C- in P.E. During COVID-19

Justin  0:02  

All right. Welcome to another episode of remote voices. We have got an amazing guest today, Chris and Wilson here. I actually did a live podcast with her a couple months ago, I think. But Kristin, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, where you work, what you do and all the great stuff about you.

Kristin Wilson  0:20  

Hi, everybody. It's good to be here and to everybody listening or watching. My name is Kristen Wilson, and I've been working for myself as a relocation consultant since 2011. But I started working remotely actually before that back in 2008 2009. So I have been a solopreneur in the real estate and relocation space for more than 10 years. And I'm basically a relocation consultant turned content creator, remote work advocate, and now since the past I mix since there's no travel and relocation happening right now, I have shifted into video production, content creation and YouTube consulting for other small businesses, remote companies and entrepreneurs and founders.

Justin  1:16  

So what does a relocation consultant? Do?

Unknown Speaker  1:21  

I basically help people move to foreign countries.

Justin  1:24  

Oh, all right. Obviously, you're highly in demand at the moment. So like you said, you're kind of pivoting into some more content creation tiles style stuff. what's what's that transition been like for you?

Unknown Speaker  1:36  

It's been happening very organically over the past few years because I moved abroad, originally back in college to study abroad and I just completely fell in love with the idea of living and working in foreign countries. And so when I graduated from Business School in 2005, instead of working in Orlando and getting a normal job, like everybody else, all of my classmates, I was offered what appeared to be kind of a crazy offer to work for $1,000 a month in Costa Rica opening up real estate offices for Coldwell Banker. And so I decided to do that for one year. And that was during the real estate boom. And so one year turned into seven years. And then once I had all of that experience helping people move to places in Central America, I started helping people move to more countries all around the world. And then I realized I could work from anywhere. So why stay in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, so I started traveling full time. So I've kind of been a digital nomad since then, and I also was traveling before that as a surfer. So I've always been traveling in some capacity, and I felt like something was missing. And I think what that was was sharing what I was learning through all of these experiences. And so I started researching how to even do that, how do I share should I start a blog? And I inevitably decided to start talking about what I was doing, how I was doing it, how people could live an alternative lifestyle, living and working on their own terms. And so I bought a GoPro, and then a camera and just started documenting everything that I did in 2017. And so I started learning how to make videos and publishing on YouTube. And then I started a podcast called badass digital nomads, which was exactly one year ago. And over the past two and a half years I've created more than I think 300 videos, and as I got better at it, other people started asking me to help them create videos. So I've been writing on medium started a blog, start To podcast to YouTube channels, I had a new show for nine months with remote work news. And started publishing on medium and Korra. And things like that just basically trying to spread the word about the pros and cons, but mostly the benefits of remote work and also helping people transition out of location dependent jobs, to location independent jobs and also helping from the company side. So basically, I think it's kind of been a little bit of a Gary Vee kind of trajectory where he owns a media company and a creative agency, but he started off just creating content about wine. Whereas for me, I started just creating content about travel and remote work. And eventually, that turned into me helping other people make videos for their businesses. So it's just happened on its own, but I'm loving it, it's definitely more my style than working in real estate, which is where I started out. So I'm really happy right now.

Justin  5:09  

That's awesome. Yeah, that definitely sounds very organic. So kind of based off of all that content machine that you just told us about, we're gonna go through just a couple hot topics that are based off kind of today's news and remote in startups. And you know, even, you know, the pandemic. We'd love to just kind of get your thoughts on. It's just kind of open Roundtable. So let me let me bring up the first one that we're gonna talk about here. I don't know what your current situation life is. But, you know, one thing we just realized, by the way, we just made remote voices into an audio only version and realized how awful The experience was because we just kept showing stuff on a screen and then just saying, Yeah, this one and then not referencing it at all. So we're just gonna start reading these out now so that people that are listening on the audio only cast actually have some context. So this is a tweet itself. My third graders school just gave her a C minus in physical education and guys what the actual hell? And the follow up tweet to this was all of the people in my replies I think it said like 90% of the people in my replies seem to forget that we're in the middle of a pandemic. So, you know, Krista, what are your thoughts on this? Like what where where does grading in schools and the fact that it's all remote now follow the responsibilities of the school to actually give somebody a grade, but I mean, geez, a physical education score, how could you possibly even grade somebody on that now?

Unknown Speaker  6:34  

I actually didn't even think about the implications of physical education with remote learning. I'm not sure how they are grading that and what their standards are for that. But there's two sides to this remote pandemic situation because the best time for people to go remote was probably five or 10 years ago, but it happened, you know, five weeks ago instead of five years ago, so we have that to deal with, and everyone's dealing with it at the same time. So hopefully a year from now, or a couple years from now, things will be different. But that doesn't solve the fallout of being thrown into this crash course of remote work and remote learning at the same time. So I have a lot of empathy for the kids right now, as well as their parents or caregivers. I've talked to my cousin who just graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Florida. And she has basically moved back in with her mom to basically teach her her younger brother, because her mom works full time and where is the kid gonna, I mean, go to class. So basically, she has to make sure that he's logging in at 8:30am for his classes, and that he's watching them and he's not playing video games. And then one of my friends He has basically adopted her boyfriend's two kids, and she is now the stay at home moms teacher while he's working. So I can see that this is happening all over the world right now. And I don't have kids. So I can't speak directly into like, what people are doing and how people are managing that. But um, I think it's just really important for the schools to have some compassion

Jordan  8:29  

up. Did we lose crystal? I think we might have

Hunter  8:35  

just frozen. I don't want to lose compassion for her either.

