- Duration: 65 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K1XNVJJX3TTRSE8W7G16HM5Y (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K1XNVJJX3TTRSE8W7G16HM5Y)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you Hey. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: What’s up, what’s up? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Never mind. [Michael Houck]: Greg, you survived the storm. We’re thankful. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: My darling today set up, so let’s see how that holds up. Nice. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think Emil confirmed that he was joining us, but he said he wanted to join every other week. So let’s give him a minute or two here before we jump in. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, he said earlier if he can, he’ll try. He’ll try to do it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Well, we got stuff to go over either way, so it’ll be all right. Jacob, how you doing? [Jacob Shipley]: I’m good, man. How about yourself? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, good. Good, good, good. [Jacob Shipley]: Getting tired of Charleston yet? Ready to move to Bentonville? [Michael Houck]: Dude, the pitch is strong. The pitch is strong. [Jacob Shipley]: Just so you know, Yeah, no, I’m not tired of it yet. [Michael Houck]: It’s been pretty great, actually. Awesome. I’m Did you find a I’m still going from church to church So I think the goal is by the end of August to know Sweet. But, Nice dude, that’s awesome. This is going to be a recurring theme until you make the move. Is the KPI tracker. So this is the new sheet that I set up. Thank you guys for filling that out. I know we have questions for Emil on one of them and if he doesn’t come today, I’ll just shoot him a note afterwards. But Rena will be sort of maintaining this and she might reach out to you guys if she doesn’t know sort of where to find things. So I think great for yours in particular. It’s go online and see. How many meaningful contacts Emil has gained on a weekly basis. She’ll probably reach out, but for other ones, she might be able to just sort of automate it. Okay, so let’s quickly go through that. Just make sure we’re on the same page. Won’t take too long. So, okay, so for, I guess, let’s start with yours, Greg. So for meaningful contacts gained, Who are the two that we have so far? Just so I kind of have it in my head. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Amy. B612. And what’s the other one? There’s another one. I’m blanking right now. Hi, guys. [Emil Barr]: We’ve got a whole tracker here and everything. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’re a real team now with a real spreadsheet. [Emil Barr]: Well, that’s all it takes to build Startup has been built from less. [Michael Houck]: All you need is a Google Sheet and your next stop is a billion dollars. That’s it. [Michael Houck]: All right. [Michael Houck]: I’ll hold your word for it, Alc. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m going to hold you to that. Oh, no, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m just messing around. [Michael Houck]: Well, cool. Glad you were able to come. We just are getting started. Is there anything that you want us to go over first before we dive into a couple of things we had on our agenda. [Emil Barr]: No, I didn’t have a chance to listen to last week’s call. So I was just going off your notes. How, um, so overall it looked good. I think, you know, something kind of top of mind is in Greg and I talked about this this morning. Um, but how do we get reach escape velocity on some of these things? Like, I think some of these ideas are very good, but how do we start executing? Cause I think too often we kind of, I just rather start trying shit and throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks as opposed to just like talking about doing stuff. You know, now we’re about a month in to this project, so you know, like, how do we get some of this content series and stuff off the ground? But other than that, I think I’m mostly here just to observe today and give feedback where needed. I didn’t have a ton of feedback other than I liked it, and you know, basically, how could we get started today on some of the stuff that we mentioned that we’re not currently doing? [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. That’s, that’s what we sort of have planned. For the second thing, we’re gonna be talking through, so we’ll go through that and… In detail, sort of some initial thoughts, and definitely also want your input there as well. But first, I just want to go through sort of KPIs, and you can sort of sanity check if these goals are ambitious enough and on point and everything like that. So let’s just quickly go through that first. How do I do this? Okay, there we go. We’re back. [Emil Barr]: Welcome, Summer. Where are you walking? I feel like you’re… [Michael Houck]: I have one of these under desk treadmills. [Emil Barr]: Oh, so you’re walking to nowhere. You’re just walking for fun. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m walking five or six miles to nowhere today, basically. [Emil Barr]: Okay, well, yeah, I had one and I couldn’t do it. I have to feel like there’s a destination here, but you’re a better man than me. [Michael Houck]: It’s tough when it’s 95 degrees and 80 plus percent humidity. I mean, just these numbers are sometimes a bit like, um, you know, do we, do we, do we have 20 kind of, you know, low level, whatever, or is it four billionaires, you know, like kind of take your pick of what’s more meaningful. Right. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: So, It’s gotta be the right ones. Like Emil and I talked about I think if we can get a contact to Right. Like, The outside, so inside works just fine, probably be like, you know, five normal ones, like Mark and Steve Jurvetson, for example, like, you know, two really, really great contacts. And then the question is like, what level? Like, is it just a Zoom? Is it an email? Is it a meet? I think meeting Steve Jurvetson could be realistic this year. So I think we just, you know, I kind of put in a number, but yeah, I’m more thinking about the impact of this rather than just, you know, like, let’s just fill up the numbers quickly. I don’t know if anybody looked at that. I shared that billionaire sheet a few days ago, last week. It was like 75. I think that’s probably a good one to start with. We’ll see how far we get. [Emil Barr]: What are meaningful contacts who aren’t billionaires, Greg? I think that we’ve… Can we bifurcate this into billionaires gained, like billionaire contacts, and then other meaningful contacts? And if so, what… Constitutes a meaningful contact who isn’t a billionaire. