Amit Rathore

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In this episode of the Judgment Call Podcast Amit and I talk about:

• How the Internet monopolies like Facebook and Google have shaped our life and prevented upstart innovation
• How 'social-to-social commerce' works.
• How the 'data giants' usurp data from anyone without their 'expressed' consent
• What meditation does for your mind and how to think more clear
• How Awake may change we do social commerce
• How many universes there are?
• How does consciousness actually work and what makes it different than a dream?
• Do we have free will?

Amit Rathore is a 40 year old serial entrepreneur and angel investor based in San Mateo, CA. Since 2003 he has focused on AI, media, commerce, and FinTech verticals.

He is the founder of AwakeVC, a private equity holdings company focused on creating 100M jobs by enabling 10M new technology ventures globally.

You can reach Amit via email at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

You can find the episode's transcript here.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Judgment Call, podcasts where I talk to risk takers, adventurers, travelers, entrepreneurs, and simply mind partners. My name is Thorsten Jakobi and I'm your host. A 30,000 feet view for this podcast is I'm really trying to find an essence of entrepreneurship. So I myself have been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years and we talked about that in our quick call last week. And what I'm trying to find out is what inspired other entrepreneurs, why did they learn to see the world the way they see it now? What contributed in terms of their background? What is the rationale? What is the logic that they applied to the world? And what helped them, which is the big challenge as an entrepreneur to predict the world and produce something in order to sell it to people before everyone else even knew that they wanted it. And this life cycle as an entrepreneur is as a risk taker. I'm less interested in the soft banks of this world because I feel they don't take enough risk personally. I'm more interested in the angel investor, it doesn't mean VC is a bad thing, I'm just saying there is this personal conviction that you drive with your own money and your own fate with your own loyalty towards something in your life. And this is really what this podcast is about. So when do you make a judgment call in your life and when you did this, what happened? And obviously we go much deeper into some of the topics that the specific thing you're working on. So that should be our entry into this discussion. But we can go from wherever we want, but that's kind of the 30,000 feet view. Cool. Yeah. We might go into religion, we might go into free will, yeah, there's a lot of things. So you have the notes then from last time? Of course. Yeah. I'm reading from my notes. More or less forgotten. Okay. Well, it's like Twitter, people say they don't know what happened two hours ago. They definitely don't know what happened yesterday on Twitter. It's completely gone. And nobody can go there because you can't scroll back, right? So it's a big mystery, this thing. So let me do it a quick intro. It's only like a few words and then we'll jump into this. This episode of Judgment Call is sponsored by Mighty Travels Premium. Full disclosure, this is my business. Mighty Travels Premium finds the travel deals that you really want and it finds them as they happen between 450,000 offers every day to give you the best deals in economy, premium economy, business and first class. We also make recommendations for four and five star hotels all over the planet when they are much cheaper than they usually are. Thousands of subscribers have saved more than 95% on the effort tickets and have flown the business class, life led, transcontinental using our deals. In case you didn't know, Americans, Europeans and many other nationalities can now travel to more than 80 destinations again. Give it a shot and try out Mighty Travels Premium for free for 30 days today. You can sign up at mightytravels.com slash mtp of everyone who's troubled with all these characters. Go to mtp4u, that's just five characters, mtp4u.com and sign up for your 30 day free travel. Hello, everyone. This is Torsten Jakoby, your host. Today I'm here with Amit Rohor and Amit is an entrepreneur and investor with the software development background from San Francisco. And Amit is working on a framework to replace the crazy internet monopolies we all love and hate like Facebook, Twitter, Google and even Lyft and Uber. So that's going to be very interesting. Hi, Amit. It's great to have you. How are you? Hey, thanks for having me and well, hope you are. Very well, very well. That sounds like a really big undertaking you've put up in front of you there. How does this work? And I think you'll call it awake, right? Awake, yes. Tell me more about it. This sounds like a crazy undertaking. It sounds like you couldn't sleep for a long time and came up with this. Not sleeping is the equivalent to awake. Yes. It's really not dreaming is what is awake. That's what I say. So you know, I think that most people are in a kind of matrix like world where they are plugged into their belief systems and that allows them to feel comfortable, but it totally blinds them from reality. So that's when I mean, so that's when that dropped away for me, I woke up. That's kind of what I say when somebody asks me, what do you mean? And I say, you know, meditation and all these words people have come across, but they don't know what it means because meditation is the space between thoughts. So how do you get there using the mind? You know, people try to be mindful, but you know, mindful is still of mind only and true meditation is of the no mind space. Okay. So everything I know about meditation, gotta be honest, everything is from Sam Harris. So I listened to his podcast and some of his meditation podcasts and that's kind of all as far as I got with meditation. So I do understand basic concepts. But I can't really, I haven't really done it myself to an extent that I felt I got anything out of it from what I understand that takes a lot of practice until you get to that state where you, but you get something back like a few hundred times and never, never even got there. So I gave a bit too early, probably like everyone else. Are you actually, you're meditating every day? So you see the reason it's called a practice is after a while you don't need it. So the reason you drive a car in the beginning, you know, using the whole mind is that you have to be very conscious of all the rules, all the things, you know, you're making sure you don't, you know, forget something, you don't bump it to somebody, you know, you're very scared, you're not driving anymore, you're really just following some sort of strange instructions that tell you what to do and so on and so forth. At some point, the practice becomes so flawless that you don't even think about it. That's correct. Okay. So that is the God, God. So in other words, sometimes you don't even, you know, you're driving and you're driving for a long time and you are thinking of something else entirely and you reach home or whatever and you're like, no recollection of how you got there, right? So you see, that is the flow state of no mind and there action is automatic. You're driving, it's automatic. You're not thinking about it. Somebody, you know, runs across the street, you break, it's just totally automatic. Yeah. So with meditation comes the ability to remain in the flow state. Okay, but what does it give you? Does it give you, from what I understood, it gives you an ability to not be bothered by thoughts that kind of go into any direction, you have the ability to be much more focused and at peace and in that state and you reduce anxiety and you have the ability to focus on what's really important and you kind of can shut off these voices in your head that keep telling you, I'll just go bigger, go harder. What happens in fact is that, you