Optimism In A Tech Downturn — With Packy McCormick and Austin Rief

Austin Rief is the CEO of Morning Brew. Packy McCormick is the author of Not Boring on Substack and founder of Not Boring Capital. The two join Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of why the economic downturn has hit tech disproportionately hard and how bad it's going to get. They also look for places of optimism, and areas of opportunity. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss whether their own investing has changed, how their media businesses will get through this moment, and the latest on Elon Musk's plan to buy Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  LinkedIn Presents.

• 1:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We are in the middle of, or the beginning of, what might be a very long downturn. And it's been amazing to hear people go from any side of the spectrum to we're about to bounce back up to be prepared for five years of depression. Of course, the takes on Twitter and elsewhere online are totally devoid of nuance. And so why don't we spend the next little bit breaking this stuff down with the appropriate nuance? And to do it, we have, I think, one of the most dynamic duos in tech, two guys who used to do Twitter Space together. I don't know if they still do it, but anyway, I enjoyed it so much, I thought, why don't we get it back together? And we do it here on the podcast.

• 2:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Joining us today is Packy McCormick, the author of Not Boring on Substack, and founder of Not Boring Capital, and Austin Reeve, CEO of Morning Brew, which you all know very well. Guys, welcome to the show. Great to have you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  It's great to be here.

• 2:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is great. So nice to bring the band back together. I'll kick it off with this. Okay, so I was just checking today. You know, put the downturn in context. The Nasdaq is down 25% year-to-date. Bitcoin is down 37%. Ethereum is down 46.5%. Zoom, Spotify, Shopify are all down 50% to 70%. And of course, we all know what just happened with Luna and Terra. The cryptocurrency that went from around $18 billion in market cap to effectively nothing. What's happening here? And how bad is this going to get? Packy, do you want to kick it off?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Oof, tough, tough way to start it off and tough early question. I mean, the obvious kind of what's happened here is a couple of things, right? One, after a decade, but particularly after a couple of years of cheap, easy money, low interest rates, all of that. We got inflation, the Fed got scared and rightfully, as they probably should have done a little bit ago, started tightening. And so any growth asset that threw in your discounted cash flow model with a low interest rate, discounted those future cash flows in a pretty favorable and aggressive way, are now worth a hell of a lot less. And so all of these valuations that have been bumping over the past couple of years

• 3:45Speaker 02

  are coming back to earth and progressing to the mean and then crashing kind of through the floor of that mean. Things that were super attractive to people a few weeks ago. I remember people saying like, you know, even here, even this expensive, you got to buy Shopify and then Shopify crashes. And then all of the sudden, everyone's like, yeah, obviously you can't buy Shopify at these levels. There's still a lot of pain to come. That sentiment shift to me is the kind of weirdest and most interesting thing going on. And then on top of all of that, the bearish sentiment, people getting a little bit scared and discouraged and wondering when the rate hikes are going to stop and all of that. UST, which is the Terra US Dollar, a stablecoin, undercollateralized algorithmic stablecoin,

• 4:28Speaker 02

  launched by Terra, the L1 blockchain out of Korea and Dukkwan.

• 4:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  So a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Cryptocurrency algorithmically pegged to the US dollar, theoretically pegged to the US dollar. Gets attacked and absolutely shits the bed, falls apart, goes, you know, breaks the peg, goes to 90, 80, 60, bounces around. But if you break the peg at all, it's bad news for something whose whole job is to be pegged to a dollar. Luna, this, this thriving blockchain ecosystem goes to pretty much, as you pointed out, zero and kind of just, you know, confidence in this whole thing gets even further shaken. I guess one, one last point here. I know I'm rambling on this, this whole thing, but one last point here is I just, my favorite part of all of this is that for two years, for a while, for a decade, really, people have

• 5:19Speaker 02

  been like, you know, the crash is coming, watch out, the crash is coming, of course, it's coming, I can't wait to buy stuff. And then it comes and you can never predict the exact kind of reasons it's going to come and like the things that happen inside of the crash. And so then you see U S T and people get really, really, really scared. And people don't want to buy when they said like all along, I can't wait to buy into cheaper prices. So I don't know. I mean, I get it, but I think it's just a very funny stance that people are now taking.

• 5:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. There've been some tweets that like pointing out that VCs have correctly predicted like nine of the past two recessions or something like that. So.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that was about, uh, Bill Gurley, who obviously is a great investor, but I think someone tweeted like Gurley's predicted five of the last two recessions or something like that, which was, which was great. So I think, I think one more thing here also is, is I think there's a reevaluation of, of the reevaluation of consumer preferences, right? Covid hits and we see that chart where it was like, you know, direct to consumer preferences have changed 40 years and 40 days. And, and, you know, there's all the quotes like in decades, you know, in decades, nothing happens, but then in days, decades happen. You know, there was all of that sentiment and Peloton's through the roof, Shopify's through the roof. Everyone's living on their phones, their computer, the metaverse, you

• 6:30Speaker 03

  know, clubhouse is worth $4 billion. And I think in reality, over the last two years, maybe consumer preferences changed, you know, three, four, five years into the future, but it's not 40 or 50 years. It's, it's, you know, people are going back and they're, they're shopping at the grocery store and they're not just Instacarting. And so preferences have changed, but to what extent, right? Is it Peloton up 10, 20x? Like probably not. But these companies invested as if consumer preferences had changed forever. And I think a lot of these companies. Got excited off of the combination of cheap capital, expectation of consumer preferences changing, but then also they were told to do so, right? Investors, they were like, you know, just grow at all costs, grow at all costs. And now you hear every investor, well, like you need three years of runway. I was like, well, two months ago, you're telling

