- Duration: 39 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JTVD3W8ETKB4CGZVM4C8M5HW (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JTVD3W8ETKB4CGZVM4C8M5HW)
Transcript
[marc scarpa]: marc, what’s up, man? Hey, Michael. [Michael Houck]: How you doing? I’m doing well. [Michael Houck]: I’m so sorry for yesterday. I total idiot and like I wasted your time. So I’m so sorry for that. Don’t worry about it, Michael. [marc scarpa]: It happens. You know, uh, time zones, I get screwed up too. It’s not a problem. I didn’t take it personally. [Michael Houck]: I was, I was going from Hawaii to Utah where I am right now. And whenever I landed mountain time, I always screw something up. So I’m sorry about that. [marc scarpa]: Cause you’re lost in the mountains. That’s why. Yeah. That’s why we go to the mountains. [Michael Houck]: You go there to get lost. That’s the whole point. I’m going to hit up Zion next weekend, which will be nice. [marc scarpa]: I’ve been there since I was a kid. I’ve been there only once. I rode a horse through there for eight hours and had an incredible experience. [Michael Houck]: It was great. So I’d love to get back there at some point soon. That sounds magical, man. It was. Dang. First, let me give you a little bit of update on our side. So we’re still working through next steps with Tim. Once that’s finalized, we’ll probably be managing the full sort of content calendar rather than just delivering some content to him for posting. So we expect that to see some progress next week once they’re done with their like big internal meetings that they have through Tuesday. [marc scarpa]: So behind the scenes, we made that recommendation as well. Um, thank you, Sereca and myself. And, um, you know, it’s like, look, if you’re going to hire Michael and his team and they know what they’re doing, just hire them to do everything in terms of social media, that is right. And we’ve got a big launch with this Draper television network coming up. There’s going to be plenty. [Michael Houck]: to do so my feeling was I’m glad they got to that point because it just makes the most logical sense you know yeah I think Michael’s is sort of has that same voice I really appreciate you pushing for the same thing as part of what I’m proposing to Tim part of that is a stronger emphasis on video and so I think that’ll probably mean sort of the same thing we go to you guys for for some more stuff that would want to do specifically around vertical videos. So yeah, I think good to hear that because I think we’re on the same page about this making sense sort of on both both sides. No problem. [marc scarpa]: And in terms of the nine by 16, I mean, we sent you just like a rough cut. Once we know that we need to contractually deliver them, we’ll figure out you’ll say to me, hey, you know, I want, you know, out of the five that you’re already doing per week that we’re on contract to do turn one of those into nine by 16 because we’re launching on TikTok and Instagram Reels. And we’ll go great. And I’ll tell you basically ballpark of what that would cost us to do. And then we can go through the process that way. And by the way, Michael, you know, I know you have tremendous amounts of resources being a leader in social media. And you’ve got, of course, a lot of other content providers that you could probably work with. But if there’s other creative ideas you want us to test out at Defiance based for specifically for Tim. Uh, you know, we would really appreciate being that one sole content creation engine for you guys. I’ve already got them worked out, having worked for them two years now in terms of what I know is going to work and not work. It could save you some time. Uh, cause my guess is Michael is really going to do what she normally does is her real job is going to be. You know, being investment stuff, she wants to hand this over to you as quickly as possible. So I just wanted to communicate that, you know, Sarika, Sujata, myself want to be a real ally to you and, and make sure that, uh, you know, you’re successful and hopefully we can, um, be that resource for your needs beyond what we’re currently thinking of Cause I’m sure you guys are going to come up with some great ideas. And we’ll go, yeah, we can do that too. You know, there’s no doubt what we can make 100% same page. [Michael Houck]: I don’t want to go through some big process of evaluating different folks. Like you guys already have a great relationship with them. And I think you and I have a good relationship that we’ve been able to build up in a relatively short period of time too. We’ll be, we’ll, we’ll definitely be coming to you guys for, for more stuff here. I already have some ideas. I think capacity wise, just give me a second. Like if we wanted to do like, you know, daily vertical nine by 16 type videos, is that something that we’d be able to do? Yeah. [marc scarpa]: I just need the budget to do it. That’s all. So the answer is yes. You know, and, and they could be mirrors of what we’re already doing in 16 by nine. And of course that’s a step easier, but if you all of a sudden say to me, I want to create, let’s for lack of a better term, come up with a new show and it’s called the Draper beyond. Show and we only want to do that 9 by 16 and it’s gonna be You know this kind of theme and futures and I’m just whiteboarding and you’re teaching me like we need this whole other type of content I might say okay. Well, you know, that’s a brand new show and we’ll do a pilot if you will Then we can figure out Yeah, and