all this money to do a research because everyone at that time and still today says, oh, you know, maybe diversity on the board is good.

48:07Maybe having a younger board is good and linked to better performance. Maybe having, you know, this type of background and that of background is better and um but nobody had actually studied it and actually seen what is linked to better performance you know upper you know from from a uh you know a director's perspective yeah from a directors on what does that say yeah about the culture of the company are they founders who have skin in the game or is it like some of these other ones where it's performative and they're getting what 250k a year 500k a year in cash comp you know and then they're just doing it for the money i know those directors because they will ping me sometimes they want to be in a hot startups board and i'm like what is this person actually adding to so bring into the table so what did the research show mckinsey gave me all this money i hired like five columbia college kids and they had i had to send them down to the world trade center to the sec library and they had to physically photocopy like the the actual you know prospectuses from all these public companies and we had to code all this data about their ages of the directors and comp and like how did they get paid was it stock options was it in cash comp and all this kind of stuff anyway the big net result was the only thing that mattered none of this diversity stuff mattered none of you know all these like common prescriptions the only thing that mattered was skin in the game and by skin in the game, I mean, not RSUs given to people, not found money, but actually directors who dug into their own pocket with their own money after tax money, and had actually bought stock.

49:40And it didn't matter. No, sometimes it was a million dollars worth of stock. Sometimes it was a hundred thousand dollars worth of stock, but you just wanted to see evidence of interest and belief in that company through those share purchases. And so the one thing I saw at Carvana in 2022 is that on the way down from$400 down to$3.50, Ernie Garcia Jr., who's, you know, he's wealthy, right? His dad was wealthy. He's wealthy. Okay. You know, he was, he was like born on second base or whatever, but he bought$70 million, seven zero of, of Carvana stock on the way down in one tranche at 50 million at$50 a share in March of 22.

50:22And another tranche in June of 22 at$20 a share. And then the stock just kept dropping. Like it didn't stop until it was$3.50. The other thing that, you know, piqued my interest, which I never saw once in any of those SEC filings from 25 years ago, and I never have seen it today, is that I noticed this chief product officer for Carvana, a guy named Dan Gill, had bought$3 million of stock himself in Thanksgiving of 2022, when the stock was$7.50. And it just so happened that he followed me on Twitter. So I DM'd him and I said, could I give you a call? I'd love to chat. And he said, sure. And I started talking to him and it turns out he's Canadian like me, but he lives in Santa Monica now.

51:06And so we're catching up about that. And then I said, I got to tell you, I never see chief product officers spending$3 million. I said, like, I know if that was me, if I was in your shoes and I came home and told my wife, you know, hey, honey, you know, this company Carvana, where I work, where like 90 % of our wealth is tied up into the stock price of Carvana. And it's gone from 400 to$7.50. What I want to do is I want to take$3 million of our own money and put it, put it in more Carvana shares. I honestly don't know if I would have won that argument with her, especially like, you know, I don't want to diversify.

51:42I want to consolidate more. I want this one giant stock. So this is an incredible insight. So then that leads us to. Well, and so he said, like, I really believe in Ernie. I know it's going to be tough. You know, it's not it's not a layup that we're getting back to 400. You know, we have a lot of issues that we have to deal with. But, you know, we've known each other since Stanford. Everybody else on the team knows each other. When I heard him say that, I just said it's going to happen for sure. For sure. These guys are going to come back. And all the hedge fund bros on Twitter, anonymous accounts, they were dancing on the grave of Carvana.

52:13They're like, these guys are bunch of criminals and all this kind of stuff nobody said anything positive i didn't see anything positive about caravan until the thing was above 300 a share that's a great segue to open door because i feel like for a long time people have been dancing on that grave and you on the other hand had a very different thesis so eric why don't you tell us what caught your eye about it and when you bought it i think it's a very similar company carvana like once revolutionizing used cars going direct, you know, getting rid of the, you know, used car dealerships that you used to have to go to, to, to buy and sell your used car.