• 7:15Speaker 03

  us to grow at all costs. And so I think there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty right now.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, the investor threads and belt tightening and all of that kind of stuff is very funny to watch. And I get it. You can't now in this market be yelling to like, keep spending, keep growing. The market has changed, but it's just a very weird thing. The same people a couple of months ago who were yelling for growth are now yelling for profitability. Or like, how do you even expect a company to adapt in an environment like this where the whole thing has been top line? Maybe you haven't even turned on your monetization engine. And then all of a sudden, you're expected to definitely be generating revenue if you have, if you want any chance of raising right now and maybe be profitable, or at least have like a very, very clear path to profitability. It's a tough pivot for companies to make.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  No, I was just saying, I don't think a lot of companies are going to be successful at doing it. I think a lot of companies are really going to struggle. Payrolls through the roof, you know, they're spending so much on marketing and a lot of companies got funded that just shouldn't have gotten funded, or at least not in the current business model they, they had. And I mean, the system actually like, you know, you can talk about like people acting irrationally. But I think what's so interesting is every actor in the system actually acts very rationally, right? LPs of all this capital. So they have to deploy it, right? So now you're raising bigger and bigger funds. What are you not going to raise a bigger fund? But then you invest in more companies, which bids up prices, right? And then companies have bigger, bigger balance sheets. They're going to, you know, you're not going to sit with, you know, capital needs to grow at 20 to 30% IRR against some of your balance sheet. And so every actor is acting rationally, but the whole system

• 8:49Speaker 03

  in itself, I think acted pretty rationally the last couple of years. And, and now it's like, how, how quickly can the company of a, of the founder of a company that was burning $5 million a month, how quickly can they get to, to cash flow positivity? And I think the answer for most of them is going to be they can't.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Austin, as a founder and CEO, how are you like, how do you think about a market like this? Obviously, you're in a very different situation, but imagine that you, that you had not gotten acquired, like. Do you stick to your guns? Do you actually try to switch everything on a dime? Like, what do you do in a market like this?

• 9:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  And just for context, Morning Brew got acquired by Insider for $75 million, if I'm not mistaken, a couple of years ago. So, good timing, Austin. Go ahead.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of people for the last 18 months have called me an idiot. No one's come back recently and been like, oh, maybe you had decent timing, right? You can never time the top. But, you know, I like to say, oh, I would never have been in that situation. But I probably would have been, right? It's so easy to get caught up in the hype. I think, though, a lot of the companies, and this is terrible, right? And obviously, anyone losing their job sucks. Like, I shouldn't put that up front. Like, it is awful. But if you're burning a bunch of capital, I actually think some of these companies that are doing early layoffs are the ones that are actually starting to act disciplined, right? And I think they're the ones that may be okay, right? If your company can't support 500 people, you can't have 500 people. And so I think some of these people are actually getting ahead of things.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  They're actually doing the right thing, even though it really sucks. And maybe they've done the wrong things the last two years. So I think if you're going to act, I think you have to act pretty swiftly and move with conviction. I think I hear a lot of, again, there's uncertainty out there. And I think, you know, you want to be as default alive as possible. You want to extend your runway. And so I think it's going to take, like, fairly drastic measures for some of these companies. But then you look at some of these public companies. And Robinhood, if you look at their enterprise value, right? You subtract the cash on their balance sheet, they're only worth like $3 or $4 billion, right? I think it's like, what, $10, $12 billion mark cap? They have $6 billion. So, I don't know. I could totally see things bouncing back. But, yeah, I think you have to act pretty swiftly and make sure you're going to be okay for the next three to five years.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  You have to assume it's going to be a longer time horizon than maybe even anyone's talking about.

• 11:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to get to how bad it's going to get, but I actually found something interesting in both your answers. And maybe this is why you guys play off each other so well. So, Austin, it seems like from your point, like, you're pointing out how people were overly optimistic about the shifts we saw during COVID. Packy, to your point, you're saying people are being overly pessimistic now in terms of like, hey, you were going to buy Shopify on the way down. Why aren't you buying it now? It's cheaper than you ever imagined. So, let's talk a little bit about like, why some of that, why that is. So, Austin, like, I'm curious from your perspective, why do you think, and then, Packy, we'll get to you, but why do you think? People were so, it seems like their brain locked on something that it shouldn't have,

• 11:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  which is like, we were never going to be Netflix Nation where all we did was Netflix. Or we were never gonna be, Amazon Prime was never gonna continue to grow the way that it was when everybody was locked at home. So why do you think people, and the market in particular, got locked on this idea that, you know, we had changed forty years in four days, or whatever it was, where like, all rational evidence would say, there's a shift happening here, but it's not going to be, you know, this, you know, light switch flip like a lot of people imagined?

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. It's tough, because I would consider myself being optimist, but sitting here, I guess not physically, but in this ZenCaster, next to Packy, I probably look like the biggest pessimist in the world.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  It's really easy to get caught up in the hype, and there, I mean, yeah, like, there probably was a chance. I think a lot of people believed that people were gonna spend hours on Clubhouse a day, or people like, you know, people were gonna spend their days on their Peloton and cancel their gym membership. Like, I think people actually believed that. And you have to look for, you know, yield somewhere, you have to look for return somewhere, and with interest rates at zero, and, you know, increasing inflation, like, where do you put your money? And you put your money at companies that you believe in five years can be spitting off enormous amounts of cash flow, right? And people did believe it was Amazon. There was just so much money out there, I think. Like, I know, the government was in such a tough position, right? Because we didn't really know what was gonna be the impact of COVID.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  It's so easy in hindsight to be like, oh, you know, like, judge, you know, and there was a lot of stimulus at the beginning. Then there were some questionable, you know, later rounds of stimulus by the Biden administration. I think a lot of people are starting to question, like, did we need that last, whatever, two trillion dollars? But, I mean, you have to put money somewhere, because you don't want your money to shrink eight percent a year with inflation. Now, of course, in hindsight, you were better off letting your money shrink eight percent a year as opposed to putting it in Peloton or in Shopify. But a lot of optimism and a lot of just like, you know, looking to get, to make short-term money and FOMO.