you say to me I want to do five of them a week like we’re doing with Draper decentralized. It may be that I just, I’d have to bring on a new editorial person for that particular vision or a producer. You get creative with me, the more outrageous, the better. We love it. And that’s why we’re called Defiance Media. So I’m all for it. Whatever you can sell in, we can make, I just need the resources to do it. And by the way, we don’t charge, uh, Tim, um, anywhere near what we charge our normal customers. He’s got basically like rock bottom pricing from us. Um, not because, not because he’s like, uh, he’s strong armed us. It’s like, we, we love working with the Draper team. We’re we’re super honored to be working with Tim. You know, the guy’s a legend and just being able to have that affiliation really, um, is, and we learn a lot from him too, by the way. So, um, you won’t have to worry about. Pricing and like, Oh, is he going to come back with a $50,000 fucking quote? Like that’s, that’s not going to happen unless you’re telling me you need, you know, a thousand pieces of media per month, right? Like I got to spin up the team in the Philippines, you know, and really good. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, same page, man. I think we, we sort of view working with Tim in a similar way, uh, over, over a megaphone. So, um, Yeah, good to know we’re on the same sort of wavelength there. I see this being a long-term thing, so I’m excited about it. We tested out, I think, one or two of the horizontal format Draper decentralized videos on LinkedIn, and they performed okay. I think they performed better in the vertical format for sure, but they performed decently. So we’ll probably continue to do that with the regularity that we’ve talked about before. Once we get to the point where we’re adding in more slots for vertical videos, my guess is that we would expand that either through the existing accounts and or creating a new digital twin specific account like we talked about too. [marc scarpa]: Yeah, I mean, look, my understanding is that the nine by 16 formats work as specifically on TikTok, Instagram reels, and what is it YouTube shorts? Everything else is algorithm for 16 by nine, as far as I know. I mean, you don’t see a lot of nine by 16 on LinkedIn at all. It’s typically all 16 by nine. And then the nice thing about that is it then goes out onto other platforms in the simple. But again, we’re making five of those a week already. If you say make one of the five is nine by 16, however you do what you do, make your magic. All I care about about is having the eyeballs on them finally in the right way. Like we want it to be a success and you’re there to make that happen. [Michael Houck]: So thank you. The LinkedIn recently has been testing and probably is going to do a wider launch based on the numbers I’ve seen of a vertical video feed specifically and probably going to start replacing some content in the main feed with that. So it’s on their mind on X. I know vertical video does perform well, pretty comparably to the horizontal video. So once LinkedIn fully rolls that out, I think it’s going to be a pretty big deal. My guess is they’ll drive a lot of traffic and impressions to those posts just to get people using it on the platform. It’s like… [marc scarpa]: Would it be a separate thing? Like Instagram has Instagram and Reels is Reels. Is this going to be like a LinkedIn Reels that’s specific to time by 60? 16, if you will. [Michael Houck]: I mean, right now, the way they have it is for people who are in the beta test, it’s mo it’s on the mobile app only. And it is a separate feed, but I don’t know if that’s going to be the final form factor or if that’s just the experience they’re testing. Um, but either way, I think they’re going to drive a lot of, a lot of impressions to it because it’s like, I mean, you know, how did TikTok get big? They had this mindset. I watched this interview with the, the, the original founder of TikTok. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: He was like, the way that we got people from Instagram is we treated TikTok and Instagram like countries. And he said, how do you get people to migrate from one country to another country? You show them success stories. You start a lottery, and you amplify the winners of that lottery. And you have them write back to their friends at home. And so that’s basically the mindset they used, where they were like kingmakers. And I think that LinkedIn will probably do something similar with like, oh, you should be posting vertical video on LinkedIn, not the sort of written posts even that are the mainstream thing before. So I don’t know how big they’re going to go into that, but my guess is they are going to drive a lot of traffic to it. [marc scarpa]: Well, that’s your expertise, bro. We’ll follow your lead on that. So I appreciate it. I didn’t know that was happening with LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: That’s a good tip. Okay. So one thing Michael set up, I don’t know, I think you were probably on that email that she sent. Let me double check. And if not, um, uh, where is it? There’s so many emails. This is why I hate him. Um, okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You were, you were not on here. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to, I’m going to send this to you right now. Um, I feel left out. [marc scarpa]: Maybe she doesn’t like me. No, no, no, no. [Michael Houck]: I think she, I think she was sending it to the PR person and then I added me to it too. I don’t know, but basically She’s setting up a new process for us to get notified of like PR stuff that comes through like announcements and things like that. Yeah, we have that in place already. Go ahead. [marc scarpa]: Right. And so I think I was thinking about how you guys already have that set up. [Michael Houck]: And I think it might make sense to have this be part of what we do in Slack, which is like one place, you’re in there, I’m in there, the whole team’s kind of in there, we’re all seeing the same thing at the same time, and can kind of comment on the stories as they come in. So we should figure out the slack thing. [marc scarpa]: Yeah. So I’m not your guy. I’m the CEO of the company. Um, Carolyn’s my editorial director. Uh, so let me share with you our process and what we don’t want to do is get bogged down in like a debate about what stories to run and, and all of that, because you have to also understand that we’re, um, editorial organization, right? So there’s, The fun stuff you might do with social media, but we are an accredited member of the media. So we have a process that follows journalistic guidelines. So that said, our process is pretty simple. We know all of the companies that Draper Associates has invested in, except for the ones in the last few months, right? So what we need to do, and what we have is we have an email where the announcements go to. So we’re scrubbing all this data, if you will, based upon all these companies. We’ve reached out to a lot of them, and they’re sending us emails directly to a specific Draper bin, if you will, email address. Within there, they’re sending press releases. We definitely want to get the PR people to send us press releases there as well. The Draper Associates press releases should go there. We’ve asked for that before. It didn’t really kind of materialize. We got a whole dump of stuff originally, but we haven’t gotten an update in a year, right? Let’s say that happens. The other thing that we did is we made a video with Tim Draper that should be sent to all of his portfolio companies that basically says you guys got to do a better job at marketing. I have this editorial outlet. Send your press releases. To this email address and he’s encouraging his entrepreneurs basically to embrace the fact that he will be the one promoting their company for them. Yep. Right. So that video already exists. So now we have this email bin, plus we do our own kind of searches. We have a bunch of other AI that we use on our backend platform that tracks all the noise in the Draper ecosystem. So then, um, Our editorial director, Carolyn, who is hoping to join this call, she then decides which story we go with on that daily basis based upon a variety of criteria. Usually there’s not more than one company that’s making an announcement on any given day anyway. So that solves the problem. There’s nothing to discuss. There’s nothing to debate. If there’s two that announce the same day, she might do one on a on a Tuesday or on a Thursday. And then there’s also the criteria of what else is going on in the news cycle in general. So for example, if it’s Robinhood versus say Wisecut and Robinhood has a massive announcement that’s going out to just the world, we want Tim to be timely with that news cycle and we’ll do the Robinhood announcement before Wisecut, even if they’re We’re both trying to get editorial on the same day. And that’s an obvious thing. So then we then write the story. We curate it. We put it together in the videos that you’ve seen. And then we syndicate it out on Defiance TV, as well as our VOD, our social. And it goes in that little bucket that we shared with you, that Google Drive. And that’s where Tim was pulling it from and so on so forth, but it was never published to his social media natively. Um, so really all you guys have to do is pull from that. Like here’s the five videos that are approved. Tim also approves all the videos before they go into that bucket. So we have a process where we’ll make the videos, we’ll send them to him. He approves them. We then put them in the bucket approved, and then we release them during that week upcoming week’s news cycle, depending upon that other criteria that I mentioned, right? But you guys can just pull them from that news bucket and publish them natively, and you’re fine. Now, also, if you saw on that news bucket, I’m sure you looked at the Google Drive, the scripts are there, everything is there. So you can finesse how you want the text that associates with that particular video to be in social media. This is of course, 16 by nine. Now, if you wanna make them nine by 16 or one out of the five, nine by 16. So let’s say we send them the videos usually on Friday or Saturday. He approves them by Sunday. Michael has now started to ask him, which one of these five do you want to be highlighted? And this past week, he said all of them. So it’s like, he’ll do that. So, you know, I think that’s fine. Then you publish them all. If you’re going to do nine by 16, then that means we have to make five nine by 16. Once you start reels and stories, tick tock and so on. If he’s just gives us one, then maybe we make one nine by 16. And that means another couple hours of work to convert it. And we go from there, but all of that stuff is. In the Google Drive, and all your team member has to do is pull it once the drive says approved and everything that they require should be there. So there’s really no content for you guys to make, per se, except for, I would