EP 5: Coinbase Tweet Storm, Truth Social, Death of the Five Day Work Week and the ClearCo Breakup

(05:10) Coinbase Crypto Ad Tweets (12:23) Company Origin Stories (20:47) Truth Social (29:42) Death of the Five Day Work Week (41:20) ClearCo Cofounder Breakup Follow the show: https://twitter.com/cartoonavatars https://www.instagram.com/cartoonavatars/ https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonavatars Follow the hosts: https://twitter.com/zck?s=21 https://twitter.com/nikitabier?s=21 https://twitter.com/loganbartlett?s=21 Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Andrew Nadeau and Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:00Logan Bartlett?

  Well, before we get this going, we know there's plenty happening in the world right now with Ukraine and Russia. You don't listen to us for our inputs on international diplomacy, and it's certainly not our area of expertise. There's going to be plenty of other people lacking credentials in the tech community that will weigh in on this ad nauseam over the next couple of days, weeks, months. And so we'll spare everyone three more, but it should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, our thoughts are with those in Ukraine, and we hope there's a swift end to this needless and devastating aggression. Nikita, I know your family is directly impacted by this. Maybe you can share a little bit of that for everyone listening?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my family's safe, but my mom's side of the family is from Ukraine. So I have an uncle and an aunt in Kiev. So the events unfolding, you know, they certainly hit home. They're doing well. They're migrating to the western part of the country in Lviv and playing across in Poland. And so I'll be watching closely. There are challenges, you know, airports not working, but they are letting women and children into Poland. So it's looking pretty promising, and we'll see how it plays out over the next few weeks.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Well, keep us posted. We're going to be thinking about it.

• 1:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, our thoughts are with everyone in Ukraine right now. So I guess if you're not in a place to laugh along with the absurdities in the tech world right now, we totally get it and hope you come back to us when you are. But for everyone else, hopefully this serves as a break from the terrible news over the last 72 hours.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll say we're reminded of the first SNL sketch, first SNL episode after 9/11, when Rudy Giuliani came on and someone asked, are we allowed to be funny? And Giuliani said, why start now? So, you know, we'll see if we start now this time, too.

• 1:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. So with that as a caveat, let's get going.

• 2:16Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the fifth episode of Three Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett, and I'm joined today by my esteemed co-hosts, the Don of the G-Wagon, the Jewish Gatsby, Nikita Beer, and the George Costanza of Venture Capital, Zach Kukoff.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I actually think I prefer the Stanley Tucci of Venture Capital. If we're just gonna reframe, if we can reframe who my bald icon is for a second, it's Tucci, not Costanza.

• 2:41Logan Bartlett?

  I think you wear the Costanza thing so well, though. You know, we've posted some videos comparing, and I don't know, I think it's you.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I think it's a pretty aspirational person to be, you know?

• 2:51Speaker 02

  George Costanza is an aspirational person to be?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I mean, he's modeled after Larry David, the most liked guy in America right now.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  I do love Larry David. I will tell you that. But the idea is you want to be the looks of Stanley Tucci with the attitude of Larry David. That would be like the combo Transformer I'm trying to be, you know?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Look, Zach, you can't have it all.

• 3:16Logan Bartlett?

  Who says, honestly, you're a young soul, or you're a young person with an old soul?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely not a young soul.

• 3:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, no, definitely misspoke there. But, well, other than the terrible world events that's been going on, it's kind of like, other than that, how is the play Mrs. Lincoln? How's the weak men? Zach, you're in LA. How is it out there?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I am in Nikita's neck of the woods. I'm here a little bit early for our friends at Upfront, putting on the Upfront Summit. So the first day I got here, I hosted a big dinner at an outdoor restaurant, only to find out it was going to be 45 degrees at night. That wasn't so great. But other than that, it's been beautiful, warm, sunny. It almost feels like sinful to be enjoying myself and having a nice trip in LA with everything's going on.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Welcome to LA.

• 4:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, long LA. You know, I'm kind of misrepresenting. I thought it was always like 65 and sunny. This whole 40-degree thing, by the time I get out there, hopefully that's flushed through the system.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  I was more bundled up when I landed in LA than I was when I took off in Boston. So make of that what you will. I gotta say, long, long Boston. Famously mild Boston winters rearing their head again, once again.

• 4:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. We, we, uh, so we're actually gonna do our first IRL dinner meetup since we've been doing this. Pretty funny. We've, uh, we've, we've had five episodes or whatever, and we're finally gonna break bread. So we'll see how, we'll see how all that goes.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Nikita, are you gonna host us at the house? The house that is so famous on Instagram?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the famous beer house. Uh, I have a bunch of engineers at my house working right now, multiple different app ideas. So you'll, uh, you'll, you'll see how the sausage is made.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  This is actually all, once again, a scam just to get allocation in Nikita's app. We're gonna have dinner at his house, and we're just gonna walk up and down the lines of engineers trying to sell them.

• 5:01Logan Bartlett?

