watsonweekend pilot

And we're live. I think it's worse, Hendrik. I've never seen a worse picture.

That's good.

Hello, I'm used to vampire Hendrik. Can we go back to that? There we go, there we go, that's better.

Um, so I'm using a 3G situation today. I'm open to all feedback.

Um, and yes, can we talk about Flexport for a moment? I just got a LinkedIn post from, uh, one of my friends, Colin Rice. He's actually an ex-Flexport employee. I'd like to put emphasis on the ex. Okay. Uh, and I, um, I had written a post about 2 weeks ago saying, uh, basically how not to avoid a disaster if you join a startup, you know, meaning like, what do you look for And kind of my tips were, first of all, don't worry about it too much. You know, it's a startup, it's a risk. Don't know, like, overly stress about it. The second is, if you find yourself at a startup and you're like really happy in the first week, like, don't immediately recruit your friends. Like, wait a bit until you really know it's actually a good place, or you think you might know it's a good place., before you recruit them. And then I think the other thing I mentioned was don't just sort of follow your friends just because they're there for 3 weeks and say like, hey, this is great. After about 6 to 9 months will really tell the tale if it's a good place or not, not the first 3 weeks. Uh, and I just see so many people— yeah, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, instead of looking at the week-old photo of the welcome pack that they got, they should send you the 6-month care pack. Yeah, Tylenol, whiskey, and, uh, something to get you through the weekend.

That's the real benchmark of OxyContin.

So what did Colin say?

Uh, so he said career advice is accurate, but the big but, the Flexport story hasn't been played out.

Yet.

People there are high caliber, top to bottom, and betting against Ryan is like betting against Brady in his prime. Brady in his prime?

That's crazy. Plus Brady came out of retirement like twice, so did he ever have a prime?

Uh, well, you know, look, Brady won a Super Bowl. Multiple Super Bowls, right? And sadly for Hendrick, it— that's like old news for the Patriots. But, um, I think, what Super Bowl has Ryan won, right?

So what do you think, Hendrick? A late-stage starter to arguably the greatest football player in the history of the NFL, uh, help. Uh, two, uh, did we ever see, um, Mr. Brady and Coach Belichick have a public fallout where the entire world is aware of the, you know, the laundry? Um, thirdly, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like Flixport has a huge, like, cult of people, like, wanting to believe that it's a future success. Yet what is it at its most core fundamental? It's a commodity business that's tech-enabled. Just like logistics. Help, am I missing something? Rick? Vinny? Help.

Well, the first thing, we can't call it a startup anymore, can we? Like, how many chances do you get to not be a startup? It feels like they gotta mature a bit beyond that.

That is a good question. Are we sure about this?

It's not like it's in a new industry. It's in an old industry trying to make a new splash, and that's going to take time. I mean, there's a lot of legacy providers in there. So they want the startup moniker, but they don't want— they're not going to be able to compete in a mature industry. That's a fact. So unless Ryan has got that in his playbook, There's not too much I think they can do in the short term. Yeah, and if they have all this talent top to bottom, what are they doing?

Well, didn't all the talent leave? Didn't Dave fire all the talent? And now he's firing all of Dave's talent.

I was gonna just make exactly that, um, guys, just reminder, we let people go with a pink letter. You know, saying bye-bye. It's not free. So start down, uh, you know, the second revival of, of the, the founder of Flexsport. He's, he's not even at the 20-yard line. He's at like the 1-meter yard line with the San Francisco 49ers defense basically trying to make him stop. Uh, stop getting touched down. And, and to be honest, I, I'm concerned over the fact that the launching of this new thing, Flexport Plus— really, is that how creative you are? And it's really a capital play, it's not really a freight play. You know, what, what are we wanting to admit here? Are we, are we admitting that the core business of Flexport isn't going to, you know, be this 10x opportunity? Or is it a case of one thing that's on my radar— wait for it— pandemic mirages?

Oh, yes, pandemic mirage.

