#124 - From Fantasy Stock Betting to Milk Bombs: Generating Ideas with Elaine Zelby

yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking bad ryan okay what's up everybody sean here we're waiting on sam he's gonna be joining in a second we'll let him you know make a dramatic entrance and then we have elaine z with us i say it right hello yes that's perfect it's weird because i've met people but i've never said their full name out loud and i do it for the first time on the podcast and i'm like well shit hopefully get this right but yours is pretty easy yep that's for sure me and sam have a mutual friend who i think has known us for a he's known me he's sam for a long time he's known me for a couple years and he calls me shannon he thinks my name is shannon and i haven't corrected him and so he just calls me shannon and i just let it go which is kind of a weird move on my phone i should probably tell him at some point yeah i feel like there's always that awkward of if your name is pronounced a little bit different than it's spelled of like do you correct people all the time do you just let it go and be like what it's okay yeah yeah i usually correct people because and because i i would want if i was saying somebody's name wrong i would want them to be like hey actually it's this but the moment went by and i didn't say it and i was like well moment went by now now i'm stuck with this now that never named shannon but might will tell everyone that's what it is okay so tell people what you do and we met because you sent me a bunch of cool ideas once and you're were like hey we should meet i like your podcast and i have a bunch of ideas too and then we did a zoom call that by the end it i was shit i should have just recorded that that would have been an episode and so finally got you on for an actual episode but give people a quick little like introduction yeah for sure so i have had kind of a random life and career i started as a mechanical engineer i actually did undergrad and grad school and i thought i was gonna do mechanical device sorry on mental devices and i'm really impatient so pretty quickly realized that hardware was probably not a good fit for me so and wanted to do my own company but couldn't figure out what i wanted to spend seven to ten years on so i joined as one of the first employees of an end of enterprise software company which they don't tell you that it's the same risk without any of the upside so i learned that lesson which is interesting but spent about five years there and got to build out a lot of the go to market functions and we ended up getting fundraising from recent and h and some other big vcs got to kinda learn a little bit about what vcs is which i had no idea and fast forward five years i went to slack when slack was launching an enterprise product to lead their enterprise product marketing and i had accidentally started my own little side hustle doing growth marketing for seeds and series a companies and through that i ended up working with a bunch of companies i got brought to the firm i'm at now which is signal fire so i am a a vc at signal fire and i got brought to essentially just help the portfolio became an advisor got to know the team and after a couple years ended up joining full time on the investment side very cool and so you're on the doc doc dark side as we say yes but i think you know i i think i got introduced to your podcast on the second episode i don't remember how but when i started listening i was like yes my people i'm just constantly on all kinds of ideas i love on sex niches i see problems and opportunities everywhere so very excited to to check alright well well we can just jump in because you have a bunch here and i don't know here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna pick a random one off here i'm just gonna say the the little three word description you gave it and you tell me what it is and then i'll either react to it we could r off of it for a little bit or i'll be like i don't know what the hell to do with that let's go to the next one okay so awesome so let's do let's start with c working two point o what are you thinking with c working two point zero yeah okay so when i think about this is there is something to be said about the concept of c working holistically i think we work was an you know disaster for a variety of reasons but it's a little bit bizarre that we are essentially have our social circles and our work circles together just because of the office but why can't you essentially go into a physical place like also i mean you're at a bigger company even if you're in a smaller company you don't work with ninety five percent of your your actual coworkers like you hang out with them at lunch you grab coffee you go for a walk but you won't actually work with them so why can't you go into a physical space based off of where you live and have essentially friends and colleagues that aren't your actual coworkers right to me it just seems very obvious and natural and then you get economies of scale where you know your company is paying a small amount of money for you to go work there but you get that social piece but it's also community oriented right so you don't have to go and commute an hour you can commute five minutes to and you know just have more flexibility but i think there's something to be said about going to the same place every day not hopping not traveling so that's kinda what i mean by that and so let's say you took this idea and what what do you think would make it have that sort of initial adoption do you think how would you approach if you were gonna actually build this idea out give me kind of the one two three of how you would how you would approach this and get the initial traction yeah so when i was brainstorming around this idea the concept was to go and take a lot of these leases that are still being held by companies so a lot of people are on the hook for three to ten year leases they don't want problem is exactly during covid nobody wants it so you start going and essentially to taking these leases at a really ridiculously low price and then you can go to those companies that you're taking the leases and then also find any other smaller companies have given up their office space and essentially the plan is you hire staff who's gonna be kind of the everything from security office manager all that kind of stuff and again economies scale you can retrofit it with furniture or whatever you need but you essentially start selling these enterprise contracts two companies right where they're gonna pay per head per person but they can go and leverage this space i think of it as like the coworker sorry the starbucks model of c working okay so you know exactly what you're gonna get when you walk into one of these places it's smaller it can probably hold thirty fifty people not you know twenty story building with a thousand people something like that and basically a couple different companies you know have have these contracts and then that allows some number of seats for their from their team to go to go there on a regular basis exactly but essentially this is your office so you're you're saying like i was paying a thousand dollars per month per head i'm gonna go and pay a thousand dollars per month for you but you're gonna go not to an office with other people from our team it's other people from different teams right yes exactly okay this only really works in cities you know i don't think this works in you know the suburbs are in random places but i think in any way where there's some kind of density i could see this working pretty well well i forgot that maybe it was last episode we were talking about this but somebody was doing these like the suburbs they were doing basically like these tiny home offices so basically you buy a pre fab home put it in your backyard and it's designed to be in office not like a a bedroom and then you basically have that as you know if i put up the eighty grand that it's gonna take to create this little thing can i then rent these out for five hundred bucks a month to you know people in my geography and you create a network of these you could create you know sort of airbnb model where you can search and find a