#124 - From Fantasy Stock Betting to Milk Bombs: Generating Ideas with Elaine Zelby
I feel like I could rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off.
On the road, let's travel, never looking back. Okay, what's up everybody? Uh, Sean here. We're waiting on Sam, he's going to be joining in a second. We'll let him, you know, make a dramatic entrance. And then we have Elaine Zelby with us. Did I say it right?
Hello. Yes, that's perfect.
It's weird because I've met people, but I've never said their full name out loud. I do it for the first time on the podcast and I'm like, well, shit, hopefully I get this right. But yours is pretty easy.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Me and Sam have a mutual friend who I think has known us for a— he's known me. He's known Sam for a long time. He's known me for a couple of years and he calls me Shan. He thinks my name is Shan and I haven't corrected him. And so he just calls me Shan and I just let it go, which is kind of a weird move on my part. I should probably tell him at some point.
Yeah, I feel like there's always that awkwardness of if your name is pronounced a little bit different than it's spelled, of like, do you correct people all the time? Do you just let it go and be like, whatever, it's okay?
Yeah, yeah, I usually correct people because— and because I would want— if I was saying somebody's name wrong, I would want them to be like, hey, actually it's this. Um, but the moment went by and I didn't say it, and I was like, well, moment went by now, now I'm stuck with this. Uh, now that— now my name's Sharon, but might as well tell everyone that's what it is. Um, okay, so tell people what you do. Um, We met because you sent me a bunch of cool ideas once and you were like, "Hey, we should meet. I like your podcast and I have a bunch of ideas too." Then we did a Zoom call that by the end of it, I was like, "Shit, I should have just recorded that. That would have been an episode." Finally got you on for an actual episode. Give people a quick little introduction.
Yeah, for sure. I have had kind of a random life and career. I started as a mechanical engineer. I actually did undergrad and grad school and thought I was going to do mechanical device— I'm sorry, medical devices. I'm really impatient, so pretty quickly realized that hardware was probably not a good fit for me and wanted to do my own company, but couldn't figure out what I wanted to spend 7 to 10 years on. So, I joined as one of the first employees of an enterprise software company, which they don't tell you that it's the same risk without any of the upside. So, I learned that lesson, which was interesting. But spent about 5 years there and got to build out a lot of the go-to-market functions. We ended up getting fundraising from Andreessen Horowitz and some other big VCs and got to kind of learn a little bit about what VC is, which I had no idea. And fast forward 5 years, I went to Slack when Slack was launching an enterprise product to lead their enterprise product marketing. And I had accidentally started my own little side hustle doing growth marketing for seed and Series A companies. And through that, I ended up working with a bunch of companies. I got brought to the firm I'm at now, which is SignalFire. So, I am a VC at SignalFire. And I got brought in to essentially just help the portfolio, became an advisor, got to know the team. And after a couple of years, I ended up joining full-time on the investment side.
Very cool. And so you're on the dark side, as we say.
Yes. But I think, you know, I think I got introduced to your podcast on the second episode. I don't remember how. But when I started listening, I was like, "Yes, my people." I'm just constantly ideating on all kinds of ideas. I love unsexy niches. I see problems and opportunities everywhere. So, very excited to be here. To chat.
All right, well, we can just jump in 'cause you have a bunch here and I don't know, so here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna pick a random one off here. I'm just gonna say the little 3-word description you gave it and you tell me what it is and then I'll either react to it, we can riff off of it for a little bit, or I'll be like, I don't know what the hell to do with that, let's go to the next one, okay? Awesome. So let's do, let's start with Coworking 2.0. What are you thinking with Coworking 2.0?
Yeah, okay, so what I think about this is, There is something to be said about the concept of coworking holistically. I think WeWork was a disaster for a variety of reasons, but it's a little bit bizarre that we essentially have our social circles and our work circles together just because of the office. But why can't you essentially go into a physical place? Like also, I mean, you're at a bigger company. Even if you're at a smaller company, you don't work with 95% of your actual coworkers. Like you hang out with them at lunch, you grab coffee, you go for a walk, but you don't actually work with them. So why can't you go into a physical space based off of where you live? And have essentially friends and colleagues that aren't your actual coworkers. To me, it just seems very obvious and natural. Then you get economies of scale where your company is paying a small amount of money for you to go work there, but you get that social piece, but it's also community-oriented. You don't have to go and commute an hour. You can commute 5 minutes and just have more flexibility. I think there's something to be said about going to the same place every day, not hopping, not traveling. That's kind of what I mean by that.
Let's say you took this idea And what do you think would make it have that sort of initial adoption? Do you think— how would you approach if you were going to actually build this idea out? Give me kind of the 1, 2, 3 of how you would approach this and get the initial traction.
Yeah. So when I was brainstorming around this idea, the concept was to go and take a lot of these leases that are still being held by companies. So a lot of people are on the hook for 3 to 10-year leases.
They don't want them.
The problem is— exactly, during COVID nobody wants it. So you start going and essentially taking these leases at a really ridiculously low price. Then you can go to those companies that you're taking the leases and then also find any other smaller companies that have given up their office space. Essentially, the plan is you hire staff who's going to be kind of the— everything from security, office manager, all that kind of stuff. Again, economies of scale, you can retrofit it with furniture, whatever you need, but you essentially start selling these enterprise contracts to companies where they're going to pay per head, per person, but they can go and leverage the space. I think of it as like the coworking— sorry, the Starbucks model of coworking. Okay. So, you know exactly what you're going to get when you walk into one of these places. It's smaller. It can probably hold 30, 50 people, not, you know, a 20-story building with 1,000 people, something like that.
Right. And basically, a couple of different companies, you know, have these contracts and then that allows some number of seats for their— from their team to go there on a regular basis.
Exactly. But essentially, this is your office. Right. So, you're saying like, "I was paying $1,000 per month per head. I'm going to go and pay $1,000 per month for you, but you're going to go and not to an office with other people from our team, it's other people from different teams.
Right. Yes, exactly.
Okay. This only really works in cities. You know, I don't think this works in, you know, the suburbs or in random places, but I think in anywhere where there's some kind of density, I could see this working pretty well.
Well, I forgot, maybe it was last episode we were talking about this, but somebody was doing these like, uh, in the suburbs, they were doing basically like, uh, these tiny home offices. So basically you buy a prefabbed home, put it in your backyard,, and it's designed to be an office, not like a bedroom. And then you basically have that as, you know, if I put up the $80 grand that it's going to take to create this little thing, can I then rent these out for $500 a month to, you know, people in my geography? And you create a network of these, uh, you can create, you know, a sort of Airbnb model where you can search and find a nearby tiny office for you to go join, and you use people's backyard real estate, which I think is interesting. But What I think you're talking about makes a little more sense right now because the real estate is not scarce in this case, right? The real estate is actually up for grabs, uh, kind of a desperate situation. You can buy low in a lot of, a lot of cases right now for commercial real estate. I think they said in San Francisco there's 12 million square feet of available commercial real estate right now. And, um, and so, so I think you don't need the like sharing economy to do it. I think you, you would be better off just picking up premade offices already and assuming the lease with better terms.