Think about it. Ryan played his cards really well in the pandemic. Remember the infamous Los Angeles, like, port, like, movie scene? And then you have, you know, him doing everything to get, like, access to shopping and everything. Well, newsflash, we are back to where shipping is cheap, it's not being— it doesn't have peak value anymore. Um, and where's Flexsport suddenly? It's neither here nor there. So I don't know, I, I keep coming back to the simple question is, wow, Ryan knew— Ryan and the Flexsport board knew exactly what they were getting when they hired Mr. Clark. Clark would not have agreed to basically do the normal things because that's not what Clark does. For the record, just a disclaimer, I neither know Ryan Peterson nor Dave Clark personally. I'm basing this all on the heaps and reams and streams of internet content that, that's been made public by the both of them. The point for me is that I think there's a different situation that's not being spoken about, and that is that Flexport's one investor is called Shopify. And days before this breaking of the boy, the boy band Shopify essentially told Mr. Clark that they're gonna let Amazon do the fulfillment thing and Buy with Prime is a go. So suddenly Flexport, being the preferred partner to Shopify, didn't go up into smoke. It was a non-starter. Even the dog.

Hold on. So look, here's what a lot of people don't understand. Uh, Dave Clark was named CEO here. This is when he joined in September.

Yep.

But he was announced back here in April, which means like if you kind of go back up 2 months from there Um, that's when he was looking for a job. So he was kind of looking during this peak. I mean, talking about calling the high. Yep. And then this was kind of the holy shit moment, I would say, 2 weeks after you joined.

Yeah.

So, and then he didn't even become CEO. Like, he was still co-CEO during this time. Yes, in theory, like until March. And so like, this is, this is, uh, this is his reign here, this period here.

If Flexport died in the morning, would anyone care?

That's a good question.

So my comparison here is, if you had someone like Klarna who fell out of the buy now pay later space, there's quite a lot of fallout. There's investors, there's partners, there's banks, there's ecosystems built around it. That would cause a stir and a ripple. Flexport going down people would just pick up the pieces, staff would just go to other jobs, and we'd be talking about Flexport in terms of its place in history in 10 years' time. Would we even talk about it?

Good question.

And that raises like pity the bears. But, but Vinny, that's a really good observation. Why? Because Let's be honest, with the talent drain that's happened recently, I'm convinced that Flexport is losing more staff than what they're willing to admit.

So there's something interesting even in how the business model operated, and it goes back to something that you were saying earlier about hiring and, and not following people into startups, right? Flexport seems like a business that was born in a bar on a Friday night where 4 or 5 buddies were sitting around talking about all the shit they knew about their day jobs, and they were like, if we combine this into one product and use our relationships, our network to build relationships and bring business in, we can do something. And that's what it feels like to me. And there's no real strategy there.

Uh, look, I think that's a tad harsh. Um, the simple—

harsh in a nice way. Like, wait, from Hendrik?

Too harsh?

Yes, yes, that, that is, that is— to say it's ironic coming out of my mouth is, is like hilarious. Here's, here's the thing for me that's really interesting. The Flicksport story is going very similar to what's happening in another Seattle transport marketplace business called Convoy. We've seen the— we're seeing this story happening very closely there again. And if you digitize an old industry that was run on paper and spreadsheets and telephone calls and all that stuff, you know, that's, that's a, that's a nice boost. But if you think about the really successful internet businesses, I'm talking of Amazon, Microsoft, Lord help me, Meta, Facebook, Alibaba, etc. What is the, what is the one thing that these businesses all do? And that is they reimagine themselves almost on an annual basis to find a new high margin opportunity. You've got thousands of people on your payroll, yet your announcement about using AI is to, for all intents and purposes, generate a lead gen situation for somebody else or yourself. And then you're offering access to capital. We still don't know who's, who's offering that capital. Is it, is it a third party? Is it coming from Flexport's balance sheet? I don't know. It's just, what does this business do in order to generate the return that this opportunity supposedly was? Because if there's no 10x opportunity, Vinny O Brien, your concept of 5 friends sitting in a bar mashing networks and, you know, looking for an upstart. It hits the spot.

What did they do? They, they, they launch a revolution. Didn't they just launch a revolution? Did you not guys see the news, Hendrick? It says right here, revolution.

They hired a CMO. I was gonna write copy like this.

Global trade is as old as time.

Rick, can you, can you give me the one sentence?

So, so is Beauty and the Beast song is old as time.

I was just singing that in my head. How did you know?

I'm here for you.

Where can I—

come on, I'm just saying, I read that press release like 5 times. And every time I just realized that it's, it's not as old as time, it's just, it's, it's a reach. What can we sound like what we are doing?

He sold scooters, come on, give him some credit.

