What is Spill and could it (finally) kill Twitter?
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Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Max Uffberg, standing in for Yaz Gagne, who was out sick this week. And to switch things up even more, I'm joined by MIC's producer, Avery Miles. Hey, Avery. Hi, Max.

So you and I are leading the charge this week. Yes. Yes. How are we feeling? Pretty good. Pretty good. Different being behind the mic instead of behind everything else. How does it feel for you? Good. It gives me a new appreciation for what Josh and Yaz do. Before we go on with the show, Avery, any updates for this week? Yes, we do have a couple. Apply for MIC. The early deadline is August 25th, but the window extends to October 6th.

So check that out. And we also have our Fast Company Innovation Festival coming up this fall. Those dates are September 18th through the 21st. And then finally, check out our Fast Company Digest. This is a short weekly podcast from Fast Company Magazine highlighting essential reads from tech, design, and work life.

All good updates. And later on today's episode, we will listen to Yaz's interview with Rebag founder and CEO Charles Gora about building his business in the resale industry. But first, there's a new Twitter or ex on the block. And here to give us a sneak peek is Alfonso Fonz Terrell, co-founder and CEO of Spill. Hey, Fonz. Hey, Max. How you doing?

Doing all right. How are you? Good. Busy. Exciting times. Let's talk about Spill. Tell us a little bit, how did you come up with the idea? What did that sort of look like building up to the launch?

Sure. So Spill, for those who may not be familiar, is a visual conversation platform that moves at the speed of culture, we like to say. And it was created by myself and my co-founder, Devaris Brown. Both of us are former Twitter employees. We started on the same day.

about four years ago and we were one of the few black folks in the group so we became fast friends and fast forward to last fall I was part of the first wave of Elon Musk cutbacks at Twitter one of 3 700 people that got let go and that night I reached out to devars we have very complimentary skill sets he's a great technologist my background's in marketing and social content and I was like

Like, if anybody could build something that would be next gen, it would be us. You want to go on this ride with me? And he was like, let's do it. So fast forward to about six weeks ago, we released our invite-only beta into the Apple App Store.

We had a pretty solid wait list of about 80,000 people and we were slowly letting people in. And then over the July 4th weekend, we got discovered, one might say, by a variety of communities on Twitter and off. And we had over 100,000 people join the platform in less than three days.

And it's been a wild ride ever since. Now, is it still invite only? It is still invite only because we are a beta product, which means we are still very much testing and building some foundational pieces to ensure everyone has a great experience. Can you talk a little bit about those foundational pieces? Like what are you doing to improve the product and to differentiate it from X and the other competitors?

Yeah, I think when Devarus and I initially talked about building a platform, we really wanted to focus on three things. First, this challenge that has faced Twitter, but also many other social platforms as well, of really keeping people safe, protecting especially marginalized groups, Black folks, queer folks.

other audiences outside of the United States who often create all the cool stuff and really make these platforms sing with the energy and the new lexicon and the dances and all of that. They often get the most hate and especially women too. And so we really wanted to focus on building a platform that was first fun, second much safer,

especially for marginalized audiences. And third, more rewarding and having a better ability to credit and highlight these creators who really drive culture, not just on Twitter, but all social platforms.

Can I just jump in about creating a fun space? How do you ensure that it's fun? Yeah. When you look at what's most fun about social, especially real-time platforms, it's the memes. It's the conversation around your interests. It's co-viewing your favorite show and chatting with people in real time. And so that's really what we set out to build Spill for. So for those that have not seen the product yet,

It kind of looks like a cross between like a group chat and a social platform. And our native sort of post, which we call a spill, is actually mixed media. It's about adding text to an image, to a GIF, to a video, which we see all over social and has been around on the internet since the beginning of it. But nobody's really like built for that. So it's just really easy to do that on spill. And then, of course, when you look at the products,

