#59 - YC Demo Day Startups, Airbnb Survival & Teachable Acquisition

what's going on listeners we get asked all the time different bits of advice on the stuff that sean and i talk about and that's great and it's actually something that sean and i do all the time which is ask people for different insights particularly those who are a lot better than us and one person who who we've been heavily inspired by is jordan harbinger i've known jordan now for eight years now and i've been listening to him for about that long and he's had podcast for years and in fact has been in the top one hundred for the last thirteen years and he has a new show called the jordan harbinger show and what he does is he talks about social engineering in particular for helping men be more charismatic which is great but what i think is even more interesting is that he teaches social engineering to seals to intelligence agencies to special operations and it's incredibly fascinating we actually have jordan here for a minute to tell us some of his favorite episodes in particular the one that i've listened to recently was how to ask for advice jordan what's going on hey thanks for having me on i've really appreciate i think the reason i chose the advice topic was because i'm sure you get this too you get an email from somebody maybe even somebody who's younger saying something like i want you to mentor me or how do i succeed in my idea or how do i come up with a good idea and these are the wrong questions a lot of people are asking for validation of their idea they're asking for permission to do something you really can't get a lot of value from that it you have to be sure if you're actually asking for advice you're actually asking for permission you're just asking for an encouragement or if it's specific intentional and explicit in detailing what you need the other half of course is being able to implement that advice and then show the other person how you've implemented their advice in a very specific way so i decided to write an article and do an entire show about this on episode three twenty one of the jordan harbinger show because it's been it's helpful for people looking for advice and it's also helpful for people who get asked for advice in the wrong way all of the time because they can just say hey listen to this and then come back to me after you're done and i get maybe three or four dozen messages a day of people doing this and breaking the rules that you've just mentioned and i've noticed that when people do it right it can be career changing has any listener came to you and said thank you for giving this advice here's what i've done effectively and how it's worked oh it happens all the time and it's great it's really rewarding for me of course when people write to me and say my dream is to start a clothing line any tips all i can do is say i don't know really what you want or what you're gonna do and then of course any tip i give them that's not go for your dreams just leaves them feeling angry so i don't like to even field those questions anymore crazy i do the same thing whenever people ask advice i just say just start if the question isn't specific enough it's impossible it's like saying how do you make art so i think this is like an incredibly useful podcast it's something that people need to listen to regardless of where they are in their journey of of building whatever they're building so us a listen i mean it it's a great podcast i actually have i've paid for a handful of your products so this isn't just nonsense i i have really been a customer for a while and i appreciate you coming on and so what where should people turn to if they wanna listen to this sure you can find me at jordan harbinger dot com but honestly the podcast is anywhere you get your podcast well thanks for coming and this really means a lot to us thank you what up nothing it's been a crazy few days i got my car broken into last night oh now front was there something in it or you just francisco breaking i i have a garage i didn't park in my garage and the back window was broken into and someone stole my little two hundred dollar like battery that jumped jumps starts the car but it was like a thousand dollars or no it was four hundred dollars to fix it just sucks i'm also pretty sure have corona oh no you're feeling it yeah adam mike adam ryan my coworker he confirmed has it he lives in austin though but i'm pretty sure i have it were you're in contact with him or you just think you have it in general i just think i have it oh no i was going to the office up until thursday but i thought was okay because i was the only one in the office right and i didn't and i like i i didn't like see yeah and allan was only there one the other days and i didn't see or talk to anyone even like i would i drove in i parked on the street and i just watched right up but i've doing shit but not that bad not bad enough that i can't do stuff but i you know that's a bummer what's going on with you well on the right side for you you got to talk to your hero yeah so the other day i for the listeners beard sean are extra u nerds one of my favorite guys is he your favorite you like i like him but he's not my favorite i feel like you feel connected to him yeah so basically name ben as he's interesting because he's very polarizing i would say he has more people who hate him than loves him but the people who love him love him and the people who hate him hate him so on last week i gave a lecture on cold emailing and literally the day before i just called tweeted adam him and then we became friends in the inbox and then we just did like a conference call and we've been chatting and that was awesome now what was your cold tweet at him he he tweeted out a podcast that he liked and i tweeted oh hey i was actually on that same podcast like two months ago and and then i dm him the episode i go hey i was just on that i see you're doing x y and z i do this this and this i just like you but like if ever wanna like shoot the shit let me know that's amazing and then you you had a call with him he's cool guy you guys are gonna hang out and be best friends are what i i pray i i'm trying to convince ben at okay so ben ask is he's kinda like this he's kinda like i think the the people who like them are like the jordan peterson crowd like the people who never had good fathers and wanna learn how to be men you know what i mean yeah like discipline and even though he's kind of a loud mouth and i am like dude bed you have to like you could cut like you can like copy be all like you could like at the same way dave as has built a huge thing you could do that too by selling workout stuff and i'm trying to give convince him to do that yeah he has a very big brand and he's a very he is a very unique personality so you i could see that working for him yeah and i'm trying to convince him to do that he's based in wisconsin so i don't know like if he has like a whole bunch of like internet nerds hanging out with him that he truly understands what he's capable of and i'm trying to meet his nerdy friend that's good and fighters don't have a very long shelf life like he's retired now so you know they have to figure out the sec second act well he told me he has a wrestling academy and that they're not in session right now so he's like i i got a lot of free time and so i asked him if you wanted to come on and he said yeah so if you want them to come on the next couple of days or weeks we totally can do it yeah we should do a brainstorm with ben on what ben can do like what would i do if i was ben i think it it'd be cool to brainstorm those