know, the voice that you're talking about is actually based on fear. It's always a fearful voice that says, what will happen though? What will happen to me tomorrow? What's about to happen? You know, it's an insecurity basis, you know, ego or ID or, you know, yourself or, you know, the so called, you know, false self is actually this bundle of thoughts that have ideas and beliefs about what is reality and what will happen and not happen and what's okay and not okay and all the stuff that we call, you know, that's a chatter all the time that happens. If that's not there, then what is there, you know, is pure clarity of seeing. You see the world exactly as it is. So you asked me how come I'm taking on, you know, Facebook and Google and, you know, Uber and just all the platforms because the way you take it on is by not taking them on at all. There is no taking on. There is only clear seeing. So in a way, the software, what it does is it simply sees the world correctly, not through beliefs that Facebook or Google or anybody else is something to take on or is even in the way. And I'll explain that very, very briefly and we'll come back to meditation if you want, but very, very briefly on the internet, when you say the word internet, you imagine some sort of network, you know, that you connect to. And in fact, there isn't any, there is no network called the internet, there are many different networks that together compose the internet. We call it the internet. It's like the world, you know, but it's really all the countries, okay. So we are on the internet means we are on some of the networks, you're either on the Comcast network to connect to it, or you go to Facebook and you're on the Facebook network over there, social network, or you're on a media news network, ordered, you know, so there's all these different, you're on Google's network, and everybody has a, you have your own network, LinkedIn is a network, everything is a network. And together online, because they all speak HTTP, which is the open protocol, they're all composing the so called internet work, the internet. So these are all networks, there's no actual internet. There's only the different networks, you see. So there's in other words, different internet, there's many internet. Yeah, you can think of it, many networks. Yeah, you can think of it as like a virtual private networks that people are on either in reality, because you're at home in the virtual private network or in their workplace. But each of those walled gardens, you know, AOL was the biggest and first one. They were a success story for a long time, really fixing what was broken with the internet. I use the internet in the early 90s. And a lot of things were broken that if you were on the software developer, it was very difficult to access and there was no browsers or the browsers that were there for crap. It was slow. And you didn't know, it was one big image that would kind of ruin the whole experience because you would wait for like an hour on your modem. Right. Yeah. And excuse me. And AOL fixed that. So they came up with a solution that they could control. And it improved the user experience so much that they took off for a while once everyone caught up to it. They were useless and everyone was like, why do I pay for this? I can just get this for free on Yahoo. And so I do understand that concept so far. And I think what has happened with the big internet monopolies, say Facebook, we were all waiting for that point when we felt like Facebook would kind of lose this competitive edge and would just kind of dissolve like AOL has into the general internet again. What has never happened? Somehow they, and it's, we're going to get into this in terms of how they actually make money, which I think most people don't know, including my listeners. There's a lot of dirty secrets there. But the time so far for Facebook that they back kind of dissolve into the pool of internets, somehow hasn't happened. And I wonder why, but you seem to have an answer for this. Exactly correct. There is a software solution I will explain now, which is why it makes it unstoppable, like blockchain. But we'll come to that in a second, definitely, truly what you said about the whole dirty secrets and stuff. I mean, unfortunately, I'm, like I say sometimes to people, then I'm guilty of that. My AI is not, my first version of the AI was literally for converting people to buy more. I worked at a startup that was sold to Staples and then Staples of course was sold to a private equity firm and it's now dying. So that's a whole different story and we'll talk about how sad it was and why I started awake eventually. But that AI was powering everyone that wasn't Amazon, you know, we were powering the likes of Groupon and eBay and Staples and many, many, many, many others. And that AI was, it was basically meant to convert people, it was conversion marketing and we were using price and all the other upselling, cross selling and you know, behavioral targeting and delivery estimation and we were even predicting how quickly you'll get an item and that will convert at a significantly higher rate on, for example, on eBay, that little fast and free green truck that appears, that's a software, there's no logistics, they don't have any logistics. So the version of that was my code and we gave them an absurd amount of lift because it's pure software suddenly showing you that you'll get this item in one day or two days like Amazon Prime. This is 2000 and I don't know, 12 or something like that, you know, 11, 12, long time ago. So when they didn't have all this complicated stuff, right? And even now, if you want all that stuff, it's a huge amount of investment. But the software solution, almost zero, billions of dollars of lift. Yeah, but save it with the Amazon, they can use that logistical background, that backbone that they build over the years and they don't allow anyone else to access it. They make use of UPS and FedEx, but they don't let any competitors use their backbone of logistics. No, actually, that's not true. They have Amazon Logistics as a service. So you can actually drop your stuff off and it's fulfilled by Amazon. So they actually totally expose that. So that's actually half there, not half, but like a very significant part of their strategies to be a service or a platform like Amazon Web Services, they totally let you use their compute stuff, right? It's half the world is now built on Amazon and then, you know, Google and everybody else had to follow and Microsoft and all that. So Amazon has pushed the absolute like state of the art when it comes to cloud and, you know, all the other services in the cloud technologies and they've pushed it very, very, you know, yeah. But say Walmart is, hang on, so is Walmart able to say they just use, you said Amazon Logistics. I didn't know that. I'm obviously using the cloud a lot, but Walmart could go to Amazon Logistics and just on a cost competitive basis run basically the whole logistics backbone for home shipping through that, for that Walmart Plus. That's something that they have over there. Yeah, but of course you give them the data, right? That means you give them your supply chain. Yeah. So your logistics information. So that's a trade. See, the problem, the thing is supply chain and information is your, you know, only competitive advantage. Why do you think that Facebook is so successful and Apple and all these guys is because they have so much data about people and about what you're doing, right? So if I have data on what your entire movements of stuff behind your supply chain, that's a lot of information. I know who you're buying from, what's being picked up when, I mean, that's a ton of data that Walmart will definitely not want to have Amazon access it, right? Now, even if they claim that, you know, oh, they don't actually see it and all that stuff. I mean, you know, from a competitive standpoint, from a public company standpoint, it's not possible. Yeah. You know, these days, I mean, just the way they think, I mean, the