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, exactly. And the question is also like, what’s the point? I mean, right. Like, what’s the point of like that contact? Like, what are we pitching? Are we just pitching you? Is it just kind of the meeting, you know, part of the network? So, yeah, I think I definitely think, yeah, we could add billionaires. And then obviously, like, it could be like heads of like VC funds. And, you know, I mean, I think, you know, for FlashPass, for example, right, if we can already identify some interesting connections there, but then also just for your personal network. So I would like to flesh that out a little bit more just so we kind of understand how meaningful, how impactful is this actually? [Emil Barr]: So how can we maybe split this into two and have one be billionaire contacts gained and the other be investor contacts gained? Because I think you can, on the investment side too, you’re pretty plugged in. And then, you know, other contacts, Greg, you and I can track separately in a sheet and just like, oh, this person was cool. We meet them, you know, but I’m not sure it should be like a defining KPI. That’s just like something that I think would be good for us to track separately. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that works. I think just having those definitions is helpful. And I think this is definitely one where we don’t necessarily need to hit some specific to have sort of a target for like how much do we think we can grow this network over the next five months before the end of the year so that we just sort of have in mind like are we making good progress now? Because this is one that does get fuzzy and can be hard to know if we’re making good progress or not. So I think just having some sort of way to track it in some sort of benchmark is good. So do we want to say leave 20 here and sort of put, I don’t know, five billionaire contacts? Investor. [Emil Barr]: And But I think we should define investor because, you know, with our business, Hey, this is a brand new company. It’s been around for a year. They’re doing 5 million in ARR, Cause they’re How do curious what it is at the very least for market research, but that’s not necessarily something that’s going to advance our end goal. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah. So the question is, is it like heads up like, you know, like, like, like we see fund managers of, you know, a hundred million plus or something like that. Right. Certain type of like funds. Um, like I’ve got an interesting one that Michael Jordan just became a part of, but you know, it’s, it’s quite sports AI heavy. So I don’t know if like, that’s going to fit. With FlashPass. It’s just a cool fund. [Emil Barr]: I’ve got things, Greg. I’m an investor in a sports AI company. I put in a significant amount of capital, so I’ll send you the link. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Okay, We’ll target these tier one folks, and what we’ll do also, because Greg, you have that list of the billionaire folks we want to make our targets. I also had my assistant Rina put together an initial list of sort of these tier one investor folks. I need to give her feedback on that and add to it a little bit, but we can use those two lists as the sort of group that we want to measure ourselves against. Like how many of these people do we want to meet? [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, I like that. Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then for the PR side of things, we said one article per should be our goal. One to a half. Are there 25 weeks left in the year? I actually don’t know how many weeks there are left in the year. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: No. It wasn’t just the articles. Or three. There’s the At the moment, it’s three a month. I want to get it to four. Forbes is pending right now. Hopefully, it’ll be out next earned media. So I You can bring that back in we’ll Go. [Emil Barr]: We But let’s be conservative here because what I don’t want I’ll let you know, um, and then it’s also just to earn stuff, right? And that number is also like a because we were taking a moonshot, you know, and intrinsically we thought, all of us thought we probably aren’t going to hit this. Like, you know, the expectations that we overperform, like let’s meet with six billionaires, you know, like let’s meet with more than four investors, but like let’s set something that’s, you know, like none of these KPIs are set in stone. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, of course, of course. We’re just setting these as sort of our, where we’re headed, where we think we can go to now. And we’ll just as we go. Okay, moving forward, Jacob, let’s… Talk LinkedIn and X. So, can you talk us through the primary, which is followers first? [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, between X and LinkedIn, or 8788, I think it’s a little bit of a stretch goal to go from that to 20,000 by the of the year. But I also, we just have to get, you know, we’re putting a lot of shots on goal, and we just need one to go in for that to become what? Really, really feasible. Because of that, I achievable or super realistic, but I do think it’s a good spot to be in. For impressions, I originally had that set at a million, but then I looked and I saw our LinkedIn analytics already at over a million for this year, so I bumped that up to three. Hopefully, as we get smarter, I think we’re learning a lot about what people like, what people don’t like, able to leverage some of that and then engagements turning that from 11,000 to 50,000 as we get better at figuring out what content sparks engagement. The one thing that want to call out is I wonder if it might be worth going a little bit outside the normal scope and doing scheduling natively