ideas i'm gonna write that down i'll email him right after this cool and we'll we'll research a bunch of things that other either athletes or celebrities have done to leverage their name their brand kinda like what we were talking about with lance armstrong yeah and the same conversation we had with lance weeks should do a full up with ben on that i'll i'll set that up great do you wanna talk about some new stuff that's going around sure okay so first thing teachable you see teachable sold i did see that okay so teachable is you me i hate comparing things because i don't wanna be respectful teach teachable mobile but teachable like you u me it's like you to me with one core difference so u me is like you go to u me to find what you wanna learn teachable is hey i can make you know you can make your website cold emailing dot com yeah and you'll you can sell your course on your brand on your site and they make it easy you don't have to know how to code to basically spin up an online class on your own website yeah and you and i are friends yeah i think you are too right i don't know the guy but i'm really familiar with a thing and people know my education nerds so i'm like kind of was very fascinated about their business and they did a pretty phenomenal job they were at like twenty million or so in revenue i think they sold for closer to two hundred to two hundred fifty million talked to encore that's the guy you founded it and he said that it was very lucrative and it was a it was a good it it worked out quite well so so i'm i'm super i'm proud of that and their last round was at two hundred fifty million so i don't know if it's sold at the same price it which was recently so don't know if it's sold at that price or above that even that'd be kind of amazing i don't know all i know is that it sound it was a good deal for him and he is he's an he's an immigrant from india came here at h eighteen so love the love the story and i believe they have several teachers who use teachable and make over like a million dollars a year or something like that i think they have some some real success stories maybe somebody told me it might it might not be a million i don't know exactly no no there there there are seven figure annual earners yeah they're mostly like affiliate marketer types in it but but whatever let's not let's not it's like when do you say teachers people think like an english and it's actually like you know well he he told me he told me the big one of the top earners was a guy who has an excel class yeah i've seen that and you can actually google i've done this many times you can google you know high most profiting or sort of highest revenue teachable classes and you can find the list that i think they even have it on their the most popular classes there's like a social media marketing there's a excel how to do excel classes there's a coding one there's a bunch of those did you do a pocket by your i don't listen to any of our podcast podcasts by the way because right you don't ever listen to your own stuff did you don't even listen to my voice mail yeah that's hilarious let alone you talking for a long time did you launch your your individual episode so i have two episodes i did one on thursday i didn't launch it i thought it sucked and then the our editor i think he has coronavirus as well so he's been like in and of the hospital and he has like underlying lung conditions so he's like trying to make sure he he didn't know that you know get getting in a bad spot so he didn't publish it and i was like i you know i got cold feet i gotta either ship it right away or i'll overthink it that's i think you should do it and so so he lives to he's you talking about this is good and so we're gonna ship that i have two bank and then i also at the end of the last one i i i had this idea during the podcast to do a like morning routine things so like you're in your house right now right you're in your kitchen and we're all at home and everyone getting a little crazy and trying to figure out like oh i'm gonna work out by like opening and closing the fridge fifty times like people are trying to find a way to feel good and not go insane and i've had this morning routine i've done for years now that's a nine minute morning routine and so on the podcast i was like i just make a podcast it's just that this just the nine minute morning routine you can list it it's just free you just put it out there so i recorded that last night so i had two episodes in the bank plus the morning routine like thing recorded and so hopefully all those will come out this week are you working out yeah i'm working so we have we've had a home gym or like a room that we turned into a gym and now i'm using the shit out of it i have a home gym in my garage like a nice one like i've got like it's like a four pounds for squat like a squat rack heavy bag i have all types of shit yeah i talked to a guy there other day who was a listener or something like that he messaged me on twitter and he said that their home fitness equipment is selling like crazy he's like we can't keep up hot cakes i ordered a thousand pounds worth of weights on amazon last year with free shipping yeah the delivery on weights is insane i felt so guilty because the guy bringing it up to my house like up the fifteen steps is like you know breaking his back for this thing i'm never gonna use and so i bought those bow flex dumbbells which is like it's one dumb that's what i have power blocks you rotate it and it like can be any weight you want those are actually pretty handy yeah no i have those those are my favorite do you wanna talk about airbnb oh so next week we could do the trend stuff we wanted to talk about trends stuff but i and i it's a good one but i think we have a lot here do you wanna talk about airbnb now we have a lot so we're gonna do two things we're gonna talk a little bit about airbnb and then we're gonna start this thing that we we we teased last week which is y comb had their demo day and it's like a gold mine of new ideas and it's sort of you know yc is harvard and so we're gonna take a look at this batch of companies and we're gonna break them down we're gonna do like five or six of them today and if it's fun we might do the rest i mean the list is like a hundred plus i don't know how long we can do this but let's do like five today and let's see what happens so we'll do both those things in this episode so airbnb some interesting things are going on so airbnb you know very well is awesome company one of the sort of most successful startups ups of the last decade or so and was about to go public this year and was preparing for it and now with coronavirus you know travel has stopped hospitality you know hotels casinos they're all taking a total beating and airbnb of course is gonna get caught up in the the crossfire as well and so a couple interesting things here so so airbnb financially you know their revenue must have dropped by fifty sixty seventy eighty percent essentially overnight and with an indefinite time spent we don't know how long this is gonna last the second thing is airbnb not only does have huge you know staff on payroll and now revenue drops but all the hosts were essentially small small small entrepreneurs so some people did you know a traditional thing they just rented it out to extra bedroom in their house but a lot of people once they got a taste of that money they started buying places renting out places and sub leasing and basically putting it on and airbnb and so all those people now there's this thing that was a money maker for a couple years has gone to zero and