Justin  8:40  

She didn't lose compassion, but she did lose connectivity do all right says we're live. I don't know what that means. Oh, it's like right over my face. I don't know if that's actually going to be like in the thing. We actually can see our viewers from this as well. So that's exciting. Well, Kristen, what we said before you turned into a frozen video cam was I was just kind of talking about how I thought it was interesting that you said you hadn't even thought really of physical education as a thing that needs to be carried over into, like remote. And I think that's interesting. We don't commonly think about in terms of education, the physical side of it, you think of like, Oh, well, books turned into slideshows, you know, teacher turns into a webcam, you know, how do you run a mile or do a push up, you know, and teach somebody how to do that over video though. And, you know, Jordan and I are working with a company right now called salute that's doing, you know, live stream fitness and things like that. But I feel like maybe no one's even thought about the implications of what this looks like on the education side of things. And Hunter, you were saying you have a buddy that does training now, you know, what do you think he's gonna do moving forward?

Hunter  9:43  

It is, he's completely out of work right now. I mean, the MLS looks like they're gonna be coming back online, but like, online meaning like actually back to the fields, but they're doing nothing right now. So I think I saw in this thread actually that they were saying how they're kid has like wave their arms in front of the camera. And that counts as like, physical education. I get I can't imagine what it would a gym class looks like, like it's just a bunch of zoom videos and everyone's just sitting there waving to each other. But I don't know how you would even read said something

Justin  10:16  

like, is this because I didn't record my kid? Like waving for 30 seconds? There's, there's Right.

Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  10:22  

Yeah. So you should be appeal that decision?

Justin  10:26  

Well, I mean, I think it's what you say it's really true which is like you have to have some empathy and compassion in this scenario, like, I mean, I know even at a college level, you know, Emilio, who's on our team, you know, their college is offered basically anybody who wants to take a pass fail versus like a letter grade can like you can elect to say, like, Look, this was too crazy. I don't want to, you know, try and get a grade this year. I just want to take like a pass for the course. And I know, my best friend's High School for his kids. They're not doing letter grades. They're just giving everyone like everyone And gets equal credit for the semester, or something like that in the high school. So it's just interesting to me wherever this is at they even bothered giving out letter grades because everywhere else I've seen that they're just giving credit. And I can't imagine the teachers, the gall on that teacher to give writing the C minus is insane.

Kristin Wilson  11:19  

Based on what?

Jordan  11:22  

I think it's also really interesting. Is that like, the third grade level to like a high school for sure, I think I don't understand, like some sense of like, accountability, like, third grader, a third grader, like what, like, Oh, Mom, I gotta log into my zoom. Just saying

Unknown Speaker  11:39  

it needs to change at a fundamental level because and I know Justin and I have talked about this before, remote work and remote learning should not be the same as traditional work and traditional learning but in a zoom meeting, or are in like some live call. It just doesn't make sense. It has to be refreshed. emulated from the perspective of remote. So a PE class for example, might include some classes where the instructor is giving examples of how to do the workout or explaining something. And then the kids can go and do it and use wearable technology.

Hunter  12:19  

And then their stats are like loaded and they can just like insanity. I'm doing Beachbody right now Monday, on Monday at ATI I'm on day 18, baby. So I'm that's how everything should be. You just get like this nice woman in the front and she does her little exercises and you just follow along. I guess that'll be the gym teacher. I look

Justin  12:39  

forward to seeing your Beachbody Hunter. I hope you just come out of quarantine and just

Hunter  12:45  

like Shrum I'm hoping I'm coming out full beard and I won't be able to wear my pants. They're so small.

Unknown Speaker  12:52  

Have you guys seen anyone doing fitness optimally because I have been involved in three different workouts. classes, my local studio here like a Pilati studio, pure bar. And then Tracy Anderson. He has like this multi million dollar international program, but none of them are doing it correctly, in my opinion, like one of them is uploading videos to Facebook. And then if you took the class you comment below so you get credit for it. And then the Facebook app obviously, is not working like the audio doesn't work. And then for the other people, they're filming it in vertical on zoom. And they're not muting everybody. So you can like hear people working out and it's like, oh, no, like, there's just everyone's doing it the wrong way. I feel like have you seen anyone doing it

Justin  13:42  

optimally? Well, we certainly hope that our client on the surf friendly side is doing it optimally. We're helping them build out a fitness solution. So it's not it's not live yet, but I think they're on a great path to success for sure. So it's good to hear to some degree Nobody's figured it out yet.

Kristin Wilson  14:03  

Misery loves company. Yeah.

Justin  14:05  

All right. Let's see, we got next on our Google slide here.

So this is a two parter. We've got the New York City Department of Education is reversing its ban on zoom after the company addresses at security and privacy concerns. The funny thing about this is that the way that they address their security and privacy concerns was just by buying Cubase which is kind of insane to me. Like that's not how you

Hunter  14:29  

like, Oh, that's how it works,

Justin  14:31  

right? Like buy it like boom, all of a sudden, everything solved. So a I'm I'm impressed in two parts, right, like a impressed that people legitimately took that acquisition as like a they fixed it. Security is good. He impressed that like, their way of doing that was like, Well, you know what, like, let's just buy a company. Kristin are you familiar with Cubase at all?

Kristin Wilson  14:57  

No, but I'm familiar with this strategy.

Justin  15:00  

Yeah, so Cubase what's interesting to me is like, it doesn't to me even seemed like a valid acquisition. So Cubase is like a messaging system. Like, actually, I think I took it off of almost all my public profiles, but like, if you went to my Reddit account or my GitHub account, you know, maybe a year ago, there was actually a line in my bio that had this like really long key base key. And what it was is I put that there to verify my identity in Cubase Cubase had this like messenger and file sending system there was like a dedicated app, and you verified your identity by like, plopping this like unique key into your online profiles so that people knew it was definitely you that was speaking to them. And then they had all this encryption. I think that one point they were like, all blockchain based and then they weren't blockchain based anymore than they were open source and they weren't open source anymore. It's gone through a couple like change overs. But of all the companies to buy it's surprising to me that they just went the route of buying someone that was in like the messaging space rather than like No like CloudFlare or like, you know, somebody that's actually like invested in like database security. They just bought kind of like a consumer app that happened to have like, a security front end to it. I don't know, Christine, like you said, you've seen this strategy before. What do you think about this as a strategy for a company to just kind of dissuade those? Oh, well, we'll just buy a company. Is that a valid strategy?

