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It is now $199 a year, $19 a month. I have a discount. You can get it for $150 a year. I think if you go to newcomer.co right now. | Oh, there you go. Get it for $150. And what is that like? You do two a week, three a week? How many drops is it? |
Yeah, so it's a I've got like a weekly like podcast out that I just relaunched that comes out once a week. And then I tend to publish once a week myself. And now I have like, like I just literally, while we were preparing for this published a data post that we're starting to put out once a month. Right. So it's sort of... | fascinating. I think it's a good place to start here in our discussions, a lot of news going on, and we'll get to your latest scoop. But it is really interesting how independent journalists are becoming sustainable. let me just ask it outright. Without saying your salary, but the the compensation you had at the informa... |
I'm at two years, six months. Definitely a year out, I was making more than I was at Bloomberg. Now it's becoming a business to the level I think some people in media discount. I've hired a chief of staff. I mean, if you think about my business right now, I have like three revenue lines basically, right? I have subscri... | So it's fantastic. So you could hit a million dollars in year three or so of doing this possibly. |
I think, I think that'll happen. | fantastic. Congratulations. Awesome. Feels good. |
The big question is busy, you know, it's, I'm like, ready to, yeah, well, it does change your mindset, right? | From being an employee and being like, blah, blah, blah, you know, union leader employee, we need to fight management. I don't think you were that, but you did see that with your compatriots, this like anti management, and you're the owner, right? And now you're like, Oh, my God, running a business is hard. How does th... |
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot on just sort of, I don't know how a company company operates and like focus. I mean, I think one thing that's funny to me is just, you know, I think as a reporter, I would look at all this sort of self-help leadership type advice and sort of laugh at it. Yeah. Especially for like bus... | You have more empathy too. Yeah. That's good. I think this is going to I think the substack podcast revolution is call it independent journalists, because some of them are using other platforms, Patreon, this existed before substack. And they're competing nicely, I think. And then there's people who are now creating SA... |
No, Substack takes 10%. | And then yeah, Stripe facilitates the actual payments and takes like, yeah, so yeah, so when you start getting to big numbers right now, 40k, or whatever, 50k, you know, four or $5,000 for your hosting companies, not outrageous. But you hit a million, you start thinking 100k. Maybe you start look at other options. |
But a lot of my, like I'm saying, a lot of the revenue is conference and then sponsorships. I would say, I mean, right now I think Substack is super worth the money. I mean, they draw, I mean, you, you set up a Substack, right? I mean, I think the recommendation feature is driving a lot of growth for me still. Oh, the ... | Yeah. And that's why the free list is you know i have more than 50 000 free subscribers and that's that's the crazy thing is i think they figured out the referral system and so i've been getting all these free which you know if you just use a generic mail provider you're not getting that and then i looked at and i was ... |
Well, just the last thing I'll say, I mean, you know, the anchlor and then also Barry Weiss have started to build publications on them. I'd be interested to know what the, if the take rate's the same on those, because... Oh, if they negotiated a different rate? Because if you start building an actual business, I feel l... | mean, it's pretty portable. So I think the the point at which you're going to have to think about this, and maybe Casey has to think about this Newton, right, Casey Newton. Yeah. So some of those folks when they hit a million, if they have 5000 10,000 subs, which you'll hit at some point, I think when you hit a million... |
Mario at The Generalist just moved back to Substack, which was interesting after going off. I mean, ease is something people undervalue. Sometimes it's just like, this works, like worry about the other parts of your business. Yes. That's certainly valuable. | That's where take rate as a, as a general concept, you have to provide more value than you're taking. That's why I think Apple is in crosshairs for people, hey, 30% is too big of a take rate, people are like, this isn't fair. We're not going to offer Spotify, or some epic games for at night, you can't buy stuff, right?... |
