My First Million: #124 - From Fantasy Stock Betting to Milk Bombs: Generating Ideas with Elaine Zelby

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers, and each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find another bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

Okay.

What's up, everybody?

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

I'm Joe.

zahl up everybody.

Shawn here, we're waiting on Sam.

He's going to be joining in a second.

We'll let him, you know, make a dramatic entrance and then we have Elaine Zelby with us.

Did I say it right?

Hello.

Yes.

That's perfect.

It's weird because I've met people, but I've never said their full name out loud.

I do it for the first time on the podcast and I'm like, well, shit.

Hopefully I get this right.

But yours is pretty easy.

Yeah.

That's for sure.

Me and Sam have a mutual friend who, I think, has known us for, oh, he's known me

Sam for a long time.

for a couple of years, and he calls me Shan.

He thinks my name is Shan and I haven't corrected him.

And so he just calls me Shan and I just let it go,

which is kind of a weird move on my part.

I should probably tell him at some point.

Yeah, I feel like there's always that awkwardness

of if your name is pronounced a little bit different

than it's spelled of like, do you correct people all the time?

Do you just let it go and be like, what, it's okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I usually correct people because I would want,

if I was saying somebody's name wrong,

I would want them to be like, hey, actually it's this.

Yeah.

But the moment went by and I didn't say it.

And I was like, well, moment went by now.

Now I'm stuck with this.

Now my name's Shan.

I might as well tell everyone that's what it is.

Okay, so tell people what you do.

And we met because you sent me a bunch of cool ideas once

and you were like, hey, we should meet.

I like your podcast and I have a bunch of ideas too.

And then we did a Zoom call that by the end of it,

I was like, shit, I should have just recorded that.

That would have been an episode.

And so finally got you on for an actual episode.

But give people a quick little like introduction.

Yeah, for sure.

So I had kind of a random life and career.

I started as a mechanical engineer.

I actually did undergrad and grad school

and thought I was gonna do mechanical devices,

sorry, I'm mental devices.

And I'm really impatient.

So pretty quickly realized that hardware

was probably not a good fit for me

and wanted to do my own company

but couldn't figure out what I wanted to spend

seven to 10 years on.

So I joined as one of the first employees

of an enterprise software company,

which they don't tell you that it's the same risk

without any of the upside.

So I learned that lesson, which was interesting.

I spent about five years there

and got to build out a lot of the go-to-market functions.

And we ended up getting fundraising

from Andrews and Horowitz and some other big VCs

and got to kind of learn a little bit about what VC is,

which I had no idea.

And fast forward five years, I went to Slack

when Slack was launching an enterprise product

to lead their enterprise product marketing.

And I had accidentally started my own little side hustle

doing growth marketing for seed and series A companies.

And through that, I ended up working

with a bunch of companies.

I got brought to the firm I'm at now,

which is SignalFire.

So I am a VC at SignalFire.

And I got brought in to essentially just help the portfolio,

became an advisor, got to know the team.

And after a couple of years,

I ended up joining full-time on the investment side.

Very cool.

And so you're on the dark side, as we say.

Yes, but I think I got introduced to your podcast

on the second episode.

I don't remember how.

But when I started listening, I was like, yes, my people.

I'm just constantly ideating on all kinds of ideas.

I love unsexy niches.

I see problems and opportunities everywhere.

So I'm very excited to check.

All right, well, we can just jump in

because you have a bunch here and I don't know.

So here's what we're gonna do.

I'm gonna pick a random one off here.

I'm just gonna say the little three-word description

you gave it.

And you tell me what it is

and then I'll either react to it.

We can riff off of it for a little bit

or I'll be like, I don't know what the hell to do with that.

Let's go to the next one.

Okay, so let's start with co-working 2.0.

What are you thinking with co-working 2.0?

Yeah, okay, so what I think about this is

there is something to be said

about the concept of co-working holistically.

I think we work was a disaster for a variety of reasons.

But it's a little bit bizarre

that we are essentially have our social circles

and our work circles together just because of the office.

But why can't you essentially go into a physical place?

Like also, I mean, you're at a bigger company

even if you're at a smaller company

you don't work with 95% of your actual coworkers.

Like you hang out with them at lunch,

you grab coffee, you go for a walk

but you don't actually work with them.

So why can't you go into a physical space

based off of where you live

and have essentially friends and colleagues

that aren't your actual coworkers?

To me, it just seems very obvious and natural

and then you get economies of scale

where your company is paying a small amount of money

for you to go work there

but you get that social piece

but it's also community oriented.

So you don't have to go and commute an hour.

You can commute five minutes

and just have more flexibility

but I think there's something to be said

about going to the same place every day,

not hopping, not traveling.

So that's kind of what I mean by that.

And so let's say you took this idea

and what do you think would make it

have that sort of initial adoption?

Do you think, how would you approach

if you were gonna actually build this idea out?

Give me kind of the one, two, three

of how you would approach this

and get the initial traction.

Yeah, so when I was brainstorming around this idea

the concept was to go and take a lot of these leases

that are still being held by companies.

So a lot of people are on the hook

for three to 10 year leases.

The problem is, exactly during COVID, nobody wants it.

So you start going and essentially taking these leases

at a really ridiculously low price.

And then you can go to those companies

that you're taking the leases

and then also find any other smaller companies

that have given up their office space.

And essentially the plan is you hire staff

who's gonna be kind of the everything

from security, office manager, all that kind of stuff.

And again, economy is the scale.

You can retrofit it with furniture or whatever you need.

But you essentially start selling

these enterprise contracts to companies

where they're gonna pay per head per person

but they can go and leverage the space.

I think of it as like the co-working,

sorry, the Starbucks model of co-working.

So you know exactly what you're gonna get

when you walk into one of these places.

It's smaller, it can probably hold 30, 50 people

not a 20 story building with 1,000 people,

something like that.

And basically a couple different companies

have these contracts and that allows some number of seats

from their team to go there on a regular basis.

Exactly, but essentially this is your office.

So you're saying like I was paying $1,000 per month per head.

I'm gonna go and pay $1,000 per month for you

but you're gonna go not to an office

with other people from our team,

it's other people from different teams.

Yes, exactly, okay.

This only really works in cities.

I don't think this works in,

the suburbs are in random places

but I think in anywhere where there's some kind of density

I could see this working pretty well.

Well, I forgot, maybe it was last episode

we were talking about this,

but somebody was doing these like the suburbs

they were doing basically like these tiny home offices.

So basically you buy a prefabbed home,

put it in your backyard and it's designed to be an office

not like a bedroom.

And then you basically have that as,

if I put up the 80 grand that it's gonna take

to create this little thing,

can I then rent these out for 500 bucks a month

to people in my geography

and you create a network of these,

you create sort of Airbnb model

where you can search and find a nearby tiny office

for you to go join

and use people's backyard real estate.

