VC and Biz Models

This week on the ⁠HYPEWORKS Pod⁠ , we talked with Michael Houck, a former Airbnb product manager and Silicon Valley's Andreessen Horowitz-backed founder. We discussed venture capital, business models, and the role of AI (transcript below).

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Show Transcript

Alex (00:00)

Hey, hey guys, it's Alex back with episode 28 of the Highworks podcast with me. I've said already, Alex and Jake. Uh, great to have on Michael Hauck. Uh, I'm, I'm saying that correctly, right? Michael Hauck.

Jake H (00:07)

And Jay, yeah, hello.

Michael Houck (00:14)

And like most people, you nailed it.

Jake H (00:16)

Hey, no, you nailed it. You're winning again, Alex.

Alex (00:18)

Damn, cool. That's surprising. Yeah, let's cut the chase. It's really great to have you on Michael. I came across you on Twitter, like a lot of people and you've got a very successful newsletter and a really high profile Twitter slash X. But we always like to talk about the latest stuff in this pod and.

You were just saying like you have like a little bit of an exclusive. Maybe you could drop in this part. Um, you may, you can share some details.

Michael Houck (00:47)

Yeah, we'll drop the scoop. So we've had the newsletter for about a year and a half now. It's at 80,000 subscribers, most of whom are startup founders. It's an advice column and resource column for founders. So tactical advice, things I learned, you know, building a startup that raised from Andreessen Harwitz, and then now bootstrapping another one to 40K and MRR in six months. And send that out every week, but we haven't had a podcast till now.

And we're actually in the process of putting out, uh, putting a podcast out. We're meeting with some great people over the next few weeks should be out in a, about a month or two. The idea is basically to go super deep with actual people who've successfully raised capital and get them to be super candid about the things that don't get talked about, but only get talked about in DMS and group chats and things like that about what actually works, what doesn't, uh, for fundraising in particular. So that's the, that's the topic.

Alex (01:42)

Cool, yeah, that's a really good skip.

Jake H (01:43)

Yeah, I'd been on your Twitter and I saw that you had posted about, most people don't know what to look for, what VCs to look for. I think that's a great topic and also a little segue into you and your background. So it'd be nice to share that with our audience.

Michael Houck (02:02)

Yeah, sure. So, excuse me. Um, so Michael Hauk, I spent a few years in big tech. I was part of the early team at Uber Eats, a small part of helping grow that business, uh, ended up, um, going on to their data science team and then moved over to Airbnb where I was a product manager, helped build Airbnb plus got laid off during COVID started, uh, my own startup after that called LaunchHouse. We raised two rounds of capital, including a series a from Andreessen Harwitz. Um, you know, that company.

got pretty big. We were doing about three million in revenue, ended up turning it into a venture fund because our product was a membership community of founders. And so we just thought, let's turn it into a venture fund. And that's what it currently is. I have since left and now I am building my newsletter but my personal brand, but also building Megaphone, which is an engagement network for social media. So you can.

subscribe and you get big creators in your niche to go engage with your content in a super organic way to expose it to their audiences. At this point we have a few hundred creators on the platform and also a few hundred paying users doing that 40k MRR.

Jake H (03:15)

Fast.

Michael Houck (03:17)

We move fast over here man.

Jake H (03:20)

I've got a question. Obviously I'm starting a new pivot into launching a new business within the next couple of months. On the cards, there is a bit of potential. I'm bootstrapping at the moment, but there's a bit of potential for me to look for funding. What are the sort of steps that you would recommend startup businesses to go through and how would they raise capital? Where would they look?

