Good investment and you would be right. A basket of those stocks which include hill brarngsd which makes caskets, is up 5 just this month. Those baskets of casket are c l called a motive. The other are china, internet and natural gas gluten. Joined by John Schwartz of usa today and Colleen Taylor of tech crunch. So i have to ask but a death basket. It is something that makes sense all of a sudden, as people get old. What are examples of these baskets work out for . You might ask a question, does pay to lobby or not . The kings of k street being the home of lobbyists. A lot of what we do is not just the Stock Selection of help people discould have here are the biggest lobbyers in america but a lot around the waiting methodology. These things, basket wes call a motifs are 30 stocks, intelligently weighed to enable anybody to act investing. It could be a hot new trend like death. It took our ph. D. S a year to build 120. Customers eight months to build 55,000. Usergenerated. You get a royalty if someone buys your motif, so theres an incentive to go out and do that. These expressions cab trend, trading strat strat jury with buy the most wasnt down, when people panic, i want to pick them up or my old professor, runs yales investment. We take the expression, one click, put 1 million. My old p investment. We take the expression, one click, put 1 million. What are some of your more popular caskets sorry. China internet is doing well. We call that internally waiting for ali baba, kings of k street. Whether you call it a tablet or fab let, tablet takeover is doing well. One of the most viral ones is seven deadly sins. It is literally about cigarettes, lust, the wrest ling companies shall the gun companies. What is nice you can think of them, not etfs, we think they are better. I will ask but that in a minute. We allow to you take one of the motifs, i am not a bank person, make different sin, you can adjust the weighting. You can tate one of these motifs and make them your very own. Personalization, tail searing a powerful force, people customize what they know. You touched on etfs, lets get to that. An etf is a basket of stocks. How is this different than an etf . You just renamed them motif . A lot different u buy an etf it is a fund, a group basket. So when you buy an etf, buy shares in the etf company that happens to hold a basket of stocks. What weve done in this world, post a lot of things, i want to know what im investing in. The problem with mutual funds and etfs, you dont know what youre invested in. Tend to list them. Mutual funds quarterly disclose what they hold at a snapshot period, you dont know any time. You look on the screen, you dont know our mold, we have a ton of realtime fractional share trading. We give you a basket, its your basket. Take as little as two 50, put them across 30 stocks, what youre owning is. 25 shares of am, you actually own it, whereas an etf, document. The advantage of our mold there are no ongoing fees, transparent, what you see is what you own, you cant do that with any of the other fund product, if you dont like what you see, you can change it. Store, is about personalized investing. My wife and i, similar outlooks, but very different perspectives. She wants to invest in no glass ceilings, womenled companies, wants to invest in green tech. For me, we might have the same allocation model view, but i believe shale oil is super important for our country. Take two very similar percentage other products out there will say just, you know, just enjoy a bunch of etfs, we are saying, no you can do that if you want to come us to, we have a whole set of models, traditional products. For us, next general ray existing generation, knowing what youre investing has become a very important point. How risky is this . I know when im shopping for a mutual fund for etf to be part of, like it look at the management boards of whoever is kulg the different stocks that go in there and makes me feel lot better if they have been doing this at the same mutual fund since 1980 or 1990 or something. I dont typically like to see someone who started doing this a couple years ago. What im hearing from you, this is a relatively new kind of way of choosing stocks. You have got thousands of people the internet doing this. What is the risk . You have seen a lot of etfs have grown to be a trillion dollar business overnight, the old paradigm of actually having someone look after your money hasnt actually turned out. What people have learned, active investing, people get very are you active or passive . We use indexes, think of peter lynch meets jack vogel, great concepts, but you cant pick stocks. This notion, tons of research saying you cant pick stocks. What you can do is control your costs, know what youre investing in and really think about the perspective you want. And churning a bunch of stocks as a manager, i think there had are more people waking up to the fact that is not necessarily the way to go. We give you data, a sense of analyt analytics, you can assess risk, one of the things we will work on last year is like i can express an opportunity, i can express a risk, i might be worried about a 20 drop, might be worried about a european banking crisis and see risk modeling, take that expression of risk and in one click, allow you it to protect yourself this notion we want investing be easy, a sixth grader can do it. What are my sneeze why where are you making your money is say ininvest 100 in i like natural gas glut. I invest 100 in natural gas glut. How much going into owning the shares and how much are you getting . Whether you put 100 or 1 million, we get 9. 