Stop Wrestling With Giants
April 2, 2024 · 27 min 45 sec
This past week, the big news in the design software world was Canva’s acquisition of Affinity, and Paul and Rich kick off the episode by asking, “Is this a failure on Adobe’s part?” But of course Adobe remains a massively profitable company—so what drives the impulse to frame a giant tech company’s misses as overarching “failures”? As they mull over various motivations, they discuss how to reframe success on your own terms, outside the simple metrics of competition or industry trends.
Show Notes
- In case you missed Paul’s newsletter about “enormous hooting, screeching technology gorillas”…
- The official Canva post on the Affinity acquisition.
- The Nicki Minaj bar mitzvah photo might be the greatest thing of all time.
- For further reading about the Medallion Financial Corp., see this Times piece about how their loans destroyed taxi drivers’ lives, and also these 2021 SEC charges!
Transcript
Paul Ford: Well, my name is, was, will be Paul Ford. I’m the co-founder of Aboard.
Rich Ziade: That’s a weird tone. I’m Rich Ziade, the other co-founder of Aboard.
Paul: Well, we’re at home because you’re sick. So we’re like, we’re using the technology to record.
Rich: We are.
Paul: You ready? You ready for what this is?
Rich: Well, what is Aboard?
Paul: Well, this is the Aboard Podcast.
Rich: Oh, yeah. Tell me. Tell me more.
Paul: Aboard is a tool for anyone to manage data, and one of the kinds of data you can manage with it are web links. You can put bookmarks in it. It’s really good for that. But…you can manage all kinds of data. Files and fields and pictures, just…
Rich: Wow. This is just the highest-energy pitch I’ve ever heard in my life—
Paul: [overlapping] All right, you know what? Let me get it together here. [claps] Aboard is an amazing tool for managing all the data that you have in your life, anywhere. Anything that you can think of, you can put into this thing, and it becomes visual. It becomes a beautiful card. Your world of rows and columns and spreadsheets, throw it in the garbage like the animal you are and start to live a visual, dynamic, and highly interactive life, like the computer is supposed to work for you instead of you working for the computer. Is that better?
Rich: You went from unmotivated to creepy, but—
Paul: [laughing] Sociopathic?
Rich: I’ll take creepy for now.
Paul: OK, it’s a start.
Rich: That sounds great. Check it out. Aboard.com. Exciting changes coming very, very soon.
[intro music]
Paul: So let’s talk about two things today on our podcast.
Rich: Talk to me.
Paul: So the first is a little bit of news about a large acquisition in the consumer graphics space. I’m excited to talk about that, about Adobe not buying Affinity, but instead Canva buying it. So a lot of words there that we’re going to get into. And the second is, I thought we could discuss my newsletter post—this was actually your idea, I didn’t come to you with this idea—about why we always talk about the failure of very successful things in order to make ourselves feel better, and how that’s actually dangerous for running a business. [laughter]
Rich: It’s probably dangerous for living your life, too.
Paul: But we do it all the time. So let’s hit number one, which is, we have talked about this on various incarnations of this podcast. There’s a product you like quite a bit. It’s created by a company called Affinity. It’s a range of products. So tell people what that is, because they might not know.
Rich: Yeah, I mean, it’s essentially a suite of graphics tools—desktop graphics tools. There’s Affinity Designer. There’s Affinity Photo. There may be other products. It’s a suite. It’s a graphics-design suite. There are two reasons I like it a lot. One is it’s cheap. You can buy it. You can’t buy software anymore. Like, there’s, you can’t just…pay $300, own it, and own it forever. You have to subscribe—
Paul: [laughing] It’s such a bold move, right? That is a bold move today. And I mean, look, we’re selling—
Rich: To purchase—
Paul: We’re selling software as a service on the internet. We’re part of the problem, right?
Rich: Yeah, no, no. Fair. But—
Paul: Eventually when we charge—but, yes, yes. Like, Affinity, I have it. It’s great.
Rich: Oh, it’s also very cheap. Like, in the world of, like, death-by-a-thousand-cuts $10 a month? It’s, I think, I think each product is $50, and then you’re done. And I think they do, they’re starting to inch towards, like, yeah, but you won’t get the, like, new feature upgrades after year one kind of a thing, but whatever. If you want to live with the software you got, it was cheap. But there’s another reason, Paul.
Paul: Okay, so wait. Affinity Designer 2, Photo 2, and Publisher 2.
Rich: There you go.
Paul: So photo editing, vector layout, and—
Rich: Press. Composition for press.