Which I think is interesting

but what I think you're talking about

makes a little more sense right now

because the real estate is not scarce in this case, right?

The real estate is actually up for grabs,

kind of a desperate situation.

You could buy low in a lot of cases right now

for commercial real estate.

I think they said in San Francisco

there's 12 million square feet

of available commercial real estate right now.

And so I think you don't need

the like sharing economy to do it.

I think you would be better off just picking up

pre-made offices already

and assuming the lease with better terms.

And the problem with what you're describing is

it doesn't solve the social piece.

And so yes, people wanna go and work outside their house

but they want the social piece.

That's really why they wanna go to an office

and having a tiny desk in someone's backyard

doesn't actually solve that.

So in the suburbs, here's my idea for the suburbs.

So back in, I think this is 2016,

Wells Fargo shut down in a single year 25%

of all their bank branches.

That was like 1,000 or 2,000 bank branches.

Now bank branches are well positioned for foot traffic

in mostly suburban, some more rural areas.

Now, huge square footage.

What is gonna go into these three

to 6,000 square foot things?

That would be a perfect place to go

and build the suburban version of the co-working model.

Buy up the banks, all the places they're trying to shut down,

get it for pennies on the dollar,

and then go and do that.

Yeah, and somebody was doing that, right?

Or some bank did this.

I think it was Chase or Capital One?

Capital One, Capital One.

And they opened these cafes and co-working spaces

but it wasn't pay to play in the sense of

you could just go and order a coffee instead for free.

I was thinking more of you actually own the spaces

or maybe you don't own it, you operate the spaces

and ultimately it's paying to go in.

It's paying on a daily basis or monthly or whatever.

And you gotta find something good to do with the vault

if they have a vault.

So you gotta store something down there.

Yes, make it something cool.

Yeah, they have baseball cards or something.

Okay, so here's another random idea

that's sort of like that.

When I lived in Indonesia,

there was this really popular thing

that I've never seen in any city since.

It probably exists, someone's gonna message me

and be like, hey, that happens in New York all the time.

But the first time I saw it and the last time I saw it

was in Jakarta, which is like a very big city in Indonesia,

super populated area.

You have all these kind of massive hotels

and apartment buildings.

And at the bottom, they would have like nightclubs, right?

And so they would have like really baller nightclubs

that they had built out.

Now a nightclub is only useful

like Thursday, Friday, Saturday night basically.

Everything else is like,

you just have to hold it on a Tuesday afternoon,

nothing is happening there.

And so what one group was doing,

pretty entrepreneurial group, they were going

to the nightclub owners and they were saying,

hey, let us take over the nightclub Monday through Friday

from six a.m. to like one p.m.

And they were taking it over

and they were turning it into basically

like a fitness studio where you would go in the morning

and the dance floor became the like workout floor.

You know, like it was just like you would go

and you would do kind of like,

it could be like a Zumba type of class,

could be like a bearish boot camp

and some light, you know, like light equipment there.

And the bar became a smoothie bar and protein shake bar.

And so it was, and the music system is already great

and the mirrors are already there.

And so they are, it was like set up

to be the perfect fitness studio.

And so without any, without owning any real estate,

they got free access to prime downtown,

you know, under these buildings, awesome nightclubs.

And they were paying, you know, pennies

because the nightclub owner was making zero off

at otherwise and they were creating these like,

you know, breakfast studios, breakfast bars

and it was amazing.

And I'm surprised more people don't do that.

Have you heard this concept?

I love that idea.

I mean, we're so bad at using space.

If you think of how many things are open only until 2 p.m.

and then nothing is using it from 2 p.m.

until like 6 a.m. the next day or vice versa.

The thing with the nightclubs though

in fitness studios is typically any kind of gym

or fitness studio, there's a huge rush from, you know,

call it 5.30 a.m. to like 8.30 a.m., 9 a.m.

and then kind of a glut

and then you get that 12 to one window

and then another glut.

And so it feels like not optimal usage

but definitely better than nothing.

I like that.

Well, yeah, exactly.

They were getting zero value out of it before that.

So I like that one.

There's another kind of concept.

I don't think it ever took off

but it's like they turn restaurants

that are only open for dinner,

like kind of fine dining restaurants

and they were doing like co-working during the day with it.

Do you know if anything came with that?

That one, it was hard.

Yes, I did.

I do know that one.

I think what was challenging is

you have to kick people out relatively early

and also the way that restaurants are set up

is definitely not optimized for working,

not high speed Wi-Fi, not ergonomic chairs,

all that kind of stuff.

So I think it was a little bit square peg round hole

but I liked that idea.

You know, one thing that I think would be interesting

similar to that is a lot of restaurants

that are only open for breakfast or lunch

that close at 2-3 p.m.

Why don't they turn that commercial kitchen

into a ghost kitchen at night?

I mean, it's literally a commercial kitchen

with all that space.

So to me it feels like an obvious use for that.

I'm sure somebody's working on it.

For sure.

Okay, cool.

All right, let's jump to another one.

So let's pick an interesting one here.

We've talked a little bit about this

but I'm curious what you have here.

Credit cards for fans.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so there's been a lot of interesting takes

on credit cards recently.

And if you think back, typically, you know,

if you look at the ones that are popular among millennials,

they were the Chase Sapphire card

or the Capital One Reserve or whatever.

And they were focused on travel rewards.

And that was fine.

But if you look at Gen Z, they don't really care

about a lot of the traditional rewards

that you're getting from credit cards.

And we actually are an investor in a company called Carrot,

which I know you talked about before on the podcast.

And what they're doing is credit cards for creators

but they're targeting the creators themselves.

And they're giving them access to working capital

because banks don't understand

how to underwrite that kind of risk.

What I think would be interesting though

is if you look at Gen Z, there's been a huge trend

for younger people not wanting credit

and only going to debit cards.

But also, I've seen this meme on like Twitter

and wherever the hell else is it, TikTok.

What's causing this?

I don't know 100% because I'm squarely

in the millennial category,

but from anecdotes that I've heard,

a little bit of it has to do with this concept

of not wanting to be in debt.

So just forcing yourself not to overspend.

There's been some attempts at people trying to create

a credit card with a debit-like experience.

So you can only spend what's in your account,

but you can still earn rewards.

So kind of the best of both worlds.

That didn't seem to get a lot of adoption either.

So I don't know.

And I think also people are pushing off a lot

of the major life milestones later and later.

So you don't think about building credit until you're 28, 30.

But if I think about what do these people care about?

There's more than 53 million people now

making a living as a full-time creator.

If you ask young kids, what do they wanna be

when they grow up?

More people will say they wanna be a YouTube star

than an astronaut, a doctor, a lawyer.

All the things we traditionally think of

is what kids wanna be.

So, okay, they care a lot about these creators

and influencers.

Why wouldn't they wanna go and earn rewards points

that give them experiences, swag, merchandise,

whatever with their favorite creators?

