Episode Description: Dan talks with Joe Marchese, Executive Chairman & Build Partner at Human Ventures, about Snap’s struggles amid an advertising downturn (2:35), unlocking Twitter’s full potential and its brewing courtroom fight with Elon Musk (6:36), Netflix’s make-or-break push into ad-supported subscriptions (9:37), challenges with evaluating the performance of digital ads (18:45), the intensifying competition between Alphabet/Google and Amazon (29:09), if TikTok is the new center of culture creation (34:54), and whether Apple will become a dominant player in the streaming wars and digital advertising (43:40).
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00:00 Hey listeners, it's Dan here. I want to tell you about a company that I'm really excited about.
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00:26 Banking services provided by and Visa debit card issued by Choice Financial Group, member FDIC,
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00:37 Welcome to OK Computer. I am Dan Nathan. I am joined by someone today who has been on the pod before,
00:45 but he's probably the most mentioned, I guess, name-dropped person on OK Computer.
00:50 It is Joe Marchese. He is a very good friend of mine. He is the Executive Chairman of Human Ventures.
00:57 Joe, welcome back to OK Computer.
01:00 Thank you for having me back.
01:01 So here's the deal. You just poured yourself a nice glass of Comos.
01:04 Most people who come on the pod get a bottle of Comos, as you know, on the way back.
01:08 So you're not doing this for the tequila.
01:10 No, I actually like your company.
01:12 You like my company and you like the conversation. All right, listen, we have a lot to cover today.
01:17 This is our holiday shortened week episode of OK Computer.
01:21 It was Labor Day. We are recording this on Labor Day, but I just thought we'd kind of chat a little bit.
01:26 I know this is a huge day for you coming up. It's Apple's big iPhone launch day, which it is not.
01:31 But we're going to cover some things about that. Why is it not yours? You're the green guy.
01:36 Are you picking on me for having an Android? Being a man of the people,
01:40 like this is it is much more used internationally as an operating system.
01:44 You are the green guy, your WhatsApp guy, and you're the guy with the latest Samsung phone.
01:48 No, but we're going to talk a little bit about what Apple is doing, possibly on the bundling front.
01:52 And that is, I think, has a lot of really interesting implications for some of their other services,
01:57 just kind of conditioning their user to pay kind of monthly fee for the hardware and the services.
02:02 But I also want to talk about it seems like you started a digital ad tech company.
02:06 You sold it to Fox in 2015. You became the head of advertising revenue for Fox Networks.
02:13 And it's just interesting to me. And you and I talk about this a lot.
02:16 You've been on CBC's Fast Money with me talking about it.
02:18 It seems like the guys who are getting away from the cable bundle are now thinking about what ads look like.
02:24 Right. Is subscriptions supposed to save content? And then all the bundling guys, I mean, they don't even know what to do.
02:29 They're just starting their own streaming services because they want the recurring revenue.
02:32 So just a lot to talk about as it relates to anything that's Disney plus or anything plus or anything like that.
02:38 So I want to hit all that. But first things first, let's talk a little bit about Snap.
02:43 Last week, Snap announced that they were laying off 20 percent of their workers and they were restructuring the business.
02:49 They were cutting a lot of problems. Give me your thoughts when you think about that.
02:53 Because, again, you know, this is a company that basically what, 90 some percent of their revenues comes from digital advertising.
03:00 Yeah, no. And I think this is going to be the case for a lot of companies.
03:03 And I know we'll touch on Twitter, which in some ways is has a lot of the same problems as Snap,
03:08 but also couldn't be more different because Twitter is a media company.
03:11 But for Snap, you know, what's been interesting is that Evan kind of famously and I think rightfully said that Snapchat isn't a media company.
03:20 They don't have influencers on Snapchat. It's a place for real friends.
03:22 And he underlines the word real and it's a communication and self-expression tool and it's private.
03:27 And so all of those things that I just described don't sound like a media company.
03:32 Normally you associate advertising with media companies, not with utility companies.
03:36 But what Snap had is such a large, engaged audience.
03:39 And when it had a device ID on mobile, they could turn that into what is called direct response advertising and performance advertising,
03:47 because they could get credit for a lower funnel activity, meaning, you know,
03:51 they know this person might be in market for X, Y, Z, movie or e-commerce, retail, whatever it might be.
03:57 And so that was kind of a bit of a golden goose for them for a while, even though their platform wasn't optimized for.
04:04 They don't have intent the way Google or Facebook has intent.
04:07 Like for Google, you search for the movie you want to go see.
04:10 On Facebook, you're talking to your friends about these movies or you're posting things and you're letting it know.
04:14 And so Snap, it found upside in that advertising, but I think it has so much more potential on the brand side.
04:19 And it always had more brand advertisers, but that's just been out of vogue in the advertising industry.
04:24 Yeah, well, talk to me a little bit about like, so this company went public in March of 2017.
04:29 It's never been profitable on a gap basis.
04:32 And when you think about this, and I know that you're not like a financial analyst or whatever,
04:36 but, you know, they're going to do a little less than five billion dollars in revenue this year.
04:40 And net income, that income is supposed to be a loss of one point three billion dollars.
04:45 So the question is, and that's been ballooning year over year here.
04:49 So is this company on that sort of revenue base with the reliance on that revenue model?
04:55 Is this a going concern as a standalone?
04:58 It's a very big question to say, is it a going concern as a standalone?
05:01 I think you and I have talked before about like, you know, would it make sense for someone like them and Twitter to be together or others?
05:07 But I would say it's a going concern as a influential and useful company to tens of millions, hundreds of millions of teens.
05:15 And that it will grow and has utility.
05:17 I do think you're the question you're asking is fair, which is, can it get there on a direct response advertising model, which is what what mobile wants, what the Internet wants?
05:27 And I think the answer is no on that pure advertising model.
05:30 But the good thing about being a utility, and it's funny, all these streaming services that were subscription based are now figuring out advertising.
05:38 I think all these utilities that were advertising based are going to figure out subscription and they're going to come the other way.
05:43 And if you have utility and you provide value to your users, which Snap does, obviously, like they were one of the few that was up in engaged time with its monthly active users in the last earnings, even though it was down in the advertising or at least versus expectations.
05:58 So that is the going concern.
06:00 But I actually think it's a very fair question to say if they continue to try to chase, like you don't try to compete with Google and Facebook and now Amazon on their own turf of knowing who's going to buy a product.
06:11 I do think that's a losing battle.
06:12 Yeah, well, it's interesting.
06:13 And the reason I mentioned like, can they go it alone is that Twitter is obviously a profitable company, similar revenue base.
