EP 5: Coinbase Tweet Storm, Truth Social, Death of the Five Day Work Week and the ClearCo Breakup

Well, before we get this going, we know there's plenty happening in the world right now with Ukraine and Russia. You don't listen to us for our inputs on international diplomacy, and it's certainly not our area of expertise. There's going to be plenty of other people lacking credentials in the tech community that will weigh in on this ad nauseam over the next couple days, weeks, months. And so we'll spare everyone three more, but it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Our thoughts are with those in Ukraine and, and we hope there's a swift end to this needless and devastating aggression. Nikita, I know your family is directly impacted by this. Maybe you can share a little bit of that for everyone listening.

Yeah, so my family's safe, but my mom's side of the family is from Ukraine, so I have an uncle and an aunt in Kiev. So the events unfolding, they certainly hit home. They're doing well. They're migrating to the western part of the country in Lviv and planning to cross into Poland. And so I'll be watching closely their challenges. You know, airports not working, but they are letting women, women and children into Poland. So it's looking pretty, pretty promising. And we'll see how it plays out over the next few weeks.

Well, keep us posted. We're going to be thinking about it.

Yeah, Our thoughts are with everyone in Ukraine right now. So I guess if you're not in a place to laugh along with the absurdities in the tech world right now, we totally get it and hope you come back to us when you are. But for everyone else, hopefully this serves as a break from the terrible news over the last 72 hours.

Yeah, I'll say. We're reminded of the first SNL sketch. First SNL's episode after 9 11, when Rudy Giuliani came on and someone asked, are we allowed to be funny? And Giuliani said, why start now? So, you know, we'll see if we start now, this time, too.

Yeah, exactly. So with that as a caveat, let's get going. Welcome to the fifth episode of three Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I'm joined today by my esteemed co hosts, the don of the G Wagon, the Jewish Gatsby, Nikita Beer, and the George Costanza venture capital, Zach Kukoff.

I prefer the Stanley Tucci of venture capital. If we're just going to reframe. If we could reframe who my bald icon is for a second. It's Tucci, not Costanza.

I think you wear the Costanza thing, so. Well, though, I. You know, we posted some videos comparing, and I don't know, I think it's you.

I think it's a pretty aspirational person to be. You know, like, George Costanza is an

aspirational person to be.

I mean, modeled after Larry David, the most liked guy in America right now.

I do love. I do love Larry David. I will tell you that. That is that.

But it's.

The idea is you want to be the looks of Stanley Tucci with the attitude of Larry David. That would be like the combo transformer. I'm trying to be, you know.

Look, Zach, you can't have it all.

Who says? Honestly, you're. You're a. You're a young soul or you're a young person with an old soul.

Yeah, definitely not a young soul.

Yeah, no, no, no. Definitely misspoke. Misspoke there.

But.

Well, other than the terrible world events that's been going on, it's kind of like, other than that, how was the play? Mrs. Lincoln? How. How's the. How's the week been, Zach? You're in la. How is it out there?

I am. I'm in Akita's neck of the woods. I'm here a little bit early for our friends at upfront putting on the upfront summit. It was so the day. The first day I got here, I hosted a big dinner at an outdoor restaurant, only to find out it was gonna be 45 degrees at night. So that wasn't so great. But other than that, it's been beautiful, warm, sunny. It almost feels like sinful to be enjoying myself and having a nice, like, trip in L. A. Everything's going on.

Welcome to L. A. Yeah.

Long L. A. You know, I kind of misrepresenting. I thought it was always like 65 and sunny. This whole 40 degree thing. By the time I get out there, hopefully that's. That's flushed through the system.

I was more bundled up and I landed in L. A. Than I was when I took off in Boston. So make of that what you will. I got to say, long, long Boston. Famously mild Boston winters rearing their head again once again.

Yeah, exactly. We. So we're actually going to do our first IRL dinner meetup since we've been doing this pretty funny. We've had five episodes or whatever, and we're finally going to break bread, so we'll see how all that goes.

Nikita, are you going to host us at the house? The house that is so famous on Instagram?

Yeah, the famous beer house. I have a Bunch of engineers in my house working right now. Multiple different app ideas. So you'll see how the sausage is made.

This is actually all, once again, a scam just to get allocation in Nikita's app. We're going to have dinner at his house and we're going to walk up and down the lines of engineers trying to sell them.