52:46The other is obviously trying to disrupt the traditional agent and, and go direct to you. Both have needed a lot of debt to kind of build that. Both were encouraged by Wall Street to kind of grow, grow, grow, you know, at all costs, you know, growth first, profits second, and then both got hit over the head when interest rates jacked up so much in, you know, 21 and 22. And so, and then both got left for debt. And I just thought that both would eventually prove that they could be profitable with their direct approach, just like Uber. I mean, Jason, you would know this better than I do, but I mean, as recently as like 22, you know, like three years ago, I remember it would be common.

53:28You'd flip on CNBC and say, they'll never be profitable at this business. It's impossible to make money at right here. It's so funny because we, you know, as the early investors in the company had had conversations about, OK, we're going to lose three dollars a ride, two dollars a ride. It's going to increase people's adoption of the technology and increase market share. And we're going to go quickly around the world. And if people can get a ride for five bucks and the subway is two fifty or the bus is three dollars, wow, they can kind of do that math in their head and give it a shot. And then once they've got it on their phone, okay, well, you know, now you got a rainy day or you're had a couple of drinks and after work and you're like, you know what, I just want to get home safely.

54:12I'm going to take an Uber. And I went on CNBC and Deidre Bosa was coming at me so hard. And I said, Deidre, do you think anybody is going to stop using Uber if their$12 ride is 14 or 15? And she was like, pause for a second. And she was like, maybe. And I was like, nobody. right nobody just like nobody who paid nine dollars for netflix is going to unsubscribe at fourteen dollars you can you can you have pricing power if it's a great service you can just add to it and i said if they did a billion rides on the cnbc if they did a billion rides and they lost two billion just do the math they lost two dollars per ride let's say they make they add two dollars to every ride now they're profitable at two billion what do you think of the business and it was at 20 bucks a share, 30 bucks a share.

55:00I bought more shares at 30. I bought more shares at 30. I bought more Robinhood at 12. And, uh, you know, they, these weird dislocations do happen. Um, so what's the state of it now and what role does creating like an army, like an open army, uh, you know, and what's the difference between your approach and say meme stocks where AMC and GameStop, you're like, well, wait a second, those seem like terrible businesses at their core that have been disrupted, blockbuster or whatever, that they're just going to have a really hard time coming back. So what's the difference here with Open? Well, Open had terrible management and kind of arguably a lackadaisical board, you know, a much worse management than Carvana did.

55:46And this stock hit an all-time low at 51 cents on June 25th. So we're not even three months removed from this. And the stock is now over 10 bucks today. So we've 20X in less than three months, but it's not because the brilliant management, it's not, and there wasn't any buying. In fact, it was the opposite. Everyone was RSU dumping. Carrie Wheeler, who was the former CEO, was just constantly selling. She sold a big bunch of shares under a 10B51 plan at 56 cents a share. It was kind of disgusting. So anyway, I built, I did my analysis. I said, you know, obviously macro, you know, rate cuts are coming.

56:22That's going to help their business a lot. And they had indicated that they were about to have their first EBITDA positive quarter in the first time in three years. And so that's, they got to get to steady state profitability, but I could see some like things that were positive on the horizon. And they, unlike Carvana, they have no competition left nationally in iBuying. Redfin got out of it. Zillow got out of it. So think about Uber, if there was no Lyft, you know, and the potential pricing power there. Now, obviously they can't just do iBuying. There has to be something else as well. And so I was always a believer, and I think this is true, that like with Carvana, they don't make most of their money from the buying and selling of cars.

56:59It's finance and interest. Like 80 % of their EBITDA, 20 % margin, you know, comes from finance and interest. With Opendoor, it could be mortgage and title. You know, they've sort of made sort of half-assed attempts at it before, but not really. And so I come out with this like tweet on July 14, when it was like 88 cents. I built my position maybe like 73, 74 cents. I came out with this tweet storm that basically said, you know, here's my case for open. And I think three years from now, they get back to steady state profitability. There'll be a re-rating of the stock, just like there has been with Carvana on a forward price to sales basis.

57:33This thing should be$82 a share. And it was like, holy cow,$82 for an 88 cent stock that's about to, you know, risk being delisted on NASDAQ and so forth. It's just caused a huge buzz. people immediately sort of fixated on this odd number of 82. Like it just like, why 82? Why not 100? Why not 75? Like, why? Explain this to me. Yeah, but you built a model and that's the number that came out of the model. Yeah. So anyway, but and then it was a week, you know, the thing just sort of took off. And within 10 days, like it hit five bucks, it got halted on the NASDAQ. There was like 2 billion shares traded one day.