06:21 I mean, net income on a gap basis, they're expected to lose a little bit adjusted.
06:25 But again, I mean, similar revenue basis, similar monthly daily active users, whatever, like the daily monetizable active users.
06:32 I think that's Twitter's metric.
06:34 They're both in and around that kind of 300 million sort of level here.
06:38 And so I just go back to it, putting my kind of stock market hat on is like if Twitter didn't have this this forty three billion dollar bid from Elon Musk that he's trying to get out of.
06:49 OK, and this company has a thirty billion dollar enterprise value right now.
06:53 So it's trading at a big discount to the agreed upon deal.
06:56 This is obviously going to court.
06:58 A lot of people think he could be forced to buy this company if he has to pay forty three billion dollars for Twitter.
07:04 Then Snap is probably the most mispriced, one of the cheapest media or ad based kind of revenue models that exists on the planet at 18 billion.
07:13 And I got to tell you, if he's forced to do that, then I think we get an activist group together and we take this thing private.
07:21 And I mean that sincerely because it needs to be retooled and maybe it needs to be retooled out of the public eye, if you will, because investor updates every quarter and all this sort of stuff that goes with it.
07:33 Maybe it's just not a good environment for them to do what they need to do to kind of really expand on this brand.
07:39 To your point, that has, you know, like this huge influence of hundreds of millions of you.
07:44 This is the point that I think is fun to talk about, which is the similarity in both advertiser makeup for Snap and Twitter.
07:51 If they're a little more brand, Twitter has even more brand advertisers and less direct response.
07:55 And some of the troubles and some of the headwinds they're facing competing with Facebook and Google and Amazon.
07:59 But then you get to the part that's totally different. Snap and Twitter couldn't be any more different.
08:04 Twitter is a media platform. Twitter has influencers, you know, some of them famous, some of them infamous that advertisers sometimes they want to be around.
08:12 Sometimes they don't want to be. It's like being around the news and it's edgier.
08:15 The other thing that Twitter has is advertisers since the beginning of advertising have wanted to be around culture creation.
08:22 Right. That was the whole point with TV. Right. You wanted to buy being around culture creation and you paid for it in those commercials.
08:28 And so Twitter has culture creation. And this is the funny part about the Elon bid.
08:33 Right. To me, which is if you're Elon or you're anybody and you're looking at Twitter and one day you're like this company shapes the rise and fall of governments like this company has influences, popular culture and what's funny and what people watch and the water cooler conversation the next day.
08:50 It does. But you can't monetize it. And so media companies before Twitter have always had outsized influence in the world and undersized monetization.
08:59 And it's always been hard to kind of get people to pay for it. Snap, on the other hand, truly is a utility and not a media company.
09:05 So the question is, Twitter is looking at different monetization streams. They've got a subscription option now. They have a reduced ad load.
09:12 I think if you get Twitter blue, you can use the edit button that people have been hammering for forever. I think that these advertising based companies are going to start racing towards figuring out how do people value the product or service that we give them?
09:25 Because advertising as an industry isn't properly valuing their influence because they don't have a product that works like that.
09:31 So let's switch gears a little bit, because part of that snap announcement last week when they're going to be cutting all those jobs is that two key executives, Jeremy Gorman and Peter Naylor, both of whom are taking jobs at Netflix.
09:43 That is per the information here. So talk to me a little bit about this, because this is something you've been tracking fairly closely.
09:50 Now, Netflix has had a hard time with the deceleration right post pandemic. They saw this huge pull forward, and now they've seen this deceleration of user growth and they have a lot more competition as it relates to original content.
10:04 And they've decided that they want to capture some of these nonpaying users who are on family accounts, and they want to offer an ad supported model.
10:12 So they're going around and they're picking off some big execs from some big platforms. Thoughts here about their success?
10:18 And I know that they originally they were thinking that this might be an early 2023 thing. It sounds like they're going to launch this ad supported model as soon as November.
10:27 Yeah, I mean, they launched the ad supported model by November. It will be a very impressive feat.
10:32 And I know both Jeremy and Peter, and I am very much rooting for Netflix in this space.
10:38 Let's talk about what the challenges will be, though. One, live is the cornerstone of brand advertising sports.
10:45 They think like 18 of the top 20 broadcasts on television now, and it's just going up are sports.
10:51 And that's the anchor. And then you buy a bunch of commercials to go with it. And so that is a big deal. And that's something Netflix doesn't have yet.
10:59 So if we move past that, the next thing is that you ask yourself the question, is Netflix at the center of culture creation?
11:06 And it is. So, OK, brands want to be there. But how many impressions are they going to have? How long will commercial breaks be?
11:12 Which content do they have the rights to put ads into? And then if they don't have a broad base of advertisers, I'm not talking about the top 100 advertisers.
11:20 I'm talking they need thousands and thousands of advertisers so that you, Dan, when you're binging a show, don't see an ad for the 50th time in an hour.
11:27 That's the frequency problem. That's the user experience. All good. Any entrepreneur or founder that comes through the door at Human Ventures, all good challenges or opportunities.
11:36 Netflix isn't starting with a legacy ad model that it has to try to fix. It could start and do something bigger and better, something different.
11:44 The problem is they have to both do something different and then they have to get a market that is billions and billions of dollars with a lot of momentum behind it.
11:51 So TV still has it. And the reason TV has it is because if they do leave the television ecosystem, they just go Facebook, Google.
11:58 They go from above the line to below the line. They're not willing to do anything different in branding, pricing.
12:03 And so that is both the challenge and the opportunity Netflix has. And I think that this is going to take a couple of reps to get it right.
12:10 Well, let's talk about that live, because people have speculated for a very long time.
12:13 Some of these big media platforms have bid in the past for sports rights. We've seen Twitter do it.
12:19 Amazon has done it. People think that Apple is going to go big into that, too.
12:23 And when you think about Netflix, it's a small company now. I mean, it's got a hundred billion dollar market cap, which I know sounds kind of big, but it's down at its lows.
12:33 A couple of months ago, it was down 76 percent from its all time highs, and now it's up about 38 percent.
12:38 I do think it's interesting that the stock, even after having a disappointing quarter and guide, the stock kind of held its gains.
12:45 It's up now about 38 percent or so from those lows a couple of months ago.
12:50 But here's a company that was widely criticized. A pillar of the bear case in the stock market for Netflix for years was all of the cash that they were burning to create original content.
13:01 And the whole idea was they're going to create this huge moat, right?
13:05 They're going to have people locked in and they're never going to cancel their subscription because of this continuous, I guess, flywheel of content.