Paul: Page composition. So these go, by the way, extremely head-to-head with—Photo goes with Photoshop, Designer goes against illustrator, and Publisher goes against InDesign. You can, you know, for most use cases, they’re completely adequate, and—
Rich: A lot of the graphic design world lives in those three places, right?
Paul: That’s right. And, well, those are, those are the professional tools. If you do graphic design and you don’t know, you know, Illustrator and Photoshop?
Rich: [laughing] Yeah.
Paul: Maybe you’re not as serious as you think you are.
Rich: Yeah. There’s another reason, though, Paul. Even though they’ve gotten more complicated, they’re still way simpler. Hitting the right-mouse-button context menu in Photoshop is like falling into an abyss. It is so complex. And look, these are professionals learning professional tools. So who am I to discount complex software? But, God, it was nice to have someone start fresh. [laughing] Just give me layers back. And, and I understood most of the icons.
Paul: Oh, no, no. This is a wild moment, right, because Adobe tried to buy Figma, which is where all the designers are today.
Rich: Yes. And that fell through.
Paul: It fell through for anti-trust reasons. They had to give him a billion dollars as an apology note, which is nice. That’s, I think that’s nice—
Rich: No one’s ever given me that apology note.
Paul: It’s a nice way to say I’m sorry that this didn’t work out.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: We gotta break up. But then you have the whole creative suite which is now 800 products and costs a trillion dollars, and you have to use their—logging into anything with Adobe is essentially a statement on how little they care about human beings. God knows, I got lots of friends that have worked there or—
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: People I respect who work there, but geez. And if they all know it, they all know. But then—you talked to a designer in the last couple years about, and one of the first things they say to you is like, “I don’t even understand Photoshop anymore.” It’s like their girlfriend is now a scientologist.
Rich: It’s bad.
Paul: Like it’s just like—
Rich: It’s just bad.
Paul: [befuddled noises]
Rich: Well, I think going back to the complexity issue and the pricing issue, I think they’re kind of connected. It’s hard to tell how much something—that’s a big warning sign, by the way. If you’re buying a product and it’s hard to tell how much it costs or what you bought, that’s a bad sign, right? And so the obfuscation isn’t in the actual product, it’s in how you pay for the product. And that creates opportunity for the like of an Affinity to show up.
Paul: Sure.
Rich: Now there is another company out there called Canva. They are a software as a service.
Paul: Okay.
Rich: And they have grown like a weed, just extremely popular. They let you pretty much create any graphical output without a lot of lift. Their whole thing…
Paul: Kind of, like, on your phone, and especially if you’re like making art that you want to put on Instagram.
Rich: Social media. Yeah, that’s right. And they, look, and they’re, they’ve gone everywhere. You could type in, “make a menu with Canva,” “make a business card with it.” Like there’s nothing left. They’re just going everywhere, right? And they’re doing great. And they acquired Affinity, this young upstart to Adobe. That’s a, that’s a moment, right? Like, I think join my prediction as to what they’re going to do?
Paul: Sure, of course I do.
Rich: You get Affinity for free if you’re a Canva subscriber.
Paul: I mean, why not? They’re also, they’re also saying they’re going to offer it to all the students in the world who want it…
Rich: They’re going.o do all kinds of wonderful—well there’s anxiety right now. People get scared when they, when their favorite tool gets acquired.
Paul: You know what’s hilarious is they had to come out, Canva came out and said, you know, this is our, we, we bought them and yeah, that’s real. But our promise to you is that you will get to buy this software and we won’t make it horrible. [laughter] Like, like just basically the actual thing that Canva had to come out and tell everyone is that you will be allowed to exchange money for goods and it won’t be a horrible long-term punitive experience.
Rich: I gotta say, I still stand by my prediction, which is if you don’t want to pay money and you use Canva, you get these cool tools.
Paul: Yeah, Affinity free edition! Yeah, sure.
Rich: Yeah. If you just want the cool tools, you can keep buying Affinity. And look, this is a good strategic move on their part. The browser only goes so far for, like, real hardcore photo editing and whatnot. Like, Figma really pushed the limit. Figma is an innovative piece of software. It is a hell of a piece of software to put inside of a browser. But photo editing is kind of its own animal. The tools used, the way the GPU is used—
Paul: You can run Photoshop in a browser now. It’s just, come on. It’s like, why do I…I own a synthesizer, we’ve talked about this before, and it has keys that you press. I can make all the sounds using my keyboard and mouse. But boy, that would be hard.