Michael Houck (03:45)

Yeah, I mean, it sort of depends at the starting point that you're at, right? Cause you're either starting with a network of folks who are connected in the venture space or you're not. Um, and that's really the biggest and the first cut that I would make. So if you're on one side of the fence and you have that network, then, you know, just

keep people in loop with what you're doing, make sure you track their second degree connections, make sure you know who they can get you in touch with, where those nodes in the network that are super powerful are for you, and then just try to build relationships with those investors before you actually need to go out and ask them for money. I think especially with the kind of market we're in right now, unless you're an AI, capital is still a bit hard to come by, just like it was last year. If you're an AI, different story, but if you're not, then...

building relationships over a longer period of time is way more important now than it was say in 2020, 2021, or even the first part of 2022. But if you're on the other side of the fence where you're like, I don't know a ton of people who know VCs, then it really becomes about identifying who those people are that you need to get in touch with. And a great way to do that is to look at the investors who are talking about your space on social media, in newsletters, on podcasts, and look at the companies they've invested in over the past, you know,

couple years, one year or two years, whatever the case may be. Um, get introductions to those founders, because the investors are going to be really hard to get interest to. So instead focus on the founders, build authentic founder to founder type relationships with them, become friends with them, help them out, lead with some, some value that you can offer to their startup. Um, and then at some point make the S and say, Hey, uh, you know, I'm, I'm looking to raise, I saw you were backed by X investor. I'll be here to meet with them. So you have to do the upfront work.

It definitely is harder if you don't have that network, but it's not impossible.

Jake H (05:27)

Okay, I mean, I've heard a lot of advice over the years and, you know, there's always that debate about going for like VC funding versus trying to find private funding. What would you say the core differentiators between what kind of funding a startup founder would choose is?

Michael Houck (05:44)

When you say private funding, you mean like private equity?

Jake H (05:46)

Yeah, private equity or, you know, let, yeah, lend out from friends or people that have successful businesses already.

Alex (05:49)

Family, family friends.

Michael Houck (05:55)

I mean, you know, some people like to go after the brand names that big name VCs offer. We obviously got the benefit of that with Andreessen, but you know, while that did open some doors for us, I think the most important thing founder can be doing is building their business, talking to their customers, learning how to grow. And so, especially if you're in the early stages, I would focus on just getting the money in the bank as quickly as possible and getting back to building. Unless you feel like there's an investor who can strategically add something, whether that's a partnership, whether that's they've worked in the space before and can help you.

not step on the landmines that are along the way, unless there's some direct benefit to the company that you feel like you can't get otherwise, I would focus on whatever the lowest friction path is to get money in the bank and get back to building.

Jake H (06:38)

Again, awesome advice. I'm sure people are gonna love this. So you've launched a new business recently. How did that come about? And obviously it's grown quite quickly to monthly reoccurring revenues. I think I'd love to hear about how that started and where you're at.

Michael Houck (06:57)

Yeah, so it started really simply. I was in Cape Town on vacation after I left Launch House, and I had this idea for an engagement network where folks could grow with the help of other creators. I built my personal brand largely because I was friends with people who already had large personal brands, and they were interested in what we were doing at Launch House, and so they were engaging in the content that I was putting out. That exposed me to a whole bunch of...

Alex (07:20)

Michael, can you, um, who's someone you look up to in terms of personal branding, like just on that topic, like who, who are the kind of people you were looking up to?

Michael Houck (07:27)

Oh yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Sahil Bloom became a really good friend during the launch house days.

Alex (07:33)

Yeah, I just sent Jake his profile actually. I was like, this guy's killing it. Like his content's amazing right now.

Michael Houck (07:38)

Yeah, he's especially on X, but he's expanded to YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn. He's doing it all now. Um, but yeah, he's, he's the gold standard. He became a friend and yeah, I mean, just getting exposure to new people, um, through having engagements from folks with big audiences helps, and it was super organic because we were friends, but the problem is that not a lot of people actually have those relationships with big creators, right? Big creators have tons of people ask them for their time.