13:13 Well, the problem is with all the competitors, they have much deeper pockets when you think of the big platforms.
13:19 And then the media companies, they obviously pull their catalogs off.
13:22 So I guess the question is, if they go on a binge to start buying sports rights because they want to put ads in them, it seems like a tough road to hoe.
13:30 Yeah, look, that would be a very, very tough road.
13:33 One, I don't get how so many people think just buying sports rights is like that. That's what you do.
13:39 If you bought the rights to the NFL, you don't just point a camera at the field and then have it streaming.
13:44 The sports leagues know that their value is not in showing the game alone.
13:49 Their value is in you need to know who the players are. You need stories.
13:52 When you watch an NFL game and they give you the backstory on the tackle who came up through Oklahoma State, storytelling in sports is so underappreciated.
14:03 We just experience it, right?
14:05 So getting giving the streaming rights like this is going to happen this year with Amazon, where they're going to produce these games.
14:11 They're not just going to take someone else's stream and that's expensive.
14:13 And then you have to do it right. And the leagues care very much about keeping the value of their IP.
14:19 I also think this is a great point to the to the snap Twitter conversation we were just having earlier.
14:24 Every major media company other than Netflix makes most of its money from something besides being a media company.
14:32 Apple sells phones like we talked about, maybe a bundle. Amazon sells everything.
14:36 Disney uses the IP for parks and cruises, merchandise, etc.
14:41 So I think that what you have here is you and even the Paramount and NBC, NBCU has cable.
14:47 Paramount still has a lot of cable revenue from bundles.
14:50 So you have this environment where media companies figure out how to make money and monetize in other ways or they get bought by companies that do.
14:59 Netflix is the lone player that is truly global in production.
15:04 It has made the go at doing volume and this advertising tier, if they do it differently, is an opportunity.
15:09 But but that's the challenge. Yeah. All right. Well, you just brought up Apple.
15:12 There's an article in the FT today, I think Monday, that was really pretty interesting.
15:16 Apple plans to double its digital advertising business workforce.
15:20 Now, Gavin Baker of a treaties management quote tweeted this.
15:23 And I thought it was really interesting. He said the most interesting part about this story was that they have five billion dollars of revenue with only 250 people on the team.
15:33 So they're talking about building that team. I thought there was a couple of other really interesting things in this article, though, talking about, listen, they have a billion Apple iPhone users.
15:42 They have one point eight billion iOS devices out there.
15:46 When you think about who owns the digital advertising space, they quoted at four hundred billion dollars in twenty twenty one.
15:54 So it's Google at about 210 and it's Facebook at about 115.
15:58 And then everyone else is, you know, the other ones. We'll talk about Amazon in a minute because they're growing pretty fast.
16:04 Also, what are your thoughts about a company like this that has actually been really careful to diverge too much away from this hardware strategy?
16:12 Obviously, services is a really important part of the Apple story.
16:16 It's a much higher margin business. But here's a company that's defied all logic when it comes to hardware, because they have gross margins now on their entire business that are about 40 percent or so.
16:28 And they literally have like 90 percent of the gross margin in hardware.
16:32 So if you want to get a bigger multiple, even on that really good margin on their hardware, the faster they can grow in services and then advertising is better than multiple.
16:42 So curious your thoughts about Apple's ability to kind of get in there and really grow this to, I don't know, 30 billion, 40 billion, 50 billion in the next five years or so.
16:50 I wouldn't doubt that they can get there.
16:52 I mean, I'd put it back to you as someone who analyzes companies like this.
16:56 When you say doubling a staff of that size in a company that big, as big as Apple is, it's still nothing in the grand scheme of Apple.
17:04 Right. So I think that's a good signal to the street saying we're doubling.
17:07 This team means we're taking this seriously. It's a high margin business.
17:10 But I think that they care a lot about privacy, or at least that's what they're putting into the market.
17:15 That's everything we've done that's defanged, unintended there.
17:18 Some of the advertising businesses was for privacy.
17:21 We should discuss that because I actually I have some pretty strong thoughts on that.
17:25 Well, let's do it. I mean, so it was the app tracking and transparency.
17:28 And in that FT article, I think it was really interesting.
17:31 Our mutual friend, David Steinberg, CEO of Zeta Global, he was quoted as saying that this was Machiavellian and brilliant and brilliant by adopting privacy rules that force rivals to rebuild their ad infrastructure, simultaneously creating an opening for itself to fill the void.
17:48 They could build it out their advertising business dramatically and the air cover is they are protecting the consumer's privacy.
17:55 So thoughts on that. I'd love to get your take in general on the whole move.
17:58 I mean, I so I kind of agree with him, but I have a more friendly view of Apple doing this and that.
18:06 I mean, I kind of somewhat loudly said even when I was in the advertising business, I wish we could apply ad blockers to everybody's computer.
18:14 I wish I wish everybody get to start from scratch because the ad industry is so polluted.
18:19 Well, let's take a step back. So about a year, what, a year and a half ago, Apple, they started advertising all over TV about this, about their privacy.
18:27 And they created this. I guess it's kind of a new was an Apple ism, if you will.
18:31 It was app tracking transparency. So every app that's in the iOS app store, basically there needs to be an opt in for these companies to track your data.
18:40 And so what did we see after that? It took a few quarters, but companies like Snap, Twitter to a lesser degree, but Facebook got absolutely nailed.
18:50 So just describe what happened there. Why did it hit Snap and Facebook so hard?
18:54 There's a couple of views of it. One is that if advertisers have been taught by Facebook and Google, mostly, mostly Google, then then they'll go Facebook.
19:03 And now Amazon, if you can't measure it, don't buy it. And all of these companies that were chasing below line needed to have a needed to have a close loop and say, oh, look, see that that ad that you served here.
19:15 The person bought it six months later, two months later, one week later, pick pick the time frame.
19:20 But here's where I diverge from the narrative that's out there that like this really hurt ad effectiveness.
19:27 This just hurt the ability to get credit for advertising is working or not working.
19:31 Right. It didn't hurt. The ads could still be served in a lot of different ways.
19:35 Yes, you couldn't follow someone and then serve the ad to them. But but I want us to think through something.
19:40 This is the part that's always bothered me. If billions of dollars of advertising effectiveness got wiped out, you have to believe then that human beings who were going to do one thing would have done something different if they could have been targeted with an ad that consumer spending had to shift.
19:54 Like during that period when all that advertising went away, did consumer spending go down in aggregate? I mean, not that I saw in any meaningful charts what we're saying.
20:02 So you have to believe one of three things that the ad was just getting placed and then they could get credit for it because there's enough people on Snap.
