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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, 09/09/2025. We are live from the Palace Of Party Rounds. We are at YC demo day. The batch is fall twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1:Right? F twenty twenty five? Because it used to just be winter and summer, but now they've added it's a quarterly batch. And so I believe we're in fall. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so we are here with Nate. Introduce yourself. Tell the stream who you are,
Speaker 3:why you're here.
Speaker 4:Nate Vossard, friend of the pod.
Speaker 1:You the first time you came on was at the first time we did YC demo day two quarters ago.
Speaker 4:Been in the Bay Area for, longer than I care
Speaker 3:to admit. 02/2008,
Speaker 4:I've bounced around a few technology companies, spent some time at some institutional VC firms, have dabbled as an entrepreneur, and now have a seed fund.
Speaker 1:Take it back further, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet?
Speaker 4:I sold used records on eBay. Used records? Yeah. It's 2,001.
Speaker 3:2,001. Vinyl guy.
Speaker 1:Yes. This is crazy because I sold record players on eBay. Yes. I sold DJ equipment.
Speaker 4:As we know, as everything becomes more digital, tactile, physical things become more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I was early adopter there. Is there, was the arb so my arb was international shipping. Basically, people wanted top tier DJ gear in Australia, and they couldn't get it because the companies wouldn't export, or was it more about, like, going in, what what do they call it? Crate digging.
Speaker 1:Crate digging, finding stuff that wasn't available in, you know, in Ohio and then you ship it there or
Speaker 3:New York or LA. Wisconsin. Would Wisconsin.
Speaker 4:Travel up and down the Mississippi River Corridor hitting up antique shops getting
Speaker 1:soul funk, jazz, psychedelic rock records. Okay.
Speaker 3:And then you would sell them at
Speaker 4:a 10 x mark up to our friends in Japan.
Speaker 1:That's cool. That's cool. We have one more lightning round question.
Speaker 3:Was your excellent liquidity. We're
Speaker 1:starting with the lightning round. Most underrated or greatest entrepreneur of all time. Who you got?
Speaker 5:Oh, god.
Speaker 3:Underrated or greatest is actually kinda hard to throw Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. What's the actual so we're gonna ask we're we're gonna try and ask every single, person who comes on the stream how they made the first dollar on the Internet and what their favorite entrepreneur favorite. Could be anyone. I'm gonna go over
Speaker 6:the last
Speaker 4:decade, last five years. Favorite. I think Andrew Dudum from Hims and Hers is
Speaker 1:incredibly Yeah.
Speaker 4:Fastest consumer company to go public.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's true.
Speaker 4:The only successful consumer trading at $11,000,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They went out as a SPAC, but then they actually held the He
Speaker 4:is an absolute killer. And he's a retail army.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Which is weird.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Not every boardroom general can lead a retail
Speaker 4:And I I would just I think Andrew is incredibly underrated. Okay. I'm not gonna say all time in the last Yeah. Cycle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But we're we're going favorites. We're not going
Speaker 3:great. There was some recent news that that they didn't didn't compounding, like, generally get like a green light, which is very good for him.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They've had a great, kind of, new wave with the
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, a regulatory royal flash has been kinda drawn, and there's been a lot of, uncertainty about which way the the chips would fall, and they got lucky.
Speaker 3:And I wanna give one other shout out to our
Speaker 4:Hillary Coles, who also doesn't get a lot
Speaker 3:of publicity. Is also,
Speaker 4:you know, an incredible founder and, you know, important to the
Speaker 1:to the success of the Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Well, I have to put you in the truth. This is Y Combinator Demo Day summer twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1:This is summer. This is summer. Of summer.
Speaker 3:End of End summer. We're starting fall.
Speaker 1:Fall batch. We met some founders who had are I think going into the fall batch, but they've been accepted. They'll be joining the next batch.
Speaker 7:I believe you.
Speaker 3:Yes. Oh, great. My first Yeah.
Speaker 1:My first
Speaker 3:wife see you was summer five.
Speaker 1:Wow. I was summer twelve. S twelve. So just a mere '13 Yeah. Still kicking.
Speaker 1:But I mean, I was what 21 at the time or something
Speaker 3:like that. Just a lad.
Speaker 1:Just a lad. Just a boy. What else is at the top of your timeline today? Have did you watch the Apple effect? Were you shaking?
Speaker 1:Were you crying? Were you were you gasping? Were you clapping? Standing ovation from you for the iPhone the iPhone 4,000.
Speaker 4:I was looking for more innovation on the wired headphones.
Speaker 3:Oh, boy. Speaking his language.
Speaker 8:That's my boy.
Speaker 4:That's a vinyl. Yeah. You know what? I like analog.
Speaker 1:Okay. Like analog?
Speaker 4:I know they released a new pair of AirPod three's. Yep. I haven't gotten the full spec yet.
Speaker 1:I think we have it. Think we have it. MKBHD They
Speaker 3:released a newer, better iPhone that's lighter, faster, stronger, newer,
Speaker 1:and better. So
Speaker 3:Which we need. Which we all need.
Speaker 1:We all need. MKBHD summarized the the launch. He's been live posting fantastically. So AirPods Pro three, new foam infused ear tips, two x, the ANC performance versus last gen. Live translation.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're getting live translation in those? Yeah. Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:They also get heart rate sensing during workouts.
Speaker 3:Gen z do they get Gen
Speaker 4:z live translation? That's the
Speaker 1:Oh, good. Probably. And and they get and they'll sense your heart rate during workouts, but most of the people that are doing that already have the Apple Watch, but it matches what Marquez saw get added to Beats. So is it actually an audio quality thing, or is it RF? Like, what or is it losing it?
Speaker 1:I've I you know?
Speaker 4:I think the translation feature, I think, is the most interesting novel new feature. Yep. I I as think we all travel more and explore the world, I think that becomes super, super important. I think the concept of, like, the loss in translation Yep. You know, universe that we all used to face, like, now things can just be super flowing and free.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That demo, I feel like the live translation demo was hitting kind of the AI circles. Like, Google was demoing it, like, a decade ago, maybe five years ago.
Speaker 4:It hasn't, like, happened, like, live in free.
Speaker 1:I remember yeah. I remember in college, probably over a decade ago, there was a product called Google Lens, and you could take out your phone. It was visual intelligence. And you could take a picture of a sign, and it would automatically do all the OCR, then translate it. And then it would actually Photoshop it back onto the, it would, like, put in the UI the the translation over the actual sign.
Speaker 1:It was very cool, but didn't really have breakouts.
Speaker 3:I think when you're
Speaker 4:just looking at text Yeah. Live dynamic conversation,
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 4:think is a promise fulfilled yet. Yeah. Know that, you know, Latin based languages much easier
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:With that. I think when you go to Japan, it's still not there yet.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Sure. But, you know, as someone who travels and I've got Google Translate open and I'm trying to have live conversations, it still doesn't exist. So I'm, like, really excited
Speaker 1:to try that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You invested in a company in this batch. Is that correct?
Speaker 4:We invested in one company.
Speaker 1:Can you break it down for us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it's actually it's actually an Apple team.
Speaker 3:Really? No way.
Speaker 4:We've all Published. We've we've all been on our own personal vibe coding journey.
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 4:Right? And I think that the thing everybody's looking for is a native mobile on device app that can push live to test flight. Yep. And so there's this team at Apple who Apps as memes. Apps Well, memes are the end state of all human communication.
Speaker 4:We know So that's, like, important. This team came out of the Swift. You know, the Swift They basically are responsible for writing that.
Speaker 3:Interesting. They've
Speaker 4:built this product. The company's called BitRig.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And they've built essentially an on device, you know, prompt to app live in the App store Sure. Test flight Yep. From your phone. Yep. So, know, last batch it was cursor for x, y, and z.
Speaker 4:Yep. This batch it's lovable for x, y, and z.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 3:Okay. Is that a meme?
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. We'll figure it out.
Speaker 4:Find that out, but that's kind of my hunch.
Speaker 1:That feels
Speaker 7:I think everybody's been looking
Speaker 4:for this true native mobile app product Yep. From your device. And so I tested it out. I've got a child who's approaching college, and I actually built a college recruiting task manager for her.
Speaker 1:That's really cool.
Speaker 4:And so it actually loaded it up very quickly.
Speaker 1:Was shocked.
Speaker 3:It was
Speaker 4:like a paragraph or two of prompting. Yeah. And it actually produced a pretty good product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And if
Speaker 4:you have an Apple developer account, it just pushes live.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like there's gonna be a ton of opportunity. We saw this with the with the initial rollout of the App Store, like, kids being able to build, like, Flappy Bird and then just go viral. And you're gonna see like, most of the stuff is just it's gonna be so much slop and so much so many zeros, but you're gonna get these crazy, crazy breakout stories of, like, some kid just vibe coded something, had a really unique idea, and was able to execute on it so much faster. Already, the barrier to getting an app in the App Store is, like, way lower than boxed software.
Speaker 1:Like, where you had to literally call Masayoshi Sound and get, like, this physical distribution.
Speaker 3:Well, I think, by the way, this guy's stream was down the last five minutes. That was a fantastic conversation, but we're back up.
Speaker 1:Okay. We're back up.
Speaker 3:But I think what you said while we
Speaker 4:were out was apps as memes. Think the concept of like kind of transient ephemeral software, software as GIFs. Mean the
Speaker 3:original like think think about like ten, fifteen years ago, everyone had an app idea and and like Yep. I don't know, like 10,000 people in the world were actually, like, qualified to, like, ship something pretty decent. Right? May maybe more than that, obviously. But but it was like Yeah.
Speaker 3:The amount of demand like, the reason that companies like Lovable have blown up is, like, the demand for apps is, like, so much higher
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Than, the supply of developers that can actually like build these things. And then especially too, like, most app ideas are not worth investing a $100,000 into or $50,000 or even 10,000. Right? It's just like something that should should just be created for fun. Maybe it turns into a company.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's just a little piece of software.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That
Speaker 1:It is sort of a gauntlet being thrown down for the ideas guys because it's like
Speaker 4:John Fiel.
Speaker 1:But like, seriously, it's like it's like now you're in you're you're gonna be in a paradigm where like, oh oh, you have an idea? Okay. Like, you now can just put your idea into a text box and get in front of millions of people. Let's see how good your idea really is.
Speaker 10:I think apps Let's
Speaker 7:figure it out.
Speaker 4:I think the concept of social app marketplace Mhmm. A la Etsy, where now you have this more artisanal Yeah. Software experience. Yep. People with ideas can iterate and build and ship things.
Speaker 4:Think that there's going to be some sort of new thing. Is the app store the next App Store? I don't know. But I think when you lower the bar Yep. Super low, there's a lot of interesting ramifications of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was I was I was thinking about that in the context of, like, OpenAI. Like, we've we've been in this era where, you know, it's like, Okay, you have this $200 a month plan. You get the super frontier model in a fantastic iOS app. And if they go towards agentic commerce and ads and eventually they want to monetize fully, do the paid plans go away, and does the product become more one size fits all?
Speaker 1:Or do we continue to live in this world where if you have the budget, you can get, like, a really, really, really special app experience? And the flip side of that is, like, is there are a bunch of pieces of software that I could imagine building that don't work as businesses but would work essentially as a one of one piece of software. The example that I always give is if I hire an assistant, I can pay that person to buy a subscription to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and print out the articles, physically remove all the ads, and give me just a book of exactly what I want. Very expensive to do. It's probably, you know, like, lots and lots of money.
Speaker 1:But, like, I could have a piece of software that does that. Now I couldn't go and sell that software because I'm reselling subscriptions, and I'm de taking ads out of the product. But in terms of, like, a a vibe coded one of one, there's only one person that's using it. Like, it seems like potentially you could see more more stuff that feels like
Speaker 4:Well, to
Speaker 1:the domain of only, like, you needed a person to do this.
Speaker 4:To take it even a step further, I just want instead of you being on my contacts, I want the John app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's interesting.
Speaker 3:And so What would the John app have?
Speaker 4:Well, it would just be everything you're into.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Right? I don't need ask you any questions. I know what you're reading. I know what you're buying. I know where you're going.
Speaker 4:I know what you're shopping. When you think about, like, contacts as this new dynamic piece of software, there's like a portal through you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's something that's super interesting, and I I'm just riffing here,
Speaker 3:but like,
Speaker 4:I think that where you think where this goes
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Becomes really trippy. It you know what? The language Like Uber for John, basically.
Speaker 4:It's Uber for John, it's DoorDash for John, it's TripAdvisor for John,
Speaker 1:Or it's whatever workout app for is it more like
Speaker 11:It's Thoughts by John.
Speaker 1:Or is it more like a return to the old Tumblr? Two thousands web. Yeah. Exactly. Or something.
Speaker 1:Like like, we we we have we have all been forced into expressing expressing ourselves through these, like, narrow boxes and, like, yeah, you can put, like, any m p four in there or any any m p three or any image in there. But but you can't actually make any social app, like, profile, like, fully your own and customize everything. But you could do that on just a normal website. Maybe that's coming back.
Speaker 4:Think think about every time someone asks you for advice.
Speaker 1:Sure. Oh, yeah. That Or
Speaker 4:pings you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's just like you just it's just like
Speaker 1:Oh, like, my here's my app.
Speaker 4:Like, it's like, you're just a proxy to
Speaker 1:your That's
Speaker 3:some tea. And you can Yeah. John John I are John and I are investors in, Delphi. Yeah. I'm doing that.
Speaker 3:Kind of similar thesis of, you know, making yourself available $24.07.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Let's switch gears a little bit. Are you gonna be buying the Elon are you gonna be signing up for Elon's SpaceX Telecom Starlink direct to phone?
Speaker 4:Am I'm a I'm a fan of rural environments Oh, you are.
Speaker 1:You are.
Speaker 4:And you need connectivity. Yeah. And so I absolutely will be
Speaker 3:What's your Do you travel with a Starlink setup much when you're going on escapades?
Speaker 4:No. But I would say like when I'm situated in place, for sure. Yeah. Totally. My my partner Dave who is a sprinter van guy is fully mobile starlink on his van.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what are your thoughts on nine nine six? Deepfates on x says, yeah, I work nine nine six, nine minutes coding, nine hours tweeting, six energy drinks. It's just it's just an extension
Speaker 4:of the performative mail meme. Let's just be honest.
Speaker 1:So so I would totally agree with you. We had R. Karazian from ramp, the economist over there, on the show yesterday. He looked at the credit card data, and there's actually a meaningful uptick in in business activity in San Francisco, just San Francisco on Saturday, just as of six months ago. And it's, like, a meaningful uptick.
Speaker 1:And so he says it's real.
Speaker 3:Sure. There's always people that are living the realness.
Speaker 4:Sure. And then there's the performative social media Sure. Out chasing.
Speaker 3:So, of
Speaker 4:course, there's
Speaker 1:always The truth Yeah. There's
Speaker 11:in every meme.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like it's like maybe there's a 20% uptick in nine nine six ing and then that's been like five x ed by the the volume of, like,
Speaker 3:post stuff. Atlas was joking. It was, like, the great lock in, and it's just, like, working Chinese hours for four months. I mean, I think you have to burn the phone. Nival had, some new Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Some new press today. Said, Nival Ravikan expects employees to work twenty four seven at his new startup. That's the next level. After nine nine six is just don't sleep. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Just stay at your desk.
Speaker 1:Just seven.
Speaker 3:12:12 twelve seven.
Speaker 1:12AM.
Speaker 4:Twelve I'm bullish on hims and hers then for the performance enhancing aspects required.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Yeah. Maybe they might get into some sleep deprivation.
Speaker 4:Remember back in the day, people used to take pro vigil?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was always that lore about the air force pilots or motor league combat units.
Speaker 4:I've never done that, but you know that was always Obama's hack as
Speaker 3:he would, know What? Yeah. Can We're vote not gonna
Speaker 1:talk about politics and here you are. Which one time I'm talking about politics?
Speaker 3:About yeah. That's performance. That's And not I'm,
Speaker 4:you know, I'm sure that, you know, Providual's not like a partisan issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:For sure. It's bipartisan. Yeah. As far as we'll go on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Anyway, do you
Speaker 1:wanna run through the the the first Elon treasury company? Do you see this? Have you been following the the the the treasury stock memes? Is this like a micro strategy? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Micro strategy, but then there are few that do ETH and Solana.
Speaker 4:There's five Solana treasuries that are launched within the same like three
Speaker 3:week period. Like, yeah. If you if you
Speaker 4:track it, there's there's one that Pantera launched. Yep. There's one that I think
Speaker 3:Multi coin.
Speaker 4:Yep. Joe McCann, I think was working on one. There's a few coming
Speaker 1:through I the truly don't understand it, but maybe it's just because I'm aware of like you can buy crypto directly, but maybe it's like a tax thing.
Speaker 4:No. It's on ramp for TradFi to play in crypto Okay. As a as a more safer play. Yeah. Because it's highly regulated and so they think instead of them just buying Solana they can buy into this thing and
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Regulatory thing more than a more than a tax.
Speaker 4:For traditional finance and I'm just being super reductive on that. Sure.
Speaker 3:Think that's
Speaker 4:that's the appeal. Then, you know, assume that there's if they're hoovering up as much.
Speaker 3:And then you give retail an opportunity for new forms of basically betting.
Speaker 4:It all comes back to that.
Speaker 3:It's But all so we were talking about EchoStar. So so SpaceX acquired a spectrum that's gonna enable them to get into direct to
Speaker 4:sell. 17,000,000,000?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Was 8 and a half Okay. Billion of cash, 8 and a half billion of stock. EchoStar is not is up 24 in the last five days, but is pretty much flat today. And The crazy thing.
Speaker 3:People were starting people yesterday realized they were like, wait. A $20,000,000,000 public company holds 8 and a half billion of SpaceX stock? Like, this is an Elon treasury company. Treasury company. But small issue.
Speaker 3:They have $30,000,000,000 of debt. And so we were kind of, like, doing some rough math yesterday and realizing, like, SpaceX needs to be, like, closer to a $2,000,000,000,000 company for them to just pay off the and this is a company that's losing a lot of money in in in their core business.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 4:of Spectrum purchases is highly strategic and makes me very, very bullish.
Speaker 3:I think people also should be looking at
Speaker 4:if they're if they want a public market comp, know, more global play, like, at Rocket Lab. They're almost like a corollary every time Elon kinda does something publicly that's embarrassing or that is against, you know, the political it's like,
Speaker 7:guys, that that stock going
Speaker 1:Which one? Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab. Okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's also a publicly traded Yeah. Another successful tech SPAC
Speaker 1:of the era.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. They started off like
Speaker 1:And they're actually launching rockets now. There there are a couple of those, like, the anti Elon trade. Like, there's this RocketLab. Satellite company that's ASTS. Yep.
Speaker 1:And they've been, like, mooting in the in the public markets. I But don't think that they've actually, like, shipped any satellites. It's all, like, deals at this point.
Speaker 11:Rocket Labs
Speaker 1:should Rocket Labs, for sure, shipping.
Speaker 3:$15,000,000,000
Speaker 4:market cap SPAC. Yeah. Done the Kind of like a rough period and now has been ripping.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Firefly also got out and and did quite well, I believe, in the IPO.
Speaker 12:So the
Speaker 3:SPAC the SPAC universe, like, there's some winners.
Speaker 1:Yep. Let's be honest.
Speaker 13:Yeah. None of them.
Speaker 1:There's
Speaker 4:few. SoFi. Smothos part of
Speaker 1:Same thing. No. No. No. That's wrong.
Speaker 1:Is right? He did SoFi and SoFi's up. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, truth zone.
Speaker 4:One out of
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like one out of eight. So that's like, you know, that's like two fifty of your funders. Spread across them. It it it was not a good time.
Speaker 1:But it was a rough time for a lot of people in a lot of market.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Fair enough.
Speaker 3:Okay. Sorry. Did you guys see this company yesterday, Alter Ego? That No. That's doing that.
Speaker 3:It's like a telepathic, like, headset device that you can, like, think messages in. I thought it was pretty interesting. It'll be big in the astrology community. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I can see that. Web pretty got almost 2,000,000 views since yesterday. Some people were pushing back and saying, like, you actually have to, like, mouth
Speaker 1:the words.
Speaker 3:Fine, though. But I think it's fine.
Speaker 1:Like a like a fish.
Speaker 4:Is this actual shippable or preorder?
Speaker 14:Somebody I
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 1:know. Don't know. Preorder launch. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know how It's not live, but
Speaker 3:I don't know how true this is. Somebody quoted it and said this is the same type of thing Aldman and and Ivor were launching, by the way. Future is here.
Speaker 1:I think that would totally make sense. I think that's a good call. The question is just like, yeah, how quickly can AirPods four fast follow that technology? But if it's doing something else with, like, the electrical signals or, like, the
Speaker 3:This is again is is good. So we have to talk about this. Yeah. Hunter SPX Thompson says NVIDIA sells chips to Nebius to sell to Microsoft to sell to OpenAI. All for OpenAI to burn a 100,000,000,000 between now and 2029 so I can ask DigitalGod for company primers and get answers in paragraph format pulled from Seeking Alpha dog shit.
Speaker 3:Wow. Absolutely brutal. The Nebius deal that got announced yesterday, total Oh. Total retail
Speaker 1:Yesterday was insane day in the market. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Nebius is up another 40 it's 42% in the last five days, 22,000,000,000 company right now. Retail, they had a retail army behind them.
Speaker 1:And then the real world treasury company? Did you see that? Oh, is there
Speaker 4:a treasury for that now?
Speaker 1:So there's a comp there's company There's gonna be a
Speaker 3:treasury for everything.
Speaker 1:So I wasn't familiar with these these folks, but Dan Ives is, Wedbush Securities. So he is now leading a crypto treasury strategy focused on WorldCoin, the native token of the blockchain used in OpenAI's creator Sam Altman's identity startup world, and they bought so they bought, 250,000,000. They they had a $250,000,000 pipe into the come into the public company, Octo, and the company, I believe, went up 2500%, which is a lot.
Speaker 4:So Fertcoin treasury went?
Speaker 1:Seriously.
Speaker 4:I'm actually not kidding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, we we we were pitching this idea of instead of focusing on these, like, crypto assets, you could create a company that has a treasury that's just pure scratch off lottery tickets. So you have, like, $10,000,000 of lottery tickets in there. And it's like, who knows what it could be worth? It's hard to get to a book value on that.
Speaker 1:You could do the expected value, but who knows? Maybe maybe the investors will just will just not do the book value.
Speaker 4:Securitize it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Get get derivatives against the the the right to scratch off.
Speaker 3:This is something there. I do wanna cover a bit more Nebius. There's there's some coverage here from Tech Crunch that's pretty solid because we covered this company earlier this year in a different context. So,
Speaker 1:Nebius is a real company. It's a it's Hyperstream. Right? Or Neocloud
Speaker 3:No. So I'll get into it. So Nebius has actually been public for thirteen years floating in May 2011 as Yandex NV, the Dutch holding company of Russian Internet giant Yandex, which is the Google of Russia.
Speaker 1:Out of Yandex.
Speaker 3:Remember?
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:So at the tail end of 2021, Yandex hit a peak valuation of 31,000,000,000, but in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early twenty twenty two, everything changed. Nasdaq halted trading on Yandex shares in February due to sanctions imposed on Russian affiliated companies. And a year later, Nasdaq said it would delist Yandex altogether, But Yandex successfully appealed on the basis that it was restructuring a process that would take an additional sixteen months to fully complete. Part of this included offloading all of its Russian assets, was where most of the real business value lay. But what remained under Yandex's ownership was a random assortment of infrastructure and business units that just so happened to be located outside of Russia.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:So they had set up data centers outside of Russia. Windows says Windows. And everything effectively in Russia was was seized and sort of like pulled back, into the country. What a wild story. This divestment concluded in July with Yandex changing its name to Nevius AI, a cloud compute, platform with its own Finnish data center.
