YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas McInerney

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73
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2026-01-16
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2026-01-16
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  1. “Lots of spots where if you go there, you see the Americans. Is there equivalent for Germans and French? Yeah, that's, and where does that exist? How would I find that? Reddit, maybe there's a subreddit or something. How would I ever be aware of it? You have to learn from a friend, right?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Because there's expat bars here in Rapungi, somebody took me to one. I think it might have been champagne only, but all the Americans were going to this one place in Rapongi that was a champagne bar. It was very weird. But is there an American expat? Are there American expat places here? Yeah. Is it like a specific neighborhood or is it just specific spots?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Germans in Japan and Americans in Japan and French people in Japan, that's really fascinating because then when I come here, I started a group with the people we had lunch with at that time and I was like, hey, I'm thinking about going skiing. Hey, I'm looking for a place to stay. Hey, I'm looking for this. And I popped up my own little one and people started giving me good advice. And then people started giving me direct advice. Hey, this hotel is like a secret one I didn't want to put in the group chat, but it's really a little bit less expensive. And here's the person. Man, if you could solve problems for people like that, that feels like a great place to start. And you want to start in your own backyard with something you know and you can be successful at and that you're going to enjoy doing expat sounds perfect”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “What do you call charcoal in Japanese? Sumi. So if I have a brick of Sumi and I put it here, it's hot, when we're sitting here, we don't feel it. That's one person. Then you put five people and you put them next to each other. Now we're going to feel a little bit of heat. Then you put 10 people on you. You have 15 coals. They start heating everything up and we're going to step back. Whoa, it's getting hot. Then you put another 15 on. Whoa, it gets really hot. It's raining. It burns the desk. It burns to the floor. And you have to just very quickly build or very slowly and methodically add that coal to the fire. And I think that would be very interesting for expats. So if there is a German...”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I won't build on Thomas's comments there. Trusted right now, one of my theories of these kind of businesses and growth is I call it like hot embers. You don't like coal.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Self expression and then maybe trying to even make yourself famous. Yeah, it was like that sort of combination. Here's a very interesting one. Is there somebody who makes a living doing this in your system now or do you know of somebody who makes a living hosting events like this?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Is and you know, Zuckerberg had one. He's just like, I'm going to go after college campuses and dating and liking and just figuring out the relationship status. Now, if you were to look at the meta corporation now, it's not really about relationship status, is it? It's grown to be so many different things. And I'm trying to think of another example. Like Snapchat, it was really about people having these friendship streaks for ephemeral messaging and making the messages disappear. And it was like a private social network. There's all these different devices of who the initial group is that builds the foundation. My space was, I think, artistic people in LA who were trying to get, you know, was kind of pre-influencer. It was like the original influencers, Paris-Hilton had one.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Run those groups. I'm very interested in who are the Airbnb hosts of this? Who are the people who will build this, the eBay sellers? And that to me would be the magic is if you know how to find the other weirdos and people didn't, everybody thought eBay was like people would just get rid of junk in their garage, they never anticipated that there would be people who would make it their full-time job. And that's something that now people can imagine because of Airbnb, because of being an Uber driver, because of, you know, all these weird monetizable hobbies, being a podcaster, being an influencer. So I'm very excited about your company. Your strength is design, and then go-to-market and explaining to us that the next piece for you will be that I believe that'll get investors to this, is for you to show us the growth journey and the top customers, the top verticals. The go-to mark.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “If it's for everybody to do anything as investors were like, huh, what's the ICP? What's the beachhead market? Is it book clubs? Is it group dinners? Is it hiking? And you showed so many pictures, so many different things. I think it would be more effective to say, we know here in Japan there are three things that people are going to go crazy for. Everybody is looking for somebody to go on a day trip. get on a train and go to Kyoto or go on a hike. Everybody wants to be active and they're looking for somebody to play pickleball with or to go skiing with. So we're starting with those group activities. 10 people going skiing, getting on the train. And then everybody loves to cook or explore restaurants, so we're doing a bar hop and a, you know, going and eating street food. And here's the first one we did, and this grew into 20, and now it's 250. And here are the people who...”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, you know, consumer apps are incredibly hard until they're not. And it's very much about finding a behavioral loop that people become addicted to and that actually solves that problem for them. And I'm not convinced that you found it yet, but my friends started this company meetup.com. We talked about it the last time I was here, Scott Hyferman. And what they eventually found was that there were people who were weird like you who like to be hosts and like me. I like to host. And those people are called connectors and they are really good at matchmaking and building people. How it grows beyond your ability to do it and learning that loop that becomes viral and you have this viral coefficient is going to be so critical and it looks like you're figuring that out. And you just have to bring us along on that journey as investors.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Every 18 months on average. Now it's like whoa, okay, there's a big problem and AI is perfect for this problem. So you have the kernel of such a great idea and you have the passion for it. We just have to flip the entire presentation. We can fix it.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So, what we're doing is we're taking this old process and we're going to use AI and our company, Trade AI, is going to make it incredibly fast and easy and reduce the error rate and take it from costing $50,000 in paperwork down to $50 in paperwork from 50 days of work to five hours of work. And we're going to do it across We've identified 150 verticals in Japan and Sake is a declining one but the Consumer Electronics is a bigger one. Chips is an even bigger one. We're going to take every form, every antiquated, and we're not putting it into the large language models. We're putting it into an open source model that we control. And this is something that ChatGPT or Claude or Grock or Gemini, they won't even have these forms. We're going to have these proprietary forms. And by the way, the forms change.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You have to fill out over 10 forms just to sell Saki to another country. And in that country, to import it to Korea, how many forms on the other side you have to fill out?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And you did explain the problem really well too. So we can fix this. You said, hey, look at all this paperwork you have to fill out. And it's very regulated. A lot of paperwork. This was a great slide, the problem slide. And what I would say is, hey, we have a big problem. When you do import and export, there are regulations. And there are regulations in Japan. We have a lot of rules. In order just to sell sake to another country, you have to fill out how many forms.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And this was exactly what I was thinking, and we both kind of looked at each other when you showed the other verticals, because I was thinking, wow, this is so niche. And it's a declining market. There was a time when the newspapers were declining and everybody was building tools to help newspapers stop declining. And anybody who was inventure was like, you can't stop that. So you're essentially selling into the Titanic that you want to sell ice cream on the Titanic. And it's like, yeah, the Titanic's going down. There's not another voyage and you tie yourself to it and it goes down. So you presented as your first market a market in decline. And we're thinking, yeah, people stop drinking. People are on Ozempic. Like, you want to find a beach where the tide's coming in, not going out. So this pitch had all these signals of no, no, no, no, and then at the end it had the yes. Oh, he's going to do it for these other verticals. But the name also then, you're trapped in the name. So I want you, and I'm going to give you.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “No, more. I think it's $100 million, right? So 1,000 would be 1 million. No, it's 10 million. You're right. So it's like, how did I put $10,000 down and make $10 million? It doesn't make any logical sense.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Now imagine a parker game where you put the 10,000 in and you made a thousand times it, and you're like, how is that even possible? It's a hundred other poker tables.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “If you were in a poker game and there were nine people in it and they each put $10,000 in and you somehow figured out how to take everybody's money in a cash game, you would make nine times $90,000.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “This is so key. The human brain has a very hard time understanding the concept of a thousand X. It's just so exponential, and it doesn't exist anywhere else in finance. When you get your credit card bill, if you don't pay it and they charge you 2% that month or 30% that year, you're okay. And then if you buy a stock and it goes 5x and 500% in five years, you're like, oh my God, this is incredible. Right. And when I talk to people and they talk about the Uber or the Robinhood investment, I'm like, yeah, 1007, 1,000X and growing. And I still haven't sold any shares of Robin Hood, and I paired my Uber position early to Masayosu's son, had some shares to buy. We all did. But I haven't sold any since. I'm like, wow, that is a very bizarre thing to have a 7,000x or 1,000x.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's so key as investors to get lucky. And if you make a certain number of bets and you don't give up, you will eventually get lucky. It's just somewhere around the 20th or 30th investment I find something breaks for an angel, for a seed fund. But you have to. Talking about our business, if you only do five investments, man, it's hard. How long did you know before you got the cents you were good at this?”