nearby tiny office for you to go join and you use people's backyard real estate which i think is interesting but what i think you're talking about makes a little more sense right now because the real estate is not scarce in this case right the real estate is actually up for grabs of a desperate situation you could buy low in a lot of lot of cases right now for commercial real i think they said in san francisco there's twelve million square feet of available commercial real estate right now and and so so i think you don't need the like sharing economy to do it i think you you would be better off just picking up kind pre made you know offices already and just assuming that the lease with the better terms and the problem with what you're describing is it doesn't solve the social piece and so yes people wanna go and work outside their house but they want the social piece that's really why they wanna go to an office and having you know a tiny desk in someone's backyard doesn't actually solve that right so in the suburbs here's my idea for the suburbs so back in i think this is twenty sixteen wells fargo shut in a single year twenty five percent of all their bank branches right that was like a thousand or two thousand bank branches now bank branches are well positioned for foot traffic in mostly suburban you know some more rural areas now huge square footage what is gonna go into these three to six thousand square foot things that would be a perfect place to go and build the you know the suburban version of the working model right buy up the banks you know like all the places they're trying to shut down get it for pennies on the dollar and then go and do that right yeah and somebody was doing that right or some bank did this i think it was chase or capital one one capital one one and they opened these like cafes and c working spaces but it wasn't paid to play in the sense of you could just go and order a coffee and instead for free i was thinking more of you actually own the spaces is or maybe you don't know it you operate the spaces and ultimately it's paying to go in it's paying on a daily basis or monthly or whatever and you gotta find something good to do with the vault if they have a vault so you gotta store something down there yes yeah make it something cool yeah they have baseball cards or something okay so here's another random idea that sorta of like that when i lived in indonesia they there was this really popular thing that i've never seen in any city since it probably exists gonna message me be billing hey that happens in new york all the time but the first time i saw in the last time i saw it was in jak chicago which is like you know a very big city in indonesia super populated area you have all these kind of massive hotels and apartment buildings and at the bottom they would have like nightclubs right and so they would have like really baller nightclubs clubs that they had built out now a night club is only useful like thursday friday saturday night basically everything else is like you know you just have to hold it on a tuesday afternoon and nothing is happening there and so what one group was doing pretty entrepreneurial group they were going to the night nightclub owners and they were saying hey let us take over the night nightclub monday through friday from six am to like one pm and they were taking it over and they were turning it into basically like a fitness studio where you would go in the morning and they you know the dance floor became the like workout floor you know like it was just like he would go and you would do kind of like it could be like zoom type of class it could be like a bears boot camp with some light laid like light light equipment there and the bar became a smoothie bar protein shake bar and so it was or and the music system's already great and the mirrors are already there and so they or it was like set up to be the perfect fitness studio and so without any without owning any real estate they got free access to prime downtown you know under these buildings awesome nightclubs and they're paying you know pennies because the night nightclub owner was making zero off and otherwise and they were creating these like you know breakfast studios breakfast you know bars and and it it was amazing and i i'm surprised more to do that have you we're so bad at using space if you think of how many things are open only until two pm then nothing is using it from two pm until like six am the next day or vice versa the thing with a nightclubs though in fitness studios is typically any kind of gym or fitness studio there's a huge rush from you know call it five thirty am to like eight thirty am nine am and then kind of a glut and then you get that twelve to one window and then another glut and so it feels like not optimal usage but definitely better than nothing i like that well yeah exactly they you're getting zero value out of it before before that so i like that one there's another kind of concept i don't think it ever took off but it's like they turn restaurants that are only open for dinner like kind of fine dining restaurants and they were doing like c working during the day with it do you know if anything came with that that one it was hard yes i did i i do know that one i think what was challenging is you have to kick people out relatively early and also the way that restaurants are set up is definitely not optimized for working right not high speed wifi not ergonomic chairs all that kinda of stuff so i think it was a little bit square ground hall but i liked that idea you know one thing that i think would be interesting similar to that is a lot of restaurants that are only open for breakfast or lunch that close at two three pm why don't they turn that commercial kitchen into a ghost kitchen at night that i mean it's literally a commercial kitchen with all that space so it to me feels like an obvious use for that i'm sure somebody working on it for sure okay cool alright let's jump to another one so let's pick a interesting one here we've talked a little bit about this i'm curious what you have here credit cards for fans what do what do you mean by that yeah so there's been a lot of interesting takes on credit cards recently and if you think back typically you know if you look get the the ones that are popular among millennials they were the chase sapphire card or the capital one or whatever and they were focused on travel rewards and that was fine but if you look at gen z they don't really care about a lot of the traditional rewards that you're getting from credit cards and we actually are an investor in a company called carrot which i know you talked about before on the podcast and what they're doing is credit cards for creators but they're targeting the creators themselves and they're giving them access to working capital because banks don't understand how to under write that kind of risk what i think would be interesting though is if you look at gen z there's been a huge trend for younger people not wanting credit and only going to debit cards but also i've seen this meme on like twitter and yeah wherever the hell else is it tiktok you'll what why what's causing this i don't know a hundred percent because i'm squarely in the millennial category but from anecdotes that i've heard a little bit of it has to do with this concept of not wanting to be in debt so just forcing yourself not to overs spend there's been some attempts that people trying to create a credit card with a debit like experience so you can only spend within your account but you can still earn rewards so kind of the best of both worlds that didn't seem to get a lot of adoption either so i don't know and you i think also people are pushing off a lot of the major life milestones later and later so you don't think about billing credit until you know twenty eight thirty but you know if i think about what did these people care about there's more than fifty three million people now making a living as a full time creator if you ask young kids what do they wanna be when they grow up more people will say they wanna be a youtube star than an astronaut a doctor a lawyer all the things we traditionally think of is what kids wanna be so okay they care a lot about these