so i think there's something that's very interesting that's gonna happen where what happens to all these hosts who've got places just to airbnb them and now the airbnb income has sort of totally dried up are they gonna default on their mortgages are they gonna default on the rent payments if they're if they're sub leasing or are they gonna turn into just normal rentals like i don't know what's gonna happen but what think about all this so you already know what's going on in zillow you the one who told right well i did see some charts yeah so i saw some charts that basically showed on zillow normal housing so just normal rentals not a short term airbnb stay but just here's an apartment for lease for six months is exploding so like it looks like the coronavirus is like here's last month one little blue dot this month fifteen blue dots on the map right it's like the number of listings is exploding for rentals which is also bad for airbnb because in places like san francisco where there's a house shortage and for years airbnb has been saying oh we don't contribute to the housing shortage we are we're a different thing altogether well now it's actually kind of a whether it's whether it's truly the the a proof or not i don't know but it certainly does look like if you're somebody who who was anti airbnb you have a lot of evidence and a lot of ammunition now to say hey look when we turned airbnb off look at how much more housing supply came on the market look how that lowers rents for everybody well you know what airbnb is doing now though is long term rentals they've been getting into that for a while where you could rent something for many months maybe many years and that part is growing still or it's growing a lot right now right and so so i'm curious whether people in cities grand airbnb are gonna take this and run with it and you know everything very sensitive to legislation right they changed some rules here in san francisco where it's like you can only do ninety days out of the year and you have to live in the place you have to prove that blah blah and that that you know eliminated like thirty or forty percent of the listings overnight when that legislation happened a year or two ago so now i wonder if it's gonna get worse sandra you know sandra i'm googling them right now you know them no oh that's the like it's the the hotel or explain sand it's basically if you are traveling for work and you wanna go stay somewhere you'll stay at a asu often let's i'll go to son dot com it's also if you wanna stay somewhere for like three months like let's say you're going somewhere for three months and you wanna and and you have to make a lot of money order to do this it's high end shit like in san francisco it's like five or six grand a month need a place to stay or work we know it's time here the bet yeah the best parts of home and hotel so it's like a it's like a an apartment that you can rent for two months right so it's do corporate housing but done well yes but they just laid off twenty percent of their company it looks like oh wow yeah today yeah freaking news so i think this gonna be very interesting how these different companies get affected you know i'm rooting for airbnb i think it's a great product i think it's a great company i hope that they have you know a war chest of cash that lets them endure this time but you know we'll we'll see it's a i'm keeping an eye on if you could invest a little bit of what you can you can go and buy secondary shares if you can invest money at airbnb b's previous valuation i think they raised money on a thirty billion dollar valuation would you invest in that right now what i need to know right i need to know about the how the company's financials look let's say that revenue dropped more people let's say revenue dropped seventy percent for this order they're not so concerned about the seventy percent drop because that's that i think is is more temporary so i just need to know they have enough cash in the bank to endure this or i think they have three billion dollars okay so this is three billion dollars you know they're probably burning several million a month but like k three billion should should still last you through this time and the another question is where the fundamentals is good to begin with so a lot of times these companies don't have great unit economics or fundamentals to begin with and so when the downturn comes and people start looking for things that are more stable more for bets these high growth but poor unit economic companies they struggle they were profitable in two thousand eighteen dude i this is like an analyst call i and i think they're also profitable in two thousand nineteen this is all public information right so yeah so if they're if they're profitable right now even with this explosive growth and yeah it's probably a pretty good bet to to pick up a little secondary there alright boys and girls ladies and gentlemen we're gonna talk a little bit about our sponsor for this week's episode head spin if you wanna make your first million with your mobile app you gotta prioritize user experience burst that's where head spins here to help see with head spins mobile app benchmark reports you know where you stand against your peers and get deep insights into your mobile experience and app performance their state of the art global device cloud will help you obtain unique carrier network device and os level insights for your app in more than a hundred and fifty locations around the world no sdk required get your custom heads benchmark report at heads dot o forward slash benchmark okay again and that's heads spin dot io o forward slash benchmark to see how you are preparing and benchmark against your peers okay i guess we'll see what happens do you wanna talk about some y comb stuff yeah so so we're gonna go through a couple of the companies in the batch you know there these are what we won't say anything that's to what i call two private information so we'll do what's mostly public information about these companies so we'll start with the first one wait sean before we get into that do can you can i tell you something that was striking about this list how many list were there a hundred and fifty yeah shockingly africa african and indian based yes this has been a trend in the last year or two for y comb they did two things they went and did a road show so michael si who was the the ceo of yc for a while actually he might still be so he went on a road roadshow through africa through india and met met a bunch of entrepreneurs they had a bunch of events and they sort of opened up the doors to those applicants and really got people excited about coming to yc and their bet was that hey look a lot of the growth opportunity in the best companies are you know we can go in this pond were not everybody else's is fishing and you know certainly five hundred startups is did this many many years ago where they just invest companies all around the world this has not been the the the sort of way that most silicon valley investors have been operating they're not actively going and hunting for count great companies in india or brazil or in africa but yeah it's it's pretty amazing about how like there's i see a lot of latin america a ton of india and a ton of africa and what's funny is a lot of them are just you know flex sport for brazil it's like this other successful yc company or it's like the same says once tagline is smile direct club for latin america right yeah that that's literally it right yeah flex port for india or sorry flex for africa yeah it's pretty crazy and and i think that's a great