on LinkedIn and potentially even posting real time on LinkedIn. Going that route, yeah. Let’s run a test and see what happens. I think it lands in the conspiracy-ish theory bucket to me, but I could be wrong about that. There’s no sort of definitive stuff either way, so let’s just test it, get some data. For the record, I did post yesterday , I posted a selfie with me and Tim Tebow , and I posted that natively on LinkedIn, and it was like my worst performing post I’ve had in a long time. [Michael Houck]: So I could LinkedIn, so, and Twitter, for that matter, so logging in. I don’t want to add a bunch of work for Andrew, but going in and like just taking what we have drafted and scheduled or actually posting it in real time. [Jacob Shipley]: I don’t know, I mean, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if there might be some throttling of reach of content that’s scheduled on the third-party platform. [Emil Barr]: So, it could be something we could experiment with and see if we see any meaningful or Yeah, I just like to see a little bit more on LinkedIn of like, Jacob, this is just another account. Like, I don’t know if LinkedIn lets you switch on your phone, but like whatever, like an account you have access to as well. And as we develop a shared language, more like if a good idea comes in your head and even if it’s like a two sentence post, I think that, you know, the scheduled stuff in Notion is good, but there’s lots of like easy opportunities or stuff. Like I don’t really, I haven’t checked my LinkedIn for like two weeks since you took it over, you know? So just like LinkedIn is your platform. Platform, like you guys can do whatever you want in there, basically. Like, I think the notion is good to get approval on new content ideas if we don’t know where the line is. But, like, feel free to post three or four times a day or whatever, you know. Um, or repurpose basically anything that I’ve already approved. I approved it once, so there’s no reason why we can’t repurpose it. But, I just love to see it as more of an extension of, like, just one of the accounts that you’re in, and you guys just throw stuff in there as opposed to, like, this formal, you know, everything has to be scheduled out; I have to approve every piece of individually, you know, on Notion before it goes live type thing. [Michael Houck]: It’s amazing how the, what do they say, how the turntables, right, back from when we started and everything, we were doing like one or two posts a week and it was very, very structured. Now it’s the total opposite, which is great. Gives us more shots on goal. It’ll be awesome. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, and I will say too, I did, you know, we bumped up from two posts a week or whatever we were doing to now I am posting something every single day. Some of it’s repurposed, some of it’s some of its net new long form. But I will definitely, as like we continue to build up a backlog, like my personal LinkedIn, I’m currently doing two a day. And for me, that’s a sweet spot, but we can play around with this account to try to figure out what is that optimal posting frequency. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Emil, one other question we had for you on LinkedIn, and I guess it extends to X as well, but it’s just this like relevant connections measurement. Like we talked about connecting with these journalists and these investors and just having them in your LinkedIn connections so that they are more likely to see your content. How important is that? Is that a primary KPI or do you see that more secondary because we also have this sort of network growth goals that Greg is focused on? [Emil Barr]: I don’t see this as a KPI at all. I think we should do it once a month. Like we can upload a spreadsheet into Dripify or Hayreach or whatever and just automatically like I could even go in and like connect to these people. That’s a 30 minute task, right? To like go in and send 50 or 60 connection requests. So I don’t think that should be KPI. I think it’s something good for us to do. Like great pulls together a list of journalists. Hey, let’s send them all a LinkedIn connection, you know, just so that they see our content and hopefully half accept. But I just like, I don’t think this is like a primary KPI we should be tracking because it’s not a very high lift activity. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay. That’s fine. We can just have it be a test that we’re doing sort of in the background. Background then. Okay. Tatem, let’s talk video, TikTok, Instagram. Followers is primary and then comments and impressions are secondary. You want to talk through the goals here? [Tatem Lindner]: Yeah. So I think 15,000 followers by end of year is a pretty attainable number. And am thinking through that because how can I discuss kind of a swarm strategy A couple of days ago, and from there, I’ve thought through it. I think there are a few ways we can go about, you know, getting your name out there to the masses, more than just through your own profile. I think that we can create some fan accounts for you and generate some controversy in comment section. Yeah, I think that we should even create some haters for you, so that we can really get some things talking. To reach out to a bunch of people like this and get those interviews done all in the same week. And then they could be launched in the same week. And then it’s kind of like we’re swarming on people’s And then from there, we can start going. Yeah. [Emil Barr]: I So first of all… Through there, and then We might not need to work too hard to manufacture them because they might naturally appear. But other than that, this is all good. I just want to make sure we actually I know we’re filming TikToks tomorrow, but I just want I agree. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: If we The idea of doing, like, a content week in New York. I think that’s a Jacob a new thing, like Jacob. Maybe you can DM them on journalists, like not bunch, but three, four, not necessary that they write a story right away, but just kind of like get to know quick coffees. Also kind of nice to be able to say like, oh yeah, I, I, you know, I’m going in with New York times journalists for coffee or something, you know, just kind of stuff like that. But, but also just to have some really good contacts, you know, New York is like the media city. [Tatem Lindner]: That’s kind of what I was thinking. I felt that you and I can maybe work together just to make sure that those things landed. That same time frame, um, but I think like, if we’re gonna ask him to go to New York, you know, maybe we can just knock a bunch of stuff out. Um, yeah, I do think that from there we can really maximize how many new faces are seeing him and just like make it seem like he’s already, you know, bigger than the world. And then from there, we can keep launching more stuff on his own page. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: And I see if you’re going to New York, you have to go by helicopter to Mattel. That image of you landing on one of the skyscrapers is awesome. [Emil Barr]: Yeah. Well, so a few things. Just backing up a little bit there. So first of all, I can drop my travel schedule for you guys. I’ll just include it. I’m generally happy to. There’s always time, downtime, to meet interesting people. So I’ll be in SF for a month to close that around in September. So probably some of your network there. I’m in New York already. I’m going to Chicago next weekend. Like, I’m typically in these cities multiple times per month. Anyway, um, the second thing is, like, it doesn’t have to be a whole event, Chicago am. I is an hour-long where right? From flight flight Like, from Columbus. New two-hour York is a Um, it’s very easy for me to go do a day trip there and, like, move some meetings around. I know Greg, you have access to my calendar. I just don’t think we have to, like, artificially constrain this by, like, with, like, my travel schedule, obviously. I’m in Shanghai. I can’t be in New York at the same time. But it’s not a big lift for me to hop on a plane and go film some content in the morning on one day, and I can literally hop back the same evening and be back in Columbus. So that’s kind of on the logistics side. I’ll include my travel schedule, but in general, let’s not limit us to creators to certain weeks or things. If there’s a big creator that only has availability in a particular day, we can shut To schedule around, I do think this goes a little bit back to the chicken and the egg problem, like kind of like, will anyone care if we don’t have any followers already on TikTok? Like, do we need to build up some sort of base before we start flooding the algorithm? Because, like, will the School of Hard Knocks guy, like, care? Like, Daniel Mack, care who I am? Like, I don’t know. [Tatem Lindner]: I think, um, you give them money. [Emil Barr]: Is it paid? Do you pay to get on those things? [Tatem Lindner]: I actually don’t know, which was, um, yeah, I was gonna look into that and just kind of throw your name out there, but but I do have a theory that some people are paying to be on there and some people aren’t. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Tatem Lindner]: Paying on where? Sorry. [Tatem Lindner]: Like just to be interviewed by these guys because some people are like really big name people and then some people are promoting their company. Yeah. [Emil Barr]: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. [Emil Barr]: There was a time that I actually had money in discretionary income before I started downloading, donating to all of Greg’s nonprofits and paying for these influencers to be on To our page, um, so yeah, that’s fine. I, I, I again, so like, let’s do it. But I don’t think that, like, oh, Emil’s only in New York this week is a reasonable reason for, like, this not getting scheduled. Like, if we’re going to do this, like, let’s actually start proactively reaching out and trying to schedule it. And then, if we need to pay for it, like, let’s find out how much that costs. I’m just looking forward to the point where, you know, we are someone notable in six months, you know, This is more of an additional thing. So can we add a KPI that’s And I think that those impressions should be maybe impressions on page, but yeah, influencer collabs I Well, you want to make that? [Michael Houck]: Okay, we can make that a Okay, Tatem, if you want to come Months, where it’s like a little less of this pay-to-play stuff across the board, and people have an active interest. But I understand It’d be great. Cool. Okay. So This is what we’ll orient around. This is what we’ll optimize for. Let me get rid of this And Emil, we’ll keep this updated. I’ll pin this in the channel But this will be updated on Tuesday mornings every week. Quick question. [Emil Barr]: Who are Gained in column G, G2. Oh, sorry, that how many we think we can get by the end of the year, just so we have a rough guidepost. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, that’s the entrepreneurs and the observers and all that kind of stuff, and the CNBC poets. And then the Forbes one’s approved. I just need to know when it’s coming out scheduled. [Emil Barr]: Okay, but we have CNBC, poets, entrepreneur, and observer. That’s four, right? [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, and the Forbes one, it’s approved. [Emil Barr]: Okay, so let’s do four right now for just action. Accuracy, because it’ll be five next week. Yeah, um, okay, this is good. Oh wow, so like half of my LinkedIn impressions came from that one post about showing up late to meetings. It’s wild. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Jacob, followers did we get out of that post? [Jacob Shipley]: Let me take a look. [Jacob Shipley]: I can’t see analytics. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: I once, I once posted for one of my UN accounts. I once posted. I thought it. Was a meteorite exploding, it was a satellite, and that gained 80,000 followers in like an hour, until they all realized it was the wrong image that I posted. [Emil Barr]: And then they were like, Oh, I got some that one, I think I hopefully got more followers than death threats. But I will say, I didn’t notice any meaningful bump in followers from that post was actually a few other posts around that time. That one, I just got a lot of hate. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, intuitively, that makes sense, right? Because that’s not the that’s going to inspire love and devotion necessarily. That’s the kind of post that’s going to tell the algorithm you’re posting stuff that people want to see. And then the other posts, to your point, that are sort of right after that are the ones where it’ll know based on the content who to show it to, but it will be showing it to more people because of the positive results. So it’s a one-two punch. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, I think it’s not actually that unusual for that. As far as the weighted impression, I did the math one time. It’s pretty outdated, but I mapped it all out of all of my posts, and I think it was 50% of my impressions, or maybe my 90% impressions came from my top 10% of posts, and then my top 10 posts drove 95%. It is a game. One shot on goal. Can change everything. [Michael Houck]: We’ll see that same thing across all platforms. That’s name of the game. Not an unexpected result at all. Let’s move forward and talk about initiatives. I want to make sure that we have half the time to chat about that. Any last things on KPIs? [Emil Barr]: No, I just wanted to go over them. One last thing. Could we add a tab to the sheet on budget spent on things we spent just so I understand what we’re spending elsewhere? Of your guys’ monthly retainers. Cool. We don’t have to fill this out right now, but I do want to get an idea of like, you know, for accounting purposes and bookkeeping, because this is all going to be an ad back on the P&L. I’m paying it out of the companies, but like it’s going to be, when we go sell them to private equity, I don’t want them seeing this as like a regular business expense. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, makes sense. Okay, we’ll keep this up to date too. I’ll set that up later today. Okay, so let’s Forward then, on initiatives. So, we had the four initiatives that came up. Uh, two of which are sort of tied together, which is the sort of micro grants and the AI loss map. So, maybe we start there. Um, so, just a quick refresher: the micro grants are, we find people on social media who are posting about losing their job or having it impacted in some way by AI, and they’re in a situation of maybe hardship. You know, their post got some traction or something like that, and we want to reach out to these people, either initially to just give them a grant, a couple hundred bucks or whatever it might be, or ideally loop them in to film one of these sort of encounters on the street, where we, so to speak, make their dream come true. They’re down on their luck. It’s a proven format. So, that’s part one. And then part two is sort of following up with them and seeing how they do, and kind of adding that into content as well. And that’s tied. To the AI job loss map, where basically we have this larger list of people, anyone who is impacted by AI that we can find information about online. We create this map for them. We keep it up to date, sort of like that COVID case map from the early days. And then we also mark the people who were helping with the micro grants. So that’s CLDR. In terms of like initial steps here, the first thing we need to do is start process to identify these people. Um, so that can be manual with like an assistant VA, uh, doing that, but eventually it’d be great if we could build some sort of scraper, um, AI agent to go and just proactively grab these types of posts, add them to an air table database or Google sheet or something, and maybe drop ones that look interesting into a Slack channel that we can get flagged and sort of identify as people to reach out to. Um, That’s my thought on sort of initial step. What do you guys think? [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, I think for me, the map is going to be huge. I think that’s maybe the most impactful idea we’ve thought of Obviously, it’s FlashPass adjacent. And Greg, tell me if I’m wrong too, but my head goes to, Wouldn’t this be an incredible tool for journalists to look up how we can be the single source of truth on how AI is impacting job loss across the world? Yeah, how to build it. I’m just an organic social media guy. I don’t know what the logistics is, but I do know that I’ve seen clients vibe code stuff pretty quick to where you can at least get some dots on the map where the size is representative of the cut. But yeah. I think to me, that’s our strongest idea yet. I think if we can just get like an MVP out the door, it’s always easier to iterate on something that already exists. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah. I mean, from my point of view, it depends on the data, right? Like where’s the data coming from and how much data do we have? One of my clients, it’s the largest mental health survey in the world now, like 4 million people take it every year and they drive 98% of that from Facebook ads. And it only got New York Times level kind of coverage once we had, I think, the first So it’s all kind of a data. We just have to have a lot of good, reliable data. We can probably import some existing data sets. But yeah, it’s all about how much data we have and how clean it is. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I don’t think there’s going to be an existing data For this, that will be the big challenge here initially is, like, how feasible is it to get enough data with a manual process? Or is it cheaper and faster? It will be faster, but is it also cheaper to just vibe code some sort of AI agent? They’ll be looking for these types of posts on Reddit, on Quora, on Twitter, uh, on TikTok, and just kind of loop them in automatically. Um, and also, what resources do we sort of have to do that as well as sort of vibe coding the map itself to Jacob’s point? [Jacob Shipley]: Even if we’re not doing the Reddit and Quora stuff, maybe it does exist, but I haven’t seen anybody just aggregating news stories. I think like that, as long as we can say when you click on a big dot in San Francisco that says meta laid off X number of employees and we just have a source to a legitimate news article, I just I think there’s value even in the fact that it’s not proprietary data, but it’s aggregating data that nobody else is aggregating. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s that I think it’s called layoffs.fyi. It doesn’t obviously specifically tie this to a cause. It doesn’t filter by ones that were impacted by AI, but there is data on company level and then obviously city-level layoffs that we can get. Maybe to start this off before we go and try to build anything more person-specific. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah. If we do it company-wide, because I think news stories generally do it. Companies will be sometimes forthright about we’re AI in this area, and then they have a layoff in that area. You can put two and two together. I wonder if that could be something that we are reaching out, pitching to, whether it’s from Emil’s LinkedIn or Greg reaching out. But saying, okay, we just created this tool. If it would be helpful for you, feel free to use it and cite us. I don’t know. I think there’s a huge potential there. I know I’m rambling a lot, but I think it’s a great idea. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Some of these companies have like 100,000. I was just thinking from a PR I used to work for Vodafone. Which has like 150,000 employees on LinkedIn, so there’s like an easy way to just kind of like generate, like, 50,000 emails, like, all of these people, because, like, first name, last name, usually, right? Dot last name. And it’s almost like, you know, let’s just run, like, a cold survey and ask, like, you know, are you worried about, like, your job being taken by AI or something like that, right? And then we kind of put these, like, put that, like, into the bubbles of, like, you know, um, Facebook is in, in, in. San Francisco, so we have people’s anxiety levels or whatever. I don’t know, just kind of thinking something like that. That would be a newsworthy if I could say, we asked 50,000 meta employees or Walmart employees and them 30% are worried about these engineers or AI taking their jobs away kind of thing. And kind of to your point about what you said to Forbes today, right? It’s like if I’m a CEO or CFO and I’m looking at my margins and I can bring them from with that kind of data set. [Jacob Shipley]: I feel like layer one is Layer two is what’s the employee sentiment of these companies? And then maybe layer three is like, yeah, you know, It can be kind of interesting. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, because one of the ideas You can buy for like Four to eight percent with you know survey fish you can get for like 99 cents you can get like a like a real person to like answer a survey kind of anything you want and in the u.s if you have a data set like 12 to 1500 people that took a survey that actually answer a survey that’s kind of like what the new york times and cnn kind of considers I mean ideally 2000 and up considers representative so we could like run some really interesting surveys and usually you get results in like 12 hours uh so we could like on the survey on something like quite unique and then make that into a media story, but also like LinkedIn. But if we could just sort of paying like $2,000 for that, if we could just like email 50,000 people, um, you know, at Walmart or whatever, uh, it might even be easier and Well, yeah, I didn’t say that it would be cheaper. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Cause we were just, we were just need to, uh, to buy some domains and do some coding. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: I’ve got two in my system. I’ve got like 200. At 78 emails, I can do, like, I can do, like, 8,000 emails a day, or for my system at the moment, I could, I could handle that. And it’s probably like 30 bucks a day. But, but, it’s just more about, like, you know, do we want to do something like that? Does it serve a purpose? Yeah, yeah. I think this is smart. [Michael Houck]: I think, basically, let’s try to build something simple that isn’t going to take a ton of time. But I do think that the end goal that we’re aiming towards should, this sort of content machine slash actual site that we get to. So let’s just keep that in mind. But I do think that baby steps where we first build these data sets that we think can be interesting, not just to us, but also to publications. And then we can create content around for social too. Like Emil can write a LinkedIn post. I talk to 2000 people, you know, whatever, who are at Meta and Instagram worry about AI. That’s start there. And then if we see that angle resonate with folks, then we double down into creating more granular data set, creating content around it, and creating the site. [Emil Barr]: Yeah, that all sounds good. I just want to make sure if not this meeting, we clearly leave the meeting with like some next like a Next step that’s going to get done in the next seven days on that website because it’s a great idea. But I just want to make sure we’re sort of like building momentum But, like, from a creative standpoint, it’s fun to watch you guys’ creative minds work. It’s not a talent that I have, so it’s kind of cool to see everyone chip in. I would not have gotten to getting kicked off of Walmart’s Canvas; my mic would have gone. [Jacob Shipley]: But, uh, if nothing else, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee when you’re here. [Emil Barr]: And, you know, yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, I was gonna say it’d be fun to see in person, you know. [Michael Houck]: I’m Honestly, Emil, if you’re going to be in SF for September, we can definitely do a lot of stuff around this there because you’ll be able to get into any of these big tech company HQs and just start talking to people. That’ll be easy to set up. Get kicked off of every campus. [Emil Barr]: Right. That’s another KPI. How many campuses can we get escorted out of my security? [Michael Houck]: Maybe initial action here is… Greg, let’s chat about Surveyfish. I think that could be an interesting first thing and see if publications will bite on having this as a source for some things. What do you think about that? [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Yeah, I was actually thinking there’s blue colors and stuff. If we just take one group and survey them and say… Because there have been a few surveys in the last few weeks that are quite relevant, quite big ones. But if we took one specific and said we surveyed 2,000, of this kind of job profile, and 78% are freaked out at the moment or whatever, or whatever the data shows. I’m sure it’ll be good social media content too. And let me