I like it. Well, I'm really looking forward to it. So, yeah, no. Well, I will see you guys on a Monday night. So I guess a quick update from a topic of last week. So we spoke about the Coinbase QR ad for a little while and there's been a little bit of an update here. So give the quick background for the people that don't live on tech Twitter. But basically what happened was on Sunday, a week after the Super Bowl, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, decided to post a thread about how the app came to be. Now, threads are something that consistently go viral on Twitter. Gives you an opportunity to give thought, leadership, and so you a good opportunity to see how things actually occurred on the Coinbase ad. Or so he thought. So I'm not going to read the whole thing. We'll link it in the show notes. But basically the short version of it is he said that an outside agency pitched him a bunch of standard super bowl ads. They passed on all of them. They were short on time. He said the Coinbase team all rallied together and ultimately came up with the idea of this bouncing QR code. And the way the tweet ended, or one of the tweets ended, was that no ad agency would have done this ad. Well, what happened subsequent to that was Kristen Cabello, the CEO of the Martin Agency, responded with timestamps and page notes, basically saying, our team actually pitched ad concepts for the super bowl with floating QR codes on a blank screen. And I think she said this was in August of last year. So that was a pretty direct response. With the timestamps of how it came to be 12 hours after the original tweet, Brian Armstrong added, although we didn't work with a traditional ad agency, I'd be remiss not to mention the creative firm we worked with who actually created the ad, commissioned the song, got clearances, et cetera. Honestly felt like we were all one team, so I didn't realize it. Thank you. Then the CMO of Coinbase came back and basically implied that that the idea was different than the idea that the Martin Agency suggested. And she subsequently got ratioed and a bunch of people in her comments and all that kind of A hilarious and unnecessary cell phone by Brian Armstrong. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts, Nikita, on how this all played out.

My rule of thumb has always been once you start arguing on the Internet, you've already lost. There's no way to win. I think it would probably. They should have just ignored it. I think it's probably not as black and white as the tweets had framed it. I mean, I'm sure every ad agency had pitched a QR code concept to every company that was doing a Super bowl ad because we've been literally scanning these things since like for the last two years every single day. So I think by just engaging it made him look more, more guilty that like they, they didn't give them credit. But I mean, it is a pretty common trope of, you know, ad agencies coming up with innovative concepts and not getting credit for the work that they do.

Totally. Yeah. I think to the point of arguing on the Internet in general just like, isn't a great idea, right? Just had she, had she or Armstrong just responded wrong and not elaborated, I think everyone would have been like, oh, what a clap back, what a known. You know, and it would have changed the whole narrative. But they, they sort of started apologizing and explaining the situation and I hate that we lose all this nuance, right? Like they were well intentioned in this whole thing trying to actually give the story of how it came to be. And to be honest, one of my, my girlfriend's brother in law is the VP of marketing at Anheuser Busch and he said that, he said that like they were thinking about a bouncing QR code for a Budweiser ad or something. Right. And so it's. Many people were probably noodling on some version of this. I'm sure it was countless over the course of the last two years. And so ideas are, it's the execution in all this stuff, right? And so actually getting into the muck of timestamps, you've kind of already lost the conversation.

Well, not to speak about this one specifically, but in general, I think it's obvious the more surface area you give people on Twitter, right? Like the less you're able to defend against if you, the less, the less you give people to respond to, the better handled it is because as we both, we all know, basically everybody on Twitter is bad faith. Arguing all the time, looking to play to the audience and score points. No one is ever trying to actually engage and learn something on Twitter, at least in my experience, are maybe our messy corner of the universe. That's true.

I think it's funny though that like you have Brian Armstrong was drawn so drawn to create a thread. He wanted thought leadership so bad. The allure of a thread was so strong that it pulled him in and he really, he probably didn't have any context around this project. And he's like, well, I'm gonna get some engagement right now.

Totally. Once you get, once you get a hit of that sweet thread dopamine and you see the viral, like, people will throw their lives away. It's what I imagine, like heroin addicts, you know, just chasing that thread virality. And, you know, he was going for it. He was like, this is a good one. This is my opportunity. And just like get your facts right a little bit on the whole circumstance. Right. It's just, you know, and I can totally imagine how it happened was he thought he knew everything that had happened and he just sort of sat down and like started drafting this thread on like a Sunday morning. And press send. We've all been there where we've pressed send on some tweet that, you know, we probably wish we hadn't done.

Yeah.

And, you know, he like sent it and someone had to come to him and be like, hey, Brian, like, not exactly how this came to be. Right.

I love the metaphor of thread posting as the modern day chasing the dragon. Like, I wonder, are we going to lose a generation of best and brightest 29 year olds to posting threads? Are we going to have a whole Seattle grunge world of people, a culture and SF just of people posting threads? There was not to drive back to the Russia, Ukraine stuff, but there was like a number of people who decided to use today to do content marketing for themselves instead of being respectful of what's going on. That feels like the apex of thread culture. Thread culture is when you need the engagement so bad that when there's an international war brewing, you're like, gosh, time to post the thread on like five leadership tips I learned from Putin.