So the idea here is can you bundle creators

that have Shashir Mahotra from Koda

and used to be a senior executive at YouTube?

He has this fantastic thing that he put out

called the Four Myths of Bundling.

And one of this concept of bundling

is you wanna find the lowest superfan overlap

and the highest casual fan overlap.

So it's essentially saying if I'm a creator,

my number one goal is to broaden my audience

so that I can monetize them.

Let's say you and I have two audiences

and we're like, hey, we should come together

because 20% of your group likes me

and 20% of my group likes you,

but the vast majority are just totally unaware.

So now we bundle a bunch of people like this

and we create essentially a credit card

where you earn rewards based off of your favorite creators

that you can spend on like getting a shout out

or doing a one-on-one experience with them

or getting a t-shirt or access to a concert or whatever.

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Okay, I think that's interesting

and that's, I think what, is it Astro who's doing that?

Astro, yeah, they're trying to do something like that.

Abreu, you're like a little bit younger than me,

not quite Gen Z,

but do you care about debt versus credit?

I do, but funny enough, I don't have a credit card.

I always use my debit card for everything,

which is a very bad habit,

but it's exactly what you were talking about.

Why is it a bad habit?

That's the Gen Z way, bro.

Well, I should be building credit, like you said,

but it's just so convenient to have a debit card.

Isn't it more convenient to have a credit card

because then you don't even need to have the money?

Yeah, and you're building credit, but I think-

I mean, you're saying you picked debit for convenience,

but it's not more convenient.

I mean, it's just because I just always had it and-

The bank gave it to you.

Yeah, and it's like there's a process of applying

to credit cards and have to figure out which one's the best

and if I'm getting screwed over

and having to pay all these fees and it's kind of a hassle.

But I think it does have something to do with coming of age

during the financial crisis

and throwing these stats like

the average American has seven credit cards

and they're constantly in debt.

I think some of that gets ingrained

where you're kind of wary of credit cards.

Right, if I was some of these creators,

I would get together with my really smart business manager

and I would say, hey, how do we release

financial products to our audience that will,

but while maintaining trust?

And so like, if you find the things

that our audience is most confused about,

like for example, the thing you just talked about,

which credit card is best?

Oh, I don't know how to do it.

I don't know how to manage the rewards.

I don't want to like screw up.

How do you basically release a highly trusted product

on top of some of these existing platforms?

So for example, could Mr. Beast and friends

create a subscription product,

which is basically like, hey, for X dollars a month,

we're going to send you the thing you need,

the credit card you need.

And then when that's like not the right credit card anymore

because you've like tapped out of your points

or like the deal changed or this new deal is way better,

we're going to like basically say, hey, everybody,

the new best thing is this.

And like, how can you basically herd the sheep?

And that's kind of a silly example

of like which credit card to use.

But I feel like there's something where I would be trying

to leverage the audience and the trust to go into places

where there's just mass confusion and be like, okay,

if we didn't try to take advantage of these people,

but if we actually tried to, we'll do the work.

If you trust us, trust us, you'll be in good hands here.

We can find you the thing that you should be using.

I just feel like there's a big group of people

that want to be led that I would be trying to do

if I was a creator.

Well, and to your point, I mean, Credit Karma

is a multi-billion dollar company for that very reason

because there's so much confusion in the market

and just lack of trust.

And ultimately a credit card for one of these companies,

every single user is worth a lot of money to them.

So they're willing to pay huge kickbacks.

So think about it this way.

Like if you're a creator and you're not trying to shell

products and things like that, essentially,

you're just saying, if you use this card,

you will earn rewards that are redeemable with me.

And so they're gonna get a kickback,

but ultimately when you choose a credit card,

there are definitely fees and things

that have already said that are confusing.

But at the end of the day, most of the value

is seeing what are you gonna get back

from spending on credit?

Am I gonna get cash back?

Am I gonna get it from Amazon,

from my airline points, from whatever?

And if what you're gonna get back

from using credit as opposed to debit

is essentially just like, you know,

Sean Box or whatever, like I can see that being something

that people would wanna go and promote to their audiences.

So from an acquisition play,

that seems like the easiest way

to go and sell a credit card.

Right.

Okay, so here's another idea that we had talked

about a variation of this.

And so we had been talking about continuous

glucose monitoring and you have one on here

called continuous cortisol monitoring.

So tell me about what you're thinking there.

Yeah, so you guys have talked about levels before

and I'm friends with a couple of the co-founders of levels

and I love what they're doing.

I think democratizing access to that data

and showing you what's actually going on inside your body

is just amazing and mind-blowing for so many people.

And I went through their one month program

and as I had this glucose monitor on,

the mechanical engineer in me was like,

I just wanna take this thing apart.

Right.

So after the first two weeks, I took the sensor apart,

I started researching actually how it works

and what is it doing and all this stuff.

And ultimately I was like, huh,

why can't you use this to monitor other things?

Because what it's doing is there's a little sensor

that is sticking out, it essentially gets inserted

under your skin.

So describe the whole sensor for somebody

who's never seen it.

So it's like a quarter sized, like.

It's like a half dollar sized circle.

And it's maybe, I don't know, an eighth of an inch high.

It's not very high.

And you put it on yourself with this like stampy thing,

right?

So you kind of like stamp it in your hand,

doesn't hurt.

It doesn't hurt, but there is a little microneedle

that does.

Mine hurt the second time.

Oh really?

And I think I hit a very small blood.

That's because when I took it off, there was blood there.

But typically it does not hurt at all.

It's exactly like a stamp that you do to yourself.

But there's a little thing that sticks into your skin,

it's going under the skin and it's in between the cells

and it's measuring the interstitial fluid.

And it's looking for glucose essentially.

But how it measures that is there's a certain enzyme

on this sensor that binds to glucose.

And it's measuring, it's essentially electricity produced,

but they can turn that into a number that

correlates to glucose.

And so I started looking at what else

would you want to measure continuously?

And I had been looking a lot around cortisol,

which is also called the stress hormone.

Exactly.

Now stress has so many negative implications on our lives.

Everything from heart disease, obesity, life span,

just everything.

And to going back to our point around Gen Z

and younger people, the stress levels and anxiety levels

keep going up and up and up.

And even with young kids, parents would love to know,

is my kid really stressed out right now?

Can I figure out coping mechanisms, teach them breathing

exercises?

And so I thought that would be interesting.

So I started researching this and cortisol

is measured in three ways, either blood, urine, or sweat.

And there's been some really cool research,

people that are trying to essentially create a patch

that you could wear on your arm and it's sucking up

some small sweat molecules and using that to measure.

But the problem is it's not continuous,

it's only when you're sweating.

And so you aren't going to get that real time feedback

of something is causing me a lot of stress.

I need to just chill for a minute or take a deep breath.

And so I think you could probably

repurpose one of these continuous glucose monitors.