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  21. “It is a really interesting thing that happens. You have something like COVID. And if you're Airbnb, You just totally get your ass kicked and you have to figure out how to survive. If your DoorDash All of a sudden, everybody's like hockey stick”

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  22. “That list is like two things Three things. The list of what could go wrong is 300. Yeah. If you over optimize on that, you will talk yourself out of every decision.”

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  23. “These girls can ski through trees like you wouldn't believe. And I think that's in some ways what we all do as investors and founders, which is You make this big, long list These are all the things that will go wrong in a nuclear start. What could go right? What's on that list?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “The speed's okay But you're not going to look at the trees. You're going to look at that space. What do they call it? The negative space or something between the trees.”

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  25. “And think about it visualize, and how many turns is it? You're like, well, I'm going to make a couple of turns. One turn here, one turn there, and then you're going to go straight, and you're going to pick up a little speed on that straight one point.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Look at your line, find your line And what you want to do is when we start out, we're just going to stop and all three of us or four of us are going to stand there and you're going to tell me what your line is. You're going to point to it with your poll and draw it for me.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “There's this great expression that they tell drivers in race cars. Look at the track, not the wall. You look at the wall, you drive into the wall. Follow the track, and I was teaching my daughters how to ski through trees, and they love it. It's their favorite thing to do is ski through trees. Yeah. Mom's not as excited about it as we all are. They said, Well, how do you not hit the trees?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Are you conservative by nature, or are you cynical? Have you been burned? Why were you not as aggressive, do you think? Was it fear?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “There could be dynamics going on you're not aware of and pushing that issue. What do you issue new now with 100 investments that you didn't know then?”