I saw, I saw a VC actually shilling one of their portfolio companies in. In a tweet, right? Saying like, hey, you know, use our meditation app if you're stressed by the event. And it's like, dear God.

But it was, it was two of their portfolio companies.

Two of their portfolio companies. That's right. Zach, to your point, like, I really do think fentanyl and thread posting are going to be like the issues of our generation that people just throw their lives away chasing. Those are like the two. The two things we're going to have to reckon.

I can't wait for national policy preventing people from getting into threads. I want DARE in elementary schools, fifth grade education, teaching kids. Don't get hooked on thread posting. Shit. Posting not great, but at least better than thread posting.

I think that's 100% right. Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting about all of this, Nikita, last week, kind of coincidentally, you posted a tweet that said, I can't repeat this enough. If your company origin story is boring, make it up. Literally everything I've ever said about my company was made up. And so it's actually an interesting concept of narratives and how those shape PR and marketing. So I guess, first and foremost, what actually prompted that? And can you talk a little bit about, like, how you think about narratives?

So it was a shitpost. To be clear, not everything about my company was made up. But what inspired that tweet was I was listening to this podcast of a founder telling the origin story of his company, and it was literally the most boring thing I've ever heard in my entire. It was like, excruciating. Here I was, like, about to text him, like, saying, you should pull that podcast off, because that was like the worst, the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard. And so I think people should just take some creative license when crafting the narrative around why their company exists. But that tweet infuriated so many people. Like, they were equating it to, like, account accounting fraud. But really, who cares if it's like, real or not? Just tell a cohesive story about why your product should exist. And everyone, like, thinks there's this, like, inception moment around, like, something that happened and that. And then the idea emerged, like, linearly. But there's never any singular point. So just, you know, find the most interesting framing is what I suggest to founders and then simplify that story. And it doesn't. It doesn't matter how real it is. I mean, just don't, don't commit fraud or something.

I feel like we actually want founders to have kind of ridiculous founding stories. Like, if you're an employee at a company and you're working for effectively below market comp in a lot of ways, right? Your. Your stock probably isn't worth as much as it would be if you worked at Fang. And your cash comp at most startups is certainly worse than it would be if you were like a generic person. That Fang, you're motivated by the mission. And the mission oftentimes comes from the, oh, I experienced this when I had my thing that happened X, Y and Z. And not oftentimes. The far more realistic story of, like, yeah, there were two MBAs who did a market size analysis of every thing in the world, and they found out this is, like, the third biggest market that didn't have an existing player, and they said to go raise money for it. Like, that's a little bit less inspiring than, like, yeah, my aunt's cousin experienced this horrible thing, and now I'm starting my company as a result of that. I actually don't think it's a bad thing to go out and personalize it, but it helps you keep people.

We all sort of have lizard brains. And, like, the simple narrative, like, the muck of all this stuff, the details, it kind of ties back to the wrong point on Twitter. It's like, we just want the simple answer in all this stuff. And it's interesting. Like, two founding stories that aren't true or have been reported to not be true were ebay and Netflix, right? Like, the narratives around each. So the Netflix story was that Reed Hastings got a late blockbuster charge and was like, oh, this isn't the way things could be. And Marc Randolph, his co founder, revealed in a book that they were actually just, like, thinking about what the next opportunity was outside of books, which Amazon had already captured. Right? And, like, ebay had this big narrative about. Pierre Omidyar was basically saying he built a site so his fiance could speak, could sell unique Pez dispensers or something. Right? And that was like, the galvanizing story back in the day. And so, you know, I get it. This has happened, but these things, like, these narratives have happened, but they're not actually true. I kind of love Bezos as an OG with this. And, like, never represented it as anything other than, like, No. I realized, like, books are infinitely scalable and can actually be stored, like, in a. In a full facility. And so I realized the Internet was perfect for that. Right. He never came up with the bullshit version of it. I feel like brain is so robotic. He was like, what do you mean? I craft a marketing message. I just know it was books. Or that was.

What would the marketing message be? One day I was reading a book, and I realized, what if I could have this book in my couch right now without having to go to the store? Like, I just don't even know, like, that there's. Even the marketing version of it is, like, 95% of basically what he already says.

But, I mean, it's kind of. That would have been A much more wholesome, like, authentic story than thinking books were the perfect book product to service on the Internet because of the infinite volume. Right. And so, I mean, again, I respect that he didn't do that. And I'm sure all the people in Nikita's replies, comparing it to, like, you know, he's Nikita Elizabeth Holmes beer or whatever. Like, I'm sure those people also respect that. Bezos stuck with the real narrative here, but it's funny that, like, he just never did.

I actually feel like it's far more authentic for him to keep what he said. Like, clearly it wouldn't be authentic to Bezos to go out and say that he had this lived, human experience. It's far more. More authentic for him to be the NBA.