When I posted about that, some people

also brought up hormones like testosterone, which I think

could also be really interesting.

I'm not sure if that could be measured

in the interstitial fluid, but it's that one.

Do you know if cortisol can?

I think so.

I mean, based off of, again, I'm not a doctor.

But based off of everything I was looking at,

I don't see why you can't, because what a lot of the sweat,

the sweat patches are doing, is a very similar process

of using an enzyme that binds to cortisol.

And so I'm like, there's got to be a way

to retrofit one of these things.

And off the shelf, they're actually really cheap.

So if you go to your primary care doctor

and you want to get a continuous glucose monitor,

it's like $35.

It's actually not that expensive.

Interesting.

I had heard the opposite.

I had heard, oh man, this is really expensive if you're not,

if it's not covered by your insurance

because you're diabetic.

So that's not true.

These are actually pretty cheap.

If you get a prescription, and so it does,

it is a prescription product.

So as long as you get a prescription,

but your primary care physician can prescribe.

Gotcha.

Amazing.

OK, that's not bad.

So that's $35, but this thing lasts like two weeks, right?

So you're basically spending about $70 a month

on your monitor, which honestly, that feedback loop

is insane.

Where you eat something and you're like, oh, I'm spiking.

Is it really worth biting into this,

like seeing what it's doing to my body?

And sometimes you're like, hell, yeah, I love nachos.

But other times, you're like, you know what?

I didn't need that.

I kind of want my graph to stay in this green, good range

of where I want my glucose to be.

And stress, I think, is even more important.

Now, let me ask you this.

There's some people who are talking about,

and I haven't looked into it, so I don't know much about this.

But there's some people who are talking about the upside

of stress.

I think there's a book called The Upsight of Stress.

Keith Raboy has talked about this.

Somebody asked him, what are the three biggest, I don't know,

learnings you've had over the last few years or something

like that.

He's like our biggest misconceptions, biggest

contrary in things you believe.

And he's like, stress is good for us.

And he linked some book to some stress book.

So I haven't actually read it, so I don't know what that is.

But I find that kind of interesting

because there's all these things that when I was young,

we were told are good or bad.

And then as I got older, I'm like, wait, that was full of shit.

And I wonder if stress is one of those where stress,

I just immediately associate with bad

and the negative consequences of it.

And so I've never even heard somebody

argue the good side of it.

And I would love to actually go read that book.

But it sounds like just about your expression on your face,

you have not read that book either.

I have not.

But I now definitely want to.

I can see from a business perspective,

stress being a good thing, I think it's a huge motivator.

And there's that whole concept of work

will fill whatever a lot of time there is.

Similarly, putting somebody under stress

and having that fire under your ass

is sometimes a really positive thing.

I think from a health perspective,

I think the research would probably show

that it's not healthy.

But I don't know, from a success, whatever you call success,

I could see that being a positive motivator.

OK, we need a good sound as I transition between these ideas

because we're going rapid fire.

Do you need a breath?

Do you need some water?

Because you're trying to show.

Oh, I can do this all day.

I have too many ideas.

OK, let's do another one.

Stock betting.

What are you thinking here?

Oh, OK.

This is a fun one.

And this actually stems from something

that my family started doing during COVID.

So as I'm sure every listener has heard,

there's just been this huge influx of retail traders

on Robinhood.

And there is public and a few other of these plate commission

free trading platforms.

And we did this bet as a family, where we each put $1,000.

And we haven't actually put any money into the stock market,

but theoretically, we're supposed to.

Put $1,000 into a single stock.

And the goal was, who can get the most gains in a single year?

So that was the time cost of the product.

And can you trade or you can't trade?

You just hold for a year.

No, cannot trade.

It is literally buy today and hold for a year.

And we, everyone was going back and forth on what they pick,

but it was a really fun game.

And it also, it's something we're tracking.

So we created a spreadsheet that pulls from Google Finance.

Every week, we're going in and kind of shit talking

about who's winning, who's losing.

And it's really social, and it's inherently something

that you're constantly wanting to engage with.

So the idea here is, can you combine

the best of sports betting with the best of fantasy sports?

So like picking your team with public trading.

And there was an attempt at this in the Crypto Boom,

the ICO boom in 2017-18, by a company called Shapeshift.

They launched, they didn't really launch.

It was, it was called Prism.

And they had a private beta.

And I was using it and I thought it was so cool.

What people could do was pick a portfolio of tokens

at the time, so equate this to public stocks.

And you allocate percentages based off of whatever

you want your basket to look like.

And it was public, so people could go and follow you

and see how you're performing.

And it was a competition.

And so then people could come and essentially

allocate alongside you and say, I just

want to take your basket and put $1,000 in or whatever.

But I could see this being something

where you start actually making this more like prizes

and betting and things like that to create

that social and high level of engagement.

I kind of love this.

That's a great idea.

So OK, so let's play it out.

So I think the one thing I didn't like,

but I think your family was just a prototype.

You guys were buying and holding once per year,

which is kind of like you sort of set it and forget it.

You just no action you can take.

Whereas with fantasy, there's like these little micro things,

micro adjustments you can make.

Either you're changing your lineup

or you're picking up a player.

There's things you can do every few weeks

so you don't just fall so far behind,

although that still happens with fantasy.

So do you think it should be like the way you did it,

where you buy and hold and you're writing the weekly

or monthly momentum of the stock?

Or do you think it's about every month or every week

picking a new stock and seeing how you do?

I love the idea of having tons of different ways to engage.

Because if you think about how to drive

the highest level of engagement and also just this concept

of democratizing asset management,

I mean, right now you either go with a robo-advisor

like a wealth front or a betterment,

or you pay a huge fee to somebody that's an active manager.

Why can't some kid in the middle of nowhere

who just loves everything about public stock investing

and who happens to be really good at it,

like why can't I go and work with them?

So I'm sure there's a whole host of legal

and regulatory things like I am not a financial advisor,

but I think there's something there

about this democratization of asset management.

And I think if you wanted to do,

kind of like March Madness, right?

That's just one type of fantasy sports.

So imagine having all these different types of competitions

and things you could play into, whatever's for you.

Okay, I like that.

So there's different game modes.

That makes sense to me.

I don't like the democratizing blah, blah, blah,

because I'm just like, no, this is cool because it's fun.

Like forget finding the next Warren Buffett

who's like sitting in Omaha and is a 14 year old

and we're like, oh, this guy should management portfolio.

Like I just think, okay, so when I wake up every day, right?

And I tried not to do this, but I suck at it.

I swipe right over on my phone

and I'm like, look how red all the stocks are today.

Look at this, every stock is red.

No, this is just like the stock widget of my phone.

So I swipe over to the side

and I basically see my like, you know,

sales of my income store.

I see the stock market and then I see crypto, right?

I get like this widget at the bottom for Coinbase.

And, you know, I'll be damned

if I could stop checking this thing.