It's colorful. It's dynamic. There's a lot of motion. What's it like fundraising for an app at a time when so many Twitter alternatives have popped up? It's a great question. And especially given the macroeconomic environments, one might think this is not the optimal time to go build a new tech platform. But the problems are so acute, particularly facing the communities that we come from and that we're building for, especially when you look at

the the change in tone even on a platform like twitter since elon took over hate speech rising by multiples and just a fundamental shift in the way content moderation policies are being enforced these problems are real it was never perfect and it's getting worse on these platforms and so what we're out here looking to build

is really not another Twitter. I don't think there's ever another anything, to be honest. I think it's really about what's the next generation of social media going to look like and how can we learn from everything that's happened over the past 10 to 15 years. And that was really our pitch to our initial investors. And honestly, for the people that got it, it only took about five, 10 minutes of conversation and they were like, okay, let's rock. What's next? You said you didn't want to be the next Twitter. What do you think about Twitter slash X?

Yeah, well, the rebrand, especially as someone who worked at Twitter for several years, my focus was very much in a brand function, crafting the voice of Twitter on Twitter and in many places off the platform as well. You know, it's tough to see this happen in a way that goes counter to a lot of the things that we spent many years building and we're very proud of.

And at the same time, I think it highlights, frankly, just the latest in a series of missteps by the new ownership and something that will signal to people and continue to signal to people that whatever Twitter was, it's not going to be the same thing that you enjoyed before. And especially for us at Spill, when we think about our brand, again, something that's from our product to the way we communicate to our audience, to the colors and the design and the energy and the visuals and all of that, it

It's exciting for us if someone's looking for something new, something exciting. And how do you think about content moderation, especially as Spill moves out of invite-only mode and starts scaling up its user base?

to all the patient people who have been on the wait list some people for many many months at this point we we appreciate your patience that's why we're staying in beta for a little while longer the invite only beta because we have a couple of basic things that we're building that will ensure that as more and more people come on and we open the doors fully and we will eventually open the doors fully that it is a fun safe rewarding experience for everyone sort of out the gate

So the first thing that we're building that's pretty exciting is the first large language model AI that's being trained by black folks, queer folks, and the folks that get the most hate online for content moderation. We believe we're one of the first companies to actually just straight up focus on this problem, and we've already started implementing it together with our human moderation teams.

which is already creating a tremendously different type of community from the beginning. So that's number one. I think number two, and this is actually more number one than the number one I just shared, is it's our mission as a company. We spend a good amount of time composing our company and community guidelines, which you can see on our website on spill.com, that make it abundantly clear that we just don't tolerate hate speech or harassment or anything, especially towards people

historically marginalized groups in the US and around the world, period. So I think that's a really, really big differentiator and something that we learned from our previous experiences working at other major platforms that we felt could really make a difference. And then I think the third thing is really the community itself, right? They call themselves the Spillionaires, the people on the platform right now. It's already becoming this really vibrant kaleidoscope of interests and creative individuals who

have created Art Spill and Music Spill and Foodie Spill. Man, don't look at Foodie Spill. If I look at that right now, I'll be salivating. But all these folks on the platform now take that mission really seriously to create a safe community. So they are very active in...

You're pointing out this is not the energy that we want. So that really helps and counts for a lot as well. You mentioned training the algorithms more specifically to police for certain terminology. Yeah, totally. How does that work? This was a conversation that Devaris and I had before ChatGPT and all that stuff blew up last year. We were really interested in the potential of these tools to be applied for a moderation use case.

based on the data that it gets trained on, right? So we have to train it on specific data sets so that it can recognize not just the terms themselves, but also who's saying the terms. So when you join Spill, you register, you have the option to share your personal ethnic background and things like that, which many people have been willing to do because they know we're using that as a way to create a safer community, a more inclusive community.

So we, for the most part, know who is saying what to whom. So that really matters a lot in these contexts. And so it's training the model to, for a concrete example, if a white supremacist is saying a term like brownie or ninja.

It really is not maybe going to get caught by another language model if it doesn't have the context and everything that our models have and also the other data that we surround it with to be able to say, this is probably not the kind of content we want on the platform. So it can automatically flag it.

I'm curious, are there any creator collaborations in the works or anything of that nature? Yeah, we actually have already done some great collaborations with creators. When we released the invite-only beta in June, we had our first advertiser, actually, Lionsgate Films. They ran a 360 integrated campaign with us. We have some promoted products already on the platform that...