So I go back to my question: if FlexBoard was dead tomorrow, would anyone care?

Or the question would be rather, if Flexport is acquired tomorrow by a large shipping business, does anything really change? Vinny, to be honest, your question for me is kind of scary in the sense that at the moment, yes, they are, you know, larger customers using there. But what is revolutionary about this service? Rick, help me here. Revolutionary.

This, this sentence really crystallized for me the bullshit. Can we, can we blow that up for a minute?

Wait for it.

Okay, so first of all, you launch your revolution at no cost. First of all, what does that even mean? Unclear. It's not explained. And if you want more than no cost, you can subscribe to get financing. Like, why wouldn't I just go to Wayflyer or Shopify Capital to get financing? Uh, Amazon Capital, PayPal Capital, the bank, easy access, supply chain experts. Where are these supply chain experts?

Yes, I'd like to, to find some of these folks because I only know of two of these people.. And I, I believe I have a good idea.

I mean, I always find— I always look at like when you compare, when you look at what a company does, they always say the most important thing first. And I always come back to like this word here, financing. Then they do it again, financing. Flexport, get more capital. This is so low-cost lead gen to their capital. That's it. End discussion.

It's almost like the, the facial expression that Vinny just showed to that poor human at the door, but it's, it is, it's, it's essentially it's a finance play. And, you know, are you really telling me that all of their clients need financing? Really?

So is that in part why Clark wasn't a good fit? Because on paper it's meant to be his core competence, right? But in fact, if it was a finance play That's not his, not his bag.

But no, he wants to build, Rick, guys, trucks, planes, buildings.

No, what was the thing that he didn't do? What did he not do? According to all the press, he did not speak to customers. He did not speak and listen to Flexwood customers.

Really?

He's no saint. He's no saint. But, but some of this just feels to me like it's, it's personality clashes. It's, it's a fatal misunderstanding of the market. Rick, you— the earlier graphic about when, you know, it looks like the, the ultimate downhill bike ride. You know that, that graphic going down, it looks like the end of an epic Tour de France stage. Yeah, what, what makes Flix Sport like unique?

Let's throw that up again. Hold on.

I love the Tour de France analogy, Hendrik.

Here we go.

Just look at this. Just look at— look at that.

Look at that.

Whoa.

Hey, I don't know what that was.

Look at that.

Look at the line directly below it. Flexport's business, to express this another way, is closely tethered to a commodity. Yes, there tells you that the, the original intent, as you said it earlier, Hendrik, was to go in, spot a margin opportunity, and, and grow the shit out of it. If it's a commodity, that's much harder to do.

Yes, but Vinny, you know what's the one thing that this conversation thus far has not mentioned at all? There, there's this other rocket ship thing that just lately launched the day— on the day or the day before of this revolutionary announcement. It's called Supply Chain by Amazon. Everything that Flexport supposedly was going to do, Amazon basically told all of its sellers, come and get it, here we are, come and get it. For me, that's, that's like the death knell. That's where you like fall. That's like when you fall off the bike and you know that you can't go, but you feeling you have to get up because if you don't, you're gonna get disqualified or you're gonna be taken off the classification. That's how that announcement felt to me. Like the poor person who's driving, riding for the Flexport team has no idea where the energy is going to be coming from. You know, talk about oxygen being taken out the room.

Harsh.

And the one thing for me that, that remains a question is how does this become a business that even gets close to the ginormous valuation How help?

Yeah, I'm not sure. Let's talk about SEA for a second though. I mean, to me the big question is, and maybe this goes to Mr. Reynolds over there, how if you're a brand Why do you let the fox into the henhouse for non-Amazon channels? Isn't that the key question?

No matter how good they are, I think people are so squeezed that they have no option. And like, part of it was opportunistic. Um, if you're a brand right now, cash flow is in pretty short supply. I, I think anyway. So they're going to take any opportunity they get. This might push the boat out another 6 months, give someone a bit of a lifeline. It might stop job losses. So I think the fox being in the henhouse is, is not the worst thing in the world. Then your job is, do I bring the fox in the water? Do I bring the chicken? Do I, do I bring the seed? What am I going to put in the boat with me on this trip? And, you know, rather than cost cut, which is what a lot of brands have done this year, this seems like a viable option to put some legs into it. And that, that's kind of— it's a simplistic answer, but that's the way I read it. Like, the— that whole sector is so terribly squeezed. Would you start a brand today?