Speaker 3:Finnish. So
Speaker 1:And we saw a billboard for Nebius on the drive in today.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the new business, was to be spear spearheaded by Arcady, the Russian Yandex co founder and former CEO, who was removed from a European sanctions list in March after he publicly condemned Russia's assault on Ukraine. The core Nebius business sells GPUs as a service to companies needing compute. And that is pro I don't need to continue that. So anyways, crazy,
Speaker 1:crazy story.
Speaker 4:Highway 101 billboard?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe
Speaker 3:Not not 101, but we we saw it rolling in today. Yeah. I took a picture of it because I love advertising. Anyway So the East
Speaker 4:Bay the East Bay people coming in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Okay. That's us. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Came from Oakland. Okay.
Speaker 3:It said AI runs better on us.
Speaker 1:EchoStar is a wild story too. Brandon Grohl dug into it on the Substack. Go to Sub stack. What is tbpn.substack.com? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Subscribe. We I believe we have our first guest, so thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:Great to see you.
Speaker 11:You, Titans.
Speaker 1:Enjoy Thank you. The rest of your demo day. Get out there.
Speaker 3:Founder Mitch
Speaker 1:on the show.
Speaker 3:You I will find that team. Bring him over.
Speaker 1:Did you bring enough checks? Is your checkbook full? I hope you're
Speaker 4:not running out of It's
Speaker 1:all Apple Pay.
Speaker 3:Okay. All Apple Pay now.
Speaker 1:We need a ping side effect. Ching. Ching. Anyway, if you're just tuning in, we are live from YC demo day, summer twenty twenty five, and we will bring in our first team. Look at this.
Speaker 1:How you doing? Guys. Welcome to the stream. What's going on? How you doing?
Speaker 1:Hey. Do you wanna bring over another chair for them? Here. You can grab this chair. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Bring in one for you. We'll put this here.
Speaker 3:Lads. Lads. Lads. Are we going to space? What is Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What is it?
Speaker 1:Introduce yourselves.
Speaker 11:Outfits because our logo's a rocket.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 11:And we help I need to talk to Mike.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As much as you can.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So I'm Bora. This is Jerry. We're cofounders of Reacher. And the outfits are because we help brands reach more creators
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:And make viral content to help them reach more people.
Speaker 1:How how do you do that? Like, what is the actual product?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we build AI agents to help brands find the right creators Mhmm. Personalize the outreach
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Get them to respond and pay them, and then also generate scripts and hooks so that they can make viral content.
Speaker 1:Got it. Is the is the long term, a marketplace for brands to connect to creators? Do you wanna create like liquidity two sided marketplace?
Speaker 5:Definitely. Okay. Right now, like, let's build as much tools for brands as possible. There's so much work there. Yep.
Speaker 5:And then once we have a critical mass of let's 50,000 brands Yep. We open up the deal marketplace to creators and that's when they can make money.
Speaker 3:Okay. First question. I'm gonna hit you with a hard question. I'm I'm bullish on the tool in its current state. There's been so many attempts to build creator marketing tools over the last decade.
Speaker 3:None that I'm aware of have become, you know, truly, truly massive companies. Right? How what what what do you think has changed now that can enable this to be sort of a billion dollar company?
Speaker 11:So I would say one thing is the fact that TikTok's job exists and social commerce is like the first real social commerce platform. Everything is native, native checkout. The attribution is really dialed in in terms of everything happens on the platform. And it's the first real attempt at getting anybody, like you, me, regular creators that don't have millions of followers to make content. And with the algorithm, the way it works is you can go viral.
Speaker 11:Right? So I think that's one big aspect of it. And the other part is AI, and I'll let you speak to
Speaker 3:that.
Speaker 1:So you
Speaker 3:guys just just one second. So you guys are focused on TikTok TikTok shop initially as a
Speaker 11:category? Currently currently, yes. Cool. Yes.
Speaker 3:Cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What what what you said AI agents going around finding creators. Is there pushback from scraping TikTok? Like, what what's the actual interaction like there?
Speaker 5:No pushback because we're number one on the TikTok shop app store.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we're we're
Speaker 5:in the back end.
Speaker 1:We're number one.
Speaker 11:Fantastic. We hope TikTok make money, so they don't wanna push back. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. We we have some lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur. What you got?
Speaker 1:Oh. You go? You can say anybody. Yeah. I know.
Speaker 1:It could be just a buddy
Speaker 5:of was gonna say Elon, but I think it's Jensen.
Speaker 1:Jensen. There we go. Yeah. The first Jensen. Let's start counting them up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, we've been asking everyone. How'd you make your first dollar on the Internet?
Speaker 11:Oh, first dollar on the Internet.
Speaker 1:Purchase dollar in business.
Speaker 5:Dollar in business? I was fixing people's iPhone crack screens.
Speaker 1:No way. No way. That's a great story. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Awesome, guys.
Speaker 1:Alright. Oh,
Speaker 3:we have traction traction. What what what kind of numbers How's
Speaker 1:your demo day going for demo day?
Speaker 11:Demo day was great. LMI demo day was great. Our attraction is a $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Woah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Nathan.
Speaker 5:That's good. And series b territory. Wow.
Speaker 1:I was gonna have to
Speaker 3:get my 100,000,000.
Speaker 11:Oh, we heard series a and b investors don't like outfits, so we're gonna see about that. Okay.
Speaker 15:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, we love the aesthetics. Thank you so much
Speaker 3:for coming Tremendous. Have a good rest
Speaker 1:of your day. Cheers. See you. You. Hey.
Speaker 1:We have a surprise guest. We have the CEO of Gusto, I believe. Josh is here. We're gonna bring in Josh.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:How are doing? It's been too long. Good to see you. Oh, it's been so long. I'm so glad to see you.
Speaker 1:Good to catch up. It's good to
Speaker 16:be here.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly.
Speaker 17:Hello. I'm Josh. Josh. I am the CEO cofounder of Gusto, and we are right across the street.
Speaker 1:No way. Literally, of
Speaker 17:my team walked up and was like, they're across the street.
Speaker 3:Do you
Speaker 17:wanna go say hi?
Speaker 1:I'm like, sure.
Speaker 11:There you are.
Speaker 3:Let's go. Incredible.
Speaker 1:I have
Speaker 17:zero prep.
Speaker 3:Good because placement too. Did you guys do that on purpose?
Speaker 18:Well, we
Speaker 17:were an early adopter of Dogpatch. We came here 2017.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 17:And, we were surrounded by Juul.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. No building.
Speaker 17:Crazy. That's crazy lore. Uber autonomous cars
Speaker 1:Okay. Was Yeah. The
Speaker 3:other tenant.
Speaker 17:Now it's Astronis NYC.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Awesome.
Speaker 1:What batch were you in? It was 2020
Speaker 17:Winter twenty twelve.
Speaker 1:2012. Yeah. '20 That must have been just after summer twenty twelve when I went through. Because I remember we used Gussa.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What how did how did demo day go for you?
Speaker 17:Yeah. So first off, it was smaller. Yep. It was down in Mountain View.
Speaker 1:But it was still, like, it was still, like, 70 teams
Speaker 17:back the '50, 60. 50? Okay. In the batch. Yeah.
Speaker 17:And it was twice a year.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 17:It's four times a year. And, yeah, I mean, the shift was just starting to San Francisco. Yeah. So we were actually still based in Palo Alto up until four employees.
Speaker 12:Yep. And then
Speaker 17:we moved up to the city, and then a lot of companies are now here.
Speaker 3:Were you did you guys start with the payroll? Was that the the thing you were planning to build, or did you kind of pivot into it?
Speaker 17:We were before YC definitely iterating and experimenting. Once YC officially started, we were like heads down.
Speaker 3:So were you running payroll prior to demo day or did you need more time
Speaker 17:to build? Because do you
Speaker 1:ever knock dog food the product?
Speaker 17:So we we decided we weren't gonna pair ourselves.
Speaker 1:Okay. Until you can do it. We go. That's great.
Speaker 3:There we
Speaker 1:go. Then we hit two milestones.
Speaker 17:I like it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This onboard's going hard.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No.
Speaker 17:We didn't pair ourselves till we could use our own product. And we onboarded like 10 other companies
Speaker 3:Okay. But that was during YC.
Speaker 17:Was During YC.
Speaker 3:That was
Speaker 17:Or demo day, we had to be able to say to everyone Yeah. Yeah. We're using our
Speaker 1:own product.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Of
Speaker 17:course. Can process payroll.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, you have to be put a clown mat, you know Yeah. Yeah. Outfit on
Speaker 1:or something.
Speaker 3:We were
Speaker 17:we were three electrical engineering PhD dropouts. What credibility do we have Yeah. Building payroll software?
Speaker 1:What's the what's the the the craziest MVP version of running payroll? Like, legally, can you just hand someone cash and fill out a form?
Speaker 3:Aren't there aren't there stores?
Speaker 1:How do you how do you ramp up? Like, you can do it on a spreadsheet. Right? Obviously, you should use Gusto, but, like, don't do it by hand. Legally, can you just do it as
Speaker 7:When we started the
Speaker 17:company, 40% of businesses in The US were doing it by hand.
Speaker 1:Wow. Right?
Speaker 3:And you can And you There's, like, physical businesses out there in the world that still like run they do payroll bureaus. And you can like go into that business. Yeah. Exactly. And It looks more like retail.
Speaker 17:Yeah. About a third of companies are still using that type of system. No way. It's error prone. Mistakes get made, you get penalized, yada That's wild.
Speaker 3:Insane.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:How was how was how was raised did you guys have any trouble raising or or were So in the people by that point were were pretty bullish, I'm guessing?
Speaker 17:I think we stood out. There was luck. There was hard work. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:A lot
Speaker 17:of stuff has to line up because you're raising at the same time with a bunch of other founders. Instagram had just gotten bought in the last year or two, I think, before that. Okay. And so a lot of the companies in the batch were in the social, mobile, local
Speaker 1:I remember this.
Speaker 17:Kinda craze. So low.
Speaker 3:Best time to build SaaS is when everyone
Speaker 19:We we stuck
Speaker 17:out as like, we're building a business that has like very concrete need, very very established market. Yep. So we ended up doing really well in the batch in terms of the fundraising process. We raised a $6,000,000 seed round.
Speaker 3:Wow. No way. That's great.
Speaker 17:Which back then was a large amount. And and then it wasn't about spending it. Like, when we did our series a, we still had two thirds of that in the bank. But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 17:We had some great investors get involved, and we're really grateful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have a lightning round. We have two questions we've been asking everyone. Favorite entrepreneur. Doesn't have to be greatest.
Speaker 1:It can just be anyone. But who's your favorite entrepreneur?
Speaker 17:Can I be snarky in my answer? Please. Tomer and Eddie are my co founders.
Speaker 1:They're amazing. I think really highly of them.
Speaker 3:That's a fair that's a fair answer.
Speaker 1:I mean, I
Speaker 17:can go with a classic.
Speaker 1:Any biographies that you are on your nightstand?
Speaker 17:Here's a personal story. Please. Graduated 2005 Yeah. Stanford, and the commencement speaker that year was Steve Jobs.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:That speech was Yes. Was live. It's like a viral video.
Speaker 17:And that was a formative moment. And I I really admire Yeah. Like that customer centricity, that Yeah. Like imagine the future
Speaker 1:Yeah. Aspect of of Steve Jobs. Wow. Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 3:And then what's the first dollar that you made online? Was it gusto, or were you doing anything before?
Speaker 17:Back in the nineties, I was building websites.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 17:A website for a coffee shop.
Speaker 1:For a coffee So,
Speaker 17:I mean, that was I got paid for that.
Speaker 1:Do you remember how much you got paid?
Speaker 17:I think I did
Speaker 1:it for
Speaker 17:like $500.
Speaker 1:$500? That's pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In
Speaker 1:in the nineties, with inflation, that's like $25,000 today. Great. That's I mean Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you just waited some time, bought Bitcoin,
Speaker 20:you'd be
Speaker 1:all in crypto. Well, you put it all in a payroll, and I think it worked out. Maybe I'm Satoshi. You know? Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Do do do
Speaker 1:more guests just ready to go? Okay. Perfect. I just wanted
Speaker 3:I got a lot more questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to see you.
Speaker 3:Good to
Speaker 1:see you. Yeah. Yeah. Good to see you. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 21:Congrats on
Speaker 1:all the progress
Speaker 17:with, what you guys are
Speaker 1:doing. Yeah. And, yeah. Good luck out there if you're
Speaker 3:What percentage what what what percentage of the batch is already using Gusto, do you think?
Speaker 17:We tend to do pretty well with YC batches. Fantastic. And we also do a boba get together. Oh.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 1:Okay. The
Speaker 3:boba Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a list of
Speaker 17:real time. Gusto make payroll easy. Set up health care really easy. We're here
Speaker 9:to serve.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for helping us.
Speaker 3:We'll see you see you.
Speaker 1:And we will bring in our next guest. We'll also tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com.
Speaker 3:What's happening? Payroll.
Speaker 15:The show. Hello.
Speaker 1:Hey. Nice to meet Hey. I'll give
Speaker 3:you a salute. There
Speaker 1:you go.
Speaker 16:I'm big fan
Speaker 5:of the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. Yes. We're finishing yourself for the stream. What are you building?
Speaker 3:What are
Speaker 1:you pitching here today?
Speaker 16:I'm Bruno. We're building Gauss, a personal AI investment analyst for retail investors.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:We go.
Speaker 16:B to C, if you invest in stocks, you're welcome to join our platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, there's been a ton of moves in the in the retail world, tons of meme stocks going on. Yeah. Is this gonna help me find the next great meme stock or avoid getting caught up in the meme stock
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Stuff? Is it more for the retail investor who doesn't wanna get burned or the retail investor
Speaker 5:Can I
Speaker 3:tell that one? Not make mistakes. Exactly.
Speaker 16:That's actually our number one use case. We want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes.
Speaker 1:Emotional mistakes.
Speaker 16:Right now, we're focusing on thesis driven investors, so not the the meme stock buyers. So you have a clear thesis. You wanna monitor the market, but you're a busy professional. You don't have time to keep track of everything that's happening. We can find opportunities.
Speaker 16:You know, you connect your portfolio to us
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 16:And we can start giving tailored advice
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 16:That fits your
Speaker 1:financial profile. Talk to me about the puzzle pieces that you're putting together. I imagine Plaid's important. There's probably some broker dealer at some point. There's probably, a Frontier model that you're partnering with.
Speaker 1:You're not training your own models. But Yeah. What what are the puzzle pieces that you're putting together to build the platform?
Speaker 16:Yeah. Exactly. So Plaid, is part of our platform. We have read only access to your accounts. We don't do trades.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. You do you just recommend right now?
Speaker 16:We recommend. So we're an adviser base. We wanna tackle the advisory market and replace RIAs with agents.
Speaker 3:So so what kind of, what's the compliance framework if you're giving people investment advice Yeah. Yeah. As an app.
Speaker 1:Everyone always says you so you just say not investment advice, then you're fine. Right? Then you
Speaker 16:can just get
Speaker 1:as much of that investment advice.
Speaker 16:Yeah. Yeah. Right now, that's what we do, but we're in the process of getting the RIA registration. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 16:Hopefully, by the end of the month, we will be on our way.
Speaker 1:We can give advice. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Come into YC with this idea or did you pivot into it?
Speaker 16:We did. Yeah. Actually. The we've been Michael Far and I have been working on this for the past, like, three, four months. Wow.
Speaker 16:We applied with this idea. We're one of the few b two c companies in this batch because most companies have been b two b.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. But it's been exciting.
Speaker 16:We got, like, 1,700 users using our platform generating revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And is your KPI, like, assets that are linked on Plaid? Is that what you shared today?
Speaker 16:Yeah. That's one of the the KPIs. But right now, we're focusing on sign ups and retention.
Speaker 1:Just totally users.
Speaker 16:Yeah. We wanna get, you know, users coming to our platform and staying with us, and we wanna eventually be the best in giving, like, tailored investment advice for people.
Speaker 1:That's great. Lightning round?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, yeah, was gonna say, how how are you monetizing today?
Speaker 16:It's a subscription model. So we're charging $19 a month for customers. Yeah. And, you know, we'll we'll plan to continue with this for a while, and then eventually, we're gonna switch to the more RIA like model.
Speaker 1:Free plan or everyone paid?
Speaker 16:Free plan. You it's a freemium. You can just, like, sign up the platform, use
Speaker 8:the free
Speaker 1:features, and
Speaker 16:then you can pay an XMOS.
Speaker 3:I like businesses like this because people run the calculus of, like, if I pay $19 a month, but I can make a slightly better investment Totally.
Speaker 1:Pays for itself. Also, I mean, you can definitely I don't wanna, you know, degrade the business anyway, but, you can also underwrite this as, almost like an edutainment product. Like like, even if I'm not always making the trade that it recommends, if I'm just saying, okay. Here's my thesis. Walk me through the stocks.
Speaker 1:That's almost like a deep research type product. That's something that somebody can read like an investment newsletter. Exactly. What What were you
Speaker 3:doing before this?
Speaker 16:I was so I started my career at NewBank, big Brazilian fintech. I was doing data science there, then I moved to VC. Yeah. I did three years of fintech investing in Latin America. You.
Speaker 16:I I like BCs. I was in the industry, you know. I and then I switched to the other side of the table. Now, I wanted to start something on my own. Did two years of business school at Stanford.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 16:cool. Just graduated two months ago, did YC, and now we're
Speaker 3:here. Background. So I'm so about that. How how's how's the fundraise going?
Speaker 16:We close around
Speaker 1:Woah. Let's go. Okay.
Speaker 16:Still undisclosed, but we we have a small location for smaller angel checks. Oh.
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh.
Speaker 16:Oh. Know, hopefully, that's good good runway
Speaker 1:for us. He's, like, calling, but not financial advice. But also, it's going it's gonna be a thousand bagger, but also not financial
Speaker 3:dude, congrats. Couple couple
Speaker 1:lightning round questions. Question. Favorite entrepreneur. We've been asking everyone who comes to mind, throughout history.
Speaker 16:I have to say David Velas from NewBank. He's an inspiration for me. He challenged, you know, the most traditional industry in Brazil Yeah. Big banks, and he managed to create a a generational company.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I really like him. How'd you make your first dollar on the Internet? Oof.
Speaker 16:So when when I was a kid, you know, I started kinda like this small ecommerce shop to sell materials for, you know, school school materials. Yeah. It was just like a
Speaker 3:Where was where
Speaker 1:was it?
Speaker 16:School website in Brazil.
Speaker 4:I was
Speaker 16:in Sao Paulo, and, know, kids were always like they asked their moms to buy school materials. And was like, I think there's a way to just, like, sell directly to kids, and they were, like, starting to go to these websites. Cool. And I was just like and it was like, there was no payment system or anything. Was just like a storefront and Nice.
Speaker 16:They could they pay
Speaker 1:me cash.
Speaker 16:And they they pay
Speaker 22:me cash.
Speaker 16:That's cool.
Speaker 1:So I just they but you use the Internet as
Speaker 3:kind of Order management system.
Speaker 1:Management system. Wow. That's amazing. That's a great story. Thank you so much for wrapping up the Thank so was great to meet you.
Speaker 1:So much. Congratulations on the round.
Speaker 3:That was not general solicitation, by the way. He was not saying to reach out to him if you wanna invest in the company. But I love to see it. I love to see a nontraditional background into a Stanford representation. Stanford MBA, worked as a venture capitalist, worked at a at a at a hyperscaler.
Speaker 3:We we love to
Speaker 1:We are not a hyperscaler. We are just like one of the power log comers. Welcome to the stream. Perseus defense. I saw your stuff on on x.
Speaker 1:I saw the image of this massive, like, weapons warfare. Oh, yeah. Wow. Gotta update this Welcome
Speaker 3:to the show, guys.
Speaker 1:Welcome to
Speaker 3:the show. On or
Speaker 1:off. No. You're good.
Speaker 3:You're Cool. Welcome
Speaker 1:to the show, guys. For hopping on. We're gonna kinda have you pass back the mic and, back and forth. Just get it as close as you can. Sure.
Speaker 1:But, introduce yourselves. Who are you? What are you building?
Speaker 14:Cool. So my name is Jason Cornelius.
Speaker 8:This is Steve. Hey. What's up, guys? Steve with Perseus Defense.
Speaker 10:What's up?
Speaker 14:And we're building 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones.
Speaker 1:16 inch missiles to down drones. Okay. What what yeah. What what like, do we not have 16
Speaker 23:that one.
Speaker 1:Do we not have 16 inch missiles in the arsenal currently? Is this something that's, like, like you're familiar with, the Patriot and then the Bullet.
Speaker 3:How much do they cost and how do you fire them?
Speaker 14:Yeah. It's a good question. So there are some existing solutions for, like, the counter UAS problem. Right? Yep.
Speaker 1:See And
Speaker 3:walk through the well, yeah, walk through the solutions.
Speaker 14:For sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare. Sure. Yeah. So GPS jamming.
Speaker 3:Which is right?
Speaker 14:There's the there's easy ways to defeat them.
Speaker 11:Know, you can
Speaker 14:make a more advanced drone and this is what we then
Speaker 3:you have the fiber optic cables. There's fiber optics.
Speaker 14:Oh, yeah. Already defeating some of those solutions that we have. Yeah. And then there's like the Death Star laser beam Mhmm. Which is very expensive, immobile, very heavy, requires a lot of power.
Speaker 14:There's AI machine guns. Yeah. So like there's a million solutions and we were
Speaker 1:Was there anybody that does that?
Speaker 3:ACS.
Speaker 1:ACS. ACS. Got it on the truck.
Speaker 14:Yeah. And so there's some really good solutions out there for different use cases and more. Yeah. We we need more and they all have pros and cons and they have like a layered. So some of them like ACS is very short range.
Speaker 14:Some of them like a Patriot is very long range. So we looked at it, who's gonna fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend a $10,000,000 missile to shoot it 10 miles away. Yep. But we also don't want it to get so close to us that it's, you know, right on top
Speaker 1:of those.
Speaker 3:So what's the what's the range? It's a 16 inch missile Half mile. Half mile.
Speaker 1:Okay. And and is the benefit of that the payload? Like, you can blow up a bigger drone or you can just fly farther? Like, what are the trade offs that go or what are the benefits
Speaker 3:that go into having
Speaker 14:Really the the cost.
Speaker 1:The cost.
Speaker 14:Yeah. So if you look at, like, the best solutions today, you know, Raytheon has something called Coyote.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:That's still $250,000 per drone that we take out. The drone that we take out cost $1,000. Yeah. So it's like So we're building these things for a sub $10,000 a shot trying to drive that cost down. Yep.
Speaker 14:And then you have a
Speaker 3:how how is how how does it do targeting and like actual fire? Tell you about it.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So there's a thermal seeker on board the missile. All the computes on board the missile, it's fire and forget. So, it just seeks out the drones Oh.
Speaker 3:So, you can just shoot these out into
Speaker 8:Yeah. The so, we have the display out back with like the missile pod mounted on some unmanned vehicles that we got some Navy SEALs to send us. Cool. You can see like these things could they're cheap. They can pop off.