The problem with what you're describing is it doesn't solve the social piece. Yes, people want to go and work outside their house, but they want the social piece. That's really why they want to go to an office. Having a tiny desk in someone's backyard doesn't actually solve that. In the suburbs, here's my idea for the suburbs. Back in, I think this is 2016, Wells Fargo shut down in a single year 25% of all their bank branches. That was like 1,000 or 2,000 bank branches. Now, bank branches are well-positioned for foot traffic in mostly suburban, you know, some more rural areas. Now, huge square footage. What is going to go into these 3,000 to 6,000 square foot things? That would be a perfect place to go and build the, you know, the suburban version of the coworking model. Buy up the banks, you know, like all the places they're trying to shut down, get it for pennies on the dollar, and then go and do that.
Right. Yeah. Somebody was doing that, right? Or some bank did this. I think it was Chase or Capital One.
Capital One.
Capital One.
And they opened these like cafes and coworking spaces, but it wasn't pay-to-play in the sense of you could just go and order a coffee and sit for free. I was thinking more of you actually own the space, or maybe you don't own it, you operate the spaces, and ultimately it's paying to go in. It's paying on a daily basis or monthly or whatever.
And you got to find something good to do with the vault if they have a vault. So you got to store something down there. Yes.
You know, make it something cool.
Baseball cards or something. Okay, so here's another random idea that's sort of like that.— when I lived in Indonesia, there was this really popular thing that I've never seen in any city since. It probably exists. Someone's going to message me being like, "Hey, that happens in New York all the time." But the first time I saw it and the last time I saw it was in Jakarta, which is like a very big city in Indonesia, super populated area. You have all these kind of massive hotels and apartment buildings. And at the bottom, they would have like nightclubs, right? And so they would have like really baller nightclubs that they had built out. Now, a nightclub is only useful like Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, basically. Everything else is like, you know, you just have to hold it. On a Tuesday afternoon, nothing is happening there. And so what one group was doing, a pretty entrepreneurial group, they were going to the nightclub owners and they were saying, hey, let us take over the nightclub, um, Monday through Friday from 6 AM to like 1 PM. And they were taking it over and they were turning it into, uh, basically like a fitness studio where you would go in the morning and they, you know, dance floor became the like workout floor, you know, like it was just like you would go and you would do kind of like, it could be like a Zumba type of class, could be like a Barry's Bootcamp with some light, you know, like light, light equipment there. And the bar became a smoothie bar and protein shake bar. And so it was all, and the music system's already great and the mirrors are already there. And so they all, it was like set up to be the perfect fitness studio. And so without any, without owning any real estate, they got free access to prime downtown, you know, under these buildings awesome nightclubs and they were paying pennies because the nightclub owner was making zero off it otherwise and they were creating these breakfast studios, breakfast bars and it was amazing. I'm surprised more people don't do that.
Have you heard of that concept? I love that idea. We're so bad at using space. If you think of how many things are open only until 2 PM and then nothing is using it from 2 PM until like 6 AM the next day or vice versa. The thing with the nightclubs though and fitness studios is Typically any kind of gym or fitness studio, there's a huge rush from, call it, 5:30 AM to like 8:30 AM, 9:00 AM, and then kind of a glut, and then you get that 12:00 to 1:00 window, and then another glut. It feels like not optimal usage, but definitely better than nothing.
I like that. Exactly. They were getting zero value out of it before that. I like that one. There's another kind of concept. I don't think it ever took off, but it's like they turn restaurants that are only open for dinner, like kind of fine dining restaurants, and they were doing like coworking during the day with it. Do you know if anything came of that?
That one, it was hard. Yes, I did. I do know that one. I think what was challenging is you have to kick people out relatively early, and also the way that restaurants are set up is definitely not optimized for working, right? Not high-speed Wi-Fi, not ergonomic chairs, all that kind of stuff. So I think it was a little bit square peg, round hole, but I liked that idea. You know, one thing that I think would be interesting similar to that is a lot of restaurants that are only open for breakfast or lunch that close at 2, 3 PM, why don't they turn that commercial kitchen into a ghost kitchen at night? I mean, it's literally a commercial kitchen with all that space, so to me it feels like an obvious use for that. I'm sure somebody is working on it.
For sure. Cool. Let's jump to another one. Let's pick an interesting one here. We've talked a little bit about this, but I'm curious what you have here. Credit cards for fans. What do you mean by that?
There's been a lot of interesting takes on credit cards recently. If you think back, typically if you look at the ones that are popular among millennials, they were the Chase Sapphire card. Or the Capital One Reserve or whatever, and they were focused on travel rewards. And that was fine, but if you look at Gen Z, they don't really care about a lot of the traditional rewards that you're getting from credit cards. And we actually are an investor in a company called Carrot, which I know you talked about before on the podcast. And what they're doing is credit cards for creators, but they're targeting the creators themselves. Right. And they're giving them access to working capital because banks don't understand how to underwrite that kind of risk. What I think would be interesting though is if you look at Gen Z, there's been a huge trend for younger people not wanting credit and only going to debit cards. But also—
I don't know 100% because I'm squarely in the millennial category, but from anecdotes that I've heard, a little bit of it has to do with this concept of not wanting to be in debt. So just forcing yourself not to overspend. There's been some attempts at people trying to create a credit card with a debit-like experience. So you can only spend what's in your account, but you can still earn rewards. So kind of the best of both worlds. That didn't seem to get a lot of adoption either. So I don't know. And I think also people are pushing off a lot of the major life milestones later and later. So you don't think about building credit until you're 28, 30. But if I think about what do these people care about? There's more than 53 million people now making a living as a full-time creator. If you ask young kids what do they want to be when they grow up, more people will say they want to be a YouTube star than an astronaut, a doctor, a lawyer, all the things we traditionally think of as what kids want to be. So okay, they care a lot about these creators and influencers, why wouldn't they want to go and earn rewards points that give them experiences, swag, merchandise, whatever, with their favorite creators? So the idea here is, can you bundle creators that have— Shashir Mahotra from Coda and used to be a senior executive at YouTube, he has this fantastic thing that he put out called the 4 Myths of Bundling. And one of these concepts of bundling is you want to find the lowest superfan overlap and the highest casual fan overlap. So it's essentially saying, if I'm a creator, my number one goal is to broaden my audience so that I can monetize them. Let's say you and I have 2 audiences and we're like, hey, we should come together because 20% of your group likes me and 20% of my group likes you, but the vast majority are just totally unaware. Now we bundle a bunch of people like this and we create essentially a credit card where you earn rewards based off of your favorite creators that you can spend on getting a shout out or doing a one-on-one experience with them or getting a t-shirt or access to a concert or whatever.