Uh, it's tough to, it's tough to get in touch with them and build an organic relationship. And so, um, I kind of, you know, we focused on getting my newsletter to cashflow positive for a few months after leaving launch house, but then over the summer came back to this idea of the engagement network and I texted a few friends about it and I was like, Hey, if I could have big creators comment on your, you know, your posts about your startup or about your growing your personal brand or whatever, would you be interested in paying for that? And a hundred percent of them said, yes. And so.

Instantly, I knew that there was something to build there. I didn't know what it was. And so I just started playing around with a no-code tool. I had my VA slinging posts back and forth, the creators across Telegram and WhatsApp. And I asked more people about it and just the momentum kept growing in terms of people who wanted to pay to use the service. And so within a month, I'd hired an engineer and we focused on actually going from a no-code app that I'd built into a full application. And...

Yeah, I mean, I posted about it in my newsletter, I posted about it on social media a couple times and word of mouth has sort of taken off since then. Today there's two sides of the marketplace. There's the creator side and the user side. The creator side you can only get into through referral. So either I have to know you or you have to be referred by somebody who I know. That way we keep a really tight loop on the quality of the creators, the quality of their audiences, no bots or anything like that. And then...

On the user side, it's just sort of grown word of mouth because I have a lot of founders in my network from the newsletter, from launch house. Um, and so, uh, we haven't really done any paid marketing yet. We did a small paid ad test, but we're currently not doing that. It's just growing through the word of mouth right now.

Alex (09:42)

What's the business model like for this? Is this like a venture business model or is this going to be subscription based or multiple channels?

Michael Houck (09:51)

Yeah, I mean, we'll see how fast it needs to grow or if competitors would enter the space and I need to raise money to crush them. But in the meantime, it's a subscription model. And then we also take a cut of creator earnings on the other side. So people can pay either $89 a month and we'll share their posts with creators as soon as they share them with us, or they can pay $49 a month.

Alex (09:58)

Yeah.

Jake H (10:02)

Thanks for watching!

Alex (10:05)

Yeah.

Mm.

Michael Houck (10:15)

and we'll hold the post for an hour before we share them with the creators, which doesn't make or break the success of the post, but it does have an impact on the impressions. And there's some other features we're building too. And then yeah, everything they deposit, like ad spend to amplify their posts, we take 0% of that, we take a cut on the creator side after the fact.

Alex (10:34)

Yeah, there's a lot of really cool business models floating around right now. I was saying to Jake last week, so I've been using Beehive for my email newsletter. I'm not, do you use Substack or Beehive or what platform? You'll be happy. All right, cool. Yeah.

Michael Houck (10:47)

I use Beehive. I'm a small investor at Beehive, big fan of Tyler and the team. They truly build a product that lets anyone create a newsletter super quick and out there.

Alex (10:56)

Yeah. So that ad network is crazy. Yeah. Like literally when I, when I like sign up to be high, if I didn't even know that existed and then I've had four, four offers in the last week and my newsletter is like a, like a thousand subs. It's like small. Um, but like I have four offers. It's crazy how quickly that's growing.

Michael Houck (11:15)

Yeah, they've done a really good job of making it feasible for you to make money with your newsletter right away. You know, at our stage, we have a bunch of relationships with sponsors, so we're doing a lot of stuff on our own. But, you know, anyone who's starting a newsletter, you can go on Beehive and make money through both ads and referrals, like their, their Beehive boost product. You can do both of that within, you know, the first week or two of starting one. It's really insane.

Alex (11:21)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's a cool model. They have ads, they have obviously paid, you pay to subscribe to use it, loads of different models. It's cool, there's a lot of experimentation right now, which is interesting.

Jake H (11:59)

I have a question and our audience don't know this, but you've recently moved coast to coast as well as change your hair. But what was the reason to move from the west to the east?