They ran trailers for this film called The Blackening. And then we took several creators who were early on Spill, shout out to Vibin Witte and Jenna Brittany, Miss J, DMV, go check them out, to the red carpet premiere of the film in New York. And they got to create content and Spill from the carpet and meet a lot of the cast. So that was really exciting and exciting.

Crediting and rewarding creators is a big part of our mission as well. So there's going to be a lot more to come later this year as we build out those capabilities. But the vision is very much to have a symbiotic relationship between our advertiser ecosystem and our creator rewards ecosystem. I was going to ask about the advertising. What's your policy about advertising on the platform? How is that going to stand out from other social media ads?

It's one of our revenue pillars. It's not exclusively the only thing that we're focused on. But again, the demand is there. And especially for the audiences that we're building for Black communities, queer communities, other marginalized groups. We've gotten a lot of inbounds from some really amazing partners who want to work with us. And our message to them is,

We're really in this growth stage. We are absolutely down to collaborate and connect, but we want to do it in a way that's really supporting and feeding the community and coming into it mindfully rather than just we're going to start shoving performance media down everybody's throats right away.

I would say also how we price these models is really important. I think especially for brands who want to reach Black communities or queer communities in a way that's going to be meaningful. I think that that piece is really going to be exciting on Spill because we're building a lot of products where most brands have to go hire a creator agency and then go work with the platforms and do all this stuff.

Our system is going to have everything built in and you're going to be able to know who talks about the kinds of verticals your product is in, how active they are, and have a really seamless way to activate with them that the creators are going to be into and makes it easier for the platforms. There's just so much friction. It's like, how do you find the people? How do you execute around it? How do you make sure that it's

priced appropriately. And I think especially for Black creators and queer creators who always over-deliver, like their content tends to always over-perform against benchmarks, we need to price those units accordingly. You don't go into Tiffany's and see a rare diamond and pay less. You pay more. So that's something that's going to be a big focus for us as well.

Yeah, know your value. We're going to take a quick break, followed by Yaz's interview with Charles Gora about how luxury bags can be turned into assets. And then we will circle back for our Keeping Tab segment. ♪

I guess to start off with, I want to talk a little bit about resale generally. Resales we know has blown up into a several billion dollar industry at this point over the past few years. Its popularity seems to be exploding. I'm curious what led you to start Rebag and why you decided to focus on bags and accessories?

Yeah, I started the business eight years ago when certainly we did not invent resale. Resale was already happening, but it was a little bit more under the radar than it is now. But I think I had some of the shared trends that you see now were in my interest, including everything around sustainability. I think I had the conviction that over time,

And that was almost a decade ago. This would become priority topic for everyone. So that's a big part of what we do here. And also as a consumer, I've always been interested in luxury. I've always been value centric, you could say. So that's also something I very much like in resale is how you can access things that are amazing and that maybe you couldn't get otherwise.

And why bags to start off with? Yeah, that's a great question. The bags has more to do with unit economics and more like financial operability and sustainability of the company. Initially, I was attempting more around dresses because I had worked at Rent the Runway. So that's kind of how all of this got started. I was in business school and I met the founder of Rent the Runway. And

I became obsessed with it and passionate. And so I was like, oh, let me do something that's not rental. And so I started with dresses and I figured the economics are rather thin. And so we were looking for something where the product sustains itself over time. There's not as much damage. It's easy to ship from e-commerce perspective. There's not that many sizes. It's

It retains value. So it has all these characteristics that makes it easier to create economics around it. Tell me about building the business. At the time when you started, obviously resale was a thing. It was in the conversation, but what was it like to get funding? And do you think people's enthusiasm for resale has changed now? Well,

Oh, yeah, for sure. Everything is so much mainstream now. But at the time, you're correct. We're not really phase one, right? I think you could consider us like phase two of resale businesses. Like we got started in like 2014. So you're right. There was already four years or five years of head start that I think there was sort of proof of concept. And some businesses had proven some level of scale already. But for us, it was how do we differentiate from that?