Speaker 8:You can have like they're only a pound each, so you can have like 25 missiles in one pod. That's only like 30 pounds or so. So a guy can carry around like a mini surface to air missile site basically.
Speaker 3:That's crazy. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the progress of the business? Are you going straight to program of record? Are you doing some different grants? What what's the business model?
Speaker 14:Sure. It's a good question. So, you know, typical way to do this is you apply for a SIBR, small business innovation project. I mean, we've so we've done some of those applications. We're kind of trying to attack it from all different possible angles.
Speaker 14:So I was in the Pentagon three weeks ago. I carried missiles inside the Pentagon Cool. To show two offices there. K. We're working with Fort Hood, so first cavalry division down there.
Speaker 14:They've been super helpful giving us feedback on our solution, trying to help us accelerate it into the DOD. So we're talking to the soldiers at the ground level, we're talking to the Pentagon, we're talking to the science and technology communities inside the DOD, and really have a list of supporters. They're just waiting for us to get the technology ready so that they can bring us out, we can demo it, and get it ready to rock.
Speaker 3:What's it like testing a product like this?
Speaker 9:Oh, that's cool. It's
Speaker 3:yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but but, you know, a lot of your batch mates here can go and just ship a product, you know, to make make an edit, ship it to prod, and then the stakes are a little bit lower. So, like, where are you guys even testing and all that stuff?
Speaker 14:Can't say on here where we test at. Yeah. But every two weeks, we do we do a long drive very far outside of San Francisco, and we load the truck up. We take a bunch of missiles out into a very faraway land, and we test. That's been the entire YC batch.
Speaker 14:Every two weeks we've done it, so four or five cycles. Then in between those two weeks, we have the entire team doing major iterations to the design, improving it. So in the ten weeks of YC, we've done five major missile iterations, launched over 30 missiles, and it's it's progressing quite fast.
Speaker 8:I will say the the first thing that we bought with the YC company or with the YC money was a Ford Expedition. And so we just packed that thing full of
Speaker 1:all the
Speaker 3:That's crazy. The
Speaker 1:And then we blew it up. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Lightning round. Favorite entrepreneur. Who do you look to for advice or or as a role model?
Speaker 8:We're looking at Dino at Cyronic right now and trying to match that growth trajectory that they're having a lot.
Speaker 3:Makes sense? And I'll say
Speaker 14:Steve Blank, we're we're kind of friends with him down at the Stanford
Speaker 1:class. He's awesome. I love him. Yeah. I interviewed him a while back.
Speaker 1:He's great. Second lightning round question. How do you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 8:First dollar? I used to wash horse trailers.
Speaker 1:Wash horse trailers. Oh.
Speaker 24:Question. Analog.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There you go. That's good.
Speaker 2:I got
Speaker 3:For people who pay their money. Question industry.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Good luck with
Speaker 6:the rest
Speaker 8:of demo day. Cheers. Cheers.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon. We if you're tuning in, we are live from YC demo day twenty twenty five. We, we're gonna have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tan stop by. The team's gonna bring in Gary Tan as soon as he's available.
Speaker 1:But And now next, we have Meteor. Welcome to the stream. How are doing? Nice to meet you. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm Pranav. Nice to We're building Meteor, this is Farhan. The AI native browser that's gonna kill Google Chrome.
Speaker 1:Oh, We got the browser wars going. Let's go. Let's fire.
Speaker 5:Yes. Okay. Okay. Browser wars. You
Speaker 3:guys going after Comet too?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. Everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Well well, what's the plan? I mean, everyone has installed Chrome at this point.
Speaker 1:Everyone runs it. It's so hard to rip it out. How do you how do you create a solution that's 10x better?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I mean, we all spend seven or eight hours every day on our browser. Right? Spend We do most of our work on the browser.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? Most of it is redundant work. Yep. We're saying we can automate all of that away.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Right? We're saying we want AI we want to spawn AI agents that work with you Mhmm. As your copilot to the web Mhmm. That can do your work for you so you don't have to waste your seven, eight hours.
Speaker 1:Okay. But but but, like, what does that look like as I use the product? How do you pitch it to somebody who says Chrome works well enough for me?
Speaker 2:Right. Chrome does work well enough for you
Speaker 1:if you're
Speaker 2:okay wasting many hours a day.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:What we're saying is we're gonna need time savings. Yeah. It's sort like people pay thousands of dollars for personal assistants. Sure. Right?
Speaker 2:People pay thousands of dollars for employees to like, hire to create automations. Yep. We're saying, we wanna create virtual employees
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:That run on your browser. Yeah. Right? And that's Meteor. So, like, let's say you wanna handle your calendar.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Right? Just automate all, meeting creation, you know, based on your your emails. Like, if you want if you want, you know, some kind of, like, data entry, just hand or, like, tell media and and we'll handle it for you. Right?
Speaker 1:How is the AI agent interfacing the actual data? Are you screen scraping, taking screenshots, trying to interpret it that way? Are you you doing computer use or, you know, interacting with the HTML API underneath?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we're in alpha right now, so we're trying out a bunch of Right now, we're primarily using Vision. Yep. So we use screenshots. Sure.
Speaker 2:Also helps a little bit with, like, some of the the prompt injection stuff. So definitely. We're we're primarily using Vision, but we've been playing around with a bunch of things.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think we're
Speaker 1:What's the best frontier model right now for what you do?
Speaker 2:Right now it's it's probably Cloud Sonnet. Okay. But we use a mixture of models. Yep. Of We use GPT.
Speaker 2:We use Cloud. We use all of them. And we are state of the art. Very cool. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So What were you guys doing before YC? Yeah.
Speaker 21:We were at the UW. We were investing in computer science.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way.
Speaker 21:Left to build Meteor.
Speaker 1:There you go. Amazing. We have a lightning round. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?
Speaker 2:Gotta It's be Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1:Steve Jobs. Yeah. Okay. How did you make your first money online, your first dollar in business or online?
Speaker 21:Selling Pokemon cards.
Speaker 1:Selling Pokemon cards. We go.
Speaker 14:There we go.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on demo day. Thank you so How's
Speaker 3:the race going? First year, college dropouts. Yeah. You're here. You're going through IC.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been it's been going great. Yeah. We've we're, you know, we're both second time entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Had a bunch of
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Push in the past.
Speaker 3:First time dropouts. Second time.
Speaker 2:First time dropouts. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can only do that once.
Speaker 1:This is all of No.
Speaker 3:You could go back and get a you could get an MBA
Speaker 1:and I'm just gonna drop out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You you go to med school at 35 and drop out.
Speaker 3:What your last what was your last company?
Speaker 2:So he built Maxima, which is an FPGA ID. That was 10 times faster than the industry standard.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Serious. Lots of code. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of lot of code code optimization.
Speaker 1:There's a
Speaker 2:bunch of projects that you dubbed that went viral. Awesome.
Speaker 21:He almost got kicked out twice.
Speaker 1:No one did. All the us why. What was the worst the worst thing you did to get
Speaker 2:this done? So the the thing that went most viral was I figured out there was a data leak that allowed students to get access to their professors before UW published it. And I published it within eight down within eight days, it got taken down. Yeah. I got called in.
Speaker 2:But, you know, everything's okay now.
Speaker 1:We're we're Okay. Everything's okay now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Congrats, guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Appreciate it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank Good luck out there.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Run the other direction. Just run the other direction.
Speaker 2:Cheers, guys. Thanks
Speaker 3:for coming on.
Speaker 1:We have our
Speaker 3:next trying not to do handshakes. People are
Speaker 1:insisting on handshakes. We're gonna do handshakes. Okay. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome. How's it going? Congratulations on a fantastic demo day. Why don't you introduce yourself?
Speaker 25:And It just literally came directly from the stage. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:We love you.
Speaker 25:I think it really good.
Speaker 3:You look calm and collected. Okay. That's good.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 25:Cool. I'm Has Hobble. I'm the founder of Pally. We're bringing every contact and every conversation from every platform into one place. Okay.
Speaker 25:And using AI to help you keep track.
Speaker 1:Okay. IMessage. How do you
Speaker 5:get my iMessage? Modern
Speaker 3:modern work. I got iMessage. There's Signal. There's X There's LinkedIn. There's email.
Speaker 1:There's personal email.
Speaker 25:Tell me
Speaker 3:about it. And, there's been a few people that that have like tried to crack this. I think like text.com Yeah. Highest maybe highest profile solution.
Speaker 1:There was
Speaker 3:a But what what's the what's the what's unique insight and and, what kind of value do I get from connecting all these services and giving you all of my data? Well, one, you don't give us all your data.
Speaker 25:Okay. We do it fully locally on your device. Okay. With on device LLMs Okay. On device back to databases.
Speaker 25:Your data remains local, which is amazing for you guys, and for us because we don't wanna see your data either.
Speaker 1:So so I have to run it on a computer that's always on, basically?
Speaker 25:No. So it's on your MacBook, and then it syncs to your iPhone as well.
Speaker 1:Okay. But if my MacBook's closed right now, it's
Speaker 3:not gonna sync
Speaker 1:to my phone?
Speaker 25:If it's switched off fully, it won't sync. Oh, but it's chilling in that's okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. Never turn off. Yeah. But
Speaker 1:but realistically if I really cared about this I could get a Mac mini and throw it or It could be. It's just running. Okay. Got it. How are you actually scraping?
Speaker 1:Can you share how you're scraping out of iPhone six?
Speaker 25:It's very clever. Okay. So I
Speaker 1:don't know
Speaker 3:what say. Know what to one
Speaker 1:stupid trick that Tim Cook hates. And and good luck to you holding on to that.
Speaker 16:What Fun.
Speaker 3:But what's attraction been like? What kind of metrics
Speaker 25:so we launched two months ago. Yep. We reached product of the week on product ton and Oh, that's to over thank
Speaker 1:you. Fantastic.
Speaker 25:We've since grown to over three and a half thousand users,
Speaker 1:a 125
Speaker 25:k of ARR. Oh.
Speaker 3:Wow. So people people are really paying
Speaker 25:lot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 25:Okay. Growing at 22% week over week.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Double kill. We have some lightning round questions for you. Who's your favorite entrepreneur who you're learning a lot from?
Speaker 25:My favorite entrepreneur of all time Yeah. Actually would be, like, Richard Branson. Oh, okay. A fun story. So when I was I dropped out of high school.
Speaker 25:Yeah. And I remember when I was, like, 14, 15, speaking to my mom mom about this, I pointed to him as someone who was successful who dropped out.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Actually, drop out
Speaker 4:of high school,
Speaker 1:though?
Speaker 25:Yeah. Oh, wow. And then ten years later, I was invited to spend a week on his island with him.
Speaker 1:No way. Nothing.
Speaker 25:And I spent actually time with him on Necker Island. So it was like a very cool full circle moment. Totally. He's been a great great like mentor over the years.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. That's amazing. So, like, a lightning round question. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?
Speaker 25:I was 12 years old and I sold FIFA Ultimate Team coins.
Speaker 3:FIFA Ultimate Team. What do coins mean in
Speaker 25:that kind like you can buy and sell players and create a team.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 25:And I would
Speaker 1:It's like virtual currency Yeah. Inside the game.
Speaker 25:But how I'd do it is I'd find a player and buy up every single version of that player and then price fix. Oh. Three times higher
Speaker 1:Absolute down. Than the
Speaker 25:like classic price. And so
Speaker 1:I love
Speaker 25:it made so much money. Definitely illegal in the real world Yep. But on this
Speaker 3:Great to meet you. You too.
Speaker 1:Can't wait to test the product out. We will bring in our next guest, and we are live here from YC Demo Deck. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 20:I'm to you. Nice to meet man.
Speaker 1:Nice Nice to meet you. A direct name. Let me guess. Model, context, protocol, AI, something like that? Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's going on? Introduce yourself. What do you do?
Speaker 20:Yeah. My name is Pietro. I'm the CEO of MCPUs. Okay. We help people use MCPUs,
Speaker 1:of course.
Speaker 20:Okay. We have open source dev tools and infrastructure.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say, what's the open source strategy?
Speaker 20:Yeah. Open source, I mean, is a no brainer.
Speaker 3:The strategy is to open source.
Speaker 20:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. License, everything is free.
Speaker 1:Okay. Everything's free, and then there's probably a GitHub repo that's growing and some measured by stars or
Speaker 20:something like that. K stars.
Speaker 1:So there
Speaker 3:we go.
Speaker 1:I know it. Let's hear it for seven k stars. Congrats. And then, at some point, do you wanna be more like Red Hat, Linux? Like, who are you looking to in terms of well run?
Speaker 1:Is it GitLab? Supabase. Supabase. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Breakdown. Yeah. How will their business model look like yours?
Speaker 20:Yeah. Because they they have a bottom up approach. They get developers, and then those developers introduce inside the company the tool.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 20:And I love it.
Speaker 1:And and is the goal there to sell a a a non self hosted version long term? Yes. Got it.
Speaker 20:Like, cloud. You know? Great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What else is driving adoption right now? Like, who are the key businesses or customers that are really going all in on MCP?
Speaker 20:Enterprise.
Speaker 1:Enterprise. 20% of Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's good. 100 users. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is there any, is there is there any, like, specific subset of enterprise that's particularly all in on AI or MCB? Like, we saw this data point yesterday that, when the census polls people, maybe enterprises are less likely to adopt AI. Maybe they got over their skis. But you can imagine that it's different if you're a farmer adopting AI or a large, you know, agricultural conglomerate or chemical plant or a widgets business versus, like, your Visa or your fintech company. And, like, AI is it's already already a digital business.
Speaker 1:So is there are you have you noticed any trends in who your customers are?
Speaker 20:I Yeah. Think what you said makes a lot of sense. Like, tech forward enterprise Sure. Are doubling down. Okay.
Speaker 20:Like, PayPal, these kind of companies because they have, like, a very software like, they have a very valuable software. MTP allows to expose this software to agents. Yep. So they're only ones, you know, doubling down.
Speaker 1:How's the raise going? Very good. Very good. We raised Fantastic.
Speaker 20:Six already.
Speaker 1:What? So So $6,000.
Speaker 3:$6,000.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:How many times did you have to apply to YC to get in?
Speaker 1:Oh, three. Three. Three.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Never give up.
Speaker 3:I'll never give up. Never give up. What were you doing?
Speaker 5:What I was I was in Zurich,
Speaker 26:you know,
Speaker 1:all Nice. So far
Speaker 20:far there and, we've virtual try on for ecommerce. Okay.
Speaker 1:Oh, virtual try on. Did you
Speaker 3:just say miserable?
Speaker 20:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:very hard
Speaker 20:to sell to fashion. Don't do it to founders.
Speaker 3:It's crazy how many companies have taken that crack. Yeah. Yeah. It's just
Speaker 5:But now it's getting better,
Speaker 25:you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. I mean, you you always wonder if it's gonna is that functionality gonna live like at Shopify or at at an independent enterprise?
Speaker 3:What's the what's the AI scene like in Zurich? I I there's
Speaker 1:got I mean, it's bad. They're poaching all the time. Apparently. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 20:No. It's great. Zurich is a great place for talent, like deep research.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 20:I think last year you had another Zurich guy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There we go.
Speaker 20:So we're we're also getting it.
Speaker 3:But you're staying in the bay?
Speaker 20:Yeah. Yeah. We're staying in the Okay.
Speaker 1:Good. America. Play the America eagle. We got it. We got it.
Speaker 1:Thank you. We we have a lightning round. We like to ask two questions. First, who, what who is your favorite entrepreneur or someone in business that you look up to?
Speaker 20:Yeah. Brian Chesky, I think.
Speaker 1:Brian Chesky.
Speaker 3:There we go. Oh, I see
Speaker 1:a lot, no less. And then our second question, how did you make your first dollar online or in business?
Speaker 20:Converting an open source user.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Was when With we CPUs?
Speaker 20:No. So I thought it was like a hypothetical question.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Literally, like a lot of people, they When did it go sold records on eBay or they, you know, set up a website for a friend. Everyone has an interesting story of, like, their first taste of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Could just been a job. I don't know.
Speaker 20:I think it was, an app where people could create picture of their kids.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 20:I made it with a girlfriend at
Speaker 1:the time. No way. Okay. Cool. And programming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And you got your first dollar. Well, congratulations. Guys.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest demo day. Nice to meet you.
Speaker 9:Bye.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon, and we will bring in our next guest at YC demo day twenty twenty five. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Thank you for hopping on the stream. I'm John.
Speaker 1:Nice to meet you. Please introduce yourself. What do you do? What are you building?
Speaker 22:Yeah. I'm Pranjali. I'm building Slashy.
Speaker 1:What is Slashy?
Speaker 22:Slashy is a general agent that connects you your apps. Okay.
Speaker 3:Like your
Speaker 22:calendar, Gmail, Notion, Slack.
Speaker 1:It does stuff for you. Android, iOS, both?
Speaker 22:It's on the browser.
Speaker 1:It's on the browser. Yeah. Okay. So is this a Chrome plugin or is it or are you engaged in the browser wars? Are you going up against Chrome directly?
Speaker 22:We're not in the browser wars. We're actually built on a APIs. APIs? Yeah. No MCP.
Speaker 22:No browser.
Speaker 3:No No browser. Old fashioned way.
Speaker 1:So does that mean I have to go through, like, 25 different OAuths to actually log in to every single app with you once and then you have the freedom to move around with your agents
Speaker 22:inside to get around it.
Speaker 1:There's ways
Speaker 22:to get around it. Oh, yes. Know, Google
Speaker 1:Sith Lord magic. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Speaker 22:Uh-huh. Right now, it's very basic. We just don't wanna, you know, unleash our power to the world
Speaker 1:just yet. Well, speaking of power, how powerful is
Speaker 3:the business now? Value like, what is the value that you're, telling users they'll get out of the product? Is it more b to b focus, more consumer? Where where is the focus?
Speaker 22:The the focus is just to, you know, you're nine to five, the shit that you don't like doing. And you just like have Sachi do the automating of the repetitive tasks.
Speaker 1:So so specifically, I I have a workflow that I'm doing where I'm going from this document to this app to this calendar to this email and I do that every single day. Mhmm. And so I'm gonna use Slashy to automate that.
Speaker 22:Well, yeah. I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1:Pretty workflows.
Speaker 22:Yeah. Except Slashy writes the prompt for you and thinks of the edge cases for you as well. And, one thing we should try on it is people search. I know you're meeting lots of founders today. Sure.
Speaker 22:But, yeah, we made we made a specific template for you for Okay. We season.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 22:I like Yeah. Yeah. To be like find everything about x founder.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:Atlassian just bought the browser company. Do you think they're kind of going after a similar opportunity to what you guys are Mhmm. Going after?
Speaker 22:I think I think the issue is just it's really hard to build habits around browsers. Yeah. It's really hard to get people to use browsers and switch from, like, what they've already been using.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. So better to integrate at a deeper level.
Speaker 22:That's exactly it. Yeah. You need to you really need to just, you know, be, like, useful and be something that people wanna use.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So once I once I authenticate and you're you're hooked into my digital life, are you going to just automatically detect things that could be workflows? You said you're gonna write the prompt to yourself. So you're gonna notice that every time I get an email from someone saying, hey. I'd like to meet, I open up LinkedIn, and I search them and I go over here and I look at their website and then you might do that automatically for me in the future?
Speaker 22:Yeah. Like, I
Speaker 19:asked last year
Speaker 22:to do one thing and then it'll be like, do you want me to set this up for you every single day?
Speaker 3:Fantastic. That's valuable. How, how did you meet your cofounders and what were you guys doing before this?
Speaker 22:We met at college, all three of us. I'm 18, freshman. My co founder is sophomore and then the other one is junior.
Speaker 3:Wow. What school?
Speaker 22:Georgia Tech.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 22:Yeah. Before that, I had
Speaker 3:You guys dropped out?
Speaker 1:Sorry?
Speaker 3:Dropped out?
Speaker 22:Dropped out.
Speaker 7:There we go.
Speaker 3:There we go. Freshman dropout.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry for that. Freshman dropout. You're making very far. It's fantastic.
Speaker 3:How did how did your parents feel about the the dropout?
Speaker 22:They're both PhDs. It's a, you know, it's a little bit of an uphill battle Yeah. But, you know, they're supportive.
Speaker 3:Thank you, mom. What what metrics did you share during your pitch?
Speaker 22:What metrics did I share? Well Tell me. 40% of the batch uses us.
Speaker 1:What? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 22:Growing 30% week over week. 3% of the VCs in demo day are using us for meeting pro.
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. Crazy. It's really good. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you came in with a pretty broad pitch, but you narrowed down really well. I like this.
Speaker 3:Amazing. How's the fundraise going?
Speaker 22:Fundraise going well. We're almost almost done with closing. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 27:Be here
Speaker 3:to make that
Speaker 1:to make your parents feel
Speaker 3:a little bit better. It's like, okay. Like, she dropped out, but she
Speaker 1:raised bank.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 1:The bag's in the river. We have a lightning round. We ask two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?
Speaker 22:Who's my favorite entrepreneur?
Speaker 1:You look up to.
Speaker 22:Elon Musk, Lucy Guo.
Speaker 1:Wait. Somebody Lucy Guo.
Speaker 3:Woah. Love that. Wait. Somebody somebody's asking you a question. Freshman drop out on September 9 is wild.
Speaker 1:Did you
Speaker 3:go did you go for
Speaker 1:a week or were you a freshman last week? Or not?
Speaker 22:I did a year.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:You did one
Speaker 1:year. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It would be funny.
Speaker 1:And then the last question we ask is, how did you make your first money online? Although, normally, that's like people much A younger ago. A decade ago. But, yeah. What was your first introduction to entrepreneurship?
Speaker 1:Was it this company or did you make money in some other ways? Some people, you know, did some stuff on eBay or built an app or built a built a website or something.
Speaker 22:I started a company when I was 14 that Lucy Guo funded, actually.
Speaker 1:No way. Oh, no way.
Speaker 10:He went
Speaker 22:to age of zero.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Yeah. Okay. What what did you actually do? How'd make money?
Speaker 1:Like, what what did someone pay you for?
Speaker 22:Summarizing research papers.
Speaker 1:Way. There we go. Crazy. Alright. Well, legend legend in the deep research eventually.
Speaker 3:Legend in the making.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have
Speaker 3:good rest
Speaker 1:of your demo day. If you are just tuning in, are live from YC demo day twenty twenty five, and we are bringing in our next guest. Welcome to the stream. Thank you. How are doing?
Speaker 1:I'm John. Please Hey, John.
Speaker 3:Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Talking to that microphone and introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do? What do do?
Speaker 18:Hey, everyone. I'm Anmol. I'm the CEO of Clozera, and we build AI agents for commercial real estate.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Big industry.
Speaker 18:Huge industry.
Speaker 1:What part of the commercial real estate stack? The actual transaction? Do you sit on the buyer side, the seller side?
Speaker 18:Like Yeah. That's a great question.
Speaker 1:Administration? There's so much to that in commercial real estate.
Speaker 18:Exactly. It's a huge industry. So, yeah, my co founder and I, our families actually grew up in the commercial real estate space. Our our families are developers.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 18:But you
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for the developer building. We
Speaker 3:like developers. Developers.
Speaker 1:It's time
Speaker 3:to build. Developers. Usually say that in a different context. Exactly.
Speaker 18:But, yeah, we we kinda did a survey of the whole market and we realized actually the most insane amount of manual tedious boring work that, of course, can be automated with AI agents, is actually done by brokerages. And so that's where we decided to focus.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And and so where in the brokerage stack do you say is this somebody who's who's they never actually take possession. They're just facilitating the buy and sell.
