Weekly Recap Oct 18 - 22

Hey Everybody!

It was a packed week of news and interviews on the show.

We had Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire, HNGRY's Matt Newberg, Tech Journalist Eric Newcomer and few tactical segments on how better operate a startup.

Twilio

Twilio's market cap more than 4x'd from when we last had CEO Jeff Lawson on the pod in 2019. It's now over $63B!

In this episode, Jason and Jeff discuss lessons from scaling and Twilio's big acquisitions of Segment & SendGrid. Twilio doubled their headcount just this year!

Jeff also announced the launch of their new product "Twilio Engage" that coincides with their renewed mission to build the leading customer engagement platform. Twilio helped define the "API" business model and is one of the most important tech infrastructure companies. If you like to know what things look like in tech from 10,000 feet, listen to this episode.

My favorite quote from Jeff

"It's no longer build versus buy. It's build versus die...The survival of the fittest is those that adapt most quickly will survive."

Crypto & Stablecoins

In a long awaited episode, Jason chatted with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire about USDC, Tether & more.

Circle is the second largest stablecoin by market cap ($32B). Jason has been critical of Tether, the largest stablecoin ($69B). Tether has operated outside of regulatory frameworks and uses offshore banks.

In this episode, Jason confronted Jeremy to understand why we should trust Circle and if stablecoins pose a risk to overall economic stability.

Jason came away from the episode trusting Jermey. He's reasonably confident Circle is a stablecoin operator avoiding the pitfalls of Tether. You'll have to listen and decide for yourself.

Food tech

A lot has been happening in food tech & delivery. Several billion dollars have flowed into "Quick Commerce" companies like Gorillas, Jokr, Flink, GoPuff and more. Doordash is heavily funding their own "Dashmart" concept. Amazon is continues to expand its "Fresh" grocery offering nationwide. Delivery-only restaurants like Mr. Beast Burger are being launched out of "host kitchens" and "ghost kitchens" at an increasing rate.

To help make sense of all the new developments, we brought on Matt Newberg. Matt founded HNGRY.tv and goes the extra mile to track the latest developments changing the way we eat. To get scoops, he has delivered as a driver on almost all the major platforms and talked with countless operators. Listen to the episode here.

Tactical startup advice

In our "Customer Basics" series we rolled out an episode on how to manage customer relationships. Too many businesses don't implement the right systems to get to know their customers.

"Often it's said that data is the new oil, but you cannot pull up to an oil rig and fill your car. You have to have it go through a refinery, which to me is analytics. The petrol that powers the vehicle is those insights." - Tiffani Bova from Salesforce

The latest Startup Checklist episode was all about finding and delighting customers. Listen to this one if you are thinking about launching a company or are looking to improve your business.

News

It was a big week for SPACs & IPOs. On Friday's episode, tech journalist Eric Newcomer joined to talk about the Trump SPAC, the WeWork SPAC, and the behind the scenes funding story of GitLab's IPO.

Some other News highlights from Jason's coverage this week:

• Jason reacts to Apple’s new M1 chips & MacBooks
• Inflation warnings and hedge strategy, Bitcoin ETF, Hindenburg’s Tether bounty

Do you have feedback for us? Comment

By the numbers, lots of listeners have been engaging with our news content. Many times, "News" episodes have outperformed interview shows with big-name CEOs (when measured by total downloads).

As result, most days we've been combining news & an interview into one podcast. We'd love your feedback on how the show has been as a listener and what you'd like to hear more of!

Best,

Producer Justin

Special thanks to our partners for making the show possible:

Real Good Foods, Masterworks, Lemon.io, LinkedIn Marketing, Vanta, Odoo, Marketerhire, Bank Novo, OurCrowd, Embroker, Drata, Fiverr Business, Salesforce