Generated Transcript

[00:00:15] David Hornik
Hello and welcome to VentureCast. I am David Hornik from August Capital.

[00:00:20] Howard Hartenbaum
And I am Howard Hartenbaum, also from August Capital.

[00:00:24] David Hornik
And we had a relatively short partner meeting today, so we come to you live from my office.

[00:00:33] Howard Hartenbaum
Thank you and good night. Thank you. And it’s almost Thanksgiving, so we’ll try and get this out out on and available so you can listen to it before it’s the end of the year.

[00:00:43] David Hornik
You know, you can listen to it during Thanksgiving if you need your post post meal, you know, coma, you can say, oh, what did David and Howard have to say?

[00:00:55] Howard Hartenbaum
I wonder how many people listen to these things when they’re driving in their car. Because that’s like the only time I have the time to sit and listen to something for 45 minutes.

[00:01:02] David Hornik
It’s got to either be car or someone who actually runs more than I would someone who runs a few miles so they can actually get through VentureCast.

[00:01:14] Howard Hartenbaum
But I think when you’re running, walking maybe, but when you’re running you got to pay a little bit of attention. You don’t want to be distracted.

[00:01:22] David Hornik
I think real runners have no problem. They just cook along.

[00:01:28] Howard Hartenbaum
The good old days.

[00:01:31] David Hornik
So what’s up today, Howard? What do we have on our calendar of excitement?

[00:01:36] Howard Hartenbaum
Why don’t we do everything backwards today?

[00:01:38] David Hornik
Okay.

[00:01:39] Howard Hartenbaum
Don’t we usually do a shout out?

[00:01:40] David Hornik
Shout out?

[00:01:41] Howard Hartenbaum
Yeah.

[00:01:41] David Hornik
Who do we want? Who are we gonna shout out to? Oh, you know who I’m gonna shout out to. By the way, I just saw reported yesterday that Jerry Yang.

[00:01:49] Howard Hartenbaum
I was thinking the same.

[00:01:50] David Hornik
Were you? I love it. Jerry is going on the board of work day. And you know, everybody gave Jerry such a bunch of crap and for, for his handling as he was the CEO of Yahoo. But you know what? Jerry was only CEO of the company for a very short period of time and then wisely brought in a very good CEO early on and Tim Kugel. And then he, he worked alongside these folks. And I don’t think that Jerry wanted to be the CEO of the company, although he ultimately was thrust into that position after Carol Bart sort of, shall we say, imploded. But those people who are close to Jerry know that he’s incredibly smart, very thoughtful and quite forward looking. He has a new fund called AIM Cloud Ventures and he, he’s been investing in a bunch of big data things. We invested alongside him in a company called Data Torrent. He has.

[00:02:46] Howard Hartenbaum
You know what AIM stands for?

[00:02:48] David Hornik
No.

[00:02:49] Howard Hartenbaum
It’s ame. It’s, it’s in Japanese. It’s. He and I had this argument and I can’t remember which the answer was. It’s either ame or it’s ame. Oh, well, one means candy and the other means rain. And he wants it to be like rain, Let it rain candy, not like candy Ventures. And so anyway, his wife is Japanese descent and my wife is Japanese descent, so we had to both go to our respective board to find out that aim, A, M, E is actually ame.

[00:03:21] David Hornik
And conveniently at the beginning of the Alphabet, it’s better than Aardvark Ventures.

[00:03:26] Howard Hartenbaum
So the, the, the crazy thing with the press is, you know, Jerry Yang could do no right. He’s the guy who turned down that offer from Microsoft for 40 billion, and it’s now wor more than 40 billion again.

[00:03:39] David Hornik
Nice.

[00:03:40] Howard Hartenbaum
And he is the idiot who screwed everything up. Oh, and by the way, he’s the guy who put that Alibaba deal in place, which made them so much money. So the press kind of says what it wants to say at the time because it makes for great sensational stories. But congratulations on the new board. Seated work day and.

[00:03:56] David Hornik
Yeah, and Anil, that’s our shout out. Neil Busseri, who is the CEO or co CEO over there, said, you know, we’re talking about the consumerization of. Of enterprise. Jerry’s very focused on enterprise now, working on Big data and Hadoop and the like. And, and he knows a lot about consumerization, so love it. And, you know, I’m quite hopeful that both Anil and Jerry will join us at, at the upcoming Lobby Enterprise. Which is.