creators and influencers why wouldn't they wanna go in earn rewards points they give them experiences sc merchandise whatever with their favorite creators so the idea here is can you bundle creators that have them s mo from cod and used to be a senior executive at youtube he has this fantastic thing that he put put out called the four myths of bundling and one of these concepts of bundling is you wanna find the lowest super fan overlap and the highest casual fan overlap so it's essentially saying if i'm a creator my number one goal is to broaden my audience so that i can monetize them and let's say you and i have you know two audiences and we're like hey we should come together because twenty percent of your group likes me and twenty percent of my group likes you but the vast majority are just totally unaware okay so now we bundle a bunch of people like this and we create a essentially credit card where you earn rewards based off of your favorite creators so you can spend on you know like getting a shout out or doing a one on one experience with them or getting a t shirt or access to a concert or whatever okay i think that's interesting and that's i think what is it astro who's doing that astro yeah they're trying to they're trying to do something like that bring you you're like a little bit than me not quite gen z but do you care about debt versus credit i do but funny enough i don't have a credit card i always use my debit card for everything which is a very bad habit but it's exactly what we were talking about but why is that a bad habit that's that's the gen z way bro well i should be well i should be building credit like you said but it's just so convenient to have a debit card isn't it more convenient to a credit card because then you don't even need to have the money yeah and your building credit but i think i you're saying you picked debit for convenience but it's not more convenient i mean it's just because i have i've just always had it and the bank gave it to you yeah and it's like there's a process of applying to credit cards and not to figure out which one's is the best and if i'm getting screwed over and having to pay all these fees and it's kind of a hassle but i think it does have something to do with coming age during the financial crisis and their on like these stats like the average american has seven credit cards and aren't constantly in debt i think some of that gets ingrained where you're you're kind of wary of credit cards right if i was some of these creators i would get together with you know my really smart business manager and i would say hey how do we release financial products to our audience that will but while main maintaining trust and so like if you find the things that our audience is most confused about like for example the thing you're just talking about which credit card is best oh i don't know how to do it i know how to manage the rewards i don't wanna like screw scrub up how do you basically release a highly trusted product on top of some of these existing platforms so for example could mister beast and friends create a you know a subscription product which is basically like hey for x dollars a month we're gonna send you you know the the thing you need the credit card you need and then when with that's like not the right credit card anymore because you've like tapped out of your points or like the deal changed or there's new deal is way better we're gonna like basically say hey everybody the new best thing is this and like how can you basically heard the sheep and that's kind of a silly example of like which credit card use but i feel like there's something where i would be trying to leverage the audience and the trust to go into places where there's just mass confusion and be like okay if we didn't try to take advantage of these people but if we actually tried to we'll do the work if you trust us trust us we you'll be in good hands here we can find you the thing that you that you should be using i just feel like there's a big group of people that want to be led that i would be trying to trying to do if i was a creator well to your point i mean credit karma is a multi billion dollar company that very reason because there's so much confusion in the market and just lack of trust and ultimately a credit card for one of these companies is every single user is worth a lot of money to this so they're willing to pay huge kickback so think about it this way like if you're a creator and you're not trying to sell products and things like that essentially you're just saying if you use this card you will earn rewards redeem mobile with me and so they're gonna get a kickback but ultimately when you choose a credit card you know there are definitely fees and things that a where you said that are confusing but at the end of the day most of the value is seeing what are you gonna get back from spending on credit am i gonna get cash back am i gonna get it from amazon from my airline points from whatever and if what you're gonna get back from using credit as opposed to debit is essentially just like you know sean bucks or whatever like i could see that being something that people would wanna go and promote to their audiences so from an acquisition play that seems like the easiest way to go and sell a credit cards right okay so here's another idea that we had talked about a a variation of this and so we have been talking about continuous glucose monitoring and you have one on here called continuous cortisol monitoring so tell me about what you're thinking there yeah so you guys have talked about levels before and i'm friends with a couple of the c cofounder of levels and i love what they're doing i think democrat access to that data and showing you what's actually going on inside your body is just amazing and mind blowing for so many people and i went through their one month program and as i had this glucose monitor on the mechanical engineer in me was like i just wanna take this thing right so after the first two weeks i took this part i started researching actually how it works and what is it doing and all this stuff and ultimately i was like why can't you use this to monitor other things because what it's doing is there's a little sensor that is sticking out essentially gets inserted under your skin so just i'm just trying to measure sensor for somebody's who's never seen it so it's like a quarter sized like it's a like a half dollar size circle and it's maybe i don't know an eighth an inch high it's not very high you put it on shelf with this like stamp thing right so you you kinda like stamp your saying doesn't hurt but there is a little micro needle that might hurt the second time really i think i hit a very small blood because when i took it off there is blood there but typically it does not hurt at all it's exactly like a stamp right do you do yourself but there's a little thing that sticks into your skin and makes going under the skin and it's in between the cells and it's measuring the interstitial fluid and it's looking for glucose essentially but how it measures that is there's a certain enzyme on this sensor that binds to glucose and it's measuring it's essentially electricity produced but they can turn that into a number that correlates to glucose and so i started looking at what else would you wanna measure continuously and i have been looking a lot around cortisol which is also called the stress hormone yeah exactly now stress has so many negative implications on our lives everything from heart disease obesity lifespan you know just everything and you know to going back to our point around gen z and younger people the stress levels and anxiety levels keep going up and up and up and even with the young kids parents would love to know is my kid really stressed out right now can i figure out coping mechanisms teach them breathing exercises and so i i thought that would be interesting so i started researching this and cortisol measured in three ways either blood urine or sweat and there's been some really cool research people that are trying to essentially create a patch that you could wear on your arm and it's sucking up some small sweat right like sweat molecules and using that to measure but the problem is