Unknown Speaker  16:25  

No. It is strategy on both ends. It's also like a, it's just a PR strategy. Basically, it's like this FFO outrage by the Department of Education, kind of throwing zoom under the bus for their security when really security and privacy is an issue for everybody. It's not like zoom is the only company but just because zoom has been in the news lately, because they have this technology for video calls. It's like now everyone go attack zoom. And so zooms like okay, let's deflect this negative attention. by acquiring this company just to put a bandaid over, even if it doesn't actually solve the problem, which a lot of people don't even understand how to solve that problem, either. And then maybe they paid off. I mean, I don't know the details, but like, maybe they made a contribution to somebody at the Department

Hunter  17:18  

of Education. Wow, we're really getting in it.

Unknown Speaker  17:23  

Now. I'm just saying like, that does happen in government, though, where like, all of a sudden, things that were a big deal fall off the news. And you have to wonder, like, why did that happen? But

Justin  17:34  

I saw a lot of articles when this came out, which was like, Why is everyone picking on zoom? Google Hangouts has the exact same privacy and security concerns, like all of these, you know, conferencing apps should be under the same magnifying glass but they're not. And that's just because zoom happened to like, be in the news. And so everybody suddenly got more, you know, higher scrutiny over it. I just can't believe that the solution was to just buy a company because, you know, knee ly and Dieter covered a lot of this actually, with Tom Warren, on the verge cast. And one of the things that they talked about was that the security concerns were decisions. They weren't lack of technology, like some of the security things that zoom was doing, especially in your computer, like at one point last year, and this was like, unprecedented at the time. And Jordan heads earlier know if you guys even knew this news, but at one point, they were essentially installing like a local web server on your computer to bypass all of like, OS, Mac, oh, like the restrictions. so that it can auto install zoom like without your permission, and they even had like malware level scripting set up at the installer base, where it would like click through all the like, agree, you know, to terms or conditions continue continue. You know, they were spoofing the system admin so that it would auto install without you having to have permission from your system admin. So like if you needed to install zoom on like a corporate managed computer, it would actually spoof your system admin so that you didn't have to go get, you know, permission from your ITT. And what Tom learned was awesome was like this concept of like, Sure, we know you did that. Because that is ultimately like a UX thing. Like it's a better experience to be able to install zoom, and not have to go check your with your IT team. But like, dude, that's literally malware. Like you literally installed actual malware on people's computers. And so when you have all these practices in place that are nefarious, I don't know, as a good word for it. And then your solution is not to like, admit that you're changing your tone or your approach as a company. It's just to like buy a company. It seems like you're still shoving that stuff under the rug and not admitting, yeah, we totally messed up like that was super uncool of us. The answer now is apparently like, yeah, we'll just let Cubase worry about it for us. Something it seems like a weird cop out.

Kristin Wilson  20:02  

Yeah. And it seems like whenever you know a lot about a given topic that happens to make it into the mainstream news, you're always going to find a lot of inconsistencies and misinformation there. And this is one of those examples. I mean, when I was doing some research on an article for medium about remote work programs around the US, I went down the rabbit hole of the Amazon HQ to a competition just so you guys remember that?

Justin  20:32  

Yeah, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  20:34  

And there was there was there were so many media sound bites out there by local governments and local economic development councils and different departments that wanted to own the sound bite of like we recruited Amazon to come to our city or our state, and it created this many jobs and they're investing this much and, actually, in the data that I uncovered found that Amazon might have a negative impact. Sure, it would have a negative impact long term on that local economy and would actually take jobs away or not, you'll have like a net loss of jobs because of where they were hiring and remote and robots and things like that. But it didn't matter. Because for the local governments, it was more politically valuable for them to get the soundbite of Amazon than it was important to have an actual positive impact in the community. And so this kind of reminds me of that, where they're like, you know, this foe outrage of the security thing, because they want to appear that they're keeping people safe. And then they're like, Oh, yeah, we did this thing. And they're like, Okay, great, because we said something. Now they fixed the problem. And so we deserve a pat on the back, basically. And it also could be that they don't understand what you know, that maybe the Department of Education doesn't understand the technology needed to actually resist solve this problem, so they wouldn't even know.

Justin  22:02  

They wouldn't even look into if this was solved or not. It just looks optically great. And so they're good with it.

Unknown Speaker  22:08  

And very few people in the mainstream would notice the difference, like you guys know, because you have a technology company, but most people wouldn't know. Yeah.

Jordan  22:22  

Definitely agree. Uh, next slide. I feel like we've killed this one. Let's see we got

Justin  22:29  

Okay, so we are doing a TV show on Twitch called twitch pitch. We're giving the first VC fund on Twitch, which I think is cool that it's on Twitch and not you know, any other streaming service, basically Shark Tank where we give cash prizes of $5,000 up to $100,000 in AWS credits, plus access to pitch book apply here is done by lightship capital. We've got you know, this whole thing sponsored by pitchbook and AWS. I think this is interesting specifically because Cuz we saw, you know, other pitches move remote like yc is now doing like remote demo days. They're doing remote. They're actually I think the new cohort is going to be completely remote as well. Yeah. And it's interesting to me that they're using twitch instead of, I don't know, a million other opportunities for like live streaming something that might be a little bit more. I don't know less gaming. I don't know, Jordan. You're right.