It doesn't worry me as much. I mean, I think anything to make the reader experience better. And right now, we're all very dependent on like, Gmail, right? You know, like, Gmail filtering, I don't know, it's, I'm happy for, you know, my readers to be able to find the newsletter, however they want. | I thought the chat was interesting. Did you use the chat feature yet? |
I haven't, you know, with Casey, I am actually in a discord group. | Yes. You know, I joined that as well. I forgot the name of it, but I just didn't like my channel. |
My, my community isn't very active. I would not call it. I think Casey's has been more of a success. Mine. I don't know. I haven't really invested in building the community, but then I didn't, I didn't want to play around with the chat feature. | know, the pro I do I put I turn the chat feature on and it was kind of interesting that dozens of people showed up to say hi. But it was interesting. I think it's got potential like to turn a mailing list into a community is kind of a clever idea. Right? I think that over time, people will like that if there's a purpos... |
I'm and I'm not speaking to that story specifically. I mean, it seemed what I'm describing is challenged with their public holdings. I don't know enough about the new phone. | Well, everybody else. Yeah. |
Yeah. Yeah. The But yeah, I mean, I feel like the value of the newsletter is that every piece is delivered to your readers' inboxes as equal to the prior pieces, right? At Bloomberg, it really felt like, even though we had a big audience, stories were sort of fighting for a spot on the homepage or on social to be valua... | I think that's a very healthy dynamic. I think this is like, you know, we had a talk on debt count, dead cat bounce, which is the previous name, just dead cat, the old name. |
Yeah, exactly. | Old name, the dark, dead cat bounce podcast. I mean, that's what you're talking about. The dead cat bounces as a finance. |
That is part of what it references, but it actually references a conversation between Mark Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, where Mark Marc Andreessen text, Marc Andreessen texted. Yeah, no, no, no. It's spycraft. Marc Andreessen texted Zuck and said, the cat's in the bag, the bag's in the river, which is some reall... | And so yeah, that was dead cat. I felt like that was either. like Mark Andreessen's finest moment or worse. I couldn't figure it out. I was like, wow, this dude is really on the side of founders. He's negotiating against the other board members to covertly coach Mark on how to manipulate totally the comp committee to l... |
company. I just I just love it. You know, I'm all about insiders. And like, Silicon Valley works based on actual human beings. Like, I just have to read Hoffman for my new podcast. And like, that's like a dream. And so I feel like that, that whole Mark Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg saga, it's just funny to me. It's just ... | Yeah, exactly. I love it. Alright, well, there's a little preamble for you folks. Okay, now, you just published on newcomer.co. Go subscribe, everybody. 150 bucks. You published a scoop. Scoop. On Stripe. So, tell us what's the latest on Stripe. |
Uber was the only one. I think it's got to be top three, at least. For sure, yeah. So yeah, amazing. And it's at a $50 billion valuation down from 96, which had been the peak for Stripe. Cut in half. But this is not money for Stripe to use to run its business. All the money is basically going to be used to help resolve... | So the tender offer means that thrive capital general catalyst a 16 z founders fund who are reportedly participating around they'll buy some shares from those employees, so they'll own some common shares. This is exactly what Masayoshi San did with Uber. bought put in some shares at a very high valuation for preferred,... |
I think, I mean, yeah, some of the details, it's not clear, you know, not yet. I mean, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been sort of steering stripe through this. And some of the Goldman private wealth alliance are also invested. | Well, their revenue has slowed a bit over there. But they're still growing 85% year over year for their net revenue. Well, that was 21 to 22 net revenue grew 85%. But yeah, what what's is it? Are they growing fast? Or are they growing slow? |
Well, I think it's the combination. The information reported that they lost some $500 million last year, which for a company that I think had bragged about how profitable it was, was worrying. The gross revenue grew 27% last year to $14.3 billion. And yeah, I think the year before had grown sort of much more than that.... | Right. I mean, that's a lot of headcount to add. And they did the riff, right, cut up 1100 employees. I've been dealing with business insurance for three decades, I am on the board of a bunch of companies, I watch people who don't have insurance, get themselves into trouble all the time. Switching providers has always ... |