  I like it. Uh, well, I'm really looking forward to it. So, uh, yeah, no. Well, I will see you guys on a Monday night. So I guess a quick update from a topic of last week. Uh, so we, we spoke about the Coinbase QR ad for, for a little while. And, um, there's been a, a little bit of an update here. So give the quick background for the people that don't live on tech Twitter. Um, but basically what happened was on Sunday, uh, a week after the Super Bowl, um, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, decided to post a thread about how the app came to be. Now, threads are something that consistently go viral on Twitter. Gives you an opportunity to give thought leadership.

• 5:43Logan Bartlett?

  And so a good opportunity to see how, how things actually occurred on the Coinbase ad, uh, or so he thought. Um, so I'm not gonna read the whole thing. We'll link it in the show notes. Uh, but basically, the short version of it is, he said that, uh, "An outside agency pitched him a bunch of standard 'Super Bowl ads,' quote unquote. Uh, they, they passed on all of them. They were short on time." He said, "The Coinbase team all rallied together and ultimately came up with the idea of this bouncing QR code." And, and the way the, the tweet ended, or one of the tweets ended, was that no ad agency would have done this ad. Um, well, what, what happened subsequent to that, uh, was Kristin Cavallari-

• 6:24Logan Bartlett?

  Hello, the CEO of the Martin Agency responded with timestamps and page notes, basically saying, "Our team actually pitched ad concepts for the Super Bowl with floating QR codes on a blank screen." And I think she said this was in August of last year. So that was a pretty direct response with the timestamps of how it came to be. 12 hours after the original tweet, Brian Armstrong added, "Although we didn't work with a traditional ad agency, I'd be remiss not to mention the creative firm we worked with who actually created the ad, commissioned the song, got clearances, etc. Honestly, felt like we were all one team, so I didn't realize it. Thank you."

• 7:06Logan Bartlett?

  Then the CMO of Coinbase came back and basically implied that the idea was different than the idea that the Martin Agency suggested, and she subsequently got ratioed and a bunch of people in her comments and all that. Kind of a hilarious and unnecessary cellphone by Brian Armstrong. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts, Nikita, on how this all played out.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  My rule of thumb has always been, once you start arguing on the internet, you've already lost. There's no way to win. I think probably they should have just ignored it. I think it's probably not as black and white as the tweets had framed it. I mean, I'm sure every ad agency had pitched a QR code concept to every company that was doing a Super Bowl ad, because we've been literally scanning these things since, like, the last two years, every single day. So I think by just engaging, it made him look more guilty, that like, they didn't give them credit. But, I mean, it is a pretty common trope of,

• 8:11Speaker 01

  you know, ad agencies coming up with innovative concepts and not getting credit for the work that they do.

• 8:18Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, yeah. I think to the point of arguing on the internet in general just like isn't a great idea, right? Just had she or Armstrong just responded wrong and not elaborated, I think everyone would have been like, "Oh, what a clapback, what a known," you know? And it would have changed the whole narrative. But they they sort of started apologizing and explaining the situation. And I hate that we lose all this nuance, right? Like, they were well-intentioned in this whole thing, trying to actually give the story of how it came to be. And to be honest, one of my my girlfriend's brother-in-law is the VP of Marketing at Anheuser-Busch, and he said that he said that like, they were thinking about a bouncing QR code for a Budweiser ad or something, right? And so it's like,

• 9:02Logan Bartlett?

  how many people were probably noodling on some version of this? I'm sure it was countless over the course of the last two years. And so ideas are, it's the execution in all this stuff, right? And so actually getting into the muck of timestamps, you've kind of already lost the conversation.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, not to speak about this one specifically, but in general, I think it's obvious the more surface area you give people on Twitter, right? Like, the less you're able to defend against, the less you give people to respond to, the better handled it is. Because as we both, we all know, basically, everybody on Twitter is bad faith arguing all the time, looking to play to the audience and score points. No one is ever trying to actually engage and learn something on Twitter, at least in my experience, or maybe our messy corner of the universe, that's true.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I think it's funny, though, that like, you have Brian Armstrong was so drawn to create a thread. He wanted thought leadership so bad. The allure of a thread was so strong that it pulled him in. And he really, he probably didn't have any context around this project. And he's like, "Well, I'm gonna get some engagement right now."

• 10:06Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. Once you get, once you get a hit of that sweet thread dopamine and you see the viral, like, people will throw their lives away. It's what I imagine, like, heroin addicts, you know, just chasing that thread virality. And you know he was going for it. He was like, "This is a good one. This is my opportunity." And just like, get your facts right a little bit on the whole circumstance, right? It's just, you know, and I can totally imagine how it happened was, he thought he knew everything that had happened, and he just sort of sat down and like, started drafting this thread on like, a Sunday morning and pressed send. We've all been there where we've... Press send on some tweet that, you know, we probably wish we hadn't done.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:47Logan Bartlett?

  And you know, he like sent it and someone had to come to him and be like, hey, Brian, like not exactly how this came to be, right?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  I love the metaphor of thread posting as the modern day chasing the dragon. Like I wonder, are we going to lose a generation of best and brightest 29 year olds to posting threads? Are we going to have a whole Seattle grunge world of people, a culture and SF, just of people posting threads? There was, um, not to drive back to the Russia, Ukraine stuff, but there was a, like a number of people who decided to use today to do content marketing for themselves instead of being respectful of what's going on. That feels like the, the apex of thread culture. Thread culture is when you leave the engagement so bad that when there's an international war brewing, you're like, gosh, time to post a thread on like five leadership tips I learned from Putin.

