Meme Marketing with Investor Alex Cohen

Sup nerds. Today I talked to one of the funniest people on Twitter. His name is Alex Cohen. He is an investor, he's a founder, and he is a meme lord to the extreme. Alex has built his audience to almost 200,000 followers shitposting and dropping funny memes. I really enjoyed this conversation and I learned a lot from Alex about how he's using meme marketing to grow his brands and the brands that he's investing in. One of Alex's recurring bits is that every time there's a scandal at some company, maybe OpenAI or Google or whatever, He says, hey, my name's Alex. I just got fired from blank. And then explains why, right? Jokingly. And this actually drives revenue for him.

How?

I guess you'll find out, right? Memes make millions. This is the Attention Economy 101. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Alex Cohen. Gushers were not, they weren't good for me.

That's why we're all, that's why we're all autistic as adults.

We're all autistic making memes and writing tweets is 'cause of Gushers and Fruit Roll-Ups.

Skittles, Gushers, Fruit Roll-Ups.

Dude, Lucky Charms, that shit should not have been legal.

No, it's good though.

I eat it as an adult. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like Gushers shouldn't be legal either. They, that could, that should be like a, a class 2 substance of some sort. Same as like heroin or something. Maybe below heroin, but like above Advil or something. You ready to start kicking it?

Yeah, I finished food. I'm full. I'm, uh, I'm happy, so I'm ready to, to do whatever. All right.

Question number 1, how have you gotten fired from so many companies?

I'm just a serial firee and I can't hold a job anywhere. Somehow every large tech company likes to employ me for a couple weeks at a time and then I always am the one to take the blame, but I'm happy to take the blame. Part of my philosophy on work is accountability and I live that through and through. I've been fired at OpenAI for being the Director of board Dex and fired at Google for caring too much about trust and safety, and then fired at Twitter for accidentally locking our entire exec team out when with their badge access. You know what, one of these days I'll hold down a job and, and all will be great.

Believe in you, man. I've been fired from SpaceX 'cause I was on the team that was supposed to make it not go boom, but then it went boom. Yeah, that was a tough one. I got fired from OpenAI as well for drinking Sam Altman's Diet Cokes.

Oh, can't do that.

That was rough. Yeah, man, my parents were very disappointed. Actually, I put CEO of OpenAI on my LinkedIn during like the whole crisis and my grandma called, congratulated me, and it was the cutest thing. Just absolute confusion.

Your grandma has a LinkedIn?

Yeah, I asked her why and she's, I don't know, but somebody linked me in. Just some Jewish grandma being adorable. And goofy.

Sylvia, Sylvia retired '70, like graduated from high school in 1910 on her LinkedIn.

Shelly, she was manufacturing parts in the war. Not even, that's what she was doing was just working in some war or something.

That's right.

Great. Let's, yeah, let's talk resume for a sec. So I didn't realize like you founded a couple companies, right? Yeah. In the past. And then I only came upon your work when you were at Carbon Health and now you're on Spendoso and investing. So would love to just hear a bit in your words about the journey so far.

For sure. Most people don't know that I have real jobs, even though I joke about being fired. I'm on Twitter a lot of the day firing off memes and shitposts, and I've always considered it the yin to my yang of I've got this real important job in healthcare and we're like serving a whole bunch of patients, but then online I enjoy making jokes and bringing out that, that comedy side of me. I'm also a very sarcastic person in real life and I think you either learn to embrace it or you just get really annoyed. There's no in between. But Twitter's a good reflection of, of who I am in, in real life. I started my career actually like starting companies and just going face first into them. Started two, one got acquired back in 2018. We were working on a personal finance app for people to help them optimize the different types of financial products they were using based on their spending habits. And turns out that's a very challenging business. It's not a very big business to be in the business of making affiliate fees from credit cards. At some point there's been some successful companies that have done it. It's very hard to do it as an app. I have not yet seen a company become very large besides Credit Karma and NerdWallet who have been operating in that space. And then there's a few blogs. And then after I stayed at the acquiring company, which I moved to New York for, I left and started a second company. We raised a couple million dollars to build a productivity operating system that basically connected all of your tools and then gave you this command line interface before generative AI was a thing. We were building all the natural language input and turning that into like real actions across your different apps. And then we had a big co-founder breakup back in, that was the end of 2020. So we like got started in November 2020, no, sorry, November 2019. We raised $2 million in March 2020. So about 4 years ago today or sometime this week probably. And then in November 2020, we just had a big co-founder breakup. We were not a good match, like big divorce. And he got, I know he got to keep the kids and I went on and became a bachelor and joined Carbon. And then yes, I stayed at Carbon for 3 years running all of our consumer products. So if you've ever been to a Carbon Health clinic and you've used the app or booked an appointment online or chatted with your provider, really did anything that involved like touching anything Carbon Health from a consumer perspective, that was my team for the last 3 years. And throughout that time I ended up raising a small seed fund, a couple small seed funds. We've been investing out of that since late 2019. We've done like 90 investments so far or something like that. And that's been going pretty well. Other than that, just had two kids in that process and now figuring out what's next with my life and bootstrapping and hacking on Spendoza, which you mentioned. I've just always loved building things with small teams and probably will continue to do that forever. Just who knows what each thing will be.