Rich: Yeah, and also, uh, look, that may be part of the plan. I don’t know their strategy for why they’d acquire it. I mean there’s, you know, browsers pretty much are just containers for hardcore software now. So here we are.
Paul: Well, I’ll tell you their strategy. Their strategy is to take money away that would normally go to Adobe.
Rich: Which leads me to the question I want to ask you, and let’s close out this topic with this question, because this isn’t about these two companies, this is about Adobe.
Paul: Right.
Rich: What’s the meeting at Adobe like on the other side of this announcement?
Paul: There’s not one meeting, there’s 6,000. [laughter] I mean, look, Adobe is…Adobe is a tricky one because Adobe is more like a Xerox in 1995 than it is the software company that makes Photoshop. It has Adobe Enterprise and sort of all the different consulting services around that and all the different publishing platforms. And I mean, it really does run a big chunk of the world that way.
Rich: And it will continue to. Also PDF, which is this bizarre, pretty much agreed upon format, is still under the Adobe banner in the strangest ways. It’s one of the stranger sort of gives-back-to-the world, because Adobe PDF is still a thing, but PDF is universally understood to mean the electronic version of a piece of paper.
Paul: I mean, Adobe is a world, right? You’ve got all these different software tools. You’ve got Photoshop and Elements and InDesign. You’ve got After Effects, so a lot of the video world. And then as you go down, they have, like, a stock photography service which we use where they kept jamming AI-generated images in. You have to tell it every time you don’t want AI-generated images even when you select photos. I’m a little bitter about that.
They did PDF. They have Adobe Experience Manager and Experience Cloud, which are their big marketing automation and management. They are just this entire universe and they’re very enterprise-down. Big purchases, you spend thousands if you’re an individual, to buy their software, but typically they really want to talk to businesses. And whenever you go to get a license, you just enter something that is just sort of nightmare bureaucracy where they’re just utterly indifferent to you. And so I think Canva’s trying to come from the entirely opposite direction. Everybody needs to be visual. We’ve created this whole new substrate of people who need to think visually with social media.
Rich: Adobe’s trying to get in there, I mean, to be clear. They have Adobe Express, they have a bunch, they have a million apps. Adobe, you have to give them credit for one thing. They’re going to put the thing out.
Paul: They will!
Rich: As soon as they see a threat. They can ear, they can earmark a team, take two dozen people and the app will come out.
Paul: They will. But frankly, this is not a great moment for them, right, because they can’t get down to the grassroots and come back up. And I think they really tried when they were going to buy Figma for $20 billion and they got their hands slapped. And so now if I’m Adobe—and I’m not, thankfully, and that’s one thing I’m glad I’m not—I am looking at a world where, because I steered so hard enterprise about 10 or 15 years ago, even though I’ve built a lot of tools, a lot of things on mobile that people are supposed to be able to reach out and touch as they’re figuring out their sort of path through the world of graphic design and creation, I am seeing that get sapped away from me. I am seeing Canva grab, you know, and I’m sure there are people inside of Adobe going, “We don’t care, there’s no money in it. They want to make stupid images for social media. They bought it for a couple hundred million dollars, and it’s a lousy Photoshop clone and we have a lot of lock-in in the industry.” But if I’m really Adobe? I think about you a lot of times, because you’re one of the most paranoid people I know in a business context, [laughter] which is praise.
Rich: Thank you.
Paul: You would be freaking out if you were Adobe right now. You’d be like,”They’re coming for us. They are absolutely coming for us. And we should not pretend…”
Rich: Yep.
Paul: “We are going to lose the next hundred million customers to this.”
Rich: Yes. Let’s not shed a tear for Adobe.
Paul: No.
Rich: Adobe’s revenue in 2018 was $7.6 billion.
Paul: Aw, good for them.
Rich: In 2023, it was $18 billion.
Paul: Yeah. So maybe they’re sitting there going—well, this actually brings us to our next topic of conversation, right? Which is we’re sitting here talking about Adobe like it’s, you know, it’s on its last leg.
Rich: Failure. Loser. Loser!
Paul: [laughing] Yeah, it’s in, each one of its limbs is in a cast, right?
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: Adobe is a fantastic success. Everyone inside of Adobe probably should be very proud, and the many millions or hundreds of millions of people love their products.
Rich: Yes.
Paul: And billions of people look at things that are made with Adobe products every single day.