• 11:35Logan Bartlett?

  I saw, I saw a VC actually shilling, uh, one of their portfolio companies in, in a tweet, right? Uh, saying like, hey, you know, use our meditation app, uh, if you're stressed by the event. And it's like, dear God, but.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  It was, it was two of their portfolio companies.

• 11:52Logan Bartlett?

  Two of their portfolio companies. That's right. Uh, Zach, to your point, like I, I really do think fentanyl and thread posting are going to be like the issues of our generation that people just throw their lives away chasing. Those are like the two, the two things we're going to have to reckon with.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I, I can't wait for national policy preventing people from getting into threads. I want dare in elementary schools, fifth grade education, teaching kids, don't get hooked on thread posting. Shitposting, not great, but at least better than thread posting.

• 12:20Logan Bartlett?

  I think that's a hundred percent right. Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting about all, all of this, Nikita, last week, kind of coincidentally, you posted a tweet that said, I can't repeat this enough. If your company origin story is boring, make it up. Literally everything I've ever said about my company was made up. And so it's actually an interesting concept of like narratives and how those shape PR and marketing. So I guess first and foremost, what, what actually prompted that? And can you talk a little bit about like how you think about narratives?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  So it was a shitpost, to be clear. Not everything about my company was made up. But what inspired that tweet was I was listening to this podcast of a founder telling the origin story of his company. And it was literally the most boring thing I've ever heard in my entire. It was like excruciating to hear. I was like about to text him like saying, you should pull that podcast off because that was like the worst, the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard. And so I think people should just take some creative license when crafting the narrative around why their company exists. But that tweet infuriated so many people, like they were equating it to like accounting fraud. But really, who cares if it's like real or not?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Just tell a cohesive story about why your product should exist. And everyone like thinks there's this like inception moment around like something that happened and that and then the idea emerged like linearly. But there's never any singular point. So just, you know, find the most interesting framing is what I suggest to founders and then simplify that story. And it doesn't, it doesn't matter how real it is. I mean, just don't, don't commit fraud or something.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  I feel like we actually want founders to have kind of ridiculous founding stories. Like if you're an employee at a company and you're working for effectively below market comp in a lot of ways, right? Your stock probably isn't worth as much as it would be if you worked at Fang and your cash comp at most startups is certainly worse than it would be if you were like a generic person at Fang. You're motivated by the mission and the mission oftentimes comes from the, oh, I experienced this when I had my thing that happened X, Y, and Z. And not oftentimes the far more realistic story of like, yeah, there were two MBAs who did a market size analysis of everything in the world and they found out this is like the third biggest market that didn't have an existing player and they decided to go raise money for it. Like, that's a little bit less inspiring than like, yeah, my aunt's cousin experienced

• 14:43Speaker 02

  this horrible thing and now I'm starting my company as a result of that. I actually don't think it's a bad thing to go out and personalize it, but it helps you keep people.

• 14:51Logan Bartlett?

  We all sort of have lizard brains and like the simple narrative, like the muck of all this stuff, the details, it kind of ties back to the wrong point on Twitter. It's like, we just want the simple answer in all this stuff. And it's interesting, like, two founding stories that aren't true, or had been reported to not be true, were eBay and Netflix, right? Like, the narratives around each. So, the Netflix story was that Reed Hastings got a late blockbuster charge and was like, "Oh, this isn't, you know, this isn't the way things could be." And Mark Randolph, his co-founder, revealed in a book that they were actually just like, thinking about what the next opportunity was outside of books, which Amazon had already captured, right?

• 15:33Logan Bartlett?

  And like eBay had this big narrative about Pierre Omidyar was basically saying, "He built a site so his fiance could sell unique Pez dispensers or something," right? And that was like the galvanizing story back in the day. And so, you know, I get it, this has happened, but these things, like, these narratives have happened, but they're not actually true. I kind of love Bezos as an OG with this, and like, never represented it as anything other than like, "No, I realized, like, books are infinitely scalable and can't actually be stored, like, in a, in a full facility, and so I realized the internet was perfect for that," right? He never came up with the bullshit version of it. I feel like his brain is so robotic. He was like, "What do you mean, I craft a marketing message? I just, no, it was books or..."

• 16:18Speaker 02

  But what would the marketing message be? "One day I was reading a book and I realized, what if I could have this book in my couch right now without having to go to the store?" Like, I just don't even know, like, that there's, even the marketing version of it is like 95% of basically what he already says.

• 16:34Logan Bartlett?