[00:04:28] Howard Hartenbaum
What’s that?

[00:04:30] David Hornik
You’re an excellent. You’re an excellent front man. I don’t know what it’s. Yeah, you’re. You’re Vince McMahon. No, you’re not Vince McMahon. You’re Robin. This is the worst Venture Cast ever.

[00:04:45] Howard Hartenbaum
We’re going backwards.

[00:04:46] David Hornik
Oh, that’s a problem.

[00:04:47] Howard Hartenbaum
What is the Enterprise Lobby Day?

[00:04:49] David Hornik
Oh, thank you for asking. No, anyway, those of you who have listened to Venture Cast for a long time know that we run this conference called the Lobby. And Howard and Vivek and I have been working on it for. This was year seven, and the Lobby has been this consumer digital media event which has included gaming and mobile advertising and mobile and search and all those things. But in the meantime, there have been all sorts of interesting enterprise businesses, these B2B businesses that have been forming around cloud, like Workday. Exactly. And Cloud or like Data Torrent, the company we funded, or, or Splunk or Tagile, another great company. We’re investors in. In the, in the storage space, like Agile you’re right, but the name is.

[00:05:44] Howard Hartenbaum
So bad and we have to argue.

[00:05:45] David Hornik
About what it’s pronounced like Agile. Ted, Jail, Tejile. Anyway, so we’re, so if we’re getting out, I think we’re gonna hopefully get out invites today to folks and hopefully people will be excited to come to lobby Enterprise and sort of talk about the, all the innovations in enterprise. So, so hopefully we’ll see Jerry there, we’ll see Anil there and we’ll see a bunch of other interesting folks and, and, and hopefully learn a ton about how people are thinking about re reinventing the enterprise. So that, that’ll be awesome if it.

[00:06:17] Howard Hartenbaum
Works and you get your advertising done right up front.

[00:06:21] David Hornik
Exactly. I don’t know what we’re advertising for because unfortunately it’s like it’s a, it’s an invite only conference and actually we’re, we tend to get kind of beaten up because we can only invite a couple hundred people to the event and it sells out quickly. So. But, but we’re always interested in great people who are, who want to, want to join us. So what else? We’re backwards. What is back.

[00:06:44] Howard Hartenbaum
What else I want to talk about? You know, I’m kind of interested in the whole concept of privacy. And in case you’re not aware, August Capital is an investor in reputation.com.

[00:06:57] David Hornik
Do you mean in case I’m not aware? In case the person listening is. Of course I’m aware that we’re the person listening. What do you think? Okay, please.

[00:07:04] Howard Hartenbaum
And reputation.gov is the odd line leader in reputation management services. So privacy is a big issue and it’s turning into a big business segment as well. And I was an automotive engineer years ago, so I’m always interested in technology put into cars. And one of the technologies which I think is fascinating, which I don’t have, is by Progressive Car Insurance where they give everybody a little dongle. You plug into your car and then it tracks how fast you’re going and how much you’re driving and how hard you brake and how fast you go around corners and G forces and acceleration and all that stuff. And they know right away if you’re a safe driver or an aggressive driver. An aggressive driver leads to accident. And there’s a startup company which has a similar thing on your phone called Automatic where there’s a dongle, you plug in and it broadcasts to your phone and the data is yours. You’re not actually sharing it with somebody else in this case. But if you think about all the conversation and NSA is listening to us And Google is watching us, and everybody is trading on our data, and we don’t have any privacy. You know how I drive, I think is a pretty private thing, but I’ll sell it for 100 bucks to get lower insurance rates from progressive.

[00:08:23] David Hornik
And so, yeah, no, it’s always amazing to me. I mean, I’ve talked about this a lot, that privacy isn’t really. Oh, people are concerned about privacy. Well, they’re not really concerned about privacy in the sense that they want to keep things private. They just want to say, if I’m going to give up privacy, I should get something. Right. So, you know, I have fly clear. Do you have fly clear? I do so fly clear. They have our fingerprints. They have a retina scan of us. And what do we get in exchange for that? We get to cut in line at the airport. And you know what? Totally fair deal.

[00:08:55] Howard Hartenbaum
Apple now has my fingerprint right on the phone.