Okay. I think that's interesting. I think what— Is it Astro who's doing that?
Astro. Yeah. They're trying to do something like that.
They're trying to do something like that. You're like a little bit younger than me, not quite Gen Z, but, uh, do you care about debt versus credit?
Um, I do, but funny enough, I don't have a credit card. I always use my debit card for everything, which is a very bad habit, but it's exactly what you were talking about.
Why is that a bad habit? That's, that's the Gen Z way, bro.
Well, I should be, well, I should be building credit like you said, but it's just so convenient to have a debit card.
Isn't it more convenient to have a credit card? Cause then you don't even need to have the money.
Yeah, and you're building credit.
But I think you're saying you pick debit for convenience, but it's not more convenient.
I mean, it's just because I have just always had it and the bank gave it to you. Yeah, and it's like there's a process of applying to credit cards and have to figure out which one's the best and if I'm getting screwed over and having to pay all these fees and it's kind of a hassle. But I think it does have something to do with coming of age during the financial crisis and throwing like these stats like the average American has 7 credit cards and are constantly in debt. I think some of that gets ingrained where you're You're kind of wary of credit cards, right?
If I was some of these creators, I would get together, um, with, you know, my really smart business manager, and I would say, hey, how do we release financial products to our audience that will— but while maintaining trust? And so like, if you find the things that our audience is most confused about, like for example the thing you just talked about, which credit card is best? Oh, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to manage the rewards. I don't want to like screw up. Um, How do you basically release a highly trusted product on top of some of these existing platforms? So for example, could MrBeast and friends create a, you know, a subscription product which is basically like, hey, for X dollars a month, we're going to send you, you know, the thing you need, the credit card you need. And then when that's like not the right credit card anymore because you've like tapped out your points or like the deal changed or this new deal is way better, we're going to like basically say, hey, everybody, the new best thing is this. And like, how can you basically herd the sheep? Um, and that's kind of a silly example of like which credit card to use, but I feel like there's something where I would be trying to leverage the audience and the trust to go into places where there's just mass confusion and be like, okay, if we didn't try to take advantage of these people, but if we actually tried to— we'll do the work. If you trust us, trust us, you'll be in good hands here. We can find you the thing that you, that you should be using. I just feel like there's a big group of people that want to be led. Um, that I would be trying to do if I was a creator.
Well, and to your point, I mean, Credit Karma is a multibillion-dollar company for that very reason because there's so much confusion in the market and just lack of trust. And ultimately, a credit card for one of these companies, every single user is worth a lot of money to them. So they're willing to pay huge kickbacks. So think about it this way. Like, if you're a creator and you're not trying to sell products and things like that, essentially you're just saying, if you use this card, You will earn rewards that are redeemable with me. And so they're going to get a kickback. But ultimately, when you choose a credit card, you know, there are definitely fees and things that you said that are confusing. But at the end of the day, most of the value is seeing what are you going to get back from spending on credit? Am I going to get cash back? Am I going to get it from Amazon, from my airline points, from whatever? And if what you're going to get back from using credit as opposed to debit is essentially just like Sean Bucks or whatever. I could see that being something that people would want to go and promote to their audiences. From an acquisition play, that seems like the easiest way to go and sell a credit card.
Right. Okay. Here's another idea that we had talked about, a variation of this. We had been talking about continuous glucose monitoring, and you have one on here called continuous cortisol monitoring. Tell me about what you're thinking there.
Yeah. You guys have talked about Levels before, and I'm friends with a couple of the co-founders of Levels. I love what they're doing. I think democratizing access to that data and showing you what's actually going on inside your body is just amazing and mind-blowing for so many people. I went through their 1-month program. As I had this glucose monitor on, the mechanical engineer in me was like, "I just want to take this thing apart." Right. After the first 2 weeks, I took the sensor apart. I started researching actually how it works and what is it doing and all this stuff. Ultimately, I was like, "Huh, why can't you use this to monitor other things?" Because what it's doing is there's a little sensor that is sticking out essentially usually gets inserted under your skin.
So just describe the sensor for somebody who's never seen it. So it's like a quarter-sized—
like, uh, it's a— like a half-dollar-sized circle, and it's maybe, I don't know, an eighth of an inch high. It's not very high.
And you put it on yourself with this like stampy thing, right? So you kind of like stamp it. It doesn't hurt, uh, but there is a little microneedle that might hurt the second time.
And I think I hit a very small blood vessel because when I took it off, there was blood there. But typically it does not hurt at all. Um, it's exactly like a stamp that you do to yourself, but there's a little thing that sticks into your skin. It's going under the skin and it's in between the cells and it's measuring the interstitial fluid and it's looking for glucose essentially. But how it measures that is there's a certain enzyme on this sensor that binds to glucose and it's measuring— it's essentially electricity produced, but they can turn that into a number that correlates to glucose. I started looking at what else would you want to measure continuously? I had been looking a lot around cortisol, which is also called the stress hormone. Stress. Exactly. Now, stress has so many negative implications on our lives, everything from heart disease, obesity, lifespan, just everything. Going back to our point around Gen Z and younger people, the stress levels and anxiety levels keep going up and up and up. Even with young kids, parents would love to know, "Is my kid really stressed out right now? Can I figure out coping mechanisms, teach them breathing exercises?" I thought that would be interesting. I started researching this and cortisol is measured in 3 ways, either blood, urine, or sweat. And there's been some really cool research. People that are trying to essentially create a patch that you could wear on your arm and it's sucking up some small sweat, like sweat molecules, and using that to measure. But the problem is it's not continuous. It's only when you're sweating. And so you aren't going to get that real-time feedback of something is causing me a lot of stress, I need to just chill for a minute or take a deep breath. And so I think you could probably repurpose one of these continuous glucose monitors. When I posted about that, some people also brought up hormones like testosterone. Which I think could also be really interesting. I'm not sure if that could be measured in the interstitial fluid, but it's definitely—
Do you know if cortisol can?
I think so. I mean, based off of— again, I'm not a doctor, but based off of everything I was looking at, I don't see why you can't because what a lot of the sweat patches are doing is a very similar process of using an enzyme that binds to cortisol. And so I'm like, there's got to be a way to retrofit one of these things. And off the shelf, they're actually really cheap. So if you go to your primary care doctor and you want to get a continuous glucose glucose monitor. It's like $35. It's actually not that expensive.