Rich: Every single day. And they’ve always been—actually, I would consider them more nimble for their size than others. They’ve always, like, they moved their boxed software to subscription many years ago ahead of the game. And, you know, you have to be a little bold to cannibalize what you think is the sure bet.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: And they’ve been good at that. But let’s face it, Adobe, you know, Canva is one of those things that I think Adobe is defending the professional, and Canva’s like, “Well, you know what, we’re all professionals. There’s plenty of casual use of graphic tools and we want all of that.” Right?
Paul: This is the story.
Rich: And this is to eat away at that, right? And so… But let’s go back to the point you made very casually a minute ago. Why do we look at other people’s success and focus on the failures inside of the success?
Paul: You and I are terrible this way. This is one of our great failings as human beings, because we’ll say things—
Rich: I think this is one of our best qualities. But that’s the discussion we’re about to have.
Paul: [laughing] Fine. We’ll do another podcast later. We’ll be talking about something like, I don’t know, like Airtable. Airtable had to do a bunch of layoffs. Airtable is a database product on the web. It’s not…Aboard and Airtable have similar goals, but are very different kind of products for different audiences. So we keep a close eye on them, and at one point they’ll do a bunch of layoffs and so on and so forth. They’re still a $6 billion company.
Rich: Tons of revenue.
Paul: Tons of revenue. And we’ll be like, “Oh, boy. Well, there you go!”
Rich: A smashing success in every, by any measure, all the time—by the way, which I say all the time, Paul, you’re making me sound like a sour grapes guy…
Paul: No, no. But we go in on that failure. Another good example, you know, Apple with its smart cars, everyone is like, where did Google, you know, Google went so wrong.
Rich: Losers!
Paul: Google went wrong with AI. They could have had it, but they didn’t. And the people—
Rich: Where is the smart car. Where is it?
Paul: Where is it? Where’s all my stuff? Right?
Rich: No, no, but where is the smart? Like the prototype.
Paul: Oh, it’s in a basement. Yeah. Google—can you imagine the basements that large tech companies own where they’re able to put stuff? Storage facilities.
Rich: You know, who doesn’t mind, like, even showing you their ridiculous stuff? Amazon. You really, like, there was like a robot, it was like a tablet duct taped to like a dog robot at one point for Amazon or something. [laughing]
Paul: [laughing] Yeah. I mean, there was the Amazon phone. There was that.
Rich: You know what? They just go in, this is shameless. They’re like, “Oh, that failed. Delete! Shift-delete!”
Paul: Yeah, well, and also, they had Bezos. He would get onstage. Like, now they don’t have—nobody even knows what the new guy looks like. So…
Rich: No.
Paul: It’s less exciting.
Rich: Why do we do that? Why do we sort of focus in on the weaknesses? And, you know, part of it is, I think, human nature and envy, I think that’s part of it. I don’t think I carry a lot of that. I’m always dumbfounded by success. I’m happy that they succeeded, but I’m always like, I can’t believe the masses bought that nonsense. That’s me.
Paul: You are always shocked, I think it’s a very Lebanese thing where you just assume that the people who make all the money are really sharp, really sharp-edged, and just figured a lot of stuff out, and then they went out there and they made all the money.
Rich: And they deserve it.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: Yeah, it’s deserved. [laughing]
Paul: This is America. You have, like, your dad did pretty good, and now you own six used-car dealerships. And your car and your house combined are worth $7 million. It’s just absolutely the most bananas society ever, maybe since, like, ancient Rome. But don’t worry, it worked out great for them. [laughter] So, like, here we are. And I think so you get shocked by that. I think there is just a very, very natural tendency, as a primate, to look at a company like Apple and go, “Ugh, they suck.”
Because essentially, if you don’t do that, it’s a very tricky position because—and you know, you know where you see this, actually, I didn’t put this in the newsletter, but you see this with Elon Musk. He’s either—and you see it with Donald Trump. I think companies also have the same relationship, where you either are like, I want that out of my brain and far away from me, or, you are like, well, I better look up to that. That’s the king of the world. There we go.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And those two individuals in particular, it’s very pronounced, but you also see it—people used to get Apple tattoos. I’m sure they still do.
Rich: [small wounded noise] Okay.
Paul: [laughing] Very few people, less so with Microsoft. But like a loyalty and identity and a fealty towards these giant brands and these platforms, and it’s very sort of primal, and I think that there is a very natural urge to reject that. To go like, “Ah, to hell with them.”
Rich: Is it compet—is it just competitiveness? Is that what’s going on?