say, adopting the scripts and putting them in a voice like you have been doing. I’ve noticed it. That are different than what we do on Defiance, for example, that accompany the video, which is great. And we don’t, you know, take the script, do what you want. You know, that’s what your art is. And we’ll probably learn from you in terms of how we can make his post better on our platform too. I’m not anti-Slack. I’m not an idiot. I actually use Discord. I’m really good at Discord. That’s how it is. And I’ve tried Slack a bunch and I’m like, I got to pay for yet another platform and I got to like be in there. I’m not your guy. She’s your person. But I don’t know, like, what is it that you need us to do in Slack? Like, yeah, the decisions are not made by you or I or Michael makes a decision. And we we make the decision editorially. Here are the five videos of the week that we’re covering because it’s five announcements. And we do all that. And then we send it to him and he just approves it. He has never said to us in the year that we’ve been working with him, oh, I didn’t like these five videos. Why are you covering them? We’re covering them because they’re part of his investment portfolio. What he has done is he has sent us emails on occasion that says, I want such and such need to get coverage next week. And we go, great, we’ll do that. That’s a tip. And he’s the anchor of the show. So there you go. So the workflow’s there. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think there’s anything process-wise that I would even propose changing. That’s not the pull into Slack. The pull into Slack is just so that we can communicate quickly, and we can be on the same page. I think back and forth, multiple email threads, making sure the right person is cc’d on an email. It gets cluttered, it gets lost really quickly. In Slack, everything’s just right there. When somebody is done with those videos, when they’re approved by Tim, we just want to make sure we know when that’s going to happen so that when we’re scheduling content out and we’re writing next week’s batch of content, we can have those to reference. Because right now, it seems like it’s happening you know, in the Google Drive and in email, which is, you know, the writer on our team who’s writing the first draft of Tim’s post before I go in and edit them, or before Blake goes in and edits them sometimes, is not on those threads. And they don’t operate really out of email that much either, because we do all of our clients through Slack. So it just creates like a separate world that we sort of need to go into, which I guess is the same for you the other way. So there’s no real good solution. [marc scarpa]: Well, my question is, your writer isn’t going to be writing the videos that we’re making as it pertains to Draper Decentralized. So what they’ll do is they’ll take the script from the Google Drive and they can rewrite it however they want in terms of publishing. And we can certainly send him or her an email to let them know, hey, these videos are ready. I can also talk to Carolyn and say, hey, let’s put you in the Slack But she will just give you alerts when it’s ready. She won’t get sucked into any kind of conversation about strategy and this and that and all that. I mean, I can also jump in there too. Here’s what Draper uses. They use WhatsApp. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I know, I know. [marc scarpa]: They don’t even use Google drive, man. [Michael Houck]: This is why I’m trying to consolidate because the more platforms we have, the more things get lost in translation, the more email versus WhatsApp versus Slack. [marc scarpa]: It’s like their whole company, no one in their company uses Slack. So I’m sorry, you got, uh, Michael to use it. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Michael, Andy, um, and to a lesser degree, a couple other folks too, who I’m less familiar with, but definitely Michael and Andy have been, you know, we’ve been in Slack jamming and things like that. [marc scarpa]: So, well, I’m happy to join with Carolyn in there. Um, her participation will be, Hey, it’s ready. Go get it. And I, you know, I’ll be like, uh, somebody that will tune in and out depending upon if you have a question for me, I’ll answer, but I, I don’t even open, like, I got to learn Slack. I got to tell you because I don’t even like, I don’t, I have the, I obviously have it. I showed you that I have it. Yeah. Um, but I don’t ever open the application ever. So will it get me alerted? Even if the app’s not open? [Michael Houck]: I guess so, right? If you’re if you have the like, not not if it’s open on your screen, but if you like are logged into it, and if like I were to tag you on something being like, Hey, marc, what do you think about this? Or how should we tag team this or whatever? It’ll notify you then. And then but it won’t notify you for like every message or everything. [marc scarpa]: All right, I’ll give it a try. If it’s if it becomes like insanely 1000s of messages, I’m I’m gonna call you back. Hey, man It’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: Just tell me to fuck off. [marc scarpa]: It’s a Learning experience and we’re not resistant. It’s just like I’m dumb when it comes to slack and Carolyn doesn’t want to get sucked into She’s an edit. She’s a she’s a you know editorial director, you know, she’s not a social media person Well, that’s that’s not that’s not what her job is. She’s just like here’s the content. It’s approved We, we, we see that as, as an improvement to