What can we bring to the market that's not already covered? And I think that's why we went into it with a very specific value proposition, which I think at the time had to do with this idea that most of what existed were essentially peer-to-peer marketplaces. Yeah. Right? So companies wanted to build an eBay for fashion. Mm-hmm.

So we say, okay, that's kind of covered. So then we looked really into the luxury aspects of things where RealRail was there and it was big. But I think the main issue we found there is that it's mostly consignment-based, which is rather unfavorable to sellers because of the...

uncertainty of the process, the uncertainty of the outcome, the time that things take to sell. And so we came to the market with something that's a bit more seamless. And so we came to it with that lens of immediacy, of high execution. And I think that's what created some differentiation for us then.

It's hard to find people who want to consign enough. The interest almost outweighs the willingness of people to sell. How do you find sellers and how do you develop that relationship with them and make them trust you? That's the core question. I know exactly what you mean. The bottleneck in our platform is always on sellers.

We have way more demand than we have supply. Meaning at the end of the day, we sell great product at a great price. That's a great condition. There's a lot of interest of those all wonderful brands. But then on the other side, you're talking to people. I'm talking to my mom. I'm talking to my sister. And then my sister is like, no, mom, don't sell the Chanel. I want to keep it. Right. Every time my mom sells me a Birkin and it's my company. Right. Like my sister is going to say something. How many Birkin?

Does your mother own? She has like a few, but she cycles through them, right? So she sells and she buys. So you can go a long way with that. And actually they improve in value. So it's actually a pretty good investment. The concept is there is not enough product. And so a lot of the edge that we found is around making this easy enough.

The initial idea comes when I was in business school. I was running around, I was getting like my friend's products. I was selling them, buying them. And someone, my friend told me, listen, you need to stop bothering me. Take your stuff, come back in the week and give me the check. And I was like, that's it, right? They are interested in the outcome of that process and the seamless execution of it. And so I was like a bit of the aha moment.

In terms of both quality control but also checking for fakes, there have been now a couple of pretty viral articles about the fact that there are people who make very convincing fake Birkin bags that rich people sometimes buy to use while their real one is in their closet. How do you control for that?

Yeah, it's extremely hard. I think what you describe, it's definitely happening. There's an industry, right? It's kind of like virus, antivirus type of relationship. So every time there's a product, someone's going to want to counterfeit it, right? And you got to stay on top of the knowledge because the counterfeit, as you say, are becoming more and more advanced. And so the way we do it, we have a team that we recruited over the years of passionate, observant people. And that's how you build your knowledge.

You try to document what is the main pattern. And anytime you see a deviating pattern, that becomes an orange flag. Right. And then there's a discussion. Is that deviating pattern a problem? Is that a manufacturing defect? It's really like playing Clu, right? Or Sherlock Holmes. You try to...

pick up those differences and then get an overall picture of the risk level. I've spoken to a lot of luxury companies that are considering putting retail on their own sites to own that whole experience. So this would be like if Chanel had a resale section on their site, for example. Do you see that as like a competition or a threat to your business? Or do you think the two can coexist? How do you think about that relationship? Yes, it's amazing. I pray for that day every day. What you described is the end game.

Absolutely. It's the convergence between first-hand and second-hand retail because there are so many synergies. You come and you can sell something and then you use your credit and then you buy something else and then you cycle through the product. It's really the concept of a trade-in that's not a new invention in any ways. If you look at the car industry, for instance, it's been happening for decades. Now, what's the place to us for that? This is where there's a discussion. Executing what you describe is actually extremely hard.

So you could license your tech stack method to be able to do it to other companies, for instance? 100%. We have to be a partner in that. We spent almost a decade developing, I mean, I call it the resale operating system. It's basically the ability to ingest, digest, operate, authenticate, evaluate products.

secondary products in a way that is scalable and that is financially sustainable. And what's important to know as well is the resale business has structural issues, which we can talk about when it comes to unit economics, because the margins are very thin.

And the products are unique, which means every single time you have to take the pictures. Every single time you have to do quality control versus in e-commerce, I can take one picture and sell the item 10,000 times. And so when you combine that,

Single units and low margin, it makes it extremely challenging. And on top of the operational complexities of building evaluation skills and authentication skills and quality control, I think there's not going to be a shortcut. And so definitely our pitch to brands and retailers is that we want to be a partner. We can make them benefit and essentially get a 10-year shortcut into a resale.