Oh yeah, I feel that. I love working on a hundred different projects and my fiancée just gets a little confused sometimes of what the focus is and it's like everything, baby, everything.

Yeah. Look, that's just a downstream byproduct of us eating too many Gushers when we were kids. Like now we all have ADHD from all the Red 40.

So many Gushers, so many Lucky Charms. Um, curious, getting co-founder breakup sounds messy. Could you walk somebody through that or how to cope with that? How'd you deal with that? Because dude, I've worked with friends, that shit, it's tough when it goes sour.

Yeah, I think it can be messy if you make it messy. Generally, like, I think that's the rule of thumb with these things is typically you have two very irrational or three very irrational co-founders. They're all very emotionally driven. They're all in love with the project they're working on. They all somewhat hate each other at some point. And, and then it ends up being messy because you're like fighting really over who gets to keep the kids, which in this case is full custody of the company and continue working on it. And I think in our case, I tried to be as level-headed as possible and said, you know what, what's best for the company is if I leave and at least I can walk away without destroying the entire enterprise value along the way. And it's difficult to walk away from the thing you've dedicated a large portion of your, of your thought, of like, of your time to, and you're just like, you've been in it and you've built this thing from zero to one over a certain period of time. And it's hard to walk away from something like that. I think there's an emotional aspect. There's a sunken cost component. There's always going to be who's better at this role that should be continuing with the company. And I think in many of the co-founder breakups that I've seen, that have not been amicable, they're messy because someone just doesn't feel like that. They still believe that there's a large upside to be had, as we all do as founders who believe that there's— irrationally have this sort of like a hope that there will be a big outcome someday and you're walking away and giving that piece up. There's definitely a spite element where you're like, no, fuck this person. I don't want to leave. Like they should be the one to go. But ultimately I think it comes down to like how rational you can be about that decision. But it's hard because it really is not typically a rational decision. Book that goes on when you're deciding to essentially have a co-founder breakup. Then, and it could be for a number of different reasons, whether it's like you just, you're not compatible working styles, one person's checked out, or they did something like actually really bad and you have to fire them essentially. I think in most cases it tends to be a difference of two big things drive co-founder breakups. One is just very different working styles. You end up disagreeing over a whole bunch of stuff and That makes it to be a really, it's like being in a marriage and disagreeing with your spouse over everything. I think that's challenging and it's good to have disagreements. Like you should be able to disagree and commit and disagree and work together and have strong opinions that balance each other. You cannot be disagreeing and holding strong opinions on things that you loosely have an idea about and then fighting over them nonstop. That's just how you destroy, destroy these things. And it makes it really unpleasant to work on that thing when that's You know, you're waking up every morning saying, are we just going to argue today? And then the second thing is just there's always this element of how good is the other person at their job. When things are really stressful and you're getting a company off the ground, it's not going as well as you thought it would be. Like you always have this plan in your head. We're going to get to X number of users or X millions in revenue. It's going to take us this amount of money and like these hires and this product. And 99% of the time it doesn't go that way. It's like a much different journey and a path that ultimately gets you to, to that eventual outcome if you ever do get to that milestone. And along the way, things get really stressful. You have this timeline that you're fighting up against. You've got a lot of insecurities and doubts and things that are like, am I actually the right person to be running this company or this particular job function? Or then you start to push the blame, which is instead of being self-reflective, you go, that person is actually the reason why we're not doing well. And it's very easy to point fingers and put the blame on someone else. And I joked about this in the beginning of our call, but accountability's actually a really important thing where people are just not self-reflective enough to say, objectively look at something and say, this is what went wrong. This is actually my fault. These are the poor decisions I made, or we made the best decision that we had with the available information at that point in time, and we just had the wrong information or interpretation of that information. And instead they just say, this is broken. This is this person's fault. Like, growth is not there because my co-founder is working on growth and like, they just don't know what they're doing. It may be the case they don't know what they're doing. It may very likely be the case that it's not, that that's not the main reason why things aren't working. And so I think you find a lot of finger-blaming and pointing at these early-stage junctions when stress is really high, anxiety's high, and you've got investors who you have a responsibility to and, and, and you're trying to basically return capital that you've taken on. And when things don't go to plan, I think you find that folks start to disagree and point fingers over who's at fault. And that leads to a lot of these breakups.

Are you happier now as a solo bootstrap founder?

I'm not solo bootstrapping, so I do have a co-founder. We've worked together for 3 years at Carbon, so it was very clear that we had a good working relationship. We knew what we were doing together. Very clear separation and ba— of boundaries in terms of who owns which piece of the business. He's very happy to just build, recruit engineers, like If a great product, very happy to not have to touch marketing, go-to-market, onboarding customers, talking to customers, figuring out how to make money. And it's nice when you have like—

What about bootstrapped versus VC aspect?