Interesting. I had heard the opposite. I had heard, oh man, this is really expensive if you're not— if, you know, if it's not covered by your insurance because you're diabetic. Um, so, so that's not true.
These are actually pretty cheap if you get a prescription. And so it does— it is a prescription product. So as long as you get a prescription, but your primary care physician can prescribe.
Gotcha. Uh, amazing. Okay, that's, that's not bad. Um, so that's $35, but this thing lasts like 2 weeks, right? So you're basically spending about, you know, $70 a month on your monitor, which honestly, that feedback loop is insane where you eat something and you're like, oh, I'm spiking, huh, is it really worth biting into this, like seeing what it's doing to my body? And sometimes you're like, hell yeah, I love nachos. But you know, other times you're like, you know what, like I didn't need that. I kind of want my graph to stay in this green good range, uh, of where I want my glucose to be. And stress I think is even more important now. But let me ask you this. There's some people who are talking about, and I haven't looked into it, so I don't know much about this, but there's some people who are talking about the upside of stress. I think there's a book called The Upside of Stress. Keith Raboi has talked about this. Somebody asked him, "What are the 3 biggest," I don't know, "learnings you've had over the last few years?" or something like that. He's like, "Biggest misconceptions, biggest contrarian things you believe." And he's like, "Stress is good for us." And he linked some book to some stress book. So I haven't actually read it, so I don't know what that is. But I, I find that kind of interesting because there's all these things that, like, when I was young we were told are good or bad, and then, like, as I've gotten older, I'm like, wait, that was full of shit. Um, and I wonder if stress is one of those where stress I just immediately associate with bad and the negative consequences of it. And so I've never even heard somebody argue the good side of it, and I would love to actually go read that book. But it sounds like, just judging by your expression on your face, you have not read that book either.
I have not, but I now definitely want to. I could see from a business perspective stress being a good thing. I think it's a huge motivator. There's that whole concept of work will fill whatever allotted time there is. Similarly, putting somebody under stress and having that fire under your ass is sometimes a really positive thing. I think from a health perspective, I think the research would probably show that it's not healthy, but I don't know, from a success, whatever you call success, I could see that being a positive motivator.
All right. We need a good sound as I transition between these ideas because we're going rapid fire. Do you need a breath? Do you need some water?
I could do this all day. I have too many ideas.
Let's do another one. Stock betting. What are you thinking here?
This is a fun one. This actually stems from something that my family started doing during COVID As I'm sure every listener has heard, there's just been this huge influx of retail traders on Robinhood and there's Public and a few other of these places. Commission-free trading platforms. We did this bet as a family where we each put $1,000, and we haven't actually put any money into the stock market, but theoretically we're supposed to, put $1,000 into a single stock. The goal was who can get the most gains in a single year. That was the fun of this challenge.
Can you trade or you can't trade? You just hold for a year.
No, cannot trade. It is literally buy today and hold for a year. Everyone was going back and forth on what they pick, but it was a really fun game and it also, it's something we're tracking. So we created a spreadsheet that pulls from Google Finance. Every week we're going in and kind of shit-talking about who's winning, who's losing, and it's really social, and it's inherently something that you're constantly wanting to engage with. So the idea here is, can you combine the best of sports betting with the best of fantasy sports— so like picking your team— with public trading? And there was an attempt at this in the crypto boom, the ICO boom, in 2017-18. By a company called Shapeshift. They launched— they didn't really launch. It was called Prism. And they had a private beta. And I was using it. And I thought it was so cool. What people could do was pick a portfolio of tokens at the time. So equate this to public stocks. And you allocate percentages based off of whatever you want your basket to look like. And it was public. So people could go and follow you and see how you're performing. And it was a competition. And so then people could come and essentially allocate alongside you and say, I just want to take your basket and put $1,000 in. Or whatever. But I could see this being something where you start actually making this more like prizes and betting and things like that to create that social and like high level of engagement.
I kind of love this. That's a great idea. So, okay, so let's, let's, let's, let's play it out. So I think the one thing I didn't like, but I think your, your family was just a prototype, you guys were buying and holding once per year, which is kind of like, yeah, you sort of set it and forget it. You just— no action you can take. Whereas with fantasy, there's like these little micro things, micro adjustments you can make. Either you're changing your lineup or you're picking up a player. There's things you can do every few weeks so you don't just fall so far behind, although that still happens with fantasy. Do you think it should be like the way you did it where you hold, you buy and hold, and you're riding the weekly or monthly momentum of the stock? Or do you think it's about every month or every week picking a new stock and seeing how you do?
I love the idea of having tons of different ways to engage because if you think about how to drive the highest level of engagement and also just this concept of democracy, democratizing asset management. I mean, right now you either go with a robo-advisor like a Wealthfront or a Betterment or you pay a huge fee to somebody that's an active manager. Why can't some kid in the middle of nowhere who just loves everything about public stock investing and who happens to be really good at it, like why can't I go and work with them? Right. So I'm sure there's a whole host of legal and regulatory things, like I am not a financial advisor, but I think there's something there about this democratization of asset management. And I think if you wanted to do, you know, kind of like March Madness, right? That's just one type of fantasy sports. So imagine having all these different types of competitions and things you could play into, whatever, whatever's for you.
Okay, I like that. So there's different game modes, um, that makes sense to me. Uh, I don't like the democratizing blah blah blah because I'm just like, no, this is cool because it's fun. Like, forget this, forget finding the next Warren Buffett who's like, you know, sitting in Omaha and is a 14-year-old and we're like, oh, this guy should manage my portfolio. Like, I just think— because, okay, so when I wake up every day, right, and I try not to do this but I suck at it, I swipe right over on my phone and I'm like, look how red everything— all the stocks are today. Look at this. Every— every stock is red. No, this is just like the stock widget of an iPhone. So I swipe over to the side and I basically see my, like, you know, sales of my e-com store. I see the stock market and then I see crypto, right? There's— I get like this, uh, widget at the bottom for Coinbase and And you know, I'll be damned if I could stop checking this thing. I like to just see every day, am I up 2%? Is it green or red? And is it like a big pop? Because that can always happen. Or is it like a big crash? Because that can also happen. And so like today was, you know, I wake up and it's like Bloody Wednesday, everything is red. And I'm like, all right, you know, that's where I'm at. That's the scoreboard that I check. And I love the idea of turning it into a social game. I'm almost surprised that this isn't already a big thing. And I feel like somebody's gonna be like, oh no, this has been on Yahoo fantasy for like 10 years. Um, but this makes a lot of sense to me. If I was trying to build a fun social product, a fun consumer product, this is like at the top of my list right now. From, from, for, you know, jumped immediately to the top of the list. Uh, so you could have basically a— you create a social group, you, uh, click, pick one of the game modes. Maybe you start with one game mode which is like, you know, monthly bet, and you get $1,000 to allocate in your fantasy portfolio however you want. And it's whoever whoever ends up with the most money at the end of the month, uh, is, is winning. And then you can have all these other game modes as well. I, I really like this.