• 13:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Austin, you've been doing like this series of tweets, which it's like, you wanna learn how to make a million dollars, put ten million dollars in stocks and then just wait? And you're like, you wanna learn how to make a hundred thousand dollars, put ten million dollars in crypto and wait? So, anyway. So good segue to you, Packy. So what do you think is going on? Do you think we're being overly pessimistic now? Also, like when I had tweeted that you guys were coming on the show, someone like got in my DMs and was like, you know, Packy is the biggest techno optimist. He's got to answer for it. So how do you, what do you, do you think that you were too optimist?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  What do I have to answer for here? So yes, I mean, I think I mean, today, in the middle of this bear market, I wrote another optimistic piece. And my point has never been, and we can like, look back at some of my pieces, maybe I wrote about how Stripe was undervalued relative to comps and stand by that in the market at the time. But my points have like rarely, rarely, rarely been on the prices of the assets. There was this great, I think it was a Morgan Housel tweet about the fact that a lot of the arguments on FinTwit and Twitter in general are people with different time horizons yelling past each other. And for me, like, I think bubbles are a really fucking useful thing. And if some LPs lose money and some VCs lose money, like, oh, well, like, that's, that's kind of part of the process.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  But I think for the past decade has been really, really good for funding innovation in a lot of important areas. I wrote about this today, but like the fact that, you know, there's five real contenders in the EV race, and then they've spurred the, the, the big car manufacturers to get into electric vehicles. That's a really good thing. The fact that we're now like, kind of, you know, on the cusp of being able to manufacture things in space and there's satellites kind of everywhere out there. And there's a real path to be kind of on Mars within like a decade. Like, that's really cool. The fact that, you know, there's been a bunch of experiments running web three, some useful, some not, I think is a really, really great thing. So I don't know, I'm still a techno optimist here.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  And this is just kind of how the whole thing works. Like, it feels very, very, very much like we're riding the Gartner hype cycle where we were at the peak of inflated expectations. And now we're crashing into the trough of disillusionment. And then some things will die and some things will kind of continue to go, but we're continuing to make progress. I don't know. I think like, I'm still a techno optimist in a market like this. Does that mean that we couldn't crash another 50%? Like, I don't know. I don't really particularly care. I mean, like, the most important thing to be, I think, is like, stay, don't, don't get too levered. Don't get in a position where you're going to wreck yourself by expressing your views. But otherwise, I don't know, I believe that people are out there building a ton of unbelievable things. And the fact that

• 16:23Speaker 02

  13 years ago, when I came out of school, all the smart people were going into finance. And now all the smart people are going into tech is like just a good shift generally. And so like the more of that that can happen, the better. And I think this next wave is going to be even cooler as people kind of like move more into kind of the harder atom side of things.

• 16:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  I did like how you wrote that the tech bubble is very different from a banking bubble. Banking bubble, you get nothing out of it. And in fact, that ruins people's and people's livelihoods. And with the tech bubble, you can actually get some innovation out of that. I was reading your story this weekend and there's one interesting part that I wanted to to bring up and kind of talk to you about. So you said, the weirdest part of a bear market is that the people who are rooting for something other than the people to succeed and humanity to progress are the ones winning. So let me ask you this, because you know, is it also, I mean, you know, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that the people that are rooting for rationality in the market are the ones that are successful. And you know, you there, we're definitely going to get tech innovation out of the whatever, whatever happened in the past 10 years of bull market.

• 17:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  But we also had stuff like tariff, which brought, you know, built this $18 billion, you know, valuation based off of essentially vapor. And is going to end up housing a lot of investors who, due to this lower interest rate policy or zero interest rate policy, were just scrambling to find places to put their money. So isn't a rational market, you know, better for everyone, especially like the, the little guy who's like trying to, um, you know, find a way to, you know, take whatever money they have and invest in an asset that will, you know, beat inflation.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, I think a rational market at this point is kind of a myth, right? Like I, I do think that we're going to get over excited and then we're going to get over sad and pessimistic. And then we're going to get over excited again. And, and the idea of just a market like where it makes, if the average retail investor knows exactly what to put their money into for the best risk adjusted return, like either we have built the best fintech products in the history of the world, or like something has changed really, really dramatically. I think that's always going to be hard. Certainly, I think it's, it's, I wrote this too, that in a market like this, even the chance that there's something like a Terra that comes out is much, much, much lower. And that's a good thing, like you don't want the BS projects.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  I'm particularly personally excited to not get nearly as many DMs from scam NFT projects asking me to promote their thing. Like there's a bunch of shit in the market that like just will go away, which I think is a really, really good thing. I think I probably just spend too much time on FinTwit frankly and like all of just like the super negative shitty pseudonymous accounts like those are the ones that I'm kind of talking about here where it's not just like cool I'm like super happy that we're returning to you know a place of rationality it's like this fucking idiot company and bubble like it's just like really negative and I just like don't like the sentiment that that happens in an environment like this and so that's I think what I was referring to I think you know the more kind of the more we can get the scans out of the market the better but there's also a little bit of you have to take the bad with the good I think.

• 19:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah for sure Austin you have been sharing some thoughts about you know where we are now and how bad it can get so recently you wrote that we haven't even seen the start of the layoffs down rounds and capital conservation efforts and you know you also said it might feel like carnage but the NASDAQ is still up forty-two percent from January twenty twenty that was a couple of days ago so it might not be as high and there's a lot of potential freefall left so Austin where how bad do you think this this could get because it seems to be that you know from the thoughts that you're expressing that we have plenty far to go.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah so I'm not an expert like I'm not a markets expert by any means but I just think if you if you look at the way some of these companies are trading right like yes you know some of the some of the SaaS businesses right like the the what is like the Bessemer index is down I think but like below its average right like it's getting pretty pretty low in terms of multiples but you look at some of these like the mega caps right you look at some of these bigger companies they're only down like twenty twenty-five cent percent they're still up a ton from February twenty twenty so if you look at it based off of that like there still is room to dip and I think like we're in such a bubble right now right like you know the three of us and just people on Twitter you go talk to I go talk to like

• 20:43Speaker 03

  my family no one's talking about like a recession right at least no one I know right like I bring it up and people like what are you talking about like your people think I'm like crazy people think I'm like a conspiracy theorist and like yes people's 401k is starting to get hit a little bit but it really hasn't even like hit the the mainstream and I think if the domino effect really hasn't started to fall a couple of the really really high tech growth companies have laid off a few people but if these stocks remain down fifty sixty seventy eighty percent I just don't see how there aren't.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Uh ramifications beyond what we're what we see now in terms of layoffs, in terms of cost cutting, I think it's going to continue. We're seeing that, of course, in the venture private markets, but we'll continue to see what happens in the public markets. And then it's like, okay, well, but if those people, you know, get laid off or leave their job, then what happens in terms of like consumer spending? And, you know, what I haven't seen, I've seen a lot of people work at really high tech, fast growth companies whose shares have halved in value or or even more.