future is different. What I'm building totally changes everything. But this is where we are today. Okay. Well, one more thing, if we go into, if you go to Facebook, what I didn't know is literally any, we always think, oh, you go to Facebook, you click on a link, and obviously Facebook is going to track that. So, and everyone's like, okay, well, I don't care. If they give me better ads, then so be it. People don't know is that about 50% of all apps and many of them have not even a Facebook login have something you can call a spyware. It's a software development kit developed by Facebook that given the right permissions and most apps get those permissions, it sends data directly to Facebook about that user. So there's a unique idea of that device. There's a, there's your geolocation, there's whatever you did with this app in that moment is being sent to Facebook. It's also being sent to the app developer, but Facebook gets the same data and that works even if you are not logged in with Facebook, never logged in on this device with Facebook. The app just sends the data anyways to Facebook and in the background, it matches it back to your potential advertiser identity then later on, Facebook uses for better advertising. They say, I'm not really sure what else they're going to use it for, but it's an incredible amount of treasure trove that's especially coming from smartphones, maybe to a lesser extent from desktops, but the amount of data they get on smartphones because there's so many sensors, acceleration sensors, they know where you went, GPS sensors. That is something people think Facebook data only appears when they interact with the Facebook website, but that's actually, when you just do this, Facebook would probably never be profitable, would be a small operation, but they are inside every single app and they just, they can resale that data, they can mine it, they can do whatever they want. That's really dirty. I feel this is just an invasion of privacy. But let me tell you now, you know, it's anonymized, here's the thing, right? But it isn't, but it's very easy to get back to the original source. So here's the thing, right, Facebook is the biggest platform that does this because they're so big, but this basic thing that you talked about, the data exchanging and that whole data market place, what we call third party data markets, these are like the staples of the internet, not staples, the company, I mean, but they're like the foundational, you know, this has always been the case where, you know, people like are, you know, selling and aggregating data about everybody they know and all the things they know, and they're trying to like target and retarget and all that. That's like, that's, that's what the internet and the internet targeting and all that stuff is all about. And you're talking, I think about the Facebook pixel, which you can, you know, they actually expand outside of just the Facebook apps, but outside of, you know, just their own properties and to anyone using the Facebook pixel, it's like a Google pixel or any other pixel that, you know, that, that you can use to track. It's a third party, you know, kind of a model where it's, if you look at the technology, it's a third party technology. And well, I mean, yeah, here's the thing, right? Yeah. So I'll just say this, right? So go ahead. A couple of things. First of all, this is not a new thing. And Facebook is, you know, one of the, everybody who does it, right? Everybody does. Yeah. It's bad, totally bad. Data is the new oil and all that. Absolutely. 100% true. Everything that you said. Now let's look at Apple very briefly. That is actually a better system in the sense that they have a lot of data, privacy things in it and all that, right? Well, one thing, that's, that's the case. And it is true. They have a lot stringent rules around, you know, encryption and your own data and all that stuff. Very much more than the open, so called open systems. Now good and bad, right? Everything is good and bad. So if you look at what Apple, the kind of data Apple has, Apple is now the world's biggest company, right? And they're going to continue to grow at an astronomical pace because here's what's coming. The Apple's glasses and the, you know, the sensors on their visor and all the stuff that we haven't even heard of yet, but it's all coming, is going to use LiDAR, which is the same thing Tesla uses to like map the streets when it drives to map everything you are walking around and seeing in your house, in your office, with your people, like it's literally mapping that at super high resolution pixels. And it knows what you're looking at in your home. It knows everything, spatially. Yeah. Okay. Now it's private. Yeah. Okay. But it knows everything. You see? Yeah. Okay. And now they're killing the third party fix, the tracker, which means you might have seen in this time's earnings report in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said that the Apple killing the third party cookie is going to have an impact on the COVID recovery. As if that's his real concern, it's obviously that it's going to impact the ad business. Yeah. I would be concerned about Facebook stock because the actual user base of the Facebook website isn't growing for a while anymore, and I feel the total usage hasn't been growing in a long time too, and it's actually falling quite a bit. So the core CPM, I would say, of what Facebook can sell ads against on their platform, say it might be $5 in international markets might be much lower. So they obviously can crank it up with personalized ads, but it might be 15, but that's still a very difficult business to make it work, especially if you go outside the U.S. with the CPMs are much, much lower. So in lots of places where Facebook is active, it might not even be worth to deliver traffic because you can't really monetize it, given the low CPMs of the platform. That was always my doubt with Facebook. They have overcome this with this huge spying exercise. I'm not sure they can still do it in the future. And just one more thing that I realized, I did download my Quantcast data, one of those third party apps that is just, like you said, there's a lot of them. And they had tracking browser history of pretty much any website I visited, well, probably less, let's say 50% of the websites I visited in the same browser, I'm logged into, this is my main browser. And that data went back two years and had pretty much every visit. I was like really amazed and they sell it, they give you the data, who they sell it to, they sell the clickstream. So if you've been on this website, you're also interested in this website and that one. And there were thousands of inquiries where my data matched against. I was amazed how deep that data is and that data doesn't go away. It's probably going to be there for the next eternity and it's always going to be matched back against you. So you have a service like LifeRamp that matches it back against you, even if you use a new browser or you sign up from a different device, whatever you do, that data will never go away. So that's the coming data privacy wars which are being fought right now for the battle of the soul, so to speak, of the consumer and therefore of the consumer internet, which is everything. I'm just always blown away how deep the data is. That's why it's exciting. Yeah. That's why I said to you earlier. It's not a big deal. It's like that's how it's been. That's how it's always been. Yeah, but nobody knows that. Anybody who's worked, yeah, those people who work in the industry like me and everybody else here in Silicon Valley, this is like non news. This is like everybody here goes, but isn't that in the terms of service when you click I accept? I mean, every website, every website. I think it is and it's a bit like the, was it Snowden who was putting this into the public domain or it might be WikiLeaks, when all this data ended up on the NSA servers and that was never, I mean, I never doubted they would end up there. I just was blown away how deep the