20:09 There's enough people on Twitter. There's enough people on Facebook that you can figure out who's going to buy a Ford or who's going to buy, you know, who's going to.
20:15 Or you can convince someone who wasn't going to spend any money to then now download this app and spend five ninety nine on the thing, which does happen some of the time, but not all of the time.
20:25 And then whether that's good or bad, that people should be doing that. And so I think that there's a difference between performance advertising went away versus people weren't able to claim as much credit for all the same purchases consumers were making.
20:36 And it's somewhere in between. It's not one or the other. And so I'm a fan of this happening so that ad models can get a little more honest about how they work.
20:45 I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't like see a McRib ad on Twitter and then zombie walk into a McDonald's like that's just not what Twitter ads don't work.
20:54 But I think one of the reasons why people actually don't mind Instagram ads is they're doing a really good job serving things to you that they basically the algo has trained that right to serve that ad.
21:05 Because I actually do zombie by things on Instagram because it's literally feel like it's tapped into my brain.
21:11 But I will also tell you this and you probably see this as a power user of Twitter and maybe it's Twitter Bluetooth.
21:18 I never see any ads. I see some promoted tweets, but I never see real ads. And so they drop the ball.
21:24 They had the opportunity to do micro payments and e-commerce and all that sort of thing.
21:29 So I mean, Twitter's dropped every ball imaginable on this front. Yes, I'm going to go a big yes.
21:35 But here, which is I mean, I still see some ads. I still think that it's highly effective placement because you have attention.
21:41 I think the problem is you are missing two things. So let's say Google has your intent and Facebook has your interest.
21:48 Really, Instagram has your interest, but you're like your commercial interest, whereas Twitter has.
21:54 This is what I find funny, right? This is what I find interesting for the news. This is what makes me makes me angry.
22:00 None of those things are good indicators of, hey, time to go buy something.
22:03 So just because they could have all the data in the world on you, Dan,
22:07 and you're reading a Twitter stream because there's something happening in a country somewhere and there's flooding in Pakistan, you're like, well, now is not a time to serve a Lexus ad.
22:15 And so their product enhancement does come from thinking about different ad formats.
22:21 But there is great time to serve an ad when we're all talking about the Oscars or we're all talking about an NBA game or all type.
22:26 And that is what Twitter focuses on. It's just the mechanism for getting advertisers to pay enough.
22:31 This is, again, back to the same thing, cultural relevancy.
22:34 Can I ask you, I never asked you this question before. So in the last, I want to call it 20, 30 minutes of the Oscars.
22:40 And I'm just thinking about this because you brought it up and you're wearing a tequila, Como's T-shirt right now.
22:45 You guys had an ad, OK, it was either right before or right after the slap.
22:50 What did that ad do for your brand awareness?
22:53 Because you happen to be in the half an hour that everybody was focused on as they were gearing up towards the biggest awards and then the biggest unscripted or maybe scripted, I don't know, event ever on that stage.
23:05 Was that like a monumental event for you? And you're somebody who knows how to evaluate the relevancy of an ad.
23:13 I'll put it this way. My first answer is I don't know what it really did for the brand overall.
23:17 I mean, I know it got seen and I know it's very valuable, but this is the same thing I think about out of home.
23:22 Like I'm on the board of Clear Channel and I just love billboard and out of home industry. Right.
23:27 And the truth is, you don't know how effective an ad is in a short period of time because who are you really marketing to?
23:33 Like, are you marketing to consumers because you think people are just going to go buy that tequila next time they see Como's?
23:38 Or are you marketing to the buyer at Four Seasons who's like, oh, everyone who is watching the Oscars is now going to expect that I have this at my bar or are you going on the list of who you're talking to with it?
23:49 But then what I think is amazing about big moments like the Oscars, sports like the NFL and out of home has this very similar thing.
23:58 They have this bit of meta information in the ad that's not actually in the ad.
24:01 So you've never seen a billboard that says we have a billboard, so we must be a serious company so you can you can take us seriously.
24:08 Right. But every time you see a billboard, you're like, oh, that must be a serious company.
24:13 You saw all those digital, all the DTC advertising companies that we work with or that we've even seen in the New York ecosystem.
24:19 There's been a lot of them once they move to like subway advertising billboards because direct response advertising is a treadmill that you can't get off if you don't build a brand.
24:29 Building a brand requires that you market to groups of people, not just people buying your product.
24:34 And so going back to the Oscars or buying a billboard or like happen to love trucks because they're on wheels with advertising.
24:41 There's just something to advertising like that that delivers a message that isn't even in your creative.
24:47 And that is incredibly powerful. The thing that tech companies are uncomfortable with.
24:51 And it's because they've been taught by Facebook, Google and Amazon.
24:54 If you can't measure, if you don't have an immediate feedback loop, don't buy it.
24:57 Well, that means that everything that's hard to measure is probably getting wildly undervalued, like incredibly undervalued.
25:02 Well, it's interesting when I think about that commercial in particular, though, I can only imagine how many people went and just Googled tequila combos.
25:09 Yeah, I mean. Right. And so the hits that you had, whether it be on your site or your socials, was probably something that just from a brand awareness stuff made a lot of sense.
25:18 Just real quickly on the AT&T, though, the app tracking. What was the effect on YouTube, for instance?
25:23 Right. Obviously, the largest kind of property, if you will. It's really the only social property that exists of all the Google platforms.
25:31 Just curious your thoughts, like because it seems like they were kind of unscathed a little bit, too.
25:35 I think they have so much first party data that if you're searching on Google, you're searching on their apps.
25:40 They have so much information on their own in their ecosystem.
25:44 I would say that they would be the least affected by that.
25:48 And I mean, everything seems to apply that way. I don't know internally how things moved around.
25:52 They could have lost some advertisers who were trying to track a certain way and picked up others, but like they could fill it up.
25:58 The most interesting thing about YouTube that doesn't get enough attention is that in CTV, in this world where Disney Plus and Netflix and Paramount and go down the list of giant media companies are going,
26:10 the number one streaming app on the wall is actually YouTube and your TV at home.
26:16 And that's the number one ad supported streaming app. It is the most watched time.
26:20 It's weird to have an 800 pound gorilla that nobody talks about in an ad ecosystem because everyone's thinking about how is Netflix and Amazon and Disney Plus going to do.
26:28 So I think that that's very interesting. I think the question I've always had is long tail advertising.
26:35 It's very hard to produce a 30 second spot that's good. It's very hard to produce.
26:39 Like making a search ad is easy. Making a banner ad is a little less easy, but still easy enough.