[00:08:58] David Hornik
Yeah. Oh, my God. By the way, here’s a little hint if you haven’t seen it. I was talking with this great guy, a game guy named Michael Doctor, who is a doctor at Boston Children’s, and he’s there.

[00:09:10] Howard Hartenbaum
His name is Michael Doctor?

[00:09:11] David Hornik
Yes, Doctor Doctor. His name is Doctor Doctor, and he’s a wonderful guy. And he’s like, there. I forget what his title is. No. Well, did he have a choice? If your name is Michael Doctor, you have to be a doctor.

[00:09:23] Howard Hartenbaum
He probably got a lot of dates when he was 17. All the people say, hey, Doctor. Yes.

[00:09:28] David Hornik
Yeah, we can’t go down this path. We can’t go down this path because. But anyway, your name is Hartenbaum.

[00:09:37] Howard Hartenbaum
Yeah. I didn’t get me a lot of dates.

[00:09:38] David Hornik
What is that? What did that require you to become? Something to do with a tree?

[00:09:43] Howard Hartenbaum
Heart is either heart or hard.

[00:09:46] David Hornik
Hard tree. Well, there you go. That should have gotten you some dates anyway.

[00:09:53] Howard Hartenbaum
What is Hornick?

[00:09:55] David Hornik
Nothing. I was meeting with. With Michael Doctor from Boston Children’s, who’s like their chief mobile officer, their chief innovation officer. He has some. And he’s working on all sorts of interesting technology and. And how to think about bringing technology to bear on these challenging problems for, you know, childhood diabetes or. Or IBD or these sorts of issues. He actually just had a hackathon that sounds like it was amazing. But I was complaining that my thumbprint reader didn’t work particularly well. And he said, well, you know, you have five slots. All you do is put multiple thumbprints of the same thumb in, and it’ll be much more responsive. And sure enough that it Works like a charm. So if you’re having any problem with that thumbprint reader, add a couple of prints from the exact same finger that you use most of the time, and it will be way more responsive. But anyway, yeah, it’s totally true that our phones now have our fingerprint, our thumbprints.

[00:10:53] Howard Hartenbaum
We don’t even. We’re not even getting any money for that. It’s just we don’t have to type in a code. It’s that much easier. And we’re willing to give up our thumbprints totally.

[00:11:00] David Hornik
It’s so much speedier to, like, download an app here.

[00:11:03] Howard Hartenbaum
Went bankrupt. Remember that?

[00:11:04] David Hornik
I do.

[00:11:05] Howard Hartenbaum
We all signed up and they didn’t have a great business yet, and they went bankrupt. And there was a big deal like, wait, they have our retina scans and our fingerprints. And most people are like, well, maybe they’ll come back in business. I’ll get it back later, people.

[00:11:17] David Hornik
Then they did. And then they did. And by the way, they are integrating with pre, which I think my favorite thing on the planet. Have you gone through pretty TSA Pre TSA Pre, where they clear you and then you can leave your shoes on and they can leave you leave your computer in the bag and you just walk through, none of this body scan crapola. And so now you get clear, do a little retina scan, they zoom you through Pre, you’re through in what, two minutes? I mean, their goal is to make it super predictable, right? But it’s amazing when you think about that expectation has changed how we think about these things. Because before all of this idiotic, you know, overzealous body scanning business, it would not have been exciting to simply put your, you know, your bags through security and walk through and think that that was some great triumph. And yet pre, to me is. Is joyous. It’s a joyous experience to just walk.

[00:12:11] Howard Hartenbaum
So you like public, you like going to the airport, getting on planes because it’s so joyous.

[00:12:15] David Hornik
Yeah, exactly. I get to celebrate. I actually don’t mind getting on planes. I like flying because it gives me the opportunity to, you know, think and focus. I have a period of time when I’m in one place. I’m very add. But now you can use your phone the whole time and you have wi fi. And what do you think? How long until people start talking on their phones, using Skype and other things for, you know, on the plane, flight?

[00:12:43] Howard Hartenbaum
I don’t think it’s going to happen.

[00:12:44] David Hornik
And is that because it’s a social thing?

[00:12:46] Howard Hartenbaum
I think that so many people are going to be so violently against the noise of people talking that they’ll. I mean maybe it will become legal and then there’ll be airlines that say fly with us and there’ll be no talking and I’ll fly with them.