  But, I mean, it's kind of, that would have been a much more wholesome, like, authentic story than thinking books were the perfect product to service on the internet because of the infinite volume, right? And so, I mean, again, I respect that he didn't do that, and I'm sure all the people in Nikita's replies comparing it to like, you know, he's Nikita Elizabeth Holmes beer or whatever, like, I'm sure those people also respect that Bezos stuck with the real narrative here, but it's funny that, like, he just never did.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  I actually feel like it's far more authentic for him to keep what he said. Like, clearly, it wouldn't be authentic to Bezos to go out and say that he had this lived human experience. It's far more authentic for him to be the MBA.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I think it's, it is funny, though, like, the, the, when you go to zero to one with some of these companies, the actual thing that resonates is really mundane and kind of trivial and sometimes like embarrassing. Like, the early days of Facebook, the whole function was so you didn't have to ask someone for their phone number after you meet them at a party because you have too much anxiety and you don't want to put yourself out there. So you can just type in their name and add them and message them then. Like, that use case can't, like, galvanize a group of people. So, over time, you kind of have to evolve it into, we're trying to make the world more open and connected. But, you know, that flirting use case was that, what got that initial velocity going.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  I don't know. I, I think you could basically pitch a lot of employees on, hey, tech employees, have you ever been too anxious to ask somebody out? That feels like a pretty galvanizing pitch, actually, for most of the tech folks I know.

• 18:09Logan Bartlett?

  Nikita, what, what was the actual founding story? We know you iterated on a bunch of ones, but like, was there some real version of how you had this aha, and then some like bullshit version that you spun to VCs to get them, like, all excited about it?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the story that we told was that, you know, the internet is really a toxic, can be a toxic place, and it can make us feel kind of terrible after we use it. People are really mean to each other. But, you know, I, the, the way it, the idea kind of emerged was, there was another app that was at the top of the App Store called Soraha. It was, this app builds in Saudi Arabia, and it was blowing up with teens. And I actually saw a, one of their users tweet at the founder saying, "Look at this awful message I received." And the guy just replied, "If you don't like these messages, don't use the app." And I was like, "Oh, my God, this is like some of the worst publicity management, like, PR management I've ever seen in my life."

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And so, I was like, "Well, maybe that we can control what users say." So that people don't have those experiences. But you know, that that whole interaction, that observation is not that great of a story. So I, you know, I I took a little bit of artistic license and reshaped it to be something cleaner. And that could be retold. My team got excited around that narrative and we put it up on the FAQs. And it wasn't necessarily us like lying. It was just telling a much simpler narrative that people could digest.

• 19:42Logan Bartlett?

  So Nikita, what what was the simpler like narrative version that you put on the FAQs?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  So we wanted like, our aim was to make people feel good about themselves after they used our app. And so we came out and said, like, our mission is to improve the mental health of teens. Even though, you know, a lot of the use case of our app was, you know, teens flirting and kind of sending kind of messages to to the person they're attracted to. We still got a lot of messages from teens saying they decided not to commit suicide because of our app. And we got those almost every day. So, you know, even though Facebook shut down our app, we were still pretty proud of the impact we had during that period of time that that we were running. Okay, Logan, are you gonna are you gonna chill now?

• 20:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, whether you are hate listening or actually enjoying listening to the pod. We appreciate if you can subscribe and also share if you think there's anyone else that would enjoy us bantering messing around on Saturday morning.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  I can't believe you just you just said like and subscribe.

• 20:46Logan Bartlett?

  Another topic that feels right up our alley that I was thoroughly enjoying. On President's Day Monday, Donald Trump's Truth Social launched. So for those that don't know, Truth Social was an iOS app, is an iOS app that launched on Monday. And it shot quickly to the top of the App Store for free apps. It also hit a lot of problems. It turns out maybe Donald Trump might not be the the technologist or leading a team of of technologists to to build a social app. So registration couldn't be completed for a number of people. There was a partial outage. There was an internal waitlist. As they were trying to manage the infrastructure load, terms of service wouldn't actually load.

• 21:29Logan Bartlett?

  It turned out that the Truth Social logo was very similar to Tralor, Tralor, a fleet telematics business in the UK. So they're now investigating legal recourse. So a very convoluted, chaotic lunch, as only our former president of the United States could do. So I guess one of the funniest things for me is that instead of tweets, they're called truths, which is just ironic in and of itself.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  It's incredible that they've solved the misinformation problem in one fell swoop. All you have to do is declare every post the truth and you no longer have to deal with it.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Sounds very 1984.

• 22:07Logan Bartlett?

  I only tweet truths anyway, so I, you know, it's very familiar for me, you know.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  We both know, we both know that is not a truth. That's a, that's a Truth Social truth, not a Twitter.com truth.

• 22:19Logan Bartlett?

  I feel like Truth Social, you could make like a billion dollars just by, you know, the kind of the old Nigerian prince scam, but just, just like, oh, I'm a, I'm a Trump, I'm Trump's nephew and, you know, the, the president needs your help, right? And send it to this crypto account or something.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Truth Social feels just like Twitter, but nobody starts their posts with, I don't mean this in a racist way, but.

• 22:41Logan Bartlett?