How do you get consumers past the ick factor? I'm somebody who buys actually most of my clothes from resale, but I might explain it to my aunt or to my mom and they're like, what are you doing? You know what I mean? It's a big perspective shift. Yeah, there is. And that I think we have mostly crossed that bridge. But you're right. When we started, we had a lot of questions on the demand side of things. It's like, why are you even buying a resale?

10 or 15 years ago, this was the best kept secret. Totally. Because there was essentially some stigma associated to it, which was, oh, you're buying resale because you can't afford, right? Is that back in the days...

consumers, me, you, oh, we're buying resale because we want a good deal. That was a negative. Now it's like, no, you're a smart shopper. Right. That makes a lot of sense. You're a smart shopper and you're contributing to a more circular ecosystem. Do you find that a lot of the sellers on the platform are the same as the buyers? Yes.

Yeah, so actually not that much, which is interesting. So there is some level of overlap, but I would say they're largely different. It's almost in a generational way, by the way, right? So our seller is...

is typically older, is more mature. You're talking 45-year-old plus, sophisticated, urban customer. Essentially, the customers who buy luxury products firsthand. And these are the customers who, they're always in newness. On the other hand, the buyer for us is typically more sort of sub-35-year-old,

Still some discretionary income. We're usually the first or amongst the first luxury purchases. Yeah. A lot of clients who are experimenting or discovering luxury and some form of aspirationality there. You have a storefront in Soho. I'm pretty sure I walked by it. Tell me about your brick and mortar strategy.

We love the store for a few reasons. One is that 80% of the luxury market is still offline. So at some point, it's nice to go somewhere, look into the mirror, ask questions. And so that's great, great, great use of the stores. Now, you're absolutely correct. Our stores are actually two-sided stores. So what makes them very unique, we have what we call the Reback Bar.

where you can actually bring your product in and we will assess it, review it, and we will pay all of that within an hour. Wow. That's pretty cool, right? Because you go and we have people who like drop suitcases and we do our magic. While we do that, you found your next piece or you're going to get a coffee at La Duree and then that's just already done.

You have a feature called Infinity Exchange, which seems like maybe a little bit of what you learned at Rent the Runway. Tell me a little bit more about that and why it made sense to have that alongside your existing offerings. Yeah, it's interesting. It's actually somehow related. So Infinity, I guess, is our rental equivalent, you could say, or a rental proxy, right? It's the idea that you can buy a product from us and every single product that you buy from us

we essentially give you a guaranteed credit back over a certain interval of time. So let's say you spend $1,000 today. The idea is that you buy something for $1,000 and you know that you can own it for like six months. And in six months, you're for sure going to get $750 in re-backed credits. And so that means that when you think about it, you can own a piece for six months for only 25% of its cost.

Well, my last question for you is about investment advice. Say if I were to go on your platform now, I can make some educated guesses. I think Birkins and Hermes are probably doing well. I suspect Chanel flat bags are always going to do well. But what would you advise our listeners to get if they wanted to make money? Yes, I guess I have to say what they say in those financial podcasts, right? This is not financial advice. Buy and sell at your own risk. No, but joke aside, yeah, it's interesting you mentioned investment because that is the mindset, right?

that we're trying to create or really to facilitate because people are hungry for these data points. It's probably the question that we get the most, right? And I think what's been happening over the years is we've participated to making handbags an asset class.

So it's not consumption anymore, it's investment. And that completely transforms how people think. You're correct. Hermès is on its own, right? We call it the unicorn. So if you can get any Birkin or any Kelly in a store at full price, it basically immediately appreciates. But what's interesting through our data, we publish some things that are less known. For instance,

We noticed that Telfar is actually right now reselling at similar or higher retention levels than Hermes. Really? Yeah. In other words, there's Telfar handbags that you can buy for $200 or $300. And because of the scarcity of it, they resell for $500.