know, SF, because B612 is in Mill Valley, which is SF, right? So I can probably go to meet some astronauts and stuff. [Emil Barr]: Just a reminder, guys, we have planes. I can hop on a plane the same day and be an SF this afternoon. If you’re already there. Location restriction. [Michael Houck]: Okay. We’ll follow up in the next, say, 48 hours tops with actionable next steps here. But I think this is a good idea space for us to play in for this initiative. So let’s take the first steps here. In the interest of time, let’s move on to the others. So the next one is these tennis challenges. So this is where you play, maybe a set or however much tennis we want with people, you’re challenging them to sort of do something about AI unemployment, like get involved in some way, basically. The first step here is just creating a list of targets for who we want to challenge and then trying to get in front of I don’t know we want this to have with the billionaire list, with the investor list or a broader list. I’m curious what people’s thoughts are on that. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Well, actually that’s a great idea. Why don’t we, I can scan that billionaire, you know, we can, we can even bring that billionaire list like down to, you know, like 500 million and above, like, you know, then we probably have, I mean, then we have several thousand and I can screen for like the top 20, like tennis, like finance. And we could like go after them and just say, hey, you know, Emil, maybe even publicly, right? Like, you know, that you challenge them to a match to talk business and, you know, and then have a tennis match. I don’t know, something like that. That could be like a fun, I’m sure like an email that they don’t receive every single day. Kind of a different ask. [Michael Houck]: From the content side, Tatem, Jacob, do you guys have thoughts on this? [Jacob Shipley]: My main question was regarding to the New York stuff, San Francisco stuff, I know my first question was, would Tatem be there to capture video content? I can write about it all day, but I feel like seeing it, a tennis match is much more interesting when you See it then, when you Read about it. [Emil Barr]: Um, there’s options like what we’ve always done at Candid: if it’s not that person, then you can find people, like New York-based, to pay them a contractor, right, to get content that day, or a videographer. It’s like not that hard, basically. [Tatem Lindner]: Yeah, I can probably, like, if someone else was there, I could create, like, shot lists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I guess I’m just saying, like, Do we have specific ideas for, like, what this content should look like yet? Or do we want to, there’s an step on, sort of, the outreach side, on, like, what Greg is going to do with the list? On the content side, do we have a perspective on, of, you know, we play off of existing formats and templates that we see work well? Like, what should we be doing here? [Tatem Lindner]: I think that there are, like, a few different areas that I would look into. Have you ever? It to be to just not focused on Emil, you know, like, I just want to make sure that we’re emphasizing that he’s the focus. And so is like the actual issue that we’re trying to solve, which is unemployment AI. So I think we just have to be very wary of not crossing that line. My question here about this idea, like from an execution standpoint, Seen, um, chicken shop update. [Emil Barr]: No, okay. It’s like a YouTube I think this one would be the most fun for me to do, and I like it. Is that your thesis, that it’s such a weird fact Why would any of these people Is that just an off-factor, Greg? [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: I’ve got a list in front of me, like Steve Ackman, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Mark Cuban, all recreational tennis players. I was thinking, if you’re already doing that for fun anyways, It’s like Emil’s going to fly down, going to play a set or play a few points, and then you guys can talk business, ideas whatever. It’s kind of a different way than the soft factor, I guess, asking for a Zoom call, especially somebody like Mark Cuban who hates conference calls or Zoom calls. He likes to do the in-person stuff. So it’s kind of like, well, you’re already doing this, let’s just have a bit of fun and then also, you know, get to know each other on that level and, you know, talk business a bit, like kind of a nice combo. And I feel like it’s unique. [Tatem Lindner]: Sorry. [Tatem Lindner]: I think it’s also the fact that oftentimes when people do stuff like this, they, the other person has something that they’re wanting to promote too. So it’s not just you with like the unemployment. It’s also maybe they have a book coming out. Maybe they have something just like different, but it’s kind of a two for one. [Michael Houck]: So I think that the sort of unspoken thing here is that, you know, it’s not why would anyone do this? It’s why would anyone do this right now with us where we don’t have this big audience, right? Because it’s easy to go to these people if you have a million followers and be like, hey, I want to help you talk about this or be part of this or expose this or expose your book or whatever it is to this big audience that I have where I built a lot of trust. It’s a different equation. About this issue, and they want to be in front of this too, as much as we want to make you the face of this. They also want to be part of this. So, I think there’s some intrinsic motivation. Um, so what I’d like to do is I’d like to see some pitch emails around this. I think the next step is to consider what we would send to Steve Ballmer, Mark Cuban, or whoever, you know. Um, just so I can wrap my head around it better. I do think, like, you know, I like this idea a lot for doing it. I also think When we’re talking about this stage, where we’re sort of more early with, uh, with all these accounts, so in my mind, the reason they would do it is a meal, because you’re super young and you’re super accomplished for your age, and that’s just interesting to these people. [Emil Barr]: They want to mentor the next generation of business leaders, so there’s that angle. And also, this is an issue with a lot of them, uh, to the point where they’re