[00:12:59] David Hornik
Yeah, exactly.

[00:12:59] Howard Hartenbaum
Like if you want to be at you know like in the noisy plane, you can go fly on whatever but I’m going on.

[00:13:04] David Hornik
Or it might be that this is like the bet the best argument for these. You know, they’ll develop new seats like these pods that you have in. In international first class that actually are soundproof and you could have a convers. Phone conversation. Suddenly you could do work by. While you’re flying across the world you could have a real.

[00:13:23] Howard Hartenbaum
Who actually talks on the phone anymore for work?

[00:13:26] David Hornik
That’s a fair point. I don’t.

[00:13:28] Howard Hartenbaum
It’s all going to be people like oh and let me tell you what my dog did last week and how is your daughter doing? And I’m going to be like sh.

[00:13:40] David Hornik
That was an incredible digression. Back to privacy.

[00:13:44] Howard Hartenbaum
Privacy is an interesting thing.

[00:13:46] David Hornik
Yeah, super interesting.

[00:13:48] Howard Hartenbaum
I mean people who don’t have anything to hide. I mean what’s the big deal? Except there’s just no trust of the government. And that’s really the issue that there’s been so many cases through histories where the government that we elected or other people are took power in some market. They just do whatever they want.

[00:14:09] David Hornik
Yeah, well so I think that’s the fear but at the end of the day people are. You know, I always go back to the same thing which is there’s Amazon before it understood your interests and your likes. There’s Amazon after and everybody wants the Amazon that gives. It gives them good recommendations. Well, there’s always someone, there’s always one outlier who doesn’t want any information about him shared in the.

[00:14:32] Howard Hartenbaum
Has he gotten a cell phone yet?

[00:14:35] David Hornik
Not one you’ll be calling anytime soon. So. Yeah, well it’ll be, it’ll be interesting to the. The quote unquote evolution of privacy. What happens. But, but you and I are for sure I think on far ends of the spectrum willing to trade all sorts of information and etc for you know, for, for, for convenience or a better experience of me. After all we, we did fund Blippi, which did you see by the way reemerged.

[00:15:04] Howard Hartenbaum
We.

[00:15:04] David Hornik
We gave the Blippi name to another. To a. To a friend of the company because we’re no longer using it and Blippi just reemerged as a new. As a new app. So you can get Blippi.

[00:15:15] Howard Hartenbaum
Did you sell it for, like 300,000 bucks for the name or something?

[00:15:17] David Hornik
We sold it for. You’re a good guy. Feel free to use Blippi. I don’t know if we got anything for it, to tell you the truth, but we’re. We’re so busy building Top Hatter, which is. This is like the shameless plug version of. Of Venture Cast, but looking for eyeglasses. Yeah. Go to Ditto. No. Well, it is the holiday season. We’re coming up on. We’re coming up on.

[00:15:39] Howard Hartenbaum
You want to buy sunglasses for your friends and family? Ditto. Anyway, Top hat, actually, if you really.

[00:15:44] David Hornik
Want to, you know, we’re coming up on what, Black Friday and then Cyber Monday. And the place to go is Ebates. Last year, according to comScore, 4% of Black Friday traffic came through Ebates. Ebates is this place where you go and you. And you buy stuff and you get money rebated to you. And literally four out of a hundred transactions came through ebates because people were very focused on how do I get the best, best deal? And Ebates had that. I just miraculously got my Ebates credit card. We’ve been talking about the Ebates credit card forever. Cash back, so on. It’s actually a great deal. 3% on Ebates transactions. So if you shop. If you’re already shopping through ebates and you get. You know, I just bought a magazine, right? Subscription for my son for Hanukkah make magazine. And. And I bought it through evates, and I got 40% back or something, and then I bought it on my ebates credit card, and I get another 3%.

[00:16:46] Howard Hartenbaum
What if you buy United Airlines plane ticket? 3.3% back if you don’t buy through Ebates.

[00:16:53] David Hornik
Oh, if you buy three. But if you don’t buy three. Bates. 1%. So I just saw 1% on everything. So there’s 3% on Ebates.

[00:16:59] Howard Hartenbaum
Add on TV for some credit card companies doing a point and a half now.

[00:17:05] David Hornik
In cash or in what?