Wow. They don't call it the Bushwick Birkin for nothing. Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on as a guest. No, thank you so much. I appreciate the invite. All right. We are back with Fonz Terrell and it's time to wrap up the show with our Keeping Tabs segment where each one of us shares a story, trend, or a company we're following right now. So Fonz, since you're our guest, you can kick it off. What are you keeping tabs on?

Amazing. So I'm going to cheat and do two really fast, if that's okay. The first is really community. And this is something that has come up a lot as we've gone on this journey with Spill. Many younger audiences, the most active audiences on the platform right now are 25 to 30 year olds. And many of them are like, I miss the era of social media when it was community based, just kind of connecting around friends and everything like that.

And you just can't plan for this. But there's a lot of teachers on Spill who have been sharing their wish lists for school supplies and different things to support their students because we're coming up on the back to school season. And it's been amazing that many of their wish lists have been fulfilled within days and they've just been so appreciative. And again, I take no credit.

for this, but it's just, I think the power of community continues to be just something really magical. And then kind of connected to that is the writers and actors strike. We work with a lot of media partners, as you guys know, and we've been trying to find ways to still support the work of the actors and the talent without obviously causing any issues or crossing the picket lines. And

One of the things that we started doing, again, as a suggestion from the community, was what we call live spills. It's just essentially everybody sets a time. Usually it's Fridays at 6 p.m. Pacific to watch something together. Everybody presses play at the same time and everybody comes on the platform and starts spilling together, basically. That's the only nice story I've heard to come out of the writer's strike. So that's great.

Trying. We're trying.

What about you, Avery? What are you keeping tabs on? Yeah, I'm going to do a hard pivot to worms in the Siberian permafrost. They were discovered by some German researchers. And basically they've been lying dormant, i.e. like kind of dead for like 46,000 years. It just kind of shows that life can happen again. Maybe not for humans yet, but these worms have this ability to survive forever.

very, very cold weather by going into this state called cryptobiosis. It requires the sugar though. So if this were to ever become applicable to humans, we'd have to kind of tap into this sugar in order to allow us to also go into this cryptobiosis stage.

Is there any world where this is applicable to humans? Well, yes. Like there are so many levels of applicability here. Like the fact that global warming is melting all this permafrost. So things will come out of the ice and affect us.

But then if you want to take this research that they conducted, yeah, we could possibly find the right genes and then apply them to somebody who goes into hibernation. And then you're able to give them, I think it's the sugar called trehalose.

And then they will come out of dormancy and live again. I don't know for how long because the worms only survived maybe days. Their lifespan is days. Don't look into this, Max, as like a serious kind of... I want to be revived in like 5,000 years and then live like four days and then die again. As a worm, specifically. It makes me think of Heidi Klum's dress, that costume that she wore. Was it last year to the Met Gala? Oh, yeah.

Totally. Yeah. Bringing worms back. Mm-hmm.

Max, what's yours? Well, I'm looking at another worm story. No, just kidding. My story that I've been keeping tabs on is X, formerly known as Twitter, has threatened to sue a group of researchers who have documented what they've said is an increase in hate speech on the site since it was purchased by Elon Musk. That's researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

It's interesting to me for a lot of reasons, the most obvious of which is that it appears Elon Musk is not the free speech absolutist he led us to believe. Right now, it's just like threat of suit, nothing definitive. But it's a curious action to take, particularly against a group that is pretty ideologically sound. Forget partisanship. As far as I know, the Center for Countering Digital Hate is not a particularly controversial group. Yeah, but it's just him kind of...

Picking a fight? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, look, it's not as much fun as worms, but it's been significant in my day as a tech editor, try to assign a story on it. That is our show for today. Thank you so much, Fonz, for coming on and talking worms and spill and all things. Amazing. No, thank you. And I look forward to being unfrozen in 5,000 years and playing with everybody in the spill-a-verse on whatever planet we're on at that time.

There you go. Likewise. All right. Our show today was produced by Mariam Kiparuice with help from Avery Miles and Blake Odom. Mix and sound design by Tad Wadhams and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review. We'll see you here next week with Yaz and Josh, hopefully. All right. Bye, everyone. It's been fun. Bye.