And like, there's a cool way to build status and become an influencer on a platform like this too. And like, to push a little bit on the, the whole democratization piece that I was talking about—
I just don't like when Silicon Valley tries to make fun ideas important ideas. I'm like, hey, fun can be fun, it could be important later, let it be fun for now.
That's why you work in gaming. I— it's like OK, so think about when you go to a casino, if you've ever been to a casino. Many times. And you go and see people either playing roulette or craps. There's a couple players, but there's a huge crowd of people who are just rooting for that.
Right.
And you pick your horse, and you're super excited when they're winning, and you're super bummed when they're losing. And I could see something like that too, where you build these small personalities on this platform, and you're rooting for their portfolio. You're rooting for them to be an amazing picker. And so I think there's a cool social aspect of that too to make it fun with less skin in the game. But I agree with you. I think making it fun and making it a game is probably the crux here.
Okay, I like it. So I'm in on this idea. Of all your ideas so far, I'm the most in on this. I like the cortisol monitoring, although I don't know if it's possible. Uh, okay, let's jump to another one. So let's do functional MILKS.
Oh, this one I'm so excited about. This has been— this has been what I've been spending my evenings doing. So I I typically would drink black coffee and we got gifted from my mother-in-law a milk frother a couple months ago and I started experimenting with frothing milk and making lattes. Awesome gift. But I also had started reading up about a lot of these Ayurvedic spices and all the health benefits of spices. So I started adding things like cayenne and cinnamon or turmeric and ginger to the milk and frothing it. And it was delicious.
What are the benefits of some of these? What's the benefit of, let's say, turmeric? Indian people love turmeric or whatever. You can pick a different one, ginger.
Cinnamon, I know, is something to actually help monitor and level out your blood sugar. Yeah. That's one that's just to kind of maintain blood sugar. Cayenne is for digestion and metabolism. Ginger is for digestion as well and some other arthritis and things like that. There's a whole host and you can go down the rabbit hole for 1,000 years of how people have been using these.
You're putting them in your body.
Well, then I started reading about functional beverages in general, which is a huge exploding category. This is everything from people putting nootropics and CBD and all that kind of stuff, but it doesn't seem like there are any functional milks. Then there's also this concept of experiential drinks and experiential food and beverage. I wanted to see, could I create essentially a bath bomb for functional milk? Okay. You have this cool thing where you drop it into your milk or tea, and I had two ideas. The first one, I bought a kit online for spherification. What this allows you to do is take any liquid and turn it into essentially like a bubble. You can either make an egg yolk size bubble, like a big one, or caviar size bubbles.
Is it fragile like a bubble or it's like a bouncy ball?
The caviar size ones taste like boba. It's like a little bit firmer. Right. It's consistent throughout the whole thing. The egg yolk size ones essentially is liquid inside with a very thin shell. Now, these were really cool, but they don't melt. So, that was the problem. It turned out actually great. Both experiments went better than expected. Then they look pretty because whatever I spiced them with, it's bright colors. So, like the turmeric one is bright yellow. I think the idea of like boba coffee or boba tea is kind of cool with the milks, but I really wanted it to dissolve. So, then I started researching how do you build a bath bomb. It's actually really simple. It's citric acid, baking soda, whatever your other dry ingredients are. Right.
It's like a second grade science experiment turned into like a fan fiction. Totally.
That's my favorite. Totally. So then I went and bought almond flour and dry milk powder and all these things and have been making these bath bombs essentially at home. So does it work? It does. It works really well.
Can you show me one?
Surprisingly. Yeah.
Should I go grab one?
Yeah, go grab one. I'll grab it. Yeah, here. I'll show you a bunch.
Okay.
Okay. So this is the caviar-sized boba.
Okay. So I'm looking at, just to describe because most people listen on audio, so I'm looking at this jar you have of like tiny boba that you look— they're yellow, so it looks like you custom made a sphere, uh, a bunch of spheres. They look like cakes. Okay, so that's, that's your bombs.
That's— yes, these are the boba, and I've been enjoying putting a big spoon of these in my hot coffee. They taste really cool, and they have that mouthfeel of boba.
So those don't explode?
They don't explode.
To make those, I literally had to hand drop with a syringe every little ball because I just Amazon for spherification kit, and it looks like some really crazy science thing, not like something easy and fun.
That was not as easy, but it actually turned out really well on the first attempt. Now, these are the bombs. And so essentially, I have some small ones that are essentially half sphere, and then some bigger ones. And they harden really nicely. It looks like a donut hole.
Yeah, it's harder.
It looks exactly like a donut hole. These ones are cinnamon and cayenne. And when you put them in hot liquid, it foams exactly like a bath bomb. Wow. It's like Alka-Seltzer. Foamer, and it foams for— it was interesting. The almond ones with the almond flour, which is essentially the base of almond milk, they foamed for maybe like 10, 15 seconds. The dry milk powder ones foamed for like 2 minutes, but it was a really cool experience, and then it dissolves into the liquid.
Wow. Okay. I kind of— this is amazing. Okay. That's great. Why aren't you doing this? This should be a company. This should be a product.
Well, I'm roping in my sisters and my mom.
I'm like, "Let's do this." Let's make this.
Yeah. How fun would it be to get a cool tin? The nice thing about What I like about MILKS, and specifically for coffee and tea, is it's a natural subscription product because it's a ritual. If you drink coffee or tea, you drink it every day. And you're going to use this every day. So you now buy your little tin of whatever functional bomb.
And it's fun for social, like people who like to make tea, have tea together, have coffee together. Gifting. Yeah, this becomes like a thing to talk about. It's like super viral. It's like, it's real world viral, as we call it, like playground viral, where one person is going to show it to the other and everyone's going to be like, I want that. That's amazing. Especially because it's not just the— the, like, kind of like the science experiment. It actually has the functional part. So you— I think this is, this is really great. This is a winner. I love this one.
I need a name, so you have to help me brainstorm a name, or get your, get your audience to come in and crowdsource a name for me.
Okay, okay. We always start with the Greg Eisenberg special, which is you just add the Spanish word bueno to the end of whatever you want. So this could be Milk Bueno, this could be something like that, but we'll work on, we'll work on names.