move yeah from for sure because a lot of these companies that that work when they're not purely software based they're gonna scale slowly they're not gonna expand everywhere overnight so same thing up in airbnb airbnb got cloned in europe and in all all different parts of the world sometimes they they were able to catch up and beat them most of the time they weren't and they had to buy a piece of them or acquire them or they just lost and they said okay i guess we're not gonna be the number one player in the uk we're gonna be or three year or and it works out yeah and you wanna you wanna smart do you wanna start it off yeah so let's do cro so cro is an app the website just cro dot app c r o n dot app and what these guys are trying to do is essentially super for your calendar so that assumes you know what super is which is this really slick and very hyped email client i used it for a while i stopped i don't know about you do you have you used super i'm still using it verdict still out i love it but their tagline for people who don't know super human is the calendar for professionals right so their thesis is look the market for calendar users for just if you just take google calendar is five hundred million people and what they're trying to do is take the top you know set of pros consumers right so professionals people who really care about efficiency people who are heavy power users of the calendar app and they're trying to say can we get the top x percent they said top twenty percent but really it's gonna end up being the top two percent of people to pay nineteen dollars a month to have you know their google calendar on steroids what's one percent of what's one percent of five hundred million that fifty million wait no that's five million yeah that's five million okay so if five dollars if you're paying ninety bucks a month not bad so so they're trying to go after that they basically made a very slick looking calendar so it's got okay you know aesthetically it looks looks better they have hot keys and little short commands and oh you wanna set up a meeting and it's hard to sorta to say oh i'm free tuesday from one to two and thursday from three to four it's like you just share your availability and make it make it really easy so have a bunch of these features and they have a thousand users on the waitlist list who are so ready to pay and they're they've onboard the first fifty paying customers so far so they're they're doing that thing that yc companies do you'll see this a lot is big idea yeah and then good traction but over a very short amount of time so you can't really judge if this is successful or not yet and it says like fifty percent month over over month growth but it's like six weeks but it's been six weeks and and a hundred percent of those companies were other hundred percent of the customers or other companies in the yc batch right so it's like you know it's hard to really get a sense of these things but i thought this pretty interesting idea do what do you think about this okay so if i was this guy i would bet my life that this could be a company that makes a shit ton profit it so there's the nearest competitor that i could think of as call call call is a plug in for gmail it's a thirty million a year company that's bootstrap out of atlanta started by a guy who moved here for from my i think nigeria cool story andrew wilkinson i i i respect and like thinks that cal or i i think he thinks it's total bullshit and that google could totally clone it i disagree agree with i disagree with that assessment i think that k can for sure be a very very profitable software company i'm not convinced that it that they should raise venture capital because i yeah i wouldn't raise venture capital for them i was them if they needed money and just a start i would say raise a million dollars and just make this make like make it stupidly profitable right that's that's what i would do route they're going because they're in nyc but yeah i hear that i think that's a valid path i don't think they're gonna need a ton of capital there's not a big they don't need a huge engineering force they don't have to buy a bunch of assets you know this is a software play that really a motivated team of six to ten people could could knock out the park if i was listening to this podcast i would say and i was technical i would be like oh that is a great idea their their website if you go there right now it kinda shows how the product works and i would just completely rip it off right and scale but be far more scrappy because i don't think these companies out here are scrappy and i think that someone could build it and be able to pay themselves five million dollars a year in net income yeah you know the so i think this that's a good idea i also like this general genre of company so our friend su tipped me off to this a while ago he goes i just think superhuman for x is a good investment thesis right now and so he loves superhuman it loves the business it's doing really well and you know we were looking at this company called linear which is a it's like a bug tracking software so every big software company tracks their bugs usually using jira or some like old school ticketing system nobody loves using jira it's just like you know it's a must you have to be organized around your bugs and linear just made like a slick looking jira and and so we you know we talked to them thought about investing in them did you and i didn't end up it was like a was a bit of a competitive around and then i could have got in at the end but i sort of cooled on it because when i tried to bring it into our company there was a lot of security concerns not that they were doing something wrong but you just have to do a lot of work to be enterprise security compliant and pass those checks and they hadn't done that work yet now in reality they're gonna do that work it's gonna be fine and they're gonna get there it's just got out of sight out of mind for me because i stopped using them and i forgot about and you're making investments right now no now i'm on startup up investments i have cooled off for for the time being there's need to freeze so okay so verdict on cro how do you say it cro cro a verdict for me is great company to own i think it will work i don't know if it's good raise money on yeah agreed thanks a good idea good product i think there's other products like this if you just take a superhuman for x and you take any work tool that's massively used and you just make extremely slick ui ux for for that this can work with to do list this can work with email this can work with calendar this can be and you know how i would do that is i would log in to gmail i'm gonna log in to gmail right now i would log in to gmail i would click that little the drop down arrow the drop down no the google apps thing on the top right right i would look at search gmail calendar docs drive sheets slides sites groups contacts hang out and i would just oh wow there's way more youtube maps news translate photos admin my business i would and you just put that on a bulls eye or a dart just close eyes and just there it is that's when do air table did this for excel notion did this for docs superhuman did it for email there's a new one that's doing it for presentations call so let's let's talk about that yeah i don't know much about it it's called pitch dot io o right or pitch dot c i think it's pitch dot c if i remember correctly is it awesome or something i don't know like why are people talking about it so much no it's pitch dot com do they get the con that's like that's that's how you know it's legit