58:10They only have 700 million shares. And this is because you have so many retail investors on Robinhood. This is like the Robinhood effect that people can just very quickly make. There was that. And there was the Carvana angle, I think was significant. And the fact that I had called Carvana, I think definitely gave me credibility. And I heard from so many people, not just in the U.S. That was the other shocking thing. Open doors only in the U.S. I'd say 75 % of the retail supporters are outside the U.S. And they all said the same thing. They all said, I missed Carvana. I'm not going to miss this one.

58:38I'm not going to. This is generational So there's some FOMO there. For sure. Yeah. For sure. So, but one of the things that seems to happen when this FOMO occurs and you've got a bunch of lunatics who I watch them and I'm like, you know what? I actually know Keith, well, boy, I know the business. I like the business. I've had the founders on before. I'm going to YOLO into this. And I think that there could be a turnaround here. And I was aware of your work. So I was like, yeah, sure. I now make bets to learn. It's a very strange thing to do, but like when I was experimenting with prediction markets, I was like, let me just place some small bets on prediction markets to learn and see while I have skin in the game, now you have my attention.

59:21I think a lot of people have started doing this. They're like, I'll just buy$1 ,000 worth of something or$10 ,000 worth of something or $500, whatever they can do that's de minimis. And then they have their attention. They watch it go up and down every day. And then something happened in the last couple of weeks where the fact that this started to turn around and there was some attention and enthusiasm on it, essentially a dead brand, all the old investors and a new CEO emerged and Keith Rappoy went on CNBC and he started talking about it. So maybe you talk about what happens when you identify something and then, you know, people with gravitas get involved.

59:58Well, the one thing I did learn from 10 years of, you know, beating my brain in with Yahoo is all the tricks that that board tried to play with me. And they tried to ostracize me and say, Eric's just an idiot up in Canada. What does he know? He doesn't have the long-term view. Like I was in the stock for 10 years and I didn't have a long-term view on Yahoo. You know, like we have a plan. We know what we're doing. It's all part of a plan. The fact that our stock is like doing nothing for seven years. and so I didn't want to repeat that same you know same stuff and I knew Keith you know obviously wrote the business plan I had enormous respect for him you know I I'd never met him until a couple of weeks ago but my dream of all dreams was that one day you know I could convince Keith to come back in and join the board of this company because I know that there are just certain people that have you know bring with them a certain magic pixie dust and that gets sprinkled over the company.

1:00:53And I knew that Keith could do that. I knew he would attract other talented people to the team and so forth. And I started to notice as I tweeted about it, that Keith was liking my tweets and then saying supportive things. And so I just started getting more and more locked at the hip with Keith. And I knew that if that happened, the open door would be flummoxed because they could no longer say, these guys don't get it. Keith Rboy doesn't get it because he's the guy who wrote the business plan. So they would, you know, have to hopefully come around. And, you know, that's what ended up happening.

1:01:29My, and, and Keith just got more and more energized. I had the chance to meet him just a couple of weeks ago in New York and Soho and just spent an hour with him and just hearing about, you know, exchanging ideas about where we think the business can go and the possibilities and it, you know, literally goosebumps. And so the fact then that suddenly he's back on the board. He's a chair. Eric Wu, a co-founder, is back on the board. And immediately they bring in Kaz, who was the CEO of Shopify, to be the CEO. I don't think people, you know, I was in New York just a couple of nights ago and I was at like some cocktail party and all people could talk about is, can you believe they got Kaz to run this company?

1:02:05They got a significant CEO and then you architected, or they architected, I should say, I believe, a deal for him that is reminiscent of, say, Elon's original deal with Tesla and now the new one, which is, hey, if the stock hits certain prices, you get certain compensation. So you only win if the shareholders win. I mean, it was mind blowing to me that anybody put up a fuss about Elon's thing in the first place, because I remember when that whole thing was up in the media, I could pull a CNBC clip from the day that that deal was announced in 2018 or 19 or whatever it was. And there were these anchors in Davos, Switzerland, that day talking about it, laughing, saying there's no way he will ever achieve this, of course, you know.

