And he was like, oh, this is Facebook. They,

I was like, Facebook. He's like, yeah, they have a internal podcast that they do for their employees. Because Facebook has, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees, maybe fifty thousand. I don't know.

It's it's, I know I I try to get a get past media, but I I just I love it so much. Okay. So

Jeff Bezos Bezos, Bezos, Amazon guy. He owns

Washington Post.

And

a few years ago, he goes, yeah, wanna buy, and I'll let the editorial do its thing and whatever else. I'm gonna go and stay out of it. But I kinda wanna take your guys' they build their own technology to publish their articles. Like, I kinda wanna take that and make that like a huge business. And a lot of people try this and never did very rarely works. But what he did was or he didn't do it, but he was somehow part of it.

They've created this thing called art publishing, and it does a couple things. The first thing is companies like me pay money to use it. But it's really interesting that you and I have talked about this idea.

But what art publishing is is they're going to companies like BP. So,

the oil company that has two hundred thousand companies, and they are

saying, Hey, BP. You have, you know, two thousand employees. We're gonna help you publish newsletters and articles and stuff to your to your employees, which you already are, but we're gonna help you organize it, make sure it's read, things like that. And they're saying in the next year or two, they're gonna hit a hundred million in revenue.

Wow. Which means which means,

I bet Washington Post probably does. Maybe five hundred in revenue in total, but a hundred million in this enterprise SaaS revenue would be worth more than Washington Post is. And I wanted to get your opinion a, that's a cool idea

that you and I had been noodling with for a while, and they're just executing it in a really interesting way. And, b, the idea

branching out,

from your main thing to doing more. And, yeah, like, so and a totally unrelated thing. In some ways, it's totally a stupid I mean, some there's an argument to be made like, this is just stupid idea. Never do it. There's an argument to be made that a lot of people do it successfully. So what's your take on this? So first, this I've never heard of ARC, so this is my first time hearing about it. Just to clarify,

they give,

other brands companies, the tools that Washington Post, so they sort of productize their own toolkit. But is it always, like, the use case you talked about, like, PP want has fifty thousand employees wants to publish internally or is it also external publishing?

I I that they're still trying to figure it out. And I think that they're building it for a variety of reasons. At first, it was just for publishers. And then beep, they closed this deal at BP, and they I think to them, they're, like,

maybe that's the way. That's the path. Right.

Now, I think there's something to that because, you know, when when I started the podcast, I used to go to this podcast studio before you guys built a dope studio in your office.

I was going to this, like, kinda rent a studio by the hour place. And I was talking to the guy who did it, and he was like, they had a sports radio station, a twenty four seven sports radio station, and then they were like, well, we know how to build the studio. We built one for them. What if we turned a few conference rooms into

broadcasting booths and we did pro we offered it to podcasters.

These hipsters and SF, they love this shit. And so they didn't say it. And by the way, in San Francisco, there are there there are no studios studios studios. They're basically the only one. Interesting. And it sucked.

Yeah. And so I went there and

I was like, Hey, can I get eleven AM tomorrow? And he was like, no. We're booked up from eleven to three. I'm like, shit. Who else who are the podcasters using this? And he was like, Oh, this is Facebook. They,

I was like, Facebook. He's like, yeah, they have a internal podcast that they do for their employees because Facebook has, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees, maybe fifty thousand I don't know. But they have managers who come in and record a podcast about managing at Facebook, and it gets distributed only internally. And I was like, I'd never heard of a internal only podcast that a company was doing, but of course, you know, makes sense. People want it, put out content,

training, you know, different things like whether it's in text or audio form, that was my first time hearing about these, like, internal publishing systems that I had never really considered.

And that is what our trying to do. And like Facebook that has fifth fifth I don't know. What do they have? Twenty thousand employees, tens of thousands of people.

They need to create a lot of this stuff. Like, hey, everyone. So here's how we're addressing,

this situation. Here's what we're gonna say. Here's the words we're using.

Yada, yada, yada,

or we're quitting this product here's why yada yada yada.

Here here's how to use the internal software yada yada yada.

It's a great idea, I think. I had discussed,

a slight variation of this, but

I want the listeners to tweet at me and tell me

And I always hate the idea when people say like, oh, I can't do this already exists, but I just wanna know, does this exist? Who is solving this

Yeah. We've talked okay.

We've talked about a few variations of this. So let's go over them. So this is all in the bubble of the theme of what I'll call

I mean, I wanna, I wanna say internal publishing because that sounds lame as shit, but basically

intra company stuff. So, I'll think of a good name in a second. But Basically, we talked about Q and A, sorry, All Hands software because, you know,

com big companies do all hands, you know, for their whole employee base, also in individual com, you know, divisions will do all hands for their group. And what you need there is video streaming. You need chat or Q and functionality, but it needs to be private. It needs to be internal. It needs to be behind a wall that nobody else can get to this. So a lot of people already have video streaming services out there, but that's for mass, you know, It's like YouTube, it's Twitch, it's things for to go get a big audience, but this is for a select audience. It's a little bit different. So we talked about that one. We talked about when we were we were going over Hemingway, and how it makes you a better writer. We were saying, What if you could do this for, internal your emails inside a company, but also just a mailchimp for your company. So How does somebody get the word out within a company? How do they make nicely formatted, easy to read, you know, company announcements and bulletins

that come with the kind of tools that Mailchimp has, like tracking opens and clicks and that sort of thing.