• 21:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  They're lucky, yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  I haven't seen those people though spend less money. I haven't seen those people move into the new apartments, start selling their apartments. So like, it's, you know, is consumer spending going to change? And what is going on with the consumer credit markets, right? Are banks lending less money to consumers? Now their shares are down fifty, sixty, seventy percent. Like, I don't know, but I think that could be a real concern. If people don't actually change their spending habits, when their incomes or their net worth has dipped seventy, eighty percent.

• 22:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  So when it comes to how far it could go, your perspective is like, you know, we well, it's interesting because you're like, basically like, well, we haven't really seen anything yet. So it seems like, yes, there's this could get bad.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  And I think it could get much worse. And I think what's bad is like, right now, we are in this, this, uh, we're in uncertain times, right? Like, I think typically, like, once you're like in the, in the, okay, we're in a recession, right? Things could be better. But right now, like, especially, you know, like, as a media company, we're an ad based business, right? So I'm really speaking more to our, to the way media companies work and ad based businesses work is what slows down the flow of funds into marketing, right? Whether you're Facebook or Twitter or Morning Brew, uncertainty, right? It's not, it's not down markets, it's uncertainty. Because, you know, you, oh, let's just pull our marketing for two weeks to see what happens, right? Like, let's wait and see. And I think that, that, that flow and that uncertainty can cause issues in the entire media market. Again,

• 23:07Speaker 03

  like, not just smaller publishers like Morning Brew, Facebook and Twitter and Snap, they're all, you know, they're ad businesses or and the New York Times said too. I mean, all these big companies are ad businesses are not growing nearly as fast as they were.

• 23:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Packy, what do you think? I mean, is there a chance that this doesn't go according to some of like, what the conventional wisdom is or and, and, you know, bounces back quickly? Basically, is it gonna, can we get a V recovery here?

• 23:36Speaker 02

  I think of the recovery stuff. I mean, I, I, I think it's almost certain that things will not go exactly according to conventional wisdom. But to Austin's point, they could get a lot worse, right? They could get a lot worse. They could get better more quickly. That, you know, it's hard to see a path to kind of either one of those, but you know, it, it, it has been kind of shocking how quickly everybody has kind of come to agree with each other on everything. And so, you know, that might work itself out of the system more quickly if everyone's on the same page about exactly what's happening and what's going to happen. Pretty good chance it's not going to happen that way, but I have no idea. It could get very, very bad, like deleverage.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  And then this is how like bankrupt start or like kind of crashes continue is that people like have to go risk off because they don't want to lose everything in case it does get a lot worse. But again, I would just say like not financial advice, just get yourself out of a position where if Facebook goes down another 25%, like you're going to be in huge financial trouble.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Right. And I also think there, there is a bit of a self filling prophecy there, right? So if, you know, you, I'm sure you guys saw the, the report that Craft did, right? They're, they're encouraging everyone to extend their runway and, and be, you know, assume we're in this for two to three years. And so it's like, okay, well, what if we're not, but we're actually putting like, what if we're not headed for that, but we're actually putting ourselves into, right? Conventional wisdom in venture now is extend runway, extend runway. That's going to naturally change things, right? So there is a little bit of, okay, maybe we're not even headed there, but our actions right now will cause us to get there.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. It is, it is. It's, and it's wild how everybody like, there is, I think some, and this is like all colored by my own perspective, like being on the opposite, but like some responsibility theater going on right now, I think, where like GPs are signaling to their LPs that like they're the responsible ones and they're telling everybody to tighten their belt. And like in times of crisis, you better give money to Craft and founders better work with us because like we know what we're doing in this situation. But they are very smart and have a great track record and are respected. And so to Austin's point, people are going to listen to that. And so like, yes, there will be layoffs. People will be spending less on advertising, any kind of like side experimentation they're doing away from the core product will get cut.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Like all these things that will inevitably lead to some sort of slowdown or some sort of pain. Come from people who are respected, kind of giving this, this kind of advice. I think the other interesting opportunity, and this is not for the faint of heart, but is for some companies to say like, cool, we're in a pretty good spot. Actually, we're going to lean into growth. We're going to steal customers. We're going to steal market share. So the fun part about markets to me is that they're so dynamic and that every, every action has a reaction. And so some people are going to take advantage of what's going on right now and come out of this a lot stronger, too. And some are going to get crushed and all that.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  And by the way, that is my, that's my, my hope, my, my, my goal with Morning Brew, right, is, is to, we run a really, really healthy 25% EBITDA margin business, right? We have a lot of room if things, and we haven't seen it yet, but if things do slow down, there's a lot of room there. A lot of other media companies are, are, you know, 2% EBITDA margins or break even, right? And so I totally am, you know, I, I am keeping a keen eye on the competition and seeing what's out there. And there is absolutely opportunity to whether it's for its talent or M and A. Like, I think there are absolutely, you know, if, if we can see this, see this downturn, there is going to be serious consolidation, not just in media, but everywhere.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, we're totally looking at that, that for sure.

• 27:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And just to clarify, some of the things we're talking about, so having a longer runway means burning less money and being able to be a sustainable business if you don't raise again. So in the previous markets, businesses would burn money and, you know, be sure that they were going to raise at a higher valuation, you know, 18 months down the road. And now that's not the case. So there's long, they're planning to have longer runways. And when you talk about having a 25% EBITDA margin, basically you're profitable enough that you can suffer, you can, you can survive through a downturn. Is that what you're saying, Austin?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, we're, the, the businesses that Pac and I are talking about before, he's like the one with Pac Invest, right? It's very, very different, uh, uh, business, stage of the business, right? We're, you know, we're, I like said, we're fast growing. We're growing like 80% year over year, right? Venture, you know, again, in craft deck, great companies grow 3X year over year, right? We're not growing, uh, 3X and we're also not paying for that growth, right? Um, but yeah, very different business, uh, not, not burning capital, uh, but again, also not growing 2 to 4X year over year.