it's not continuous it's only when you're sweating and so you're aren't gonna get that real time feedback of something is causing me a lot of stress i need to just chill for a minute or take a deep breath and so i think you could probably repurpose one of these continuous glucose monitors when i posted about that some people also brought up hormones like testosterone which i think could also be really interesting i'm not sure if that could be measured in the interstitial fluids right but it's not do you know if cortisol can i think so i mean based off of again i'm not a doctor but based off of everything i was looking at i don't see why you can't because what a lot of the sweat the sweat patches are doing is a very similar process of using an enzyme that binds to cortisol and so i'm like there's gotta be a way to retrofit one of these things and off the shelf they're actually really cheap so if you go to your primary care doctor and you wanna get continuous glucose monitor it's like thirty five bucks it's actually not that expensive interesting i had heard the opposite i had heard oh man is really expensive if you're not if you know if it's not covered by your insurance because you're diabetic so so that's not true they these are actually pretty good if you get a prescription and so it does it is a prescription product so as long as you get a prescription but your primary care physician can prescribe gotcha amazing okay that's that's not bad so that's thirty five bucks but this thing last like two right so you're basically spending about you know seventy bucks a month on your monitor which honestly that feedback loop is insane where you eat something yeah and you're like oh i'm spiking is it really worth biting into this like seeing what it's doing into my body and sometimes you're like hell yeah i love nacho but you other times you're like you know what like i i didn't need that i kinda want my graph to stay in this green good range of where i want my glucose to be and a stress i think it's even more important now let me ask you this there's some people who are talking about and i haven't looked at it so i don't know how much about but there's some people are talking about you know the upside of stress and think there's a book called the upside of stress keith boy has talked about this like somebody asked them him like what are the three kind of like biggest i don't know learnings you had over the last few years or something like that he's like or biggest misconceptions biggest contra and things you believe stress and he's like stress is good for us and he linked some book to to some stress book so i haven't actually read it so i don't know what that is but i i find that kind of interesting because there's all these things that like when i was young we were told argue or bad and then like as i've got an older i'm like wait that was full of shit and i wonder if stress is one of those where stress i just immediately associate with bad and the the negative consequences of it and so i've never even heard somebody argue the good side of it and i would love to actually go read that but i it sounds like i just judging about your expression on your face you have not read that book either i am not but i now definitely want to i could see i could see from a business perspective stress being a good thing i think it's a a huge motivator right and you know there's that whole concept of work will fill whatever a allotted of time there is yeah similarly putting somebody under stress and having that fire under your ass is sometimes a really positive thing i think from a health perspective i think the research would probably show that it's not healthy but i don't know from a success you know whatever you call success i could see that being a a positive motivator right okay we need a we need a good like sound as i transition between these ideas because we're going rapid fire do you need do you need a a breath that you need some water because you're oh i can do this all day i i've too many too many ideas okay let's do another one stock betting what what are you thinking here oh okay this is a fun one and this actually stems from something that my family started doing during covid so as i'm sure every listener has heard there's just been this huge influx of retail traders is on robinhood and there's public and a few other of these put commission free each trading platforms and we did this bet as a family where we each put a thousand dollars and we haven't actually put any money into the stock market but theoretically we're supposed to put a thousand dollars into a single stock and the goal was who can get the most gains in a single year so that was the price you can't trade just hold for year cannot trade it is literally buy today and hold for a year but and we you know everyone was going back and forth on what they pick but it was a really fun game and it also it's something we're tracking so we created a spreadsheet that pulls from google finance every week we're going in and kinda shit talking about who's winning who's losing and it's it's really social and it's inherently something that you're constantly wanting to engage with so the idea here is can you combine the best of sports betting with the best of fantasy sports so like picking your team with public trading and there was an attempt at this in the crypto boom the ico boom in two thousand seventeen eighteen by a company called shape shift they launched they didn't really launch it was it was called prism and they had a private beta and i was using it and i thought it was so cool what people could do was pick a portfolio of tokens at the time so equate this to public stocks and you allocate percentages based off of whatever you want your basket to look like and it was public so people can go and follow you and see how you're performing and it was a competition and so then people could come and essentially allocate alongside you and say i just wanna take your basket and put a thousand dollars in right or whatever but i could see this being something where you start actually making this more like prizes and embedding and things like that to create that social and like high level of engagement i kinda love this that that's a great idea so okay so let's let's let's let's play it out so i think the one thing i didn't like but i think your your family just a prototype you guys were buying and holding once per year which is kind of like yeah you sort of set it and forget it you just no action you can take whereas with fantasy there's like these little micro things micro adjustments you can make either you're changing your line up or you're picking up a player you know there's things you can do every few weeks so you don't just fall you know so far behind although that still happens with fantasy so would do you think it should be like the way you did it where you hold you buy and hold and you're writing the weekly or monthly momentum of the stock or do you think it's about like every month or every week picking a new stock and seeing how you do i love the idea of having tons of different ways to engage because if you think about how to drive the highest level of engagement and also just this concept of democrat asset management mean right now you either go with a robo advisor like a wealth front or a betterment or you pay a huge fee to somebody that's an active manager why can't some kid in the middle of nowhere who just loves everything about public stock investing and who happens to be really good at it like why can't i go and work with them right so and i'm sure there's a whole host of legal and regulatory things like i am naughty a financial adviser but i think there's something there about this democrat amortization of asset management and i think if you wanted to do you know kind like march madness right that's just one type of fantasy sports so imagine having all these different types of competitions and things you could play into whatever is for you okay i like that so there's different game modes that makes sense to me i don't like the democrat bubble blah because i'm just like no this is cool because it's fun like forget the forget finding the next warren buffett who's like you know sitting in omaha