Speaker 18:Yeah. Exactly. So our our customers are commercial real estate brokers. Okay. So both on the buy side and sell side.
Speaker 4:Very cool.
Speaker 18:And that's yeah. That's what we're where
Speaker 1:we focus. Then then in terms of we're we're talking AI agents. Are you trying to build an RL environment for some of the other platforms and and kind of, you know, throw your own agent on top, or are you just building, like, SaaS that pulls the different AI tools off the shelf as needed for
Speaker 18:It's great questions.
Speaker 1:Like, how should I think about the business?
Speaker 18:Yeah. So you should think of us as kind of like AI employees. We automate entire end to end workflows. And so for commercial real estate brokers, there's two workflows in particular that take up the most amount of time and money. And so, for example, one of them is creating sales materials for buying and selling buildings.
Speaker 18:So today, on average, teams spend about four weeks making these materials and spend about 5 k in design fees. And with us, they can do that entire process in about five minutes.
Speaker 1:Very cool. There we go. Progress on the Traction. Okay? The traction, how's the raise going?
Speaker 1:How's the demo going?
Speaker 18:Yeah. The raise has been great. We were we were done in forty eight hours.
Speaker 1:What? So it's nice. Yeah. Was fun. Yeah.
Speaker 18:I think with raising, it kind of either goes one of one of two ways. It's either like Exactly. Know you're hot and
Speaker 3:Yeah. What were you doing right before this?
Speaker 18:So I was at Google. So I was a PM working on monetizing Gemini, NotebookLM and Yeah.
Speaker 3:That that helps with the Yeah. Amazing.
Speaker 18:Yeah. So that launch was, was super fun. It was like we were in chats with like Sergei. Yeah. It was it was crazy.
Speaker 3:Why were you rate limiting us so hard? John was paying 500 and
Speaker 1:he 3. Couldn't I wanted to pay you more. I didn't feel like you weren't monetizing hard enough. Come on, man.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Know, I
Speaker 18:don't work there anymore, but
Speaker 19:I can I can Actually, I wanna
Speaker 1:hold you accountable? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have two lightning round questions we'd like to One, favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to.
Speaker 18:Yeah. Think, you know, classic answer, definitely Steve Jobs. Reading that biography in middle school is like what got me to wanna move to the Valley, to Stanford, DYC.
Speaker 1:The Walter Isaacson book. Exactly. Second question, how'd you make your first dollar on the Internet?
Speaker 18:How we made our first dollar on the Internet was actually we, cold called. So brokers are, you know, they always pick up the phone. And so Cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anything as a kid? Some people, like, sold eBay or, like, you know, did, like, websites as a kid? Any any
Speaker 3:any Yeah.
Speaker 18:So in In high school, I made an app. It was a free app but it I used AI to help the visually impaired. Oh, no
Speaker 3:way. And so
Speaker 18:basically, this is like pre multimodal models and stuff and you could take a photo, and if you're blind, like it would tell you, you know, what you're looking at, like say like a can of Coke or a can of Pepsi. Wow. Yeah. That had users in about a 120 countries. It was named one of TechCrunch's top AI stories of the year and was also, in a Google commercial with, Jeffrey Hinton and Justin Trudeau.
Speaker 1:No way. No way. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:Legend. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations
Speaker 1:on the game.
Speaker 18:Yeah, good luck out there. Awesome. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good luck. Nice to note all the VCs that couldn't fit in already.
Speaker 3:Yeah. RIP.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we are live from demo day YC twenty twenty five. We will bring in our next guest whenever they are ready. In the meantime, any breaking news, Jordy? Anything we should run through before we're bringing I our next think we have our next guest right here. Hey, Josh Browder.
Speaker 1:How are doing, man?
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 8:What's up?
Speaker 1:How are doing?
Speaker 9:I'm okay.
Speaker 1:I wasn't expecting you.
Speaker 3:How many did you did you back all the winners already?
Speaker 9:No. I'm here mainly for social.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just hanging
Speaker 1:out. Just hanging out.
Speaker 4:Just hanging out.
Speaker 9:There are some amazing companies here.
Speaker 1:There are. There are. Yeah. What trends do you like? We heard that last batch was cursor for everything.
Speaker 1:This batch is lovable for everything. Have you noticed any trends?
Speaker 9:I'm seeing a lot of boring software AI. Was just speaking with amazing founder working on waste collection AI software.
Speaker 1:And and you and you're using boring taxing. And and you're using boring as a pejorative or not as a pejorative?
Speaker 9:No. I think, more of these businesses need to be built. Yes. Less jargon Yes. And more boring stuff.
Speaker 1:More boring stuff. Find a specific Yeah.
Speaker 3:I've been I've been impressed with the traction so far. There's been a couple founders that have come on that, cool ideas expected to to to not necessarily have like a a bunch of like real Totally. Traction with with businesses. And
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you've obviously been working in, like, the application layer of AI for, what, a decade or something like that now.
Speaker 19:Yeah. I'm getting old.
Speaker 1:You're still a Thiel fellow. Right?
Speaker 21:Yes.
Speaker 1:Young at heart. But but but does the, does this idea of, like, going after bore boring kind of vertical SaaS, vertical AI, does that fit with a a worldview that maybe, like, we're not just gonna get the the the Foundation Model Labs to one shot every single business opportunity, and in fact, it is a great time to build a niche business?
Speaker 9:I think that there's opportunities that are beneath the foundation models. You're seeing them now get into, like, coding and things like that, But those are huge opportunities. They're not going to go into waste management.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 9:And so you can build a 100,000,000 to a 100,000,000 business doing this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We I I looked at, Fiji Simo at Yeah. When she became the CEO of applications at OpenAI. She had five things that she was gonna knock down and it was like, you know, knowledge retrieval, health, you know, coaching.
Speaker 1:She's shopping stuff. Yeah. Coding. But then waste management's not on that list. And so I think you're safe for a little bit.
Speaker 1:Anyway,
Speaker 3:what what's happening in, in your business that's that's exciting? I imagine there's every time the models get better, your product gets better.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I think you constantly have to be innovating. We're, like, always worried about what the big companies are doing to detect our AI robots. There are now SaaS startups that detect our robots. Sure.
Speaker 21:So we're trying be
Speaker 1:yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 9:Anti robots as a service. Unfortunately, we're more motivated than the average, like, Comcast SaaS vendor. We we stay ahead. Okay.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 9:on the product side Yeah. When when do not pay started, it was just like templates. Now you could just ask chat GPT to generate a template. So we're trying to go deeper. Try and go more in the background
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Build really exciting things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you been talking to founders about where prices are sitting? Do you have any sense of of what what what a, you know, median valuation is for this round or or or, you know, high end of the batch pricing? I remember when I went through, you know, raising it like 12. It's great.
Speaker 9:I I think any company raising below 20, there's like a problem with
Speaker 1:it. Oh, really?
Speaker 9:I think 20 is now the baseline.
Speaker 1:20 is the base and then Yeah. The high end, what would you say? $40.60,
Speaker 9:something like even a 100. 100 already. Yeah. Wow. I'm trying I'm I'm here to meet a 100 people at once and then I can relax.
Speaker 9:I'm very introverted. So this is my one social event of the year.
Speaker 3:Wait. One of the year. One of year. But this just four matches.
Speaker 9:You gotta keep something first YC demo day. It's amazing. You can just meet everyone.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah. We've been doing a lightning round with everyone that comes on the stream today. Favorite entrepreneur? Someone you look up to.
Speaker 1:Who comes to
Speaker 9:mind? I guess in this batch there's an amazing founder from Kazakhstan, Nozomio, I think that's the name of his company. His name's Arlen. He's just such a hustler. I'm not an investor in his company, but I wish I was.
Speaker 1:What about throughout history? History's greatest entrepreneurs. Who sticks out to you?
Speaker 9:I think Larry Ellison.
Speaker 1:Larry Ellison
Speaker 9:is an inspiration. He he's very, kind of pricing focused. Did your other guests say that?
Speaker 1:No one said Larry Ellison. Said Larry yet. But we've been talking about Larry for a long time. As a deeply underrated founder, just a
Speaker 3:fantastic Absolute animal.
Speaker 1:An animal.
Speaker 9:Oracle will sue its customers. They're so focused on money.
Speaker 1:But mean, the fact that he's just like never really sold any like really just the position that he has in that company is just remarkable. There's just a bunch of things. Yeah. Also, he just looks great at his age. You can just tell that like a lot of
Speaker 3:things are going on. Headline. There's a headline from the LA Times in the year in 06/29/2000 called Oracle Defends It's Spying on Microsoft as Public Service.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it.
Speaker 3:They also called it their civic duty.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's great. The other, the other lightning round question, this one would be fascinating for you, is how did you make your first dollar ever on the Internet?
Speaker 9:So I was jailbreaking phones
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 9:And, selling themes on CDS. So this was before the days when the Apple operating system allowed you to change Apple icons. Yeah. And so I would sell a Disney theme. Oh.
Speaker 9:And this was like a complete copyright violation because I take all of Disney's IP and make it but I guess they weren't detecting it. And it was very lucrative.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How old were you at the time?
Speaker 9:Maybe like 13. 13. And there's different waves.
Speaker 1:Disney's worst nightmare
Speaker 21:So I was
Speaker 9:in the jailbreaking wave and then there was the Minecraft wave. Okay. Then there was the
Speaker 1:people making money on Minecraft?
Speaker 9:Minecraft server businesses.
Speaker 1:Okay. So you said that server
Speaker 9:that was Adam Guild's generation with owner. That's the Wonder founder and the amazing TBPN sponsor.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 9:Yes. Yeah. They were making money with servers. Yeah. Then there was sneaker bots
Speaker 1:Yep. And that's the
Speaker 9:WAP founders.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And now
Speaker 1:What's next?
Speaker 3:Fortnite? Anything in Fortnite? I
Speaker 9:think it's Roblox. Roblox. Yeah. Roblox. Roblox.
Speaker 9:Roblox. Roblox.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Fascinating. People that are printing on Roblox today will be here in five years.
Speaker 9:Well, maybe just SaaS startups. I mean, there's like a 12 year old who's viral on X
Speaker 1:with this. Yeah. Yeah. To practice product to be nice.
Speaker 3:I don't even mess around
Speaker 1:with the video games. I just went straight to enterprise SaaS age 12. First dollar? Yeah. A business deal between me and Oracle.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Me and Larry.
Speaker 1:To build out a new data center. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 9:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Have a great day. Enjoy demo day. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC demo day twenty twenty five. Nice to meet you. I'm John.
Speaker 1:Pleasure. Welcome to the stream. Great to meet you. Please introduce yourself for the stream. Alright.
Speaker 1:Who are you? What are you building? How's demo day going?
Speaker 28:Yeah. Hi. Do I look at you or
Speaker 1:do look at you?
Speaker 28:Okay. I'm gonna
Speaker 1:look at you. Fantastic. I'm
Speaker 28:Anson. We're building normal, and we're automating hardware testing and compliance.
Speaker 1:Hardware testing and compliance. Any specific verticals? Are we talking like semiconductors, rockets, spaceships, cars?
Speaker 28:Yeah. We're starting with, like, robotics and drones and other any electrical components that have, like, a radio
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 28:Part to it. So Yeah. That's mostly it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's, like, a test stand where you need to actually see does the motor work when pick up the the robotic arm? Yeah. Basically. And it needs to be, and there's someone there testing that robotic motor.
Speaker 1:Like, every day, they get a new robotic arm they test it, and then they need to put that into some sort of database to manage and and and you kind of provide the software suite that they interact with on the day to day basis.
Speaker 27:It's awesome when you
Speaker 1:pitch a factory. Okay. Fantastic.
Speaker 28:It's, very similar to that. So basically, as people are trying to build more hardware
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 28:And try to build more hardware here, a lot of the testing infrastructure is either overseas or it's Sure. Not, like, very nice to deal with. It's kinda like working with the IRS a
Speaker 1:little bit.
Speaker 28:So just kind of streamlining the process so that as teams go through and, like, they they build this, like, wonderful robot or a wonderful, like, drone, like, subassembly, they're able to actually get that tested in in, like, a facility and through a process that is, like, deserving of the thing that they've made.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Who are you selling to right now? Do do you wanna start with, like, go figure out how to work with big manufacturing, the the the the big automaker OEMs and primes or startups? Like, who who who's the ideal customer to work with at this stage?
Speaker 28:Yeah. So the people that we're working with now are mostly, like, early stage startup companies. So if anybody's watching, like, we'd love to work with you. Okay. So, yeah, mostly drone, robotics, toys, cameras.
Speaker 28:Yeah. Yeah. Anything with, like, a RF component Okay.
Speaker 1:Great. We're helping out. How's Demo Day going? Did you share, any sort of headline KPI or news on the race?
Speaker 28:Yeah. We're wrapped up. So this is kind
Speaker 3:of like Let's go. It's a celebratory stream.
Speaker 1:We don't have to be here. Oh, and
Speaker 3:then talking.
Speaker 1:We can get back to building.
Speaker 28:Yeah. Yeah. So this is my cofounder. He couldn't be. He's outside, so we're just gonna we're gonna put
Speaker 12:him on
Speaker 1:the screen.
Speaker 28:His name is Hudson.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hudson. Wait.
Speaker 7:I've seen
Speaker 1:him on X. He had some wild post just yesterday I was watching. Was wrong about something. I I just need to put him in the truth zone. I gotta debate him.
Speaker 1:Bring him
Speaker 3:in. Come on.
Speaker 1:I I don't remember anything other than that he was wrong. I I just remember seeing his post and being
Speaker 3:like What about what about traction? Attraction there. What what were you guys able to do?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did you share?
Speaker 28:So we launched three weeks ago, and we have 35 in revenue.
Speaker 1:So That's so fast. So it's Three weeks. Congratulations. Yeah. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Yeah. And then, race wrapped up. We do have a lightning round. We've been asking Okay.
Speaker 1:Everyone two questions. Okay. First is who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to? It can be anyone.
Speaker 28:Favorite founder?
Speaker 1:Favorite founder. Can I say Throughout history?
Speaker 28:Anyway. Sir sir John a McDonald.
Speaker 1:Who's that?
Speaker 28:First prime minister of Canada.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yeah. Wow. Started a did he did
Speaker 1:he Start Canada? Start Canada. Don't have buttons for Canada. I I this is something about I don't know if I can fully endorse it but it's out it's outside the box and I appreciate it for that reason. The second question is, how did you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 1:Like as a kid, did you do interesting? Some people set up websites, some people I
Speaker 28:taught kids how to argue. Okay.
Speaker 1:Wait. What? No way.
Speaker 3:Are you arguing
Speaker 28:less? Argue debate.
Speaker 1:Okay. Debate. Okay. And and and so they pay you like on an hourly basis. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 1:That's great. There you Watch out. Don't get in an argument with her.
Speaker 3:Congrats. Professional. Congrats on getting the round done and thanks for coming on. Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If your co founder wants to debate John too, send
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 28:I'll I'll bring him in
Speaker 1:right after.
Speaker 6:I don't
Speaker 1:remember what he said, but I know he's about it. I'm I'm ready to debate. Something wild.
Speaker 29:Nice.
Speaker 1:Nice. What was sorry. What was that of all time? Oh, favorite favorite entrepreneur of all time is what
Speaker 30:we have here.
Speaker 1:Okay. Thank you. We're we're clarifying our questions. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Great. We are live from news from the timeline.
Speaker 3:There is now a $2,000 iPhone. It's the iPhone 17 pro with two terabytes storage.
Speaker 1:Terabytes. $2,000 iPhone dropped. Welcome to the stream. Nice to meet you. What's happening?
Speaker 3:It's Jordy.
Speaker 1:Nice to meet you. Will you be picking up the $2,000 iPhone? It just dropped minutes ago. This is breaking news.
Speaker 24:I'm I'm probably sticking with my
Speaker 1:You're good.
Speaker 3:He's Short the stock. Short the
Speaker 21:I feel like the incremental Oh, he's going,
Speaker 1:oh, this is a disaster. His Yeah. We look to YC founders as the future, the tastemakers. If they're not adopting the latest and
Speaker 3:greatest, what's gonna happen?
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself. What are you what are you building?
Speaker 24:So I'm Aiden, the CTO of Effie Gov.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 24:We're doing the AI operating system for local governments Okay. Starting with the 311
Speaker 1:311. What do you is that information hotline?
Speaker 24:Yeah. It's the informational counterpart to 911.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 24:So interestingly, only around 2% of cities have a 311 line even though every city has 911. Yeah. Yeah. And what we're doing with our first product is creating a 247 call center that's available to anyone from if you're in San Francisco
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 24:Or if you're in, like, a city of 10,000 in the middle of Iowa. Like, you should have the same level of service.
Speaker 1:311, it automatically routes you to your service. And then Yeah. If I'm in my city, it'll give me information. What what are the what's the I obviously, everyone knows 911 call. Someone's breaking into my house.
Speaker 1:What's the 311 call? Yeah. I think
Speaker 3:is this road open, or when does the trash pick up comes, stuff like that.
Speaker 24:Stuff like that. It definitely varies a lot more city to city. So we're live in Florida, and we're taking calls about alligators roaming around the city.
Speaker 1:So it's And and it can kind of route you and and I'm sure you've set the system up so that you can route to 911 if you need to
Speaker 9:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Or write to animal control, kind of sit above the rest of the stack of all the different city services.
Speaker 24:Yeah. And that's kind of why we started with this is because it gives us a really great insight into what are the calls and services that the city's providing. So now we can go down and actually handle these workflows end to end Yeah. With our agents.
Speaker 1:What's the secret to actually having, like, high NPS? I imagine that, like, people are not very happy with robot phone trees. You're literally in the clanker business. You're like the you're the meme of, like Yeah. But if clanker pays off, I just
Speaker 3:tell are phone trees are
Speaker 1:They've been terrible for decades. Is conversation. This is potentially what's the secret?
Speaker 24:Most people don't realize they're talking to an AI.
Speaker 1:They don't? No. Okay. Why is this? Are for male loneliness.
Speaker 1:Are are are are you building on top of a particular foundation model or specific APIs that just sound so good? Yeah. Who who who are
Speaker 6:you using? How do you
Speaker 1:piece things together to make it great?
Speaker 24:Yeah. We're using a voice from Vappy that's just
Speaker 16:Okay. We've
Speaker 24:trialed a bunch of different voices. Vappy. Vappy? Yeah. Another YC company.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool. Okay.
Speaker 12:Is that
Speaker 3:in this batch?
Speaker 24:No. They're, I think, winter twenty four.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's check
Speaker 13:them out.
Speaker 24:But, yeah, they're we just try all these different voices. Yeah. And this one has a bunch of stutters and makes it sound super natural.
Speaker 1:Okay. So it just feels completely natural. Got it. Very
Speaker 3:cool. Traction. Yeah. You're you've been lining up cities? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Driving around?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. All over. What did you share? Do you share, like, an r, like, ARR or just, number of cities?
Speaker 1:Like, what what's the headline number that you shared today?
Speaker 24:We shared, live in one city Mhmm. And 80 k ARR.
Speaker 1:80 k ARR.
Speaker 24:No. Two contracts that have yet to go live,
Speaker 16:but Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We signed them. But in the pipeline. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Let's go. So what you're charging is it is this 40 k per city effectively?
Speaker 24:60 k and then 20 k.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine this replaces, you know, potentially replaces a job or make somebody a lot more high leverage. And if you want, like, round the clock coverage on a helpline, which I'm sure these cities don't offer, but even if you're offering, like, a workday, that's just somebody who has
Speaker 1:to sit I there flip it around and just be like, if I'm the mayor and I'm charging every single person in my city some sort of property tax, and I'm taking in millions and millions of dollars, and my citizens can't get information. But for whatever price he's charging, I can offer this this service to my population.
Speaker 3:It's very valuable.
Speaker 1:Be like, wow. The city feels so much more responsive. Like, when that tree fell down on my street, I was able to just dial 311 and send it to the right thing. It's an
Speaker 3:interesting website. It's an interesting execution challenge where you can literally create a database of, every potential buyer for your product and then just hound them On day one. Yeah. Then hound them. Like, it's not like a mystery of like, who are we gonna sell to?
Speaker 1:Oh, there's yeah. The perfect client doesn't know I don't even know that they're in the market. No. It's like, you know
Speaker 3:who's in the market.
Speaker 10:That's right.
Speaker 24:We're doing kind of a state by state go to market motion
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 24:Sure. Because a lot of the first question they'll ask us is, okay, what other cities in Sure. Florida are are using it? Because they can also do this, thing called piggybacking where they literally just copy and paste the contract from a new city.
Speaker 3:No way. So
Speaker 24:that's kind of, you know, little hacks like this, I think, will help us conquer the GovTech market where historically it's been hard to break in.
Speaker 9:But now
Speaker 24:you have this AI, obviously.
Speaker 3:Land and expand. Yeah. How how did the how did how's the fundraise gone?
Speaker 24:It's good. We're around three quarters done.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 24:On our rounds.
Speaker 1:We have a lightning round that we've been doing. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Someone you look to for advice.
Speaker 24:Peter Thiel.
Speaker 1:Oh. That's a good one.
Speaker 17:First first person
Speaker 1:to see PT.
Speaker 3:Mister Thiel.
Speaker 1:Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 24:Flipping Supreme t shirts.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:There we did go. You acquire did you have bots that would buy them? Yep. Yeah? Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Into the into
Speaker 24:the bot game.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 24:Yeah. When it was like during my lunch in high school. So I would just, like During lunch? Monitor the site
Speaker 1:and The and situation. Monitoring the situation. I love it. Thank you
Speaker 3:so Congrats on all the progress.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon. Have a
Speaker 3:good rest of your day.
Speaker 12:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. If you are just tuning in, we are live from YC demo day twenty twenty five. We will bring in our next guest when we're ready. Just oh, we got, hi. Here we go.
Speaker 23:The demos you've
Speaker 1:been waiting for. You all have been waiting. Will they bring you massive block? Metal onto the stream?
Speaker 3:That makes sense. To see you.
Speaker 1:The answer is, like, good to see
Speaker 3:you. You got a little workout on the way in.
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 3:How many many pounds is that?
Speaker 15:No clue. No clue.
Speaker 3:It's a lot.
Speaker 15:I borrowed it from Astronis.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yeah. But did you sell it to them and then you borrowed it back or is this just there? This is theirs. Okay.
Speaker 1:They wanted
Speaker 15:to help the cause.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's illustrated. It's an art. So, yeah. Why why is this sitting here?
Speaker 1:What do you do? Introduce yourself. Who are you?
Speaker 15:Yes. My name is Zane, founder of Knox Metals and we cut metal. So Okay. We're trying to build the most efficient metal service centers in America to empower every factory in America to work with better margins and to move faster.
Speaker 1:Okay. There's a lot of ways to He's doing meme.
Speaker 3:He's doing the He's doing the meme.
Speaker 1:Meme. He's re
Speaker 3:industrializing. Also also to be clear, this is Zane from X. Yes. Probably if you're if you're on
Speaker 1:Famous post. The Everything app, you've
Speaker 3:seen him before. I've seen him. He's been on the show via his post many times before. Yeah. Remember.
Speaker 3:It's great to finally
Speaker 15:I've been printed a few Oh, No. You're a print hero. Was that was fun. I was I remember one time I was watching TVPN, and I was like, for some reason, it was
Speaker 1:I had
Speaker 15:to go somewhere, and I was like, I just skipped to the print section. So you guys would print
Speaker 1:the best tweets.
Speaker 15:I was like, who they got today?