analysis package is. So the way that they really make use of every single piece of data. So it doesn't get lost. That's what I'm trying to say. We always knew the data is there and it's being transmitted, but it's actually being analyzed down again and again and again. That still blows me away. So how do you get rid of these monopolies? What's your elevator pitch? So I want a better Uber and Lyft. I think it's terrible to just have this to hopefully or the same as Facebook. What do we all do to make this more democratic? Yep, good question. So you see, what our technology does is it fixes the internet. The internet, as I mentioned, is not there. There's no single internet because there are all these different networks. So AWAKE is actually a set of new protocols that work with the HTTP internet. That's not an elevator pitch, by the way. I'll get to the elevator pitch if you want, but this is just me talking. We have more time. This is a very slow elevator. Exactly. Thank you. So nice elevator too. So the way the internet, as I said, the way the internet works today is it's many, many internet that are all these big guys have acted as become gatekeepers. And so it's a very, very expensive internet for the small business, for you and me to do business. Not only do we are paying this 30% tax to your point earlier, what is the big deal, why we're still paying this, right, is one question. And on top of that, small business has to drive eyeballs and customer acquisition. They're not doing that for you. There was a time when it was not a tax. The reason it was not felt to be a tax was because, you know what, they gave you a lot of sales and you're paying 30% for those incremental sales. So you have a business and then you put something on there and then there's only like 20 apps or 100 apps or 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 apps around the world. And therefore, that's pretty good. You got this sudden incremental revenue, they're helping you go digital, they drive the sale, they do all that stuff, you get 70% of everything that you do together. That's cool. But as you said, like AOL, when they kept growing and growing and growing, you've got like 3 million plus apps now. People say they're a monopoly. Obviously being a capitalist, I don't believe that, right, because it's the internet. They've just got their own market, right? So I totally buy that thing. So however, it's not a monopoly, you see that misses the point. It's again a shift in consciousness. It's not a monopoly, it's a utility. Yeah, but the utility is usually organized as a monopoly. So that's... And my point is when you look at it as a utility, what happens is the tax seems totally egregious. Because when you say it's a monopoly, they totally argue the point, right? They're like, yeah, but I'm not a monopoly. And so... But you are a utility, you've got everybody on the internet, right? So you've become a utility, you know? I think that's kind of... We don't have to argue that point. Absolutely, 100%. Because here's this interesting argument that I heard recently and people always say, oh, you don't pay for it. Nobody pays for Google. They literally only have a few thousand customers, so it's probably more than that, a few hundred thousand who are advertisers. And these are capitalists. They know what they're doing. If it's too expensive and a lot of people dropped out of AdWords, I was a huge buyer of AdWords, I completely dropped out of it. And a lot of people, pretty much anyone else, consumers lit, they almost never pay for Google. There's a few websites where you can pay for, but you really have to find yourself to be in that spot. People are like, so it's free and it's definitely better than paid subscriptions from that sense for the consumer. How can that be worse? And the simple answer is all what you don't know is that, given that monopoly, the amount of innovation we could have seen, and you mentioned that before, there's so many things that could have spawned and so many innovations that we should have seen in the last 10 years that somehow never made it, that they've been held back by these monopolies. And we can play with the semantics and say, oh, this is a utility and it should be treated as a utility and I'm with you there. But it sounds different because the utility, PG&E, enables people to use electricity for, I feel it's really cheap, maybe even in California, given our investments in renewable energy. And I don't feel that a lot of what Facebook and Google does is really fostering innovation. I'm not saying they don't do it at all, but it seems like there's a very specific piece of innovation that they allow, say right now they want YouTubers because they need more channel, more content for YouTube. In like five years, they're going to throttle this back and there's going to be zero innovation in that space. So that happened with Facebook, that happened with pretty much anything that is a regular website. For a while, like Google sends or Facebook says, oh, we want this, give us more. And then the day comes and they say, oh, you're not going to show up in the newsfeed anymore because we thought so and we really don't worry, don't worry about it. It's all about engagement. So that argument in my mind is huge, but it's very difficult to quantify this and really saying, okay, we haven't seen a ton of innovation, which I feel is absolutely true even in Silicon Valley, there's unicorns who basically use the soft bank money to leverage themselves to oblivion and then defraud the retail investor. But you can say that in the 90s, there was too much euphoria and it was all crazy and I agree with that. But in between, we should have seen this technology rolling out from thousands, hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs with like probably very specialized solutions. That stream of innovation has completely died down the last 10 years. I mean, you look at what's come out of Silicon Valley in the last 10 years and it's all this tick tocky type stuff, Instagram and this and that, it all has like a hundred billion in fundraising. And you're like, who gave you a hundred billion dollars? That seems really sketchy in the first place, like no, no, no sane investor would do this. They do it because they can control the IPO pipeline, right? It's literally the way they make a deal with Goldman Sachs and say, okay, put 50 billion in, but I know I get 75 billion out if the market doesn't crash and if it does crash, then I'll get, I wait another two years and then I make my money back. So because nobody else can raise that much money, right, there's literally only two investors who put that much money into these startups. So yeah, this is it. So I'm telling you now how to bring an unlimited amount of money into the markets and how to fix these crazy utility monopoly, you know, companies. That's why I have you. That's what everyone is waiting for. We want to know. Everyone's waiting. Okay. So like I said, there aren't, there isn't a single internet. There is many, many different internets. Okay. So what was the promise of the original digital internet when we, when the internet first came out, everybody said, oh, you can connect to the internet, this will enable peer to peer commerce, the final, you know, frontier of empowerment and all that is that the gatekeepers disappear and we're able to directly do trade with anybody else, you know, it's not just the direct to consumer economy, not just DTC now, which is the big rage, which is amazing and is definitely talk about that. But really the ultimate is the consumer to consumer economy, you know, because we directly Yeah. Okay. So that's the ultimate sharing economy. That was the promise of a single internet without gatekeepers. I see that's, that's the absolute ideal. There's a lot of, a lot of building blocks in between that people need in order to get there. Right. So, I mean, so why for a reason. Wake has created a set of software solutions that manifest themselves as a single log in, log in with Facebook, log in with