95 to give you a 30stock basket that you can customize. Try to do this at a traditional as long as i dont change it, move it. If you change it or move it you have another if its multiple stocks, if its a single stock, its 4. 95. But contrast that trying to do this at a traditional online broker, they charge 10. Say i own. 25 of am, i have no voting share there i have no dividend there, right . You have dividends, a fractional. Absolutely. And so, and thats the nice part about actually owning it you can take stock delivery on a fractional share. Whacky cop sent but it is doable. Thats kind of the model that we he do. What is the typical motif investing user . Whats your user base look like . Actually remarkable. When i wrote the Business Plan i thought woe get 30yearolds, millennials, a social platform as well. Our lair adopters surprised us, over 65, High Net Worth investors and originally their play money. What we have done over time, we have been on the market a little over a year and a quarter now. What we have seen now you is we have got demographics across the board. Women is an interesting segment for us because its a very visual product. We have kids, you know, winter to a sixth grade school and got kids, like, really interested in investing and day traders trading a motif 30 stocks, 20, 30 times a day while telling their friends about it. It is remarkable, one of our marketing challenges so many different customer base. How popular are you among people who dont usually invest . We would you appeal to someone who had reluctance . One of the things i think investing is is about we have a very simple view of life, care about what you invest in, want you to engage. A group of investors, set it and forget it, keep my cost loan, i will check in once a year to see what youre doing. We have a product called horizon. What we do for them that cat gear, completely free, dont make any money at all, no management fees, no transaction fees, you dont pay 9. 95, completely free. cause what we have learned, people this that category, one of the first things they ask you is help me do this, they will put in 50,000, 100,000 they he get to some degree of complexity, what we have done is launched a new business recently where we are working with Financial Advisers now who we then refer them to and monetize the Financial Advisers. I hate to end on a negative, what is the biggest dog in the moment tea motif, the one that went nowhere . Getting into healthy foods, healthy foods. Soy . Soy nuts . Junk food is doing really well. That thing on the vending machine what do you want, oh, apples, the apples the junk food motif is trounce it. Thanks for having me. You bet. The man who pulls so many strings in Silicon Valley, david simoff discusses with weather shah mom can help mooks. When press here continues. Apologize, for the way, by mispronouncing your name about the tease, so excited about sheaing a shmoop and mook. An article in Business Insider said this started over several glasses of wipe about starting to write gat biabout gatsby. I used to have hair and an earring. Lived in lon done. You struck true to your artistic roots more than, did i i had a 15, 18year career, got lucky in the bubble, founded yahoo , one of the original investors, my wife the original employ yesterday, lived through this internet revolution that shrunk the world. All these things happened in a short period of time. The Wealth Creation was a corollary piece of it, but if you think about how easy it is to communicate, connect with people to do tasks today versus 20 years ago, its a different planet. And education somehow got left behind in that whole shrinking process. The friction against learning never really got addressed well. We rail against being called cliff notes, we empower students to read mork the goal is for them study more and to love the literature the way we do. I wrote all the original guides an experiment really are. Which put them up and very hopefully humorous, almost they are clever. I do find i do find it amusing and this show is not about net worth, its about p p entrepreneurship, here is this billionaire, a couple glasses of wine, brig great gatby and some kid in nebraska learning from it. The whole goal was to make kids love learning, to feel learning, not just to