A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:04:41 · Jack Kuveke
[00:04:41] S0: I just think that like, he's just doing like what Ba BlackRock's doing. He's buying him a bunch of residential properties. He's gonna rent them to people who are too broke and too indebted to be able to fight , afford abort, buy , buy homes on their own. So like, this may actually be a totally fine play. <laugh> , if he just owns a bunch of property, becomes a landlord and property manager that's like the oldest business in the book. Before he would just became a commercial property manager, and no one's going to office this anymore. So that was kind of a dog idea. But like, everyone still needs a home to live in, they just can't afford to buy one. So they're just gonna rent one from Adam Neumann . Like, it's just a re it's literally just a property management company, which is not a bad business, it's just not like a tech company. But
00:05:22 · Pablo Srugo
[00:05:22] S1: He is , you know, I'll give him this. He's like the ultimate storyteller, <laugh>, at least from what I can . I mean , like , think about WeWork, man. Like we were , like you said, I mean, it was actually Covid aside and nobody predicted Covid, but it was a pretty solid business. I remember I rented WeWork, that place was packed. Like, I'm like, you know, the margins have to make sense because he's just packing a bunch of people in a space and making 'em pay a lot of money. But this guy, you know, he was, he had like community adjusted ebitda. I mean, I mean, he was building a community, he was building something much bigger that turned out to not be bigger at all. It was really just space. But I mean, that, that's probably his number one trait. Is this guy just really good story guy . Yeah ,
00:05:56 · Jack Kuveke, Pablo Srugo
[00:05:56] S0: Dude, he's, he's , he's electric. Everyone, everyone gets drinks. The Kool-Aid, I remember back at like, whatever, five, 10 years ago, it must be more like 10 years ago now, like the amount of nerds I knew in the tech space who collected like WeWork office stickers. Like I've been to the one in Bangkok and the one in Malaysia or whatever. And then those same people five years later when we worked one in the bank, we're like, this is a terrible business. I'm like, what the, what are you saying, brother? You are literally the most avid WeWork fan in the world. And like, they were always buying Herman Miller chairs and couches for like $50,000 and just cutting into the margins of their business. And they really wanted to make a good coworking business. They should have just bought like homeless people's furniture, just thrown it in an office and done all the same sort of community building dynamics that they did. But, you know, either way, I'm pro Adam Neumann. I think this residential property movement , great, you know, it'll be BlackRock and Adam Neumann that are gonna be owning all of the homes in America. And who better to be alongside the biggest financial demon organization of all time than Adam. So [00:06:56] S1: Let's start , let's start to the next one . Man, this is a great month to start because there's literally spies in Silicon Valley at Deel or whatever, rippling what? Dude , tell me, I mean, what, you know, the story there, what's going on ? Like what happened? Maybe a little summary to start.
00:06:56 · Pablo Srugo, Jack Kuveke
[00:06:56] S1: Let's start , let's start to the next one . Man, this is a great month to start because there's literally spies in Silicon Valley at Deel or whatever, rippling what? Dude , tell me, I mean, what, you know, the story there, what's going on ? Like what happened? Maybe a little summary to start. [00:07:09] S0: Well, this is awesome. So the two most boring companies of all time, which is Deel and Rippling, which are just hr, like, and out like contract software, software companies. So if you wanna hire someone, which [00:07:21] S1: Would even ease, like Deel is like the fastest growing company ever or whatever. Like it's up there and like, it just helps you hire people abroad. Like that's as , that's as good as I could understand
00:07:21 · Pablo Srugo, Jack Kuveke
[00:07:21] S1: Would even ease, like Deel is like the fastest growing company ever or whatever. Like it's up there and like, it just helps you hire people abroad. Like that's as , that's as good as I could understand [00:07:29] S0: It, right ? It's just like if you wanted to set up a company, I used things like Deel and, and , and Rippling before I used what, like Gusto, which is a similar business model. Yeah . You know, they give you HR and benefits. If you're a small company, you pay them a subscription every month and they give you access to like health , healthcare and payroll, fine business. I get it, cool, whatever. A lot of small businesses out there. But apparently what went on is , uh, Deel found an ex rippling , found a rippling employee, and basically planted them in the company. And then this guy just went into Slack channels and stole all of their like rippling sales and marketing information and pawned off the deal. And then it turned out that the CEO of Deel was involved with this guy who was making like $62,000 a year out of the Ireland office in rippling and either Deel, CEO . Like, I don't, what was he getting paid or was he doing it just so that he could be friends with the , with a billionaire CEO , which by the way, is a legendary grift if this guy managed to not pay him and would just be like, yeah , dude, I'll totally be your boy if you just send me trade secrets for my top top competitor, [00:08:36] S1: I'll invite you to couple parties. Yeah, that's <laugh> , that's,
00:08:36 · Pablo Srugo, Jack Kuveke
[00:08:36] S1: I'll invite you to couple parties. Yeah, that's <laugh> , that's, [00:08:38] S0: That's the greatest trade of all time. And it just goes to show you like how many losers work in tech to like, where someone comes up to you and is like, listen man, here's what I want you to do. This is totally, you're gonna be basically like James Bond. You're gonna go into a Slack channel, okay? And you're gonna be wearing a collared shirt and like $40 Chinos every single day. You're gonna log into Slack, you're gonna find these documents, you're gonna send them to me, and you're basically like the modern day of James Bond. Your Jason Bourne send me all this . And this guy's like, you're totally right. I'm cool. Now, the [00:09:09] S1: Funny thing is, is if you think about sp like spies are intrinsically cool, but it also, like, they find out cool, like real spies , you know, you find out like somebody is, you know, paying some, some gorilla thing in some other place or, you know, they're gonna like, you know, bomb this other whatever it is. Like, it's big things. These guys are figuring out like, oh, Deel is gonna like change the color of the logo next week. Or , you know, like whatever product features happening at big companies. It is not, it's not , uh, very exciting stuff.