Google, log in with Apple, log in with awake. When you do that, you are suddenly part of a new internet where whatever it is you do on the internet, you see, there's only a few things people do on the internet. And that is they move digital media around HTTP content is moving around from person to person. And someone creates it, somebody moves it. And the distribution of this digital media happens on a variety of ways. I could call you, I could send it to you on a text message. I could put it on Facebook. I could Pinterest it. I could put it on WhatsApp or WeChat or Tiktok or YouTube or Twitter or anywhere. Right. Now this is digital media. I can create it. I can share it. When you log into awake, suddenly anything that you share and do within our internet is totally tracked in a way that we give you a wallet, it's free, a wallet, regular wallet like PayPal or Apple Pay or whatever, like a PayPal, like a wallet, you know, and you're now doing something like you're pasting on regular wallet, PayPal, okay, no, no, regular cash like us dollars or Indian rupees or, you know, pounds or whatever, regular cash, regular wallet. And what happens is, let's say you're, you come across something nice that you see one of the awake, you know, entrepreneurs or one of the awake media companies is selling some beautiful, you know, Persian rug, let's say, handmade and all that, right? You put it on Pinterest. Right. Reminds me of the, reminds me of Paula Altie University Avenue. Those were the original investors in eBay and PayPal. The people who sell Iranian rocks on University Avenue. Is it not true? Yeah. The world comes around in full circle, you know, the world is a repetitive samsara, they call it in the Buddhist terminology, it's a samsara, which means it's repetition. Okay. Yeah. So everything is a circle. We're back to the original Internet. I'll explain. So what happens in awake when you're logged in or you're not logged in? This is the Internet today. You're either going to be logged into awake or you're not logged into awake, like you're logged into Apple or you're not logged into Apple or you're logged into Google, you're not logged into Google and you're doing many things. As you said, Facebook tracks you, even if they're not on Facebook. So we know how to do that, right? Everybody knows how to do that, scarily enough. But when you log into awake and you share something on Pinterest or Facebook or anywhere else, the wallet collects any sales that routes through that content. Okay. If that rug gets sold, you make 50%, 40%, 30% of the money, which you put on Pinterest. Yes. I mean, you're losing me a little there, but I'm trying to picture it. No, it's like magic. You see what happens. Yeah. It's like magic. Here's the scenario. Yes. No, no, no, no, no. It's already done. It's launched. Okay. Let me explain how it works. All right. It's not yet launched in the sense that we haven't done a major public launch yet. It's launched into Alpha and it's been tested in multiple countries around the world. Now we'll be live in 14 countries by end of next month and by end of Q2, I'll be live in about 45 countries globally. Now let me explain what is being put together. Okay. When you post something on Pinterest, that piece of content, that Persian rug, which is being sold by a store in Palo Alto or a website somewhere, okay. That's what's happening. You put it there, you put it on Pinterest. Somebody is going to buy the product, right? That's why these people are in business. Everybody in the world is in business because someone is buying something and the reason this rug goes onto Pinterest is eventually somebody will buy the rug or anything else associated with it. Eventually somebody will make a purchase. And that's on Pinterest or that's on the Avig platform. Where does the actual checkout happen? Let's put it this way. No, I'm talking about today. In the world today that we live in, when somebody puts something on Pinterest, I'm just saying, generally speaking, everything happens because of consumption. Somebody is buying something. That is why the advertising model exists. That's why Pinterest is in business. That's why Facebook is in business, right? Because of business. Business of business. It's a B2B platform actually, okay, where the money comes from B2B, okay. Facebook is not getting paid by the people who are on it for free. You and I don't have to pay it to be on Facebook or Pinterest. It's the business who has to try and get sales that is paying lots of money to Facebook and Pinterest in order to get eyeballs. And they're hoping that their goods like the Persian carpet is going to get bought. That's their hope. Yeah, that's correct. And today, as you know, they're paying, as I said, 30, 40, 50% of their P&L just to drive these sales. For example, if Walmart comes to you and says, hey, I'll take your beautiful perfume or whatever you got going, and I'll put it on Walmart or Sephora, you're going to be like, damn straight. Yes, thank you very much. And they'll be like, here, cut your margins in half or one, two thirds of, you know, like take out 80% of the upside and even in fact, make a loss because you know what? Because you're how much we're going to give you the visibility, you can make your money elsewhere. Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. So if people get squeezed, right? Yeah. So what is happening? The cash flows that drive the business of business, all those margins are being extracted out by somebody, right? At the end of the day, somebody is making the purchase and the maker hardly makes any money. So all the middlemen have taken out so much cash, right? Yeah. Wasn't that what we envisioned, building the internet that this will get rid of the middleman? You know, that was what I said. Where is the single internet? I just said that. But it didn't work out that way. So I mean, it's a relatively free system or it was a relatively free system when it started. And so let's take the example of PayPal because I think it's pretty interesting. When they started out, they were really cool because they basically had no risk management system and they were very, very much a target of pretty much any cyber criminal anywhere. Like most crypto exchanges are right now, and they took them a lot of VC in a couple of years to actually see the pattern and become a secure platform. But once they got there, they were very hard to copy because everyone else who would build such a platform and, you know, all the banks were jealous of this and pretty much any other Silicon Valley company after their big exit to eBay, it was very difficult to recreate PayPal because the network effect and the learning that they went through for a couple of years, even if you recruit the same people, you have to put it in an algorithm, then you have to fine tune these algorithms and then you have to hire the people who follow up, the whole customer service in terms of securing the PayPal platform. They still known for just freezing your account for no reason and they've really overdone this for a couple of years because of the losses that they had. But it became very difficult to copy and it became the source of trust. And no, everyone hated PayPal, but people still use it because it seemed to be the only way to send money, now we have crypto, but before crypto, it seemed to be the only simple way for businesses as well as individuals to send money on the internet around. And you feel like someone could have done it, but it didn't happen. Once you have this network effect, you basically become a monopoly and every day you have more ends in this network, you become a bigger monopoly and there's very little anyone else could have done about it. And Venmo is trying and since then a couple of initiatives have happened. No, Venmo is owned by eBay also, PayPal owns both, Venmo is actually PayPal, they bought them also. Yeah, it's an illusion. But I mean crypto is there, but crypto is slow, at least the current coins are very slow. If so, it's not the solution. It's strange that you