Yeah, exactly. It does, right. Pitch twitches is a great brand. But Jordan use twitch all the time. Is this something that makes sense, you know, for people to get into, I don't even know how I would pitch on Twitch as an end user. Because you have to like have all the streaming stuff set up. Like I don't even know how I'm going to come into a pitch. Obviously, I know how the end user is going to do it like I'm sure lightship could set up. Yeah. So what's cool is like with some of the default streaming software, you can like cute stuff. Up ahead of time to say like for these slides, for example, are on our live stream here, you could put that into your streaming software. So when you go to pitch, you don't necessarily have to have

Jordan  24:09  

all the stuff to the point and stuff, you just basically swap scenes. So it's actually easier than like one would expect. But I think this is super cool. And it's I think it's really cool, especially for us because you know, we weren't raised totally remotely when we did our round and people are Oh my god, you guys are doing this. And now people are alerted building out entire systems, things to like, raise funds remotely. So I'm a huge fan of this and good on for twitch to like, leaning out of the gaming stuff entirely and going into some more like IRL stuff. That's really cool for them.

Unknown Speaker  24:43  

Yeah, I really like it because it doesn't make sense anymore to have this burden on startups to like, fly their team out to California to try to get money when they should be working on their product. It's just a distraction In my opinion, and I get that you Know you want to have some FaceTime sometimes, or you need to expand your network. But all of my friends with startups, like I feel like they're just always fundraising. And there's a lot of smart people out there. Many of them are on Twitch watching video games. I mean, maybe that's stereotypical. And being a female, it could be a bit unfortunate to see from that perspective that maybe they've decided like, our target market is like, male, this age right now they're on Twitch. These are like the stereotypical guys creating tech startups or something. But I think it's good to give people access to funding no matter where they are in the world because it shouldn't just be based on who you know, you know, who's in your virtual Rolodex. It should be based on a good idea, good management and like merit, and you know, giving people an opportunity. So I think it's a win win. It's It's good for the investors because they're going to attract new pitches that they wouldn't have otherwise had in front of them. And it's good for people who wouldn't have access to funding.

Justin  26:13  

Yeah, definitely Hunter, what do you think are yc interview would have looked like, had had had been in Twitch,

Hunter  26:20  

you know, I wish they would have done it, and Twitch because then they would have had the content, and then we'd be able to like, see our pitch, and we'd be able to laugh about it now how different the product is.

Justin  26:30  

But I think that they'd be recorded, so you'd have some like to share.

Hunter  26:35  

That is the one thing that I really like about remote work is everything starts getting recorded, and you can see it later. Could be a good thing or a bad thing. But I think about it. What's interesting is this doesn't Amazon own twitch? Yeah. Is that true? Yeah. So it's presented by AWS, which I'm assuming Twitch is being run on. So like when you get funding from these guys. I'm also assuming you'll get it says up to $5,000. I'm assuming you'll get AWS credits, so for them, there. It's powered by AWS But in reality, what are they really, really doing it for? Right? Yes.

Justin  27:04  

Yeah. So it's on the one. The one thing everybody has always told us, you know, we're on the hundred thousand credit thing as well. So like we're using, yeah. But what everyone has always told me is that that's like the ropin. Right is that they they count on you growing very quickly blowing through those credits, not realizing it on the you know, because they're, they're timed credits. So it's not like we utilize $100,000 over the next 10 years. We utilize, you know, maybe 10% of that in the first like year to grow to this insane amount. And then year three, all of a sudden our AWS bill is like a massive shock and surprise to us. There's definitely a little bit of corporate america being sprinkled in here.

Hunter  27:46  

I love it. This is the way it should be though, right? Like they should be sponsoring things like this twitch should have done this a long time ago. I just think that because of quarantine, things like this actually get to happen. TWITCH has been around for a long time. They were around With a recall before that, but we were just Yeah, I was just talking with Kp from company yesterday about this. It seems like even the incumbents like twitch are now creating new products new channel in this case, it's like a twit. It's a it's a pitching platform. So like when the pitch came out from gimlet media like that was huge. And so like I can see this becoming the next Shark Tank I would totally watch it. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  28:24  

yeah. I didn't think about it being like actually a great marketing idea for Amazon because it's not costing them that much like that might be the value or their perceived value to the people participating but their cost of offering is obviously much lower and then you're locked in then they're switching costs like

Hunter  28:45  

it's zero dollars

Kristin Wilson  28:46  

you're never you're never leaving.

Justin  28:49  

I just think seeing to see if things like this become more niche like if if you look at twitch today and it's definitely sitting around gaming and then we also look at like salute that's doing fitness. Do you think That twitch will start opening itself up more to better branding or like more opportunities, or do you think other startups are going to come in here at like pitch calm, for instance, they're just doing like SlideShare software right now. Like it's essentially a competitor to Google Slides. But I could see them like swooping in and being like, Hey, you know, there's a huge opportunity right now, for remote pitches, nothing is centered around that specific use case. Because I really feel like you'd have to hack twitch a bit to get this to really work because each individual pit startup would have to have their own individual stream. And then people would individually have to view that like there's or you'd have to have one account where everybody like shares the account, like it's definitely not like set up for like multiple people all streaming to one central location. That's what that's what that's one of the big changes they've made. So I don't remember what it's called. But you can like do like group stream now. So say, like, I want to watch two gamers playing the same game. I could watch them in the same stream now. So I don't know me from a broadcaster. That's I guess what I'm asking is like, I'm bro all of Twitch, right? versus like broadcasting only to one person who is, you know, because maybe as a startup you don't want at the time, maybe you're in stealth. You don't want literally every company in the world to be able to know what your pitches and what yours are, you know, a lot of these pictures are typically done behind closed doors, and they might contain things like traction, revenue, you know, burn rate. Twitch is a very public platform. So I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for startups moving forward to like, maybe offer some kind of like private VC pitch thing? I don't know, pitch calm, guys, if you end up watching this free idea, I'll take 10% royalties.