1:02:51And so that was the point of view at the time that he was given this call. And then to go back later and try to say like, oh, this is unfair. I mean, every this is like to your thesis of do the board members have skin in the game? It should be required that when you join the board of these companies, you have to pay for some shares and put some skin in the game. And if you don't, like, why are you here? or you're some academic, or you're, you know, I don't know, you check a box or something. It's just not, it doesn't make any sense. Well, I've had a conversation. I won't say his name here, because, you know, he's a good guy.

1:03:21But I had a heated discussion with one of the directors of Opendoor, who said, you say I didn't buy shares. I bought shares in Opendoor. I said, when did you buy shares? I haven't seen the SEC filings that said that. Oh, it was in 2016. When it was private, you bought shares? Yeah. I said, but I don't know. I'm talking about when it's a public company. well my my my firm my my firm uh my vc firm you know botches i said that's other people's money that's not your money oh have you seen my gp commit of course it's my you know i had to i had to buy i said it's not the gp commit might be low single digits of the fund so they could be some millions of dollars they have but i do think yeah i said you want your 50 000 just 200 000 just show faith just show the shareholders that you are at all everybody all the retail all these retail people, all they care about is this woman, Carrie, was dumping shares at 56 cents a share to us retail.

1:04:13So let's see a little sign that you're on our side. There was a moment where Dara bought, I think,$10 million in Uber shares, and it was probably in the 30s. And so you have to just wonder, like, okay, the CEO of the company believes that this is a good deal and he's going to double or triple his money. And then you look at his comp package, and you're like, oh,$8 million is a significant number for him of, as you said earlier, post-tax dollars. And, you know, that to me was another great sign. All right, listen, continued success with it. I yoloed into it. I went in and as I publicly said, I'm going to buy this thing.

1:04:49I know it's going to work. So I'm just going to sell a couple of shares as this thing pops in the next six months to cover my base and then I'll have free shares. It happened in the next five days. I appreciate that. You cranberryed in, I believe was your word. Cranberry in Vegas. I have one more request and I said the same to Keith. I don't know if I'm joining the board. We want Shamath back. Oh, bestie C. Bring him home. You know, bring him home. I don't know why he hasn't tweeted about it. He hasn't talked about it. A lot of people criticize him and say, oh, you know, IPOB or C or whatever it was.

1:05:24You know, he should have stuck around or whatever. I have the highest respect for him. Another bright Canadian, by the way, I'll point out. But I will say everybody loves the redemption arc. You can't tell me that Keith Reboi does not love the redemption arc going on right now. In some ways, I think Open Door must be his favorite of all his private holdings. This has got to be his most energizing. I think Shamath would find the same. That would be very interesting if he came back. Put in a good word for me. Continued success. And are you going to do another one of these this year? I was looking at Nextdoor, which I had YOLO'd into like a year or two ago.

1:05:58And I'm like, God, I love that company. The founder's back. It's such a great product. Like, I just feel like Nextdoor has some of that potential. I've been pitched on Nextdoor. I get five pitches a day, private DMs. People saying, hey, can you pump my bags in this or pump my bags in that? I'm not pumping bags, but what do you look at and go, that's a killer product? I do have an announcement. I think I'm going to be making it next week of my next 100 bagger. So, you know, watch for that and I'll DM it to you or whatever. So to make sure you see it. it's a good company. It's not a screw-up company where I'm going to be immersed in marrying the CEO or something like that.

1:06:34So I'm really excited about it. And my hope had been to find one of these once every six months. I mean, it's obviously tough in the public markets to find 100 backers, especially all these private companies stay private longer. I think there's a playbook emerging, which is incompetent, non-skin-in-the-game individuals running companies with no downside. They've basically got no downside. And if you can have people join these companies and say, hey, you do have some downside. We've been asking you to put some millions of dollars in on your time, but the upside could be really great. That's actually a really good playbook.