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  30. “It's up to you to ask the issue. If you ask. And I think maybe some first time founders are like, wow, I don't want to push them. You actually want to be pushed. They want to get this decision made. And sometimes they're just busy. They have a life. These investors, maybe they are dealing with other issues in their personal life or in their firm.”

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  31. “And some people might not do reference checks and not even do due diligence. And you're like, okay, well, what's the holdup here? And that's where forcing them to get it in and get that term sheet in and sign it and tell them the timeline that you're doing this on.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I tell folks who are like, oh my God, I've got this one person, they've committed, and I'm like, okay, can I see the term? She would go, oh, we don't have the term sheet, but they gave me a verbal. I'm like, okay, anything that's not a signed term sheet is a no. So ask them, say, listen, you know, I've got some other investors. We talked about some broad terms. Would you like to send us a term sheet or should I send you the term sheet? And just be a forcing function. And then if they don't send you a term sheet when they say they're going to, they're out. And proceed as such. And you have to, I mean, in a way, it's like ball control or pot control in a poker game. You have to control that process. What is a great fundraising process for a company that doesn't have a hockey stick?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “How do they go from saying, okay, I'm about to close this million dollar seed round. Yeah. And you know, you're not even close. How do you advise them that you may want to cut half the staff or get everybody to reduce their salaries and take your three months of runway to nine? So you have more time to close this because I don't think you're going to close it”

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  34. “And yeah, when you get that money in the bank, sometimes you just do stupid things. I had one founder who hired a PR firm because people had told him and I said, how much you pay in the PR firm? I said, $35,000. And he had raised like $2 million. I'm like, okay, yeah, you got to stop that. We don't need that much press. And it's like not important. And he's like, oh, I signed an 18-month agreement. I'm like, okay, I'm going to call them and read him the Riot Act. And I got them to settle to get it out of that. To get them out of it. Yeah, but it was pretty brutal. Have you seen a company with a lot of money in the bank go out of business?”

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  35. “The way I've said it internally is we're looking for founders who get a dollar of value from a nickel. Founders who get a dollar of value from a hundred dollar b”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “At LinkedIn dot com twist, then promote it and get access to LinkedIn jobs new AI assistant. That's LinkedIn. com slash twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. All right, we're back here live in Tokyo for Founder University. Let's talk a little bit about what should the founders hear. Let's say they're successful in raising that $250K. They've got it deployed. They get into an accelerator, they get another 250k, whatever it happens to be, 125k. What are you trying to accomplish in those first 12 months?”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “When we get back from this quick break, I want to ask you what should founders do with that first 250K, 500K in year one of their startup when we get back on this week in startups. You know, I hear from founders venting all the time about how tough it is to hire great people. Well, let me tell you what the biggest game changer for our hiring process at launch has been the LinkedIn Jobs AI assistant. It's like having an amazing recruiting manager. We've been growing our team over the past year and we've filled multiple positions in weeks, not months with this new AI assistant, which makes it so easy to post a new position without filling out a huge form with a thousand steps. And it filters applicants based on the customized criteria that I set for the role, so only the best matches get surfaced, and I'm not stuck scanning through a million resumes. But that's not all. It also shows your post to twenty five optimal candidates every day, so you can actually invite the most qualified people to apply for your position. So higher right the first time. Post your job for free.”

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  38. “It's wild to watch these dogs. They just all of a sudden they just run away and then they're just pointing and scraping at the bottom of a tree and then there's five truffles there. They're like those truffle hunters.”

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  39. “A lot of times they're like, yeah, the first two are my friends from college are my fraternity brothers, and they did it for me as a favor. But the third one I reached out to through LinkedIn and then they didn't respond, so I cold emailed them, and then I met the next three at a trade show. I'm at a trade show. They're like, oh yeah, there's a trade show for lawyers in Milwaukee I went out to it and I just, I couldn't afford a booth, but I just intercepted people at coffee and I introduced myself and I got three customers there and you're like, holy cow, this person is like, you know those dogs that hunt for truffles in Italy. You ever go on one of those truffle hunts?”

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  40. “I also think about that when I ask them another secret tell kind of thing is when I ask them, tell me about your first three customers. And they're like, well, you know, we sell into the military and we sell into this. I'm like, yeah, okay, tell me the top three companies, the one you landed first, the second one, and the third one, how'd you get them? And sometimes we'll get that during the due diligence process.”