So Vinny, if you put me on the spot, how— where I would start a brand today, for me it's kind of simple. I would create a marketplace-native brand that leverages all of Amazon's tools. Uh, we'll get to TikTok in a minute, Mr. Watson. We'll get to them in a minute. My point is, is that Amazon provides you with all the tools. I think that what Supply Chain by Amazon is— and it's, it's been on my, it's been on my radar for a while What is it really? And we saw the first iterations of this move when, um, Buy with Prime was announced. Amazon wants to be the pipes that powers commerce, whether it happens on Amazon or whether it doesn't happen on Amazon. They want a percentage of that revenues because they have the best technology and supply chain solutions available for brands. Vinny, to your point, and this is 100% on, on, on, on, on point at the moment, name me any business in e-com that does not have the largest cost center being logistics and fulfillment. If you can farm that out at a discounted rate to somebody or business that does this day in and day out and has expertise, it's a case of take my money. Yes, yes, thank you, Mr. Amazon Consultant. That's what I've been seeing all over the internet last couple of weeks.

Isn't this— do you guys remember this scene? Can we, can we talk about this for a second? It's a trap! There goes Lando.

We gotta have some Lando.

I know, right? Come on, there's too many of them. Which one is Shopify in this thing? Is that Toby right there?

Nomination, yes.

Does that make Amazon the Death Star?

Oh, good one.

That's kind of what you're implying, right? Yeah, that makes— that makes kind of Come on, does that make Toby Luke Skywalker?

Careful now. Whoa, whoa, careful now, careful now. We don't want you to be canceled by the entire Shopify community on the web.

But is that not like the greatest compliment of all time to be called Luke Skywalker, despite the sarcasm? Oh, sorry, I meant Luke Skywalker from The Simpsons, The Simpsons version. Okay, but, but the point you make is, is really true. But Amazon are not the only one doing this, Hendrik. We've talked about this before, where there's Chinese conglomerates that are setting up the— setting themselves up to be that kind of an infrastructure for people. And I've seen it closer to home with PCH, who are looking to provide these solutions for people. Wayflyer are doing it themselves. So there's no one that's at that scale that doesn't realize that the further up, up supply chain they get, the, the more of that incremental revenue they're gonna get as well. As is kind of some of the things that we've talked about, Andrew.

Uh, yes, but I think what I, I continue to believe that Amazon is playing defense with the supply chain moves, um, this week Um, you know, Alibaba announced that they're going to invest $2 billion into TrainYol in Turkey. Um, China Network has been growing like exponentially out, out, uh, outside of China. Thank you for your humble knocking of my beloved Patriots, right? You make my day. Thank you. But my point is, is that Amazon sits on on the data of these sellers. And PCH, Channel Network, Shopify Logistics, and whoever else— Amazon understands exactly what needs to be done and when. They have the trust of these sellers. Yes, the sellers, I think, to the mountains and back, because of all the costs and everything. But I would be surprised if we don't hear at the end of next year that Supply Chain by Amazon has like 10,000, 10,000 sellers using it. It's generating so many billions in revenues and everything. Here's the thing that Amazon's figured out, Vinny. They figured out that in order to drive revenues with logistics, you need a marginal business. The margin business is called Amazon Advertising. And Amazon Supply Chain for me is not inevitable, it's a reality, but it's also a hedge against them, I believe, getting hammered by the FTC for being a bad actor. Because now it's no longer just Amazon, we can, we can do the supply chain forever where you want to do, whether it's on Walmart, whether it's on Shopify, you know, even it's on this, the, the, like, I, I, I think it's, it's, I think it's a big deal. And I'm, I'm interested in the sense that in the last 30 days Amazon has literally announced only logistics and supply chain concepts, programs They've not invested anything close to this in any other thing this year. It's literally been supply chain, supply chain, supply chain, and supply chain, and supply chain.