Unknown Speaker  30:43  

I mean, that technology's there, because it's basically like doing a webinar. And you can do that on YouTube. You can do that in Google Hangouts. You can do that on zoom. And so yeah, like I can, I can stream unlisted to YouTube And just send the link out or I could stream it privately so that only I can see it. And it's it's really I mean, they obviously have the resources to do it. And twitch has been trying to get more mainstream for a long time because I remember one of my clients, actually two of my clients are like the top three poker players on Twitch. I helped them relocate to Costa Rica. And I actually went down there and lived with them in a poker house with a group of poker. I was like their relocation person, and I became friends with them. And we went down and they have YouTube channels. And so like, that's when I started creating content. And yeah, they're getting tons of views on Twitch. So at the same time, I started I think that summer I started streaming travel. So I was one of the first twitch partners in the travel IRL segment in 2017. So I can see that happening. And also, I don't know if anyone's talked about this much, but this was mind boggling to me that Airbnb started offering the virtual experiences. And that hit me like a sack of bricks. I was like this can compete with teachable Udemy Skillshare. TWITCH like, they're live streaming YouTube, like, imagine Airbnb competing with all of those sites all of a sudden, when it started out as just a travel booking site. Yeah,

Justin  32:29  

I mean, the future battleground is is bandwidth, right? Like people are gonna be competing for your bandwidth. Where your eyeballs What are you streaming? Whether yours and don't think people would have ever thought of Airbnb is competing for your bandwidth before?

Kristin Wilson  32:44  

Never, not before the pandemic.

Justin  32:46  

yeah. So it's totally it's totally changed, you know, the landscape of like, where do you even see your startup in that, you know, that like classic graph that you see unlike a, you know, pitch deck, it's like, where we're at competitors and kind of where you lie on that teacher. You know, that's all over the place now, because everybody's kind of in the same segment.

Unknown Speaker  33:07  

Yeah. And do you think that everything is turning into like this mega monopolies basically? Well, it's kind of consolidating power and those types of companies with all of the resources because before it used to be the bigger traditional companies had a harder time changing and shifting and adapting to competitors faster. But now that everybody's online, they're just like,

Justin  33:29  

yeah, I think there's a couple things, right. A, it's probably a great time to be AWS, or, you know, as your Google Cloud or whatever, for every single company relied on you for like, email login, and now just all of a sudden, to next their bill, because now everything is streamed and you know, they've just like, you know, their entire system is now reliant upon these servers. But yeah, to the flip side, I mean, I think what you're going to see just like we just talked about, with zoom acquiring key base, I think you're going to see a lot of these smaller guys that were prepared. offer something that was like, very niche, you're going to see a big guy go, Well, we don't have the time to build that out. So let's just buy them and slap that on top of whatever existing services that is now no longer accessible, because they offer, you know, some live streaming. So probably a good time to also be in live streaming business, we'll see how long stream yard lasts before somebody buys them.

Unknown Speaker  34:23  

Yeah, and for people who just want to get acquired if that's their exit strategy, it's a it's a valid one, especially now I used to work for, or I interned at a like a renewable energy company in the UCF incubator back in the day. And pretty much all of the companies there, were selling out to oil and gas companies, because once they got big enough, and those companies would just acquire their technology and it was like a good payday for them. They could move on to the next project and then whether or not Not those technologies ever saw the light of day was another story. But yeah, it's really interesting time. From that perspective.

Jordan  35:07  

Definitely.

Justin  35:09  

What do we have next here? Yeah. So I'm surprised SAS companies haven't started charging by the hour, at least from a marketing perspective. 25 cents an hour is ridiculously cheap if the user of the SAS tools paid $50 an hour to do their job. But 899 a year sounds like it needs manager approval. And I think this actually goes right back to what we were just talking about, if you think about how much of our systems are going to be relying upon, you know, AWS server being running all the time, and we build, you know, for Yac, like we pay minute by minute for an AWS server to run our some stuff. But then we turn around and you know, Hunter and I have gone back and forth over this like a million times to sort of like the cost per user trying to figure out like, how much does one user cost us and we have to slap some like generic number across it because some users cost a lot more than other users. And it is interesting to think that, you know, if you started pricing things, according to how it actually costs you to even run them, not only does it mean that there's a one to one relationship between your costs and what you take in on it, but that also technically does sound a lot cheaper. Hunter, would you be able to pull this off from a marketing perspective? Can we start charging by the minute?

Hunter  36:24  

No, and I think this is saying is like, because it says like, 25 cents an hour is ridiculously cheap at the user of the SAS tool is paid 50 $50 an hour to do their job. So I guess like an example of this is like a designer's pay $50 an hour to do their job. And so that they're only charging, like, let's say 25 cents an hour to use, like figma is am I interpreting that right?

Justin  36:47  

Well, I think No, I think the goal is like when you look at a sass tool, and you're trying to figure out if you're gonna buy it and you have to do some cost analysis. Let's use sketch as an example sketches. 99 bucks a year. And some you know, we talked about this all the time internally, you got to spend money to make money. But if it's 99 bucks a year, and you're saying, Oh man, that's that's a huge expense. And then, you know, I'd rather just have my designer keep using Photoshop, we already have the license to that, right. But if your designer takes twice as long to get anything done in Photoshop, then they could in sketch, you've just paid them, whatever, $50 an hour, $80 an hour to do their job twice as slow when you could just pay a one time fee of 100 bucks to get sketch. So I think that the question is, you know, if a sass tool price themselves the same way that they price a, you know, a design tool or a employee, the person making that purchasing starts to go, Oh, well, my teammate, you know, my employee is working, you know, half as many hours on this task now, and it's only adding 25 cents an hour to what I already paid them. And it's just interesting that as products and product people will always want to price things like a monthly price or a yearly price. And I think it might be difficult For a manager to like, think through the actual cost savings overall, but maybe if you just put it as like a minute by minute or an hour cost, all of a sudden it becomes, oh, well, that's nothing in the long run, right? When you think about it tied into how much I pay my employee,

Hunter  38:16  

I was just looking at this actually, a lot of transcription companies charged by the minute, right. And I don't like it because it actually discourages me from using the product. I can see the minutes I was actually just using a company called record phi. And I think they have 100 minutes or something like that. 100 minutes of

Justin  38:36  

transcription where you're what's available, right? Yeah, screen. So

Hunter  38:40  

I only used a minute, but all of a sudden it starts shrinking. And I'm like, I don't want to use this anymore. I'm gonna use up all my transcription minutes just testing this thing out. So yeah, I would I would never charge by the minute, at least in my head. I don't I don't know how I would pull that off. That's terrifying to me.