that's like a hundred thousand dollar domain name what what why are people talking about that so much so i saw this the first time so this is again you know just like air table did for excel these guys are trying to do for powerpoint so powerpoint also has hundreds of millions of of users it's a critical business function and microsoft does not make the ui ux better over time they do not do smart things in the cloud and so you have on the low end you have google docs and google sheets google slides and on the high end you have right now microsoft you know powerpoint and these guys are trying to to do a better job of making making a sexy powerpoint and i'm down with sexy powerpoint i love i always love their website it looks great pitch dot com and it looks like it's ready to come out now i've seen this thing this has been in like for over a year i believe maybe two years that i've seen this this website like this based off the people who are recommending it on their on their homepage i feel like i know the people behind this yeah it's like your friends with all the testimonials yeah great i'm very yep i like that i don't know anything about it other than what i'm seeing on this website and yeah awesome and so this is one where i think great market to go after your execution obviously has to be good but like you know but but that's okay it's better than going after a bad market because then even great execution doesn't do jack shit for you i have another one that's like this on the excel side that's called causal so i've been talking to these guys i'm not quite enough i don't think i'm an official adviser but i just give my give these guys a lot of opinions so causal is it basically tries to give everyone the ability to do like data modeling like an excel wizard or like a awesome that's on hard but that's awesome and so they have some cool things you should just if you just google causal rent versus buy calculator you can see what the end output looks like they make this like calculator of rent versus buy how you spell that c a u s a l that's causal causal app dot com is their thing and then if you just google causal app rent versus buy you could see it it's a cool tool i don't think they've quite got it to work i'm telling them they're trying to make it too they're they're basically too smart so they're trying to do like data model data science like oh look how easy it is to make a linear regression or armani carlo it's like yeah you don't do that frequently you should just make it where it's really pleasurable and easy to do simple formulas and spit out awesome charts i love just do that because what air table did was air table took the part of excel that's just rows of information and they made that sexy but what they didn't do is calculation people use excel for calculation and chart and a air table doesn't do that so if you did the calculation and charging and you made it beautiful and sexy you could win and these guys aren't doing that i'm looking at calls now it's awesome on and pitch dot com i changed my opinion they're gonna deal okay why i went to their about page and they have nine employees and they're all founders oh yeah that's a that's a bit of a red flag literally dude another about page they have nine people it says c for all of every employee yeah that that ain't gonna work these are also like amazing heads shots that they took for themselves yeah so i changed it's a cofounder and a qa engineer it says c cofounder founder next to all of them yeah no pretty pretty legit investors okay so say andrea is an investor in them yeah okay i'm excited to see what they got i won't wanna see been two years okay so let let's go to the next company the next one is art in res art in res so the idea here is you can buy fine art in installments and you know i personally didn't know too much about the fine art market i think my hunch is that a little bit more i i think you like to look into these things so tell me what you think about this idea and what you know about the fine art market yeah so master is one of our partners we work with masterclass class i went and met with the founder his name's scott in new york a couple weeks ago a couple months ago and i learned a lot so fine art is one of the largest asset classes in the world but master class is not about art right or what do you mean sorry master works so mass master works is a website where you can purchase pieces of a ba or a pablo picasso in the same way that you buy stock in publicly in the publicly traded markets so but our fine r is a massive massive asset class but it's incredibly ill liquid as in you you either have to have thirty to buy or you don't get any upside and so what master works is doing is allowing people to purchase it with a minimum i think of a thousand dollars and what i learned meeting with those guys was how how great that that that that as an asset class how great it could so for example david ge from ge records of a big entrepreneur during the financial crisis he was famous for saying that his fine went up thirty percent while his normal equities went down significantly let me see what else i haven't bunch of stats here that's so i think i think i think that's really interesting if i wanted to look at how this company could do i would look at etsy so as etsy has traded at at a fifty to eighty price earnings ratio which is really really good i would ebay right now is is in the gutter but i'm really i think that marketplaces can be quite large and i think that i personally was shocked at how large find like fancy art and and i thought it was like i thought that there's was only like a couple paintings sold the year that made a difference and in reality it's not it's not that way right the value proposition is that you can buy find our in installments so you were saying master lets you buy a piece of a of piece of of of art they've sort of fractional it these guys say it's yours but you can you're in a monthly payment plan this has been a big trend in e commerce anybody who's been paying attention to a affirm or after pay these are multi billion dollar companies that are just saying even low priced items right here's a forty dollar item but you can buy it in four easy installments of ten a firm is doing quite well both of those companies are gonna go public or it's it's looking like they will right africa is actually already public and firm is i think going to go public and so they're and there's there's more sizzle there's there's others that are doing this too so that's a very good business to be in i believe and so so that's what these guys are doing they said they've sold thirty six thousand dollars worth of art in three weeks this is unlike a firm and unlike after pay they're not a payment option on other market other websites they are their own marketplace and so what they're trying to do is they give artists the ability to sell their work they say most artists don't even sell their work so they say list it here we offer people the ability to buy in installments so more people can buy so with more buyers in our pool and they they get the artist to put their link to their store just like an etsy store in their buy so they put their art and res link at the bio and that's driving a lot of users because these are you know instagram artists or artist with an instagram who have you know a hundred thousand followers and they're getting in the bio of all these different artists and that's gonna drive traffic that's a lot how sound cloud grew early on was going for these independent artist and then saying cool we'll give you an easy way to host your