So I, I got two things on that. One is a question to you guys, and then the other is kind of a point in general, something I've observed. For Shopify, if they went all in on Shop as a, as a proper marketplace, their greatest revenue stream they could be generating right now is ad-based if they did that properly. That's surely something they've got to be considering at this point in time. That's the question. But then just to kind of finish up on the Amazon point, I kind of think there's like this two or three-tier ecosystem emerging in e-commerce right now. And the second and third systems are places like— I'm going to use my home country, Ireland, and I'll talk about South Africa briefly, or Africa in general, because The way I see it, Ireland is 5 million people. We should have 4 distribution centres and we should be co-opping the services. So to bring the cost of logistics down, to bring down the cost of marketing, we should be setting up to say, okay, for all the small retailers, pay service fee and that's it. So similar to what Amazon are doing elsewhere. One of the big articles I read this year, it was kind of nonsense really. It was, or it was Africa, the next 1.4 billion people. It's your biggest market that you've not heard of yet. And in reading it, it was kind of claiming this is going to be the next place to grow your e-commerce empire. And the more I read through it, the less it indicated that that was possible. And the one thing that stuck out was the fact that procurement projects that are brought to life, 80% of them fail at viability stage. So there's no ability to do next-day delivery. There's probably not even an ability to do 3-day delivery from one end of the continent to the other. So we can't do e-commerce in the same way. So my thinking a lot right now is that we need to find new ways to think through e-commerce. There will be US e-commerce, which is what we know and we spend a lot of time building towards, but actually we've got to find a version of it for ourselves. I don't know how you guys— that was a long question, sorry.

What was the question?

The first question was about Shop. The second was just a bit of a ramble. I'm gonna do that every week.

I think, uh, okay, okay, Africa.

Um, the Shop—

I think Shop is still evolving. It seems to me they're running a lot of experiments. I think they acquired, you know, originally this Shop was an acquisition. I think they acquired a company called Ticktail, and I think the guy who, who is CEO of Ticktail is actually still running Shop, if I'm not mistaken. Um, and I think once it got within Shopify, they kind of saw that marketplace wasn't— I think they were too afraid to launch a marketplace. For fear of going against their merchants. And now what I saw, what I heard in the last earnings call was that you need a mobile app strategy, and why don't you go inside our app, which is kind of like, I don't know, call it the mobile mall for Shopify. What do you think about this idea?

So let's, let's just start with all the questions. So question 1, Vinny, you mentioned about, you know, Shopify advertising. I think that boat has sailed. I think Toby essentially created partnerships with everybody under the sun, and I don't think they'll ever create their own advertising play. I just don't think it's inside them, nor do I think it's something that's interesting. For me, if you are doing a mobile mall, is this Shopify actually finally admitting that their mobile play and infrastructure is horrific? For me, it does. Um, two, I'm not sure what the end goal for Shop as an app is. It essentially started life as a data plane, a large one, but it's morphing more and more into essentially, let's offer a service and we don't tell our partners, you know, what you need to do to— in order to be part of this. Uh, we have a— we have a friend by the name of Victor Castro Victor is a good man, but when you, you mention the Shop app to him, he goes into like— he becomes a totally different human.

Have you ever— have you guys ever done this?

I think I've seen that website before.

Oh, this website, notamarketplace.com. Nice. So I don't know, maybe they're serious about not a marketplace, but there's—

I think it lacks vision when you think about it. There's a lot of functionality in there that would be useful for local merchants. So shop near me, show me merchants that are in my vicinity that I can shop from because I want to shop local.

Well, that, that market is there to help with advertising. Yes, it is, but it's totally broken, um, Vinny. I have Shop App inside, uh, and when I look at the, the brands, no, close to me, so I, in Africa, I get brands shown in the UK and Australia. I don't see local brands, which, which is a fundamental failure because discovery is still a huge challenge. So yes, um, I think what's, what's interesting is Rick wrote about it this week, and I think the one thing for me with the Shopify story that isn't getting spoken enough is that I think the relationships between them and TikTok is really, really dense. And as much as Shopify wants to be a good partner for TikTok. TikTok is pretty clear in the sense that they, they want to become the first algorithmic-based shopping business where intent leads to a purchase that's driven by algorithms and all kinds of interesting technology. Um, Shopify is in a tough place in the sense that they want to be seen as being a good partner to many, yet they kind of, kind of feels like— for me, it feels like they've kind of made their bed. It's, it's a payments business. It's, it's a continuation of components and all of these other things, but B2C for me kind of feels like they've kind of said, you know what, Shopify Plus is good, there we go, have at it.