1:07:12I think what you're doing is an important function in the market, which is identifying people who are not aligned properly. All right. Good luck with everything, Eric. Thanks for coming. on the show. All right. Great job, Eric. And I saw Waymo tap Lyft for their fleet management in the city. Yeah, this is a really interesting one. There were two Uber stories back to back. Yesterday, Uber and Tesla did a partnership for freight. So this is a very big story. Everybody said, oh, Tesla and Uber will never join forces. Well, there you have it. And then people thought Lyft was dead and circling the drain and they get Nashville.

1:07:53You can explain all of these things. When there is a big opportunity like autonomy and it's competitive, if I'm Waymo, I want to be on all platforms. Just like if I owned a hotel chain, if I own the W Hotels, am I going to be on hotels.com and not Expedia or I'm going to be on Expedia and not this other platform hotel tonight? I'm going to be on every platform and I'm going to try to negotiate the best possible deal. Conversely, if I'm Expedia, am I only taking Marriott's and I'm not taking Holiday Inns? Of course not. So what a lot of the Tesla Q or Tesla Bulls or Waymo Bulls, Waymo people criticizing them, what they don't realize is it's a dynamic marketplace that is global with many different product offerings.

1:08:42Zoox will eventually be part of the Uber network and the Lyft network. Lyft will have, you know, Lucids and Neuro on it eventually. If you have one of these assets, you would want it to have full utilization. You wouldn't do an exclusive unless there was some incredible reason to do so. And exclusives very rarely exist. If you look at the DoorDash exclusives or Uber trying to do exclusives for food. Eventually all these folks are like, yeah, you know, we did an exclusive for two years to get, I don't know, McDonald's or Starbucks on a platform. But I think you can get Starbucks on all the platforms now.

1:09:19Yes, yeah. I do recall there was a time you could only get Mission Chinese in San Francisco on DoorDash. So I was an entirely Uber Eats guy and then DoorDash for that one restaurant. I remember hating them for that exclusive. But yeah, super effective. So Jason, this podcast, a lot of people watch it on YouTube. We do a live stream, of course, everywhere around the internet. but people have really taken to video podcasts as kind of the new format. So audio is still quite big, but YouTube has noticed that people are doing this. I think they said that they got 100 million hours of podcasts consumed daily as of July over on YouTube.

1:09:52So not a huge surprise. YouTube is rolling out new tools. And I think we might actually use these because they can help with some of our editing requirements. What they're gonna roll out is an AI workspace that makes suggestions about clips to cut for social media, which is something that we've been talking about internally. making better short clips. We talked about TikTok earlier on in the show. Yeah. And a feature that's going to help audio podcasters make videos so they can be on YouTube in a more engaging format. So leveraging video and getting more video podcasts out, a great use of AI, I think.

1:10:22Yeah. So a tool that let you take an audio only podcast, like say Adam Curry's No Agenda, and then just create supplemental visuals based on what they're talking about or just something that looked good and had like a wave on it, you could very easily get those podcasts onto YouTube. I don't know what percentage of podcasts are just audio-based still, but there's a number of them. And that would be like really amazing. Generative AI to make compelling graphics or just any kind of graphic. I mean, even if it was just a logo with a sound wave, that would be better than not having them on YouTube because YouTube is so ubiquitous and the algorithm's so good.

1:11:04I would love to make it my primary podcast player. Did you ever see those lyric videos that bands with lower budgets put out when they drop an album so they can't make it a lot of music videos? I mean, just give me a lyric video for a podcast. Use the AI tools, transcribe it, put that on the screen. I can read while I listen. I love that. All right, everybody. It's been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. You can sign up for our newsletter on Substack. Just search for This Week in Startups over there. And then we go live there. There's a nice chat room. You can follow me on LinkedIn.

1:11:32We go live there. And yeah, there's a subreddit. We don't really check it too often. We probably should. But we're going to start the Discord up again and probably move from this week in startup Slack, which is just not the right software for this. I think everybody's kind of hanging out in Discord now. So we'll be over in Discord soon for community stuff. We're hiring a, speaking of video editors, we need somebody in Austin. Don't have to have a college degree. Do have to be creative. Do need to know how to do CapCut. So if you email capcut at launch.co and just send us some samples, you know, we'll hire you in the office.

1:12:09Eat some barbecue with us. Hang out. Make clips of the show and help us edit the show. Produce the show. We're looking for somebody. So we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye. Bye.