I like to just see every day.

I'm like, oh, 2% is a green or red and is it like a big pop?

Cause that can always happen.

Or is it like a big crash?

Cause that can also happen.

And so like today was, you know, I wake up

and it's like bloody Wednesday, everything is red.

And I'm like, all right, you know, that's where I'm at.

That's the scoreboard that I check.

And I love the idea of turning it into a social game.

I'm almost surprised that this isn't already a big thing.

And I feel like somebody's going to be like,

oh no, this has been on Yahoo fantasy for like 10 years.

But this makes a lot of sense to me.

If I was trying to build a fun social product,

a fun consumer product,

this is like at the top of my list right now

from, you know, jumped immediately

to the top of the list.

So you could have basically a, you create a social group,

you pick one of the game modes.

Maybe you start with one game mode,

which is like, you know, monthly bet

and you get $1,000 to allocate in your fantasy portfolio,

however you want.

And it's whoever ends up with the most money

at the end of the month is winning.

And then you can have all these other game modes as well.

I really like this.

And like, there's a cool way to build status

and become an influencer on a platform like this too.

And like to push a little bit on the whole democratization

piece that I was talking about.

I just don't like when Silicon Valley tries

to make fun ideas, important ideas.

I'm like, hey, fun can be fun.

It can be important later.

That'll be fun for now.

That's why you work in gaming.

It's okay.

So think about when you go to a casino,

or if you've ever been to a casino.

Many times.

And you go and see people either playing like,

roulette or craps.

There's a couple of players, but there's

a huge crowd of people who are just rooting for that.

And you pick your horse, and you're

super excited when they're winning,

and you're super bummed when they're losing.

And I could see something like that too,

where you build these small personalities on this platform.

And you're rooting for their portfolio.

You're rooting for them to be an amazing picker.

And so I think there's a cool social aspect of that too,

to make it fun with less skin in the game.

But I agree with you.

I think making it fun and making it a game is probably

cruxier.

OK, I like it.

So I'm in on this idea of all your ideas so far.

I'm the most in on this.

I like the cortisol monitoring, although I

don't know if it's possible.

OK, let's jump to another one.

So let's do functional milks.

Oh, this one I'm so excited about.

This has been what I've been spending my evenings doing.

So I typically would drink black coffee.

And we got gifted from my mother-in-law, a milk

father a couple of months ago.

And I started experimenting with frothing milk

and making lattes, awesome gift.

But I also had started reading up

about a lot of these Ayurvedic spices

and all the health benefits of spices.

So I started adding things like cayenne and cinnamon

or turmeric and ginger to the milk and frothing it.

And it was delicious.

And what are the benefits of some of these?

What's the benefit of, let's say, turmeric?

Indian people love turmeric.

Or whatever.

What were you going to pick it from on ginger?

Like cinnamon, I know, is something to actually help

monitor and level out your blood sugar.

Yeah, so that's one that's just to maintain blood sugar.

Cayenne is for digestion and metabolism.

Ginger is for digestion as well.

And some other arthritis and things like that.

There's a whole host.

And you can go down the rabbit hole for 1,000 years

of how people have been using these.

And you're putting them in your milk?

Well, then I started reading about functional beverages

in general, which is a huge exploding category.

This is everything from people putting

in new tropics and CBD and all that kind of stuff.

But it doesn't seem like there are any functional milks.

So then there's also this concept of experiential drinks

and experiential food and beverage.

And so I wanted to see, could I create essentially

a bath bomb for functional milk?

So you have this cool thing where you drop it

into your milk or tea.

And I had two ideas.

The first one, I bought a kit online for spherification.

So what this allows you to do is take any liquid

and turn it into essentially like a bubble.

You can either make an egg yolk-sized bubble,

like a big one, or caviar-sized bubbles.

And is it fragile like a bubble or it's like a bouncy ball?

So the caviar-sized ones taste like boba.

So it's like a little bit firmer.

It's consistent throughout the whole thing.

The egg yolk-sized ones essentially

is liquid inside with a very thin shell.

Now, these were really cool, but they don't melt.

So that was the problem.

It turned out actually great.

Both experiments went better than expected.

And they look pretty because whatever I spiced them with,

it's bright color.

So like the turmeric one is bright yellow.

And I think the idea of like boba coffee or boba tea

is kind of cool with the milks.

But I really wanted it to dissolve.

So then I started researching how do you build a bath bomb.

And it's actually really simple.

It's citric acid, baking soda, whatever your other dry ingredients

are.

It's like the second grade science experiment turned

into like a fan favorite.

Totally.

So then I went and bought like almond flour

and dry milk powder and all these things

and have been making these bath bombs essentially of milk.

So does it work?

And it does.

It works really well.

Can you show me one?

Yeah, should I go grab one?

I'll grab it.

Yeah, here, I'll show you a bunch.

OK.

OK, so this is the caviar-sized boba.

OK, so I'm looking at, just to describe,

because most people listen to audio.

So I'm looking at this jar you have of like tiny boba.

They're yellow.

So it looks like you custom made a sphere, a bunch of spheres.

They look like cakes.

OK, so that's your bombs.

That's, yes, these are the boba.

And I've been enjoying putting a big spoon of these

in my hot coffee.

They taste really cool and they have that mouthfeel of boba.

So those don't explode.

They don't explode.

To make those, I literally had to hand drop with a syringe

every little ball.

Because I just Amazon for a spherification kit

and it looks like some really crazy science thing,

not like something easy and fun.

That was not as easy, but it actually turned out really

well on the first attempt.

Now, these are the bombs.

And so essentially, I have some small ones that are essentially

half spear and then some bigger ones.

And they harden really nicely.

It looks like a donut hole.

Yeah, it's harder.

It looks exactly like a donut hole.

These ones are cinnamon and cayenne.

And when you put them in hot liquid,

it foams exactly like a bath bomb.

It's like Alka Salzer.

And it foams for, it was interesting,

the almond ones with the almond flour, which

is essentially the base of almond milk.

They foamed for maybe like 10, 15 seconds.

The dry milk powder ones foamed for like two minutes.

But it was a really cool experience.

And then it dissolves into the liquid.

Wow.

OK, I kind of, this is amazing.

OK, so that's great.

Why aren't you doing this?

This should be a company.

This should be a product.

Well, I'm roping in my sisters and my mom.

I'm like, let's do this.

I think it'd be, yeah.

How fun would it be to get a cool tin?

And the nice thing about what I like about milks

and specifically for coffee and tea

is it's a natural subscription product

because it's a ritual.

If you drink coffee or tea, you drink it every day.

And you're going to use this every day.

So you now buy your little tin of whatever functional bomb.

And it's fun for social people who like to make tea,

have tea together, have coffee together.

Gifting.

This becomes like a thing to talk about.

It's like super viral.

It's real world viral, as we call it, like playground viral,

where one person's going to show it to the other

and everyone's going to be like, I want that.