I mean, in fairness to Shopify, Shop is kind of their moonshot. That, that's the way I look at it. It's like it's gonna bounce along for a while, maybe they'll figure out the formula, maybe they won't figure out the formula, but if they do figure out the formula Having that relationship with the buyer seems pretty important that they can give to their merchants that other people can't. Um, you know, the challenge with that is that do they just become another marketplace at that point? Back to TikTok for a moment.

It's—

I think it's so fascinating. I think, um, what people forget— people look at TikTok launching e-commerce and they're like, oh, it's just gonna feel like Instagram Shop. The, the, the challenge is you, you never went to the entertainment value of TikTok and the discovery for finding new brands, listening to people do things. That's about trust, and trust is the foundation of e-commerce. And to do that, you actually need to be able to create interesting videos and content. And so I think it still is going to be true that the average brand is going to fail on TikTok because the content will be dull.

Have you ever tried to create content for TikTok? I've already You have, Hendrik? How'd you find it?

Oh, look, here's the thing, and I think this is kind of an important situation. Um, I think we're at the stage where if you're a brand and you are not wanting to do experiments with TikTok, you know, create content for it, for me that's, that's like mismanagement. No, I'm not. Um, do I— I think— I think TikTok has some platform challenges. So in Wired this week, there's an article about, you know, slime from— yeah, and, you know, counterfeit products being sold to people based on, you know, trends. Um, uh, Rolling Stone has an investigation into Parasite Cleanser, which according to TikTok's terms and conditions is naughty and shouldn't be on it, yet it gets completely amounts of eyeballs. I think with, with what makes TikTok really unique for me is, is that it's the first iteration of shopping where the is that virality can literally create products that we've never ever seen before. And I've seen in the last 12 months brands use TikTok, especially Amazon brands, use TikTok as a way to generate engagement and eyeballs at us at a rate that no other platform can.

TikTok, small brand here called The Smooth Company, that they've got this hair stick They didn't exist before 18 months ago. It was a young lady, she was 20, her grandfather, and they came up with the product. They launched it on TikTok, set up a basic Shopify store for €2,000, and they're going to trade over a million quid this year. They're very, very profitable. They've moved all their manufacturing from China to Barcelona. They've now got shorter lead times in terms of product delivery, and they can order in better batches.. And it just seems like a really smart way to grow a business. They're at the point now where with TikTok Shop, they actually don't need Shopify next year. That's a whole other cost line taken out. And I— whoa, that finger's pointing at me. I gotta stop. What is it?

That's exactly the tension between Shopify and TikTok. You've just won it. You've won the debate, Vinny. You mentioned the pain and stress between the two platforms, but that exists everywhere, right?

So we, we just kind of have to suck it up. The one thing I love about it is that you can actually do everything in one place. So that's what I'm excited about. Whereas you, you go talk to a client, you work in a business now, and you're— you've got your Amazon strategy, your Walmart strategy, your, your paid search strategy, your organic social strategy, your email strategy. Now they're all underpinned by one overall strategy, but that's a lot of balls to juggle. People get overwhelmed before they even start to do their job. And I think that's why we have such ineffective marketing, because we're constantly trying to think our way through really basic operational things rather than be creative with our brand. And in essence, we don't have any brand values, whereas TikTok, it's brand values first and everything else follows. You know, you can get yourself out there and get known because of your brand values, be that you want to be funny, you want to be entertaining, you want to be knowledgeable. And you know, that, that's how you can build it, and it's much simpler, all on your phone. Like, that's a compelling argument. It's easy.

It's easy.

Yeah, exactly. And that for me was the difference. We, we kind of chatted about this where Facebook did this a number of years ago Timing was wrong. I think it wasn't as easy, and the fluidity of the content is way better on TikTok just because of the way the platform is structured.

I believe very strongly that TikTok Shop should be on the radar of any person in e-commerce.

Why?

Because TikTok is now leaning in or aggressively standing behind their business and saying, we are going to drive a new version of e-commerce that's like nothing that's ever been seen before. Just a news flash, TikTok Shops available in 3 markets: Indonesia, the UK, the US. What, what scares me is that this is— they, they've been doing things methodically, and they are doing the most logical thing that I've seen in a very long time. It was on the information yesterday, news flash, they are going to build an office in or a campus in Seattle. So they're going to be looking for Amazon talent. This is for real. This isn't something where let's hope and see how this works. This needs to work. And the simple reality for me is, is that TikTok wants to accelerate live shopping, video shopping, you know, shopping that's entertaining. In a way that nobody else is wanting to do. So to your point about Instagram, Meta, eBay, whoever, nobody's been wanting to make this fun.