already, you know, setting up foundations and donations, things like that. They are aware that this is going to be a thing, and they want relatable content. Playing tennis out with Mark Cuban, you know, I just think I’d like to, I do think it’s not as easy as we send them an email and they probably say yes. And now there could be an argument that we send 200 emails and one says yes, but I would like to like understand the pitch a little bit more here. Okay. [Jacob Shipley]: You told me the other day you were playing tennis with Vivek. Um, I know that’s like kind of a, want to be careful with that relationship. And you had that call with Sam Altman, um, If we’re okay with kind of pushing social proof, I’m not going to be annoying about it. But I do feel like there’s an opportunity there to leverage some of that for content. [Emil Barr]: Yeah, Vivek would do it. But also, if we did it with someone else first, Vivek’s team would be a lot happier with it. Because their argument is going to be, all the posts we make, they’re going to have to be run through the campaign team. And their question is always, when we’re in these polls, how large is the audience and what voters does this reach? The sort of mode of operation was they didn’t want to talk to anyone who had a smaller audience than Vivek himself. Now that he’s changed to sort of running for governor, the rule has shifted a little bit because it’s like you’re going to interact with local news media and stuff like that. So I do think that there’s a narrative around it, but it can’t be the first post we make on TikTok is like me playing as Vivek because that just like looks pandering. I do think that that’s something that we could feasibly get done in the next, you know, especially if we do it with one other person and there’s some sort of following or something on there. He’d be game for that, I think. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, sweet. [Emil Barr]: Cool. [Emil Barr]: The dude plays for four hours a day, every day. He goes playing in a pro tournament, so it’d be probably embarrassing to capture on camera, but Tatem can have fun editing it, just watching me miss every other ball in the world’s fastest set, but that’s worth something. [Michael Houck]: Um… Okay, and then the, just moving forward, we only have a few minutes left. The final thing was the, we just sort of initially vaguely had this as like billionaire centric media. We talked about podcasts, we talked about book, we talked about leaning into the column that Greg has set up. I think Greg and I talked about this a little bit this morning and we think it makes sense to do this primarily as leaning into the column because we think that podcast availability will be too inconsistent and not be worth kind of spinning that whole thing up. I also want to flag sort of in tandem with your point about the tennis challenges. We don’t want to be leaning too heavily on these sort of like shots on goal with these big contacts right away, right? We don’t want it to be like, hey, what will you give me? Do all these things for me, play tennis with me, be my column. We need to be conscious. I’m not saying necessarily that we should change course in any of this stuff. I’m just saying that we should be conscious of that and try to think scrappy as well. [Emil Barr]: Go ahead, Greg. You go first. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: No, I was just going to say it’s more about the psychology of, again, like Mark Cuban, right? He gets around 1,000 to emails a day. He reads every single one of them. And so I’m just trying trying to put myself in his shoes of all of these emails, everybody’s pitching him something. Like, I want your money here, I need this, this is more important than this, whatever. So I’m just thinking of something that’s a little bit different. I’ve had him work on two of my new stuff for two of my projects, and they were all really weird and unique, and not all this other business stuff that I sent him. And it’s like a one-sentence, two-sentence thing. He’s like, sure, send me more, that sort of thing. It’s too long. And I think that’s going to be with a lot of folks like that are just bombarded with stuff. And then once we have them on a personal level, then we can ask a million things and do a million things with that. [Emil Barr]: Yeah. So unless anyone else has anything to add, I see this as this is just a little bit too broad. It’s like, hey, let’s talk to billionaires about stuff. I kind of like the tennis format. Maybe we lead in with that the next 30 days and see. But I don’t think that there’s like, you know, I think the I don’t think we also need to like start writing a book necessarily at the same time. No, we could write a book once you have like 10 really fun stories. [Grigorij “8664 Grigorijrichters” Richters]: Like make, make some, let’s have some of the stuff in the back burner And it’s like, Hey, this would make such a great book. I know the dots connect, yeah. Um, it’s like, why don’t I write a book with Mark Cuban about, you know? Yeah, I like it. And if that doesn’t perform, we could come up with something else. [Michael Houck]: my list for this week is basically just to think more about these ideas, not just not these ideas, but ideas in general, because I want to make sure that we are doing sort of the scrappy things that will get us to having like unique assets that people want to be part of outside of just our social So the map, I think, is a really good example of that. Maybe there are some more. So I’m going to keep Week, yep, yeah, yeah, of course. Okay, um, so we’ll focus on you could pretty please change your email and sign this so that we can pay you oodles and oodles of money. [Emil Barr]: I would appreciate it. Yeah, we’re on it. [Michael Houck]: I have to do Okay, cool. [Emil Barr]: Well, thanks Really exciting and looking forward So, you know, we can kind of have a lot to talk about in two weeks. Cool. [Michael Houck]: And Maybe go back and forth on that a little bit. Um, hours with Hager’s list of actions we’re going to be doing before our next call as a crew next week. Great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you, Houck. [Michael Houck]: Cool. All right, guys. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Have a good one. Thanks, everyone.