know it. And i didnt know if my voice would resonate frankly, the creative artist in my 20s, miles on my tires change that. We put up the websites, no advertising, no press, no nothing, a million users showed up three months later with thousands of emails saying you are hysterical, we love this, i want to teach this in my class. I want to off they are in my library, how do i get it . We just started having a real sales force, just relatively very recently. But people just emailed us and it was that little amount of good praise that just made us say, hey, we have a business here. What is a shmoop . Shmoop is a yiddish word. My grandmother, which this i was very, very close to, i miss her very much, i lived with her, actually, while i was in film school, would say, you know, honey, you shmoop me my vodka gimlet and my chocolates. It means to move something forward a little bit. And many of the educational efforts have failed because people tried change the world overnight rather than let him get to his i know where youre going, rather than just shmoop it forward. Rather than move something forward a little bit, thats actually attainable, if youre some heavy, outofshape guy, running a big mar tonight next day doesnt help you, it kills you, so we thought the address, what Silicon Valley taken for education, revolutionary things painted teachers as the enemy, a friend, the wrong way to go. What is always the resistance for kids learning the classics, like catcher in the wry, once they start reading that, they are hooked, i think, then thats an exception probably. The smart kids that you hang out with, yes, are hooked. But a lot of times, theres its question of depth. So they can be hooked on the story at a given level but they dont understand the 5 words the teacher will use behind them, whats existential theory, so on, we try to make a nice touch with the twilightesque reference. That draws them in. For now. Until yeah. Rewrite it. Often, when i talk to teachers or people in the education space, the reason that they are sort of resistant to some sort of apps like this is because you cant tell if a kid is look act his phone, if hes reading shmoop or if he is texting a friend or if he is cheating in some way. What do you see as the big resistance when teachers might be a little nervous about bringing shmoop in their classrooms. We have 10 million users in the United States now, so i dont know how much resistance theres been, frankly. Most people hably, think i can arrogantly say now with the data in, people love us, we make learning easier, we make it deeper. I think teachers get younger as well. My dad was a School Superintendent answered really railed against the first kids who were doing book reports on power point. Because he said, hold on, we are just learning power point. We are not learning book reports. I agree with him. I am uncomfortable when i see ipads in the classroom bus i think, oh, could i teach a class without a ipad, if you do it with a literal slate, you dont need a tablet. However,ize think teachers get younger, they will more adopt some of these newer ideas. Boy, your dad would fit well at shmoop. We feel the same way. The number of incredibly highpowered brains that have been put to task to repurpose old, boring content in clever, Software Packages on mobile phones and on power point things and whatever has about awesome. But nobody solved the basic issue, the original content written 200 years ago was boring. Its hard to read. Not relevant today. The people who designed our academic system designed it 350 years ago and weve not really groan gro grown. Trying to teach something that 2 or 300 years old and trying to give it a relevant spin. My wifes a teacher, im thinking shmoop is kind of a tool among many tools she could use to kind of engaging kids. We hope so we should talk. Have her call me. You can talk during the commercial break, back with david sim minute in just a minute. Minute. Minute. Minute. Minute. Welcome back to press here, talking with David Siminoff and john schwart ofz usa today. Given all your suck southwest yahoo , amazon, paypal what made you decide to do something, as you said, egalitarian . Egalitarian in the sense of leveling the play willing field. You shouldnt have to be a rich kid to understand how the system works in america. And it starts with simply loving learning. It goes into test preparation, College Application preparation, and career preparation, thinking about what the futures gonna be. A lot of poor kids in this country dont have parents who can actually explain to them, hires how Venture Capital works. Heres how Silicon Valley works. Their parents are service people, whatever, dont have but they happen to have a smart, curious kid or one who just wants to work hard and make their life better. Well, we offer shmoop at a small fraction, 2 to 5 of what the typical retail price was for various test prep, at a price so low, there was money was not an excuse