They both have their different places. I think I will definitely go and start another venture-backed company at some point. I think you have to be really willing to eat glass and take a bet for 10+ years to do the thing. And like, you're really going for a home run. There is no, you can't just go and settle if you're raising money. I think I find that a lot of founders look at VC money as the very quick path to raising and de-risking that component of the business, but they have no intentions or they don't understand what it means to go and actually go spend the money it takes to go build a venture-backed company. And that's part of the struggles. Like there, there aren't a ton of other as easily accessible capital resources for starting a company. The best is customer funds, right? You build something, but you still have this period of time where you're not making any money. Who pays for it? Who subsidizes it? It's typically your time plus your money. And then when you start making custom money, that's the best way to fund a, like a steady growing healthy business. But then there's a lot of businesses that require some capital to get from zero to one. And there aren't a ton of other outlets or resources for that capital. Like you can raise an angel round or family and friends money. You could take a loan out from the bank. I guess that was the traditional thing. I'm going to walk into my bank and put a suit on and hope they give me a loan for $30,000 to get my steel business off the ground. but that's not a thing anymore. When you're building software, like there is no bank for software. And because you don't necessarily have these like very— banks are not in the business of underwriting product market fit in that regard. And so like you're saying, I'm building this whole brand new thing and they're like, we don't fucking know if it's going to work. You're a very high risk customer and banks are not in the business of that versus like VCs are, but there's this middle ground of it's medium risk and it's not going to generate revenue for some period of time. There isn't this like piggy bank that you go pull money from to go do that unless you're raising from family and friends or crowdfunding or maybe finding a type of venture fund that's in the business of 2 to 5x returns, not 1,000x returns. Anyway, sorry, this goes back to, they have different places. I think bootstrapping, way less stressful, way poorer during the process of doing it. Venture money, it's like immediate cash upfront, lots of stress, like you're hiring, you're burning a lot more money intentionally because you've gotta grow the business. You have more pressure and you're really like, I think that there's been amazingly wealthy, successful people that have been made through bootstrapping, owning 100% of the business. Like if you build a business to $500K a year, sell it for $3 or $4 million and you own 100% of it, that's fucking great. You might never get that level. Yeah. You might never get that level of payout if you even go raise 5 subsequent rounds of funding and then you sell the business for like half of what you raise, your investors get prepped stack, like two very different profiles of people who should be doing this thing.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people realize that when they go to raise money that they could potentially just bootstrap it, or maybe they do realize it and they just want the big check and they want to do that. But I've, it's crazy. I've been on the phone with plenty of bootstrap founders that are making more than the VC-backed ones. It is just unbelievable.

Oh wow.

That is weird. That doesn't make sense. Everybody outside of VC and startups just expects all venture-backed companies to be just glowing in money, but it's so many of them aren't. I've been ghostwriting for founders for the last 3 or 4 years. And so spent a lot of time talking with founders and they have recently been asking me, oh, when are you going to start something? When are you going to start something? I'm doing my thing. I'm doing my content empire. Started playing around with some SaaS ideas. It's the idea of something scalable is beautiful.

Yeah. And I think if you're raising venture money, like the thing that you ask yourself is, is there a clear path to $100 million in gross profit here? And am I willing to go on that path and do what it takes to get to that like $100 million gross profit number, which I think is the magic number of you're going to have a big outcome. That's like the most typical number that I think folks like anchor on to say, is this going to be a big outcome or not? Most companies, 99.9%, never get to that number, let alone anywhere close. And if you are not willing to spend the money to get there as quickly as possible, it's hard to justify raising. Venture money. And yeah, we've just seen this all the time where folks even get stuck, like they build great businesses in the millions of dollars of revenue, like $1 to $3 million, but they've raised $10 million to get there and they're not going to have a massive outcome. And then they get the profitability. They're like stuck in limbo and investors like do not care because those companies don't return the funds. They might return like 2x capital at some point. Great. I wrote you a $500K check. My fund is $25 million. That is not returning my fund. And I'm in the business of allocating capital into high-risk, high-reward opportunities, which means I'm looking for the company that's going to get to $100 or $500 million in revenue per year. And as a founder, you have to ask yourself, do I want to fucking do this? That is a long journey, a lot of stress, a lot of fundraising, a lot of hiring, a lot of messiness. It is not always a great time. You have to have a stomach and a bit of sociopathicness to be able to put away your emotions and do the thing. And that's, it's just hard versus if you're bootstrapped or even if you've raised a few hundred K from friends and family to be like, I'm going to go build a SaaS tool. Great. It does this exact product. It's never going to be a $100 million company. It could be a million a year dollar company. That's amazing. Go do that for sure. You don't have your timelines, your oper— so this is the thing with Spendoso is I'll never raise money for it because I have no desire to go try to turn SaaS management into a $100 million company, nor do I think it has the opportunity to do that. Because when you look at comps in the space, I'm not going to name any names, but if they're listening for whatever reason to this podcast, they'll know that it's them. You've raised like $200 million and you're stuck at $30 million a year in annual revenue, and those contract values are decreasing over time. You're never going to return enough money to even clear your own liquidation, like preference stack. And why would I look at someone who's the best in the space and say, I'm going to go raise money to do this thing when I very clearly see a half a million dollar a year staff's opportunity where this thing operates on autopilot. It's a point solution. I don't have to worry about building services in. I don't have to worry about boiling the ocean on different vertical or product features. And instead I can just keep onboarding customers and say, cool, you're going to pay me $49 a month. That's great. I'll go get 100 companies paying me $49 a month and another 100 companies paying me $49 a month. And I have no timelines, no investing money to return, like no huge burn. That's the nice thing about bootstrapping. If you're willing to deal with sort of the early stages of we're not making any fucking money or have any money in the bank while we build this thing, I think that's a big difference.