26:43 Making a commercial that's good enough to put in the middle of Stranger Things, good enough to interrupt Game of Thrones, that's pretty hard to not be jarring.
26:52 And so that shrinks your universe of advertisers significantly.
26:56 So Netflix was talking about doing a lot of product placement or that was some of the early thoughts that how they might kind of do that.
27:01 Is that something that you think is interesting?
27:03 I do not. I love product placement from a brand perspective, from a publisher and creative perspective.
27:08 You know, it's hard enough to make a show that's good to begin with, like to make a show that's good and then have product placement.
27:14 I mean, if you've if you've worked with creators and I did this at Fox, they'll work with you to a point to bring the Prius into whatever show ABC.
27:21 But there's a limit. And then also your problem is what do you pay for that? How long is the show going to run?
27:26 Do you know how it's going to rate? You know who's going to watch it?
27:28 So product placement. So it's a nice thing. It's like a cherry on top.
27:31 But it is in no way going to be a driver of massive advertising revenue.
27:37 Hey, Dan.
27:38 What up, guy?
27:39 You're into this FinTech. What's all this I'm hearing about Current?
27:42 You're going to like this guy. Current is a FinTech company that's completely disrupting traditional banking.
27:47 Wait a second. Does that mean I don't have to drive to the bank anymore?
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27:57 Well, I got to get this app. But where can I learn more?
27:59 It's super easy. Just go to Current.com/ok, O-K-A-Y, and download the app. That's Current.com/ok.
28:07 Current is a financial technology company, not a bank.
28:10 Banking services provided by and Visa debit card issued by Choice Financial Group, member FDIC,
28:16 pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. and can be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
28:21 Hey, it's Dan here. I'm excited to tell you about a $1 billion app that's disrupting the way people like you and me invest.
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29:17 Taboola uses AI to power recommendations for many of the world's top publishers and cell phone manufacturers.
29:23 You know Taboola if you ever went to websites like CNBC or USA Today.
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29:34 They also help brands reach over 500 million daily users, which makes them a compelling alternative to Facebook and Google ad platforms.
29:42 Taboola has long-term exclusive partnerships with publishers, which means they help people like you and me discover content outside of social media.
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29:58 So the pie is kind of growing in digital. And I want to kind of broaden this out a little bit.
30:05 And I wanted to hit a lot of this just because we started with Snap.
30:08 You know one of the things in Amazon's quarter in Q2 that people were kind of pretty excited about is they did nearly $9 billion in ad revenue.
30:17 That was up 18% year over year, a higher growth rate than any of the major competitors.
30:22 Now obviously coming off a smaller base, we just said that Google is north of $200 billion in annual revenue, Facebook over $100 billion.
30:31 So now you think of Amazon doing $9 billion a quarter.
30:35 This is going to be a $50 billion business for them pretty soon.
30:38 We just talked about Apple and you think about their installed base of iOS devices and the App Store and all the services.
30:45 I mean this is going to be a $50 billion business probably in five years.
30:49 So the two next $100 billion annual ad revenue companies are going to be companies that do hundreds of billions of dollars in other revenue.
30:59 So how does that change the landscape?
31:01 So you have these two behemoths, then you have everyone else. You have the Snaps and the Twitters and everything like that.
31:07 Doesn't it change the game?
31:08 It does and Amazon's different. Amazon's the biggest one that actually is, I don't want to call it a threat because that would be speaking it too high,
31:17 but is really meaningful to Google's business or threatening to some portion of Google's business.
31:21 Because Google gets intent, I type into the Google search box with these certain headphones or those certain headphones and then the ads can then come.
31:29 Amazon, when you go in and type in, Amazon absolutely knows your shopping intent.
31:33 And what performance advertising becomes, first from Google, second from Amazon, then from Facebook, save your interest, maybe they do some discovery.
31:41 But we all talk about how the credit card companies, a lot of the fintech companies that we know out there and a lot of the talk in the crypto or DeFi world is that 2% or 3% or whatever the credit card fees are on is a tax on transactions.
31:55 But for another debate, that tax on transactions is for safety and customer service and everything else.
32:00 But advertising, performance advertising is a tax on all e-commerce, basically.
32:05 Like you are searching for Nikes and then you click through the ad to buy the thing.
32:08 It's more than 2% of the price of the Nike was probably what they're paying for those ads.
32:12 And so Amazon, same way. And more and more you see that on Amazon and Google, if they're the front door into what you're doing, they then can decide what tax to take.
32:22 And someone else wants to pay more than they get that spot.
32:25 Ones that are the brand side of the world that we talked about, Snap and Twitter and others, they're going to have to figure out one if they can convince the ad world, hey, you still need to build a brand over time.
32:34 You don't want to be just paying for that last attribution right at the end.
32:38 And if we can't, I struggle to see how this all plays out where brands are fully commoditized.
32:45 There was a point, we talked about this before, but there was a point, I don't know, six months ago, maybe a little further, that the richest people on planet Earth were Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault.
32:55 Jeff Bezos says your margin is my opportunity. And Bernard Arnault makes the best brands in the world with the highest margin.
33:01 And the middle is just gone. And I kind of think about that at a micro level for every startup.
33:06 I'm like, which one are you? I'm not saying you have to make luxury goods with like a Dior or Louis Vuitton.
33:12 You do have to decide is your brand and the quality of your product you stand by and that's the margin you're going to make and people come to you?
33:19 Or is there a risk that you'll be commoditized? Because I think that a lot of what's happened with this D2C and even with the ATT from Apple was that it just kind of showed who was just buying conversions over and over again.
33:32 That was not a sustainable business model to begin with.
33:35 And I ask a lot of small businesses, a lot of startups, like, what is your plan when you cap out on your direct response advertising?
33:43 Because the largest expense for every VC backed company, besides people, most VC backed companies, is the money they spend on Facebook, Google, Amazon. And that is mind blowing.
33:53 So let's talk about that for a second, because again, you have many portfolio companies that you advise on similar sort of issues.
34:00 You also speak to a lot of people. You just said you're on the Border Clear channel, not asking you what you guys are seeing from that.
34:06 But at the end of the day, I mean, it just seems like a lot of tech companies are bracing for a recession.
34:12 We're in a bit of a market downturn, downward pressure on valuation, on margins, on a whole host of sorts of things.
34:20 And so one of the easiest things that you can do is obviously cut marketing spend. We're seeing people also cut jobs.
34:26 So I'm curious how you think about that. If that's one of the biggest expenses, if you're forecasting a bit of a recession in the future and you don't have great visibility about your business, cutting ad spend seems like the logical course.