[00:17:06] Howard Hartenbaum
In cash. On your quiz. It’s a capital one quicksilver card.

[00:17:10] David Hornik
Point and a half Capital one. I. I’m a. I’m. I’m a United’s. I have a United card, but I have to say I’m gonna. I have the. I have this Ebates black card, and I’m very excited about. Although they gave me like 12 cents in credit line. They don’t trust. They clearly don’t trust me to actually pay my bills. So I might have to build up my credit.

[00:17:33] Howard Hartenbaum
I’ll get one.

[00:17:34] David Hornik
That’s cool.

[00:17:34] Howard Hartenbaum
I’ve been thinking about getting rid of my American Express card because I get nothing back and I pay like a ton. $400 a year.

[00:17:41] David Hornik
It’s a joke. It’s a, it’s, it’s so painful. But I have mine.

[00:17:46] Howard Hartenbaum
And if. Josh Silverman. You’re listening to this, we’re very sorry.

[00:17:51] David Hornik
Our good friend Josh. I will never get rid of my American Express card. Do you know why?

[00:17:57] Howard Hartenbaum
Because of Josh.

[00:17:58] David Hornik
No. Although I love Josh. Josh. Josh and I worked together 15 years ago at, at Evite and he’s now the head of head of consumer at American Express. The reason I will not.

[00:18:09] Howard Hartenbaum
Was that a shout out?

[00:18:10] David Hornik
It was a double shout out day. And then I had lunch and I had lunch just last week with one of the founders of Evite, Selena Tobacco Walla over at, at Survey Monkey. They’re doing awesome stuff and I love Selena. I, I, she’s just like such a spectacular. So it’s triple shout out day. And then the other founder of Evite, do you know who that is? Alib, who was doing clear slide and they’re just crushing it.

[00:18:38] Howard Hartenbaum
So wait, so all these people, you know, who are just crushing it. Why aren’t we in those deals?

[00:18:42] David Hornik
Well, that’s a fine question. Selena and Al. Although Amex. I don’t know how we would get into Amex. But, but anyway, the reason that I cannot ever get rid of my American Express is that I have memorized the number. And that is so convenient in E commerce to just be able to type the number and have to instead of taking it out of your wallet that you know what, we should talk about that all in one credit card. Coin. What do you think of coin?

[00:19:08] Howard Hartenbaum
I think it’s solving a real problem. It’s a very practical solution for a real problem. My only concern being is there technology that’s defensible or not? Because if there isn’t, I mean the credit card companies are going to hate it. Yeah, all that branding, all the branding gone. The fact that they’re just another number in your wallet. But I want one because I have in my wallet a few different cards and I want less in my wallet. I want coin. Now the, I’m actually going to see them in a week or so.

[00:19:33] David Hornik
Are you? Well, it’s, I think it’s super interesting. I saw a coin equivalent 10 years ago and the tech was way worse. So it was really hard to do. Etc. You didn’t have this iPhone thing. But here’s my question for you and for coin. The way you load it is you take your iPhone and you take a little reader that looks like the square reader, and you scan your card and then it inputs it into the mag stripe. What is keeping the waiter who grabs your credit card to pay for a meal from going in the back and swiping your credit card and gathering up 20 or 40 or 100 credit cards on his coin?

[00:20:11] Howard Hartenbaum
What’s keeping him from doing that now with your credit card?

[00:20:14] David Hornik
Well, nothing in particular, except it’s just so convenient. Right. So, yeah, you could write them down or photocopy them. Take. Actually take it. Just take a picture. Boom.

[00:20:22] Howard Hartenbaum
When you go to a restaurant, you hand your credit card, they can have a reader they describe. They don’t get all your cards, but they get that one card.

[00:20:29] David Hornik
Yeah, but I’m just saying. Oh, yeah. But even if so, it’s just much harder.

[00:20:32] Howard Hartenbaum
Have a fingerprint reader.

[00:20:35] David Hornik
That would be.

[00:20:35] Howard Hartenbaum
That only allows them to get one card. So I got to tell a credit card fraud story. I had.

[00:20:39] David Hornik
Oh, good.