So so that's a internal Mailchimp, internal podcasting,

What these guys are doing is basically internal,

you know, Washington Post, which is like a whole bunch of different,

features and functionality. They have

these guys have, you know, broadcasting like live streaming. They have blogging. They have Are you reading the the website right now? Through their products. They have they have a huge set of things. Basically, everything you would need to make Washington Post. So I think that's just an interesting thing to think about. What if you took

the best in class products that people use to publish and broadcast

to large audiences, and you said, how,

Do companies need this just for internal broadcasting, internal,

announcements?

I remember my brother-in-law, he owns gyms, on, like, fifty gyms. And he was like, yeah, dude, I just need a easy way to mass text all my employees on a text list.

The, kind of, numbers for the day any key announcements about what we're trying to do. He's like, you'd be surprised. It's really hard to, like, get this stuff set up and get this make this a part of onboarding of my company. So that everybody knows that you join. That's the SMB,

version, like the small business version,

which is also is a idea. And then the second thing you talked about is, you know, when do you, when do you do this? When do you take your eye off your core business and how do you expand into other lines of businesses? I think that's, you know, generically a hard thing and that's a case by case thing. You have plenty of examples where it worked and it becomes a huge business unit. It let's call AWS being the best example of this, where Amazon takes its own sort of server and compute system and services system and makes it available to any company And now AWS brings in, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year.

And, so that's like the best case scenario. And then you have a probably, you know,

hundreds of thousands of of other examples that you can come up with where somebody does this. It doesn't take off. It becomes a distraction, etcetera, etcetera. And you guys have considered this too. So how do you how do you guys think about this? Yeah. So when we consider it, everyone says the same thing. They go, well, Amazon did it. Let's just make AWS for them. And I'm like, well, you have to understand that Amazon did it, like, ten years into the business when they were

ten thousand employees and

throwing two hundred and fifty people at that problem. It ain't ain't no thing. And so at my company, it's like, yeah. Okay. I could hire a person. Like, I have no problem

couple of people, like, doing it. But you do need to get, like, your main thing right first. That said, I struggle with it because I have ADD I wanna I wanna do this shit.

So it's hard.

I I don't know what the, like, Twitch I bet Twitch in the same boat. They're big enough that they they can have these same projects. And a lot of the infrastructure that they probably

are built on, I bet they had to make a lot of it from scratch.

So I don't

I don't know. So Twitch is ten years into the business, and you're right. They invented essentially the best in class let's say live video streaming at scale where you can have hundred thousand people all watching one channel with low latency and it doesn't fall over

and, broadcasting around the world. Nobody else really had that problem, so nobody else built a solution.

And so you could imagine that Twitch could say, Hey, we could make this available to others. And that they could spin it out as its own business unit. And I think that might be a good decision, right, because,

you're taking an asset you've already have that you've that you've refined

that's sort of,

battle tested and brandable.

Right? Like, your sales pitch is, hey, we use this for the biggest live streaming network, you know, out there.

But at the same time it's a distraction and they wouldn't have done it year one, two, or three. They, you know, could do it at year ten because

that point, your core is stable. It's not going anywhere. It's not gonna die. And so, you know, I I always make these analogies, and I don't know if my team really likes it, but I always talk about like, you know, the startup is like a baby. And like with a baby, a baby just they need to eat, they need to sleep, they need to poop, and nothing else matters. Like you don't need to teach baby calculus right now. You don't need to, you know, do all this other stuff. And, but as it becomes a teenager or gets ready to go to go off for college, you know, you don't have to watch it so intently. You don't have to worry about is it gonna, you know, keeping the baby alive every single day. That's the main objective of the of early stage, but as you get later stage, have to worry about that, which lets you invest. Why don't they like that's a good analogy. Why don't they like it? I think it's because I'm always like, right now we just gotta keep the baby alive. And it's just like sort of a a dark, a darker way of of talking about it. But, like, I did this with one of our companies in the ideal lab. I was like, had one company that was already mature. It was already profitable, making millions of dollars, and we had this other project that was totally unproven. And so anytime you had to decide where do I spend an hour, it always seemed like a good idea suspended on the thing that's making millions in profit, never suspended on this super speculative thing. But if we did that, we would have never invested in a new thing. And so I I made a decision. I said, Hey, we can't have the the baby and the teenager in the same room because they have totally different needs. They need different type of care. And,

you know, one will always look feeble and weak compared to the other, but that one that's feeble and weak today has the most growth potential. And so we need to be investing in too. And so let's split these two companies up and let's spin them out.