the existing process. [Michael Houck]: So I think we’re not here to tell her how to do her job or how to choose which pieces to run with, or how to, how to, you know, create the videos or anything like that. Strategy POV for that. That’s not what we’re trying to do. It’s just my ops guy and my writer being in there and me being in there too, all in one place. We’ll sort of make communication, I think, just smoother. Sure. [marc scarpa]: So you can, you can, you can, you know, hit me up for all that stuff. Cause I’m here to support and uh, Carolyn, like I’ll, I’ll ask her to be in there and just say, Hey, just let them know when the videos are ready. We can get the PR person at Draper associates to send the press releases to Carolyn’s email. Um, as well as whatever other email you want, that would be great because again, we’re, we’re, um, that’s where the stories should be going. Right. Because and she uses her journalistic background and creates that stuff. Now, I understand that you’re going to publish stuff beyond the Draper Associates announcements, but the Draper Decentralized show is 100% exclusively designed to be the vehicle for all the Draper Associates announcements. I mean, when I say all, I mean updates on the companies they’ve already invested in, any announcements Plus, if Draper just made an investment in somebody, we’ve done those stories too, where it’s like, oh, we just put in X amount of dollars and, and those stories are there. I mean, we’ve done now 500 Draper decentralized episodes. We got another 250 to go for the contract that we’re on now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Michael Houck]: I mean, let’s give it a shot. If Slack becomes too chaotic, we can reevaluate. Um, but, um, This will definitely lead to us being more on top of getting the videos out and posted from the account in a timely manner. So I think it serves sort of the same end goal that we share there. [marc scarpa]: No problem. And this weekend’s a perfect opportunity to test it out. Just send Carolyn an invite. I’ll let her know. What’s her email? [Michael Houck]: Because the one on the thread said it wasn’t an actual email address. [marc scarpa]: Oh, that’s weird. Here, I’ll put it in the chat. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: There you go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Perfect. [Michael Houck]: OK. [Michael Houck]: I will add both you guys, and I’ll also send a quick email to you and her just sort of summarizing what we have chatted about here. I said that she has full context from this chat. But yeah, man, I’m pumped. I think this is going to be good. And the timing works with us going into the next phase of stuff with Tim. So it’s good timing. [marc scarpa]: Yeah, I’m assuming you’re going to be doing a bunch of other types of posts outside of just Draper Decentralized doing announcements on the investment companies that he, the investments he’s done. Meet the Drapers, Carolyn, I think, sorry, Sarika, I think would love for you guys to take over that. And then, you know, again, Draper TV, which is a television network, Bloomberg for crypto, we’re launching in a couple of weeks. So there’ll be a whole bunch of new shows on there as well. And, you know, he’s got to promote it all. He’s the main voice of it, right? [Michael Houck]: If you want to, I think this would actually be a good sort of first use case for Slack too, is like, if you want to prep myself, our ops team, and also just keep Michael in the loop about that launch a little bit ahead of time so that we can prep some content around that too. That would be And I think having everyone, again, in the same place will make that a lot easier. [marc scarpa]: Yeah, I’ll get on that next week with you. First step, internally, Sarika is going to draft up a press release. We’ll then, of course, go to Draper’s PR. They’ll shape it. And it’s the second week of June that the announcement will be made. By then, that’s five weeks away. So we want to streamline all this stuff and be good to go. The Google Drive, you know where to go to get media. So please use that. And I’ll make sure Carolyn is like, Okay, it’s ready. And then right. [Michael Houck]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Be perfect, man. [Michael Houck]: And I will I’ll add you guys and we can we can go from there. So thanks, Michael. [marc scarpa]: And I’ll be in New York the for New York Tech Week first week of June. So maybe if you have time, we can grab a coffee. [Michael Houck]: I might I might be back. I’m, I’m still traveling through the end of this month. I’m going to Philly to see my parents in the very end of May. So maybe I’ll hop a train up to New York, and we can hang. [marc scarpa]: Well, I mean, I appreciate it. You don’t have to make a special trip for me. But I’ll be there from the 2nd through the 6th. And it’s New York Tech Week. There’ll be a lot going on. I’m also going to be in New York for a show that we’re doing, a shoot we’ve got on the, I’ll be there from the 20th through the 23rd. Hamptons for Memorial Day weekend, then Vegas, and then back to New York. Yeah, I am. [Michael Houck]: I’m sort of like in the process of leaving New York. I’ve sort of already left, but I’m still like, I have like reasons to go back for a little while. So I don’t know where I’m going to end up yet leaning towards Charleston, but we’ll see. That’d be great. [marc scarpa]: It’s a nice place. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, man. All right. Well, we’ll talk more. Bye bye.