[00:20:41] Howard Hartenbaum
Years ago, I had my. I work at Honda, and I have a Honda credit union account still. That’s for employees or ex employees. And I have a Honda Visa. And I like it because it says Honda on it. People look at it like, where did you get this Honda credit card? And I had fraud. Somebody was buying gas in Kentucky or something like that. So I had them send me a new card. And I had this new card, and I hadn’t used it yet. And I decided, well, I’ll use it and see if it works. And I went to the pet Food Express shop in Mountain View to buy some food for my dog. And I. They used it there and swiped it. Two days later, it was showing up fraudulently all over Mountain View. And there was only one shop where I had used this card. And so I went to the shop, and it was the same guy at the counter. And I said, I’d like to talk to your boss. And I said to the boss, I came in here. That’s the guy that was working. As soon as I had the card for like a week or two weeks, hadn’t used it, I used it here. And starting the next day, it started getting used all over town. That’s the guy. And he said, thank you very much. And I left.

[00:21:43] David Hornik
And that was that.

[00:21:44] Howard Hartenbaum
That was that.

[00:21:45] David Hornik
You didn’t want to punch him in the face?

[00:21:47] Howard Hartenbaum
Yeah, I did, but then I go to prison.

[00:21:49] David Hornik
Yeah, exactly. No, it’s a tricky thing. I mean, anyway, I think this. I think the coin thing is great. I’ve already bought one or pre ordered it. I’m sure you’ve pre ordered. It’s 50 bucks. Like, seems to me a no brainer would love to have it, but I am a little concerned that it makes it even easier.

[00:22:07] Howard Hartenbaum
So my daughter, who is a college student, has a iPhone with a case that holds like two, like her student ID and a credit card in it, and that’s her entire wallet. And with coin, you can actually do that. You can have your driver’s license and coin, which will have the rest of your cards in it, and that is it.

[00:22:26] David Hornik
I lost my wallet the other morning, and it was a nightmare.

[00:22:32] Howard Hartenbaum
Did you get it back?

[00:22:32] David Hornik
Have you lost your wallet?

[00:22:34] Howard Hartenbaum
Did you get it back?

[00:22:35] David Hornik
I did. It turned out I didn’t lose it. Turned out I misplaced it. But if you had a coin, I freaked out. But I do. You know what I do have, actually? I have Lemon. Do you have Lemon?

[00:22:47] Howard Hartenbaum
I do.

[00:22:47] David Hornik
So Lemon, I had already made. I’d taken pictures of all my credit cards, and I had a picture of my. Of my license. And they’re all in one la one app. You get the Lemon app and you can save it. All right? And so I had a picture of my license, and I was supposed to fly that night. I was supposed to hop on a red eye, and I’m like, how. I. I’m. How am I gonna get on? So I took my passport. Okay, I have my passport. Great. No problem. But I was renting a car on the other end, and they always check your light, your license. And I was thinking, is it going to be sufficient to show them my license on. On Lemon, are they not going to rent me this car now? It was a. It was just. I can’t tell you how horrible it was. But without. Without Lemon, I wouldn’t have had a record of all these things. So at least I had a record of them. It turned out that I had just put it on the shelf in my closet as I was frantically changing for that Deloitte thing. So I was, you know. But by the way, so. So Lemon. So the founder of Lemon. We’ve talked about this guy before. Wences Casaris, the most interesting man in the world. I adore Wences. And Wentz has said to me several weeks ago, david, bitcoin, put your money in Bitcoin. Wentz is a monstrous believer in bitcoin. And I think bitcoin was trading at a hundred dollars a coin. And he said, I’m Telling you it’s going up, up and away. He believes, he believes that it will be the world currency and that actually every bitcoin will be worth a lot of money. I won’t tell you how much he thinks, but a lot of money. So he said, put it in. So I, I was gonna actually take my money and buy out of my 401k into a Bitcoin fund and then I got distracted and I didn’t do it or whatever. And so what’s bitcoin trading at today, Howard? It would have been at 100, peaked.

[00:24:35] Howard Hartenbaum
At 900, but now I think it’s about 700.

[00:24:37] David Hornik
Oh my God. So what’s Quandal, Howard?

[00:24:42] Howard Hartenbaum
Quandl is a website that has all of the interesting data in the world on it. If you need to know an interesting data set, Quandl has it.