  So, so Nikita, what are your, what are your thoughts on the durability of this app? And do you, does it have any chance of survival after this terrible launch, after all the infrastructure failures they've had? What's your opinion here?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think the amount of hype around it doesn't really seem to line up with a level of risk and uncertainty. Like the SPAC that's connected to this app, DWAC, is now trading at over, over $3 billion. And I, I think investors don't really, like, at least retail investors and Wall Street don't understand that creating a social app that ends up being sticky is a black swan event. It happens like once every decade. 99.9% of all social apps fail. Like you could really count the ones that have succeeded on like three fingers. So even with a

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Celebrity endorsement like Trump, the chances are still slim. The celebrity endorsement, it certainly helps with acquiring users. But acquiring users, you could do that with investor money, a viral TikTok video. But whether they'll stick around, like this app has the same probability of users sticking around as any other app. We saw the same pattern play out with David Dobrik's Dispo app, where it had a surge of millions of users and most subsequently churned. For an app to actually stick, the network effects need to form quickly. So the way users connect with each other has to be perfectly executed. And the engagement loops need to have them keep coming back.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  So this is sort of me putting on my not investment advice or not financial advice. I think at the current price that this stock is trading, I think you have a pretty good asymmetric bet here of shorting it. Because apps with this amount of momentum are typically priced, at least the ones that I've invested in that have reached number one, are typically priced at about 100 million valuation. But this is now trading at like 30x that price, with the same probability of failure as all those others. So I mean, I don't encourage people to short a stock since, you know, there's uncapped downside. But this seems like there's pretty good risk and reward.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  I will say notably D E Shaw, who had a pretty large position in the SPAC, has dumped their entire position, presumably done quite well in doing so. Nikita, if you were sitting in, you know, call it Dispo or Paparazzi or now Truth Social, right? And you have sort of the flavor of the month moment. What do you do to actually convert that from like, hey, we have the hot five minutes of attention to we're going to make the attention last past three months?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I actually think this approach to going to market is like basically the kiss of death. You grow way too fast, you prematurely exhaust your audience's attention before you can iterate and figure out what works. So at least in my experience, I used to do launches like that and it always would just crash and burn. The better approach is try to get some like little Petri dish working where you've geofenced your users, you're not like letting people sign up and let the cat out of the bag too early and you can figure things out.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  When TBH was scaling, like it was growing out of our first school that we had launched, we saw that this thing was going viral, so we geofenced it around three states. And my team was not happy with that decision. They were like, "We shouldn't do this, we have all this momentum." But we geofenced it around three states and we spent about six weeks rebuilding the app, re-architecting it, adding features, and then we relaunched. And I think that's the approach I generally recommend to founders is don't go chasing those top-line numbers, get the engagement loops right, get the network effects working, and make sure users retain.

• 26:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things like Facebook, obviously notoriously launched in the different schools, right? Started with Harvard and then it spread through the Ivy League. And so there was like a natural core market that was self-contained in all of this. But building one of these social apps, I've never done it, but it's equal parts like the actual infrastructure that it works, right? And gosh, you remember all the fail whales of early days of Twitter? How painful that was to deal with? So you need the actual infrastructure to work and then you need the network itself to be self-reinforcing and have compelling content. And you need those two things to kind of work symbiotically, right? And so if you artificially squeeze one part or the other, like it's not

• 27:40Logan Bartlett?

  gonna work and so now you have all these people showing up trying to start a network effect that exists on this app clearly there are people that are so passionate for Donald Trump that I think they're going to be far more forgiving than some of these other apps right and their willingness to keep banging their head against the wall to get it to work but like at some point they're going to be exhausted of the app crashing not being able to get on whatever right

• 28:04Speaker 02

  but doesn't your examples sort of undermine that a little bit like Twitter farewell was constant and yet here we all are as addicted as ever right like maybe the amended version is possibly you have to have and Nikita I'd like to get your thoughts but like you have to have the network effect spinning before you know before you go big because if the infrastructure isn't there it'll it'll shut down but like I actually think the lesson at least that I took from some of this stuff is people will power through a lot of really bad infrastructure work if they're getting core social utility out of the actual app itself

• 28:37Speaker 01

  yeah I think with Twitter it started off small so the network effects were there the use case was there people were getting to the aha moment the scaling issues emerged way later down the line when and that was just because people wanted it too much for intrinsic and they were intrinsically motivated to use it right now you're Trump is driving people to adopt this app and they haven't even experienced why it's good or anything or they don't have any intrinsic motivation to use it

• 29:07Logan Bartlett?

  yeah I mean really they should have started like on with the QAnon Reddit group and then expanded slowly into like you know or started with the people that stormed the Capitol and then gone to the QAnon group and then gone to just like the core you know covid deniers and then like the anti vaxers and then just like all the different concentric circles there right

• 29:26Speaker 02

  what's what's the truth social version of Snapchat making people download the app to get into frat parties like you have to like it's like the anti vaccine card if you have truth social installed I know that you probably are dangerous but you can't eat at a restaurant

• 29:41Logan Bartlett?