• 28:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, yeah, and not burning capital, that could be the your firm, your venture firm and not burning capital can be the balance out. Okay, look, we've talked a lot about a lot of stuff. There's still so much I want to hit. What's going to happen to crypto? What are the opportunities in this market? We've touched on that. And then a little bit about publishing and Twitter. Let's take a break now and come back right after this with Paddy McCormick and Austin Reeves. We'll be back in a moment. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AppPoint does.

• 28:51Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 29:34Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 30:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 30:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Paddy McCormick, the author of Not Boring on Substack, founder of Not Boring Capital, and Austin Reif, CEO of Morning Brew. Quickly touching on crypto, Paddy, you're pretty pro crypto stuff. It seems like some people were asking whether this Terra, which is again a cryptocurrency, Terra Luna, which is a cryptocurrency, two sister currencies, is that the right way to put it? That basically had a collapse last year, whether that was going to be the Lehman Brothers of crypto. It doesn't seem like that's the case, like Tether, which is another stablecoin, has basically kept its dollar peg and Bitcoin has been down, but it's not down to zero, although it's really down a lot. How bad is this?

• 31:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  It seems like there's a lot of the irrational exuberance in the past market. You know, people looking for returns outside of traditional places went to crypto and they're pulling back in a real way. So how is, assuming this downturn continues on its current path, how does it impact crypto?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  This is another tough one because I have no crystal ball here. I'm not going to say like buy and hold and this is all going to bounce back quickly. And there's going to be no contagion. I actually have, I'm not qualified to speak on what the impact of kind of UST Terra Luna is going to be on the broader ecosystem, what is connected to. I think people are still kind of working that out, although to your point, it does seem relatively contained. Bitcoin got crushed, Ethereum's a lot, like kind of the stalwarts have also gotten crushed in this. And they could also continue to experience a whole lot of pain. I mean, I think one of the interesting things about Bitcoin to Warren Buffett's point is that there's no cash flows, right?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Like there's no thing to value this on other than a bunch of people's collective belief. And as that gets broken, that can be damaging. To me, I'm back to the, I feel like a broken record almost, but like regardless of what the prices are, I think washing a bunch of the hypey scammy projects out of the space in this downturn, which will undoubtedly happen. There's a lot of people who've just come, kind of come in because it seemed like a really easy way to make money. I think a lot of that gets washed out and I think we come back in a stronger position. I have no idea when that is, but I do think that we'll be in the spot in 2024 or whenever, whenever it may be, where people are just using NFTs as tickets and an identity that

• 32:58Speaker 02

  they can carry with them across the internet. And where certain of the kind of, you know, more stable pieces of DeFi are just kind of naturally being used in a bunch of products. And there's regulation in the space, frankly, which is almost undoubtedly going to happen as a result of what we just saw happen with, with Terra and UST. And so I, I really, I think we're on that hype cycle where we're going to come out after this crash and, and it won't be as hypey or as exciting, or it won't be as easy to make money super, super quickly. But I think the overall market will be a much, much, much bigger in 2024, 2025 than it was in this past cycle.

• 33:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so, yeah, that gets me to another question, which is what are the opportunities here? Where do you guys think, we've talked, we danced around it a little bit, but where do you guys think the opportunities are going to be?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  This is a, like kind of horizontal point as opposed to a vertical one, but I think in snatching up as much great talent as possible right now for the strongest companies, I wrote a piece in the beginning of the pandemic about how this was actually going to be good for a lot of people who got laid off because they were inside of these bloated companies and like doing something that at the end of the day, like not probably particularly important. If you're like, if your job is the first to go and you are like sitting inside of an over, an overemployed Uber or something and your job is to optimize this one little thing, but you're really, really smart and you're smart enough to get a job at Uber, go start something or go work at a company where you have a bigger impact or all that. So I think we're going to see something similar play out here in the course

• 34:26Speaker 02

  of all of these layoffs. People have been so starved for talent and companies have been so starved for talent and founders are smart and know that this is going to be an opportunity to hire a lot of really great talent. So a horizontal point I think is that, is that talent is going to flock to the kind of stronger companies in this market.

• 34:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Austin, what do you think?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  I think, and this is not, you know, this is not earth shattering, but there will always be an opportunity to build great companies, right? That have true unit economics that provide a service, product or service for consumers, whether those are, you know, first people or businesses that people actually want to buy and they can be sustainable businesses. Maybe your, your time horizon to success is extended by two or three years. Maybe you have to do it with a smaller team. Maybe you have to burn less money or spend less money or actually bootstrap. But at the end of the day, there is always a need in the market for products and services that people actually want to buy. And so to Packy's, and then add value to the world. It's the Packy's

• 35:26Speaker 03

  point, like, yeah, who knows what's going to happen to these profile picture products, you know, these NFTs, right? I don't know. Just like, I couldn't tell you, right? If you said, hey, like, what's the, what's the market and economic down for, uh, term for like a Mona Lisa? Like, I, I don't know. But to the, the crypto projects that are actually leveraging this technology in a way that adds value, Packy gave a couple of good examples. I think they're going to be totally fine. What I, I don't know about what I'm issued, and I'm sure Packy knows way more, is what's going to happen with these crypto funds that have a billion, $2 billion of capital, whose, I mean, books are now down, you know, who knows what, right? Some of these funds are even putting, putting