Paul: Look, we’re tribal, right? We are humans who live in a relationship to other people in our cohort. And what happens, I think, and I think media does this especially, you’re in this industry, and you’re aware of yourself in the industry, and the giant platform company is there, and it’s very present. And so it’s hard to have no opinion. But I think you should, at some level.
Rich: Do you think that it’s just us being competitive, like wanting to win? Because it motivates me. I like, I like folk—I turn them into a villain.
Paul: I think that that is a mistake.
Rich: Oh… NOW you’re telling me? I’m fuck, I’m 54, dude.
Paul: I think that what do we want to do, right, as a business? It’s very easy to have a conversation about all the other people and what they are doing. I’ll give you a good example. Do you go out and raise venture capital? Right? Well, it would be nice to have more money. But then everybody tells us that VC is ridiculous. And you end up in this swirl of conversation about this thing that ends up being about the industry as a whole as opposed to what you need to accomplish.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And over and over, we have these narratives and we have to push through them in order to figure out what success would be for us. And I see this a lot of times where people are very judgmental of relatively small efforts because they don’t behave or act like giant platform companies. Just sort of like, people have internalized models for how things should behave at all times, and the world just doesn’t line up that way. And so you end up internalizing, like, venture-capital thinking and giant-platform thinking and so on, and that keeps you away from focusing on your own near-term or even long-term goals.
Rich: Look, man, I’m gonna be blunt. To close this out with some bluntness.
Paul: Blunt away.
Rich: Most people don’t have that level of maturity, and I think there’s something more fundamental going on.
Paul: Really? Are you saying on our own marketing podcast that you and I happen to have that level of maturity?
Rich: I don’t. You just told me. I don’t.
Paul: That’s true. I don’t either. [laughter]
Rich: So I’m not flattering myself in any way. Here’s what I want to get at, get at here. And I think this is natural. I don’t think this makes people bad. When we see in the gossip rags that someone very powerful falls, it is arguably just as satisfying as, like, a, you eever see, there’s a donut burger where you can have the sugar from a donut and the fat and salt from a burger.
Paul: Oh, the Krispy Kreme burger. Yeah.
Rich: Yeah. It is satisfying to us, because the truth is, it isn’t about them. It is about us. And it is about how we have to go to work every day, and then we have to wait five months to go on vacation. And when you see people who seem to have infinite freedom and infinite money and infinite power fall, it makes us feel a little bit better about ourselves. And I think that’s natural. I think that’s normal.
Paul: I mean, I’ll tell you, I remember—remember when Tiger Woods got caught having all of his affairs?
Rich: Do I!
Paul: And it kind of spilled out and spilled out and spilled out. That was a good time for a lot of marriages in America. [laughter] Because, you know, guys went home, and it was like every single—
Rich: “Look, I’m not perfect, but, look—”
Paul: “Yeah, honey—I never did that.” Right?
Rich: “I never did that.”
Paul: And so, I think there is, I, over my, the course of my life, have come to believe less and less in any particular ideology or any particular anything, and more and more that we are always trying to see where we exist in relationship to all the others. And one of the things that has made life so confusing in the last 15 years is that instead of that being the other people in your, you know, you’re teaching in the English department, or, you know, you work at the muffler shop. How am I doing? You now are comparing yourselves constantly in terms of ideology and belief system and financial success and romantic success to thousands of people all day long. And I think that a lot of times, when we talk about how humans can’t handle as much information as being projected into them, I don’t think it’s the information. I think you can, I used to read all day, and that didn’t overwhelm me.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: But what is overwhelming is 20,000 little signifiers telling you where you are compared to all the other primates in—
Rich: You never give. You’re never there.
Paul: No.
Rich: You’re never winning. Right? Like, you’re never there. I think it’s part of why, like, I think the big part of the, of England loves the royal family, because I think they’re like, I’m part of that. Like, that is something that I’m connected to. Yeah, they’re royalty, and there’s no more royalty in the world. But what does your country have? Right? So they feel like they get to actually have some of it. There’s others that obviously want to take them down a notch for all the other reasons I just mentioned before. But I think, ultimately, you know what, a test for me, Paul? A test for me is if, when people say to me, and I’ve been trying harder to say it to others, by the way, that I’m really, really happy for you.
Paul: Mmm.
Rich: Because when you say, I’m really happy for you, you’re essentially shedding that instinct that you have to brutally judge yourself and just be actually genuinely happy for someone else in that moment. Right? You still go home, and you’re like, man, that is a big house they have. [laughter] That is a really big house. That’s okay. You can still go home and have that feeling. But tell them you’re happy—if they’re good people, tell them you’re happy for them. If they’re bad people, don’t tell them anything. Go home.