34:39 Yeah, it is. I also think cutting your brand advertising spend, the so-called above the line, even goes first, because you think that in order to maintain sales, you do the most effective stuff that's closest to the sale.
34:51 The problem is, like I said, that's a treadmill that you can't get off of. And so then you have to keep spending that money.
34:57 It's funny, advertising as a whole market, like the billions and billions of dollars in television and the tens of billions of dollars that flows through hundreds through the platforms is a marketplace.
35:09 So if some people are pulling back, then the people who are still spending, it gets cheaper for.
35:13 And so the people with a successful product, what we call in VC world product market fit, right, I guess just means something people actually want to spend money on or enjoy using, are massively advantaged when there isn't money sloshing around the ad.
35:27 Because if every VC backed company, there's tens of billions of dollars in the market, all going against Facebook and Amazon and Google ads to try to acquire users and get app downloads.
35:37 Even if your product is great, it's hard to reach people now in a market where that money isn't sloshing around really good products can rise to the top.
35:44 And the company we haven't talked about, which is astonishing this late into a conversation about the ad market is TikTok.
35:51 And it's really TikTok that's eating everything like mind share from consumers, but also mind share from media companies.
35:57 The companies think I need to have my TikTok presence and then mind share from the advertisers.
36:03 The difference of TikTok is we don't really see their ad products in the same way.
36:07 There's a lot of influencer marketing. There's a lot of things that we're still figuring out how to price.
36:11 But again, same theme. It is at the center of culture creation.
36:15 So brands want to be there, but they need to figure out how to attach to it and how do they value it.
36:19 So a lot of those influencers, though, who are probably getting paid to be on TikTok are kind of annoyed.
36:23 Kim Kardashian had that tweet, I think it was, or Instagram posts about Instagram copying with reels what's going on on TikTok.
36:31 And when you think about it again, I think about what's going on there.
36:35 And I think there's a very strong likelihood that TikTok gets banned in the US in the not so distant future, especially when you see some of the stuff that's going on.
36:42 There was this export ban of advanced AI chips for US chip companies to China.
36:47 I think it's just going to be a tit for tat. I think it's going to keep going back and forth.
36:51 And if you think about most of our digital companies do not have a footprint in China.
36:56 Well, what's one that we can easily I mean, the Trump administration is probably one of the only things I probably agreed with them about was that when he was trying to ban TikTok here.
37:06 But the way in which they were going about it, he was trying to put it in the hands of his pal, Larry Ellison, on a sweetheart deal.
37:12 That was never going to happen here. So I actually think this goes back to Snap in a way.
37:17 I think if TikTok were banned here in the US, I think Snap stock doubles kind of immediately.
37:22 And so I look at this period. I think it's been the sort of disconnect that we've seen in the tech markets, at least in the public markets so far, is reminiscent of what happened with tech stocks back in the highs in 2000 to the lows in '02.
37:37 And just to be really clear, it took the Nasdaq more than 12 years to get back to those highs from March of 2000.
37:45 And it's also very similar, but obviously very different by industry.
37:49 And what happened in the financial crisis with financial oriented companies, there's been some generational disconnects, you know what I mean, that have happened in the public markets.
37:58 Now, that doesn't mean the stock that goes down 75, 80 percent can't get cut in half again, especially in a period where we just don't know what the visibility looks like going forward here, how bad of an economic situation we're going to be in.
38:12 But I find some of these things that are down 80 percent really interesting from a brand value standpoint.
38:17 And I'm curious, again, this goes back to, let's just say Elon, and I suspect he gets out of buying Twitter and Twitter goes directly.
38:24 What's your bet over under?
38:26 If this whistleblower that came out a week or two ago hadn't come out, it really looked like the court in Delaware was moving towards making him close on the deal.
38:33 He had agreed to close on it.
38:35 I also think, though, that tech in general and a lot of ad supported models could be in for a massive reckoning if it is proven that Twitter has been fudging a lot of these bot numbers and stuff like that.
38:47 You've got to stop there on bot.
38:49 This is what everyone's got wrong, right?
38:51 It's not bots.
38:53 This is the thing.
38:54 We've created an image in people who don't really dig into this world too much of bots.
38:58 One person could run thousands of accounts.
39:01 They're more like what they'd call sock puppet accounts.
39:03 It's a real person signing up for a real account and doing a real thing or phone farm places, not bots.
39:09 Yes, and then that means Twitter wasn't lying or fudging anything.
39:13 But they know.
39:15 For instance, if you were looking at that business and you would basically see that behavior, they know that it's bullshit.
39:23 They know it's a farm.
39:24 I guess bot is just an all-encompassing term of not a real person.
39:28 But I think we've always had this idea of there's a certain amount of waste built in.
39:32 We've made the decision advertisers, the most culpable group in this whole thing is the advertisers.
39:38 Advertising broke the Internet because it created perverse incentives.
39:41 It said just give me more impressions, do this.
39:44 And that's why performance advertising became all the rage in Internet advertising.
39:47 Everyone's like I have no idea what you're selling me is real.
39:50 It sounds shady.
39:51 I have no idea if anyone's seeing my ad.
39:53 I'll just pay if someone ends up buying my shit.
39:55 That was what happened.
39:56 And that screwed up the Internet because then places that were beautiful places to have brands where they say, oh, I can put your Lexus ad here on the New York Times, but they're not going to buy it tomorrow.
40:04 I'm like, well, I don't really know how to value that.
40:06 So I'll just keep buying performance advertising.
40:08 And so it screws the good publishers.
40:10 But I think Twitter truly does culture create.
40:13 And like all of that noise is it is just noise.
40:16 But who cares?
40:17 I think you said if TikTok got banned, which I don't think it will, I think it would be more likely that it gets cordoned off to the U.S. somehow.
40:24 Maybe not in like a sweetheart deal, but it gets it becomes a U.S.-based business with the financial incentive still going back to its parent company, but with full management here.
40:32 But if it did, it wouldn't be.
40:34 Snap would go up significantly, but it would be it would be Facebook and Instagram that would breathe the biggest sigh of relief.
40:40 Like it'd be Facebook and Instagram that has the attention back.
40:43 But that Kardashian post, far be it from me to know what's happening inside of the head of Kim Kardashian, but was really not about, you know, I want to see friends.
40:53 I want to do it on Instagram.
40:55 You can become a media empire like Sam Less than had a great post on the information about this a couple of months ago, maybe even longer than that.
41:02 The pandemic really squeezed time.
41:04 But he had this post talking about how like they're the new Disney.
41:07 Right. They've created IP. They've got fans.