I think it's. It is funny, though, like, the.

The.

When you go to 0 to 1 with some of these companies, the actual thing that resonates is really mundane and kind of trivial and sometimes, like, embarrassing. Like, the early days of Facebook, the whole function was so you didn't have to ask someone for their phone number after you meet them at a party because you have too much anxiety and you don't want to put yourself out there. So you can just type in their name and add them and message them then like that Use case can't, like, galvanize a group of people. So over time, you kind of have to evolve it into, we're trying to make the world more open and connected. But, you know, that flirting Use case, was that what got that initial velocity going?

I don't know. I think you could basically pitch a lot of employees on, hey, tech employees, have you ever been too anxious to ask somebody out? That feels like a pretty galvanizing pitch, actually, for most of the tech folks I know.

Nikita, what was the actual founding story? We know you iterated on a bunch of ones, but was there some real version of how you had this aha and then some bullshit version that you spun to VCs to get them all excited about it?

Yeah, I mean, the story that we told was that the Internet is really a toxic. Can be a toxic place, and it can make us feel kind of terrible after we use it. People are really mean to each other. But the way the idea kind of emerged was there was another app that was at the top of the App Store called Saraha. It was this app builds in Saudi Arabia and it was blowing up with teens. And I actually saw one of their users tweet at the founder saying, look at this awful message I received. And the guy Just replied, if you don't like these messages, don't use the app. And I was like, oh my God, this is like some of the worst publicity management, like PR management I've ever seen in my life. And so I was like, well, maybe we can control what users say so that people don't have those experiences. But that whole interaction, that observation is not that great of a story. So I took a little bit of artistic license and reshaped it to be something cleaner and that could be retold. My team got excited around that narrative and we put it up on the FAQs. And it wasn't necessarily us lying. It was just telling a much simpler narrative that people could digest.

So, Nikita, what was the simpler narrative version that you put on the FAQs?

So we wanted. Our aim was to make people feel good about themselves after they used our app. And so we came out and said our mission is to improve the mental health of teens. Even though a lot of the use case of our app was teens flirting and kind of sending kind of messages to the person they're attracted to, we still got a lot of messages from teens saying they decided not to commit suicide because of our app. And we got those almost every day. So even though Facebook shut down our app, we were still pretty proud of the impact we had during that period of time that we were running. Okay, Logan, are you going to shill now?

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Another topic that feels right up our alley that I was thoroughly enjoying. On President's Day Monday, Donald Trump's Truth Social launched. So for those that don't know, Truth Social was an iOS app is an iOS app that launched on Monday and it shot quickly to the top of the App Store for free apps. It also hit a lot of problems. It turns out maybe Donald Trump might not be the technologist or leading a team of technologists to build a social app so registration couldn't be completed. For a number of people. There was a partial adage, there was an internal wait list as they were trying to manage the infrastructure load. Terms of service wouldn't actually load. It turned out that the Truth Social logo was very similar to Trailer, a fleet telematics business in the uk. So they're now investigating legal recourse. So a very convoluted Chaotic lunch, as only our former President of the United States could do. So I guess one of the funniest things for me is that instead of tweets, they're called truths, which is just ironic in and of itself.

It's incredible that they've solved the misinformation problem in one fell swoop. All you have to do is declare every post the truth, and you no longer have to deal with it.

Sounds very 1984.

I only tweet truths anyway, so I, you know, it's very familiar for me. You know, we both know.

We both know that is not a truth. That's a. That's a Truth Social truth, not a twitter.com truth.

I feel like Truth Social, you could make like, $1 billion just by, you know, the kind of the old Nigerian prince scam, but just. Just like, oh, I'm a. I'm a Trump. I'm Trump's nephew, and, you know, the president needs your help, right? And send it to this crypto account or something.

Truth Social feels just like Twitter. But nobody starts their post with, I don't mean this in a racist way, but so.

So, Nikita, what are your. What are your thoughts on the durability of this app? And does it have any chance of survival after this terrible launch, after all the infrastructure failures they've had? What's your opinion here?

I mean, I think the amount of hype around it doesn't really seem to line up with a level of risk and uncertainty like the spac that's connected to this app. DWAC is now trading at over. Over $3 billion. And I think investors don't really like. At least retail investors and Wall street don't understand that creating a social app that ends up being sticky is a black swan event. It happens, like, once every decade. 99.9% of all social apps fail. Like, you could really count the ones that have succeeded on, like, three fingers. So even with a celebrity endorsement like Trump, the chances are still slim. The celebrity endorsement, it certainly helps with acquiring users, but acquiring users, you could do that with investor Money, a viral TikTok video. But whether they'll stick around, like, this app has the same probability of users sticking around as any other app. We saw the same pattern play out with David Dobrik's dispo app, where it had a surge of millions of users and most subsequently churned. For an app to actually stick, the network effects need to form quickly. So the way users connect with each other has to be perfectly executed. And the engagement loops need to have Them keep coming back. This is sort of me putting on my not investment advice or not financial advice. I think at the current price that this stock is trading, I think you have a pretty good asymmetric bet here of shorting it. Because apps with this amount of momentum are typically priced. At least the ones that I've invested in that have reached number one are typically priced at about 100 million valuations. But this is now trading at like 30x that price with the same probability of failure as all those others. So I mean, I don't encourage people to short a stock since, you know, there's uncapped downside, but this seems like there's pretty good risk and reward.