• 36:07Speaker 03

  the money into Ethereum, the money into Bitcoin, right? And that was such a great strategy in 2017, 18, 19, like what, so, so I guess, Packy, I'll ask you this question, like, what, what's going to happen to these huge crypto funds? Are they going to be on hold? Are they going to raise less capital?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  I think this is another one of those kind of like game theory, market dynamic kind of situations where some funds are, they're, they're all kind of holding off right now. Like, that's, that's pretty clear. A lot of funds are holding off right now. Maybe they're going to be piling money into the companies that they work with, that they really like the most, and they think have the best chance of surviving out of this and taking advantage of the situation, not even in a nefarious way, but just like building up a stake in their, in their best position. So I would imagine that maybe a higher percentage of capital goes into their best performing portfolio companies and the one that they're most confident in. I also think that some funds, and maybe it'll be the big multi, multi-billion dollar ones, it'll probably be somewhere that's trying to build a reputation for themselves, are going to come in and start paying. I saw a tweet the other day.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  I think, I'm going to blank on who it was from, but about just giving checks to kind of like everybody who's coming out of Coinbase and Robinhood, just giving them like 500K at a $500 million valuation. I think some funds are going to try to make their reputation and kind of like break through to the tier one level by starting to invest aggressively at some point here in this market. And then maybe the whole thing starts again, or maybe they get wiped out. I don't know, but I don't think it's going to be as simple as like, everybody just waits on the sideline and people raised billions of dollars and they're just going to sit there and kind of wait for the market to come back. Like, I think investors will invest ahead of the market coming back, for sure.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  And this is the interesting dynamic of venture, which is so different than every other asset class, which is you need one winner, right? Unless you have a billion dollar fund, you know, if your fund is like 100 million to a billion and you're leading rounds, you need like one, maybe two winners. And so that's the interesting dynamic is the whole market can go to zero, basically, and you can hit the winner and you're good if you own 20% of that company. And when you get liquidity, 15%, right? And that company's worth 5, 10 billion, you return the fund a couple of times over. And that's the interesting dynamic of this whole game is you can do everything wrong, but you get one thing right and you're a top decile fund.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  And it's so, it's such, I mean, I think that back to the person who said that I need to answer for being a techno optimist, I think like certainly the way that my brain works is like much more of a venture style. Like, there's two levels, I think, that my brain works at, which is the venture level, the venture level of thinking about all of this, which is Austin's point on you need one or two winners. And then the kind of just like humanity scale level of like, You know, think about what websites looked like a decade ago, or like what the mobile app experience was a decade ago, or, you know, name your industry, what a car looked like, or look back at a picture of yourself from 10 years ago, and it all looks like super old. And so like, there's that humanity level progress thing that gets me excited as well. But like, am I going to be the growth investor looking for, you know, the, the

• 39:10Speaker 02

  company that, that's multiple is compressed to a level that I feel comfortable in that? Like, that's just not going to be me at all. But there are going to be some massive winners, undoubtedly, either to come out of this, or that are born during this crash. And so the, the job is to look for those.

• 39:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  As we get into the home stretch, I do want to talk a little bit about your guys, both, both your businesses. So you both invest. It's not your core, the core thing you do, but it is something you do. Is, are you changing the way that you invest based off of how the market's looking right now? Is there anything that you're doing differently? Or is it business as usual?

• 39:45Speaker 03

  I can start. Yeah. For me, I've always been a founder, a founder driven investor, right? When you're investing at the pre-seed and seed stage, I think, like, quality of founder is so incredibly important. And so I'm just doubling down on that. Like, you know, over the next couple of years, it'll be really, really tough. And you have to find someone you really can trust to take this capital and, you know, run a great company. And it's really, really, it's, it's hard, it's always hard. It's probably even harder now, right? It's incredibly challenging to raise a couple million dollars and from scratch, build something. Like, it is so hard. It's really, really hard. And so just finding people who are domain experts, or you really, really trust, is important. And then, yeah,

• 40:28Speaker 03

  I mean, everyone's getting more price sensitive, right? There's, there's no really way not to, because the, the whole market is doing it, right? And so if you're not getting more price sensitive, you have to believe that this company is going to take this capital, never raise capital again, because even if you're not price sensitive, the next investor's probably going to be. And so there's no choice but to be more price sensitive.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's, that's very well said. The good thing about the kind of investing that Austin and I do, where we're not, we're not leading rounds, is that we end up being, you know, as price sensitive as, as the market, right? Like, we end up being takers of whatever terms are set between the founder and the lead investor. And so I'm still kind of doing the same thing that I was doing before, looking for great companies, XYZ. I think I'll do a little bit more and I'm sure Austin will see some of this too. Already starting to see it where companies are doing these like these bridge rounds at a lower valuation than they wanted to go out and raise their say Series A at. And for the best companies in the portfolio will certainly want to participate in those and actually build an ownership stake. Whereas before it was kind of like a fight to get whatever you

• 41:32Speaker 02

  possibly could in the company. Now I think is the time to survey the portfolio and say like, all right, what are the 10 companies that I wish I owned a whole lot more of? How do I get in those in one of these bridge rounds where like, do I reach out and offer them, you know, just a check to kind of keep them going here? So those are not to keep them going because if a company needs my small check to keep going, like probably not the best investment, but like just to add to the add to the war chest. I think that'll be an interesting opportunity right now is to build up some of those, some of those positions.

• 42:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, Packy, just actually I said that that your newsletter is bigger than your investment firm, but is it, which one's bigger, the newsletter or your capital?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  It depends how you define bigger, but I guess like management fees versus revenue. The newsletter is slightly ahead, but I would imagine the fund will overtake it at some point.

• 42:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Oh, wow. So, um, so let's talk about then the newsletter revenue. That's the, um, the one ahead, or you don't have to give numbers and stuff, but it is interesting that both, both of you run media businesses, media obviously is impacted and downturns. I mean, I run one as well. So these are, this is selfish questions for me, but what's going to happen to media companies right now? And are you guys experiencing anything on your end that's worth talking about?

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think the definition of media company, right, is it's tough to, to really even define now, right? Cause what Packy does is so different than what Maureen Brew does, right? The the quantity of advertising. So I think every business is is unique. But if you want to look at like the the big digital publishers, I believe they are in big trouble. These are companies that have been over over capitalized for years, right? And they thought the SPAC was their their way out, their ticket to success. One made it out and we know how how that is doing.