and is a fourteen year old and we're like oh this guy should management portfolio like i just think because okay so when i wake up every day right and i tried not to do this but i suck and i swipe right over on my phone and i'm like it'll look how red every all the stocks are today at this every is stock is right no this is just like the stock widget of okay so i swipe over to the side and i basically see my like you know sales of my eco com store i see the stock market and then i see a crypto right there's i get like this widget at the bottom for coinbase base and you know i'll be damned if i could stop checking this thing i like to see every day my two percent is a green red and is it like a big pop because that can always happen or is it like a big crash because that can also happen and so like today was you know i wake up and it's like bloody wednesday everything is red and i'm like alright you know that's where i'm at that's the score board that i check and i love the idea of turning it into a social game i'm i'm i'm almost surprised that this isn't already a big thing and i feel like somebody's gonna be like oh no this has been on yahoo fantasy for like ten years but this makes a lot of sense to me if i was trying to build a fun social product a fun consumer product this is like at the top of my list right now from for for you know jumped immediately to the top of the list so you could have basically a you create a social group you click pick one of the game modes maybe you start with one game mode which is like you know monthly bet and you get a thousand dollars to allocate in your fantasy portfolio however you want and it's whoever ends up with the most money at the end of the month is is winning and then you could have all these other game modes as well i i really like this and like there's a cool way to build status and become an influencer on a platform like this too and like to push a little bit on the the whole democrat the piece that i was talking about i just don't like when silicon valley tries to make fun ideas important ideas i'm like hey fun could be fun it could be important later let it be fun for now so why you were gaming i it's it's okay so think about when you go to a casino or if you've ever been to a casino many time and you go and see people either playing like let or crap there's a couple players but there's a huge crowd people who are just like rooting for that right and you pick your horse and you're like super excited when they're winning and you're super bum when they're losing and i could see something like that too where you build these small personalities on this platform and you're rooting for their you know portfolio you're rooting for them to be an amazing picker and so i think there's a cool social aspect of that too to make it fun with less skin in the game but i agree with you i think making it fun and making it a game is probably proxy okay i like it i saw i'm i'm in on this idea have all your ideas so far i'm the most in on this i like the cortisol monitoring although don't know if it's possible okay let's jump to another one let's do functional milk oh one i'm so excited about this has been this has been what i've been spending my evening doing so i typically would drink black coffee and we got gifted from my mother law's a milk fro couple months ago and i started experimenting with fro milk and making latte awesome gift but i also had started reading up about a lot of these spices and all the health benefits of spices a so i started adding things like cayenne and cinnamon or turmeric and ginger to the milk and fro it and it was delicious and what are the benefits of some of these like what's the benefits of let's say turmeric and people love turmeric or whatever well you can pick a difference on ginger like cinnamon i know is something to actually help monitor and level out your blood sugar yeah so that's one that's just to kinda of maintain blood sugar cayenne is for digestion and metabolism ginger is for digestive as well and some other like arthritis and things like that there's a whole host and like you can go down the rabbit hole for a thousand years of how people have been using these you're putting them in well then i started reading about functional beverages in general which is a huge exploding category this is everything from people putting nut and cbd and all that kind of stuff but it doesn't seem like there any functional milk so then there's also this concept of experiential drinks and experiential food and beverage and so i wanted to see could i create essentially a bath bomb for functional milk okay so you have this cool thing where you like drop it into your milk or tea and i had two ideas the first one i bought a kit online for purification so what this allows you to do is take any liquid and turn it into essentially like a bubble you can either make an egg yolk size bubble like a big one or caviar size it fragile like a bubble or it's like a bouncy bowl so the caviar size ones taste like bo so it's it's like a little bit firmer right it's consistent throughout the whole thing the egg size ones essentially as liquid inside with a very thin thin shell now these were really cool but they don't melt so that was the problem it turned out actually great both experiments went better than expected then they look pretty because whatever i spice them with it's bright color so like the turmeric one is bright yellow and i think the idea of like baba coffee or bob tea is is kinda cool with the the milk but i really wanted it to dissolve so then i started researching how do you build the bath box and it's actually really simple it's citric acid baking soda whatever your other drying second grade science experiment turned into like you know totally a a fan favorite totally so then i went and bought like almond flour and dry milk powder and all these things and have been making these bath bombs essentially does it work and it does it works really well like only yeah show grab i'll grab it yeah here i'll show you a bunch okay okay so this is the the caviar size bo box okay so i'm looking at just to grab because it's much of a melissa audio so i'm looking at this jar you have of like time bo that look they're yellow so it looks like you custom made a a sphere a bunch of fears they look like cakes okay so that's that's your bombs that's yes these are the bob and i've been enjoying putting a big spoon of these in my hot coffee right they taste really cool and they have that mouth feel of of okay so those don't explain to they don't explode to make those i literally have the hand drop with a syringe every little ball that because actually i just can't amazon for purification kit and it looks like some really crazy science thing not like something easy and fun that was not as easy but it actually turned out really well on the first attempt now these are the bombs and so essentially i have some small ones that are essentially half spear and then some bigger ones and they harden really nicely exactly yeah it's harder it looks exactly like a donut home these ones are cinnamon and cayenne and when you put them in hot liquid it foam exactly like a bath wow it's like a seltzer and it foam for it was interesting the almond ones with the almond flour which is essentially the base of almond milk they foam for maybe like ten fifteen seconds the dry milk powder ones foam for like two minutes but it was a really cool experience and then it dissolves into the liquid wow okay i kind of this is amazing oh okay so that's that's great why aren't you doing this this should be a this should be a company this should be a product well i'm rubbing in my sister and my mom i'm like let's do this i think it it'd be yeah how fun would it be to get a cool tin and the nice thing about what i like about milk and specifically for coffee and tea is it's a natural subscription product because it's a ritual yes if you drink coffee your tea you drink it every day and you're gonna use this every day so you now like buy your little tin of whatever fun channel bond and it's fun for social like people who like to make you know make tea have tea together have have coffee together yeah this becomes like a thing to talk about it's like super