artwork in that case music but you know here share your sound cloud profile and that's how they got tons of traffic and built up their marketplace and so i think that's what these guys that are trying to do i think this is smart the art market is one of those markets that's bigger than you think because you don't even you don't even learn about it till you're already rich and once you're already rich you don't do start a company in it and so i think it's one of those big invisible markets to most entrepreneurs who are scrappy and don't own you know like a pencil let alone a piece more i so i would have agreed with you and before you start talking i i agreed that it was great but then you the way you described it if okay so i would i would be against it if if etsy is competent they can destroy these guys yeah you know i i think it's gonna be hard though because etsy niche is handmade crafts and i think that's just fundamentally different than fine art i think when like putting a bottle of wine next to a budweiser right in in the aisle it's it's a little bit i don't think the people who want their art to be sold or fine art to be sold or wanna buy wanna be next to somebody who's making bracelets that would be my that'd be my bear case against that okay i buy that i buy that but oh okay i get it so i see a painting on here it's three thousand dollars i can pay over time for for twenty four months for a hundred and thirty seven dollars okay so my question is this is this pay over time feature even that unique enough to build most of your company on top of why not just like have a normal art store and just install a firm yeah that's a good question i don't know why they're not just using one of the existing installment plans you know why are they why why are they owning that piece of it it's like an art marketplace but then also this financing program when they could just use one of existing financing programs so i'm looking at it now yeah i i'm changing my mind it's stupid okay well we'll we'll see jury out on on arden and res i'm not an expert in this but but what's your bet or something there my bet would be i think marketplaces are really really freaking hard to start correct and so i for that reason i think that it's gonna be incredibly difficult and they they definitely haven't shown that they've done that yet but you know so i would i would say odds are always against any marketplace being successful but i do like the fundamentals of what they're trying to do i don't think this is a stupid i don't think this a stupid bet to take if you're a entrepreneur but i do think still likelihood is at doesn't work like most startups i think that okay but there's a difference here of working and just building wealth and then working by raising money no i mean the business working not not the raise money lots of companies can raise money yeah but what i mean is should i think this if it if for sure can make a living for the owners the question is is if they raise money then will it work or will not my prediction is that they were raise money it's gonna fail i feel like that's your prediction with most things i think you just don't like people raise money for the most part no the next one that we're gonna talk about carrot i think that could work okay alright let's talk about it okay so carrot it's they provide loans and align a credit for influencers and that's interesting and the reason it's interesting is i use i have a million dollar line of credit with a company that provides line of credit for for media companies this clearly works in some cases influencers can it work maybe but the so the company that i use it was started by dream works exact it has over a hundred employees and they have billions of dollars and and and and i don't know what how do you describe billions of dollars in credit yeah they have billions a billion to over a billion dollars to deploy i think it's great because i'm totally hooked on their company and i don't plan on leaving and i think i pay them like a thousand dollars a month for what do what do you use it for your company expenses or a personal what company yeah so we don't really use it but when a rainy day comes and we need money i have that set up right and so and so the other example here is clear bank where they're basically providing credit to commerce companies and they're saying great you don't don't go raise money for this if you can show that your credit worthy by looking at your shopify data then we'll we will front you the money you need for inventory or for facebook ads or whatever else you shouldn't go raise venture capital for to pay for facebook ads and so the interesting thing here is the big ideas the real big ideas that come out of y comb don't know with sound like big ideas to start airbnb is a great example of that yeah you know when when it was on yc sees list like this it would've have been called air bed and breakfast it would would've been like you know rent out an air mattress in my apartment and it would have seemed like a small idea and this is one of those two words like to influencers really need credit do they really need loans what do influencers need you know this for and it just turns out i think that there's a lot of influencers and this might be a hidden and big market it might be something that influencers really actually do need this capital they are not there they're traditional banks and lending institutions don't know how to how to assess an influencer for credit worthiness in the same way that they didn't do it for e commerce and the cool question i have is how does the influencer use that capital to invest and grow their business like for e commerce i get it for your business i get it you're gonna invest the money you're gonna grow your business what does an influencer really do to to grow their business it adds is it to pay for stunt that's content like what are they doing with this that's question and i don't think anything but let me go let me go a different angle here when you bought your house was was your wife listed as in in earn yes was she listed as self employed yes well what do you mean listed by like like for example when you got your mortgage sorry when you got your mortgage should she should she say that she was a sole provider did you say that you are twenty five percent owner of a business didn't i say that now okay when she was getting approved for the mortgage was it hard for her no she well it was a lot of paperwork but it was it wasn't hard like she had the the income to show it but it just required like mine was simple w two submit they're like yeah got it we understand your your economics for her she had like you know this roller coaster history and a whole bunch of different entities and like all these different stuff that like was very very hard for them in fact we i just refinance because the interest rates have dropped like crazy and we didn't even use her this time because the lady at the bank was like if we can let's just do this off your income like i don't i don't wanna do all that paperwork again for for your wife that's what i think the opportunity is when i try to buy a home because i'm an entrepreneur i told them my own i think the threshold twenty percent they go they said do you owe more than twenty five percent of a business i said yeah and they go okay we need to see the last x amount of the years in p and l and i showed it to and it was profitable or whatever and they still gave me a hard time i think that if i was this company care i would i think there's a big opportunity who can provide home loan for home loans for small