Paul: No, just, you know, have an hors d’oeuvre.
Rich: And I got to say, I observe it, and it’s rare. It’s very rare. Nobody tweets out and nobody puts on Threads, “I couldn’t be happier. This is, like, one of the nicest professors you’ll ever meet. I had this guy seven years ago. He’s the best.”
Paul: That’s not. news
Rich: “He’s just the best.”
Paul: Nobody wants that.
Rich: [laughing] That’s not news! That’s not news! Right. Exactly.
Paul: [overlapping] It’s not interesting. No, no. We created these amazing mechanisms for communicating, for everyone to communicate where they are in the hierarchy and to sort of angle upwards and that is just absolute catnip to humans. You gotta lean in.
Rich: [overlapping] It’s just catnip, right. Exactly.
Paul: I feel that a lot of technology news and a lot of news about how to run a business—and I’ll tell you the last bit of, you know, we used to run the agency together. People constantly would come to me, assuming I was an idiot, which, okay, I get that. And they would be like, “How come you’re not, you know, you got to get in on machine learning, or you got to get in on crypto, or you got to get in on—”
Rich: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: And I was like, yeah, “I don’t know, man. You know, we’re kind of busy. Like, we’re delivering these relatively stable platforms to large companies, and they keep paying us,” and they’re like, “[comically derisive noise] Good luck with that, chum!”
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And always used to blow my mind, because I’m like, I thought you were supposed to do the boring thing.
Rich: Yeah.
Paul: And it turns out that everybody thought that was a huge letdown. That’s where I’m getting to. I’m really, and I’m sort of hitting you with it, and I’m hitting me with it as we are planning the next phase of this company, we’re launching a bunch of new stuff, we’re kind of going back out to marketing. Our metrics should not be compared to anything else. It should be compared to, can we make incremental progress towards kind of revenue-positive and a good team? And if we can get there, then we can get to the next step. Like, just compare to your own past, not to where anybody else is.
Rich: You know? I got to tell you, Paul, I mean, what you’re saying here isn’t business advice. It’s kind of good life advice, which is, like, otherwise you’re—you ever see, meet, like, someone very successful who is unhappy? Like, not only unhappy, but feels like the world is just not getting it. They’re not getting it at all. I’m like, good God, man, just be happy.
Paul: I mean, dude, that’s most of them.
Rich: That’s most of them.
Paul: Yeah.
Rich: Makes me think of that Uber guy that got ousted.
Paul: Oh yeah, Travis—
Rich: He was just miserable all the time.
Paul: Yeah, Travis Kalanick.
Rich: I mean, he was kind of a douche, but he was also kind of miserable, always.
Paul: Yeah yeah.
Rich: He was always really unha—I’m like, dude, you fixed car rides in the world for everybody in the world, and you gave people jobs—
Paul: WELL, now— [laughing] Let’s not—
Rich: [overlapping] Look man, I grew up—
Paul: I’m gonna let that sail by.
Rich: No, no, no. I’m gonna say it, as a New Yorker, I’m glad that the medallion mafia went away. I think that’s a good thing.
Paul: They are. Do you remember the guy who owned all the medallions—so medallions in New York City give you the right to operate a taxi, and they’ve been aggregated into medallion holders. And one of the guys, they make so much money, or they made so much money that one of the guys had a bar mitzvah for his kid, invited Nicki Minaj, and it made big news.
Rich: There’s pictures. There’s an article on the internet, the Nicki Nicki Minaj bar mitzvah. It’s one of the best photos on the internet.
Paul: Yeah. And it’s medallions.
Rich: Let’s close it with that.
Paul: It’s medallion money, right? So, okay. Okay. I’m with you on that. I don’t have any—Uber gives me weird tum-tum feelings, but—
Rich: No, I get that.
Paul: But medallions are also, were not good for New York City.
Rich: Both not good for the tum-tum.
Paul: Anyway, here we are. Here we are.
[outro music]
Rich: Check out aboard.com. Reach out at hello@board.com. We love to talk to people. We love to hear about how technology is impacting their lives, whether at work or at home. So reach out to us. Paul, have a lovely week.
Paul: Hey, thank you, Richard. You too. I’m hoping your throat feels better. We can get back in the office. It’s better when we record in person.
Rich: It really is.
Paul: It’s not as much fun looking at you through a screen. All right, everybody, everybody do good and let us know if you need anything. We’ll talk to you soon.
Rich: A great week.
Paul: Bye.