viral it's like it's real world viral as we call like playground around viral where one person gonna show to the other and everyone's gonna be like i want that that's that's amazing especially because it's not just the the like kind of like the science experiment it's actually has the functional part so you i think this is this is really great this is a winner i love this one i need a name so you have to help me brainstorm a name or get your get your audience to come in around there's a name for me okay okay we always start with the greg isaac special which is you just add the spanish word bueno to the end of whatever you want so this could be milk point o this could be something something like that but we we'll work on we'll work on names okay okay so you would produce these you would sell these as a as a you know kit or subscription yeah direct to consumer yeah and they're shelf stable that's the cool thing too they don't need to be refrigerated does it go well in coffee or no yeah okay interesting and do you taste it once it's in there or you don't really taste it once it's dissolved you taste it so it's essentially like letting milk and if you want it sweetened like i did some with fake sugar put stevia in it and it tastes like you added stevia it your coffee oh okay this is this is a winner okay no we don't even need to let's actually keep this on wraps this is this this is a winner dude brand is already googling verification kit am i right i was gonna say i think someone are after listening to this is gonna make it this is just now this has been podcast patented do not steal ai idea exactly and can i can rally to help us make this a podcast product success and and help us make this special and if people are awesome designers this is the most instagram ad friendly thing ever right well if we have people that are awesome at designing packaging or you know just amazing at how to get things viral and instagram happy to chat that'd be really fun to work on it with people we actually have a lot of e commerce and do you see kinda of specialists in the in the audience in the community because a lot of people a lot of people have companies like that and then i've seen tons of good packaging stuff tons of stuff with influencers because i think this would kill with influencers too and so yeah there's a bunch second can happening here okay so we're we're all in on this i i'm your silent cofounder i do know work i only take upside but that that's it so okay we're in on that one i'll ship you a attend you can do it my my beta love something like this so okay let's do one more as a we'll do one more that we'll we'll we'll just freestyle out the rest okay so i've got a good one that i've been like really just itching on it's this concept around automating re zoning and permitting for real estate right i'm sexy so yeah it's super un sexy but if you have ever had to or thought about re zoning or getting some kind of construction permit for your house or anything like that it is the most ridiculous and archaic process it is governed by it's essentially the process is run by the state city or the county and it involves a stupid amount of paperwork you have to go and find all the historical documents about the property you have to fill out a ton of forms it's government bureaucracy and then literally you have to go two meetings physical meetings where the counsel the zoning counsel the right on this and if you lose you have to appeal and then go back to these things and i'm like this is stupid there's essentially two parts of this there's the paperwork part and then there's the human part now the paperwork part seems super simple to automate that's it's public records of stuff you can just go and without a lot of tech build something that automate the filing of the papers now the human part is more complicated but now with covid you know everyone is not going in and having physical everyone has a smartphone literally just downloads some kind of simple app that's almost like your next door where it pushes notifications to the people that need to go and make a decision with all the information you can go and ask questions in it but essentially it streamline a process that could have taken twelve months down to something that's like three weeks so would this be something you're selling to the city and municipalities or this is for a consumer to just you know to till over the bureau the paperwork and the the the headache that's gonna come here and the city doesn't have to do anything i don't know that's that's actually where i keep getting caught up is what is the go to market strategy for this in terms of monetization i don't know i don't know what the incentive would be for a city or a county to pay for it but i can definitely see for anybody who's looking to re zone a building especially if it's not residential if it's more commercial that in you know to our earlier conversation there's just this glut of real estate sitting unused san francisco actually had passed a vacancy tax i don't think it's in effect right now but if your property was vacant for more than two weeks you had to start paying taxes on it because it's an and things like that so imagine there's a huge impetus to go and figure out how to reuse it and if it's zone one way but you have a buyer that wants to use it for you know a kitchen or a school or an office or whatever it's just it's silly that there's such a gate right and this isn't not just for zoning like my my sister was like hey be right back and then she got on a zoom call and i thought she was talking to her friends or something she was there for like forty minutes and i was like what you know how are your friends doing and she goes oh no we were there's a treat we had to have a a city meeting for cutting down this tree in front of our building and so we had like done this permit at this request cut down the tree it's a small tree and like then this was the the the meeting normally this is in person hearing but we did it over zoom and they passed the tree cutting and we get to cut the tree as long as we had plant three more trees or whatever and i was like wow this is insane of like the level of sc that you have to go through for this and so so i i i agree with you i think that's like anywhere that there's headache and there's money to be made like usually when you're resigning something because you sort of see some opportunity to like at a unit or like convert to space and and make more money off of it i think that's a good one it's also like no transparency there's no version of the like domino's is my pizza baked get tracker where you're like okay where are we in the process how many steps are there where are we now and what comes next just that i think would be pretty killer on the consumer side and think people would pay for it yeah let alone that like the second part you're talking about like notifying everybody getting them together i think that part's a little bit harder but but yeah i definitely see see a use case for this somebody is doing this with dmv i don't know this whole business but someone posted in our podcast group that there are some other entity outside of a dmv that can do license issuing or renewal i don't know if i'm gonna get all the details right about this but there's some other i forgot what it's called it's not called dmv it's called to something else and apparently these things are always busy there's like a four hour line because people need to go and get the license renewed or get their ids or whatever it is and so these guys had made kinda like a like a either like a mobile or like a a digital version of this where you could do it all from home or or something like that and they were charging money they're making you know very very good money doing this and so that's like a a you would have to go take my very vague inaccurate description and go find what that business is but that's what i would model this after is what did they do for dmv could i do that for the zoning you know of commission there's also a whole similar world for visas if you're going to like brazil or china and you don't wanna go and sit and way at the consulate for four and a half hours and pay the seventy five dollars you can go