[00:24:50] David Hornik
Yes, indeed. Not that Quandl is. Oh yes, actually it is another one of our portfolio companies. But Quandl’s amazing. It has these, has tens of thousands of data sets around things like the exchange rate of a currency over time or the, or weather or you know, fluctuation in the prices of corn futures or whatever. Anyway, so here, Bitcoin, Bitcoin data, it says as of 22nd November, one Bitcoin can be exchanged for $765.90, $766. So it went up 7.6x from when I stupidly didn’t buy. Oh, I was gonna move like a 100k in my 401k. I’ve been worth 700k with no taxes. And, and this is kind of an interesting fact, it says they’re currently 11,000,989, 675 bitcoins, although that’s changed since. Right, because they’re constantly increasing. And this is also very interesting. A total of 27,000,291,441,91,441 Bitcoin transactions have occurred because there’s a sole ledger, you know, exactly how many bitcoins have exchanged hands. So 27 million Bitcoin transactions. It’s, it’s sort of astonishing actually. Now what comes of it is going to be an interesting question. And they continue to connect it, you know, connect bitcoin to things like murder and drugs or whatever else.

[00:26:24] Howard Hartenbaum
But in the meantime, the meantime at the US government was saying, yeah, we think bitcoins are fine.

[00:26:29] David Hornik
And, and some, and, and I forget, there’s some, oh there’s a, there’s some private university, like a for profit university that now will accept payment in bitcoin It’s.

[00:26:42] Howard Hartenbaum
I wish I had something. I’m gonna pay my kids a college tuition by December 13th. Every time I get the bill, I say, you’re gonna go back next semester. Because I don’t want to pay it.

[00:26:53] David Hornik
I just. Yeah, exactly. I just paid. I just paid one of them. I just paid outright. In the beginning, that was silly. And then I just paid another kid’s private school money.

[00:27:04] Howard Hartenbaum
Tough problems to have.

[00:27:05] David Hornik
You do know there are these things called public institutions, like public high schools and whatever.

[00:27:10] Howard Hartenbaum
My kids go to public high school.

[00:27:12] David Hornik
One of mine does. Oh, man.

[00:27:17] Howard Hartenbaum
I saw in the press, it said that there was some issue at Microsoft or the. They were trying to force their Microsoft messenger users over to using Skype because now Skype is owned by Microsoft. And it sort of made me smile because in end of 2005, right after eBay had bought Skype, I went up to talk with the Microsoft Team with Jeff Jordan, who was running PayPal, and Dana Stalder, who’s now at Jeff Jordan’s at Andreessen Horowitz, and Dana stalder, who was GM of PayPal North America. He’s now at Matrix, and some other guy who, I can’t remember his name. We went up to Microsoft and we met with Hank Vigil and Ray Ozzie and a couple of other really smart guys. And Microsoft just wanted to Talk with eBay, PayPal, Skype, to try and figure out what type of partnerships. At the time, it was actually the. They were interested in PayPal. Ray Ozzie said to me, he goes, so when are you going to make it so that Skype can integrate with Microsoft Messenger? I said, well, we’ve been thinking that we might. And he cut me off and he goes, bullshit. You know, you’re never going to integrate because you want a proprietary network. I sort of smirked to myself and I thought, yeah, one day Microsoft messenger is going to be integrating with Skype.

[00:28:42] David Hornik
Yeah, the other way around.

[00:28:43] Howard Hartenbaum
I just read on the news Skype.

[00:28:45] David Hornik
One, and they’re, yeah, they’re using Skype Messenger.

[00:28:49] Howard Hartenbaum
They’re using Skype Messenger. They’re actually pushing Microsoft messenger out because Skype is better.

[00:28:55] David Hornik
You know, though, it’s kind of ironic because I was just reading a story about Yahoo Mail and it said that they did a study in that, that Yahoo people can’t give up Outlook. They don’t want to go to. They don’t want to go to Yahoo because they’re on Outlook or whatever.

[00:29:11] Howard Hartenbaum
Right, because they’re used to it.

[00:29:12] David Hornik
Yeah.

[00:29:12] Howard Hartenbaum
Once people get used to software and they like it. They just don’t really want to change. Even though, like, sometimes after you change, it really is better. But that’s one reason why something like Dropbox, I think, has some longevity. How much it’s worth in the long run. Let the markets decide. But once people get in there, it’s just work to go.