I mean, I feel like, obviously, everybody has a different opinion. I think there are some people that I've seen almost like lampooned for they get laid off and then they still write some tribute to their years there and sort of totally understand it, sort of the capitalist. And then I think you see sort of people who w... | Right. And he's like, yeah, this has got to stop. And we're going to consolidate down. And if you want to be a manager, maybe leave. |
Right. And I mean, yeah, I don't think anybody wants to work for a company where managers are managing, you know, it's just like at some point, productive people want to work at companies where they're surrounded by people who feel like they're doing the work. | I might, you know, I've come to the conclusion that it takes two to tango. I think Google created this culture of entitlement, because they had the money printing machine. I think Silicon Valley copied it because they had no choice because it was an arms race. And there was a talent, you know, war going on. And Google ... |
Well, we'll hire you for you to give up on your dreams. You see with us, you know, exactly. | That was that was the explicit strategy, Eric, as vocalized to me from the top of the company. And, you know, people other people copied it. But they didn't have the money printing machine. So then that gets you into a bit of a trap. People basically are going really fast. And they just went flying off the cliff. |
Right. And I mean, you can see why people are upset. If they do give up on their dreams, they think they're gonna get this money year after year, you you sort of set a norm, and then people expect it. And, you know, it's a hassle, you're pretty far along on your career to go find another job. | So there's, you know, I wonder what happens to this group of people, let's say who didn't have jobs that were essential. who now find themselves having maybe gotten paid three times what they were getting paid maybe five years earlier, right? So they were working in marketing or sales or PR, let's PM design, let's call... |
Yeah. I mean, hard to know, right? | just think that's and then I think there's two things that are headwinds now for talent. One is everybody insisted on continuing remote work. You know what happens when you insist on remote work and you're highly paid? Your managers learn what your output is, right? because they have to figure out your output because t... |
And then AI. Yeah, AI, but remote can be helpful to the employee too. I mean, there's so much wasted time at the office. I agree. I mean, I love Bloomberg, but you just feel productive talking to your colleague, you know, like hearing their problems, whatever, but it didn't necessarily get you anywhere towards work, th... | I feel like nobody likes to commute and everybody likes to live in low cost place. I think it just, I think what's happening is we're going through a great reset of salaries and compensation. So this great reset in tech and business and media is, you know, going to be impacted by two major forces remote work, global re... |
Right. Well, you know, I was preparing for my interview with Reid Hoffman, you know, the LinkedIn co founder who just stepped off the opening board. And so I was talking to chat GBT, and like asking him for question advice. I thought, on the one hand, it was a very useful tool to think through things. It knew generally... | Like, uh, this is hilarious while we're talking just to show you the power of like this technology in its most early state, I decided to, uh, type in the doing an interview with the prompt I gave was what question should I ask read Hoffman on a podcast ask questions in the voice of Joe Rogan. All right, folks, we got a... |
There's no spice. | Yeah, no spice. But if you were a college kid learning how to do sure, a podcast, they would be like, yeah, asking about their career. You co founded LinkedIn. Okay, getting more specific is now the world's professionalism. What is the original inspiration behind LinkedIn? Pretty good question. Original inspiration que... |
But they're very old. Yeah, yeah. It could Yeah, they're very generic. | The generic today. But if you said, you know, if I think the interesting thing is, you're going to be able to say, those questions are pretty generic, can we get right, something a little more spicy, and it's gonna be like, okay, spice it up. |
I mean, I'm extremely bullish. To be clear, I think this is huge. I mean, it's regular people on the street, I feel like I go to the gym locker room, people are talking about it. You know, like there are lots of things, crypto or whatever, that Silicon Valley gets itself hyped up about that nobody else cares about. Thi... | I'm trying to figure out what's more shocking, that she does it for email or that you have a fiancee. Hey, welcome to the All In pod. I feel like I could do a pod where I break the chops a little bit. Yeah, my favorite is we've gotten to the point in which and look at these, like this gave me like more questions than i... |