I will say notably de Shaw, who had a pretty large position in the spac, has dumped their entire position presumably, and done quite well in doing so. Nikita, if you were sitting in, you know, call it dispo or paparazzi or NASA Truth social, right, and you have sort of the flavor of the month moment, what do you do to actually convert that from like, hey, we have the hot five minutes of attention to we're going to make the attention last past three months.

I actually think this approach to going to market is like basically the kiss of death. You grow way too fast, you prematurely exhaust your audience's attention before you can iterate and figure out what works. So at least in my experience, I used to do launches like that and it always, you know, would just crash and burn. The better approach is try to get some like little, you know, petri dish working where you've geofenced your users. You're, you're not like letting people sign up and let the cat out of the bag too early and you can figure things out. When TBH was scaling, it was growing out of our first school that we had launched. We saw that this thing was going viral. So we geofenced it around three states and my team was not happy with that decision. They were like, we shouldn't do this, we have all this momentum. But we geofenced around three states and we spent about, about six weeks rebuilding the app, re architecting it, adding features and then we relaunched. And I think that's the approach I generally recommend to founders is don't go chasing those top line numbers. Get the engagement loops right, get the network effects working and make sure users retain.

Yeah, I mean it's one of those things like Facebook obviously notoriously launched in the different schools, started with Harvard and then it spread through the Ivy League. And so there was like a natural core market that was self contained in all of this. But building one of these social apps, I've never done it, but it's equal parts the actual infrastructure that it works. Right. And gosh, you remember all the fail whales of early days of Twitter, how painful that was to deal with. So you need the actual infrastructure to work and then you need the network itself to be self reinforcing and have compelling content and you need those two things to kind of work symbiotically. Right. And so if you artificially squeeze one part or the other, it's not going to work. And so now you have all these people showing up trying to start a network effect that exists on this app. Clearly there are people that are so passionate for Donald Trump that I think they're going to be far more forgiving than some of these other apps. Right. In their willingness to keep banging their head against the wall to get it to work. But like at some point they're going to be exhausted of the app crashing, not being able to get on, whatever.

Right, but doesn't your example sort of undermine that a little bit? Like Twitter fail was constant and yet here we all are as addicted as ever. Right. Like maybe the amended version is possible. You have to have Nikita, I'd like to get your thoughts, but like you have to have the network effect spinning before, you know, before you go big. Because if the infrastructure isn't there, it'll. It'll shut down. But like, I actually think the lesson, at least that I took from some of this stuff is people will power through a lot of really bad infrastructure work if they're getting core social utility out of the actual app itself.

Yeah, I think with Twitter it started off small. So the network effects were there, the use case was there. People were getting to the aha moment. The scaling issues emerged way later down the line when. And that was just because people wanted it too much for intrinsic and they were intrinsically motivated to use it. Right now you're Trump is driving people to adopt this app and they haven't even experienced why it's good or anything, or they don't have any intrinsic motivation to use it.

Yeah, I mean really, they should have started like on with the QAnon Reddit group and then expanded slowly into like, you know, or started with the people that stormed the Capitol and then gone to the QAnon group and then gone to just like the core, you know, Covid deniers and then like the anti vaxxers and then just like all the different concentric circles there. Right.

What's what's the Truth Social version of Snapchat? Making people download the app to get into frat parties. Like you have to like. It's like the anti vaccine card. If you have Truth Social installed. I know that you probably are dangerous, but you can't eat at a restaurant.