That's amazing.

Especially because it's not just the science experiment.

It actually has the functional part.

So I think this is really great.

This is a winner.

I love this one.

I need a name.

So you have to help me brainstorm a name

or get your audience to come in and cross the name for me.

OK, we always start with the Greg Eisenberg special, which

is you just add the Spanish word bueno to the end

of whatever you want.

So this could be milk bueno.

This could be something like that.

We'll work on names.

OK, so you would produce these.

You would sell these as a kit or subscription kit.

Yeah, direct to consumer.

Yeah.

And they're shelf stable.

That's the cool thing, too.

They don't need to be refrigerated.

Does it go well in coffee or no?

Yeah.

OK, interesting.

And do you taste it once it's in there

or you don't really taste it once it's dissolved?

You taste it.

So it's essentially like adding milk.

And if you want it sweetened, like I did some with fake sugar.

I put stevia in it.

And it tastes like you added stevia to your coffee.

Wow, OK, this is this is a winner.

OK, no, we don't even need to let's actually

keep this under wraps.

This is this is a winner, dude.

A break is already googling spherification kit.

Am I right?

I was going to say, I think someone after listening

to this is going to make it.

This is just.

Now, this has been podcast patented.

Do not steal Elaine's idea.

Exactly.

You can rally.

You can rally to help us make this a podcast product success

and help us make this special.

And if people are awesome designers,

this is the most Instagram ad friendly thing ever.

Right.

Well, if we have people that are awesome at designing, packaging,

or just amazing at how to get things viral on Instagram,

I'm happy to chat.

That'd be really fun to work on it with people.

We actually have a lot of e-commerce and DC kind of

specialists in the audience and the community,

because a lot of people do a lot of people have companies

like that.

And then I've seen tons of good packaging stuff, tons of stuff

with influencers.

Because I think this would kill with influencers too.

And so yeah, there's a bunch that can happen here.

OK, so we're all in on this.

I'm your silent co-founder.

I do no work.

I only take upside.

But that's it.

So OK, we're in on that one.

I'll ship you a tin.

You can do it.

My wife would love something like this.

So OK, let's do one more as a.

We'll do one more that we'll just freestyle the rest.

OK, so.

I've got a good one that I've been really just itching on.

It's this concept around automating, rezoning,

and permitting for real estate.

Right, unsexy.

So it's super unsexy.

But if you have ever had to or thought about rezoning

or getting some kind of construction permit for your house

or anything like that, it is the most ridiculous

and archaic process.

It is governed by, it's essentially the process is run

by the city or the county.

And it involves a stupid amount of paperwork.

You have to go and find all the historical documents

about the property.

You have to fill out a ton of forms.

It's government bureaucracy.

And then, literally, you have to go to meetings,

physical meetings, where the council, the zoning council,

votes on this.

And if you lose, you have to appeal and then go back

to these things.

And I'm like, this is stupid.

There's essentially two parts of this.

There's the paperwork part, and then there's the human part.

Now, the paperwork part seems super simple to automate.

It's public records, this stuff you can just go

and, without a lot of tech, build something

that automates the filing of the papers.

Now, the human part is more complicated.

But now, with COVID, everyone is not

going in and having physical meetings.

Everyone has a smartphone.

Literally, just download some kind of simple app

that's almost like your next door,

where it pushes notifications to the people that

need to go and make a decision.

With all the information, you can go and ask questions in it.

But essentially, it streamlines a process

that could have taken 12 months down to something

that's like three weeks.

Would this be something you're selling

to the city and municipalities, or this

is for a consumer to just tiptoe over the paperwork

and the headache that's going to come here,

and the city doesn't have to do anything?

I don't know.

That's actually where I keep getting caught up

is, what is the go-to-market strategy for this,

in terms of monetization?

I don't know.

I don't know what the incentive would

be for a city or a county to pay for it.

But I can definitely see for anybody

who's looking to rezone a building,

especially if it's not residential,

if it's more commercial.

To our earlier conversation, there's

just this glut of real estate sitting unused.

San Francisco actually had passed a vacancy tax.

I don't think it's in effect right now.

But if your property was vacant for more than two weeks,

you had to start paying taxes on it,

because it's an eyesore and things like that.

So imagine there's a huge impetus to go and figure out

how to reuse it.

And if it's zoned one way, but you

have a buyer that wants to use it for a kitchen, or a school,

or an office, or whatever, it's just silly

that there's such a gate.

Right, and this is not just for zoning.

My sister-in-law was like, hey, be right back.

And then she got on a Zoom call, and I

thought she was talking to her friends or something.

She was there for 40 minutes, and I was like,

how are your friends doing?

And she goes, oh, no, we had to have a city meeting for cutting

down this tree in front of our building.

And so we had done this permit, and this request

to cut down the tree.

It's a small tree.

And then this was the meeting.

Normally, this is an in-person hearing,

but we did it over Zoom, and they passed the tree cutting,

and we get to cut the tree as long as we plant

three more trees or whatever.

And I was like, wow, this is insane,

like the level of schlep that you have to go through for this.

And so I agree with you.

I think that's like anywhere that there's headache,

and there's money to be made.

Like usually when you're rezoning something,

it's because you sort of see some opportunity to add a unit

or convert a space and make more money off of it.

I think that's a good one.

It's also like no transparency.

There's no version of the dominoes as my pizza baked yet

tracker where you're like, OK, where are we in the process?

How many steps are there?

Where are we now?

And what comes next?

Just that, I think, would be pretty killer on the consumer

side, I think people would pay for it,

let alone the second part you're talking about,

like notifying everybody and getting them together.

I think that part's a little bit harder.

But yeah, I definitely see a use case for this.

Somebody is doing this with DMVs.

I don't know this whole business,

but someone posted in our podcast group

that there are some other entity outside of a DMV that

can do license issuing or renewals.

I don't know if I'm going to get all the details right

about this, but there's some other.

I forgot what it's called.

It's not called a DMV.

It's called something else.

And apparently these things are always busy.

There's like a four hour line because people need to go

and get their license renewed or get their IDs or whatever it is.

And so these guys had made kind of like either like a mobile

or like a digital version of this where you could do it all

from home or something like that.

And they were charging money.

They were making very, very good money doing this.

And so that's like a you would have

to go take my very vague inaccurate description

and go find what that business is.

But that's what I would model this after is,

what did they do for DMVs?

Could I do that for the Zoning Commission?

There's also a whole similar world for visas.

If you're going to like Brazil or China

and you don't want to go and sit and wait at the consulate

for four and a half hours and pay the $75,

you can go and pay them $300,

but they're going to do it for you tomorrow.

I can see something similar to that as well.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm all about, you know,

what are the most low NPS experiences people have?

Like going to the DMV,

going to the visa immigration office, you know,

like, you know, the one like this would have been

going through airport security before clear.