And can I set a challenge? We mention eBay once a week just for nostalgia.

Well, I did my job. I did my job.

There used to be eBay.

eBay is awesome. Ironically, the first value you learn in eBay is that everybody is good. It's that trust thing. I love that about the place.

For used stuff, eBay is still pretty great.

They advertise £1 iPhones this morning at 10 o'clock and they didn't appear anywhere on site. I was, I was late for a client meeting just trying to get myself a refurbished iPhone. Didn't work. But the thing about TikTok, to go back to that point, Hendrik, I was chatting to some of their biz dev team at a senior level in the UK. £1 iPhones, nice. It's a currency thing, Rick. We're going to bring you up to speed on currencies of the world as we—

Yeah, you were talking about quid before. I was confused.

Yeah, sorry.

I thought that was Latin. Like, he's speaking in tongues.

Yeah, quid pro quo. The end of the world is nigh. He's speaking in tongues. TikTok don't really have a roadmap. Did you speak to anyone about this? At a development level, they kind of organically grow out different business functions. Have you guys heard this at all? You're nodding. Yeah, I find that to be kind of what— it doesn't even feel risky anymore. It feels like it's a really smart way to grow the business.

So are you saying like TikTok is stumbling around like a drunk at the end of the night?

Like me, you mean? I know that's where you wanted to go with it. That's okay.

Hey, beautiful now.

Beautiful now. Permission to go there. Yeah, they kind of are. And you can see it in the speed at which they get products out there. They're pretty on trend. They're accessible and they're not caught up in a roadmap that means that they've got to be super strict about development cycles and so on. So they're, they're not locked into, um, releases the way that other companies are. And I think that just gives them a lot of flexibility, and they can read the market as well.

Yes, but I think if you understand the Chinese way, you know, this is how Alibaba, JD, Uh, Kwashau, all of these guys operate in the sense that they are wanting to play in every sector.

Why?

Because that's how you learn about your consumer. Um, in all honesty, we went from Flexport to TikTok shop in a space of 40 minutes. What does it show me? That the Watson Weekly can basically go many miles in many places in 40 minutes.

Amen.

Yeah, yeah, thank goodness. Well, if you're, uh, interested in hearing more of this— I'm, I'm a little confused if you are still here and listening.

They, they still are.

It just might have turned the camera part off.

Yeah.

Oh, I hope it's because of your— your mic isn't on, Vinny. Sorry, your mic isn't on. You didn't notice that?

No, I'm very single functional person. I'm not a multitasker.

Okay, that's good. Anywho, tune in next week, sports fans, where we see if the Patriots can find an offensive game plan.

Oh, come on, you know it's gonna be terrible. Let's rather be more focused on, on Saturday. Vinny's beloved Ireland plays against my beloved Springboks in the Rugby World Cup. Both men enter smiling. One man will be very unhappy after the match. And I have a feeling it's gonna be— is there a wager here that I, uh, yes, there is a friendly wager, but we will not discuss that publicly.

I would like to see the loser wear the rugby jersey of the winner.

That sounds fair. I'm gonna do push-ups before I come on camera though.

Get my swell on and sing the anthem.

The anthem? I can do that. I learned the words.

That's a bit harsh.

My one South Africa fact, Hendrik.

Wait for it.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison on my 9th birthday, resulting in me being late for my own party because my dad wanted to see him walking out of prison. And he was like delayed by 2 hours. So here's me, this kid just turned 9, waiting to go to his own party, all his cousins eating his cake, watching this moment of history. At the time I thought my dad is an a-hole.

Oh my word.

In retrospect, it was quite a moment.

All right, we gotta shut this down. It's, it's gone way over the line. Next week, Hendrik, you're gonna, you're gonna be singing the Soldier Song.

I don't know, let me just say, let me just say, Ireland has one of the most beautiful national anthems. I won't be lying, I do sing along with it weekends, on the weekends, because it's, it's like the Welsh. They, they're a nation that sings. So if I have to sing the Irish national anthem next week in the last, like, parts of the, of the show, I don't mind at all. It's just For me, it's just what a week.

Best of luck tomorrow, Hendrik.

Take care, team.

Enjoy the game.