Unknown Speaker  38:55  

I mean, I think it would end up being it always ends up being more expensive. This way. The End User so I can see why they would want to do it. But it would be tough. Just like when airlines started charging, you know, extra for seats and baggage, it's kind of like if everyone did it and there was no choice, then the consumer would just have to go with it. But it's going to be hard. If you're the first company to stick your neck out there and be like, this is what we're doing now, it could come down to game theory, or fantasy.

Justin  39:26  

Budgeting makes a huge difference. I mean, Jordans messing with our numbers all the time. And I think having an unknown of how someone might use a product would like throw off our budgeting a lot. Whereas like, if I tell Jordan, x software is going to cost x per month, he could plug that into a spreadsheet, put it across an entire year and see how that impacts our bottom line.

Kristin Wilson  39:47  

Yeah,

Jordan  39:49  

from a from a people perspective, I would almost argue sometimes this is, I'll say predatory but I'm one of the words you use like in the context of like AWS, like you talked about earlier, Dustin, you look at it and you go oh point Since a minute, it's not that bad. And then like really, really adds up over time. And you know, this makes for a start up at some point. So yeah, definitely. Let's see, what's our next slide here?

Justin  40:15  

So, Chris, have you heard of Rome research?

Unknown Speaker  40:19  

I just saw this on Twitter. There's actually another company, a co living company called Rome. That closed down I believe. But um, so I was like, wondering what this was.

Justin  40:33  

Yeah. So Hunter, do you want to kind of give her the the overview and then we can read this tweet out?

Hunter  40:39  

Yeah. So Rome research is a brand new product. I think it's less than two months old or something. Maybe they just released it recently, completely free product that's basically your own personal Wikipedia page. So as your as your experience, you would love it. Honestly, you would become a power user of it. People like Colin borns use it every day. He was just telling me about it on Yac Last night, but basically what you do is you just type out your notes throughout the day. And then you'll put something in brackets and then that makes it a link. So like in Wikipedia if you're, if you're going through, let's say digital nomad TV, you'll see the word Kristen Wilson and blue, you'll click, you'll click Kristen Wilson, and then you'll have your own Wikipedia page, right? And then you'll go down, you'll see the word remote. And then when you click on remote, it goes to its own page. So basically, that's what Rome research does. It's sort of like a, like a cowboy bootstrap, like two or three founders. The guy smokes cigarettes every day. He's got long hair, like super, super cool California dude building this thing. And, yeah, they're getting a lot of hype right now. I think they have like, I don't even want to guess the percentage, but it's, it's like the darling right now in Silicon Valley. But yeah, just don't add anything else.

Justin  41:50  

It's sort of like that. It works like Wikipedia where you get into like, I don't know, people talk about this all the time on YouTube. You get into the black hole where you like click into one thing and you find a related item, you click in another thing you teach keep diving further. And you know, similar to Wikipedia where like kind of all the pages are connected all at the same time. That's sort of how it works. So like you have a concept that's referenced one place, but then you can click into it and it goes to a completely different place where maybe that's defined and then inside of that it's using another word that gets defined somewhere else and so it's like I don't know a notion document that's also kind of like a mind map at the same time but you know, the suite says the people have spoken the gates of Rome closed new users tonight in case of Rome Yeah.

Hunter  42:32  

Which is that's amazing.

Justin  42:34  

Extra way of saying that we made it invite only but

Hunter  42:37  

Oh, wait, wait. So Justin, before you go into it, I do have to explain to Kristen though, they do have like the Rome cult like it has its own like website as its own Twitter handle, like a whole thing because people love it so much, that they've called themselves the Rome code. So that's why it's funny that they call it the gates have room. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, Justin.

Justin  42:58  

Well, I mean, I just think it's interesting. You know, we started as invite only as well, right. And I think the goal there for us was to keep the iteration cycle really tight. We didn't want to listen to the vocal minority we wanted to listen to, you know, the power users. You know, they opened it up all together, they did a reverse, right? Like, they opened it up to everybody, and then made it private. We made it private, and then open it up to everybody, which is probably the most the more normal way to do it. But I think this is interesting, because they, they did what I think a lot of startups struggle to do, like you said, they have like the cult, right, like they did the superhuman thing, they built a following around it product that arguably is very ugly, kind of clumsy. It's very powerful. But I mean, so is like a million other pieces of software that have been eclipsed by someone who came along and built a sexier version of it. But they built that following, and now that they've shut it down, it kind of makes you want it like even more, right? Like, I'm not even a user, but now I'm like, how do I get an invite? Right? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  43:58  

I know. I was like, I had a wish that I knew about this sounds great for SEO. That's why. But I mean, Wikipedia is so powerful and they have their own cult as well. And, you know, like, there's actually like a category that you can become like a wiki pdn. And then people can hire you to build out their Wikipedia pages, but like, you can't build your own page. So like, this will be interesting because you could actually make your own page and you could associate yourself with the key terms or words that you want to be connected with. And what do you write short?

Hunter  44:42  

Do you write I remember, I talked to you a little while ago and you said that you write a lot do you write like, journals every day to yourself about remote work like? Or is it just like blogs?

Unknown Speaker  44:54  

I've experimented with a lot of writing actually how to travel blog back into 2007 2008 and I used to teach my high school English class. Because, like, I think kids had a hard time with grammar and commas back then. Were probably now too so my teacher was like, can you teach this like writing was my thing. I was always really bad at math. But Sal, like failed the math side of the a CT a CT as the other side. Yeah, but um, yeah. I and I have been, like following Tim Ferriss work since 2007. And so I'm kind of like, have been going through a similar evolution as him like, I've noticed that sometimes he's doing morning pages, he's always doing experiments, right. And I've kind of done that as well, like I have. I'm very analog person, but also digital. So like, I have journals. And then I also have so many different, like writing apps and, like workflowy I don't use notion but then I have different blogs and things so I do some form. Writing every day like actually one of the, the fellow writers on medium invited me to a 1000 words per day 30 Day Challenge. And I was like, that's fine, because I might write 10,000 words a day. It's not my blogger. Yeah, I mean, I'm writing like podcasts, descriptions and YouTube scripts and like, all kinds of stuff. So I'm just constantly writing. I should probably outsource more of it.