  So a thing that went viral over this week was an article by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic that was entitled "The Five-Day Work Week Is Dying." And basically, what it went through is something that I think we're all experiencing to some extent, but is the fact that the five-day work week hasn't existed in a normal way for knowledge workers and a large portion of the economy over the course of the last two years. And so, one of the quotes from this said, it was a guy, Nick Bloom, who was an economics professor at Stanford, said, "I talked to hundreds of companies about remote work, and 95% of them now say they're going hybrid, while the other 5% are going

• 30:23Logan Bartlett?

  full remote. The exceptions to the rules such as Goldman Sachs are scarce." And so, he went through and laid out three key takeaways. I'll knock through them quickly and then get your guys' reaction. So, the first was that the five-day work week is dying, and that the most popular form is hybrid, between Tuesday through Thursday in the office, and Monday and Friday out of the office. Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, backed that up and said, "Monday and Tuesdays are the fastest days of the week for travel, and more people are treating ordinary weekends as holidays." The second takeaway was, "The age of hybrid work is going to be a beautiful mess," and

• 31:05Logan Bartlett?

  so, dealing with people in the office, some people out of the office, all that stuff. And so, that's definitely going to happen. And then, the third big takeaway from it was, "Cities are starting to freak out in general." And so, we've seen, at least in New York, Eric Adams, the mayor, is asking for people to delete the Zoom app, and that New York actually can't function as a city the way it has historically without people commuting into the office. So, a lot of stuff there, but interested in your guys' takes on this article specifically, remote work generally. Zach, I'll go to you first.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've gotten screamed at online a bunch every time I've tweeted about remote work. So for one, I'm eager to hear how I get screamed at for this podcast episode dropping. The thing that struck me as sort of strange in all of this is I think it's fairly obvious there are real drawbacks to remote work, but it's become so dogmatic to so many people's lives. And what I mean by this is this, I tweeted something fairly innocuous. My thought was pretty obvious, which is if you're early career, remote work is probably much, much worse for you than it is in the office, right? You miss out on the collaboration, you miss out on the mentorship, most importantly, you miss out on sort of all of the unplanned spontaneous moments of learning that happen. And some people agree. I thought it was a fairly self apparent point,

• 32:24Speaker 02

  but like a lot of people were up in arms at the idea that there are any drawbacks at all to remote work. And so I'm curious, obviously, we can say a lot about collaboration and talent retention, yada, yada, yada. But like, I'm curious, why are people so dogmatic about this in their lifestyles? And why is it that we can't talk about the drawbacks, the very real drawbacks that people are experiencing for remote?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I think the separation lies between like a big company and a startup. Like, if you're going to be working for a big company, the company is making a trade off where they're like, we're big, we're going to let you have flexibility. Like, you're not going to be dedicating your life to sitting in a long commute to, you know, sit in an office. But I think for, at a small company, you're taking a different sort of trade, you know, you're getting more equity, you're getting more ownership. And I've kicked off my own product development cycle for my new company. And it's just the speed and quality between the remote teammates that I'm working with and the ones working at my house is like striking. I just don't

• 33:26Speaker 01

  know how, and you could certainly grow a company, like if you have a product that's already, the flywheel is already spinning. But I don't know how you go zero to one remotely. There's just so much nuance and so many side conversations that are critical. Like with TBH, we designed like 90 apps and we built probably 15 of them. But the best ideas always emerged like during side conversations when Everyone was like getting in in the morning and settling down.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  So I and it's it's also a lot more fun like I think that that part is we're losing like that that part of that part of camaraderie of, you know, working together. So, yeah, it's I don't I think startups will should still try to lean toward working in person.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it feels like when you're early before you have product market fit, that's so much more of a creative experience and Nikita, it's your point, it's the early mornings, but also like I remember very fondly like the late nights, right? Like the when you're in the office at 2am with the group there, both in terms of the camaraderie, but also like there's so much real learning when you're working late at night in an office with a senior person and maybe we're like, okay, it's, you know, 1:30 and I'm going to info dump on you like the last five years of shit that I've learned. Like, that's a pretty extraordinary moment and important, yeah, both the thing I mentioned earlier about the eyes of development, but also so important for product market fit, too. And I wonder, like, maybe remote works, I think it probably does work, at least we've seen in our portfolio, for companies that are playing an execution game, who are further along and it's

• 34:58Speaker 02

  a question of just pouring gas in the fire and growing. But when you're still in the wilderness, you have to creatively iterate on something, I think it's just really hard without those magic moments.

• 35:07Logan Bartlett?

  What I found interesting is, so I I invest, so I'll invest after product market fit is established. And so I sort of view all of that as black magic, right? But what I found interesting is we're drawing these like distinctions, I think, that exist in a very real way between pre-product market fit and post-product market fit, right? And those two worlds are very, very different. But I also think there's distinctions between the type of person working, right? Engineer and salespeople have been remote-ish for a very long time at a lot of businesses. And I think that works because it's much more individual contributor oriented and it's less collaborative, like there's there's things that you can execute on in a given day. And I've also

• 35:52Logan Bartlett?

  found that, like, so we I've looked at Automattic and GitLab and Zapier and a handful of these businesses that were very remote before. And what's interesting Thing is, the people that gravitate to remote companies actually skew a little older because they don't need the social elements that come with the office, right? And so if the average tech company is 27 or whatever, from an age standpoint, these full remote companies are 34, 35, 36 because they've already established their social dynamic, right? They have families, they don't need the office for camaraderie. And so I think there are all these distinctions that exist. Now, where we're headed that I think is just going to be a fucking disaster

• 36:35Logan Bartlett?

  is this whole collaboration that is going to exist in the hybrid world, right? And Automattic and GitLab, I think, were fairly dogmatic. Someone can probably look this up for us. But they were pretty dogmatic about like, every meeting, no one can be a second-class citizen, right? And so what that meant was, even if Nikita and I are going to be in the office together, if we're going into a meeting, we need separate rooms, we're both going to be on Zoom, so that everyone else was in a level playing field. Because when there are certain people in certain rooms, there's so much subtlety in conversation that happens, you know, within that room that people inevitably were going to feel like second-class citizens there. And now that we're moving to this like hybrid world, some people are going to want to go into the office, some people aren't.