Nice.
Okay, so you would produce these, you would sell these as a, you know, kit or subscription kit.
E-commerce.
Yeah, direct-to-consumer.
Yeah. And they're shelf-stable. That's the cool thing too. They don't need to be refrigerated.
Does it go well in coffee or no?
Yeah.
Okay. Interesting. And do you taste it once it's in there or you don't really taste it once it's dissolved?
You taste it. So it's essentially like adding milk and if you want it sweetened, like I did some with fake sugar, I put stevia in it and it tastes like you added stevia to your coffee.
Wow. Okay. This is, this is a winner. Okay. No, we don't even need to discuss. Let's actually keep this under wraps. This is, this, this is a winner, dude. Uh, Abreu is already Googling spherification kit. Am I right?
I was going to say, I think someone in our— after listening to this is going to make it.
This is just too insipid.
This has been podcast patented. Do not steal Elaine's idea.
Exactly.
You can rally to help us make this a podcast. Product success and, and help us make this special.
And if people are awesome designers—
Well, if we have people that are awesome at designing packaging or, you know, just amazing at how to get things viral on Instagram, happy to chat. That'd be really fun to work on it with people.
We actually have a lot of e-commerce and D2C, uh, kind of specialists in the, in the audience, in the community, uh, because a lot of people do— a lot of people have companies like that, and I've seen tons of good packaging stuff, uh, tons of stuff with influencers, because I think this would kill with influencers too. And so, uh, yeah, there's a bunch that can happen here. Okay, so we're all in on this. I, I'm your silent co-founder. I do no work, I only take upside, but that's it. So, okay, we're in on that one.
I'll ship you a tin.
You can do it. My wife would love something like this. So, okay, let's do one more as a, um, let's do one more that we'll, we'll just freestyle the rest.
Okay, so I've got a good one that I've been really just itching on. It's this concept around automating rezoning and permitting for real estate.
Right.
Unsexy. Here we go. It's super unsexy, but if you have ever had to or thought about rezoning or getting some kind of construction permit for your house or anything like that, it is the most ridiculous and archaic process. It is governed by— It's essentially the process is run by the city or the county and it involves a stupid amount of paperwork. You have to go and find all the historical documents about about the property, you have to fill out a ton of forms, it's government bureaucracy, and then literally you have to go to meetings, physical meetings where the council, the zoning council votes on this. And if you lose, you have to appeal and then go back to these things. And I'm like, this is stupid. There's essentially two parts of this. There's the paperwork part and then there's the human part. Now, the paperwork part seems super simple to automate. That's, it's public records, it's stuff you can just go and without a lot of tech build something that automates the filing of the papers. Now, the human part is more complicated, but now with COVID you know, everyone is not going in and having physical meetings. Everyone has a smartphone. Literally just download some kind of simple app that's almost like your Nextdoor, where it pushes notifications to the people that need to go and make a decision with all the information. You can go and ask questions in it, but essentially it streamlines a process that could have taken 12 months down to something that's like 3 weeks.
So would this be something you're selling to the city and municipalities, or this is for a consumer to just just tiptoe over the paperwork and the headache that's going to come here and the city doesn't have to do anything.
I don't know. That's actually where I keep getting caught up is what is the go-to-market strategy for this in terms of monetization? I don't know. I don't know what the incentive would be for a city or a county to pay for it, but I can definitely see for anybody who's looking to rezone a building, especially if it's not residential, if it's more commercial. That and to our earlier conversation, there's just this glut of real estate sitting unused. San Francisco actually had passed a vacancy tax. I don't think it's in effect right now, but if your property was vacant for more than 2 weeks, you had to start paying taxes on it because it's an eyesore and things like that. Imagine there's a huge impetus to go and figure out how to reuse it. If it's zoned one way, but you have a buyer that wants to use it for a kitchen or a school or an office or whatever. It's just, it's silly that there's such a gate, right?
And this is not just for zoning. Like, uh, my, my sister-in-law was like, hey, be right back. And then she got on a Zoom call and I thought she was talking to her friends or something. She was there for like 40 minutes and I was like, what, you know, how are your friends doing? And she goes, oh no, we were, uh, there's a tree, we had to have a city meeting for cutting down this tree in front of our building. And so we had like done this permit and this request to cut down the tree. It's a small tree. And like, then this was the, the meeting. Normally this is an in-person hearing, but we did it over Zoom and they passed the tree cutting and we get to cut the tree as long as we plant 3 more trees or whatever. And I was like, wow, this is insane, uh, like the level of schlep that you have to go through for this. And so, um, so I, I agree with you. I think that's like anywhere that there's headache and there's money to be made, like usually when you're rezoning something, it's because you sort of see some opportunity to like add a unit or like convert a space and, and make more money off of it. I think that's a good one. It's also like no transparency. There's no version of the like like Domino's is my pizza baked yet tracker, where you're like, okay, where are we in the process? How many steps are there? Where are we now and what comes next? Just that I think would be pretty killer on the consumer side. I think people would pay for it, um, let alone the, like, the second part you're talking about with, like, notifying everybody and getting them together. I think that part's a little bit harder. But, but yeah, I definitely see, see a use case for this. Somebody is doing this with, um, DMVs. I don't know this whole business, but someone posted in our podcast group that there are some other entity outside of a DMV that can do license issuing or renewals. I don't know if I'm going to get all the details right about this, but there's some other— I forgot what it's called. It's not called a DMV, it's called something else. And apparently these things are always busy. There's like a 4-hour line because people need to go and get their license renewed or get their IDs or whatever it is. And, um, so these guys had made kind of like a— either like a mobile or like a, um, a digital version of this where you could do it all from home or something like that. They were charging money. They were making very, very good money doing this. You would have to go take my very vague, inaccurate description and go find what that business is, but that's what I would model this after is, what did they do for DMVs? Could I do that for the zoning commission?
There's also a whole similar world for visas. If you're going to Brazil or China and you don't want to go and sit and wait at the consulate for 4.5 hours and pay the $75, you can go and pay them $300, but they're going can I do it for you tomorrow? I can see something similar to that as well, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm all about, you know, the— what are the most low NPS experiences people have? Like going to the DMV, going to the visa immigration office, uh, you know, like, you know, the one like this would be— would have been going through airport security before CLEAR. Um, so if you just go and you say, what is the— what's the absolute worst? What would get like a negative 5-star review on Yelp? And then you go and you like build the alternative or build the like layer on top that like abstracts away all the pain, um, that's like a pretty valuable thing if you're willing to go into that boring space.