Got you. So before we get into meme marketing, I do want to talk about that. First, I want to ask, were you always an entrepreneur as a kid? What were you like? What was Alex Cohen like at 16?

Yeah, strangely, I like, I was, I'll tell you what my first job was and I've got a couple of like how I actually got fired stories that I'll share. Cause I have, I've have gotten fired and they are funny stories. But my first job, I lifeguarded a bit in high school. I feel like that was whatever, I'm 16, I'll save some people drowning in a pool. And then I actually was like a big tennis player and I strung tennis rackets to make side money. So my dad bought me a tennis, tennis racket stringing machine and I watched at the time, I think YouTube was like a thing and I watched YouTube videos on how to string tennis rackets and I dunno, just the tension and all these things. And my dad also was like a bit of a tennis guy back at, a lot of a tennis guy back in the day. So he knew how to string. So between YouTube and my dad, I learned how to string tennis rackets and I would go, he made business cards with me and I passed them around to the tennis centers like saying, hey, I'll string your racket for $20. Don't go to the pro shop, like string with me. And I would like make a couple hundred bucks a month doing that. And that was, I'd watch TV and just like string rackets. Boring, but it made some money. The first job I got fired for. Was, um, I worked at a fish tank store. It was like one of my first jobs in high school. I was like 15 or 16. I don't know. I needed a job and someone was like, I know this guy. He owns a saltwater fish tank store and he's hiring someone for $4 an hour. I was like, sick. I can pay for my weed addiction in high school. Like, I'll go work that job. I show up to work and, whatever, it's fine. I'm trying to learn how like fish, saltwater fish work and like how the tanks work and all this stuff. And honestly, I didn't know what I was doing. I think I lasted 2 months before I was fired. The boss, I forgot his name, he sent me out one day, the owner, to go buy basically like Windex to clean the front of the, of the fish tank glass with. But it turns out you have to buy glass spray without ammonium or something. I forget what the ingredient is, or else you'll kill the fish. And he's do not buy Windex or any of these. And I was like, all right, where do I go? He's like, go fucking, he's a big asshole. He's go find a place. So I was like, okay, I guess I'll go to CVS. I went to CVS, I asked the guy. $8 an hour guy at CVS doesn't know the difference between different, like, glass cleaning products. So I just pick one up. I look at the back. I don't see whatever this toxic ingredient on it is. I go back to the store and I just start like spraying the fish tanks and like wiping them down. He comes out, he looks at it, he's like, what the fuck? He starts screaming at me. I'd bought the glass spray that had ammonium or, but I, again, I don't know the ingredient, whatever it was. He was like, you cannot use this. Luckily you didn't kill any of the fish, all this stuff. I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. Like, you didn't tell me where to go. I like went to CVS, like where was I supposed to go? And he sent me home that day, but he didn't fire me. I show up 2 days later wearing gym shorts one day and I walk in and he's what the fuck are you wearing? And I was like, gym shorts. You don't have a dress code policy here. It's a fish tank store. And he was like, get the fuck outta my store and never come back. And that's how I got fired from the fish tank store.

So getting fired from fish tank stores to OpenAI, that is, that's big moves.