• 37:19Logan Bartlett?

  Some people are going to be on screen, some meetings are going to happen, you know, not with a camera present. And I think it's just going to be a total disaster for the next three years.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Well, this is not a comment on GitLab, which is a portfolio company, and so certainly not commenting on that. But what I'll say generally about this is, it's like fairly obvious that no matter what tooling you use or what process you have, if you have a culture where some folks are remote and some folks are in person, no matter what age, right, the remote folks are at a disadvantage. I think it's not uncontroversial, it's not controversial, rather, to say that. At least it ought not to be. And so the question is like, then do you find there's a sorting mechanism where the most ambitious employees, regardless of age, want to be in the office because they know that's where the first-class experience is? And you have a world where folks who say, hey, I'm really optimizing for lifestyle over career right now, end up being remote instead.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  And I wonder if that's something that we're going to see more and more of as companies try to figure out what this messy middle hybrid looks like.

• 38:19Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard a story of a $5 billion plus private company who in their offer letters actually write in still today that every employee, even though they've been kind of, some people are going in, some people aren't, but they've been writing in, you have to live within 45 miles of the office.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Really?

• 38:38Logan Bartlett?

  For at least the executives, they're actually putting that into the offer letter, which I think is really interesting.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  I wonder if it's like early career and late career where you want to be in person, right? Early career, you want to be in person to get the mentorship. Late career, you want to be in person to collaborate with the C-suite. But if you're in sort of like mid-career, then maybe remote makes a lot of sense. And if you're happy being in mid-career, then maybe remote makes a lot of sense for you.

• 39:00Logan Bartlett?

  Someone's going to write the playbook about how this actually works, right? And how to, what roles you can do it in. I think product and marketing probably are going to be a lot more collaborative and skew more in-person in this hybrid world. Sales and engineering probably less. And so someone's going to write this definitive guide of like how to make sense of all this and what age works for where. But like, it's going to be chaotic and I think we're going to lose a lot of productivity as we get back into this office world, kind of figuring all this stuff out.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if the two competitors are going toe-to-toe on out-executing each other, it's just really hard to execute at 100% in a totally remote context. And I'm curious, I think that we'll have some stories that play out where one company just simply executed, because they say the last 20% of a product development cycle takes up 80% of the time. In that last 20%, you're hand-waving, you're talking, you're trying to communicate emotions and the triggers of a product. And I'm curious to see like, if someone creates a in-person team, will they out-execute some other startup just simply because they have more craft and they sweat the details?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  You know, we even see this in venture, right? Like, we know that when you're chasing something that's really hot, or when you're chasing a deal you're excited about, certainly it helps to get on a plane and go meet somebody and walk in person, right? And we know that even better yet, still being in the cities and the geographies where great founders are, gives you an edge that's unfair. So it certainly seems to me that that's going to be the case for most industries.

• 40:37Logan Bartlett?

  As the stereotype like seems to be in the industry altogether now on the venture side, like you sort of have Benchmark on one end and you have Andreessen on the other, right? Benchmark is they've been back in person for the last whatever 18 months or something doing in person and like that's very much core to their bespoke how they operate group. Andreessen, you know, people are kind of sprawled all over and they've made this work in a big organization, right? And so it's interesting, the two of them always seem to exist at the the polar ends of like, you know, huge fun, small fun, you know, bespoke craft, big institution, right? Like in person, remote. It's just like these two orgs kind of exist at the at the ends here.

• 41:19Logan Bartlett?

  So one other news item this week. So Clearco, the former company that was formerly Clear Bank, announced that their two co-founders stopped dating. So Andrew D'Souza and Michelle Romanow were in a relationship when they founded the business. D'Souza served as the CEO while Romanow served as the president. This is a $2 billion financial modern lending company. And so my understanding what they do is some form of factoring related to e-commerce. So they'll give you advances so that you can spend on marketing or inventory if you're

• 41:59Logan Bartlett?

  a D to C e-commerce business. So this week they announced that they have broken up and D'Souza is stepping up to the executive role as as people do. And Romanow is taking over as CEO. So they said in a statement, we're no longer dating, we're no longer in a personal relationship anymore, but we still care very much for each other. And they said, we have a $2 billion baby. It was very easy when we were always in the same room. Someone would call one of us and get both of us. So I don't know your guys' opinions about this. There's been a bunch of famous companies that have had a bunch had success founded by either dating or married co-founders. So notably VMware, Diane Green and Mendel

• 42:43Logan Bartlett?

  Rosenbloom, Cisco, the the original founders were dating.

• 42:47Logan Bartlett?

  Eventbrite, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Canva, which is now whatever, a $30, $40 billion design software, Clifbar, Tootsie Roll, notably, I found in my advanced research, the husband and wife have been running the company together for a while. So Zach, I don't know, any perspective here from you.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Logan, have you invested in any, I'm just curious, and Nikita and your angel investing, have you invested in any husband and wife or dating co-founders?