Michael Houck (12:12)

Well, I had been in LA in, I moved to LA in 2016 to help launch the markets for Uber Eats and join the team there. And then eventually moved up to San Francisco about a year later when our, you know, my role in the team grew. And I was there at Airbnb, but in 2020 when I got laid off from Airbnb, I left SF and I went nomading around for a bit. That's how Launch House started. I booked a co-living house in Tulum and invited

19 other founders to come live with me for a month and build stuff. Um, and then after that, I ended up, um, right before we went to launch house in, I was in New York and I ended up meeting my wife. And so we ended up settling down at least for now in New York. Um, and so that's where we've been for the past, uh, the past few years.

Jake H (12:59)

Congratulations.

Michael Houck (13:01)

Thanks, man.

Jake H (13:03)

You're welcome. Wow. So quite a journey. When you were no muddin' around, where did you go? Did you move to other places as well? Was it like a traveling road show or were you just permanently based in?

Michael Houck (13:15)

I had no plans. I just knew that I didn't want to be stuck in my tiny little SF apartment if I didn't have to be. And so Tulum seemed like a good place. I'd never been there. My friend had a wedding there. And so I felt like a good place to go check out. And then when we came back to the States after two months of doing a launch house down there, my two co-founders went to LA to manage the sort of like physical location that we booked in Beverly Hills.

And I went back to New York to sort of focus on the business side of things. So that was how we, we split things up and there was no plan beyond that.

Alex (13:50)

Is the New York ad scene, is it still preferable to be in New York in terms of the, you know, Madison Avenue and this, like, obviously all the big advertisers are there, right? Is that still a thing? Or do you think you need to be there to kind of work with advertising and...

Michael Houck (14:08)

Um, I don't know. I mean, I'm in, I'm in Brooklyn most of the time. Most of my life is, you know, in, you know, with my family and friends and then online, so I'm not, uh, I'm not on Madison Avenue too often.

Alex (14:17)

Yeah.

Yeah, you're not exactly knocking on doors to get advertisers. So how do you get advertisers on that topic? Like, is it mostly inbound or, you know, do you guys do have a lot of cold outreach or?

Michael Houck (14:24)

Yeah.

Yeah, we, I mean, we, at this point, a lot of our ad businesses repeats. So folks who have tried an ad, it's worked really well and they've kind of continued to work with us or expand the partnership in some way. We also do things like founder dinners and events and stuff like that. Um, but we do get a lot of inbound through the newsletter and through X and LinkedIn when I post on there. Um,

Also, we do cold outreach. We look at other newsletters and see who's sponsoring those in our niche and who might be a good fit. And we try to find the right contact at those companies to get in touch with. So it's a, it's a mix of all of them. I'd say the actual split and breakdown is, um, at this point, it's probably 50% repeat business and then the others are, you know, 50, 25, basically, uh, between the, uh, between inbound and outbound.

Alex (15:03)

Yeah.

Jake H (15:20)

What's the size of the team behind the newsletter?

Alex (15:21)

Yeah.

Michael Houck (15:24)

So I write the newsletter. Sometimes I'm up till 3 a.m. the night before writing it, but I always get it done. Um, other than that, I have my chief of staff who handles all partnerships for me. I have partnerships is not my thing. I don't love it. So he handles that. And then there's also some research tasks where he'll help out with that as well. But, and then I have my VA, my assistant who helps out with basically anything and everything that I need her to. She's really incredible.

But the majority of the team is focused on megaphone. So we have four engineers right now working on megaphone, hired them all through Micro One, shout out to those guys. And we also have a designer and we also have, because I'm terrible at design, I'm like the design is the one thing that I just am terrible at. And so we also have then some writers who work on our megaphone studios project, which is a subset of megaphone where we actually will create the content for you, like a ghost writing model, content creation model.

So we have a couple of writers working on that as well.

Jake H (16:24)

That's fast. Speed, honestly, your speed is impeccable.

Michael Houck (16:27)

We move.

It's the only advantage a startup has is how fast they can move. So that's what I focus on about Ballout.