But there was one other firing in the middle. I worked at Office Depot for 2 years in high school. So after the fish tank store, I landed a job at Office Depot making $8.25 an hour doing like tech support, like tech repairs and whatever. And after a year of working there, we were like upselling all these old people on these like really basic services. So like printer setups and like installing antivirus software, like shit that should have been basically free. Office Depot was like $200 for this, $200 for that. And they would force us to sell these things in order to make commission. And it was really sad. Finally, one day I was like, you know what, fuck it. I'm gonna tell these people I'll do it at their house instead of them coming in. So they would, I'd sell them a laptop and it was just like really cute old person who's retired in South Florida. They'd be like, oh, can you like, do you guys set this up? I also wanna buy a printer. And I'd whisper, don't fucking tell them, but I'll come to your house and do it after work. Here's my number. And I built this book of business of 30 different old people houses where I would go do work for them for $25 an hour. And it was great. It was like 4 times that I was making at Office Depot. No taxes, all under the table. I learned how to mount TVs on walls that way. I did a whole bunch of stuff. I got really cocky and after 6 months of doing this, I was like, I need some— I'm gonna turn this into a real thing. I need some flyers. Instead of my ass going to like Kinko's or Staples, like a competitor and like paying to print flyers, I made flyers and I printed them at Office Depot on our printers for free. I just printed like 100 copies of color, black, double-sided color. I go to the bathroom and I come back and the lady behind who was like my coworker behind the print desk, she was like, here, these are yours. What is this? And I was like, oh, don't worry about it. But I didn't pay for it. She told the manager, comes out, like he had a, she gave him a stack of them and he's explicitly against our like rule, like the, the employment agreement that you signed that you can't poach customers from Office Depot. And I was like, okay. And he's also like, you printed all these for free and that's technically stealing company property. And I was like, so now what happens? And he's first of all, you're fired. Second of all, you have to pay for these print services with $90 worth of printing, which isn't that much in hindsight, but like when you're making $8 an hour, it's a lot of money. And he's third of all, if you like agree to leave today with no problems, I like won't press. I won't go and basically report this up to the company, which is like dumb in hindsight because it's $90 worth of stolen goods. Like, fuck them. It's not something you're going to go to jail over. And anyway, that's how I got fired from Office Depot was like competing with their shitty print services. So now as I watch Office Depot stock go in the tank and I watch them like close down stores, I'm like actually spitefully happy after all these years because they were such a fucking terrible immoral company under the hood.

Fantastic. I got fired from Bonefish. I was, well, yeah, I was a waiter. I was 4 days in after the training and you know how they have to wear those stupid white uniforms at Bonefish to make you look like you're some kind of chef even though you're the waiter.

Yeah.

And I didn't clean my uniform and I was asking a lot of questions like, where do I press the buttons and all this? And so I get fired for that. And not to mention, I am also stealing like a lot of fries. I'm also crippling weed addiction and just see fries everywhere. And yeah, that, that didn't turn out. But once I got my first like good tech job, I went and ate at Bonefish, a celebratory meal, a celebratory fuck you to Bonefish.

So that's amazing. Did you not pay? Did you dine and dash?

Oh no, I ate, I, I paid proud, proudly paid in my like sweatpants. It was like, never have to wear a uniform again. Thank you very much.

Bonefish was the shit. That's where my mom always loved going to dinner and be like, oh, we're going to go to a fancy dinner, like Bonefish Grill.

Yo, Bonefish was the shit. It was very good.

It was Florida chain. Are they all over? I know we had a lot in Florida. Yeah.

They're like part of the Carrabba's Outback conglomerate. My ex was working at Outback and I was at Bonefish. It was, we were a power couple at the time.

So rival, you guys were rivals.

Exactly.

A combined $16 an hour.

Yeah, except I got fired after 4 days, so then it was just $8. All right, let's, let's jump into meme marketing. So I also wanna talk about meme investing because nobody, I've never seen meme investing before, but you are doing it, which is posting a meme and then plugging one of your portcos underneath, which I was just like, this man is killing it. That's another level of 4D chess right here.

Maybe I'll throw it up on the video, but which one are we talking about? The scheduling one?

Yeah, it was, yeah, exactly. Let me see, do I got the Notion? Can you see on here?

Oh yeah. Amazing. This is the tweet that I was thinking of. And while you do that, I'm going to pull up the analytics for you so that you can actually see how this performs under the hood for your own dataset or whatever you want to build.

So here you can see Alex is talking about using Calendly links to schedule each other screwing around with salespeople. And then boom, right? Howie.ai right underneath, which is Portco. I assume that's a similar to Calendly, but a better competitor with AI, right?

Hold on, let me pitch. So today's episode is brought to you by, oh, sorry, let me pitch Howie. Today's episode of the Shit Poster Memes Podcast is brought to you by Howie AI. Howie is an artificially intelligent executive assistant who can schedule your meetings on your behalf so long as you CC Howie in your email. So I use Howie whenever I'm scheduling a meeting to say, adding Howie to this thread, we can share some times for whatever you need. Howie contextualizes and understands the thing that you're saying, replies back into the thread as if it were an executive assistant with times. Your recipient responds with their preferred time or more times. And Hally books the calendar for you. Hally is an incredible piece of generative artificial intelligence software, and I highly recommend you sign up. It has become a part of my daily workflow. Now back to the podcast. All right.

So that was some great Tim Ferriss work right there. So my favorite legal thing that feels illegal is using the Calendly links from salespeople who email me nonstop and booking them calls with each other. Incredible. And then that got 1.7 million views and then you plugged Howie.ai underneath. So 60,000 views right there, but how many link clicks was that? I'm curious.

Take a guess and I will tell you if you were close. What do you think 60,000 impressions converts to?

2,200 link clicks.

You are pretty close. 2,726 clicks to the Howie website. Wow.