• 43:15Logan Bartlett?

  So we have one in the portfolio that I know. And I guess, I remember, it used to be something five, 10 years ago, that was, I think, pretty avoided by venture capitalists. I mean, you can imagine, like, all the ways in which relationships can go awry, right? And then you throw in a company to it, and it's like, geez, that seems like some level of existential risk to the business. Interestingly, we've gotten comfortable with it. It's obviously dependent on the personalities and the roles. And, you know, it's weird, because you're also kind of judging their personal relationship, as well as their, like, professional relationship,

• 44:00Logan Bartlett?

  as we do analyzing any co-founder. But it's something that I think just goes into a risk bucket, like anything else, right? When you're like, coming up with the pros and cons of the deal, you can't avoid this being a risk, right? Like, founders breaking up is certainly a risk. But when you're throwing in all the other emotions that go with being in an actual personal relationship with someone, it's definitely enhanced risk of the founding team going the other way. Now, there's a trade-off, right? Like, theoretically, they should be able to communicate better with one another. There should be a lot of trust there, all of that stuff. But it definitely goes into our risk bucket, but not a non-starter. What about you, Zach? Have you, have you ever done it?

• 44:42Speaker 02

  I'm sure that somebody will come out of the woodwork to say that, across my career, there's been some, some firm. In fact, I should, I should say that when I was at Emergence, we were investors in Clearco. And so this is not specifically about them. But I can't think of a scenario where I personally have led or participated in investments that had a husband and wife team, or any sort of marriage or partnership team. It's, it's not that it's such a huge risk. Like, it certainly is a risk. It's more that... I actually don't know that the kinds of people who get married and make ideal co-founders, like so often you want like different complementary skillsets in a co-founding team. You want the person who's hyper extrovert, who is so good, and the person who's like the introvert,

• 45:27Speaker 02

  who's running the operations and keeping things stable.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, at a personal level, I think it's such a commitment to pick a co-founder. You end up spending more time with them than your spouse often. So like when I'm right now in kind of a co-founder dating experience and I'm trying to like, the line that I give to them is, do you want to spend 10 years of experience, 10 years of mental trauma with me? That's essentially what you're signing up for. And if that person's also your spouse, it sounds like a lot, a lot of exposure to the same person. Having said that, you know, Clearco is like an incredible company. I've known Andrew for many years and I think they're going to be fine. But I, and I totally understand, you know, after many years,

• 46:14Speaker 01

  you might want to part ways after spending, you know, 14 hours a day together.

• 46:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, Zach, to your earlier point on it, I mean, I know a lot of extroverted and introverted, like people that pair very well together as couples. And so I guess from a personality standpoint, I could totally see it. But yeah, it is one of the jokes that I'll often make when evaluating an investment and talking to an entrepreneur is like, listen, this is a more formal relationship and it's harder to unwind than a marriage, right? Because like marriage, you have legal recourse to like to get out. You can get divorced, right? And that happens, whatever, 50% of the time in general. You actually can't, there's no legal recourse to get rid of your VC or your board member, right? Structurally and, and that's, that's very much true with a co-founder.

• 47:02Logan Bartlett?

  And so now you're conflating these, these things in such a meaningful way. And I wish, I think Canva's been the one, like Melanie's talked pretty, pretty publicly about. The struggles in the early days of their founding, right? And I don't know Diane Green and VMware story well enough to comment on that. But I know that like that was something that people were very concerned about. And they weren't married at the time. I don't know if they are today, but like they were, I think openly dating and people were like very apprehensive about it. And, you know, it was probably a risk arbitrage on the business. I mean, clearly whatever they're worth now, $40 billion, clearly it worked out. But I know that was a real concern from people that passed on the investment.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I often say to founders, you wouldn't want to have a shotgun marriage, right? You shouldn't have a shotgun financing. It's not the case that you can, this is marriage without divorce, which is far more serious in some ways, honestly, than a lot of marriages are where you can unwind if you need to.

• 48:01Logan Bartlett?

  I wonder if this is something we're going to be seeing more and more. Like at the end of the day, VCs look to pattern matching or precedent, right? And so I wonder if now that Canvas had this success and the examples aren't just VMware way back in the day and Cisco where the founders were ultimately fired. Like now that this has actually happened, I wonder if this is going to be something that people are more comfortable doing or not going forward.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Wait, so Zach, did you literally just say that you would take an investor more seriously than your future spouse?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  I'm going to say no.

• 48:38Logan Bartlett?

  This is going to be read back at the rehearsal dinner. There's going to be press play on, yeah, this is, everyone's, the father of the ride's going to get up and do his little speech and then we're going to press play on this.

• 48:53Logan Bartlett?

  Well, that'll do it for the sixth episode of Three Cartoon Avatars. We will be here next week as well, again, if we don't get canceled. So thank you everyone for listening.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Should we do the app thing to fade out? I thought that was pretty funny last time.

• 49:09Logan Bartlett?

  I think we should. I think four in a row.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Like a dead horse.

• 49:12Logan Bartlett?

  I think four in a row is more than enough of that joke. I think it'll take another six for the ironic to get good.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Fine, fine.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think with Nikita.