feel like someone who would design crypto would come up with something that's better than PayPal, but it's slower, it has the same fees if not higher and has a terrible user interface. I'm like, whoever invented this was definitely not an entrepreneur. And I mean, there's definitely things about crypto that are awesome, but as a replacement to PayPal and credit cards, it totally fails the test. Yeah, so I'm just explaining now to you the solution. It's a wallet that you log in to, you log into a week, you get a wallet and when you log in, you can log in with Facebook or Google, a usual thing, it's a social login, universal login. You got it. So you're logging into one single internet work of networks, you're logging into a new network that only does one thing and one thing only. It is a network operating system for the internet, which means it creates a new single network that connects every other network into back a unified whole. So could I transfer my PayPal money into a week? I still don't get it. So you see. I'm pretty slow with this. So you got to help me out. It's a little bit, you have to see it, you know, so I meet talking and explaining is a little bit more complicated than what it actually does. Okay. So here's what it does. Right. Like you go to a website, like say our cannabis venture, you know, we're launching many, many, many verticals on top of this code abstraction now. Let's let's let's try the Uber replacement that it's something that I may be able to understand easier. Uber replacement is much easier to understand, yes, but it doesn't won't convey the magic of what it does. But let me tell you the Uber replacement very, very quickly. Okay. So the company that we're the portfolio company of ours, we're bootstrapping many, like I said, this one's called SuperCab, you know, that's life already. That's something I can take a look at right now. It's going to be live and it's coming first in North Dakota up in Fargo, North Dakota actually. Whoa. Yeah. And it's also going to be in Minnesota pretty soon after that. And so we're doing a rural first launch where as it turns out, who does not have much of a presence, not as lift, and it turns out that people still need cabs, then it turns out that anyway, we'll get to that. But why are we launching SuperCab there? And why how do we launch SuperCab and how do you take on Uber and lift? It's because you see, in what's happened in the last 10 years, where lots of investors like you said, made money, but retail investors were left in the bag, right? And so were who was one more person left in the bag, one more actor, the drivers and the fleet operators that before this had a living. As bad as the system was, right? The medallion system and all that in New York, minus that whole mafia. There was a time when, you know, taxi cab companies made money. You didn't have to have Uber come in and screw up the taxi cab business. Right? Yes. I mean, yeah. So what Super does is it is actually an Uber of Ubers. You launch an Uber or SuperCab with SuperCab. So if you're a fleet operator or any kind of local operator that wants to launch your fleet, you've got 20 cars, 10 cars, 100 cars or buses, whatever, you connect. You launch, you know, your own version or your own version, I mean, your own sort of sub network. So say I have 20 cabs in Minneapolis and I would love to get individual bookings from obviously where I have the cabs available and have this in an app that looks like Uber and it's something that has the same convenience but has lower revenue share. I don't actually know what taxis pay they are on the Uber app. Exactly. It's extremely expensive, they're paying them 25% to 30%. On top of that, Uber is charging a ton of fees from you and me. So NetNet with Super, drivers earn more and you pay less, believe it or not, okay? Okay. So you have, say you have 100 or 200 fleet operators all over the US or wherever this is being launched, they sign up and they install the app and then they get hailed. I guess that's how it works and then you pay inside the app and then they get 90% of the revenue or 95%. 95%, yes, 95%. And get this, you know, so the other side, Super cab will allow you to pick any other public transport or Uber or Lyft or anything else that is available wherever you are. And you pay in the app? No, you still have to pay it now, I mean, it just gives you to, no, you pay in the app. No, no, you pay in the app. Everything is paid. So see what Awake Enables is a new internet operating system. What is it that's needed to disrupt any internet business is technology, people, capital and strategy. That's it. That represents the, yes, the software represents the know how and the strategy. And technology is obviously there with that. People of course, entrepreneurs all over the world now can strap networks that take back control and money from the existing internet because the network of networks is the internet. We launch new networks that are powered by a single interconnected network of networks that sits on top of the existing internet. Yeah, hang on. I mean, I think I'm getting the picture a little better, but so there was another company, I forgot the name, it was a turbo car, silver car, that's competed with Uber and Lyft beginning. And they also, but that actually was bootstrapped. And I think it was actually a local startup, forgot the name. And there's also the, in San Francisco, there's something called, oh my gosh, cap fly, fly cap, where you can hail a cap. That was basically what the local San Francisco taxi mafia came up with. And they said, you know, Uber and Lyft, Flywheel, you're right. We've been doing this for centuries, Uber and Lyft are crap. And they don't even have professional drivers. They have like people who are drunk driving in their Uber and they have a stinky car. We know better, we've been doing this for a hundred years. And so we just, what we don't have is we don't have the hailing service and that sucks because it's always been hard to get a taxi. The communication was broken. And we also, and that was the, I think, the biggest initial draw into the Uber app. We can see, once you'd hail a taxi, you can see where it is. So you know if it's coming to you or if it's just going to abandon you. And while this is subsidized by the taxi industry in San Francisco that goes back and forth between it's the end of the world and Uber is done and tomorrow we're going to take over, I feel it hasn't really taken off. So I know you have a different approach that this same technology can be used by everyone. But I wonder if Uber that has such a deep penetration in terms of just people who signed up, they spent all their soft bank money and giving everyone a hundred dollars basically in free credits. But what it did for them is that they have this high penetration where they feel they have the lowest cost for drivers because you either work for Uber or Lyft or you don't work in that system. And on the other hand, for a consumer, even if there would be 15 other apps, I think those people would just ignore it. So if you would have such a new app and say it's slightly cheaper than Uber, it will take forever to roll it out. And during that time all the drivers will say, oh, this is a new app. It's cool. It has 95% revenue share. But do you know what? I got two requests in a whole year, so I think I'm just going back to Uber. Yeah. Very good stuff. So I'll explain how it works, right? So take, for example, Fargo. The way it launches in Fargo is that any place where Super goes, the first thing it does is it crowd funds the tax T&C permit with the driver fund. Drivers make either equity in the company or 3x returns in two years on that cash they put in. A portion of every 95% of whatever they're earning can be going back to earning equity in the company at existing round prices. So essentially it allows people to participate in the company itself. And what it does is it's a super aggregator. So all it does is on the other side, if you're driving an Uber or a Catalyst or that, you're anywhere driving