business owners i think that's the real opportunity here yeah and maybe they do so they so here's some of the stats about them right they've loaned out a million dollar in the last six months the average payback period is forty five days so extremely fast payback that the the apr is very high because of that so even on a low apr because of the fast payback it annual utilizes at forty percent and now they're rolling out a credit card after they video credit card sure that they would wanna get into other financial services and if they can be sort of the financial services for influencers or the bank for influencers that's very interesting because this will always be a niche market that is overlooked and misunderstood by the traditional banking system and so that's the bull case the bear case is i don't know i don't know what the influencers need this money for i don't know if they can actually pay it back and i don't know how how credit worthy they actually really so the the strategy here is you get into a market you get a ton of you buy ton of share you you people like you and trust you and you're profiting and then you start launching more and more stuff to them which i personally love which is a x model in this case right well it's yeah and it's what i do i mean it's what i for living we're built we build up a free email list they'll be sell more stuff up and then more and the more and the more i mean yeah a lot of people do it and but you gotta get them locked in early and you gotta get a enough people so i think that that's cool and that actually brings us to a good point of our of the next one how do how do you pronounce this and i'll tell you why there there's a there's an angle here well what's this one called how do you pronounce that we're just gonna call it lila i don't know what it is it's leah i don't know they need to change to their name because that's hard to pronounce right so it's it's stupidly simple it's it's a it's a product that helps women freeze their eggs pretty straightforward but what i think could be cool with these folks as well as carrot is once you get this customer on the hook there's loads of products that you could sell them and this same way him started with viagra and now is doing hair loss and then now they're thinking about doing testosterone doing x something dude y whatever i think you could do the same thing for both carrot really well and this egg freezing one hello lil lil yeah i let's see yeah little drive i think how do you say it so bad name great idea great business you know this is one of those you just close your eyes invest is how i would treat it yeah so the so here's some stats that i i went and found i this is not from their deck i just went and found this okay and this number was shocking do you do you know that only according to cnbc only like eleven thousand people freezer their eggs a year is that right it's not a lot yeah not not a lot but it's growing at twenty five percent a year yep and i actually buy that i think it's gonna grow significantly gen z i think are gonna put it off more and more i also think that so large companies like facebook and google actually subsidize it and pay for it so to get your eggs frozen it cost between five and twenty grand year if you're in san francisco it could be eighteen grand if you're in a smaller city it could be six grand so it's really expensive it's very invasive it takes four to six weeks where you gotta give shots in your arm and the it's like huge needles it's a it's a it's just a it's intense shit but you know it's about having children so it's a pretty big deal and you're willing to put up with all that it's a pretty big deal my question is so first of all there's not that huge of a market right now ten like twelve thousand people well with this new company be able to convince a young woman to use them as opposed to her doctor right and the other other existing services that surely exist around this like i don't know the competitive landscape but i do like where all the trends are going so i think that you know the data shows that people are having kids later they're getting married later and that this is becoming less fringe and less taboo over time and so that's what's going in the favor of this is that more people the market for egg freezing is growing and is becoming more serviceable now do they what i don't see here is some unique go to market strategy oh here's how they're here's how they're gonna acquire customers differently than how anybody else would i also don't see they're talking about their expertise and how they you in a why that why they're gonna be able to build trust in a way that's better or different than anybody else so that's what i think is missing from this limited information we have here we talk about product and distribution and how a lot of people particularly first time people think well if the product's is good it's gonna sell itself in reality that's not truth because there's way more great there's a ton of great products that die because they have no distribution there's a ton of shit products that crushed because of distribution is amazing and so in this case in the same way that him it's just resell other people shit right like him is an interesting it's just generic viagra other products nothing good it's just that they're like smack keep branding on it and they made it so men can call their call and get it and and young men don't have to be embarrassed about going to the doctor i you need to see something like that from this company i think don't more to in order for for it to work because what the service they're offering doesn't seem particularly different right right yeah exactly they haven't made it less invasive less painful less cost they haven't innovated on the product side so that means they need to have innovated on the marketing side or the go to market side that's what i don't like about this but i love the space that they're in and i think there's gonna be a winner i don't know if it's this company or another but that's what's great about this one yeah and let me see do they have use i don't know what okay is i got some information on them we charge okay so it looks like what they're doing is they're not actually doing the work they're just a middleman man for the clinic so in reality they're almost like lead gen yep so if i have a five hundred dollar concierge service that they offer first so how do we educate you handled you through the process and basically qualify the lead yeah so what they're doing is they are not they are not actually providing the service they're just a marketing company for service providers if that's the case i like this i think it's cool yeah i have a friend who does a company called y der and what they do is the same thing around dermatology so it's telemedicine but in reality what they're doing is they said most people who need to see a dermatologist are going because of acne most people who have acne get the same prescription that prescription is you know something that they can just get quickly from a doctor the biggest bottleneck is getting an appointment takes you know twenty seven days on average to get an appointment with dermatologist so what they did was they built a marketing company that basically says hey do you need to see dermatologist this is a faster easier way to it just do it from like facetime your doctor and then they have a bunch of doctors who just write these same prescriptions all the time for the same acne medicine because that's what people need eighty percent of the time and twenty years of time they say you need to go see a