Speaker 1:Who they got today? It's you. Yeah. That's fantastic. Okay.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of ways
Speaker 15:Okay. So to be clear, we would sell this to Hadrian. Yeah. To someone like a Hadrian.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 15:Okay. What we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an f one fifty.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 15:Put it on our saw, which is about the size of four f one fifties. Wow. And then we band saw cut it. Yep. And then we sell,
Speaker 1:like, one of the go into a a CNC machine. Yeah. It fits into a CNC machine.
Speaker 15:Yeah. If you wanna make an f 18 part
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 15:Component for your washing machine, you name it.
Speaker 1:This is incredibly deep in the stack. I
Speaker 10:love it.
Speaker 15:Yeah. So, the operation's really simple. Yeah. What we're working on is, the complex operations of the factory. Like, I'm sure you guys know question.
Speaker 1:Wanna hear anyone say Y Combinator just does consumer apps
Speaker 15:and more.
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 3:This is pure metal.
Speaker 1:This is insane. It's so many It's challenge, so so it's
Speaker 31:not neutral logo. Seems like,
Speaker 3:obviously, like, it's not easy to just cut through metal, but it seems like that's relatively solved. Yeah. What you're trying to solve is, like, the efficiency in the factory because even if you you make this block, then how do you get it? How do you store it?
Speaker 15:How do
Speaker 3:you trans know,
Speaker 15:all So like the metal service industry is like $300,000,000,000 these guys do a year. Like if you're a metal service center, that's the total of the market. Yeah. We we strongly believe that they are
Speaker 3:John, lift them lift them. Actually, it's gonna destroy No. It's gonna destroy his suit. We need it for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Can I can figure that out?
Speaker 15:We actually strongly believe that they have a ton of overhead and lack all the technology in the world that puts a tax on every metal sold in America. Yep. That's why you're seeing more metal bought from The USA or bought bought from China.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's coming in.
Speaker 15:Yeah. Like, I worked in, like, like, a small PE shop. Like, everyone I talked to, they're
Speaker 1:like, hey. How do we
Speaker 15:get stuff in from China? Yeah. So, like, we wanna re
Speaker 1:PE shop? Like, private equity?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Okay. We wanna, like, re industrialize the metal
Speaker 1:service later. Okay. Yeah. So so how much of the value is just there's gonna be a bigger buy buy American wave? There might be more regulations, more tariffs, and so it makes more sense now to do this work in America versus you think that you could long term go toe to toe against a Chinese metal shop and just with better better workers, better automation, better technology, you will just have a better product even in a completely level economic playing field.
Speaker 15:Exactly. And, like, the key thing you said there is product. And what is product? The factory. Right?
Speaker 15:So everything that goes into it. Procurement Yep. Inventory management, like you said, estimating. Yep. So how do we get blocks, the cheapest block to any factory in America next day?
Speaker 1:Yep. That's the goal. Got it. We have a lightning round that we've been doing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:First question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur Alex Karp. Of all time. Alex Karp. We've had him on the show last week.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great pick. Bold. Good pick. How did you make your first dollar online or in business?
Speaker 15:My dad had a machine shop, and he made me scrub the floor. I was 14 years old.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:Family business. Let's 8,000
Speaker 15:square foot facility. One man in
Speaker 26:the mob.
Speaker 3:Incredible. Wait. How how's how's the fundraise gone?
Speaker 1:Oh. Fun. I'm gonna try and lift this.
Speaker 15:It's good. We closed like Oh, yeah. We had like an initial goal and we closed that,
Speaker 1:but Oh, it's so heavy. There
Speaker 3:we go.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Come on.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm just breaking the table.
Speaker 1:It's liftable.
Speaker 3:It's liftable.
Speaker 1:Liftable. I would put that at over on your pets.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And it's such an awkward
Speaker 15:My guess was my guess was 97.
Speaker 1:97. Okay. So
Speaker 15:No. Funny is going well. We like had an initial goal. We we got there. And now seeing some more interest, so thinking about raising some more just to Fantastic.
Speaker 15:Have a bit more runway and move faster.
Speaker 3:Count me in, Chad. Count me in. I'm riding
Speaker 1:with you. Yeah.
Speaker 15:I love the chat. Thanks so much for coming.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 3:Should have brought my physical checkbook. Such a missed opportunity. Great to
Speaker 1:see you. You're a legend. Good luck with that. What a terrible prop. Anyway okay.
Speaker 1:That was fun. I think I broke a sweat. This is not the right move.
Speaker 3:I was trying to warn you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the stream.
Speaker 3:Do What's happening?
Speaker 1:Great to see you.
Speaker 3:Brought my You
Speaker 1:brought your own metal.
Speaker 3:This one's new. I lifted one.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Okay. Okay. So we both lifted the metal
Speaker 3:cubes today. We did. Are you in are you in Noc? You did
Speaker 30:Noc. Yes. Nice. Yes.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the stream.
Speaker 30:Hello, everyone. My name is Paige Fendordi. I'm the founding partner behind Genius Ventures. We invest in technical storytellers at their earliest chapters.
Speaker 3:Very cool. And you wrote a children's book on venture capital. You're introducing venture capital to the children. Are you getting paid out by Anthropic in the lawsuit? Did you see this?
Speaker 32:Now I have
Speaker 1:a You special
Speaker 3:gotta go check it.
Speaker 1:I gotta check my mailbox.
Speaker 21:I have
Speaker 3:a few thousand bucks waiting for you. You can can roll that into the fund.
Speaker 30:Wait, that would be I gotta check my email.
Speaker 3:Maybe. What, yeah. What what's your reaction to to demo day?
Speaker 30:Oh my gosh. Electric.
Speaker 1:Too low. Right? That's what most
Speaker 3:people have been saying, I don't feel comfortable investing. The prices are just just
Speaker 1:when you go on T Moon, there's like $12 couch and you're like, how can a couch be $12? You're like, how can this how can this clearly billion dollar company be worth $60,000,000?
Speaker 30:Let me tell you, the energy is electric today. It's been so fun bumping into friends. My friend, shout out Casey Caruso, she brought me bone broth to pregame the day. No way. I drove over
Speaker 1:in
Speaker 30:Waymo.
Speaker 1:This is the SF Lockheed was right here. Also you remember when
Speaker 3:I explained, bone broth to you for the first time? No. I think I said something like protein tea or something like that.
Speaker 17:Like protein shake.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 13:It's like Like a
Speaker 3:protein shake.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because you warm it up. We warmed it up and we drank half a gallon on the stream one day. You
Speaker 30:guys gonna do a a mukbang of all the bone the bone broths?
Speaker 1:Well, we are we are completely
Speaker 3:Aligned with
Speaker 15:we're aligned with Kettle
Speaker 3:and Fire
Speaker 1:because we're buddies with Justin Mayer.
Speaker 25:Okay. That's fair.
Speaker 1:We so we cannot be we we we cannot be impartial when it
Speaker 3:comes to what what's the strategy going into demo day for you? You had already invested
Speaker 30:deployed Yes. So we looked at a a bunch of companies, but actually the story on Knox was pretty unique. Zane and I met, probably four years ago
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 30:When I was fundraising for my first fund. And at the time, he was working at a firm and they were like buying and selling machine shops and then we just stayed in touch over that time and I would send him like some of our manufacturing investments like we have a company in Maniva and I would send that to him for his thoughts on manufacturing And then I saw on LinkedIn, he was posting he got into IC and I was like, dude Yeah. Like this is amazing. And then we hopped on a call. I was really excited by what they're building, really fits into the reindustrialization of America, the whole American dynamism.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 30:And I actually was on my friend's roof last night. We were talking and she was just like, you know, if you just, like, love company, you just, like, gotta go in. And I remember being like, okay. Gotta call Zane and be like, yo. Like like, please, like, I really wanna be a part, of this journey.
Speaker 30:And he was like, yeah. We would love to have you be a part of it. So I, sent the wire this morning.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Yeah. There you go. You did not want don't wanna wait until the end of the day.
Speaker 1:You know? We've been doing a lightning round with everyone. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Who is the genius behind Genius Ventures?
Speaker 30:But that's so hard. The first name that popped into my head was, Jerry Lopez, who's a surfer, zen master, philosopher. I feel like very much not in like the tech Yeah. World of
Speaker 1:his movement.
Speaker 30:Yeah. And what I love about him is he he's just has this incredible sense of grace riding super aggressive waves and then took that
Speaker 1:same sense. Language here. This is Yeah.
Speaker 30:It took that same sense of grace into building companies.
Speaker 1:He gets barreled a lot?
Speaker 9:Oh, he
Speaker 30:gets barreled.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know all about getting barreled. I've learned that in this shore break. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Shore break. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:John I I teach John about Point break? Every time we see the ocean, I explain this is a beach break. That would be a point break.
Speaker 1:That's great. Second question of our lightning round. Okay. How did you make your first dollar online or in business? You do anything crazy as a kid or early on?
Speaker 30:Yeah. I tutored.
Speaker 13:Okay.
Speaker 30:Well, okay. I'm trying to I'm trying to think of like the the first dollar. Oh, you know what it is? Okay. So my mom is an impressionist artist, Kim Daugherty Art.
Speaker 30:My brothers and I, when we were camping, we would go and sell her art cards in the campground when we were like five.
Speaker 3:Captive audience.
Speaker 28:Yeah. We were it
Speaker 30:was like seven five and a three year old
Speaker 32:going around
Speaker 30:being like, can you buy our art cards? And like, I've became an amazing salesperson through that experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Now you're selling money. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Where are you on fund two now? What what's, what's the update on the fund?
Speaker 30:Mhmm. Yep. We're, wrapping up our last couple investments in fund two. So two more to go.
Speaker 1:Very exciting. Nice.
Speaker 27:More to
Speaker 30:come soon.
Speaker 3:Big announcements. Big announcements on
Speaker 2:the way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, incredible. Show will ring the gong.
Speaker 3:We'll ring the gong. We don't have our gong with us, but Do we have a
Speaker 1:gong sound effect today or no?
Speaker 3:Barely. No. Don't. We don't. Fortunately, no.
Speaker 1:Ben is
Speaker 30:getting the claps The are
Speaker 1:the the Gong we will save for a proper announcement. Oh, here we go.
Speaker 30:I like that. Guys, Gong.
Speaker 3:There we go. Sure to send us any founders you like.
Speaker 32:Yeah. And
Speaker 3:have fun out there.
Speaker 1:Let let them know. We are open for business. Thank you. Was a pleasure
Speaker 30:seeing both of you.
Speaker 1:It was a pleasure to see you soon. If you're watching live, we are at YC demo day, we have our next guest on the
Speaker 3:stream. Welcome to the
Speaker 1:stream. Hi. What's Slice? That's a fantastic jacket.
Speaker 21:Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you building?
Speaker 21:Yeah. So hi. My name is Vihar, and we're building Orange Slice. We're basically AI search infra to help you find customers that already want your product.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm so distracted by the it's oranger than the YC orange.
Speaker 21:I know. You stared.
Speaker 3:You went orange for orange when you want. For orange. Keep one.
Speaker 1:It's actually crazy. Okay. So, give me give me the give me the pitch for the company at the customer level. Yeah. Who's buying and why?
Speaker 21:Yeah. So we take all the data in the Internet and we figure out, okay, out of your customers, who actually needs your product today? Mhmm. And we just tell you, hey, these are the people I need it today. Okay.
Speaker 21:And that's the people you reach out to.
Speaker 3:So many products that this is for other B to B sales teams. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sales teams.
Speaker 21:Okay. So we can track your total addressable market, whatever is in your CRM, whoever you're talking to. Yeah. We figure out, okay, who needs your product today? What have they been posting?
Speaker 21:What have they been filing?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 21:Yeah. What is maybe a new blog is out that indicates they need something from you guys.
Speaker 3:Smart. Always on.
Speaker 21:It's always on. Let's like see who actually wants you instead of When
Speaker 3:when How old were you when you realized you wanted to build agents for the enterprise?
Speaker 21:That's a
Speaker 17:great question. You know,
Speaker 21:I think that's a fantastic question. Really started really really young.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Five years old. I woke up.
Speaker 3:I spawned into the world and I said I must I have to help out What your were you doing before this?
Speaker 21:I was basically hacking in college but I was an investor banker at JPMorgan.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's go. Let's So
Speaker 21:complete complete one eighty. This is just fantastic.
Speaker 3:Thank you for then did you did you was that like summer internship?
Speaker 21:Summer internship.
Speaker 3:Did you are you did you drop out?
Speaker 21:Yeah. And then I I I I no. Graduated thankfully.
Speaker 3:Oh, Contrarian. Contrarian.
Speaker 1:I'm super bullish. Here we go.
Speaker 21:I like college. It was fun. Right?
Speaker 3:No. Know. It's it's a good it's a good time.
Speaker 1:That's great. We've been doing a lightning round asking two questions.
Speaker 3:Wait. No. No. Before the lightning round. How much money are you making right now?
Speaker 21:Oh, that's true. So we're at like 53 k MRR. So
Speaker 1:we're
Speaker 6:Oh, making a
Speaker 1:let's
Speaker 21:bit more than, what is that, 600,000 a year?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3:That's Ramen profitable?
Speaker 21:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 8:Fantastic. We're
Speaker 19:like 90%
Speaker 21:margins, we're printing cash.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Printing. Let's go. But Let's go.
Speaker 21:This is just the start, though.
Speaker 3:That's great. Round's closed?
Speaker 21:Yeah. The round is
Speaker 1:closed, unfortunately. But
Speaker 21:if if you always Let us in.
Speaker 1:Let us in.
Speaker 21:I think for you guys we can
Speaker 2:make room. For
Speaker 1:you guys we can make room.
Speaker 3:You're gonna keep booing
Speaker 1:unless you
Speaker 2:let the
Speaker 7:sharks When
Speaker 1:you say us, you mean we can do
Speaker 21:If it's super strategic, you know.
Speaker 1:25 mil from the QIA, Gong Yen.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. That's awesome. This makes a ton of sense. Yeah. And I can see why it's ripping.
Speaker 3:Lightning around?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I have one more question. So I'm selling a business to business product, and I get some sort of alert from you saying, hey. There's a new customer. And are you focused on a person
Speaker 21:or a company? We're focused on the company level. We do both. So we'll track all the executives at the company
Speaker 33:Yeah.
Speaker 21:That could be the one
Speaker 1:But This could is the company and then
Speaker 21:And then this is the person.
Speaker 1:This is the person that owns. Who might be the internal champion. Exactly. Got it. Okay.
Speaker 3:All of
Speaker 21:that stuff.
Speaker 3:Cool. A crazy idea for you. So you guys sell to a company, you detect a customer for that company, you partner with Tesla Optimus to actually deploy a robot to go have a steak dinner
Speaker 1:Oh, they're
Speaker 3:with the end customer and close the loop and then pick up the commission on that deal. Think you gotta go full stack. Yep. Full stack.
Speaker 21:No. Totally. And that's one of the biggest reasons we haven't done the end of the stack yet. Like, people sell in so many different ways.
Speaker 3:Well, and and a lot of people are just like fighting and competing over the end of the stack Yeah. With a bunch of slop. Yeah.
Speaker 11:I don't want
Speaker 21:I don't want any more emails in my inbox.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so all you need to do is serve the person serve the lead up at the right time, and then let a stake expert take it all
Speaker 21:the way.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's beautifully anti slot because the human's just in the loop at the right point. I don't really care. If you if you misidentify someone and I click on a website, I'm like, actually, they're out of, like, the core value prop right now Mhmm. Or maybe I'll deal with that one later.
Speaker 1:Like, that's fine. Fantastic. So lightning round. Two questions. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Speaker 21:Oh, that's a good one. I'm not I don't actually know that many entrepreneurs in general.
Speaker 1:Someone that you read a biography of or look up to or or maybe just saw a recent interview with and thought was, yeah, I could learn something from them.
Speaker 3:He's Lisan Al Gayebe of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need it's just a blank slate. Doesn't need any influence.
Speaker 21:Well honestly, I don't think I I don't draw that much inspiration just because I think the biggest motivating factor in this might be contrarian. It's not actually inspiration but like the fear of mediocrity of it not working out has been way bigger for us. That's the biggest reason I don't have that much inspiration. But Eric from the ramp from ramp, my cofounder used to work at ramp. I mean, are absolutely killing
Speaker 1:it. You You know? Pick one
Speaker 3:you pick a legend from the modern Yes.
Speaker 21:I mean, you can't not like what he's doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Future Hall of Famer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one hundred Second
Speaker 31:question. How did
Speaker 1:you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?
Speaker 21:Oh man, first dollar would have to be in like elementary school. I used to like do origami of like folding up like ninja stars for like other people. Nice. And then I used to sell it on like the school bus. I'd half an hour in the morning and half an hour at the end to do all my sales.
Speaker 21:And then you go home and you just keep folding the rest of the day. I remember having so many paper cuts when I started.
Speaker 5:Damn. Fingers bleeding. Like just one more ninja
Speaker 1:star. Prospect. The kid in the second row.
Speaker 3:They're ready for go
Speaker 1:to a
Speaker 3:dark place for this ninja
Speaker 1:star. Yeah. Exactly. They're ready for a ninja star. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:Congrats on all the traction.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:Are you gonna go are you gonna hang out for the rest of the day? You gonna go Yeah.
Speaker 21:Always like to chat with sort of cool founders. Awesome. Thanks for doing this, guys. This is so cool.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Yeah. We'll find you after. Cheers. Good to
Speaker 1:meet you.
Speaker 12:Team. Talking to
Speaker 21:you guys.
Speaker 1:Let's bring in our next guest. We have the cofounder of Fall. Who do we have? Here he is. Stream.
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 28:What's up?
Speaker 1:Good to see you, Bruce.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 3:Good to meet. What's up, Joe? What's happening?
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly. Welcome to YCWA.
Speaker 3:Great shirt, by the way.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Look at this. Alright. We just talked to we just talked to a founder that that made their first, money flipping flipping supreme Oh, yeah. Logo T shirts.
Speaker 23:There you go. That's right. There you go. Yeah. I'm decked out in fall fall swag.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But the GPU poor. You guys GPU poor anymore?
Speaker 23:Well, I have a GPU rich hat too.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 23:I gotta give you guys some.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 23:So I'm I'm one of the cofounders of Fall. Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 6:Also My
Speaker 1:name is Brooke White. Our latest sponsors
Speaker 3:Yes. Of AT and Yeah.
Speaker 1:We make this possible. So thank you.
Speaker 3:Corporate media. Give
Speaker 1:us your reaction to YC Demo Day. How how what's the mood like?
Speaker 3:What are rolled in here from but give us the vibe
Speaker 23:from I rolled in from our office for like five minute drive away. I mean, it's amazing energy. I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 23:I mean, being in the Silicon Valley for, I don't know, fifteen years, close to fifteen, I actually never been to a demo day. No way.
Speaker 3:There you go. Brought you over.
Speaker 23:This is my first time. And yeah, love the energy.
Speaker 1:That's great. Give
Speaker 3:Yeah. Us So so I guess what's been how how much how much of you guys from a from a customer acquisition standpoint, it feels like there's like incredible pull from the market. You guys have crazy logos from, you know, Deckacorns, public companies all the way down. I imagine a bunch of bunch of just companies are getting off the ground and and signing up for you guys. But, like, what does that customer acquisition motion look like?
Speaker 3:Are you guys do you pay much attention to kind of the super early stage or do you just like let people find you?
Speaker 23:Yeah. We pay a lot of attention to early stage. A lot of our customers are early stage. And it is I think it's one of the best times to build like on top of fall and other LLMs as well. But like if you wanna build anything in consumer AI specifically, I think fall is probably, like, the best way to accelerate, you know, building something out there.
Speaker 23:There's incredible demand. I think I was doing some math on the way here. Like, I think in our start up segment, I think the revenue of all of our startups combined and what I define startups is let's call it like 200 people or less.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Raise less than a billion dollars.
Speaker 23:Yeah, sure. I think the total combined revenue of our customers is in the billions.
Speaker 1:Wow. No way.
Speaker 23:So it's kind of ridiculous, like, how much demand there is in the consumer AI market or even like prosumer, but you can build amazing applications that leverage the Genmedia technology. Yeah, that
Speaker 1:prosumer thing is fascinating. We saw this with the images in ChatGPT, the Dolly moment, where it's not an enterprise tool, but it's something that went so viral that everyone has to wake up. Even if you're just a marketing manager in a Fortune 500 company. Yes. You're gonna see it.
Speaker 1:You're gonna think about it and be like, okay. I actually need a strategy here. We recently saw this with, Nano Banana. Again, we saw a spike in the Google Trends chart. What is Yeah.
Speaker 3:What have you guys seen
Speaker 1:on prem? Are people banana banana era? How are things changing? Yeah. Just kinda give me your read.
Speaker 23:It's incredible. I mean, the demand the the way the way I look at it is like every time we have new capabilities
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 23:There is a jump in demand. And it doesn't seem like these things are eating into each other. It seems like we're really seeing the building blocks coming together. So for example, with Nana Banana and all the editing models in general, they actually are a key ingredient to really good video models. Meaning, when you want to stick together a few clips
Speaker 1:Start with a few of
Speaker 6:those.
Speaker 23:Can keep the consistency between using these edit models, right? So it actually solves the consistency problem in video. So that enabled video to go even further because now you can just generate 10 different starting frames and ending frames and combine them together. So these things are really building blocks and they're kind of compounding on top of each other. So the way we see it in traffic and revenue is that anytime there's a new model, new capability specifically, we we see a huge jump.
Speaker 3:It was pretty wild. There was a site that spun up, I don't know if you saw this, the day of Nano Banana's launch. It was just called nanobanana.ai. Mhmm. It had full like, it was a full looked like a Google product.
Speaker 3:Was just brain. Someone else just vending in Nano Banana under the hood. But I'm sure they got their API access.
Speaker 23:All the time. Like, you actually search Nano Banana on App Store
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 23:You get this. Just go to App Store, there will be literally 20 results.
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is so crazy. It's still nanobanana.ai is the number one result for Nano Banana. Yes.
Speaker 23:People And had
Speaker 1:to name
Speaker 23:it down.
Speaker 3:AI image editor, edit photos.
Speaker 1:Mean, the the app store was like that for so long where you search ChatGPT and it'd be like chat with GPT.
Speaker 10:It has
Speaker 1:like 5,000 Yes. Five star reviews. And you're like, I know that's not from OpenAI because I can clock it as like, clearly, is not an OpenAI branding. It's slightly off. And all of
Speaker 23:these things are, believe it or not, they're getting traction.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 23:Yeah. So That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think it's insane.
Speaker 23:Yeah. Like like Apple, I don't know. Like, they're not really doing much to stop this. Maybe they're trying but not really.
Speaker 1:It's game of whack mole.
Speaker 23:Yeah. It's a game of whack a mole and I think they're benefiting from this. And I think, you know, obviously, long term, what matters is how these products differentiate. But I think it just shows you how insane the demand is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What keeps you up at night between the, inference cost kind of stack? So Mhmm. Are you are you worried about GPU poor? Like, we gonna run out of line time at TSMC?
Speaker 1:Right. Are we gonna see a chip shortage versus just large scale data center capacity Yeah. Versus energy? Yeah. Like, if we play this out a few years, like, what what what do you wanna get right that might be out of your control even?
Speaker 1:Yes. But, like, you'd like to make it make sure that it goes right.
Speaker 23:Yes. I think we're very capacity constrained.
Speaker 1:And But at what level? That's what I'm interested in.