and pay them three hundred dollars but they're gonna do it for you tomorrow i can see something similar to that as well right yeah exactly i'm all about you know the what are the most low n mps experiences people have like going to the dmv going to the visa immigration office you know like you know the one like this would would have been going through airport security before clear so if you just go and say what is the what's the absolute worst what would get like a negative five star review on yelp and then you go you're like build the alternative or build the like layer on top that like abstracts away all the pain that's like a pretty valuable thing if you're willing to go into that boring space in general i always look at is this thing adding friction or reducing friction and then what is the volume and what is the frequency of use right so if you can get either high volume of people that have this pain point and you're reducing friction or it's you know a high frequency use but a smaller demographic of people that have that friction removing a small amount of friction people will pay a ton of money for right like in this case it's low frequency high friction right it's yeah for the zoning one okay tell me about some tell me about some products that you've been using that you really like what's what are somebody either apps websites physical things you bought that have like you that that have i've caught your eye oh man i'm like the world's cheapest person so i buy nothing i i i don't see a peloton behind you peloton well funny story with the peloton my mom actually won this about three and a half years ago and this is before a lot of people were super familiar with peloton and she sent i don't even remember she just sent me and my sisters this text message saying i won this thing called a peloton do any of you girls want it and i immediately was like yes i will take it so i got a free bike and a free year subscription so of course the first year i barely used it because i wasn't paying and then the second to subscription turned on i started paying and i use it almost every day so that i would say is is been my savior for the pandemic what else i mean i haven't put on jeans or real pants since march which is amazing i feel like i could get rid of ninety percent of my closet and just wear lulu women and a leather every day and be really happy what else have i've been using i've been playing with i'm obsessed with the audio space in general and it's now becoming a little bit more hot and people are really talking about audio as kind of a neck wave in terms of consumer social and so i've been playing with a lot of apps out there or on audio i'm still synchronous it's really hard it's tell you about a google audio app i saw yesterday just yeah so this guy who dm to me and he's a founder based in india and he goes he said he sent me some pitch that was like full jargon so i i was initially just gonna like totally ignore it they said something that caught my eye didn't remember what it was but he was basic first he was like we're you know audio audio for you know consumer audio you know mass blah blah i don't know what he was saying i was like what did your product do and he was like oh basically i people in in countries like india pakistan middle east dating is very different here culturally going on real world dates and so that's not something people are very comfortable doing and and do as frequently as in the west so we actually created a a way to date just kinda on your phone through like audio was like what do you mean and so the way it works is it's pretty cool idea it it's built around the the is built around the the the the female use case so basically two women oh sorry there's one woman who's like the date and she gets to pick like kind of like a wing woman basically and so two friends basically get on the app and then they just sort of shuffle through guys that that come in and it's audio only so you're not gonna like see a penis you're not gonna like and it's also not like messaging where you have to kinda wait it's like liven and in real time so a guy shows up he starts talking at any at any time you can sort of bounce him and like go to the next guy but like if he's you know interesting and it's it's not one on one where it's like i think a little more awkward it's like two friends who get to kinda like put these guys you know under on the hot seat and i was like i could see this being a thing potentially like i could see i could see this being fine i could see this being slightly viral and i could see something succeeding when it really takes the like sort of woman's point of view and like how do i make this enjoyable and safe and like still interesting but like let me make this as comfortable as possible for the woman and like let the guys like just you know kill themselves try to make this work from the guy's perspective though how would you feel about the wing woman just being kind of a jerk meaning i could see this dynamic where if it's just one on one it's a human in front of you you don't wanna a beat jerk for the most part some people are horrible but if i was the friend i feel like i wouldn't have that same barrier of like saying things that are probably not super appropriate or like i don't know just this life if you're at a bar and you walk up to a group of friends yeah you're gonna get this you're gonna get the that's the the nice friend the bitch friend and then like the person who you're actually trying to speak with and you're just hoping to like come out alive you know at the end of it so i think it's it's agreed it's not great for the guy but i think that's the way it should be in this case well why why is there no app that is video in like real time video because you know audio i think is a huge step up from seeing pictures or somebody's profile but video i literally see what you look like right now and you get facial expressions you get more emotion than just audio audio you lose a little bit so i just would love to see somebody playing with more video but again it has to be something where you can't take a video and practice it seventeen times i just wanna see the you today and more authentic yeah i think the the one the challenge video is you get a lot of inappropriate stuff which kind of like creates a truck the chat problem yeah so i think that's the that's the biggest downside here is that is is how do you yeah how do you make this where it doesn't just turn into like a complete shit show on video yeah that's so true and again that kind of goes back to the synchronous versus asynchronous i think with audio that is synchronous it is so hard to police we're seeing this across lots of apps right now but it's you know if you have to upload a video at least you can run some computer vision and flag immediate things that are just egregious you can't do that with synchronous audio or synchronous video for that matter yeah that's true what do you think of club are you a user of club ass i am yeah i've been in club house for a while i i'm very conflicted about it part of it is i listen to so many podcasts and i find that podcasts people are still down into like the good parts and to me i'll sit in an hour club house session and i wish it was a fifteen minute podcast but i think that's more me i think as a participant if you're active and you're actually speaking it's great it's engaging you feel you're meeting people you feel like you're what types of do you like or who who do you like to kinda hang with or or listen to you know i think i tend to like i mean to me be honest i like when people are talking about similar things as to what you guys talk about on this podcast sure is what find yeah interesting yeah like i'm not in the sports i'm not into you know people talking about politics all the time or you know like more social justice use that's just not what i get excited about but i don't know i i find that a lot of times there's is just these lowell or too many people are trying to talk and it's just not substantive it's very surface level yes i don't know what you what are your thoughts yeah i i bounced know out of it a while back because of you know exactly that i i thought early on i was like oh this was cool