Alex (16:37)

Yeah, we were actually talking about this recently, myself and Jake, we used to work in like big smartphone departments, sorry, big marketing departments of like 200 people in the smartphone industry. And like, it does feel like in the last year with AI, like you can flat pack a whole marketing department into like five or six people. Um, it's changed so quickly. It's crazy.

Michael Houck (16:54)

Yeah. I think if I was only running one of the two things, the newsletter or megaphone instead of both of them, I would probably do a lot of our, I did do all of our marketing in house, but we work with Matt McGarry's team for paid ads for the newsletter. We work with, uh, cap convert for SEO. They're fantastic. We definitely recommend checking them out.

Alex (17:06)

Yeah.

Michael Houck (17:16)

and a bunch of others too. So our partners help us with that side of things, but I'm sort of the one in the weeds directing them on decisions and stuff like that.

Alex (17:25)

Yeah, makes sense.

Jake H (17:28)

It almost scares me. We mentioned, we mentioned AI at the moment, at least four or five, maybe 20 times a day. It genuinely scares me. I actually put a tweet out the other day that said, you should be more scared of AI than you are brackets if you're not already. You know, so I think that AI is one of those things that's like, it's encroaching on everybody's patch.

It's a matter of time before you are either managed by AI or one of the managers of AI. It seems to be the split to me.

Michael Houck (18:02)

Yeah. I just want to make sure I'm on the right side of that line, right? I don't want to be managed by AI. And I think, you know, being an entrepreneur, focused on building your own businesses, focused on being responsible for your own income, um, is one of the best ways to sort of take that sense of agency, take that self sovereignty and, and hold onto that.

Um, rather than just working at some company where, you know, I saw something that was like Wendy's no longer has people at some locations doing the drive through, they just have a chat GPT screen. I don't, I don't want to have anything to do with that.

Alex (18:32)

Yeah, I saw that. I saw that's crazy.

It's a good point actually, because I think like all of us probably started our careers being a specialist, right? You have like one job, one vertical could be a social media manager, could be a ad buyer, you know, whatever. I do feel like we have to be generalists now. Like we have to like just do a number of different jobs. Um, cause I think the specialist thing is going to go away. Like think about, so, so my, my star was PR. I was a PR guy and like copyrighting was like, I spent like

Four hours a day doing copywriting, like press releases and like random documents, like that's gone now. Like it's completely gone. That whole job is gone basically. Yeah.

Michael Houck (19:13)

Yeah.

I mean, it can be if the company decides to, to outsource it to an AI, they can do that now and that'll the amount of jobs that's going to happen to is only going to increase. I think.

Alex (19:26)

Yeah. Another, another, another one is a media, like, um, uh, media buyer, like a lot, um, like, you know, setting up ads and stuff, all the technical people behind that, like that's all been like, like run by AI in it, right? Like essentially setting up ads and, and copy and, you know, it's crazy.

Jake H (19:44)

Having said that though, sorry. Come on, Michael, you're the guest.

Michael Houck (19:45)

I think this is why I was always a terrible employee. I was laid off from my engineering job right out of college after a year. I was laid off from Airbnb, although I was good at that job, but COVID was a crazy circumstance. But yeah, I think this is why I was always terrible because I have been a generalist since day one and I've prioritized learning the skills you need to be a good generalist.

Alex (19:59)

Okay

Yeah.

Jake H (20:12)

I was about to mention that I'd actually written an email and sent it out via a newsletter, but it's effectively run out of my email CRM. And I'd written it organically and I got one response. Actually I got two, I got a couple of replies, but one of the replies was like quite rude and it basically said, this is chat GPT written, you're spamming me. And I was thinking, well, what are the chances actually? This is

one of the emails where chat GPT did not come into contact with this email. And actually I'd sent it out and Phil thought to myself, well, I hope there's no mistakes in there because I hadn't maybe done a good job at proofreading it because it went, I'd written it at two in the morning and scheduled it for 9 a.m. And I thought to myself, well, all that illustrates is that people maybe don't trust emails if they don't know the person because they think potentially that it could be chat GPT.