Speaker 23:So so yeah. It's it's
Speaker 19:Well, even this even this
Speaker 3:this Nebius deal yesterday. Right? Right. Like like, shock to everyone. Right?
Speaker 3:Especially, we we were hanging with a a friend who's a multistage
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:You know, has multi runs you know, help helps run a multibillion dollar fund. And he was just like, like, a year ago, this company, like, couldn't you know, this company was not taken super seriously as a player, and all of a sudden, have a $20,000,000,000 deal with with Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft.
Speaker 3:So, anyways, like that that just shows like the the fact that the fact that, you know, Microsoft is going I I I you know, if you if you kind of like stack rank where Nebius sits in in the neo cloud space, it certainly wouldn't have been somebody's top choice. But I think that that just shows how capacity constrained everyone is.
Speaker 23:It's incredible. I think, I mean, currently, we're going through another crunch right now, specifically for H100s. So we experienced this. Interesting. And you can kind of feel it coming.
Speaker 3:What does it feel
Speaker 23:like that? It feels pretty bad, right? You're trying to scale. So most of our workloads are inference workloads, right? We don't do any training.
Speaker 23:So our needs are we don't just buy 10,000 GPUs and just sit there for a whole year, right? That's not how we operate. We're more dynamic, we go and expand our fleet over So we and we're multi cloud. So we talk to all the new clouds and we have really great relationships with all of them. We test them, we benchmark them.
Speaker 23:If they work for us, if they're reliable, support is good, we use them. And you know, when you need new capacity, you literally hit them up. You call all of them up in order. Old fashioned way. Literally, I'm not even kidding.
Speaker 23:You just call them up and you know, sometimes it's like you start hearing more no's, right? Like do you have five twelve GPUs? Do you have 1,000 GPUs? And it's just like, no, no. You're like, oh crap.
Speaker 23:So you kind of want to stock up a little bit. That's how we operate. We we like buy buy a little bit in bulk. Yep. You know?
Speaker 23:But but really prices hit hit a little bit of a bottom
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 23:Which like hasn't happened with a one hundreds. I mean, if you look at it, like they just kept going down. Yeah. With h one hundreds, they kept going down and they kinda hit the bottom. They're like, now
Speaker 3:now, like, kinda
Speaker 23:kinda picking back up again.
Speaker 1:How, what can you tell me about how inference moves around the globe as a function of time? Heard the story about mid journey Sure. Potentially doing inference in Asia Right. Where they're sleeping. They're not using they're not running Netflix Yes.
Speaker 1:In Malaysia or Singapore. And so when I generate an image or something Right. Right. You know, it it it's inference over there.
Speaker 23:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that something you're doing? Is that something that you're planning to do? Is that common? Is that happening naturally?
Speaker 23:So our traffic patterns are basically maxed out when US and Europe is up So that's kind of like the peak And then we don't have as much users. We still have customers in Asia but it's much less. So we do see a dip across when US and EU are asleep, there's a slight dip. We do a few things. We use like we basically like have a pool of GPUs that we like, you know, return and bring back simultaneously.
Speaker 23:But what's really important for us is uptime.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 23:So even if it means like we're gonna have some idle GPUs Sure. We'd like to take that cost because if you can't take those GPUs back, like if you let them go, Yeah. You get them You know, then you have a very bad time with your customers. Interesting. For us, like, reliability is more important
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 23:At this time, you know. And over long term, I think if
Speaker 1:You might be able to move the liquidity across the globe more over time.
Speaker 3:What and any any key lessons? You're at Oracle for four years
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 8:Back in
Speaker 3:the day. Any key lessons from that era that you've kind of brought Obviously Oracle has been on its and really leaning in a
Speaker 1:So little
Speaker 23:Oracle was my first job out of college. So, you know, that's 2012, 2016. Back then, they did not believe in cloud. They were like yeah. The entire cloud So Larry Ellison would go on stage and literally be like, guys, we don't believe, you know.
Speaker 23:He has like a famous quote, know, it's someone's computer or something, know, the cloud doesn't exist. They've come a really long way since then. And obviously they're on a rip right now, I think, with AI. What we hear from the field is like there's really good Nebius is a very good data center operator. Yeah.
Speaker 23:And Oracle is a
Speaker 3:very Because they had data center to that because of running Yandex, right?
Speaker 10:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. I actually had to I get more worried about Neo Cloud products that are we're doing, you know, like, there there's one, I think it's like I Irene or something like that Sure. That's coming online that that, you know, just last year, I think, was doing, like, Bitcoin mining. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, like, fast pivot, maybe a later pivot.
Speaker 23:Some of those guys are also good. Yeah. At really good costs. So and uptime is very important. So all of these things, the economics and operating the data center play a huge role into this.
Speaker 23:I think they I'm glad they chose going in this direction. I think there's only a few opportunities, right? And this is one of them and they just went ahead and capitalized on it which is
Speaker 1:really Lightning round?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:We've been asking everyone who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to throughout history? Could be anyone.
Speaker 3:Could be Larry. I
Speaker 23:really like okay.
Speaker 1:Could be anyone.
Speaker 23:Let's see. I like Brian. Brian Armstrong. There we go. It's pretty good.
Speaker 23:That's a great pick.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah. Legend. Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 23:Oof. Okay. I had do you know these toys, Karedev fighter? No. No.
Speaker 23:Okay. It's like is is that too old? How big is the toy? It's it's like it's like two fighters. Okay.
Speaker 23:You just like make them fight with each other.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 23:So when I was like six or seven, this is not on the Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like almost Rock them Sock and Robots. Yeah. Rock them Sock Yeah.
Speaker 23:Yeah. Thing. Same Same thing. I I rented those out.
Speaker 1:You rented those. Yeah. Yeah. Flip the CapEx to OpEx. You don't need to you don't need to buy this thing.
Speaker 1:You go to him. You rent them today. He's renting
Speaker 3:That's actually kids don't do renting enough. They're always transacting.
Speaker 1:Am I stretching to draw a full circle circle analogy here?
Speaker 3:You rent It's like you you you buy
Speaker 1:the servers. You rent out the tokens. You rent out the He's got
Speaker 3:me the kit. What's your allowance? Okay. $20 a week? That's what that's the price.
Speaker 8:$20
Speaker 1:a week.
Speaker 23:There you go. Value based pricing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. That's great. That's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Alright. Well, come back on the show Yeah.
Speaker 23:Anytime. Good to see you. Yeah. I gotta I gotta give you some hats.
Speaker 1:Please. There we go. I'd love some.
Speaker 23:Give them give them out to your favorites.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. We will. Perfect.
Speaker 23:Some rich hats.
Speaker 1:Oh. GPU. Oh, these are good hats.
Speaker 3:These are
Speaker 1:really good Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:This is great. We got Amazing. We got we got four
Speaker 23:to see you.
Speaker 3:Great seeing you.
Speaker 1:Don't give this away. We'll quiz we'll quiz folks on whether they own GPUs or they mere merely sit on top of hyperscalers. We got Jack from slow. How you doing, Jack?
Speaker 3:What's up? Phil, John.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's so dude, you didn't have
Speaker 5:to. I
Speaker 1:can't believe you. You look fantastic. Well You look fantastic.
Speaker 11:Thank you.
Speaker 6:Thank you. How are we doing? How is how is demo day?
Speaker 1:It's been fantastic. It's been great.
Speaker 3:Tons
Speaker 1:of cool companies.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Everybody's kinda kinda ripping.
Speaker 1:We kinda came in thinking, like, let's try and find the theme. Because, like
Speaker 6:Other than AI? Cursor
Speaker 1:for yeah. There there's, like, a little bit of an AI theme.
Speaker 3:But But we had metal. We had, Zane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I yeah. We had metal cutting. We had a missile company already. Nice.
Speaker 1:There's been a few different companies. And I I feel like the narrative is shifting now to just like AI is just a tool like cloud computing. Yeah. It's just like, are you using like a py like a Python? Or, you know, it's or are do you have a mobile strategy?
Speaker 1:Are you pulling mobile off the shelf?
Speaker 6:Like, it's like at this point, you're not gonna use, like, oh, yeah. No. We're building in the cloud. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 6:What do actually do?
Speaker 1:It's like, okay. Yeah. You're a software company, but, like, what are you actually doing? So it very much feels like we're in this era of, like, vertical software for AI. So it's like vertical AI.
Speaker 1:This is vertical SaaS all over again. Yeah. But the traction's really good. The businesses are super niche and super interesting. So you're learning a lot about, like, a guy who set up a 311 line in Florida, he's getting a of calls about alligators.
Speaker 1:And, like, that's interesting to Yep. Anyway, what's new with you?
Speaker 6:Well, so it's funny. Like, every most of the investors are here to, like, invest capital and Quickly.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the story. If don't know.
Speaker 6:I'm Jack Raines. I'm on the investment team over at Slow Ventures, early stage venture fund. We run about a billion dollars now, invest generalist, little bit of everything, 1 to $3,000,000 checks.
Speaker 1:K.
Speaker 6:But unlike every other venture fund here, we actually are launching the the Slow Ventures etiquette finishing school. Oh. I don't think can see this. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let me see.
Speaker 6:You guys are dressed sharp. Obviously, our GB video
Speaker 1:is photo. This is a fantastic photo.
Speaker 6:We had this
Speaker 3:We got a Photoshop view on there.
Speaker 6:I know. Once I make once
Speaker 1:I make GB video and
Speaker 6:beyond there. But, you know, there's there's a lot of capital floating around now that's like like financial capital to invest in founders.
Speaker 1:But the real problem in
Speaker 6:San Francisco is you don't know how to dress.
Speaker 3:Like Wait. But if people don't know how to dress, why is it you're just expecting them to go to a black tie event?
Speaker 6:Well, you know, they can we we say that. It's kinda self select.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. You show up in a sloppy toss.
Speaker 3:You want a high bar.
Speaker 1:It's rented.
Speaker 3:And then you wanna take you wanna
Speaker 1:take someone from good degree. Constructive feedback.
Speaker 6:Right. I don't know if you guys were in, like, fraternities in college. There's this whole, like, you kinda get hazed if you're,
Speaker 1:like, pledged out to guy. Pitching a start up. You come to you. The the pitch is a little sloppy. You go around.
Speaker 1:By the time you come back and pitch the second, third time, the business is polished. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Literally. And it's like there's, you know, there's there's business upside of this. Like Okay. Fixing your etiquette makes you like, you can command a boardroom better.
Speaker 1:I like it. But also Boardroom generals. We love
Speaker 6:boardroom generals. And, like, we also wanna help founders, like, get girlfriends or boyfriends. Like, there's especially in SF. Like, everybody's complaining. You know?
Speaker 6:The nine nine six is great except, you know, right collapsing. For
Speaker 3:Has has slow flipped bullish on AI?
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. That's a good question.
Speaker 3:Are you guys still bearish?
Speaker 1:Speak to the entire firm right Speak
Speaker 6:the entire firm.
Speaker 1:Speak the entire firm.
Speaker 6:And especially a friend of the program,
Speaker 9:Sam West.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 11:My boss. Yes.
Speaker 6:So my paycheck. Yes. Ideally watching this right now. Yeah. We're bullish on AI.
Speaker 6:I wouldn't say a good company that uses AI. Okay. It's like the whole, like our our take the whole time has been that, like, the models are gonna eat pretty much everything. Yeah. Microsoft's gonna eat everything.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's what we're seeing today, Demi Day.
Speaker 3:It's like Micro Microsoft is gonna eat Nebius.
Speaker 1:A lot of the companies, I feel like, are in that Sam lesson idea of, like, AI cherry on top, I think, is his phrase. I I like that framing. I thought he did
Speaker 3:well there.
Speaker 10:The more the
Speaker 6:more vertically integrated. And the thing is, like, if the founders actually have, like, real domain expertise in the thing versus, like, somebody who knew AI well, and then they're trying to, like, oh, this is an obvious problem.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 6:Maybe. But you're seeing some interesting, like, one cofounder is incredibly sharp in AI. I've been doing machine learning forever. And then the other cofounder actually is that dude in their space for twenty years.
Speaker 1:That dude.
Speaker 12:That's when
Speaker 1:it gets interesting. Is he him? So You're saying he's him? Like,
Speaker 6:when when you have AI wizard plus cofounder who is him
Speaker 1:I like that. Or her. Or
Speaker 6:her. Yeah. That's that's the magic. So I would not say that we're bullish on AI any more than we have been. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, like, you know, we respect AI used well. It's like AI is table stakes.
Speaker 1:If your
Speaker 6:only thing is
Speaker 3:AI Get a Yeah. Get a post out there.
Speaker 1:Cloud
Speaker 3:hosting. Slow respects AI.
Speaker 23:Slow respects AI.
Speaker 6:Yep. You heard it here first.
Speaker 1:Breaking news. Cool. Okay. We've been asking everyone, lightning round. Who is your favorite entrepreneur in history of all time?
Speaker 6:In history. Probably outside of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is like ESPN, so you're supposed to say that. Yeah. No.
Speaker 6:John D. Rockefeller.
Speaker 1:Rockefeller. Yeah. Was go ready
Speaker 6:to right one. About you guys?
Speaker 1:I don't think we've I don't think we've answered the question ourselves yet.
Speaker 3:Mine is always Steve. It's just the obvious answer, but growing up Yeah. You just it it it's it's, my favorite products ever have consistently been Apple products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I I just would listen to so much founders podcast. I say Jay Gould, of course.
Speaker 31:Yeah. Can we
Speaker 3:can we flip around? Who's your
Speaker 6:least favorite entrepreneurs ever?
Speaker 1:Least favorite entrepreneurs?
Speaker 6:They had to be good enough to be famous, but you just don't like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably SPF or something. Yeah. One of those.
Speaker 6:Like That's good pick.
Speaker 1:Although although maybe he's underrated because he got that anthropic bags and he's ripping now. Okay. SPF is gonna come back.
Speaker 6:Underrated venture investor. Underrated entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Perhaps. Perhaps. Yeah. We're we're not the shopper. Operator.
Speaker 1:Do you think Overrated gamer.
Speaker 6:Do you the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account is real?
Speaker 1:It it I I believe it is run by her husband. Okay. And I do I not believe it's
Speaker 3:actually disagree. I I don't I don't think it screams like ghost writer coded Yep. Because for it to be run by her husband, her husband would have had to be like hyper online on and an like it just feels like very good. Like you can tell when an account is ghostwritten.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And it's ghostwritten. Believe that he probably has the
Speaker 1:keys Okay.
Speaker 3:Sure. Hired a ghost writer
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 22:At ghost writer.
Speaker 1:We agree that she does not have The prison phone. The the everything app installed on a phone that is connected to some sort of five gs network within the prison. We agree on that.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 6:Could she? Because SPF is tweeting for prison. Right?
Speaker 1:It possible, but it's very much looked down upon. And, of course, like, as soon as it as soon as the tweet goes out, like, the warden should be able to get the news. Like, someone calls the warden because, like, someone sees the post, calls the the governor, and then the governor calls the warden and says, like, one of your prisoners is breaking the rules. Like, can you do something about this? Like, it should flow through.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe it doesn't
Speaker 19:work that way.
Speaker 6:If she I don't know what her prison terms are, but, like, if and when she gets out, like, how quickly do you think she could raise, like, 50,000,000, 100,000,000? Do think it's like
Speaker 3:I should be John's is John's take is
Speaker 1:I've got the pitch.
Speaker 3:If you really wanna she she can rebuild her her personal brand, but that's and and people people are art like, people are just it just marketing works. Right? So she's just like marketing to the timeline right now. People are deciding like, oh, maybe I like her. Like, oh, she's making me laugh.
Speaker 3:So people naturally start to like her. I don't think it's gonna repair her brand in the in the capital markets. Yep. I think if she wanted to truly repair brand, it'd be like deep threads and long posts on, like, biotech.
Speaker 1:That was my take. Was was was Martin Screlly, He has posted about biotech, about trading. Yeah. He's gotten a lot of picks right. He talks about capital markets.
Speaker 1:He talks about yes. He he did get in legal trouble. Yeah. Right? But he has but he has said, the thing that I was doing before I went to prison, I I'm still doing it, and I'm an expert, and you can kind of judge me by my opinions and my takes.
Speaker 1:And I'll go on livestreams, and you can judge me by my words. And I haven't seen enough posts from her on the state of mRNA or the state of of GLP ones or the state of of gene editing technology. Like, if she really is an incredible biologist who's been, like, wrongly convicted, like, me some incredible biology takes. Right? Yep.
Speaker 1:Don't just be okay. Yeah. You're just a mean poster.
Speaker 6:The the Martin Shkreli, like, short selling reports were like, it's like Friday at lunchtime. Yeah. He just tweets, this company's a fraud. Like, their tests are
Speaker 1:gonna fail. Yeah.
Speaker 6:The stock drops 70% on
Speaker 1:Monday. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Incredible performance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And it shows that he's like he's like at least a student of the game in Totally. In in the world, in the financial world.
Speaker 6:Now he has a kid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know? Congrats.
Speaker 6:Drop his kid on the Internet.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have a lightning round. We did the we did the favorite entrepreneur. The second one is, how did you make your first dollar online or in business?
Speaker 6:Oh, that's, first dollar online or in business. I was trading SPACs in my Roth IRA, which is yeah. So, like, most people lost money on these. I one of my buddies Money?
Speaker 1:I mean You're the guy? You're the one? It's my son.
Speaker 6:Money. To god. This is why Sam this is why Sam hired me because he really appreciated my SPAC story. But, basically, like, I graduated December 2019. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I was bored. COVID hits. Like, the first week I start my job, corporate finance. Yeah. Very boring.
Speaker 6:And one of my buddies text me. He's like, DraftKings is going public through a SPAC. If you buy this thing, you'll own DraftKings stock. I I didn't get it. I was like, why don't they just IPO?
Speaker 1:I read
Speaker 6:through the structure, and it's like, oh, if you buy these warrants, it's like a call option that Yep. It doesn't expire for five years. And then SPACs turned into a bubble. I built some web scrapers that would, like, ping me whenever whenever, like, a new SPAC got listed or, like, a merger was announced. So this was, like, fairly autistic, but I saw that Apollo had a SPAC.
Speaker 6:Okay. And I noticed that they had changed their website header from oil rigs to windmills in, like, June 2020. Uh-huh. And my hypothesis was everybody's chasing the next Tesla. They're gonna announce, like, an EV deal.
Speaker 6:Yep. And the warrants are gonna go from 50¢ to, like, whatever. Yeah. And I just put all my money in Apollo warrants, and then they announced a deal with Fisker Automotive, like, a month later. Made a lot of money.
Speaker 6:And I just basically And then
Speaker 1:you got out because I kinda didn't do well.
Speaker 6:I just parlayed that, like, 20 times. Wow. My first online money was trading SPACs in my retirement.
Speaker 1:That's a fantastic story.
Speaker 6:So shout out. A lot of people lost money on his SPACs.
Speaker 1:I would like to
Speaker 6:thank him for bankrolling a trip to Argentina.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's go. Yeah. Hopefully, you had enough steak. He's bottled wine. Maybe some tequila.
Speaker 6:And SPACs are back. Maybe it's time
Speaker 1:to do it again. Maybe.
Speaker 23:Don't know. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Maybe this time is different.
Speaker 3:Couple IPOs coming.
Speaker 1:For coming on.
Speaker 3:Good to
Speaker 1:see you. Fantastic. Well, see you.
Speaker 6:Cheers. Great to see you. Bye, guys.
Speaker 1:See you. And we will bring in our next guest to our YC demo day stream. We are live. How you doing? What's up?
Speaker 1:Yo. Of course. How you doing?
Speaker 23:Great. Great. Yeah. Nice meet you.
Speaker 3:Very Gen Z coded. I love I
Speaker 1:love it. Introduce yourself. What who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 19:My name is Arlen. I am building a Zomio, which is an API, that gives more context to agents. Okay. So if you're a Cursor user
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 19:You can pretty much just go to Cursor Yeah. Index any documentation or code base and give it as a context
Speaker 16:Okay. To an agent.
Speaker 1:We, what exactly is happening? Are I I I know Cursor does kind of roll ups of what's happening. There's there's some rag infrastructure that's popular. What else is going on in in the actual product to unlock value?
Speaker 19:Yeah. So the two reasons I built this is because, like, I was so fucking pissed Mhmm. Where I would, like, go to Google, copy paste all the docs, and paste them right in the cursor.
Speaker 1:It's all been there.
Speaker 19:Yeah. The memory is not persistent, so they will fucking forget that in, like, two seconds. Sure. And second one is that you also pollute context window, which, like, causes context fraud. It's actually a study done by Chroma, which is like AI company.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 19:We know Jeff well. Yeah. Saying, like, post 4,000 tokens, I think. Like, the performance of any LLM goes like this. Yep.
Speaker 19:So that's, like, the reason I built this.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Wait. Did you have a take on, Jeff Jeff's take on, like, context windows and and and the need for RAG? Like, how how do you think about the the trade offs in where the frontier models are scaling? Like, there's there's one world where you just throw a bigger and bigger context windows endlessly.
Speaker 1:Maybe that doesn't
Speaker 19:work. Yeah. You know what? There are two different architectures right now. So if you look at Cursor and Cloud Code Mhmm.
Speaker 19:Cloud Code doesn't index your code base. Mhmm. So they only do agentic Rack Mhmm. Which, like, only uses terminal tools. Like, GripGrab, grab Sure.
Speaker 19:And Cursor, they use both. They use local index and also vector store, so, like, Rack.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 19:It's really hard to say right now. A lot of people started hating on Rack. Yeah. But I think it's It's still very popular. It's like refining it with, like, Graph Rack, which is also a very good approach.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the traction of the business been like?
Speaker 19:Yeah. So in the past three weeks, I send up 25% of the current batch. We're paying and We're
Speaker 1:paying? Oh, god. Yeah.
Speaker 19:Thank you. And 5% of the spring batch. Amazing. So, yeah, total, like, than 90 USC companies. That's amazing.
Speaker 19:And, yeah, about, like, 11.5 k MRR.
Speaker 1:There we go. Congratulations. Thank you. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Are you profitable?
Speaker 19:Yes, sir.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 19:Yeah. Because, like, OIC deals cover everything, like, all the infrastructure costs. Sure. Yeah. So, yeah,
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 4:I guess,
Speaker 1:you're fantastic. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It covers the infrastructure costs. Okay.
Speaker 1:Incredible.
Speaker 3:What were you doing? You you have a crazy story. Right? What were you doing
Speaker 19:before So I was bored of high school when I was 17, and I wanted to build. So I dropped out, raised a million in couple days in London.
Speaker 3:Couple days? How did that go? Yeah.
Speaker 19:So usually, like, people race like, it takes weeks to race in London, especially in Europe.
Speaker 3:They were
Speaker 1:because they
Speaker 19:were so fucking slow, but, like Yeah. They're always find the right the right approach and, like, good people. So in my case, it was Local Globe. They're really, really good, and they're really fast. So I guess I just got lucky.
Speaker 19:Built from London for a couple couple months Yeah. And then applied for OEC.
Speaker 7:So, yeah, so same company. Same company. Yeah. Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great.
Speaker 19:I applied for OEC for my third time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Third time. Rejected the first
Speaker 19:My dad applied three years ago. He got rejected, so I sort of, like, put a goal for myself to, to, like, fucking apply again and again. And yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's There you go. That's incredible. It's amazing. How did how did you make your first dollar on the Internet?
Speaker 19:Yeah. On the Internet, yeah. So when I was 15, I was a student, I wanted to build something. And I needed some domain expertise. And since I was a student, edtech was, like, the solution.