this is like a bunch of interesting people from silicon valley but and and only them so they feel safe like kinda hanging out here when the masses are here they're not gonna wanna do it so i was like i kind of took advantage of that hopped to do a bunch of rooms talk to a bunch of people i wanted to talk to and then like peace out and i thought for a while it was the best way to build a network in silicon valley would have been to hang on on club boss eight hours a day like you would have literally seen like on the surface been like what are you doing and you're just hanging on a club i was eight hours a and it would've been like yeah in the next six weeks i'm gonna have like i'm gonna have a bunch of friends and and connections that like i could've have literally not bought you know if i had wanted to these are people that i i would not sit down for a coffee with me if i tried to plan it and make it helpful and useful and productive but they're willing to shoot the shit with me for an hour on club house at one am cool and so i thought there was like this arbitrage network arbitrage opportunity where you could just like get on call early and beat a bunch of cool people like i you know we hung out one night with ed williams and i talked about you know like twitter early on and shit like that and like that was cool i would have never otherwise had that conversation but i don't think i i definitely don't think the product's going on anywhere like i don't think it's gonna like succeed and now it's like not that interesting anymore because more people have gotten on it and you're right it is like a lot of politics and social justice and a bunch of like smart you know smart people trying to show how smart they are which is like really really like nausea to like be a part of and i'd rather just you know go watch you know friends reruns on netflix if i was gonna like if i wanna veg out don't wanna vet out i don't want i don't want this like intellectual you know crossfit that they try to do on club house i know a few people that took advantage of that arbitrage opportunity early and spent hours and hours a day that window of opportunity that was so short i feel like it was literally for like maybe a month if you got in that early and then it closed pretty quickly and now to me i just don't think there's that opportunity anyway i i would agree i would agree for sure okay well listen this was this is awesome you're an ideal machine so i think we're gonna need to keep you in the regular rotation if people liked this let me know let elaine know so that we can have her on more and talk more but we're gonna be launching our functional milk company soon so stay tuned it's gonna be called functional milk as of right now until we come up with the better national milk bueno exactly but thanks you're coming on where should people find you twitter is that the best place to follow your subs stack what do you wanna shout out yeah i have a sub at z it's my last name is z at sub stack dot com z e l y or i'm at e z b at twitter i'm i'm not historically great at social media i'm trying to be better i think i joined twitter in like two thousand eight and set my first tweet in twenty nineteen but i'm working on it it's it's uncomfortable for me but i'm getting getting slowly better i i also just like that you're a vc but you're much more of like a high energy tinker you know like play with ideas type of person which is typically like more of an entrepreneur and so i think it's great at what you're doing brady you what do you think of that episode give us the the real talk i loved it just because sam's not that's part of it i love i love when we bounce her around ideas like we did today i think her i'm still thinking about the milk bomb it reminded me a little bit the liquid death guy and he launched that product without having the product and i can see someone launching this without having the prototype i put up instagram at facebook ads see the response get the hype going and then you know get the final product out there that's legitimately what my weekend plans are here you go quite literally okay so we're gonna watch this idea bloom and blossom we're gonna be the social pressure that you need to not just like get busy and drop this so we're gonna be to know like fire the bullet let's see it well i actually already started talking to drink formulation companies that do all the like nutritional panel and all the stuff you actually need to get one of these things off the ground and then they have c packer relationships so essentially once you get the formulation you don't do any of the touching product you just kinda say like i want ten thousand units of x and here's the formula go and then you know they do packaging and all that stuff one question for both of you okay so on this one the one that's more of the bubbles would you how interesting is that like that one to me is more like cool but i just don't know if people would so there's two products there's there's the bomb which you put in and it fizz and it's cool like that and then there's the bob balls that you just have at the bottom of your drink and you could just drink them kind of as you go at the end the the bomb it's essentially like adding milk and sugar to your coffee like if you put over your tea so it actually goes in and infuse used to be drink a drink that was like the what what's it called so there was not capri completion but there was like that other one squeeze it or whatever it was called i don't know what is it's like really famous few kids drink is like these red and blue and tall bottles but they came out with this explosive version once where you would take the when you took the top off you would put it in and it was exactly this it was this fizzy thing that would cause it to change color and add the flavor to the thing and then it was like the lunchtime like you were the shit if you had the explosion explosive version of this drink and this is what they're saying japanese thing that came in the glass bottles no it was super american it was like squeeze plastic bottle water sugar with explosive color like that's like the description and the on the ingredients label so oh my god it's all deal one imagine imagine the bombs for kids too like you could make this where like make your own chocolate milk or make your own like whatever apple juice or you name it you could just literally give kids a cup water and be like play here you go i'm all in on the bombs that's cool just the visuals the visual of it is amazing maybe magic bombs the name magic milk magic magic the new point i like yeah i like magic magic milk is great yeah the one's good but you're not actually selling you're selling the thing you put either in milk you just put in coffee straight or do you always put in the milk and then the milk of the coffee it's well so there is milk in it milk so it's either dry milk or almond milk powder essentially so it is for people that put some kind so this is cream and sugar basically it's whatever it's like your custom thing but it also has like a perfect portion of whatever spice like whatever functional spice you want i like this okay we're gonna also talk to john f he's the guy who made gravity blanket and he made moon pods and he made the candle and shit like that he is he's kind of a a mad scientist when it comes to the stuff so you should talk to him i connect you with him at and we can go over this so okay it was called ko burst where the name of the drink so it was just ko aid in a cool bottle i think i'll check that yeah that's what they were i am actually he's i forgot his name but grab blanket guy he he was in a bunch of club house rooms early but i was and i thought he was fascinating he was awesome yeah he's great because he doesn't try to be silicon valley cool he's just like a weirdo and which is what i want i want weirdo around me okay definitely anyway this is awesome i gotta run but good stuff thanks for having me this su fun i'm happy to do it anytime and oh by the way if you can help us with this functional milk thing email me just por dot sean at gmail mail dot com or dm me and say hey i'm a c packer or i'm a or whoever and offer your services yes thank you cool gotta go awesome bye