That's awesome. That's fantastic. So yeah, and then going up. To this tweet, which related was when founders ask me how I value to, as an investor, I just show them this tweet that drove 11,500 clicks to their website. Distribution is, is power when it comes to this stuff.

Do you know which tweet that was? So I tweeted something about getting fired and then the founder of the app responded with, I'm with the Wall Street Journal. Can we like interview you about this? And I was like, sure, please loop in my assistant Howie AI to get something scheduled. And it's like, and then 11,000 people click the link, which is crazy. So a lot of really good marketing and yeah, I'm a seed investor in the company. It's hard. I will say from my perspective, it's really hard to do this with non-consumer or prosumer type of companies. I can do this with some random fucking B2B SaaS tool that just sells to enterprise. It's just, it's a lot more challenging versus Howie, anyone can sign up and use. And so. I think a lot of founders don't understand sometimes that it's really hard for me to push the boundaries on this sort of marketing unless they, yeah, unless they've got a product that like is really mass market, doesn't have a very clear ICP.

Interesting.

Interesting.

But you've been doing it as well with Spindosa, right? I'm pulling up some tweets here.

Yeah.

This is pretty fantastic.

This is my favorite.

This was incredible. Like, You, do you wanna explain what you did? Cuz this is just, it's marvelous.

Yes. So this, for anyone listening to this podcast in the car with their kids, it's about to get rated R for a minute. Turn it down or whatever you need to do. There's this woman online named Ella, and she is like known for being an autistic sex worker who documents all of her sex dates and takes all the data and turns it into real statistics at a high level. He hosted a birthday or someone hosted a birthday party for her. The birthday party was in the form of a gangbang, uh, or an orgy, whatever you want. I don't really know the difference between the two. I'm sure there's some like nuance sexual difference between a gangbang and an orgy. She hosted one, one of them, and she documented and outlined her entire funnel from the people who basically filled out this form to participate in the gangbang. Ultimately, like, snaking down to the outcome, which was some number of dudes finished inside of her at the gangbang, some number of dudes finished inside a fluffer. Um, and for those of you who don't know what a fluffer is, the person that they hire on a porn set to keep the actors hard in between sets. Quite, quite a fascinating— imagine you went to school, got a degree, and you end up being a fluffer. but probably making more than your traditional, I don't know how much Fluffr is making.

I've seen Fluffrology.

Amazing. Yeah. They teach you all the techniques that you need to know. Yeah. So, uh, she posted this like graph, which is what we're looking at right now. And I took the chart, which, uh, her case, it was like an Ella's gangbang and I remade it with the same flow to just be like, what it's like to fundraise as a founder. Like you start with some number of outreach to VCs. Ultimately you end up with some like giving you a term sheet, ghosting. I have a whole section here, like, not really a VC, they're just pretending. So there's some really funny elements in this chart that are elements of truth, and I think that's why people found it funny. But at the end of this chart, I left 15 came in a fluffer and like, I thought it was funny to leave one hint of this whole gangbang chart on this in, in my chart. And I posted it and I was like, here's what it's like to fundraise as a founder. And you either had to like understand the context to get it, or you saw it and you were like, this is so interesting. Like seed funding is so hard. And a lot of people, no pun intended, that it's hard. A lot of people took it as truth and shared it across LinkedIn. They shared, like what we're looking at is a screenshot from a newsletter that was sent out where they included my chart in their newsletter that like very earnestly saying like the unfortunate truth about fundraising with one caveat that most don't ever receive a term sheet. They clearly made it all the way from the beginning of the chart down to the turn sheet and missed the part about coming in a fluffer, which I kept in this chart. And all these people started sharing it everywhere. And, and so I tweeted a screenshot of their newsletter. So very meta. I took a screenshot of their newsletter, which had a screenshot of my chart, and I tweeted that out saying, if you didn't do enough diligence to see that I included came in a fluffer in my fake chart, like you probably shouldn't be in VC. That got 22,000 likes. And then at the end of these viral posts, I'll typically plug Spendoso, which is the company that, that we're bootstrapping because it's just great free top-of-funnel marketing. So in this particular case, I followed up with a second tweet, which said, this is why I didn't raise for spendoso.com. I get Mervel's frog fluffers. And it's great. 84,000 people saw that tweet. I don't know how many people clicked it. I have to go back and check, but we get anywhere from, I don't know, I've gotten thousands of waitlist signups just through shitposting this way. Wow.

Memes make billions. All right. That was a fantastic walkthrough. I saw that chart floating around the Twitterverse and saw Ella.

Is that how you pronounce it?

It's just Ella.

How else would you pronounce that? A-E-L-L-A. Ella. Ella. Ella.

Nobody really knows. Who knows?

I've never heard her talk, so I don't know how you pronounce it. I'm thinking Ella.

She looks like Elizabeth Holmes, which is crazy.

Oh really?

Yeah. She looks like Elizabeth Holmes with brown hair in one of these pictures.