So if you just go and you say, what is the,

what's the absolute worst?

What would get like a negative five star review on Yelp?

And then you go and you like build the alternative

or build the like layer on top

that like abstracts away all the pain.

That's like a pretty valuable thing

if you're willing to go into that boring space.

In general, I always look at,

is this thing adding friction or reducing friction?

And then what is the volume

and what is the frequency of use?

So if you can get either high volume of people

that have this pain point and you're reducing friction

or it's, you know, a high frequency use,

but a smaller demographic of people that have that friction,

removing a small amount of friction,

people will pay a ton of money for it.

But in this case, it's low frequency, high friction, right?

It's, yeah, for the zoning one.

Okay, tell me about some,

tell me about some products that you've been using

that you really like.

What's, what are some of either apps, websites,

physical things you bought

that have like, that have caught your eye?

Oh man, I'm like the world's cheapest person.

So I buy nothing.

I have a Peloton behind you.

Peloton, well, funny story with the Peloton,

my mom actually won this about three and a half years ago.

And this is before a lot of people

were super familiar with Peloton.

And she sent, I don't even remember.

She just sent me and my sisters this text message saying,

I won this thing called a Peloton.

Do any of you girls want it?

And I immediately was like, yes, I will take it.

So I got a free bike and a free year subscription.

So of course the first year I barely used it

because I wasn't paying.

And then the second the subscription turned on,

I started paying and I use it almost every day.

So that I would say has been my savior for the pandemic.

What else?

I mean, I haven't put on jeans or real pants since March,

which is amazing.

I feel like I could get rid of 90% of my closet

and just wear Lululemon and Athleta every day

and be really happy.

What else have I been using?

I've been playing with, I'm obsessed

with the audio space in general

and it's now becoming a little bit more hot

and people are really talking about audio

as kind of a next wave in terms of consumer social.

And so I've been playing with a lot of apps out there

or on audio.

I'm still synchronous, it's really hard.

Can I tell you about a cool audio app I saw yesterday?

Yeah.

So this guy who DMed me and he's a founder based in India.

And he goes, he said, he sent me some pitch

that was like full of jargon.

So I was initially just gonna like totally ignore it.

And he said something that caught my eye.

I don't even remember what it was, but it was basic.

First he was like, we're audio,

audio for consumer audio, mass, blah, blah, blah.

I don't know what he was saying.

I was like, what did your product do?

And he was like, oh, basically people in countries

like India, Pakistan, Middle East,

dating is very different here culturally

going on real world dates.

And so that's not something people are very comfortable doing

and do as frequently as in the West.

So we actually created a way to date

just kind of on your phone through like audio.

I was like, okay, what do you mean?

And so the way it works is, it's a pretty cool idea.

It's built around the female use case.

So basically two women, or sorry,

there's one woman who's like the dator

and she gets to pick like kind of like a wing moment

basically.

And so two friends basically get on the app

and then they just sort of shuffle through guys

that come in and it's audio only.

So you're not gonna like see a penis,

you're not gonna like,

and it's also not like messaging

where you have to kind of wait.

It's like live and in real time.

So a guy shows up, he starts talking

and then at any time you can sort of bounce him

and like go to the next guy.

But like if he's, you know, interesting

and it's not one-on-one where it's like,

I think a little more awkward.

It's like two friends who get to kind of like

put these guys, you know, on the hot seat.

And I was like, I could see this being a thing potentially.

Like I could see, I could see this being fun.

I could see this being slightly viral.

And I could see something succeeding

when it really takes the like sort of woman's point of view

and like, how do I make this enjoyable and safe

and like still interesting.

But like, let me make this as comfortable as possible

for the woman and then like let the guys like,

just, you know, kill themselves trying to make this work.

From the guy's perspective though,

how would you feel about the wing woman

just being kind of a jerk?

Meaning I could see this dynamic where

if it's just one-on-one, it's a human in front of you.

You don't wanna be a jerk for the most part.

Some people are horrible.

But if I was the friend,

I feel like I wouldn't have that same barrier

of like saying things that are probably

not super appropriate or like, I don't know,

just crushing somebody's ego.

This is if you're at a bar

and you walk up to a group of friends,

you're gonna get this.

You're gonna get the nice friend, the bitchy friend,

and then like the person who you're actually

trying to speak with and you're just hoping

to like come out alive, you know, at the end of it.

So I think it's agreed.

It's not great for the guy,

but I think that's the way it should be in this case.

Well, why is there no app that is video

in like real-time video?

Because, you know, audio I think is a huge step up

from seeing pictures or somebody's profile,

but video, I literally see what you look like right now

and you get facial expressions,

you get more emotion than just audio.

Audio, you lose a little bit.

So I just would love to see somebody playing

with more video, but again, it has to be something

where you can't take a video and practice it 17 times.

I just wanna see the, you know, you today and more authentic.

Yeah, I think the one, the challenge with video

is you get a lot of inappropriate stuff,

which kind of like creates a traffic

to the chat real-life problem.

So I think that's the biggest downside here is that,

is how do you make this where it doesn't just turn

into like a complete chit show on video?

Yeah, that's so true.

And again, that kind of goes back

to the synchronous versus asynchronous.

I think with audio that is synchronous,

it is so hard to police.

We're seeing this across lots of apps right now,

but it's, you know, if you have to upload a video,

at least you can run some computer vision

and flag immediate things that are just egregious.

You can't do that with synchronous audio

or synchronous video for that matter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

What do you think of Clubhouse?

Are you a user of Clubhouse?

I am, yeah, I've been on Clubhouse for a while.

I am very conflicted about it.

Part of it is I listen to so many podcasts

and I find that podcasts,

people are still down into like the good parts.

And to me, I'll sit in an hour Clubhouse session

and I wish it was a 15 minute podcast,

but I think that's more me.

I think as a participant, if you're active

and you're actually speaking, it's great.

It's engaging, you feel like you're meeting people,

you feel like you're connecting to humans.

What types of rooms do you like

or who do you like to kind of hang with or listen to?

You know, I think I tend to like, I mean, to be honest,

I like when people are talking about similar things

to what you guys talk about on this podcast.

That's what I find interesting.

Yeah, like I'm not into sports.

I'm not into, you know, people talking about politics

all the time or, you know, like more social justice

use, that's just not what I get excited about.

But I don't know, I find that a lot of times

there's just these lulls or too many people are trying to talk

and it's just not substantive.

It's very surface level.

Yes, I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I bounced out of it a while back

because, you know, exactly that.

I thought early on, I was like, oh, this is cool.

This is like a bunch of interesting people

from Silicon Valley and only them.

So they feel safe like kind of hanging out here

when the masses are here, they're not going to want to do it.

So I was like, I kind of took advantage of that,

hopped into a bunch of rooms, talked to a bunch of people

I wanted to talk to and then like pieced out.