So a thing that went viral over this week was an article by Derek Thompson at the Atlantic that was entitled the five day Workweek is Dying. And basically what it went through is something that I think we're all experiencing to some extent, but is the fact that the five day workweek hasn't existed in a normal way for knowledge workers and a large portion of the economy over the course of the last two years. And so one of the quotes from this said it was a guy, Nick Bloom, who was an economics professor at Stanford, said, I talked to hundreds of companies about remote work and 95% of them now say they're going hybrid While the other 5% are going full remote. The exceptions to the rule, such as Goldman Sachs are scarce. And so he went through and laid out three key takeaways. I'll knock through them quickly and then get your guys reaction. So the first was that the five day work week is dying and that the most popular form is hybrid between Tuesday through Thursday in the office and Monday and Friday out of the office. Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, backed that up and said Monday and Tuesdays are the fastest days of the week for travel and more people are treating ordinary weekends as holidays. The second takeaway was the age of hybrid work is going to be a beautiful mess. And so dealing with people in the office, some people out of the office, all that stuff. And so that's definitely going to happen. And then the third big takeaway from it was cities are starting to freak out in general. And so we've seen at least in New York. Eric Adams, the mayor is asking for people to delete the Zoom app and that New York actually can't function as a city the way it has historically without people commuting into the office. So a lot of stuff there. But interested in your guys takes on this article specifically remote work generally. Zach, I'll go to you first.

Yeah, I've gotten screamed at online a bunch every time I've tweeted about remote work. So for one, I'm eager to hear how I get screamed at for this podcast episode. Dropping the thing that struck me as sort of strange and all of this is, I think it's, it's fairly obvious there are real drawbacks to Remote work. But it's become so dogmatic to some people's lives. And what I mean by this is this. I tweeted something fairly innocuous but I thought was pretty obvious, which is if your early career remote work is probably much, much worse for you than it is in the office. Right. You miss out on the collaboration, you miss out on the mentorship. Most importantly, you miss out on sort of all of the unplanned spontaneous moments of learning that happens. And some people agree. I thought it was a fairly self apparent point but like a lot of people were up in arms at the idea that there are any drawbacks at all to remote work. And so I'm curious. Obviously we can say a lot about collaboration and talent retention, yada yada yada. But like I'm curious, why are people so dogmatic about this in their lifestyles and why is it that we can't talk about the drawbacks, the very real drawbacks that people are experiencing for remote.

I think the separation lies between like a big company and a startup. Like if you're going to be working for a big company, the, the you, the company is making a trade off where they're like, we're big, we're going to let you have flexibility. Like you're not going to be dedicating your life to sitting in a long commute to, you know, sit in an office. But I think for at a small company, you're taking a different sort of trade. You know, you're, you're, you're getting more equity, you're getting more ownership. And I've kicked off my own product development cycle for my new company and it's just the speed and quality between the remote teammates that I'm working with and the ones working at my house is like striking. I just don't know how you could certainly grow a company. Like if you have a product that's already the flywheels already spinning. But I don't know how you go 0 to 1 remotely. There's just so much nuance and so many side conversations that are critical. Like with tbh, we designed like 90 apps and we built probably 15 of them. But the best ideas always emerged, like during side conversations when everyone was like getting in in the morning and settling down.

Yeah.

So I, and it's, it's also a lot more fun. Like I think that that part is, we're losing like that, that part of com, that part of camaraderie of, you know, working together. So yeah, it's, I, I don't I think startups will should still try to lean toward working in person.

Yeah, it feels like when you're early before you have product market fit, that's so much more of a creative experience. And Nikita, it's your point. It's the early mornings, but also like I remember very fondly, like the late nights. Right. Like the when you're in the office at 2am with the group there. Both in terms of the camaraderie, but also like there's so much real learning when you're working late at night in an office with a senior person. And they were like, okay, it's you know, 1:30 and I'm going to info dump on you. Like the last five years of shit that I've learned, like that's a pretty extraordinary moment and important. Yeah, both the thing I mentioned earlier about the ICE development, but also so important for product market fit too. And I wonder, like, maybe remote works. I think it probably does work, as we've seen in our portfolio for companies that are playing an execution game who are further along and it's a question of just pouring gas in the fire and growing. But when you're still in the wilderness, you have to creatively iterate on something. I think it's just really hard without those magic moments.

What I found interesting is so I invest, so I'll invest after product market fit is established. And so I sort of view all of that as black magic. Right. But what I found interesting is we're drawing these distinctions, I think, that exist in a very real way between pre product market fit and post product market fit. Right. And those two worlds are very, very different. But I also think there's distinctions between the type of person working. Right. Engineer and salespeople have been remote ish for a very long time at a lot of businesses. And I think that works because it's much more individual, contributor oriented and it's less collaborative. Like there's things that you can execute on in a given day. And I've also found that like, so we. I've looked at Automattic and GitLab and Zapier and a handful of these businesses that were very remote before. And what's interesting is the people that gravitate to remote companies actually skew a little older because they don't need the social elements that come with the office. Right. And so if the average tech company is 27 or whatever, from an age standpoint, these full remote companies are 34, 35, 36, because they've already established their social dynamic. Right. They have families, they don't need the office for camaraderie. And so I think there are all these distinctions that exist now where we're headed that I think is just going to be a fucking disaster. Is this whole collaboration that is going to exist in the hybrid world. Right. And Automattic and GitLab, I think were fairly dogmatic. Someone can probably look this up for us. But they were pretty dogmatic about every meeting. No one can be a second class citizen. Right. And so what that meant was even if Nikita and I are going to be in the office together, if we're going into a meeting, we need separate rooms. We're both going to be on zoom so that everyone else was in a level playing field. Because when there's certain people in certain rooms, there's so much subtlety and conversation that happens within that room that people inevitably were going to feel like second class citizens there. And now that we're moving to this hybrid world, some people are going to want to go into the office, some people aren't, some people are going to be on screen, some meetings are going to happen, not with a camera present. And I think it's just going to be a total disaster for the next three years.