And now we'll get into the stage where you might not be able to differentiate between what is AI and what is organic. I think six months ago, we could do that. I could see something that was written and think, well, I think that chat GPT did that because it used a few too many superlatives and the word elevate about seven times. But now I think we're getting to the stage where it's very hard to differentiate between AI and that sort of gap, the blurred line will only increase. So I think that.

That scares me.

Michael Houck (21:37)

Yeah, I would love to talk to somebody who works at like the NSA, um, like forensics, digital forensics department and understand what they're prioritizing in terms of what proof of humanity versus something being AI is, right? Is this like the, is this Sam Altman's master plan with world coin to come in and have crypto be the sort of like the blockchain be the layer that determines if you're a human or an AI? I don't know.

But yeah, I'd love to think about what the people in like actually mission critical situations already in like, you know, the government and places like that are using to differentiate.

Jake H (22:11)

as well as academic institutions. I mean, anything these days, because it's not just democratized the ability to be able to write at speed, but also democratized information, right? I mean, obviously it's probably censored. All information would be to a degree if it's from a large entity for various reasons that we don't have to go into. But nevertheless, it's...

It's democratized the ability to learn things. So if I didn't know, as an example, if I didn't know basic SEO, I could learn basic SEO in about 20 minutes by having a conversation through chat GPT. Whereas before I might have to hire a mentor. I might have to go online or even YouTube now chat GPT speed.

Michael Houck (22:58)

Yeah, it's the ability to, to get over that line of, are you below the AI and taking direction from it or are you above it giving direction the ability to do that is actually easier than ever, but the urgency to do it is also higher than ever. It's very interesting.

Alex (22:58)

Yeah.

Jake H (23:14)

I do feel that gun next to my head daily.

Do you? Do you feel that?

Alex (23:19)

Yeah.

Michael Houck (23:22)

Um, I try not to think about it too much. I think I just like, I'm pretty single-minded when I have a goal. And my goal right now is to just build megaphone. So I'm megaphone's not an AI product. You know, maybe we'll launch some AI content creation tools later in the year. It's on our loose roadmap. Um, but I'm trying not to think about it too much until I get there because, um, yeah, I think it's just, you know, it doesn't benefit me right now to think about it too much.

Alex (23:48)

I was having a chat with Jake. Um, we were talking about, uh, scheduling content. Um, because like I'm from my ex kind of, I just shoot from the hip, right? If I see something interesting, I just post it and Jake shared with me another account, a really popular design account. So it's like one of the top, um, designers on X and he's basically said, if I, if I get, I'm probably giving it away here, but he said, if I get less than a hundred thousand views on a tweet, I delete it. Like that's what he said. Yeah. So.

Michael Houck (24:06)

Okay.

Oh, I saw this. Yeah, I saw this.

Alex (24:17)

What's your thoughts on that? Like, do you, like, do you schedule your content or is it more organic? And

Michael Houck (24:23)

Um, I mean, I've been pretty bad about scheduling content for the past six months, because it's been pretty heads down, but when I am on top of it, I'll usually do a week's batch at a time. So I'll take either Sunday night or Monday morning and, and schedule everything out. Uh, but when I have posted threads, for example, in the past six months, it's been the morning of I've just woke up early and written something and.

Alex (24:34)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly, right? It feels a bit like saving sex for marriage. Like, why would you, why would you, why would you do that? You know, like, why don't just put it out there, you know?

Michael Houck (24:47)

Hahaha

I will say there's a lot of ways people try to like game the algorithm to, you know, like, Oh, I'm deleting my posts so that the algorithm will think that I only tweet bangers, but like the algorithm knows deleted the tweets too. It's run by the same platform that you've deleted. So I don't believe in gaming the algorithm that much. It's just about putting it together content that people will spend a lot of time reading or engage with.