And I thought for a while it was the best way

to build a network in Silicon Valley

would have been to hang out on Clubhouse eight hours a day.

Like you would have literally seen like on the surface

of it, like what are you doing?

You're just hanging out on Clubhouse eight hours a day.

And it would have been like, yeah, in the next six weeks

I'm going to have like, I'm going to have a bunch of friends

and connections that like I could have literally not bought,

you know, if I had wanted to.

These are people that I would not sit down for coffee with me

if I tried to plan it and make it helpful

and useful and productive.

But they're willing to shoot the show with me for an hour

on Clubhouse at 1 a.m. Cool.

And so I thought there was like this arbitrage network

arbitrage opportunity where you could just like get on Clubhouse

early and meet a bunch of cool people.

Like, you know, we hung out one night with Ev Williams

and I talked about, you know, like Twitter early on

and shit like that.

And like, that was cool.

I would have never otherwise had that conversation.

But I don't think I definitely don't think the products going

anywhere, like I don't think it's going to like succeed.

And now it's like not that interesting anymore

because more people have gotten on it and you're right.

It is like a lot of politics and social justice

and a bunch of like smart, you know,

smart people trying to show how smart they are,

which is like really, really like nauseating to like be a part of.

And I'd rather just, you know, go watch, you know,

friends reruns on Netflix.

If I was going to like, if I want to veg out, I want to veg out.

And I don't want, I don't want this like intellectual,

you know, crossfit that they try to do on Clubhouse.

I know a few people that took advantage of that arbitrage

opportunity early and spent hours and hours a day,

that window of opportunity that was so short.

I feel like it was literally for like maybe a month

if you got in that early and then it closed pretty quickly.

And now to me, I just don't think there's that opportunity anymore.

I would agree. I would agree for sure.

OK, well, listen, this was this was awesome.

You're an ideal machine, so I think we're going to need to keep you

in the regular rotation.

If people liked this, let me know, let Elaine know so that we can have her on more

and talk more, but we're going to be launching our functional milk company soon.

So stay tuned.

It's going to be called Functional Milk as of right now

until we come up with a better name. Functional Milk Boino.

Exactly. But thanks for coming on.

Where should people find you Twitter?

Is that the best place to follow your sub stack?

What do you want to shout out?

Yeah, I have a sub stack at Zelleby.

It's my last name is Zelleby at substack.com, Z-E-L-B-Y,

or I'm at E-Zelleby at Twitter.

I'm I'm not historically great at social media.

I'm trying to be better.

I think I joined Twitter in like 2008 and sent my first tweet in 2019.

But I'm working on it.

It's it's uncomfortable for me, but I'm getting getting slowly better.

I also just like that you're a VC, but you're much more of like a high energy

tinkerer, you know, like play with ideas type of person,

which is typically like more of an entrepreneur.

And so I think it's great at what you're doing.

Abreu, what do you think of that episode?

Give us the real talk.

I loved it.

Just because Sam's not here.

That's part of it.

I love when we bounce around ideas like we did today.

I think for I'm still thinking about the milk bomb.

It reminded me a little bit of the liquid death guy,

and he launched that product without having the product.

And I can see someone launching this without having the product.

I put up Instagram, ad Facebook, ad see the response,

get the hype going and then, you know, get the final product out there.

That's legitimately what my weekend plans are.

There you go.

Quite literally.

OK, so we're going to watch this idea bloom and blossom.

We're going to be the social pressure that you need to not just like get busy

and drop this.

We're going to be like, no, like fire the bullet.

Let's see it.

Well, I actually already started talking to drink formulation companies

that do all the like nutritional panel and all the stuff you actually need

to get one of these things off the ground.

And then they have co-packer relationships.

So essentially, once you get the formulation, you don't do any of the touching

product, you just kind of say, like, I want 10,000 units of X and here's

the formula go and then, you know, they do packaging and all that stuff.

One question for both of you.

OK, so on this one, the one that's more of the bubbles, would you how

interesting is that like that one to me is more like cool, but I just don't

know if people would ever.

So there's two products.

There's there's the bomb which you put in and it fizzes and it's cool like that.

And then there's the boba balls that you just have at the bottom of your drink

and you could just drink them kind of as you go or at the end.

The the bomb, it's essentially like adding milk and sugar to your coffee.

Like if you put over your tea, so it actually goes in and infuses.

There used to be a drink that was like the what's it called?

So there's not Capri Sun, but there's like that other one, squeeze it or

whatever it was called. I don't remember what it is.

It's like a really famous kids drink.

It's like these red and blue tall bottles.

But they came out with this explosive version once where you would take that

when you took the top off, you would put it in and it was exactly this.

It was this fizzy thing that would cause it to change color and add the flavor

to the thing. And then it was like the lunchtime.

Like you were this shit if you had the explosive explosive version of this drink.

And this is what the Japanese thing that came in the glass bottles.

No, it was super American.

It was like a squeezy plastic bottle, water, sugar with explosive color.

Like that's like the description and the ingredients label.

So, oh my God, imagine the bombs for kids too.

Like you could make this where like make your own chocolate milk or make your

own like whatever apple juice or you name it.

You could just literally give kids a cup of water and be like, play, here you go.

I'm all in on the bombs.

That's just the visuals.

The visual of it is amazing.

Maybe magic bombs, the name magic milk.

Magic magic's the new point.

I like magic magic milk is great.

Yeah, that one's good.

But you're not actually selling milk.

You're selling the thing you put either in milk or you just put in coffee straight.

Or do you always put it in the milk and then the milk into the coffee?

It's well, so there is milk in it.

So it's either dry milk or almond milk powder, essentially.

So it is for people that put some kind.

So this is cream and sugar, basically.

It's whatever.

It's like your custom thing, but it also has like a perfect

portion of whatever spice, like whatever functional spice you want.

I like this.

OK, we're going to also talk to John Fio.

He's the guy who made Gravity Blanket and he made Moon Pods and he made

the birthday candle and shit like that.

He is he's kind of a mad scientist when it comes to this stuff.

So you should talk to him.

I can connect you with him and we can go over this.

So OK, it was called Kool-Aid Bursts were the name of the drink.

So it was just Kool-Aid in a cool bottle, I think.

I'll check that out.

That's what they were.

I am actually he's I forget his name, the Gravity Blanket guy.

He he was in a bunch of clubhouse rooms early that I was in.

And I thought he was fascinating.

He was awesome.

Yeah, he's great because he doesn't try to be Silicon Valley cool.

He's just like a weirdo and which is what I want.

I want weirdos around me.

OK, this is awesome.

I got to run, but good stuff.

Thanks for having me.

This was fun. I'm happy to do it anytime.

And by the way, if you can help us with this functional milk thing,

email me just puri.Sean at email.com or DM me and say, hey,

I'm a co-packer or I'm a whoever and offer your services.

Thank you.

Cool. Gotta go. Awesome. Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.