Justin  46:28  

Have you seen Almanac? Hmm? Yeah. So I think it's get almanac.com I'm pretty sure that's the URL. Yeah. We did some stuff for them. They're cut. It's funny. They started out as like notion. It was like this internal thing. And then they noticed that like, the thing that was taking off inside of their software was people using like templates that somebody else wrote. And so they kind of became this like, they call it like GitHub, or like notions version of GitHub is this idea of like, like I wrote our hiring guide. Basically, the guidelines That I use at our company for who we're going to hire and how we're going to find them. And then they publish that to Almanac. And now anybody else can come into Almanac and they can clone that similar like a GitHub repo and put it into their own internal Almanac. And then they can edit it, put their twist on it, you know, remove things that they didn't like about mine, or, you know, both things they liked about mine. And I think that's really interesting. I like this concept of like, knowledge sharing, externally, you know, what, if everybody's notions were just like, open to the public, and you could, you know, remix them and share them and almost like you said, kind of like associate your company with like, some sort of brands like I can see GitHub and get lab and all these companies that have these like public you know, versions of like, what they're working on, they have these like roadmaps, you know, doing that and then allowing me as a company to remix it and add my twist on it.

Unknown Speaker  47:55  

Yeah, it's like an open source, internal policy. procedure slash administration.

Justin  48:04  

That's Wikipedia, but not for like, you know, cheating on your history assignment.

Unknown Speaker  48:09  

Right, like Wikipedia mixed with Legal Zoom mixed with SlideShare maybe? there Yeah. Yeah, I'll

Unknown Speaker  48:16  

have to check that out. Because

Justin  48:19  

Yeah, Almanac pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you can check out Almanac because it's available, but you can't check out Rome because, you know, they they shut the gates as as it were.

Unknown Speaker  48:33  

It's so funny because I got removed from a whatsapp group today that I didn't even know I was in. And my first reaction was like, What

Justin  48:40  

did I miss out on?

Kristin Wilson  48:41  

I'm like, offended like, I don't even know what this group is for. I probably had it muted or something.

Justin  48:48  

Yeah, well, you know, feel that FOMO because you're no longer allowed to use broom.

Kristin Wilson  48:54  

will have to get an invite somehow.

Justin  48:57  

So I think let's see. Yeah. The last two things are just like gaming related. So, have you played Animal Crossing, Kristen?

Hunter  49:06  

Oh, I love this one.

Kristin Wilson  49:07  

I'm not a gaming person.

Justin  49:09  

Oh, you don't play Animal Crossing though.

Unknown Speaker  49:12  

My parents never let us have like Nintendo or anything. So I just man never became that person.

Justin  49:18  

Well, if you can find it in tendo switch and you're longing to eat an apple on a beach somewhere. tossing is a great way to kind of live out that. Well, no, I what I love about Animal Crossing right now during the quarantine is it's like a way to like escape out of your house for a little bit and go do something like you'd never really be able to do. And I think that's what it like. It's funny. They didn't modify the launch. This was just when it was launching, maybe Nintendo planted the virus. It's like, Huh, that's more conspiracy theories on this podcast. You know, like they literally launched it like the best time in the world. You know, you're stuck at home, you have nothing to do, we can't see the outside world. And so they launched Animal Crossing for the switch and it's just the magical experience of like, building up your island visiting other people like it's living out this like fantasy of what you can't do in quarantine. And it's built an entire economy. You know, we talk about turn up economy and all these people sharing their friend codes on Twitter whenever they have high turnip prices so that you can go sell your turnips on their island. There was like a whole article written about how Elijah Wood was like visiting people. AOC yesterday was tweeting out her friend code so that people can visit her Island and like it's created this entire ecosystem of like, trading goods digitally through crossing and their design system for the custom, like shirts and stuff is really, really well done. And I saw early on actually, I think they the Chinese government, I think banned copies of Animal Crossing, because people were building QR codes on their island on the ground that you could scan with a WeChat QR code scanner to buy in game items and like basically They had a whole like black market operation through like WeChat QR codes and Animal Crossing so much so that the government started banning cases of Animal Crossing coming into the country, which is insane. So now there's like actual people charging as a consultant to do like interior design, which is insane to me. And I think it's the coolest thing ever. Someone found a side hustle, moving someone's couch around on animal crossing. It's like

Hunter  51:31  

yeah, it's very, very like it. I've also used

Jordan  51:34  

it so I have almost like full on I got like, full staff, like they'll have like their friends come to their island, hire their friends for like our stuff or build stuff,

Justin  51:43  

get paid real money and then go to somebody else's well I would ever getting for, like farming rocks, I think, where someone had bouncers set up, they had friends that they invited to their island. They were set up as like bouncers to prevent people from like going in all at the same time. So they Like gaining access to like a certain area to farm on someone's island

Jordan  52:04  

that absolutely crazy. I don't

Hunter  52:08  

I'll just get addicted to this. You should start your own What was it like a moving consultancy? You should do that for Animal Crossing so much money you

Justin  52:17  

can make animal relocation.

Hunter  52:19  

relocation. That's right.

Unknown Speaker  52:21  

I hope you relocate to a Elijah Woods Island.

Justin  52:28  

Absolutely

Hunter  52:28  

awesome.

Unknown Speaker  52:29  

AMC was streaming on Twitch for a while and I remember that getting some buzz back

Justin  52:34  

She's hip with the kids man.