those things. The driver drives both Uber and Lyft today already. They're happy to drive Super as well. Now when the driver gets a ride, always he will choose Super over anything else because it's always good to pay him more. Then also the referral system. I didn't get it. That's why I said the magic is not explained so clearly with this one. But basically the internet work of networks allows us to split transactions on every single buy order, which means I can pay multiple people when a sale happens, which means what? I can pay people who even drove the sale, now shifting gears, just the tad for consumer internet, direct to consumer, blah, blah, blah, the Persian carpet that you persisted. Maybe last year, yeah, last year you've interested it, right? Yeah. So let's say it was being sold by an awake network now, like SuperCab, let's call it Persian network or whatever, and somebody has the store where they sell these things and you saw this and you've interested it. And then somebody else comes along a year later, clicks on it and doesn't buy because most people don't buy things when they see it. And then maybe they, but in the market for it, maybe they kind of sort of see him back in a week or two and they buy something else maybe or they buy that one or whatever happens. Because you introduced them into that network and they clicked on your Pinterest link when they came in, you get paid like 10, 20, 30% of that $5,000 or $10,000 carpet, let's call it. Yeah. So it's not based on the individual transaction. It's based on... It is based on the individual transaction. It is based on that actual transaction. Yeah. Yeah, but the... So someone buys a different rock, that was the example, but I didn't, I didn't... I had sent the initial traffic, say I'm the one who put this up on Pinterest and I just saw that in a shop and I put this up on a platform and then linked that traffic to someone and he uses the awake network, right? And even if they buy a different rock inside the awake network... Correct. I would still get a referral. You still get paid. Because I'm kind of... You get a... I have something to do with the sale, even if it's not a dialogue relationship. Correct. Okay. It is the actual network. Yeah. Which means you brought the person in and the buyer in, you see? And you were the introduction, then you could have been the nudge, you could have been multiple nudge, you could have been a media company, you could have been a blogger, Instagrammer, you could have been somebody who finally closes the sale and gets a portion of the available commission which could be up to 30, 40, 50, 60% on these things like Persian rugs and stuff like that. That's thousands of dollars. Yeah. What if it's several people putting money, putting traffic in? Say you have... Take this example with Instagram. Yeah. You have a couple of influencers and the 15 of them recommend the same product and nothing happens for you here and then they all sent that same customer because he's really interested so he follows a couple different links from Instagram. You just split it by 15 or how would that work? No, not at all. Because you click on the ones that you actually influenced by. So we pay the exact people, exact amounts, who actually drove it. It doesn't matter if you simply talk about it, but if you, the buyer actually went to them, clicked in and went through the whole sale and went and bought it, those people get paid. No, I mean, say Instagram, you can have links there only in the bio. Let's say you have 15 Instagramers who promote it concurrently and they all get one click each. Let's take the example. You're the buyer. No, no. They all get one click each. So if they all get one click each, then the order in which they get it matters and when you clicked on it matters and then the rules that are being set by the networks telling the products can say something like the introduction, the first introduction is always known to us. We're going to get let's say 10% of the referral commissions and the last one, let's say, gets half. The question is who gets the remaining 40%. Let's say we're going to split it into two, two people get 20, 20% each. And let's say that it's going to be the person who was, say that within two days, 48 hours and then the person who was within a week, let's say. So it depends on where you land in this actual heuristics or how you actually drove the sale. So it automatically pays out based on the actual activity of what drives the sale and this gets dynamic and over time, this will be controlled by AI as well. So it automatically pays the correct people because it actually drove the sale. And the rules for this, I would call it a marketplace agreement, that's something that's public and the same as true for the AI code or how do we know what it's public? Because the seller sets the rules. The seller of the market, the item says, hey, I'll give you 30% or 40% when the sale comes in. And it also says, I'll give you 10% of it to the introduction. I will say this much, this much for the, it's a whole rules, it's a game, basically a commerce game that anyone can play. I see. Well, that's pretty cool. That's what you need. I think I'm getting an understanding now. It took me a while, I'm glad this elevator is moving so slowly. That's awesome. It's fundamental. So we basically ride on top of the existing internet and we just take the money out. And then we do, we give it back to the people, 95%, payment system is ours, we take the money and we hand it to everybody. We are a single network. So if you're a Shopify customer, you just one click connect to our network, we synchronize your actual inventory, okay, in real time. Suddenly the entire universe can start selling your products and you say, hey, I'll give you 30%, boom, you start getting sales in. Just start to fulfill them. That's it. The orders will tell you, hey, you know, Martin sent this much and he needs to get paid $2 then Ahmed sent this, then, you know, whatever, right, these people and they don't even know who they are. But we have KYC on these people because we have to pay them. Any currency in the world globally. So the idea is it's really a multi tiered or a more democratic affiliate system. Is that right? Can you, could you use that name because that seems actual affiliate system that works properly because it is not a third party cookie based nonsense. It is a first party social commerce where we share the economy itself, not the sharing economy. The economy itself is shared. The business itself is shared. We share 95% of the upside with you. Yes. Okay. Well, I think that's the end of this economy. I've been following a lot of Instagram influencers and depending on Tik Tok is the same. Depending on what Instagram and Tik Tok promotes that changes based on AI and based on political views, it changes every day. But once you get into this mainstream of being promoted by Instagram and Tik Tok, it's pretty easy to get to a pretty decent amount of followers and these followers in turn very often give you views on your content and obviously in Tik Tok is faster than Instagram in growth right now. Even though I think a lot of this is a little fake or a little suspicious. But what's interesting is that the way to monetize your traffic and you can say, oh, the traffic isn't real, but just let's assume the traffic is real in terms of simple views that you get, that's a challenge because you go through a pretty archaic system of let's do a sponsorship or let's talk about this camera or I really, it's kind of fake because you kind of want to say it's sponsored, you kind of don't want to say it's sponsored and it puts the content creators who are obviously an asset to these platforms, it puts them in a tricky position. So either they don't monetize it at all, but then what happens is they will not put more effort in, it kind of dies out at some point. But if they could build a career out of this, like many YouTubers have YouTube, I think solve that problem much better. If you could get a multi tiered way to have like