41:09 They can launch products off of it.
41:11 Well, TikTok, anybody could be a star on any given day.
41:14 And that's a lot better to have like any given day pick someone who does the most creative thing that day.
41:20 And then they're not as expensive as talent to keep.
41:23 And so that changes everything when you've democratized entertainment for people.
41:28 This is purely anecdotal, though.
41:30 But during the pandemic and I had two teenage girls, as you know, they were creating TikTok.
41:35 They were following TikTok dances.
41:37 This was an activity and they never do anymore.
41:39 They never, ever do.
41:40 And I think it's really interesting that two years later now, they've gone from being a participant in it, trying to actually do their own content to just consuming.
41:49 And that's not a great place to be, because when you look at people just kind of power search through reels on Instagram or whatever, it's not an engaged behavior, in my opinion.
42:00 It has switched to become I mean, I would have to see the numbers to know exactly.
42:04 And I don't think we're going to be given the numbers from TikTok.
42:08 But I think it feels like it's become slightly less participatory, but is still growing at breakneck speeds in terms of the amount of consumption that leap.
42:17 So YouTube has that on mobile, but then also has it on connected televisions on the TV in your living room.
42:23 No, Snap was going to make that transition to the TV somehow with all their publisher partnership, TikTok, what wants to do it.
42:29 And no one else has that.
42:31 Facebook wanted to do it.
42:32 Like everyone tried to have video on TV in your home and they just haven't.
42:36 Yeah, well, here's the thing.
42:38 So let's kind of reset this whole conversation a little bit, because I want to hit two more things before we get out of here.
42:42 It seems like as it relates to the app tracking, obviously works out very well for Apple here.
42:48 And I thought this was interesting because I mentioned Gavin Baker when I saw that article from the FT and I tweeted at him, David Steinberg's response.
42:57 And he said, yes, but utter dereliction of duty by regulators, most anti-competitive behavior I've witnessed from any tech company in the last 22 years.
43:05 He's saying 22 years.
43:06 That means Microsoft, right?
43:08 Prior to that, blatant abuse of market power to the disadvantage of small, medium businesses.
43:12 While list, I never use that.
43:14 Do you use that word while list?
43:15 I don't even know.
43:16 While list, while simultaneously breathtakingly hypocritical.
43:21 So I think you would agree with that comment.
43:23 I think that's pretty interesting.
43:25 No, I mean, yes.
43:28 I would like to see the small to medium businesses that weren't, you know, a lot of the ones that really suffered from the app tracking transparency, like not is like the affiliate marketers who were selling drop goods shipped from China.
43:40 Like it was kind of QVC like meets a dumpster.
43:43 Right.
43:44 Like basically, basically it's Alibaba.
43:46 Yeah.
43:47 Yeah.
43:48 I mean, like it was.
43:49 And then and then part two of that is like if the people that it's really disadvantaging is totally non-competitive behavior.
43:54 Sorry, anti-competitive behavior are Google and Facebook.
43:57 I mean, are we really saying that that's like we're crying or so if it's Google and Facebook, let them all fight.
44:03 They can fight with Apple on their own.
44:05 If it's if it really is the small business, I'd really like to see like because like a lot of the small businesses, I think I think SMBs get taken advantage of.
44:12 All local gets taken advantage of.
44:14 They overspend on performance advertising because it's very hard to be a sophisticated buyer of performance advertising at that level.
44:20 And then the ones who are sophisticated are gaming the consumer.
44:24 So I don't know that I'm too worried about it.
44:26 All right.
44:27 Well, there you go.
44:28 I mean, so but to me, this just is positive if you think about it for Apple's stock.
44:32 If you think the ability to grow a business the way that they've grown services, the way they've grown air pods.
44:37 It is.
44:38 But I think I think the bigger positive for Apple stock over the long term is if consumers like the Apple brand.
44:43 And if this is something that plays with consumers, it also advantages their ad business.
44:46 Well, even better.
44:47 But if but if they say to consumers over the long term, like you want Apple, that's the most valuable thing in the world to them.
44:54 Yeah. And so if we're just going to kind of think about this from a stock market perspective, I think it's neutral to positive for Apple.
45:00 I think it's negative for the smaller players.
45:03 We just named two five billion annual that are probably growing less than 20 percent a year.
45:07 That's snap in Twitter.
45:08 It's probably very negative for Facebook, which has gone negative as far as growth and really putting all their eggs in this whatever this metaverse basket is.
45:18 And it's probably Google just keeps winning because that's what they do here.
45:22 I wanted to hit one thing here.
45:24 So I made this joke to you that most people who have an iPhone in their pocket every year around this time, they kind of get geeked up and they're hoping for something that's not iterative.
45:33 Right. Some sort of new iPhone.
45:35 That's really exciting.
45:36 You don't seem to give a shit because you're the green guy in all of our messages here.
45:41 But, you know, one of the one of the things that people are speculating, they've been talking about this for a while, is the idea of basically creating a bundle and putting your hardware in a monthly subscription sort of fee.
45:51 And, you know, I think that's really interesting.
45:54 I'm on the iPhone upgrade program right now.
45:57 You get so if they could just make it just so simple for everybody, they give you a new phone every year.
46:03 You're paying a monthly fee.
46:04 You're getting a bunch of other stuff.
46:05 You're getting Apple plus the TV stuff in there.
46:08 You're getting a few other things and you don't even think about it.
46:11 I mean, you're there for life and most iOS users are already there for life.
46:14 So I think that'll be probably the most interesting thing that comes out of this Apple meeting this week.
46:19 I'm just curious how you think about that as somebody who's not in this ecosystem.
46:23 Yeah, I mean, I mean, I am.
46:25 I'm speaking on my MacBook right now.
46:27 Like, like, I actually think that's the most anti-competitive behavior from Apple is the fact that they make Android users outcast.
46:34 And I'm not in the family text message with Christy and the family because, like, I don't have an iPhone, although I think I'm OK on that one for now.
46:40 Don't go, Christy.
46:41 She might be listening.
46:43 But what was the there's a joke that, like, there's only two ways to make money, bundling and unbundling.
46:48 Right. Like, you know, there was an old meme about, like, Craigslist being unbundled into that all became giant Internet businesses.
46:55 Or like our friend, Rich Greenfield, who constantly was like, good luck, bundle, good luck, bundle, good luck, bundle.
47:00 And now the bundles are breaking and like Netflix and Disney and everyone's looking for what's the new bundle going to be.
47:05 And here's Apple looking for the new bundles going to be.
47:08 I think it's just hard to be a definitive bundle when you're part of two or three.