doctor it's not acne it's not just the generic thing and and then they're white labeling the actual acne medicine and they're the ones delivering it and that's the how big is that they're doing well fuck i love that okay so we talked about k art art and res carrot and lil lily that's a stupid name have a hundred thousand dollars to put in one which one you gonna do alright let's take a look it's not gonna be cr for me i'm also gonna say it's not gonna be lil because even though i like the market for all those reasons we mentioned i don't know why this is the winning company i don't see them doing anything special and this is the what i what we have to tell people is once you meet the person behind it that could totally change your decisions for right this is not based on the people at all because you could meet someone in you're like they're still formidable that you don't care what you sell i'm in right i think if i was gonna do this i was gonna this is crazy to me that i'm even saying this but i think i would be putting it in ardent res i think i would put it in because i think if they can get the marketplace spun up it's gonna be valuable and i think that this is an overlooked marketplace so so overlooked market so i like that it's a marketplace as a model not lead gen not not anything else and then on the other side i think if they can get i i have a feeling that the sort of fine arc marketplace has not been affected by technology in the same way as all the other industries have and so i'm curious to see what they do so i would bet the k on ardent and res and i would write it as a loss because i would assume it's going to be a loss alright i would do k okay why cro i just think it's it'll it's super easy the for them to be in default survival it's so easy like i think that they can get like a hundred thousand dollars in monthly revenue like really fast i think their churn might be high but i i i think that it's just because of the market size and because it's an impulse buy and if this just saves you a little bit of time i i just think that they can get to ten or thirty million dollars in recurring revenue inside three or four years with very little capital and so their default alive pretty easily and depending on how creative the entrepreneurs are they could expand beyond that so i'm gonna go with cro okay i like i don't know if who would buy them though well like for example microsoft bought sunrise calendar i believe it wasn't calendar that people really liked it was a probe professional calendar and they got bought for i don't know how much i know like inbox got bought for a hundred million for making a slick inbox you know by google and then sort of throwing away sunrise got bought so so i think that there's potential for an acquisition there by one of the you know big companies that cares about you know enterprise and productivity and whatnot so there's a there's a chance there i just wanna be evil and just clone half of these things on this list yeah that's not evil that's that's not evil that's just capitalism but i i do like i some of these ideas i think are really stellar i don't know how i it's i okay and i tell you the one that i would invest it's not even one we discussed i'll and know we gotta go i'll i'll do it in thirty seconds company called duff they're doing fast deliveries on college campuses and horrible i but go ahead not horrible not horrible i'll tell you what what they do is they buy the popular stuff that that kids want like ben jerry's and chips and whatnot beer they put it in an apartment and then they deliver it to you on scooter when you order it so average car is sixteen dollars they make five dollars per delivery and they're delivering in a very lightweight way on the same in a very tight geographic boundary so they don't have a bunch of logistical issues there's a company called puff or go puff have you if you heard of those guys no what's that it's this but it's it's basically it's this and they're doing over hundred million dollars a year right now and they're just two kids out of i don't know penn state or something like that i don't know where they are but somewhere in middle america and so i've seen this model work i think that this is hot business idea i have puff it's i think the website's go puff dot com you're saying they do a hundred million in sales yeah more than that i believe and so they're in you can see all the different campuses so then how profitable are they i mean i don't know all that right i don't have all their financials but i mean as a hundred million like their net prop like they're after they pay the dry i mean or is it like where the driver gets most of the money and most of them money they're they're at a hundred sixty three million a year is the is the thing i don't think they even raised that much money let me look at their fundraising for for gop i don't think they raised too much oh no they have now raised a lot how much eight hundred and six million dollars oh so you describe it as two kids well it was soft bank invested in them in recently and is a huge round so soft bank backed up the truck them but anyways i think this market works and i actually think great that's soft bank back of the truck and put the touch of death on this company if i'm duff i i believe in what i'm doing there's a lot of college campuses out there to make this work can i give you two that i would do right now for this is just purely off of reading about their market and like a description of the company the first one is build plain dot com project automation for commercial construction i think that with the recession this can make this company a ton of money their previous companies who were acquired so they're solid but just i love software that is in boring industries like commercial control that can help people just save a little bit of money it's called right build build plane like i i i that that will take off and be big i like that it's not sexy and then the second one is true north fleet did you see that one i didn't see this no we give independent truckers the resource the resources of large fleets and so basically what they do is you know a lot of truckers are just small as owners right they're just like uber drivers but they must do truckers my my dad is in that industry so that's how i know about a lot about it and they're pretty raw they just see like up until recently they didn't use twitter or anything like that they would just have their cb radios and their cell phone and my dad to call them and be like hey i got a load for you to go pick up in bakersfield and then i need you to drop it off at the walmart in this place like that's is how it would work and this company is is building bids of like software for small small trucking businesses and i i don't i think people vastly underestimate how trucking is like the backbone of america and how how big logistics is in our country so i i'm very bullish on that one i like it okay cool yeah if you like this let us know we're gonna do either more of these yc sort of company deep dives since this batch just came out there's like companies we could go through if we wanted to and if you don't let us know it'd be like that was boring and don't it again and yeah we can go through a few more next week sean did you you had topics already that you wanted to go over we can do these next week yeah we'll do it next week are we on thursday thursday okay well thanks for listening this one was a little ghetto because we're all at home hopefully the quality was sufficient enough yeah i for one enjoy the ghetto pod but hate this too i hate it