It's not bad. I think it's very safe. This is where I'm almost with the Elon's of the world or whatever. I feel like I worry that it's just like, I already hate bland corporate speak with humans. I don't want this AI machine to just there's no spice in that. Like what? | Yeah, I just feel like boring. Right. I mean, right. If chat GPT and if Microsoft is making chat GPT safe for that use case, totally understandable. Right. But then again, like, search engines have like, filled with porn and hate speech and every possible corner. So if it is being compared to search, there should be a ... |
Yeah, I, on the one hand, I'm supportive of, you know, more unrestrained. On the other hand, I do just worry and I don't know what the solution is to this. They're very psychologically persuasive, you know, like the whole episode with like, Sydney and being that, you know, Kevin Roose, New York Times. Yeah. Ben Thompso... | Okay, imagine this. You got an idea for a great tech startup and you think it's going to change the world, but you got a problem. You just don't have the engineers that you need to make it come true. Why? Well, it's obvious. It's hard to find engineers. There's a lot of competition. And hey, you're trying to keep your ... |
Right? I mean, OpenAI is obviously the elephant in the room. OpenAI has an extremely complex structure. It's sort of a nonprofit. It's sort of for profit. Microsoft has a deal with them that we don't totally know. I just say that to say, okay, it's possible. OpenAI is the Facebook of social, but all these venture capit... | But there's tons. Making images, yeah. Right, right. So that's really interesting. If you were to look at those first two, these are gonna have overlap already. They're massively funded. There's a limited amount of talent in the space. I hear AI developers go for low single digit millions a year. That's, you know, the ... |
I don't know. That's a good, I should do a story on sort of the individual comp. And I also want to do a story on just like, I feel like there are certain key researchers that make some of these companies are relevant if they have them and not if they don't. So it's definitely, it's like basketball. I mean, it's like a... | It is today, Brad Gerstner said on the all in pod last week, when he sat in for free Berg, that yeah, Google was paying somebody 4 million in stock in cash. So that makes sense. If you got a whatever trillion dollar company, give a couple million dollars in equity. And this is the future of the company where you have t... |
Were you, Stability's out there raising around right now. I think it might've been Fortune said they were looking for 4 billion. | Perplexity, that was another one. |
Yeah, that was, I scooped it. NEA. Oh, you did, okay. I scooped it, NEA was doing it. And then I think Insider followed up with some of the details. I mean, there are a ton, you know, I just published like a market map So it depends. You know, there, there are a lot that battery ventures have put together. I mean, basi... | Extraordinary. That's wild. Yeah. It does seem to me, we are now going to have 25 well funded competitors in each of these spaces, right? Their products are going to be non differentiated. And it's going to be a race to the bottom in terms of the cost. per API use. So I think this is like the Uber versus Lyft versus Do... |
Characters and films right so many successful companies and that was my. Original plan with opening that sometimes we see only one big company come out but but i mean i do think it's like a huge technological transformation like we're saying i mean it's a case where. you could see why generative AI, large language mode... | If you look at Yammer, Saksis company, they didn't make the jump when they were at Microsoft to mobile. and neither did hip chat. And then slack was mobile first, and they won the day. And then you look at, you know, mobile operating systems, you know, and the impact that had on productivity software, or cloud, and you... |
I'm curious what you think about this as an investor, if I'm allowed to ask a question. | Yeah, you can ask me questions anytime. |
I mean, so obviously software multiples have collapsed, right? But meanwhile, we're seeing these AI companies raise insane valuations and it's hard to even know what the fundamentals underpinning them are. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, how do we reconcile that? And also, like, do you think, I guess one theory of the worl... | So it's not even returned, because they hadn't drawn the money down. |