weak referrals, I would call them, you know, we have the strong referrals that lead to a sale and I think everyone tracks them pretty well, do the content platforms have more problems with that, but if you could get a weak affiliate system where you can track a multi tiered referrals, this could be huge. I mean, that's, I kind of see the vision. That's what I'm describing. Yeah. No, no, it's not a vision. Here's the thing. It's already implemented and what it solves, you know, doesn't is the, what is called a the attribution problem and the attribution problem in marketing is that when I spend the money, some of the paid media, I don't know what sale generated because these platforms and agencies that are total black box, they're not, they're the actual dark web. You know, we have no idea what is going on there. Yeah, there's this famous quote from Mr. Wanaka. Yeah. Go ahead. Is it the 50% one? I like that. It's the 50%. Yes. The 50% of your advertising spend is wasted. You just know 50% is wasted and you feel like, you know, because you have all these analytics and you say, oh, this channel is crap. Let's just switch them off and then you realize six months later, oh, that was a bad idea because people came through this initial channel, didn't buy initially, but they learned about that product. It was really cheap traffic and six months later they would come maybe through the same channel, maybe through a different one and actually buy. So these analytics, there's a lot of data, but it's actually very misleading because it's not really giving you the data that you want, which would be cheaper advertising and advertising on adverts is extremely expensive, very few people can afford it. Okay. So now let's talk about that briefly, right? I say that the conversion is roughly on average 1% on the internet, you know? So when you're talking about 50% not knowing, I'm talking about being able to pay just the 1%. Think about it, two orders of magnitude better. I'm talking about paying perfectly exactly for those clicks. You talked about fraud a lot, fake traffic, there's that and the other. I'm talking about, forget about all that, forget about the attention economy or you can keep doing it if you have money and you run a multi channel operation because this is a new channel, a new internet work of networks where everybody connects and awake represents the world's largest sales force. Everybody connects to make money. They get a wallet and you can start promoting anything on the network and what do you do? You just do what you already do. You put it on Facebook, you put it on Twitter, you talk about it on TikTok and you don't just get peanuts like YouTube and all that. You need millions of followers for making any money. With this, you make, like I said, Persian carpet, if you happen to be in that industry, that's thousands of dollars. It's like a multi level marketing machine you're building. Yeah. It's not a multi level. So the 95%, hold on. So the 95% is paid out per sale. So there is no multi level pyramid here. There is only a direct sale. This is called a DTC, direct commerce. Okay. Right? There is only one level which redirects you. So we connect the people who drove the same sale. You see? Those people get paid in the same transaction. There is no multi level. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. You're right. It is something where you encourage people to make weak recommendations that don't immediately lead to a sale. And I think this is a wonderful thing on one hand. On the other hand, you can always immediately see the societal impact that basically all your friends suddenly become advertisers and marketers for things they like and they want to make money off. Maybe that's already the case. That's a weird vision. I guess we're already in there. It's not a weird vision. I'll tell you what's happened. No, no, no. I'll tell you the real vision is when everybody becomes that way, you're going to unfollow most people and you're going to only follow people that give you some value because it's going to be too much. You're going to be like, what? Everything is the same. So finally, we're going to stop tuning into noise and we're going to automatically start finding signal because we don't want so much noise. We want to find signal. So automatically now, it's clear what is signal, what is noise. Yeah. That's a good point. It's kind of fascinating. So I can see everyone. So I'll say one last thing, right? The internet is like a fusion or fusion kind of nuclear energy. So when the first wave happened, these things are always fracturing and coming back together. Fracturing and coming back together like your AOL story. When AOL brought everybody back together, it was a big deal for a while. But after a while, you said it was not dissolved and that should happen. That's exactly how the internet should function. But again, what happened now is that these are massive networks that have no hope of dissolving because they have now become practically the internet. The only way they've so called dissolve is by not dissolving. We continue to use them just as they are, but we create a new alternate economy right on top of it, which is simply the new world. And it just works on top of everything else. One click. Well, I guess you might become, you will go down the same path. More people sign up to awake and use this, the additional features, you will eventually have such a strong buy in that every platform that doesn't have the same features and eventually being having the most network ends, you become the most valuable platform out there. And then you might have the same problem that eBay has. It's a good problem to have. But Peter Thiel is saying, if you don't want to build a monopoly in Indian, you shouldn't start that business, which is a good idea, but he has his own falling out of his Facebook. Because at some point, we always thought that the market forces will come back and just draw a monopoly, but somehow that weirdly doesn't happen, but the internet monopolies were quite some time ago. But here it is, right? But here it is. And here it is because capitalism is alive and well. And while we are only going to take 5% dropping everything from 30%, 40%, 50% of today's value into a postpaid value additive, 5% value added tax model, which I will further drive to 1% over the next five years, we create a new economy powered by the 1%. This is a 1% tax on anything you do, but it empowers the entire fractal of the internet, the entire decentralization of everything that had to happen when the internet was first brought into the world and never happened. Now it happens. Everybody is empowered instantly. You just connect, finished. And the old world will have to move. How can I sign up? So how do you bring this to market? That obviously would be the biggest challenge, right? This is a wonderful idea, but how do you get this into attraction with millions of users that you probably do? So the way we do it is that. This is not a small thing. Yeah. So the way I did it is I sold a company to Staples in 2013, and I learned from that mistake. And so I also saw after that Staples was sold to Private Equity, and they're now taking them down the toilet. And they were number three behind Amazon and eBay in 2013 when we were acquired by them. I was one of the youngest or the youngest VP in the history, I think, of the company when they made me a VP, which was also a bad idea because I didn't know how to navigate anything in corporate America in that scale. And I just wanted to build stuff. I just wanted to fix the internet. I wanted to do all the things I'm doing now, but of course learned a lot more in the last year. That was 2013, seven years ago. But what is the lesson learned? The lesson learned is Private Equity, the money, people have no idea what they're doing. Zero idea because blockbuster, circuit city, borders, Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, you take name it. These people are billionaires. They have lots of money, lots of assets. What's the probl