Speaker 19:Yep. So I built, like, an AI scholarship database for high school students from, like, underrepresented backgrounds to go and apply to summer programs in US. Mhmm. So I did a couple of those myself, like, at Berkeley and then at UPenn, came back, scaled it to 20,000 active users, and made, like, $2,000 or something. Nice.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 3:Check it to the bank.
Speaker 1:Last question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur
Speaker 3:of all
Speaker 1:time?
Speaker 19:Yeah. Who the fuck the most money, bro? Like, Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 19:He's the rich man, bro. Yeah. Yeah. But otherwise, yeah, Brian Chesky is my gold. I love Brian Chesky.
Speaker 19:Brian Chesky.
Speaker 1:Founder mode. There you go. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:BOG. How's the fundraise going? I closed a couple weeks ago. Yeah. Couple weeks ago.
Speaker 3:Congratulations. Okay. Incredible.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Crushing it, dude.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. You. Good to meet you. Thank you. Yep.
Speaker 3:Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Up next.
Speaker 3:Who we got next?
Speaker 1:We are continuing our coverage live from YC Demo Day twenty twenty five. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 3:What's happening?
Speaker 1:I'm John. Alessio. Alessio. Pleasure.
Speaker 3:Great to meet you.
Speaker 9:Alessio. How are doing?
Speaker 1:Would you mind introducing yourself and your company?
Speaker 29:Sure. So hi, everyone. I'm Alessia. Vibeflow is the all in one solution to build production ready apps in no code.
Speaker 1:Okay. We've seen a lot of news recently that there's now a whole industry of vibe code cleanup specialists. What's your reaction? Can vibe coding ever make it to production?
Speaker 29:No.
Speaker 1:No. Well, not not now
Speaker 29:at least. Like, all the solutions out there are really broken. And they can they they give you this wow effect in the front end. But on the back end side, there is so much to do, and there is a huge need. People are they like, they have hair on fire problems, and they need to solve these problems.
Speaker 29:The market is huge.
Speaker 1:So how are you plugging in? How do you deliver value to your customers?
Speaker 29:So we, have a solution which is a hybrid approach between Loveable and Any 10 Mhmm. And a database plugged in. So we have this no code interface that is AI like, the AI generate this flow Yep. And then maps deterministically to code. So the code is never gonna be hallucinating.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 29:And, yeah, that's a robust solution.
Speaker 1:Traction been so far?
Speaker 29:Traction is amazing. As soon as we launched, as I said, like, people have this hair and fire problem. So they just they want to throw money at you Oh. For you to onboard them on platforms that they can actually continue developing the application on.
Speaker 1:Did you share any metrics today at demo day?
Speaker 29:I will share it. I haven't presented yet.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yes. Okay. You will.
Speaker 3:We'll Front run it.
Speaker 1:Front run it.
Speaker 3:Front it for the for the audience
Speaker 29:to watch it. Thousand 8,000 applications in There we go. Three weeks.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:What were you doing before this?
Speaker 29:I worked as a software engineer for four years for a company and actually built a no code tool, is very similar to what I placed it in for, animation and three d modeling.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's Interesting.
Speaker 29:For Disney.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Disney. Disney.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Crazy. That's amazing. How do you how how have you reacted to, like, the way that Disney's approached AI? I know they kind of seemingly it's like, they're very careful not to get into hot water around, like, using, like, too much AI, but clearly wanna stay on that.
Speaker 29:They use AI everywhere, like, literally everywhere. In, rendering, three d modeling, everywhere. And it's cool. Like, you can just make everything faster and super high resolution rendering. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Let's move into our lightning round. We've been asking two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Speaker 29:My favorite entrepreneur is Taylor Swift.
Speaker 1:Taylor Swift.
Speaker 29:I'm a big fan and she is amazing.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Icon. Definitely. Mogul.
Speaker 29:Resilience and persistence.
Speaker 1:Second, how'd you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 29:By selling stuff that my brothers didn't use at home. Really? Yes.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 3:Nice. Anyway. Incredible.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the stream.
Speaker 29:Thank you.
Speaker 1:We will talk you soon. A good We'll bring on oh, wait. I forgot to ask about the GPU. We gotta ask if they if they're GPU or Hey. How you doing?
Speaker 1:Good. Nice to meet you.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:I'm John. Welcome to the show. Josh. Josh, pleasure.
Speaker 3:To to meet you.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are we? What are you building?
Speaker 34:Well, I'm Joshua March. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Veritas Agent. We build AI agents for the consumer lending industry.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 34:So interfacing with borrowers to help help doing sales, servicing, collections
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 34:For like fintechs, banks, credit unions, services, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Do you see your company as GPU poor or GPU rich?
Speaker 34:We're rich everything.
Speaker 1:GPU rich. Yeah. Can have this.
Speaker 3:What how how have you like, how have you what's go to market look like? Are you are you focusing on Are
Speaker 1:you trying to banks involved.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I imagine there's like a couple BNPL players that would, you know, be.
Speaker 1:The
Speaker 34:ideal. Yeah. No. We're we're we're currently our first design partner was in the collection space. Collecting on medical payments has been super successful.
Speaker 34:We've done thousands of outbound calls.
Speaker 1:But but but sort of, like, a not a name that you've No. Necessarily recognize.
Speaker 34:No. But when and we're now launching
Speaker 1:Business are big.
Speaker 34:Yeah. Exactly. We're now getting live with a fintech who's launching us into their conversion funnel for, like, for sales. Yep. There's a big servicer that's in the solar space.
Speaker 34:There's collections agencies, a big a handful.
Speaker 3:Makes sense. Did you have experience in the in the space prior to this?
Speaker 34:Yeah. So I actually I previously built a contact center software company. It's like 15,000,000 ARR before it got acquired. Wow.
Speaker 4:Nice. And
Speaker 34:then immediately prior to launching this company, I was essentially working in, a Web three credit fund. Okay. And had invested into some emerging market debt buyers who are doing collections and servicing, which kind of exposed me
Speaker 3:to the whole world.
Speaker 1:Oh, that makes
Speaker 34:And I was like, we should
Speaker 25:just do
Speaker 34:this with AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically. Did you share any metrics today at demo day?
Speaker 34:Yeah. The only we haven't converted anywhere. We've got our first design customer live, like, six weeks ago. Okay. We're now launching, like, five more.
Speaker 34:Yeah. And the first customer the first design partner, we did, like, 4,000 outbound calls and collected, like, 50 k in the first month Yeah.
Speaker 7:Which is, like, a
Speaker 34:big success. But, like, yeah.
Speaker 3:We're still getting going. Are you how are you thinking about the are are you thinking of selling, like, the results in some way? Like, over time, would you just charge a percentage
Speaker 34:Yeah. Depends who we're selling to. Yeah. So when we're selling to, like, a servicer or collections agency, we'll probably just sell Mhmm. On usage based kind of pricing.
Speaker 34:But when we're selling to fintechs and banks, then we'd love to do as much outcome based pricing
Speaker 1:as possible.
Speaker 34:Mhmm. And that's on the sales side, the collection side, everything.
Speaker 1:We have been asking everyone two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur
Speaker 8:of all time?
Speaker 34:So there's this guy Felix Dennis Mhmm. Who was a who was a
Speaker 1:British entrepreneur.
Speaker 34:Yeah. And he wrote this book called How to Get Rich Yeah. Which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship. Okay. And he's like a crazy guy.
Speaker 34:He's dead now, but he was like crazy crazy guy.
Speaker 3:Big big into magazines. Yeah. Would love this guy.
Speaker 34:He owned like he was like PC Magazine, Maxim, The Week. He was like a big publisher. Did a load of different stuff.
Speaker 1:Felix Dennis.
Speaker 34:Felix Dennis.
Speaker 1:Great. I'll have to look him up. Yeah. Second question. How do you make your first dollar online?
Speaker 1:On the Internet or in business?
Speaker 34:Yeah. So I launched an e commerce website when I was like 19, still at college, and was selling selling like a load of homewares online.
Speaker 1:Homewares. Yeah. Nice.
Speaker 3:John was selling or
Speaker 1:were you
Speaker 3:selling DJ equipment? DJ. That's
Speaker 1:cool, though.
Speaker 3:He's an international businessman from
Speaker 1:a young guy. International businessman at age 13. It was great.
Speaker 34:13. Nice. Awesome.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for stopping
Speaker 34:by as well.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 3:rest meet you. Congrats on the on the progress.
Speaker 1:Congrats on the progress. Let's move on to our next guest. We are live from YC demo day twenty twenty five. How are doing? We're getting some photos taken by Bryce Johnson.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 3:We got our next guest.
Speaker 1:We're bringing wait. The prompting company? Come on.
Speaker 3:The prompting company.
Speaker 5:The prompting company.
Speaker 1:Prompting The
Speaker 3:prompt maxing. Yes, sir.
Speaker 23:But of where? Where
Speaker 1:could you possibly be based?
Speaker 3:Of San Francisco. The prompting company.
Speaker 1:San Francisco.
Speaker 17:San Francisco.
Speaker 8:Correct. Don't
Speaker 3:capitalize the of though. But I'm just looking at this. Oh, it's so funny. Yeah. Bull market and companies named that start with the.
Speaker 3:Exactly. The issue tracking of company of Australia. Right? Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 6:That was hilarious.
Speaker 1:When did you pick that name and logo and design? We picked it two months ago. Two months ago. Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay. You should be the last one to do it though.
Speaker 18:I hope so.
Speaker 3:I think I hope so.
Speaker 8:You can get a boy.
Speaker 1:Trade is over.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The trade is over.
Speaker 1:So so so you're prompting. It's pretty self evident, but tell the stream who you are, what you actually do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. My name is Kevin. I'm the CEO and co founder of Prompting Company and we help product invention and chat GPT. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. Not just another generative engine optimization tool. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:How do you how do you differentiate? Yeah. For sure. So we plan the infrastructure layer.
Speaker 1:We're
Speaker 3:not just creating articles for you.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:We create shadow sites for our companies to Okay. You know, influence all
Speaker 1:of stuff. Is there is there any special design in in in the type of shadow site that you're building? Like what what exactly does that look like? Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:PC servers, there's APIs, there's documentation, there's
Speaker 25:a lot of different
Speaker 3:For sure. So these shadow sites are basically like markdown versions of your site.
Speaker 1:Okay. Markdown.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We basically iterate on more of those.
Speaker 1:Why do the foundation models like markdown so much?
Speaker 3:Because it takes like text out there? No. It's it's just 90% less tokens there.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. It's just more
Speaker 3:compressed. Super fast.
Speaker 1:Got it. Then HTML? Okay. That's If they scrape the HTML, they're bringing in all the CSS
Speaker 3:and Okay. Got it. I hear my sense. Did you come into the batch with this idea? Yes.
Speaker 3:We did. We did not pivot. Okay. Pure play. It's a pure play.
Speaker 3:What were you doing before this? I was at Beehive. I was working there. Oh, no way. Cool.
Speaker 3:Made your money in Newsletters. Newsmaxing. What's traction been like? It's been pretty good, dude. We are at 300 an ARR now.
Speaker 3:Nice. NVIDIA is a paying customer. No way. Really? How did you how did you land NVIDIA?
Speaker 3:Oh, dude. It's it was a crazy bake off, but ultimately the better product A bake off. Yeah. I love I love bake offs.
Speaker 21:That's great.
Speaker 1:Very cool. What speaking of Jensen, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history? In history? Mean Anyone. Alive or dead?
Speaker 3:Dude, Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1:Steve Jobs. Yeah. We That's a
Speaker 3:great one. Good answer.
Speaker 1:Good answer. What about how you made your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 3:Oof. On the Internet. I actually ran a service back then to jailbreak iPhones.
Speaker 1:No way. No way.
Speaker 3:That's come up before. Yeah. Josh Browder. Josh Browder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He was jailbreaking a lot of that. IPhones. There was someone else who was fixing broken iPhone screens. So the, yeah, the the the little low hanging fruit in the digital economy Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very, very popular. Very cool. Would you consider yourself GPU poor or GPU rich? GPU poor at
Speaker 3:the moment. Poor at the moment. How's the how's the fundraise going? It's going pretty great, man. We're way oversubscribed.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Picking our lead right now. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for coming on, Sean. Great to meet you.
Speaker 8:Great to
Speaker 3:meet you. On.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest from YC demo day. How are we doing on time, guys? We have to get out of here to get a catch a flight. Correct?
Speaker 1:Okay. Let Nick know. How you doing?
Speaker 3:What's happening?
Speaker 1:Nice to meet you, Theo.
Speaker 33:Good to
Speaker 17:meet How are doing? Guys.
Speaker 3:What's happening? How are doing? Fellow streamer.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Fellow content creator streamer accidental business guy turned into an influencer somehow.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself for the stream.
Speaker 3:Yeah. For those who
Speaker 7:don't know me, I'm Theo. I started I was actually doing a YC company for making stuff like this easier because I worked at Twitch for five years. I wanted it to be easier to do live content collaborations. So I built Zoom for streamers, make it easier to bring like you on Yeah. To a show like mine in HD.
Speaker 7:I'm assuming you guys are you're actually not using LBS.
Speaker 31:That's cool.
Speaker 7:But Yeah. We built everything around OBS so that you can use your professional existing solutions. Copy paste somebody straight from your browser into our or into OBS at
Speaker 1:what you're using if you're using Hangouts or Zoom in the past.
Speaker 7:We're an alternative to Hangouts and Zoom.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:We're like better but to be clear, we don't really focus on this product anymore. We built it because it was so needed and nothing else like this existed before and I saw the need when I was at Twitch. We won half the top streamers. Our reward was 8 k a month, So we started
Speaker 3:exploring I gonna say it was like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers and have a tiny business.
Speaker 1:Yes. I had a buddy who built, this amazing tool for helping make documentaries. And I was just like, this is a very small market, man. This company Yeah. So many fun.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I was like, this is the best. I was making YouTube videos, like video assets.
Speaker 3:What you so did you
Speaker 1:you guys You tag them all.
Speaker 3:Kept the product running?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Still running to this day. It's relatively easy to maintain. Thankfully, we, I'm proud of what we built there. But at the same time, I wanted to better understand creators, and I just missed going deep on tech.
Speaker 7:Because when I was at Twitch, my favorite time of day was lunch and dinner where I could just nerd out with these super experienced COVID took that away from me. Yeah. So I built my YouTube channel to better understand what creators needed and to just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest. Yeah. And it blew up almost immediately.
Speaker 7:I'm still the last
Speaker 3:Do you do you have a head of membership?
Speaker 1:So you've
Speaker 7:seen the Bradster Company video.
Speaker 3:I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was a fantastic reaction. Jordy was saying the same thing in the morning.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, I I think it's a fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved. Think I think I can see Atlassian, like, wanting to take the browser very seriously. And so there's a way that in the fullness of time that it will look like, you know, incredible deal for both sides.
Speaker 3:But I did see the video. Was like, wait. Head of membership? What's going on there?
Speaker 7:There are just certain things in that scenario that are like hard to not have your eyes catch. So Yep. The chaos I've engaged with since my YouTube channel blew up accidentally, got more into DevTool stuff, built some DevTools as well for the business. Got so annoyed with the state of all the AI chat apps. Yeah.
Speaker 7:DeepSeek v three drops like, my god, this model's incredible, but the website was somehow even worse. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I
Speaker 7:said, time to make a better one because I'm a nerd about like full stack web and application performance and just quality of experience. I helped build a lot of Twitch chat when I was over there. World's, as far as I know, fastest updating text interface on the web.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. People love Twitch chat.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Twitch is so much better than YouTube. Unbelievable to this day. Yeah. So I wanted to make this
Speaker 1:We unpack that because I believe that Twitch Chat is specifically like doesn't just endlessly load.
Speaker 16:It loads blocks at
Speaker 3:a time.
Speaker 7:It's blocks but they come in really fast.
Speaker 1:Is that a mistake? No. That's by design.
Speaker 7:That's absolutely by design. Like chat readability is like comprehensive. Like your ability to comprehend what's happening in chat is like was really
Speaker 1:still Ludwig and he was saying like, could I start over if I didn't have any Twitch followers and he did this experiment? And he was like, I think I have an edge just because I'm good at reading chat. I was like, I never would have clocked that as like an as like a thing. But it is.
Speaker 7:It's one actually, of the things I do differently is I film all my YouTube videos live on Twitch. So I'll be like, and I have chat open next to my like return
Speaker 1:feed. Down.
Speaker 7:Yes. I have a team that like helps me manage that. We've built some custom software to auto chop the individual topics so we can get a video out within an hour of it being recorded which I'm really proud of. But the goal is really to do it live, so any like mistakes I make, any sources I need help finding Yep. Any weird comments or questions I would get about the thing can happen while I'm filming.
Speaker 1:Yep. So then the final thing is much better.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It just cuts like an it takes us an hour and a half to film an hour long video and then like thirty minutes to edit it. It's great. I'm really proud of our workflow there.
Speaker 1:That's cool. Super fun.
Speaker 3:Was that a content creation injury?
Speaker 7:Got in a fight with a Firefox user. Joking, it was a skateboard injury from a long time ago.
Speaker 1:Oh wow.
Speaker 7:Years of skateboard. Yeah. I was a sponsor skater for a little bit.
Speaker 33:I,
Speaker 7:really into that to this day. But, yeah. Ten years ago, had a really bad fifteen years ago, had a really bad wrist break. Also tore the entire ligament for my thumb and it's just slowly been like falling off of my hand. So finally got that reconfigured.
Speaker 7:Okay.
Speaker 3:Should build an app that uses, computer vision to teach people how to kick flip. I think there's a there could be a bull market in that in that space.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools.
Speaker 3:No. But it's a it's it's a public service. Right? Yeah. Teaching the world to kick flip.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We just
Speaker 3:come out. Our mission been official. Is to kickflip. So I think that's
Speaker 7:been fun for me recently that I actually really appreciate you guys for too is it seems like the hunger to for people to understand how the startup stuff actually works Totally. Has been growing a lot recently. I've always been a nerd about it recently. I've been investing in a lot more. I think I've been over a 100 YC startups at this point.
Speaker 7:It's been really fun for me and Yes. Love it. The and recently, it feels like I can actually talk about that stuff more where previously people's eyes would just glaze over. They But wouldn't I'm doing like one startup an e video a week at least right now and they're performing incredibly well. The response has been awesome.
Speaker 7:It feels like people are ready to talk about this now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a really good time. Big enough. I mean, you look
Speaker 1:at the the the traction on like the actual Y Combinator account and like on YouTube. Yeah. It has like over a million followers.
Speaker 7:Still one of the most underrated YouTube channels too. The old Michael Seibel Dalton podcast like I is reference it all of
Speaker 14:the time.
Speaker 1:So good. Yep. Yeah. And I mean that they've but there's all this stuff that Gary's done, they've done really
Speaker 9:well.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Love all of It's like like the Y Combinator, like, program, Y Combinator content, the Y Combinator partners, everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful and now why t three chat's successful too. Wouldn't trade it for anything.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 3:What, what's what's your goal over the next five, ten years? If I had
Speaker 7:a five to ten year goal, I would be probably not here. I'd be working on it. I have no idea. I've always kinda just went with the flow and that works really well. My thing's always been it's better to be late than early.
Speaker 7:I find that people try way too hard to be early to a thing and it ends up kinda rotting their brain a little Like imagine you saw how powerful smartphones were getting back in the day. You're like, oh my god, this is obviously the future. Everything's gonna be on phones. So I'm gonna go all in making Java applets for the Kyocera, Echo, and Blackberry. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Are you better or worse off than somebody who got into app development two years after the App Store came Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's better to be late. Everybody told me I was too late when we made our chat app and we're, as far as I know, the fastest growing third party chat app.
Speaker 1:Wow. Crazy. It's fantastic. Yeah. Amazing.
Speaker 1:We've been asking everyone two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history?
Speaker 7:Oh. History makes it tough. I would say like
Speaker 1:Alive or
Speaker 7:dead. I mean Modern history. Like, alive makes it a lot easier. Modern history, I think Tim Sweeney is my personal favorite. The way he's aligned his business is incredible.
Speaker 7:Like, to this day, he still owns exactly 51%, so nobody can outvote him. His focus on making everything better for developers
Speaker 13:Yep.
Speaker 7:Knowing the flywheel will eventually, like, fund him back. It's kind of like Apple strategy, but way more focused on developers, which I care a lot about. Sure. Even things that have been a flop like Epic Game Store were with the goal of getting developers more money because he was tired Apple getting subsidized with 30% revenue from an indie game dev.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3:So what did you what did you think of the the Apple launches today?
Speaker 7:Apple launch today was as a nerdy tech and video guy, I love it. The iPhone 17 Pro is an actual, like, monumental leap in what you can do for video production. Have you guys paid attention to of that stuff?
Speaker 1:No. No. I just know 14, 48 megapixel, like,
Speaker 3:better cameras.
Speaker 7:That's cool. But the, no. I mean that they added genlock support.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 7:So, like, full Blackmagic like integrations. You can do time code with a new USB, like, did I say part with Blackmagic to make? You can do crazy synchronization shots where you get like 20 iPhones at different angles. That's And do like frame by frame like like pause like freeze frame three d shots and stuff with that that was normally you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before. Now you just get like 20 iPhones and a couple USB adapters.
Speaker 7:It's insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's gonna be even cheaper in like two years when
Speaker 7:these things are. And ProRes RAW, which is really cool too because I know way too much about cameras. I'm really nerdy about this. But the RED camera company had an exclusive patent on compressed raw video encoding
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Where on camera specifically. So the reason that all those USB or that used be external HDMI recorders got popular Yeah. Atmos is a business because of RED's bullshit patents.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:That patent allowed them to just get away with things they absolutely shouldn't have and shut down every other camera company trying. Yep. The patent was they had succeeded in suing Apple, they succeeded in suing DJI, they almost got the barred from The US. They succeeded in suing Sony, Canon, a bunch of other companies. Were suing Nikon.
Speaker 7:Nikon said, how expensive are you guys? And bought them for like $30,000,000. Mhmm. So now the patent's not being enforced, so Apple got to put ProRes RAW in the new iPhone, which is unbelievable.
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 7:Actual raw video encoding on a phone is just I could not have imagined that even two years ago. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Other question we've been asking. How do you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business? Minecraft. Minecraft. But Yeah.
Speaker 7:I was thinking Minecraft servers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Somebody else said this.
Speaker 7:I if I hear from a founder that they started Minecraft servers, don't even think twice.
Speaker 3:I just
Speaker 4:write the check.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's crazy. Yeah. What's so crazy? It's sneaker botting Sneaker botting. Minecraft iPad,
Speaker 1:repairs. Back, like buying and selling stuff on eBay. It was popular in like the nineties, February.
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's always one of those every generation. It's been really fun to see. Yeah. Now I feel like people skip the step and just go straight to the business, which is interesting.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're having that. Yeah. Start in enterprise SaaS.
Speaker 18:Go to the
Speaker 1:end state. Crazy.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Just going to like the Founders Inc. Events and seeing how many like excited young founders there are now is just something I never would have imagined before. Like when I was a kid, it was the promise. Like, the exciting thing is you'll get to work at the Google campus one day.
Speaker 7:Like, that's what you were aspiring for. Totally. Now you're aspiring to be here. That's a really interesting shift.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. That's great. Are you GPU poor or GPU rich?
Speaker 7:I'm GPU middle class.
Speaker 1:GPU middle Well, you could pick a hat if you want one.
Speaker 7:Oh, I want the GPU poor hat
Speaker 1:for sure.