They said, just said, push it to the next fund or | Or Yeah, we'll just we'll make the size of this fund smaller, because the companies are not asking for more money. They're not asking for giant valuations. Therefore, we can be more efficient. So maybe some of their top LP said, You know what, we're doing so poorly. Do you think you might want to make this a little sma... |
So that could have been a back and forth discussion. | My sense is they're they do well, but they have the all in strategy for whatever their top investment is. So it is super binary. I'm an LP and a couple of founder funds. Yeah. And so without speaking about it, you know, insider information, Brian Singerman has always said, you know, we just want to figure out what is o... |
And they exit positions at the peak, whereas others like held on, I think, did sell some positions. | That's right. Yeah. |
So, but my question was just, this idea that investors are paid to deploy capital, they want an excuse to deploy capital. And this is a good one. Like, do you you see that as a persuasive? Like, do you think there's what I would say you have a fund? | Yeah, so it's you're getting close, you're close. And as a person who's outside as a journalist, you're actually keying into something. it's not that they're paid to deploy. And they need to put the money out there, they know they're going to find an investment, what they need is high quality investments that they thin... |
The one thing I'd point out is like 2021 was an environment where you could be a talented investor by seeing where the momentum was. People were momentum investors. And so you could play this valuation game. It's like, this is a company that's going to raise at a higher valuation. And with generative AI, there is a sen... | remember what Bill Gurley always says, and I think he quoted it from somewhere else, you can't eat IRR, right? You can't eat the statistic that we use the rate of return. So you have to actually get that return. So I think a lot of neophyte investors were excited to do momentum investing in private markets, but never r... |
Some people, I think they're like, homebrew, right? Did they sell out? You know, there are funds that I think that most people held on to their winners. | I did try to in 2021, you know, I didn't go out looking for secondary opportunities. But when secondary opportunities came in, I did take advantage of them. because I was like, why not lock in some wins here when we're up massively. And that was smart, because the first fund already returned its principal, you know, al... |
I mean, it's the the SVB stock price is crazy. I mean, it really like the debates about whether we went through a.com type experience. Obviously, there are lots of differences. But yes, we'd be stock price is definitely one that makes you like do pretty shocking version, though. Yeah, hit max. It looks like Bitcoin. Th... | Well, Reuters notes, just to that point that SVB sold 21 billion of its securities portfolio CNBC noted that mostly consisted of US Treasury bonds and the company estimated that the fire sale would result in a post tax loss of 1.8 billion essentially the bank is reworking its balance sheet and incurring a large loss fr... |
And right before I came on the call, I saw TechCrunch had published a story saying some, you know, investors are advising their startups like whole money from SUV that obviously would, you know, run on the bank run would be the nightmare situation. So even if nothing is really fundamentally wrong, I don't know either w... | So if people were to remove their cash from Silicon Valley Bank, that could be a problem. Or if they were if they have a Silicon Valley Bank, debt facility, a wise thing to do would be to pull that down. So you have it maybe if you had the option. And, you know, this is something that I have had a problem with in early... |
I think the broader issue beyond Silicon Valley Bank is just that there are a lot of startups that raised hundreds of millions of dollars that haven't really felt the pain yet. We've seen lots of layoffs, but I still think the fallout for private companies is pretty slow. The public market reacts, you see it, the valua... | Um, you know, if you, um, so to your point, Eric, um, is it too much doom and gloom? there are some companies that raise that large amount of money without product market fit. That is a challenge. That is a serious challenge. If they did have product market fit, and there's a there there, in other words, they have 50 m... |
So then you have to retire if you made all your money in 2021. | Or if you think that fund can never return and get you carry, you might be like, okay, start a new firm. So I think some people did that some more quotes came in from the Silicon Valley Bank CEO, New York based venture firm USV this week, Unisquare Ventures, Fred Wilson sent an email to founders advising them. This is ... |
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