How do you pronounce Ella? Let's see. Is that her real name? It says, how do you pronounce the Greek name Ella? From the sources I've read, oh, it's Ella. Or Ayla. Ayla. Ayla.

I wouldn't have guessed that one.

Ayla. I don't know. We should, you should have her on the podcast and ask her one of these days.

I do want to, speaking of Ayla on podcasts, when she went on Lex Fridman, they definitely fucked.

I'm actually haven't, I haven't watched that episode yet. I know she was on there. Good for Lex. Good for her. That, that seems like a power couple fucking.

That does seem like a power couple. Are you still doing, I know you were doing a pod, right? Nikita, Chris Bakke, those both are legends in that as well.

Nikita wasn't in the podcast, but it was me, Chris Bakke, and Michael Girdley. We had a few guests at any point in time. It was fun. We got a good viewership or listenership. It just, none of us really had an, like this idea of what the podcast was going to be besides just like shitposting the news all day long. I think we enjoyed it, but it's really hard. It didn't just, it didn't really have this theme that made sense and none of us really had the time to dedicate to really prepare beforehand. So we were just, it's like listening to 3 bros talk for an hour, which there's enough of those podcasts already. And ultimately after, I don't even know how many we did, 13, 15 episodes, you were just like, let's revisit this at some point in the future. We made it, Gurley found us a few sketchy podcast ad placements, which was nice, but it basically paid our bills to pay the editor and pay like the video slicer for chopping this up and turning it into TikTok videos. So one day I'll do another podcast. I just need to find that like idea that really sticks, that is not just, I just don't wanna be known as the guy, or I don't wanna be on a podcast where we just talk for an hour about stuff. I'd rather it be like at least something thematic.

Interesting. Interesting. I understand. I took a break from the pod for 6 months. To travel and work, finish the book and a bunch of other stuff and very happy to come back to it. It was like, I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about this and my post is coming out later this week, so this is actually timely, but like long-term games, long-term friends, or long-form content with long-term friends. So that kind of idea of like long-term games, long-form content, and it's like, yeah, you know, like doing, I was doing these short-form, I still am, I run the Man on the Street business, but that is the definition of short-term games, right? It's interview a person, walk away, interview a person, walk away. And I'm like, I was like, damn, why do I find this so tiring and stressful? And it's oh, cuz I like will never see these people again and it just drains you. And then it's oh, why don't I bring back the long-form content with people that like are in my industry that I will probably see in 5 years. And some might be good friends, some might be new like you that I've never actually talked to.

And.

I was like, oh, this makes me so much happier. So still doing the street interviews, but like trying to incorporate more long-term games and long-form content in my life is like where my head is at right now.

I hear you. My only thing that I would want to do differently if I do another podcast is do it in person. I just, I really enjoy the sit down across the table. You're in some cool studio. I'm just, I'm so tired of staring at people on Zoom all day. I just want to go back and now I feel autistic when I'm in person. I'm like, I don't know how to interact with humans anymore. I've been fucking looking at screens all day. I would like to go back to that.

Was the Gushers and the Skittles.

Yeah. Too many Gushers and COVID the last 3 years.

Gushers and COVID, basically. The two mankind's worst. I wanna close out with a quick lightning round, but really just, it's just this or that. Notion or Google Docs.

Are you gonna have some sound effects?

Like, can you do them maybe? Because I don't got that Gurley money to pay for an editor on this. Yeah.

Yeah, I use CapCut.

All right. Notion or Google Docs?

Google Docs.

Why?

Oh man, I've dunked on Notion publicly before, but I find it slow. I don't love the editor. I really have never liked Notion because it has no sense of folders or like folders are the same thing as files. You have to make a new file to put files within that file, which is how you get the structure of folders. And I don't love that. It like really confuses me for organizational purposes. I like Google Docs. I'm like, okay, this is my folder. These are my documents in the folder. These documents are a sort of like universally accepted type of document that I can edit or put into Microsoft Word versus Notion. I'm like, okay, I gotta export it to a document to then edit it somewhere else if I need to like collaborate with people, or I gotta invite them to Notion. The sign up workspace stuff never makes sense to me half the time, so. I just like the Google Docs and the simplicity. Also, like Notion just tries to do too much stuff. It's not a good spreadsheet, it's not a good database. It's a fine document editor, it's a fine wiki, but everyone uses Notion differently. So you start to use it with teams and it starts to just break down. It just confuses me. I don't like it. I don't have a time. And then like sometimes you get the white screen of death or you lose all your work. I just, I'm like very bearish on teams that use Notion for team collaboration. I just want a Google Docs. I made Google Doc. I'm signed in with my Google account. I can request access. I understand how it works. I can edit it and it does the one thing, which is I'm either in a spreadsheet or I'm in a Google Doc. I'm doing the one thing. I'm not in some fucking file within a file within 3 files to then edit some table that doesn't live anywhere else.

Honestly, not a bad investing thesis. Just don't invest. No, I can't. But all right. Kindle or paperback?

Kindle.