Unknown Speaker  52:36  

So she's on top of it. Well, she's just a Gen Z are Yeah,

Justin  52:41  

yeah, she is but you know, I think it's a I think it's amazing that a game like Animal Crossing. I mean, I played the original game q version. I remember getting it for Christmas like it was a magical experience. Because Kristen, what are the cool things with the game is that it's time its clock to real time and real time. world events. So when Easter was coming, they had an Easter event, when birthday was here, then an Earth Day event, like I had a thing I actually woke up again to start last night ran downstairs, because may 7, in like was the last day that I could use my Mayday ticket to go to the special Island Animal Crossing that was going to expire. And it's the first game that like, it's funny because it puts a pressure on you to do things that are time related, but at the same time, actually like that you can't just beat the whole game in one day. It's kind of meant to be played across like a year or a lifetime, really. But what's very interesting about it is that they just launched it in this time in which like, it's exciting to have something new to look forward to each day and to login Animal Crossing to see what the new events are, you know, talk to new people find, you know, make these friends online. But then on the flip side, when we talk about entrepreneurship and the opportunities that are presented, I love that somebody saw this and was like I'm gonna build a side hustle, you know, out of this, this is amazing. You know, it just proves that even inside of a pandemic, people are still have that kind of ingenuity to do things get creative. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  54:13  

I always say that. Like there's as many ways to make money as there are people in the world because I mean, people design video game avatars, and like, I mean, there's just unlimited ways to earn a living with the internet. So I love it.

Justin  54:28  

Yeah, definitely. Well, this is our last slide. So this is just fortnight. Welcome to the party. Jordan, you start off?

Jordan  54:36  

Yeah, I mean, I went to the Travis Scott concert and fortnight for one that was just an absolutely exciting experience. Good for them for pulling it off. But this number 3.2 billion hours spent a game in just one month. That is

Justin  54:51  

insane. I realized it was one month. That's that is nuts. So in April, players spent 3.2 billion hours in game 350 million registered players I call of duty, said yesterday that 60 million players were on Warzone. And I looked at that number I was like, Oh my god, like that's yeah, that's pretty impressive, right? 60 million people using your game. And then you go look at the fortnight numbers, it's like, that's 60 million. That's basically nothing compared to 300 billion users in fortnight,

Jordan  55:21  

far less than just like, what half of what they're doing.

Unknown Speaker  55:24  

Yeah. I mean, this just goes to show that we are like, literally one, human race. I mean, everybody is hanging out together on the internet. And this pandemic has shown that people cannot survive without community. And so wherever they find that community, whether it's in a video game or in live streaming software, or on social media, or whatever, like that is the only thing keeping people sane right now is just connecting with other people on digital islands and like Twitter and wherever else

Justin  55:59  

definitely

Jordan  56:00  

Yeah,

Justin  56:01  

I mean, I think what's crazy is I saw, I don't know where I saw like an ad for this, but they advertised it as a concert. It wasn't advertised as like a DLC or a game or it was come see Steve Aoki and dead mouse perform live like, Yeah, but it's not live but it but it is live, it's you know, it's a whole new definition of what entertainment can be, but they didn't skip a beat explaining that, like, you're gonna go to a live concert like this is what the new normal is log into fortnight. And I love like a lot of the images they use for like, players like sitting on a mountain watching like a DJ stream, like, you know, a mile away. This like, you know, the jumping around and like setting things on fire and like, it's obviously stuff that you could never do in real life. But it's completely changed how we perceive a live event like I mean, I think this goes all the way back to what we talked about the beginning with pitches being done over twitch now. The concept of a pitch and going into a boardroom. And like sitting at a table with a, you know, a pointer and going through a slideshow? I bet you could do I mean, we talked about this with Peter all the time at beta works, you could do pitches in fortnight and imagine all the like creative tools in the way that you could like totally change the way that you present your company. If you are wearing a banana suit and jumping up and down while you present your product.

Unknown Speaker  57:21  

Yeah, this is why I was really heartened to see founders tweeting about creating a YouTube channel because this is something that I've talked with some people about before. Even like dm, Andreas clinger and I was like, why doesn't Angel list have more subscribers on YouTube? And like, why aren't more people talking about what they know? Because you know, there's so many smart people like everybody on the world has a story has a personality and like, why not show up and do a pitch in fortnight like it's just all about? Being in front of other people and even something like this, like this party or this concert that's in fortnight when they canceled Coachella, some of the bands and some of the artists had their own live streams in place of that and then I ended up getting invited to like zoom parties to watch YouTube live streams of Coachella artists and so for everything that these companies put out then there's also creative people creating like side groups and side projects off of that inside streams and and so it's just really interesting to see like all the different directions that this is going and so you never know who's going to be watching and then what that spark is going to create and some someone else so

Justin  58:54  

definitely, well, yeah, cool. Certainly cool to see like the evolution and I think it's very interesting that you say like, You know, we're human race, and we found a way to all communicate, because, you know, it wasn't happening the way that we're used to. And so the world just moved on, you know, as drastically, say, life found a way right. And so yeah, it's certainly interesting to see that. Well, that is our last slide. And we'd run a little long today because we had the world's gigantic bucket of technical problems today. But Christopher, we appreciate you coming on. We're gonna cut this up. All kinds of different snippets. We'll put it on YouTube. So anybody who's not watching it live can watch the recap. But thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you online, Kristen,

Unknown Speaker  59:39  

you can find me@youtube.com slash traveling with Kristin and also on Instagram and traveling with Kristin calm. I also have a weekly podcast called badass digital nomads and a Facebook group with the same name. And I'm I've been on Twitter for a long time, but I've been quite solid Silent on it for like 10 years, but I've been more active lately in the past year. So also you can tweet me at Where's Kristin with an AI?

Justin  1:00:09  

Awesome. Well, we appreciate you coming on. Everybody wave goodbye. Yes, thank you. We'll see you guys later Adios.

Jordan  1:00:19  

Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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