[00:29:32] David Hornik
Yeah, right. Why are you gonna move it?

[00:29:34] Howard Hartenbaum
The trick is to come up with the new application that everybody needs and be kind of the first one and get a lot of adoption. And then even if your product is not so great, I’m not saying that Dropbox isn’t, but Microsoft. I mean, Microsoft Windows is not that great. Difficult, but there are pieces.

[00:29:50] David Hornik
Well, I’ll tell you, it is interesting. I was talking. Here’s the other thing that’s interesting to me. I thought that students were basically done with email, right? That they wanted to use text or whatever, Snapchat, anything, right, other than email. So I’m an advisee. I’m an advisor of these freshmen. And so I said, how do you want to be? How do you want me to contact you? Do you want me to do email? Or do you want to text or Facebook or whatever? It turns out they all said, well, we all do email. I said, well, how often do you check? Because I thought they weren’t checking at all. They said, oh, we check multiple times a day. We check our email. Seemed curious to me because in the past I have sent emails. I don’t get responses or whatever else. So I bump into a buddy of mine who’s a professor at Stanford, and he. He has some students who run his dorm. And he was saying. I was telling him this, like, I was surprised that people use email. He said. He said, you know what? It’s actually just a cultural problem. He said, it’s not that students today aren’t using email. They do. They use it all the time. They just don’t have the social cues that work that. That we have where when we get an email, we respond to it. When these guys get the email, they. They say, oh, okay, I got that information. They erase it. They don’t respond. And so you don’t know that they’ve read it. So he was saying he was meeting with his team, and he said to them, you know, you guys don’t respond. Do you read them? And they said, of course we read, or whatever. He said, well, I gotta tell you, like, the polite thing to do is to respond is to say, that’s why. Okay, I’ll, you know. Got it.

[00:31:25] Howard Hartenbaum
So I learned this fact by interacting with my daughter, who’s in college. She goes to Tufts. And when I send an email, rarely, if ever, do I get a response. But when I send a text, I get a notification that says delivered. And that’s the fundamental difference. That’s it.

[00:31:47] David Hornik
That’s what you want.

[00:31:48] Howard Hartenbaum
That’s what I want. So I know that it has been delivered. With email, there’s sort of like the mail system, you never really know if it’s been delivered until you get a response. But with a text message, Apple or Android, whatever tells you the message at and T tells you the message has been delivered. And then you’re like, okay, if they don’t want to respond, they don’t want to respond. So I think it is a cultural difference.

[00:32:10] David Hornik
No, it was surprising to me. But even when I said to my kids, like, if you want to fly home for Thanksgiving, I need to know when you can fly home, you’d think that’s something you would answer. Their answer is, you can look it up. Thanks for nothing.

[00:32:25] Howard Hartenbaum
So I sent a picture to my lovely wife today of David Hornik on the COVID of a Michael Jackson album dressed as Michael Jackson with his face. And it says delivered.

[00:32:37] David Hornik
Yeah.

[00:32:38] Howard Hartenbaum
And below it, she has responded. Boy, he sure is enjoying himself.

[00:32:43] David Hornik
Now, in all fairness, that cover of the Michael Jackson thing is from the last lobby conference, which we called the Lobby Music Festival. And it was. The. The program for the conference was kind of a record album, and it was. And. And we did a bunch of different covers of kind of iconic albums. So that was the Thriller album, only with My Face, which if you can picture that, is not pretty.

[00:33:08] Howard Hartenbaum
Well, that’s too bad. We don’t have, like, one image. We can send like a cover.

[00:33:12] David Hornik
Video cast.

[00:33:13] Howard Hartenbaum
No, a cover for each. For each one.

[00:33:15] David Hornik
That’d be good.

[00:33:17] Howard Hartenbaum
So what do you think? Any other topics? We go all day.

[00:33:22] David Hornik
We could. We could go all day. But you know what? Maybe people only have a short run this time. And. And we have gone backwards. And.

[00:33:30] Howard Hartenbaum
Yeah, I think it’s probably okay.

[00:33:31] David Hornik
All right, well, hey, thanks for listening. This has been David Hornik from August.

[00:33:36] Howard Hartenbaum
Capital and Howard Hartbaum, also from August.

[00:33:38] David Hornik
Capital, and that was it. That was venturecast. Happy thanksgiva.