Do you use Readwise or no?

No, I hardly read, to be honest, but I do have a Kindle.

Fair enough. Too busy getting fired. Reels or TikTok? Sure.

Ooh, TikTok. I find the TikTok content is better than Reels, and I find that Reels is repurposed TikTok content. I don't really love that TikTok and the CCP likely have all of my information and my preferences, but I find that like, yeah, yeah. And Gushers.

I find from Office Depot.

True. I don't know. I don't find Instagram that original of content.

That's fair. Mercury.

I use it for, for recipe. I use it for recipe. Mercury. Mercury.

Okay. Why for that one?

Pretty, well, my mortgage is with SVB and when they collapsed, I thought I was losing the house and my entire checking account, which was with SVB at the time. I would prefer that to not happen again, but Mercury's great. I know Ahmad. I think the product just does the thing that it says it's going to do. It's way easier to use. It's just like SVBs and they know it, like they're a bit of an antiquated bank and they're not even SVB anymore. They're First Citizens Wealth Management or whatever it's called. They're fine if you need more mature debt products and you need a mortgage at a very good interest rate that they're going to lose money on. They're awesome for that stuff. But Mercury, if you're a startup, use it for banking. It's super easy. You can do all the things you need to do.

So SVB is good for mortgages. That's good to know.

Yeah, they were. I don't know how they're doing now. I got my mortgage 2 years ago, but now maybe if they're still doing mortgages, they were great. They were the most—

how scary was that day? Were you like genuinely scared that day or no?

I don't keep enough in any individual accounts to reach the FDIC thresholds. And I was like, oh, this like kind of sucks. And I don't know how long it's going to take to get our money out, but It was definitely like, I remember SVB collapsing, no one could withdraw anything. And, and maybe I'm just not the paranoid person, but I was like, oh, I'll be fine. I'm not going to pull my money out. And then I was like, oh fuck, maybe I should have pulled my money out. But, and then that whole weekend I'm just like, most of our, we have a lot of money in that account. Guess we're not getting that out. We'll use our Chase account for the weekend. And then after the whole thing, I moved everything over to Chase.

Got you. All right. Last question. Zuckerberg or Elon?

That's a hard one. I'm gonna have to go with Elon. I think Zuck is a great CEO, like founder CEO has been doing it for so long. And from what I hear from people who have worked with him, he's fucking great. Like great person. I think Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink are harder businesses than Facebook. And so you have to respect, I think Facebook has done more damage to humanity than most other companies. And I think Elon's company's like putting him aside as a person if you don't like him. And, and I think he's funny, so whatever, that's my opinion. It's only really done good things for humanity. Starlink is great. It's super cool. He's trying to send people to space. He's brought back single-handedly this like reinvigoration for space that we lost for so long. Tesla, I drive a Tesla. Awesome. Like great cars. I plug it in. I'm not, I don't have to pay for gas and then use fossil fuels. Like I think the stuff he, he's working on is genuinely better for humanity. And then objectively, if you look at it compared to Facebook, you're like, Facebook ruined our brains and our social media and created so many problems that, oh, the poking feature's nice.

That was pretty good for you there. That definitely increased the population potentially more than Elon saying You know, we should have more kids, like just the poke feature.

I would love to do a study on that one day.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to school and get my PhD and figure that one out.

You should. But yeah, I think, I think that's my only take on Facebook is Mark seems like a great CEO. Facebook's a very solid business. I don't think it's been great for humanity and it's not a platform that I think, like in theory, social media should have brought us all closer together because now we have this sort of look into our lives intertwined. And instead it's just created a bunch of fucking angry boomers reading fake news all day and like the ability for Russian propagandists to shove fake media down all of Americans' feeds. And not my, not the first thing that I would build if I was like, what do I want to go spend the rest of my life working on?

I definitely feel that you gotta respect working on hard problems. It's not easy to work on hard problems and dedicate so long and So tirelessly. Facebook does seem a little frivolous now thinking about it. What? Yeah.

Marketplace is great. Yeah.

Marketplace is great. You could get a couch for cheap, man. And there's no scammers for sure.

You could just, no scammers. Yeah. Send money to everyone, especially me.

Rest in peace FarmVille. We miss you.

Bring back the, bring back the Zynga. Zynga grew because Facebook early in the days was probably really exciting and fun and didn't have as many issues as it does today, but at its scale today, It's, I don't know, I feel like I go on Facebook and it's all clickbaity. It's all designed to like try to capture your attention and get you sucked into it. And I don't know, TikTok's the same way, but at least TikTok is a little bit more entertaining than Facebook is in my eyes. Fair.

All right, dude, this has been awesome. Gotta take the dog for a walk.

Enjoy.

But really enjoyed this. This was a, this was a good time. I'll let you know next time I'm in Austin, hopefully next year, but.

Sounds good. And you're in New York?

Yeah, I'm in New York. Yeah.

Cool. Uh, hopefully we'll do a trip up there soon.

All right, cool. Let me know, dude. Thank you.