• 43:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's my former employer BuzzFeed.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  I wa- I wasn't gonna say that.

• 43:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's okay. No, hey, look, I I mean, I left. I I'm pretty happy I made that decision to leave. I mean, I love the people there, but I'm from strictly like business sense. It was the right decision to go.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we're hearing rumors of, you know, Vice was gonna do M and A. Now they're thinking maybe, uh, I I hear, I think there's an article and maybe the information or somewhere. I'm probably getting that wrong, but splitting up the company. And so, yeah, I mean, like, i- if, again, if you were in an ad business, that was there's no access to capital for these businesses, right? None. And so they have to survive with the money they've left or sold themselves. And so I think a lot of these, a lot of these businesses are in big trouble. Uh, if you're a fully uh, an ad based business. Uh, again, it depends who, it depends what. But yeah, if you've, if you've razor thin margins uh, before, the uncertainty in the market now is gonna make it very, very difficult. And they're gonna have to figure out a way. And I think there's gonna be massive consolidation. We started to see some over the last couple of years.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Vox bought a, you know, Vox did some M and A uh, in the BuzzFeed uh, IPO. They bought Complex, but that was really interesting. I think we're gonna see more consolidation. And there might only be a couple of players in the space if this thing lasts two to three years.

• 44:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh, do you think there's gonna be a big advertising pullback?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  There is always an advertising pullback when times are not as good, right? Because if you just, right, cost of capital is more expensive, right? Companies need to see a shorter payback period if money is is more expensive. And so these companies are gonna pull the, you know, if if if the range of L T, uh, payback period was from zero to 12 months. And now they need their investors come to them or their CEOs say, hey, we need eight month, eight eight months of payback. Everyone from eight months to 12 months. And yeah, every acquisition source, they're all go gonna gonna go away. So there absolutely has to be a pullback. I just don't see how there there's not gonna be. And maybe it's not for everyone. Again, someone like Packy, and I'll speak to this more. He is, he needs to sell way fewer ad placements a year to sustain his business.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  So it's almost like venture, right? He only needs a couple great advertisers to sustain a really great business. But I I don't speak for Packy, so I'm curious what's what you're seeing, Packy.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  It's been surprising me. I was a little bit worried about this. I mean, one, I think this goes back to the Ben Thompson kind of smiling curve point about how you either need to like, control the demand or like be really, really small. And I'm butchering that a little bit, but just this kind of like barbelling that happens in any market, but is like very, very clear in media where it's like, be one person and be low cost and be niche or be really, really big. And I'm happy to be in that kind of like, you know, super small niche kind of area. And Austin's point to have to get fewer advertisers to keep the, the business going. My business is interesting because there's a couple of different kind of channels. There's just like the regular kind of sponsorship. There's the podcast sponsorship and then there is the sponsor deep dives.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  And somehow the demand for those has not fallen off. And as long as I can do like one of those a month, the business is in great shape. That said, it's a super, I'm highly levered to tech, right? Like all of the advertisers that, that use not boring and talk to customers through not boring or tech. I write about tech. If people get bored of tech and it's not as exciting anymore, people will stop reading not boring. So I'm definitely like, you know, not unimpacted by everything that's going on here. That has not made its way to kind of the advertising conversations that I've been having yet. And I do wonder if there's that, you know, that dynamic of, because I only need a very few of them, those, those few companies that are feeling really strong are like, actually now is the best time to do a sponsor deep dive and not boring because we want to signal to the market that

• 47:02Speaker 02

  we're hiring and to investors that we're actually a solid business. And so it's since I only need to do one or so of those a month. It's actually probably fairly, as long as we can find 12 companies that are doing well and want to talk about it, then we're in pretty good shape.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  And the last thing I'll say, I'll add to that is you have to remember there is a similarity between not boring and morning brew is that. Our ads actually perform, right? Newsletter ads are a great, great form of advertising. Like for Morning Brew, you can't get the best of both worlds, right? You can add out to four, four and a half million people, but also people click on it, right? And so what's your first advertising spend that's going to go? It's through that billboard in Times Square because people aren't going to Times Square because they're not spending $400 on a Broadway ticket. But engagement actually in poor economic times, what we've seen, or times there's a lot of news, in poor economic times there are, is engagement goes up, right? Our engagement during COVID was through the roof. It was really, really crazy. Our open rates, I've never seen anything like it.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Like overnight, open rates spiked 10%, uh, which is pretty crazy at that scale. And so we have businesses that actually perform. And there are some types of advertising, lead gen in particular, right? Where like you actually like, you know, or affiliate advertising, it actually spikes a lot in downturns because you're, yeah, you're paying for customers. So I think we're lucky or, you know, maybe a little bit of strategy went into the product itself, such that we've had units that actually perform, right? Maybe the deep dives will continue to sell, but maybe podcast advertising, which is a little bit less attributable, will be a little bit more difficult to sell and we both have exposure there. So it'll be interesting to see, but, but, um, I think we're both, uh, a little biased, but also in, in pretty good positions.

• 48:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, this makes me definitely, uh, feel a little bit relieved as someone with a newsletter. So this is good news. Okay, we have, uh, just a few more minutes. How can we, uh, end the podcast without touching on Elon Musk? Because, you know, we're talking all things downturn, uh, you know, he has gone back, by the way, it's, we're recording this on a Monday. By Wednesday, when this airs, who knows what the heck happened, uh, because it's moving that fast. But he did go back to Twitter and say, well, you know, now you have bots and maybe I don't want to do the deal. It's now on hold. Do you think he's just trying to renegotiate the price? Because Twitter at 43 billion in the current market is a massive overpay. Wouldn't you agree? So what, what's going on there, guys?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I think he's having fun and trying to negotiate and just like, just the methodology of like, we're going to pick people and they're going to look at 100 accounts and

• 49:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, so yeah, tell people what happened there?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  He, someone pushed on like what the methodology would be in

• 49:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  How about how many bots there are?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  On how, and how to count the more, more or less than 5% bots that is his now threshold. And he said, yeah, we're going to have like people on the team go out and randomly survey a hundred of their followers or something. And if more than 5% of them are bots, then we're out. Like, it's insane.