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  41. “Elon was struggling with who was going to be the CEO of Tesla when he started investing in the company and then he had to fire a bunch of people. I said, oh, you seem like you have a lot of doubt about this. I said, yeah, I got a lot of doubt. And I said, yeah, what are you going to do? And he's like, I've been struggling with that. And he said, but at the end of the day, if there's any doubt, there's no doubt. And that was like... Opened my brain up, and he had heard it from somebody else in Silicon Valley. But when you have these doubts about somebody on the team, as a founder, you're 100% right. There's never a chance where you're like, this person's not the right person. I need to get rid of them. It's only how quickly do you do it?”

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  42. “You know, if you were to ask Travis, and we had somebody who worked for Travis at both Uber and Show yesterday spoke, he worked at Uber doing recruiting and at Cloud Kitchens. And I said, oh, how did you wind up meeting him? And he's like, I emailed him. You know, I gave him some ideas. And then when he was doing cloud kitchens, I emailed him again. And he responded, and how you meet the person, I remember talking with us back to Elon and just some other folks, they typically, it's really weird, but through social media and through their network, they just meet smart people and they really are good at assessing that. And then they're also really good. I remember we were.”

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  43. “You know, when I asked to meet the team, or hey, let's have my team meet the team and just, hey, why are you here? What did you do before this? If you look at the pedigree and how they found the person. And hey, how did you meet Jason? Or how did you meet Elon? And it's like, I emailed him.”

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  44. “At Tesla, it was to make sustainable energy in addition to the electric cars. The electric cars were the way that the battery packs, the solar, all of that would manifest itself eventually. And then FSD. Sort of became his obsession as well So you're looking for those founders, and I'm assuming also a level of work ethic, resiliency where that mission kind of drives you to wake up every day. And when you do that 12 or 14 hour day and you do it for 100 days in a row and nothing goes right, you don't quit.”

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  45. “To buy a rocket to do it or buy carriage on the rocket, and then he realized, oh my God, maybe I should just build the rocket. So Biosphere to rocket and then Starlink. It's very interesting.”

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  46. “But we were some of the first, and that car was dangerous and fun and exhilarating. And crazy, but he was going through the idea maze. And I saw a similar thing with SpaceX. People don't know, but before SpaceX, his idea was he wanted to back up the biosphere. So he's always been thinking about not Fermi's paradox, but there's another, I remember at some point he said, how do you think the world ends? And I said, meteor or pandemic. He's like, oh, that's exactly what I think, number one and number two. And then I was like, yeah, or nuclear Holocaust. He's like, yeah, that's number three. Going through this idea of just how does the world end? And his idea was to build like the movie Silent Running, great 1970s fiction film with Bruce Dern, to put giant biospheres and send everything up there, like those seed banks, but put it all up.”

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  47. “And it'll be one of those two. And then we're going to have these at your office and we're going to subsidize people to make it a destination. So having a charger will get you those customers who have the $150,000 car. You're a hotel. You're going to love that. And all of a sudden, as I'm saying this. This is how old is the roadster? 2013 or 14? Maybe we'll look it up. It was incredibly early. It was 2006 when I got my, oh my God, it's been 20 years.”

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  48. “That's DEL.com Really interesting when you started saying that, and just dovetailing with the maze, I remember sitting there with him when he lived in, when we both lived in Los Angeles and we had some of the first roadsters and we were talking about batteries and consumer behavior. And was like, okay, this thing is going to 180 theoretically, but I'm getting more like 90 miles. That's fine because I'm driving to Culver City from Brentwood and you're going to, you know, Else the SpaceX. But how is this going to work out? And he said, well, we have this idea of you're going to be able to drive when you're going cross-country and there'll be superchargers and we're going to have these ones that go much faster. Then we're going to have the ability for you to go in undo all the screws the battery will drop out move over and we'll slide it up.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “We've got a brand new sponsor this week, and it's another amazing startup whose product we actually use every day here at launch. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip team members anywhere around the world, you need deal DEL. They're going to take care of all the annoying HR tasks you don't have time for, like payroll, compliance, visas, and onboarding. So you can stay focused on your business and deal scales up with you from the first hire on. So there's never any need to switch platforms or transition into a new system. With deal, you can set up payroll for any country in just minutes and get all the complicated visas and paperwork settled right away, allowing your business to grow without borders. That's why more than thirty seven thousand startups and fast moving companies are already using deal to accelerate their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting deal. competition.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It's such a great metaphor because if you think about it like the maze from the shining or any of those kind of mazes, like the hedge mazes or the ones made of hay, if you were to just while they're talking, it's almost like you see it being drawn and you are pulled up to the three-quarter view and you look down on the maze and you're like, oh, I see yes dead end, dead end. The mouse is looking for the cheese. Oh, yeah, you figured out two-thirds of it, a third of it, you're ahead of everybody else.”

    2026-01-16 · This Week in Startups · Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source