Alex (25:05)

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I, the only time I've deleted posts is when I've been like, I've said something I regret, like some weird shit that I regret. Like it has to be serious. It has to be really bad. And that's happened maybe once or twice. I ever, you know? Yeah.

Michael Houck (25:31)

Oh, okay. That's a pretty good hit rate. I'm definitely deleting more than that.

Alex (25:39)

What's your thoughts, Jack?

Jake H (25:41)

Well, I don't know. I've been in these rabbit holes in my mind actually about social media. As you know, Alex, I'm quite a private person, but I do have a tendency to speak my mind in private. And I've been thinking to myself, do I want to share this with the world? And I should. Some of it I should. And how much should I censor? And in what format should I do this? And as you know, Alex, I've been sending you my demo videos.

Alex (25:43)

Thanks for watching!

Jake H (26:09)

of my new YouTube channel and some of it might not make the cut, we'll put it that way, but nevertheless I'd imagine it would get quite the reaction. That's generally my thoughts.

Michael Houck (26:22)

Yeah. If you, if you open.

Alex (26:25)

It is a hot topic right now, right? Like, cause companies and whatnot are looking back in time. Like, hasn't there been cases where like CEOs have been fired off the back of old tweets and stuff like that? Pretty sure there has.

Michael Houck (26:38)

Yeah, I mean, I think that gets in that happens way too much. I think that gets into the politics behind it and, you know, sort of the craziness that we're in right now in the culture in general. But yeah, that shouldn't happen unless it's really something that's like, unless it's illegal, you know.

Alex (26:42)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It shouldn't happen. No, it's just the fact that because it's online, it's there forever. Right. Like, like Jake said, like if I say in private offline and it's gone, like, you know, it's, it's done, you know,

Michael Houck (27:03)

Yeah. But if you, if you open the drafts folder of any one of the things they haven't posted, you know, I'm sure you'd find some interesting stuff.

Alex (27:09)

There's that, there's that account on X as well that shares the CEO emails, like Steve Jobs and Zach and all of the emails are just like, they're cringe worthy, they're like borderline racist, you know, like, but they're said in the heat of the moment, right? Like Steve Jobs did that Adobe one. Adobe were stealing all the Apple people. And Steve said, yeah. And Steve basically said, you know, what's, what's going on here? Like, are we, are you going to stop stealing or are we going to start stealing your people? Right.

Michael Houck (27:28)

I saw that one.

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's incentives for both of them to collude in that scenario.

Alex (27:43)

Yeah, and the Zach famous one about the fucking ear, like that DM or the AOL IM, like that's same, you know, like, yeah.

Michael Houck (27:52)

I don't think I saw that one. Alex, what are you looking at, man?

Jake H (27:53)

I don't know that one either, mate.

Yeah, are you sure that's...

Alex (28:01)

That is out there. That is out there. Um, nah, I would encourage, I would encourage just people just to say what they feel and yeah, Jake, you should. Yeah. But I mean, to be fair, like if you're writing a newsletter, you have to, you know, or it depends on context, right? If you're writing a newsletter, you have to be fairly mindful of your audience. You know, it's not like X where people are just, you know, firing out stuff, live by center.

Michael Houck (28:03)

Hahaha

Yeah, same here.

Jake H (28:10)

bear the consequences. Well.

I guess you could wear a mask and say whatever you want.

Michael Houck (28:30)

Yeah, this is like the accounts that build a big following with a, with an anonymous account, right? Like a car dealership guy was anonymous till he had a few hundred thousand followers and everyone's like, Oh, who is this guy? Um, you know, and then he unveiled himself at, at some conference or something, which was super cool. Um, but yeah, I think building so anonymously is, uh, is it, is an interesting approach right now. There's, there's pros and cons, but, um, I'm supportive of it. If it's, if you're going to say something that, you know, people quote unquote don't want you to say, but there's nothing wrong with saying it.