In general, I always look at is this thing adding friction or reducing friction, and then what is the volume and what is the frequency of use, right? So if you can get either high volume of people that have this pain point and you're reducing friction, or it's, you know, a high frequency use but a smaller demographic of people that have that friction, removing a small amount of friction, people will pay a ton of money Right, but in this case it's low frequency, high friction, right?
It's— yeah, for the zoning one. Um, okay, tell me about some— tell me about some products that you've been using that you really like. Uh, what's— what are some either apps, websites, physical things you bought that have like— that have caught your eye?
Oh man, I'm like the world's cheapest person, so I buy nothing.
I have a Peloton behind you.
Peloton. Well, funny story with the Peloton. My mom actually won this about 3 and a half years ago, and this is before a lot people were super familiar with Peloton. What? How? And she sent— I don't even remember. She just sent me and my sisters this text message saying, "I won this thing called a Peloton. Do any of you girls want it?" And I immediately was like, "Yes, I will take it." So, I got a free bike and a free year subscription. So, of course, the first year I barely used it because I wasn't paying. And then the second the subscription turned on, I started paying and I use it almost every day. So, that I would say has been my savior for the pandemic. What else? I mean, I haven't put on jeans or real pants since March, which is amazing. I feel like I could get rid of 90% of my closet and just wear Lululemon and Athleta every day and be really happy. What else have I been using? I've been playing with— I'm obsessed with the audio space in general, and it's now becoming a little bit more hot, and people are really talking about audio as kind of a next wave in terms of consumer social media. Social. And so I've been playing with a lot of apps out there around audio. I'm still— synchronous is really hard.
It's— can I tell you about a cool audio app I saw yesterday? Yeah. Um, so this guy DM'd me, and he's a founder based in India, and he goes— he said— he sent me some pitch that was like full of jargon, so I was initially just gonna like totally ignore it. They said something that caught my eye. I don't remember what it was, but it was basically— first he was like, we're, you know, audio, audio for, you know, consumer audio, you know, mass blah blah blah, blah, blah. I don't know what he was saying. I was like, what does your product do? And he was like, oh, basically, um, people in, in countries like India, Pakistan, Middle East, uh, dating is very different here culturally, uh, going on real-world dates. And so that's not something people are very comfortable doing and do as frequently as in the West. So we actually created a way to date just kind of on your phone, um, through like audio. I was like, okay, what do you mean? And so the way it works is. It's a pretty cool idea. Uh, it's built around, uh, it's built around the, the, the female use case. So basically two women, uh, or sorry, there's one woman who's like the dater and she gets to pick like kind of like a wing moment basically. And so two friends basically get on the app and then they just sort of shuffle through guys that come in and it's audio only. So you're not gonna like see a penis, uh, you're not gonna like— and it's also not like messaging where you have to kind of wait. It's like live and in real time. So a guy shows up, he starts talking, and then at any time you can sort of bounce him and like go to the next guy. Um, but like if he's you know, interesting. And it's, it's not one-on-one where it's like, I think, a little more awkward. It's like two friends who get to kind of like put these guys, you know, under on the hot seat. And I was like, I could see this being a thing potentially. Like, I could see, um, I could see this being fun. I could see this being slightly viral. And I could see something succeeding when it really takes the like sort of woman's point of view. And like, how do I make this enjoyable and safe and like still interesting, but like let me make this as comfortable as possible for the woman and I'll like let the guys is just kill themselves trying to make this work.
From the guy's perspective though, how would you feel about the wingwoman just being kind of a jerk? Meaning, I could see this dynamic where if it's just one-on-one, it's a human in front of you, you don't want to be a jerk for the most part. Some people are horrible. But if I was the friend, I feel like I wouldn't have that same barrier of saying things that are probably not super appropriate or, I don't know, just crushing somebody's ego. This is life.
This is if you're at a bar and you walk up to a group of friends, you're going to get this. The nice friend, the bitchy friend, and then like the person who you're actually trying to speak with, and you're just hoping to like come out alive, you know, at the end of it. So I think it's, it's agreed, it's not great for the guy, but I think that's the way it should be in this case.
Well, why, why is there no app that is video in like real-time video? Because, you know, audio I think is a huge step up from seeing pictures or somebody's profile, but video, I literally see what you look like right now and And you get facial expressions, you get more emotion than just audio. Audio, you lose a little bit. So I just would love to see somebody playing with more video. But again, it has to be something where you can't take a video and practice it 17 times. I just want to see the, you know, you today and more authentic.
Yeah, I think the one— the challenge with videos, you get a lot of inappropriate stuff, which kind of like creates a chat roulette problem. Um, so I think that's the, that's the biggest downside here, is that is how do you, how do you make this where it doesn't just turn into like a complete shit show on video?
Yeah, that's so true. And again, that kind of goes back to the synchronous versus asynchronous. I think with audio that is synchronous, it is so hard to police. We're seeing this across lots of apps right now. But it's, you know, if you have to upload a video, at least you can run some computer vision and flag immediate things that are just egregious. You can't do that with synchronous audio or synchronous video for that matter.
I am, yeah. I've been on Clubhouse for a while. I, I'm very conflicted about it. Part of it is is I listen to so many podcasts and I find that podcasts, people distill it down into like the good parts. And to me, I'll sit in an hour Clubhouse session and I wish it was a 15-minute podcast. But I think that's more me. I think as a participant, if you're active and you're actually speaking, it's great. It's engaging. You feel like you're meeting people. You feel like you're connecting with others.
What types of rooms do you like or who do you like to kind of hang with or listen to?
I think I tend to like— I mean, to be honest, I like when people are talking about similar things to what you guys talk about on this podcast.
Shooting the shit on my case.
That's what I find interesting. Yeah, I'm not into sports. I'm not into people talking about politics all the time or more social justice issues. That's just not what I get excited about. But I don't know. I find that a lot of times there are just these lulls. Too many people are trying to talk and it's just not substantive. It's very surface level.
Yes.