for anyone not to take our system. And we found phenomenal results. We have all kinds of test case from the poorest areas outside of palm springs, we have all kinds of data and test cases to rich the highest scores are actually aligned with the higher income areas . Thats true and the balance of efficacy of the test these we raise the snootiest prep kids scores as well as the agricultural communities and happy to say, yiddish humor accepted. Talk about mook, massively online open courses. Open courses. Do you see those being way to the help underprivileged kids as well . Not as successfulize think we hope they had were going to be . Started with such a bang and kind of fizzled out. The problem was the Completion Rate was low, you typically had a lot of nobel prizewing geniuses giving boring lectures. That is great. Other eight nobel Prize Winners that category thought the lecture was awesome. I kind of contributed to that, too. There was a stanford Computer Programming course and i signed for it, two classes and dropped out, only because i wanted to see what it was like, so i am part of the dropout i think the dropout rate is not as bad as it has to a lot of people tried it because it was free. Yeah. What would you do with mooks that would make them more successful . They need to be relevant they need to be real, not to be taught by nobel Prize Winners, need to be taught by normal people who can make you laugh and make you engage and so on. We have a course on reality television. We have one on breaking bad. We have one called bruce spring steeps america. We also teach calculus and algebra ii and u. S. History, ap, remedial, somewhere in the middle and we are in spanish, chinese, korean and arabic as well. So, we truly speak to a global audience. Its been all about engagement. If you loft learning, youre gonna do it more and youre gonna get more from the process and understand. David, let had me pivot, about three minutes left and you are a very successful Silicon Valley investor, other than ed tech what are you excited about . Boy, it is hard not to ignore Wearable Technology and some of the other sort of selfempowering technologies that are out there, you know, when i invest, i think about the 35year cycle, look at Television Commercials from cocacola, similar to what they were 35 years ago, tend to repeat each another brand and brand equity, that guides a lot of what i do. You mentioned wearables. What specifically . I read a story that smartphone fatigue already . There is. And i think it will look nothing like mooks, which did moon shot and then came back, landing in the ocean. I think there were zealots who tried everything, bought eight pairs of the brace lets and this and that. And the efficacy is Getting Better and it actually speaks to you and you have a community of people who are also struggling, running up to the dish at stanford and its just a very nice, positive affirmation and for not much money, you get incredible value from these properties so im really interested in that whole domain these days if i have to pick one. And you bet on the jockey, not the horse. So, i find the talent and the engineers who i really like and thats typically how go with, no matter what the idea is. Max talking about before, could pitch me, i want to dominate row mainian sink faucet and i have a blank check. Yes. Yes. Speaking of jockeys, they are younger, we have been around for a few years, weve seen this happen and with the quick money, your dad at was hewlettpackard, right, it was slow money, it was build a company, does that alarm you at all . My dad sold to hewlett pack card, he was the founder of his own company. I come from, you know, the child of a entrepreneur and so on but youre right, the Silicon Valley i grew up in and i did grow up here is so different from today and get rich slow was the greatest generations ethos. It took 25 years to make your first million dollars. Now, if you were the masseuse at facebook, you got that, you know, in a daily ipo snap. So the worlds different. Shortterm greed and longterm greed are in this wrestling match and i dont know who wins. We will find out. David siminoff of shmoop, thank you ever so much for being with us this morning. Thanks for having me. Press here will be back in just a moment. We were just talking with David Siminoff about shoe map and all the Different Things he, himself, wrote about, and says if you want to try one, try the writup about Hotel California at shmoop, shmoop. Com. Thats our show for this week, my thanks to my guests. Im scott mcgrew. Thanks for making us part of your sunday morning. \s hello and welcome to comunidad del vallely. Im damian true he yoechl today, the Latino Coalition of Silicon Valley and the music of los guys we begin on the fight with diabetes. N nor ma is here. Welcome to the show i was told things are not Getting Better, but worse. Look at the numbers. Tell us about that. They are getting much worse. The epidemic is