• 49:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So, okay. So it's a ploy to renegotiate. Do you think, Austin, what do you think?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  I mean, how can it not be, right? Like, how can, he goes out, he buys, he says, hey, I'm going to spend, you think for yourself, right? Like, imagine if you went and you were going to go buy, I mean, anything, right? A computer. And then two weeks later, that computer's, you know, selling for 40% less. You'd be pretty pissed if you locked yourself into that. And also like, yeah, I mean, he's, this is like what he does, right? He, this is part of the whole ploy is it makes the people who love him, love him more. And it makes people who hate him, hate him more. But he's must watch, must watch Twitter, must watch TV. Like, he is an entrepreneur and he's a top 10 account followed on Twitter. That is crazy. Like, if you really think he builds businesses, and don't get me wrong,

• 50:47Speaker 03

  he's sending people space. It's amazing. He's building electric cars. I think he's incredible. I think, you know, you can have a nuance of you on, on some of the things he does. But he, this is like, it's a spectacle. Like, this is what he does. And this is why Tesla can survive, because he is a one person marketing machine. Like, it is, it is crazy. And people are like, oh, my God, he's acting so irrationally. Like, no, this is exactly what he wants. This is his plan. And you're feeding into it. Your, your retweet dunky on him is only growing him more. You're only making him stronger.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  My favorite meme, I think, of all of the memes on Twitter, is the nerd diving in front of the bullet to protect Elon Musk thing that happens anytime he says something and people come into his replies. It's incredible, the passion that he has among his followers. Because, as Austin said, he's, he's an entrepreneur and, and a nerd and awkward and like all those things. And people absolutely love him.

• 51:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And it's, it's interesting what's happening inside Twitter right now, where you have the, you know, acting CEO clearing out the, the top ranks, which I think is, you know, a way to consolidate power around him, just in case the deal doesn't go through. The morale in that place must be in the toilet right now.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Well, I talked to somebody who was talking to Twitter about an acquisition a while back. And pretty much their take was like, hated the whole process. The only saving grace was Gavon. And now he's he's out.

• 52:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  He's that former head of product. Yeah, former guest on the show. He's out and it'll be interesting. I mean, so if Elon does come in to see what type of company he's got, what type of employee base he's got left. Maybe that's the point. Okay, so before we leave, does the Twitter deal close? What's the price? We're not going to hold you do this. Just have some fun.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  I'm I'll go first. I'm gonna say it does close. But I think it's gonna close much, much less than 44. I mean, what's the what's the market cap now? There was no quick Google search and it's.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  And that's artificially inflated to buy the bid, probably.

• 52:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it dipped a lot today on the on some of the news. But yeah, the market cap's at 30. I mean, does this happen at 20? Like, that's I don't think it's that crazy to think that Twitter dips another 30, 40, 50%. Like, I don't think it's that crazy at all. It's not a good business right now. It's not. And Pac and I have talked about this ad nauseam about the product we would change. But they've tried some of this and it hasn't worked. Like, they've tried some stuff and it doesn't seem to have been working that well. So, I mean, talk about an ad business that is brand aware. I mean, Ben Thompson's written about this a lot, that the difference between a Twitter ad unit and a Facebook ad unit. Yeah, like, if there's an ad-based company that's gonna that's gonna shrink in the next two years, it could very well be Twitter.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  And there's no way that Twitter drops to $20 billion, just because it's so strategically important to so many buyers. I think that even in a market where, you know, Microsoft, Facebook, all like, can't go out and buy Twitter. Like, the regulators would never let it happen. It's it's the town square and it's where the most important people hang out. And all of the the arguments that kind of people make are all true to to a great extent. And so the bidding frenzy that would happen at 20 and push it right back up to 30 or 40, I think, would be outlandish. So I don't know. I think probably it won't end up at 44, but will it end up at like 35 or something? That would be kind of my my guess, somewhere in that range.

• 54:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, well, we'll see it play out. It's definitely been an exciting story and has made me wake up every morning with being like a heated what? I moved east coast time. I thought I had a head start on the west coast, but Elon's tweeting at like 4 a.m. Dude, come on, give it a couple hours. Okay, anyway, we'll see how it goes. Guys, thanks so much for joining. Let's just take a moment to shout out where people can find you online, etc., etc. Pac, you want to go first?

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Sure. So I'm at @P A C K Y M, Packy M on Twitter, and not boring.co is where the newsletter lives.

• 54:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. And you're about to build a new website, too?

• 54:44Speaker 02

  So hopefully about to build a new website as well. Probably under not boring.co. We might spring for the dot com. In this market, maybe it's cheaper.

• 54:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I almost tried to buy big dot tech, but that was like $50,000 a year. So I'm gonna pass on that. Austin, how about you?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Was that breaking news? Packy, did you just break news in the pod that you're doing it? You're building a new website? I hadn't heard that.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  No, we've tweeted it because I'm trying to find someone to build it. But that is in flight right now, at least the planning stages. So.

• 55:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Got it. Yeah, you can find me at Austin underscore Reeve, R I E F on Twitter. And of course, Morning Brew is morningbrew.com.

• 55:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Two of my favorite follows on Twitter, two of my favorite newsletters. Guys, thank you so much for joining. An awesome discussion.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  This was fun.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us.

• 55:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks for being here. Thank you, Nate Gwatney, for doing the edits. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. It's been super fun. Let's keep it going. And thanks to all you, the listeners. Programming update. I am flying to Switzerland this week. I'm going to be in Davos, right outside the World Economic Forum for four episodes next. Well, I think we'll do three next week and then one the week after. But there's going to be a lot of activity on the feed. So stay tuned for that. If you're new to the podcast, please subscribe. We do this every week on Wednesdays with tech insiders and outside agitators, except for next week, where we're going to do it three times. So you can really get introduction. If you've been listening for a long time, or if this is your first time and you feel inspired, a rating would go a long way. Thanks again to Pac and Austin. Thanks to all of you, the listeners. We will see you for a bunch of shows next week.

• 56:21Speaker 04

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