I don't know, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, I bounced, uh, you know, out of it a while back because of, you know, exactly that. I, I thought early on, I was like, oh, this was cool, this is like a bunch of interesting people from Silicon Valley and only them, so they feel safe like kind of hanging out here. When the masses are here, they're not going to want to do it. So I was like, I kind of took advantage of that, hopped into a bunch of rooms, talked to a bunch of people I wanted to talk to, and then and like peaced out. And I thought for a while it was the best way to build a network in Silicon Valley would've been to hang out on Clubhouse 8 hours a day. Like you would've literally seen, like on the surface it'd been like, what are you doing? You're just hanging out on Clubhouse 8 hours a day. And it would've been like, yeah, in the next 6 weeks I'm gonna have like, I'm gonna have a bunch of friends and connections that like I could have literally not bought, you know, if I had wanted to. These are people that I would not sit down for a coffee with me if I tried to plan it and make it helpful and useful and productive, but they're willing to shoot the shit with me forever. An hour on Clubhouse at 1 AM, um, cool. And so I thought there was like this arbitrage, network arbitrage opportunity where you could just like get on Clubhouse early and meet a bunch of cool people. Like, I, you know, we hung out one night with Ev Williams and I talked about, you know, like Twitter early on and shit like that. And like, that was cool. I would have never otherwise had that conversation. But, uh, I don't think— I, I definitely don't think the product's going anywhere. Like, I don't think it's gonna like succeed. And now it's like not that interesting anymore, um, because more people have gotten on it. And you're right, it is like a lot of politics and social justice and a bunch of of like smart, you know, smart people trying to show how smart they are, um, which is like really, really like nauseating to like be a part of. And I'd rather just, you know, go watch, uh, you know, Friends reruns on Netflix if I was gonna like— if I want to veg out, I want to veg out. I don't want, I don't want this like intellectual, you know, uh, CrossFit that they try to do on Clubhouse.
I know a few people that took advantage of that arbitrage opportunity early and spent hours and hours a day. That window of opportunity that was so I feel like it was literally for like maybe a month if you got in that early and then it closed pretty quickly. And now to me, I just don't think there's that opportunity anymore.
I would agree. I would agree for sure. Um, okay, well listen, this was, uh, this was awesome. You're an ideal machine, so I think we're gonna need to keep you in the regular rotation. Uh, if people liked this, let me know, let Elaine know so that we can have her on more and, uh, talk more. But we're going to be launching our functional milk company soon, so, uh, stay tuned. It's going to be called Functional Milk as of right now until we come up —of the better national milk bueno. Exactly. Uh, but thanks for coming on. Where should people find you? Twitter, is that the best place to follow? Your Substack? What do you want to shout out?
Yeah, I have a Substack at Zelby. It's my last name, zelby@substack.com, Z-E-L-B-Y. Or I'm @ezelby at Twitter. Um, I'm, I'm not historically great at social media. I'm trying to be better. I think I joined Twitter in like 2008 and sent my first tweet in 2019, but I'm working on it.
It's, um, it's uncomfortable for me, but I'm getting, getting slowly I also just like that you're a VC, but you're much more of like a high-energy, uh, tinkerer, you know, like play with ideas type of person, which is typically like more of an entrepreneur. And so, uh, I think it's great what you're doing. Uh, Abreu, what'd you think of that episode? Give us the, the real talk. I loved it. Just because Sam's not here?
That's part of it. I love when we bounce around ideas like we did today. I think for— I'm still thinking about the milk bomb. It reminded me a little bit of the Liquid Death guy, and he launched that product without having the product, and I can see someone launching this without having the prototype. Put up Instagram ad, Facebook ad, see the response, get the hype going, and then get the final product out there.
That's legitimately what my weekend plans are. There you go. Quite literally.
Okay, so we're gonna watch this idea bloom and blossom. We're gonna be the social pressure that you need to not just like get busy and drop this.
We're gonna be like, "No, fire the bullet, let's see it." Well, I actually already started talking to drink formulation companies that do all the nutritional panel and all the stuff you actually need to get one of these things off the ground, and then they have co-packer relationships. So essentially, once you get the formulation, you don't do any of the touching product. You just kind of say like, "I want 10,000 units of X and here's the formula, go." And then they do packaging and all that stuff. One question for both of you. Okay. So on this one, the one that's more of the bubbles, would you— How interesting is that? That one to me is more like cool, but I just don't know if people would whatever.
So there's two products. There's the bomb, which you put in and it fizzes and it's cool like that, and then there's the boba balls that you just have at the bottom of your drink and you could just drink them kind of as you go or at the end.
The, um, the bomb, it's essentially like adding milk and sugar to your coffee, like if you put— or your tea. So it actually goes in and infuses.
There used to be a drink that was like the— what's it called? So there was, uh, not Capri Sun, but there was like that other one, Squeeze It or whatever it was called. I don't remember what it is. It's like a really famous kids drink. It's like these red and blue tall bottles, but they came out with this explosive version once where you would take the— uh, when you took the top off, you would put it in and it was exactly this. It was this fizzy thing that would cause it to change color and add the flavor to the thing. And then it was like the lunchtime— like, you were the shit if you had the explosion— explosive version of this drink. And, uh, this is what this is, that Japanese thing that came in the glass bottles. It was super American. It was like squeezy plastic bottle water sugar with explosive color. Like, that's like the description and the ingredients label.
So, uh, oh my God, if somebody will imagine— imagine the bombs for kids too. Like, you could make this where, like, make your own chocolate milk, or make your own, like, whatever, apple juice, or you name it. You could just literally give kids a cup of water and be like, play, here you go. I'm all in on the bombs.
That's cool. Just the visuals of the visual of it is amazing. Uh, maybe Magic Bomb's the name.
Magic Milk. I like Magic. Magic's the new bueno.
I like it. Yeah, I like Magic.
Magic Milk is great. Yeah, that one's good. But you're not actually selling milk. You're selling the thing you put either in milk or you just put in coffee straight. Or do you always put it in the milk and then the milk into the coffee?
It's— well, so there is milk in it. Oh, there's milk. So it's either dry milk or almond milk powder, essentially. So it is for people that put some kind— so this is cream and sugar, basically. It's whatever. It's like your custom thing, but it also has like a perfect portion of whatever spice, like whatever functional spice you want. I like this.
Okay, we're gonna also talk to, uh, John Fio. He's the guy who made Gravity Blanket and he made Moon pods, and he made the birthday candle and shit like that. Uh, he is a— he's kind of a mad scientist when it comes to this stuff, so, uh, you should talk to him. I can connect you with him and we can go over this. So, okay, it was called Kool-Aid Bursts, were the name of the drink. So it was just Kool-Aid in a cool bottle, I think. Um, I'll check that out.
Yeah, that's what they were. I, um, actually, he's, uh— I forget his name, the Gravity Blanket guy. He, um, he was in a bunch of Clubhouse rooms early that I was in, and I thought I thought he was fascinating. He was awesome.
Yeah, he's great because he doesn't try to be Silicon Valley cool. He's just like a weirdo, and, uh, which is what I want. I want weirdos around me. Um, okay, totally. Elaine, this was awesome. I gotta run, but, uh, good stuff.
Thanks for having me. This was fun. I'm happy to do it anytime.
And oh, by the way, if you can help us with this, uh, functional milk thing, email me, uh, just puri.shawn@gmail.com or DM me and say, hey, I'm a co-packer, or I'm a whoever, and offer your services. Yes, thank you. Cool, gotta go. Awesome, bye.