Well, this is not a comment on GitLab, which is a portfolio company and so certainly not commenting on that. But what I'll say generally about this is, is it's like fairly obvious that no matter what tooling you use or what process you have, if you have a culture where some folks are remote and some folks are in person, no matter what age. Right. The remote folks are at disadvantage. I think it's not uncontroversial, it's not controversial rather to say that at least it ought not to be. And so the question is like then do you find there's a sorting mechanism where the most ambitious employees, regardless of age, want to be in the office because they know that's where the first class experience is. And you have a world where folks who say, hey, really optimizing for lifestyle over career right now end up being remote instead. And I wonder if that's something that we're going to see more and more of as companies try to figure out what this messy middle hybrid looks like.

I've heard a story of a $5 billion plus private company who in their offer letters actually write in still today that every employee, even though they've been kind of, some people are going in, some people aren't, but they've been writing in, you have to live within 45 miles of, of the office, really. At least the executives, they're actually putting that into, into the offer letter, which I think is, which I think is really interesting.

I wonder if it's like early career and late career where you want to be in person, right? Early career, you want to be in person to get the mentorship. Late career, you want to be in person to collaborate with the C suite. But if you're in sort of like mid career, then maybe remote makes a lot of sense. And if you're happy being in mid career, then maybe remote makes a lot of sense for you.

Someone's going to write the playbook about how this actually works and what roles you can do it in. I think product and marketing probably are going to be a lot more collaborative and skew more in person in this hybrid world. Sales and engineering probably less. And so someone's going to write this definitive guide of how to make sense of all this and what age works for where. But it's going to be chaotic and I think we're going to lose a lot of productivity as we get back into this office world, figuring all this stuff out.

Yeah, I think if, if the two competitors are going toe to toe on out executing each other, it's, it's just really hard to execute at 100% in a totally remote context. And I'm curious, I think that we'll have some stories that play out where one company just simply executed because they say the last 20% of a product development cycle takes up 80% of the time. In that last 20%, you're hand waving, you're talking, you're trying to communicate emotions and the triggers of a product. And I'm curious to see like if someone creates a in, in person team, will they out execute some, some other startup just simply because they have more craft and they sweat the details?

You know, we even see this in venture, right? Like we know that when you're chasing something that's really hot or when you're chasing a deal you're excited about, certainly it helps to get on a plane and go meet somebody and walk in person. Right. And we know that even better yet that still being in the cities and the geographies where great founders are gives you an edge that's unfair. So it certainly seems to me that that's going to be the case for

most industries as the stereotype seems to be in the industry altogether. Now on the venture side, you sort of have Benchmark on one end and you have Andreessen on the other. Right? Benchmark is They've been back in person for the last whatever 18 months or something doing in person. And that's, that's very much core to their bespoke how they operate group Andreessen people are kind of sprawled all over and they've made this work in a big organization. And so it's interesting, the two of them always seem to exist at the polar ends of huge fund, small fund, bespoke craft, big institution, in person, remote. It's just like these two orgs kind of exist at the ends here. So one other news item this week so Clear Co, the company that was formerly ClearBank announced that their two co founders stopped dating. So Andrew D' Souza and Michelle Romanow were in a relationship when they founded the business. D' Souza served as the CEO while Romanow served as the President. This is a $2 billion financial modern lending company. And so my understanding of what they do is some form of factoring related to E commerce. So they'll give you advances so that you can spend on marketing or inventory if you're a D2C E commerce business. So this week they announced that they have broken up and d' Souza is stepping up to the executive role as as people do and Roman Al is taking over as CEO. So they said in a statement we're no longer dating. We're no longer in a personal relations anymore but we still care very much for each other. And they said we have a $2 billion baby. It was very easy when we were always in the same room. Someone would call one of us and get both of us. So I don't know your guys opinions about this. There's been a bunch of famous companies that have had a bunch had success founded by either dating or married co founders. So notably VMware, Diane Green and Mendel Rosenblum, Cisco, the the original founders were dating Eventbrite, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Canva which is now whatever a 30 $40 billion design software Clif bar, Tootsie Roll. Notably I found in my advanced research the husband and wife have been running the company together for a while. So Zach, I don't know any perspective

here from you Logan, have you invested in any. I'm just curious Nikita and your angel investing, have you invested in any husband and wife or dating co founders?

