This Week in Startups

Register: https://www.angel.university/online In this workshop, I share my lessons from deploying over 70 million dollars of capital in over 200 startups, including Uber, Robinhood, Calm, Wealthfront, and others. You'll learn how to source and negotiate deals, evaluate startups, and manage your portfolio. If you're an accredited investor, visit https://www.angel.university/online to learn more and register today.

Follow Arlan: https://twitter.com/ArlanWasHere Join Backstage Crowd: http://backstagecrowd.com Follow Jason: https://twitter.com/Jason https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Pomp Podcast x TWiST crossover Follow Pomp: https://twitter.com/APompliano Follow Jason: https://twitter.com/Jason https://linktr.ee/calacanis

Follow @chamath: https://twitter.com/chamath Follow @jason: https://twitter.com/Jason https://linktr.ee/calacanis 0:01 Jason checks in on Chamath, Sacks & Friedberg, opening up their social circles, outdoor activities & more 9:31 Issues with politicizing matters of public health, deaths decreasing while new cases spike, masks, lockdowns & more 20:56 Viral videos, doxxing bad behavior & cancel culture 25:39 Reforming law enforcement, separating police from the military, changing police incentives 36:42 Are public unions too powerful? How a lack of leadership has led us here 41:49 Facebook vs. Twitter on free speech, Zuckerberg's relationship with Peter Thiel, valuing comfort over freedom of expression

1:00 Jason intros "Alchemy" author Rory Sutherland 3:45 Architecture is the cheapest way to buy art 6:01 How Rory is dealing with quarantine, why he prefers working from home, and will businesses be more efficient post-COVID? 14:12 What is Rory's job, why you should strive to create your own job title, treating the free market as Galapagos Island, using the Darwinian approach to business & analyzing outliers 19:47 Why some business successes are due to psychological discoveries: Red Bull, Dyson & Nespresso 27:25 Jason's theory on why Dyson succeeded, Kano theory on product development, why eccentric CEOs have a psychological advantage with customers, how Uber's arrival map was the key feature of the product 33:48 Why the actual value of products are typically not the proposed value of products 39:40 How new products hold value as a conversation starter, how context, setting & framing is essential to innovation 43:21 Two ways to create economic value: find something people want and figure out how to make it OR figure out what you can make and make people want it & examples: Lionfish, Fish That Ate The Whale, Royal Potatoes 50:13 Why are Americans resistant to behavioral economics? Is there still a hangover from McCarthyism? How this relates to COVID and wearing masks 1:02:08 Daily news is 95% noise, why political news coverage doesn't reflect political reality 1:11:40 Why modern politics is dumb since far left and far right are much closer than they've ever been, issues with referrals & nepotism 1:21:06 How Rory got his first job in advertising "as a weirdo" and the wildcard since he was hired as part of a group, individual hiring vs. group hiring 1:23:20 TWiST Book Club Questions - Casey: Favorite behavioral study experiment or one that he found the results to be surprising? (ie. Milgram experiment or Stanford Prison Study) 1:32:12 Catherine: What's Rory's favorite alchemist moment of his own from work? Has he had to advocate for an illogical idea, and how did he persuade others? 1:41:01 What will we lose by being remote? 1:51:19 Reading their own audiobooks, how cheaper and easier consumption does NOT cannibalize original mediums 2:01:26 How Rory would reinvent the theatre experience, why modern corporations are slow to innovate & experiment 2:11:18 Greatness of re-readable books and rewatchable movies/television

0:52 Jason intros Ford X's Sunny Madra 4:39 How Sunny got his start in Accelerators working on Tinder with Hatch Labs at IAC 11:47 What is Ford X's thesis on mobility and how do they decide whether to buy or build a company? 16:18 How does Ford X evaluate new ideas & how do they source talent? Sunny speaks about his personal investment in Cabana 22:56 Going from idea to product at a large corporation like Ford 29:29 Assessing risk-taking in early-stage ventures at a major company 35:02 How COVID has impacted Ford's stance on mobility & micro-mobility 42:10 Thoughts on bikes, car subscriptions, Ford's resilient commercial business 50:36 Ford's movement in the EV & autonomous vehicle space

0:38 Jason talks about the now fully-virtual LAUNCH Accelerator and intros Cendana Capital's Michael Kim 2:47 What is a fund of funds & why do they exist? History of raising Cendana's first fund 6:06 Portfolio construction of fund of funds 10:19 Why ownership percentage is paramount, ideal ownership % for Seed funds, what makes a great Seed fund manager 17:04 How do fund of funds make money? 18:51 Hedging bets by selling secondary shares to generate liquid cash for LPs 24:33 Michael on Call of Duty, using secondary shares to win a deal 30:46 What was the greatest Seed fund ever raised? 32:42 What is the ideal number of managers in a Seed fund? 36:38 What has the last 90 days been like for Cendana? Influx of new fund managers into the market 41:50 How fast is Cendana in making decisions compared to institutional LPs? 44:47 Will there be a wave of white-collar layoffs, and how will COVID change large tech companies? 52:29 Writing small "pilot" checks over Zoom, venture/growth fund deployment, which companies in non-obvious markets will come out of COVID in great shape? 1:03:37 Robinhood as an acquisition target (Should Facebook buy it?), Dropbox/Slack merger 1:06:17 Why right now is the best time to invest in the early-stage

0:01 Jason intros Tom Uebel & Lolita Taub 5:17 George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests impacting Venture Capital, Angela Benton's tweets about her bad experience with Cowboy Ventures, how can VC move forward and be better towards underestimated founders? 17:37 Lolita & Jason reflect on some imperfect investor moments towards founders 23:55 How investor bias towards underrepresented founders manifests itself 28:23 Tom on focusing on diversity in hiring at the earliest stage of a companies life, how people with raw talent miss out on opportunities due to pattern-matching 39:23 Zoom's shuts down a Chinese pro-democracy account, importance of Data privacy at Command E, Jason's thoughts on Zoom only giving end-to-end encryption to paid accounts 52:36 Wall Street Bets, Meme stocks and a new generation of Robinhood traders 56:59 Reddit appoints YC CEO Michael Seibel to its board after Alexis Ohanian steps down, former interim CEO Ellen Pao has words for current CEO Steve Huffman 1:03:07 Issues of free speech & why relying solely on government organizations may be the wrong decision 1:05:45 Juneteenth observation, potential reparation ideas 1:10:27 Assessing COVID-19 recent death numbers & risk of getting back to work 1:23:03 Lolita shares her founder-investor matching tool 1:25:30 Tom demos Command E

0:32 Jason speaks on current events and intros Science CEO Mike Jones, how they met after selling their companies to AOL 6:02 What is Science and how has it evolved since being started in 2011? Why did they pivot away from the startup studio model? 12:43 What are the economics of a venture-studio? 15:25 Defining the 3 scenarios of a "lifestyle-business" 18:41 Founders sharpening their skills through hardship, how Mike experienced that at MySpace 25:48 Investing in Dollar Shave Club, insights on what makes a great DTC founder 38:25 Short-term/Mid-term/Long-term impact of COVID 48:37 What is gained and lost in fully-remote work? 57:28 Thoughts on eventually going back to work?