Alex (28:30)

Yeah.

Jake H (29:00)

or say what everybody's thinking.

Alex (29:02)

Yeah, I saw from your feed as well, like, I'm just going to bring it as property. I've got this zero to one signed copy from Peter Thiel himself. He came to Hong Kong like many years ago and I got a signed copy. You do these like profiles on X which are pretty cool of like business, like startup founders and business people. Like who's the most interesting people you've kind of profiled and...

Michael Houck (29:02)

Yeah.

Dang.

Um, I mean, yeah, so the threads where we sort of go over the bio of, uh, someone from the startup world was an interesting story or background, uh, have done really well, especially recently.

I think two of the ones that I really enjoyed doing were Palmer Lucky and Travis Kalanick, two people who were sort of forced out of their companies for reasons that, um, you know, I think people debate, but in general, they didn't do anything wrong. Um, Travis apologized for the things that he said to the driver in the video. And, um, and Palmer literally didn't do anything wrong. All he did was make a political donation personally. So, um,

Alex (29:40)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Houck (30:04)

I thought it was cool to see the response to both of those and people have sort of moved on from those and are very supportive of them now. Um, so I thought it was cool, especially because a day or two after I posted the Palmer thread, which got, you know, like 3.9 or 4 million impressions a day after that, um, uh, John.

Alex (30:18)

Yeah, that was crazy that one.

Michael Houck (30:24)

Uh, John Carmack, who obviously worked with Palmer at Oculus and has been at Metta until recently, since then, he posted that he had regrets about the way that went down. Who knows if he saw the thread or not and was thinking about it. Uh, but then it spurred this conversation between Palmer and, uh, and the CTO of Facebook just on X so everyone could see. Who's to say if they, if they saw the thread, but it was, uh, it was cool timing for sure. Yeah. Maybe, but you know, who knows? No way to tell.

Alex (30:40)

Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, that was crazy.

coincidence yeah.

Jake H (30:48)

Or maybe not.

Alex, we're getting into the future predictions. Last wrapping up segments. So, Michael, we always ask at the end of every podcast to wrap up about your predictions for the future. It could be within your own line of work or just the world in general. So what do you feel is about to go down in the next year?

Alex (30:55)

Cool.

Yeah. Future productions. Yep.

Michael Houck (31:17)

I mean, the big thing is the election in the States, in my world. Very interesting to see what's going to happen there. Obviously a very tumultuous time with strong opinions on both sides. I for one hope that we get back into a place with a little more cultural sanity and kind of meeting in the middle as much as we can. So I think that's the big thing that I'm trying to figure out and keep an eye on. And really the event that's going to define, I think, the next few years, at least here in the States.

Alex (31:17)

Hahaha

Jake H (31:49)

Okay, I think we've gone through everything. We haven't hit any landmines except Alex with the comment that I won't, I'm gonna look it up straight after the show, definitely, 100%. I don't want any bad searches to come up though. Safe mode.

Alex (31:49)

Fair enough.

Michael Houck (31:56)

I'm out.

Alex (31:56)

Google that, Google that after. Yeah. All right, man, great. Yeah, let's get you on in a year's time, Michael, and see how you're doing.

Michael Houck (32:10)

Yeah, let's do it. We'd love to. Thanks for having me on, guys. This was a very cool, very cool chill convo. Enjoyed it. And yeah, if anyone's interested in checking out the newsletter, just go to join.hawk.news. Hawk is H-O-U-C-K. And if you're interested in getting more visibility on your social media content, check out megaphone.network and just drop your email on the landing page and I'll personally reach out.

Alex (32:32)

Good stuff. Also sub to HypeWorks, as usual. Right. Thanks guys. Cheers. Thanks. Bye bye.

Jake H (32:33)

Lovely.

Michael Houck (32:37)

Of course. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

Jake H (32:39)

Thank you, Michael.