47:12 So it was hard for AT&T to make a bundle because they had Verizon and T-Mobile and like things like content wanted to live.
47:18 Well, but it's funny, Joe, you know, Apple went iPhones went from this luxury good to now anybody can have it if you're thinking about it as a utility and a monthly charge.
47:27 And then if you're getting a lot of other value associated with it, I think that is probably the selling point.
47:32 That's how they actually grow share in a world where Android phones are 80 percent globally of market share.
47:39 And the last thing I'll just say, and you and I have definitely talked about this before.
47:43 I mean, a pillar of the bear case for Amazon was all the spend or how much money they were losing in the years after they launched Amazon Prime.
47:52 Right. Free two day shipping and all the other stuff that went.
47:54 And now they know after all of these years of data, probably 15 years, that the prime user spends like 2x the non-prime or more than that.
48:04 But Amazon has so many other things for you to buy. OK, I'm already a prime member, so I might as well get my toothpaste here.
48:10 I might as well I might as well order some toilet paper. I might as well look for sneakers here first before I look anywhere else.
48:15 Whereas Apple, like they're going to need that. You don't have impulse buying happening left and right.
48:20 So I wouldn't doubt them for a second in terms of great.
48:24 We're locking into an ecosystem, but everyone's already kind of locked into the ecosystem.
48:28 Music purchases has gone away. I'll be interested to see how music kind of comes back.
48:32 Apple TV is the sleeper. I think I was shocked to see a chart of all the TV operating systems and that Apple hasn't grown its share in the market.
48:41 Like even with Roku kind of being on TVs and Android and Amazon having their own, Apple hasn't grown at all.
48:48 But they are the best TV operating system experience. I mean, it'd be hard to argue their TV operating system.
48:54 You have Prime and YouTube TV, and that is the gateway. Whoever controls the TV operating system is going to have a lot to say about what the new ad model is for the world because they become your home operating system.
49:05 And that that's that's the most interesting battle. Well, it's interesting.
49:09 And it seems like that was kind of Steve Jobs' last wish as it related to TV.
49:13 It doesn't sound like he ever had designs about making the hardware, but he really wanted to control how brands get into.
49:20 Maybe that's it. Maybe we stumbled upon it here. Maybe this is the secret hope. OK, we're going to do the Apple bundle. OK, I'm going to sign up for the Apple bundle.
49:27 Well, one part of that is your TV experience will be optimized if you also use Apple on your television.
49:31 And then if they if they start to pick up share in TV operating systems like significantly like that, I would say it's also about the car.
49:41 And so when you think about what they're doing as far as automotive, it really is about an operating system.
49:46 And it's about moving towards an autonomous vehicle where you like people sitting in that car will use that operating system and they will consume content and they will engage with ads.
49:56 Yeah, but a bit of a car, the replacement cycles are longer and I don't know.
50:02 They're not making the hardware again. It's just the operator in the car.
50:06 That's what I mean. So similar to the home and the car. All right. Listen, let's let's let's do one last thing here, because this is very important to you.
50:14 It's near and dear to my liver. I mean, my heart. So Tequila Comos, a company that you founded how long ago with with Richard Betts.
50:22 Yeah, Richard and I shook hands four years ago, I think, about we said I really I'd say I wanted to support him in this creation.
50:31 Yeah. And it is a delicious tequila. Our listeners have gotten to hear a lot about it.
50:35 Hopefully you guys go out and taste it yourself here.
50:38 But talk to me a little bit about this announcement here, because it kind of came out of nowhere, at least for some of us.
50:44 I mean, I am just full disclosure, an investor and a huge supporter of the product and the brand here.
50:50 But you guys just had a significant strategic investment into Tequila Comos.
50:54 Yeah, it was a Gallo, Gallo family, which are iconic.
50:58 I mean, they're they are the largest supplier in the US on the wine side.
51:01 They're one of the fastest growing spirits businesses.
51:04 They did a strategic investment, a minority investment. And really, it's just a testament to what Richard's created.
51:09 I mean, Richard was a former master sommelier, one of very few people to pass on his first test.
51:14 And he's the first person to quit the court of master sommelier, renounce it.
51:17 But he just wanted to take good on that. He'd been making tequila for 20 years and mezcal and take this idea of winemaking and care and put it into tequila.
51:26 So it just made it totally different than anything else. And that was something I was I was pretty excited to support.
51:31 And this this announcement with Gallo is I mean, it's a it's a very big deal.
51:35 This has become the fastest growing luxury tequila brand in the world right now, like globally.
51:41 We were just over in Europe. So that's by volume, you mean. Right.
51:44 And then from a valuation standpoint, as an investor, I mean, you guys have also got a zero to 100, probably faster than any spirits brand ever.
51:53 I don't know about ever. These some of these spirits brands that are celebrity back can go very quickly up.
51:58 It's just a question of like our goal is to create a generational brand.
52:01 Like I'm going to be going out to a bar someplace 20 years from now and there's the bottle in the back.
52:05 And I mean, it's just it's just an iconic brand and taste that is created.
52:09 So so it really is thinking about like how does this build the scale?
52:12 And it's with human ventures.
52:15 We do a lot in the future of media and attention, the future of work, future of wellness.
52:21 But like one of the big things we think a lot about are like is hospitality and how people are going to connect with each other, like in real life.
52:27 Like how do people get together? How do they laugh, cry?
52:30 And so backing Richard was really just about backing a great human who's a master craftsman.
52:35 And having it turn into this has been been a really special thing.
52:38 Well, it's been special. I've gotten to enjoy your guys company, your product, and I'm along for the ride.
52:44 So it's been a lot of fun so far. I can't wait to see what happens next.
52:47 Joe Marchese, I really appreciate you stopping by having this convo.
52:52 I learned a lot. And, you know, one of the things I'll just say this, and I'd love to hear your thought on this.
52:56 It's just like think about all those companies that we just talked about that are considered, you know, kind of old line tech ones.
53:02 Now, if you think about it, obviously, Google was built on an ad based model, but Apple certainly was.
53:07 And Amazon certainly was that we can go into a whole handful of other names.
53:11 And, you know, some of the apps that let's say we or our kids use most frequently are some of the like the kind of it most inconsequential is as far as actual market share and market cap and all that sort of stuff.
53:24 So I really appreciate you coming in here and dropping a little knowledge on us about all those.
53:28 Thank you very much. I love the conversation. All right, Joe, thanks for all your support. We appreciate it. I'll talk to you soon.
53:34 Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Current, and our supporters, Masterworks and Taboola for bringing you this episode of OK Computer.
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53:55 We'll see you next time.