So we have one in the portfolio that I know and I guess I remember it used to be something five, 10 years ago that was I think pretty avoided by venture capitalists. I mean you can imagine all the ways in which relationships can go awry, right? And then you throw in a company to it and it's like, like, geez, that seems like some level of existential risk to the business. Interestingly, we've gotten comfortable with it. It's obviously dependent on the personalities and the roles. And it's weird because you're also kind of judging their personal relationship as well as their professional relationship, as we do analyzing any co founder. But it's something that I think just goes into a risk bucket like anything else. When you're coming up with the pros and cons of the deal, you can't avoid this being a risk. Right. Like founders breaking up is certainly a risk, but when you're throwing in all the other emotions that go with being in an actual personal relationship with someone, it's definitely enhanced risk of the founding team going the other way. Now there's a trade off. Right. Theoretically they should be able to communicate better with one another. There should be a lot of trust there, all of that stuff. But it definitely goes into our risk bucket, but not a non starter. What about you, Zach? Have you, have you ever done it?

I'm sure that somebody will come out of the woodwork to say that across my career there's been some, some firm. In fact, I should, I should say that when I was at Emergence, we were investors in Clearco. And so this is not specifically about them, but I can't think of a scenario where I personally have led or persuaded an investment that had a husband and wife team or any sort of marriage or partnership team. It's not that it's such a huge risk, certainly is a risk. It's more that I actually don't know that the kinds of people who get married make ideal co founders. Like so often you want like different complimentary skill sets in a co founding team. You want the person who's hyper extrovert, who is so good, and the person who's like the introvert who's running the operations and keeping things stable.

Yeah. At a personal level, I think it's such a commitment to pick a co founder, you end up spending more time with them than your spouse often. So like when like I'm right now in kind of a co founder dating experience and I'm trying to like the line that I give to them is do you want to spend 10 years of experience, 10 years of mental trauma with me? That's, that's essentially what you're signing up for. And if that person's also your spouse, it sounds like a lot, a lot of exposure to the same person. Having said that, you know, Clear Co is like an incredible company. I've known Andrew for many years and I think they're going to be fine. But I totally understand after many years you might want to part ways after spending 14 hours a day together.

Yeah, Zach, to your earlier point on it, I mean, I know a lot of extroverted and introverted, like people that pair very well together as couples. And so I guess from a personality standpoint, I could, I could totally see it. But yeah, it is one of the jokes that I'll often make when evaluating an investment and talking to an entrepreneur is like, listen, this is a more formal relationship and it's harder to unwind than a marriage. Right. Because marriage, you have legal recourse to get out. You can get divorced and that happens whatever, 50% of the time, in general, you actually can't. There's no legal recourse to get rid of your VC or your board member structurally. And, and that's very much true with a co founder. And so now you're conflating these things in such a meaningful way. And I wish, I think Canva's been the one, like Melanie's talked pretty publicly about the struggles in the early days of their founding. Right. And I don't know Diane Green and VMware story well enough to comment on that, but I know that that was something that people were very concerned about and they weren't married at the time. I don't know if they are today, but they were, I think, openly dating. And people were like, very apprehensive about it. And it was probably a risk arbitrage on the business. I mean, clearly, whatever they're worth now $40 billion, clearly it worked out. But I know that was a real concern from people that passed on the investment.

I mean, I often say to founders, you wouldn't want to have a shotgun marriage. You shouldn't have a shotgun financing. It's not the case that you can. This is marriage without divorce, which is far more serious in some ways, honestly, than a lot of marriages are, where you can unwind if you need to.

I wonder if this is something we're going to be seeing more and more. Like, at the end of the day, VCs look to pattern matching or precedent. Right. And so I wonder if now that Canvas had this success and the examples aren't just VMware way back in the day and Cisco, where the founders were ultimately fired, like, now that this has actually happened, I wonder if this is going to be something that people are more comfortable doing or or not going forward.

Wait, so Zach, did you literally just say that you would take an investor more seriously than your future spouse?

I'm going to say no.

This is going to be red back at the rehearsal dinner. There's going to be press play on. Yeah, this is everyone's the father of the bride is going to get up and do his little speech and then we're going to press play on this. Well, that'll do it for the sixth episode of three Cartoon Avatars. We will be here next week as well again if. If we don't get canceled. So thank you everyone for listening.

Should we do the app thing to fade out? I thought that was pretty funny last time.

I. I think we should say I think four in a row like a dead horse.

I think four in a row is more than enough of that joke. I think it'll take another six for the ironic to get good.

Fine.

Fine.

I don't know.

Anyway, the apple watching is.