Speaker 3:Want GPU? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Middle class is this you guys. You gotta go up or Well, thank you for joining.
Speaker 1:It's not properly fitted, but
Speaker 3:you can fix that for later. Yeah. Thank you guys. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 3:Great meeting
Speaker 1:you guys.
Speaker 7:Well, if want me to comment on any weird stuff in, like, the AI
Speaker 3:chat space or whatever.
Speaker 7:No worries at all. I miss even more than you guys do. I mean, if you ever need help with anything, I'll be around.
Speaker 1:Have a good day. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Lightning round. Let's let's oh, there's people out there?
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Let's run it.
Speaker 3:Let's run
Speaker 1:Let's run it. Let's run it. Come in Speed it up. Who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 1:Welcome to stream. Bob. Just my
Speaker 12:hand. I say,
Speaker 1:introduce yourself. Who are you?
Speaker 25:What do do?
Speaker 15:Bob. Hi.
Speaker 12:I'm Bob.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the show, Bob.
Speaker 12:CTO of Embedder. We build coding agents for firmware.
Speaker 1:Okay. Coding agents for firm firmware? Firmware. Yeah. What what device are you embedding?
Speaker 3:Could we done?
Speaker 12:So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers. So think about any microcontroller you can think of, STM32, ESP, TI, NXP, any manufacturer.
Speaker 3:When learn did you wanted to do coding agents for firmware?
Speaker 12:That's a good question. So I did hardware all my life. Started like, know, started when I was 12 doing robots, moving to more professional stuff in
Speaker 3:high school. In college, I did School. Let's go.
Speaker 12:In college, yeah. Yeah. But in college, I built, humanoids. Okay. And then, went to a startup, did med tech stuff, and then went to Tesla, worked on Robotaxi.
Speaker 12:Yeah. We just kinda saw it. I saw this problem from, like, know, a risk like, a 10% research lab to a trillion dollar company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:That firmware they're on was so inefficient compared to
Speaker 1:web dev.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And traditional coding agents just couldn't do it. Yep. Like, cloud code or cursor, they lack context. What we say about context is two different problems.
Speaker 12:Right? One problem is that it has no understanding of, the chips. Like, it needs to read the documentation for the chips to understand how to actually write the code. And once it has written the code, it has no way to test the code on the device. Right?
Speaker 12:So we built this information layer and this hardware interaction layer where you can actually, you know, read read out outputs from the, from from your board Mhmm. And run out like a GB debugger to, like, debug. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How's traction? How's demo day going?
Speaker 12:Trigon's been great. We launched, three weeks ago now.
Speaker 31:We have
Speaker 3:over a 100 paying users, 500 line. Fantastic.
Speaker 12:That's great. 500,000 lines of code change, working on the first, enterprise. You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Speaker 12:Oh, Elon. Has to be Elon.
Speaker 3:That's the Elon. Are you, bullish, bearish, humanoids in the next, five years?
Speaker 12:I'm very bullish.
Speaker 3:In the next five years.
Speaker 1:In the
Speaker 3:next five years.
Speaker 1:They'll be walking around.
Speaker 3:You think I will have one in my home?
Speaker 12:Maybe not your home. Factories?
Speaker 1:Factories.
Speaker 3:Factories. Why factories?
Speaker 12:Factories because, like, it's a straight up replacement for your human workers. Yeah. You're just so much lower cost, you don't have to modify anything in your factory, drop in replacement.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, free work for us. Yeah. Okay. We will see.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so We'll hold much. You We'll hold
Speaker 3:you too. Alright.
Speaker 1:In five years, expect to hear from us with, with a fact check on that. Thank you so much for coming by. Thanks for coming. Sweet. Have a good one.
Speaker 1:We will bring in our next guest. We're doing lightning round. We got a lot of folks out there. Let's bring in the founder from Weissen Demo Daddy twenty twenty five. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:Hi. I'm John.
Speaker 27:See you. Elena,
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you.
Speaker 1:Nice to meet you. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are
Speaker 27:you doing? Elena Sakesh. I'm a partner at Google Ventures.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic.
Speaker 31:Amazing. Okay.
Speaker 3:What's I was gonna hit I was gonna hit this button, but, not
Speaker 1:not Partner mode. Partner mode. Partner mode. How what's your reaction to demo day been? What are the common trends that you're seeing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. How is this one different from other ones? Are valuations the highest they've ever been? What are you seeing?
Speaker 27:I feel like valuations are always higher.
Speaker 1:They
Speaker 27:always I think the fact that the public markets have come back has just reinstored a lot faith.
Speaker 1:IPO windows open?
Speaker 27:IPO window is open. I'm excited to see a lot of that. Yep. I run fintech at Google Ventures. There's a lot of fun fintech and crypto companies in the pipeline.
Speaker 27:Yeah, it's been a really fun demo day.
Speaker 3:Have you done? Energy
Speaker 21:is always
Speaker 3:Did you do any of the companies in this batch yet? Are you still looking?
Speaker 27:Not in this batch yet, but I think
Speaker 3:But you guys are you guys can are so multistage that you
Speaker 1:kinda come in for
Speaker 3:more about yeah. Building building relationships.
Speaker 27:Right now, we're investing out of a $2,800,000,000 fund every two years. Yeah. And our sole LP is Google.
Speaker 7:That's a lot
Speaker 27:of It's a lot of work. Why? We like work.
Speaker 1:Do you introduce it as Google Ventures, but isn't it rebranded fully to GV or have we gone back?
Speaker 27:It's a you know, it depends on what flavor Okay. People are looking for, but it's both GV and
Speaker 1:Okay. Got it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Why give us give us the state of early stage fintech today. Yeah. Because if this was four years ago, I think we would have seen, like, half the batch, some something like that Yeah. Fintech related and very little of that today from from what we've seen.
Speaker 3:It probably creates probably means, like, now is the right time
Speaker 25:to to
Speaker 3:be starting company. But what are you seeing?
Speaker 27:Yeah. I feel like fintech has always ebbed and flowed. Yeah. And at GV, we've been investing in fintech since the start. We were seed investors in Robinhood, seed investors in Plaid, seed investors in Gusto.
Speaker 27:We recently invested in Ramp. And so what you can kinda see in fintech right now yeah. Let's go. Big day. Big day today.
Speaker 27:What you can see in fintech is a barbell. There are people who are solving things at the earliest stages Yeah. Parts of the world where fintech still hasn't touched. I'll still say fintech's total market cap is 4% of all financial services. Mhmm.
Speaker 27:Financial services is 20% of the S and P 500. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways to go.
Speaker 1:Do you think the fact that there are so many scaled growth stage Decacorn plus fintech companies with founders still at the helm Yeah. Changes the strategy at the early stage? Like, you need to be more focused or niche? Because you have Zach at Plaid. You have Eric at Ramp, Brian at Coinbase Yeah.
Speaker 1:At Robinhood. Like, it's not the same era where it's like the founders died Right. Fifty years ago. And so, yeah, it's probably open season on that category. It's like, no.
Speaker 1:If you if you start that company in that space, like, that person, that founder that we all know who's already on the podcast circuit Great. Is going to be coming for
Speaker 3:your livelihood.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 3:they go multiproduct. Right? They run the trust of a of a consumer, and then they they get
Speaker 1:their rent. And they also are not in manager mode. So, yeah. Yeah. Mean, I
Speaker 27:think that's a lot of why we invested in ramp even at this last round's price. Yep. Right? Like, I've spent a decade looking at Office of the CFO software. Yep.
Speaker 27:And I think that they'll end up
Speaker 3:winning Let's give it up to the Office of
Speaker 27:the Let's do it. And I think the best founders think they're never done. Yeah. And so with fintech, what I love about it is I look at Amex. It's a $230,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 27:There is a lot of room to run if you're a fintech founder.
Speaker 1:Are you pitching Ruth Porat on ramp?
Speaker 23:Always. Let's make
Speaker 1:it happen. We gotta do that.
Speaker 3:Were you at the last demo day?
Speaker 1:Yes. Did you Yeah. Come on our
Speaker 3:Yeah. The one that's that's more important, but I was gonna say like vibe space analysis to me the, I've been more a lot more excited about this batch than last time. Last time it felt like super derivative Mhmm. It was a lot of like agents for agents and infrastructure for agents. This is a lot more Infrastructure like agents.
Speaker 3:Less infrastructure, more like here is a product with like a clear value problem. We have a 100 people
Speaker 1:We're using AI. And AI. We're using AI like we're using cloud or mobile or anything else.
Speaker 27:Yeah. And I I think I think I always think of things as variables. Right? And when people are building for things that don't yet exist, it becomes stacking a bunch of variables on top of each other. And I think what I love about this badge is it seems pretty grounded and rooted in things that people need today.
Speaker 27:Mhmm. Like the market is there. I'm not taking a risk on whether or not the market's going to come into fruition.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And a year ago, if you were doing agentic infrastructure, there was a lot of people that I was seeing, like, not even just in YC that were, like, building infrastructure for agents and yet and they would sign up a lot of customers, but none of the customers were creating any value. So it was like Yeah. It was like infrastructure for companies that weren't really working. And and I think that's and I think that the catalyst now is like now you have a bunch of companies building AgenTeq software that are delivering value for customers.
Speaker 3:And so a lot of the infrastructure companies can probably work now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're doing a lightning round outside of Larry and Sergei, obviously. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history, alive or dead? My god. Anyone that you think is inspiring, maybe read a biography or something.
Speaker 27:Oh, wow. There are there are so many. This is really difficult.
Speaker 1:You know
Speaker 27:what? I I think I would say, Brian Armstrong Coinbase created a market that didn't exist before. The largest businesses are always market creators in spite of what I said earlier
Speaker 1:about a market. Yeah. That's a great one. We love Brian. Second question.
Speaker 3:So if you're the next Brian Armstrong, if you're creating a market right
Speaker 27:now Hoping
Speaker 1:to get in touch.
Speaker 27:Please please me.
Speaker 16:Get in touch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 27:Oh, wow. Trading crypto.
Speaker 1:Trading crypto? Mhmm. I'm surprised we haven't heard that more.
Speaker 3:I know. Yes. Let's hear her.
Speaker 21:You for stopping.
Speaker 3:She was born in the trenches.
Speaker 1:Born in the trenches. In the trenches. Still the trenches. Still in
Speaker 16:the trenches.
Speaker 1:Oh, last question. Yeah. Do you consider yourself GPU poor, GPU rich? Yeah. You're you're bolted onto a hyperscaler?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I know the answer, but I'll hear it from you.
Speaker 27:Define GPU poor, GPU rich.
Speaker 1:GPU poor means that you're struggling to scrap together every h 100 you can. GPU rich is you press the button on the massive You're just trying to it if you want. You know? It's a it's a vibe, it's but also a very real thing for foundation model companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now it's just a general vibe. Do you feel constrained by technology or liberated
Speaker 27:by feel like liberated
Speaker 15:by it.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 25:you I
Speaker 1:think you called it
Speaker 27:as We gotta lean in.
Speaker 1:We gotta lean in. We'll give you this high. Two p rigs. Yeah. Love it.
Speaker 1:It it hasn't been properly said, oh, maybe it fits. There you go. It fits. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 3:Great to
Speaker 1:meet you. It's It's fantastic. Meet you. Sometime.
Speaker 27:Thank you.
Speaker 1:See you
Speaker 3:next batch.
Speaker 1:Yes. Have a good rest of your demo day. Two phones. You know she means business.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 1:That's a corporate that's a corporate
Speaker 3:That's a corporate athlete.
Speaker 1:Corporate athlete right boardroom general. Locked in. How are you doing? Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the stream. Jordan, good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Introduce yourself. What do you do?
Speaker 31:Hey. My name is Sion. We're Calinda.
Speaker 1:That's a great name.
Speaker 31:Yeah. We're basically a deep research for class action law firms.
Speaker 1:Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Let's give it up for litigation. Litigation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's the secret sauce? Is it is it just the the day the bad data in, bad data out? You gotta get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall. It's not scraped into the the pretraining weights of GPT five. And so you have some core resource in the data, or is it something in the architecture or something at the UI level?
Speaker 1:Like, where where where's the interesting
Speaker 31:Kinda like most startups at YC, like, a lot of it sits on the application layer.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 31:Most of it for for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things. You know? They can have maybe 10,000,000 pages for litigation.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 31:wow. So with that kind of scale, you can't obviously just toss them to check.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'd be a hassle. Just click upload another PDF. Upload another PDF. Upload another PDF.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then the kind
Speaker 31:of second thing is, like, most of the data sort of sits in silos and kind of aggregating it all and making it sort of, you know, comprehensive like a human would is is
Speaker 1:What's trash
Speaker 3:Would you ever would you ever go full stack? Would you ever start suing suing people yourself?
Speaker 31:Yeah. We Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We Let's go. We just said That's America that's the American way. Let's go.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We Watch out.
Speaker 31:Yeah. We we actually just said this in our in our pitch. We wanna become the world's first class action law firm.
Speaker 1:Okay. Full stack. Full stack.
Speaker 3:AI law firm.
Speaker 6:AI law law firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nice. Fantastic. How's traction? What did you share at demo day?
Speaker 1:How's it going? How's the race going?
Speaker 31:Yeah. So we have about 60,000 in revenue in just the last four months since basically launching.
Speaker 1:Congrats.
Speaker 31:We have three of the largest plaintiff law firms in the in The US Amazing. As customers.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 31:But, yeah, it's going really well. Pitch is a it was a little nerve wracking at first, got over it.
Speaker 3:That's great. What what's it like selling into these firms so far? They seem to be responding well.
Speaker 31:Yeah. Much better than, most would expect, I guess. Like, they, they probably don't know a lot about AI at all. So you just kind of say it's magic and then
Speaker 3:Has this been an overlooked category broadly just building software for this type of firm? It it feels like they just print cash and they're willing to spend some of the numbers I've heard on, like, some of these even firms that, like, have a website. They look like a tiny business, and they're just printing, like, $50,000,000 a year.
Speaker 31:It's crazy. Most settlements are a billion plus, but, yeah. Absolutely. Like, you know, because of natural language being so a lot easier with our generative AI, they it makes it a lot easier. And so the kind of work they do is has basically been overlooked for practically ever.
Speaker 31:In fact, most of them are
Speaker 1:You could never throw a software
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 31:Yeah. And most of them aren't even still paperless. They still have lots of paperwork. They're they've just gotten over the the cloud, if you wanna call it that. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:Cool. Lightning round. Do it. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time?
Speaker 31:Sam Altman.
Speaker 8:Sam Altman. Just just because I've
Speaker 31:met him twice, but he's
Speaker 23:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's a goat. Yeah. Second question. How'd you make your first dollar online in business or on the Internet?
Speaker 31:Cold call.
Speaker 1:Cold call.
Speaker 3:That's good.
Speaker 1:What do
Speaker 3:you say?
Speaker 31:It was actually so we the previous space that we were in was personal injury
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 31:Still law firms. My brother, he's an expert cold cold caller.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Are you how did when did you realize you wanted to get into class actions and personal injury
Speaker 1:law? Yeah.
Speaker 31:Well, basically, we literally about last summer, we started walking into businesses cold. Mhmm. Just like saying, hey. We do AI. We're both previously AI researchers.
Speaker 31:Like, we we can probably solve your business problems. Yeah. Law firms were a huge part of it.
Speaker 3:So Nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's based on where you sit in the stack, do you Yeah. Do you feel like you're GPU poor or GPU rich?
Speaker 31:GPU rich, but Here we go.
Speaker 1:GPU poor soon. Okay. Okay. Good luck to you.
Speaker 3:Scaling up.
Speaker 1:Cool. Hopefully, you can scale up. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:Great to
Speaker 1:meet you, guys. Congrats. Take your time. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Thank you. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day twenty twenty five. And we have our next guest coming into the studio.
Speaker 3:Welcome to It's Kernel time.
Speaker 1:It's Kernel time. Welcome to the show. You seem fired up. Did you just yourself.
Speaker 33:We haven't pitched yet.
Speaker 1:Who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 33:Ralph Garcia, founder of Kernel. We're crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your
Speaker 3:AI agent. The browser wars.
Speaker 33:The browser wars are on. These are
Speaker 1:It's basically computer use. It's API to go and Exactly. Interact with the website.
Speaker 33:Yeah. So nowadays a lot of AI agents, you wanna hook them up to exact same tools that humans use. Yep. And the browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day to day basis. And so we're powering automations in healthcare, FinTech, QA, lots of different use cases that AI is really good at.
Speaker 3:Walk us through the kind of the history of the market because I know there was there used to be this company, I'm blanking on the name, but they were doing like browser they had a browser use product and they were venture backed but they never really like broke out.
Speaker 24:And it
Speaker 3:feels like this market has just like exploded in size Yes. Or
Speaker 33:to LLMs, the main use case was you run your tests or your QA Chromium? On a headless browser in the cloud. But as soon as AI came on the scene, tools got supercharged by this intelligence you could connect to
Speaker 20:them. Yep.
Speaker 33:So I I experienced this firsthand. I I founded a company called Clever back in 2012. Was
Speaker 1:No way. That's great.
Speaker 33:We're I think
Speaker 1:we made With Tyler. Yeah. We were technically in the same batch.
Speaker 33:Yeah. And we our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 33:Data out of student information systems.
Speaker 1:Clever's a killer company, by the way. You should look it up. It's MassVac. Acquired. MassVac.
Speaker 1:Deal. Scizog. Scizog. What was the number? What was
Speaker 15:the number?
Speaker 33:100,000,000.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 33:So yeah, both me and my co founder are previous YC founders. So we are experienced at the And yeah, I was previously a quant at a high frequency trading firms. Right. So Well, be our quant. Well, you be our quant.
Speaker 33:You wanna make your browser infrastructure super fast
Speaker 1:That's my quant.
Speaker 33:Will help you.
Speaker 1:How will be
Speaker 3:my quant? Subscribed is the round.
Speaker 33:It's extremely and it's over. Yeah. It's over. It's over.
Speaker 5:It's not it's actually over. We're not back.
Speaker 1:We're We're not not back. I I mean, it is a hyper competitive space. Yep. I I saw even AWS launch something. It seems like something obviously AWS would have a product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how are you thinking about competition in the long term market structure? Are you thinking it's even a winner take all market, or is this oligopoly like what we saw with cloud where AWS, GCP, Azure, these are all great businesses?
Speaker 33:Yeah. I think, you know, with DevTools, I think there's an opportunity for companies to come into the space and just be laser focused on Yeah. The technical quality of the product.
Speaker 1:I agree with this.
Speaker 33:You see this with, like, PlanetScale and RDS. Yep. Know, Amazon has a competitor Yep. That, like, has a huge market share but PlanetScale is like eating their lunch when it comes to mind share and some bigger customers. Databricks, there's
Speaker 1:a lot of examples of
Speaker 10:like So
Speaker 33:we are like infra nerds like trying to make browsers super fast in the And I don't think they're the lengths we are going to do that, like AWS is gonna be years behind whatever we're working on.
Speaker 3:How are the bake offs going?
Speaker 33:The bake offs are going well. So we, you know, we did YC and YC is now like five or 6,000 companies. So it's a huge early adopter market to kind of launch and sell into. But now we're starting to see deals come on that are, you know, Fortune 500, more enterprise deals. So yeah, size Gong is is going off in And yeah, we're we're seeing really good revenue growth over, I guess, a thousand percent, you could call it month over month.
Speaker 33:400 usage month over month. We've spun up like 200,000 browsers in the last three months. So, yeah. Things are things are going well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We've
Speaker 3:How big is the team today?
Speaker 33:We're six full time. So hiring a
Speaker 10:lot of people.
Speaker 33:Worked with at Clever and Yeah. Sense. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No. I love I love when a founder comes in, put runs it back, does it like they did it the first time, like, goes back through YC, and then just puts on a master class.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the the mistake, and I don't know if you'll agree. The mistake is like, okay.
Speaker 3:Do the next.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna incubate 25 different things.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You could
Speaker 1:have I'll be at the beach Yep. Yeah. For the next
Speaker 10:six so high
Speaker 1:that you do it. You to build things as hard, and they've completely forget how hard it is at the early
Speaker 3:stage. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's that's the value of going through YC again is, like, the partners put you in that mindset of, like, okay. You actually have to do things that don't scale. You have to build a product something wants. Right? Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just you you could have done the whole, like, raise 50,000,000, get the really crazy office out the gates.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:And then then you wouldn't you you gotta earn it every time.
Speaker 1:You gotta earn it every time for sure. Yep. Well, speaking of people who earned it, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history? Oof. Who do you look to?
Speaker 1:Favorite entrepreneur.
Speaker 7:And how far back are we going?
Speaker 1:We can go live or dead. Literally thousands of views if you want.
Speaker 3:You can go can go Edison.
Speaker 1:Somebody has somebody has mentioned Christ. Somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at Ramp.
Speaker 33:So I mean I
Speaker 1:didn't make the comparison but it was I made
Speaker 33:mean cliche, I'll have to go Steve Jobs. Mean I I grew
Speaker 1:up reading That was Jordy's answer too.
Speaker 33:And studying Apple. Like that was my first computer as a kid. Yeah. So I I gotta shout out
Speaker 1:to Steve. I said Edward Land, Steve Jobs' mentor, but it's not. Anyway, second question. How did you make your first dollar online or in business?
Speaker 33:I mean, do you count trading futures as ad quant in twenty two years?
Speaker 1:Is there a more noble way to make your first dollar? What are we talking about?
Speaker 33:I mean, was my first job
Speaker 1:out of college. There we go. Fantastic. That's my quant. That's my quant.
Speaker 1:Anyway Congratulations on the progress. Thank you
Speaker 3:so much. On the show as
Speaker 1:you have more news. When
Speaker 16:you're ready
Speaker 3:to announce the round touch. Jump on.
Speaker 1:We're very excited. Anyway, we will bring in our we have what?
Speaker 3:Ten minute countdown.
Speaker 1:Minutes. Minutes. Countdown. Come in. Where is the lightning round?
Speaker 1:There we go. Who are you? What do do? Explain yourself.
Speaker 13:My name's Adi. I'm a cofounder of AgentMail. It's the first email provider built for AI agents. Key distinction there you go. The key distinction is we're not AI for your email.
Speaker 13:We're email for
Speaker 1:your AI. Okay. Woah. Oh, interesting. Like, browsing news for agents.
Speaker 1:Okay. I was wondering about this because I go to agent mode Yeah. And oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like, okay. It should just now it should just email the person to actually kick off that process, and it can't do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Money are you making?
Speaker 13:How much money are we making?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did you share a KPI at demo day? Did you share progress?
Speaker 3:KPI should
Speaker 1:we share?
Speaker 13:We did not,
Speaker 1:but we love our customers. Okay. Okay. And there are but you customers, plural. I know that there's more than one.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes. I'm learning.
Speaker 3:I'm learning. But keep going.
Speaker 1:Okay. Did you come
Speaker 3:in with this idea or did you pivot to it?
Speaker 13:So we were trying to get rich quick. Is
Speaker 3:that why you're is somebody vlogging out there or is that someone else?
Speaker 17:Exactly. Remember were hustlers.
Speaker 3:You're YouTube. You're doing that YouTube.
Speaker 1:I know what questions I'm asking, right? Let's go.
Speaker 13:So we wanted agents to go on the internet, make us money, farm free trials. Yeah. And then
Speaker 3:Wow. Interesting.
Speaker 13:Exactly. And we realized, okay. It's kinda hard to give agents their own inboxes. Yeah. But they should have them.
Speaker 13:Sequoia's talking about them. Langchaine's talking about them. Yeah. Agents need their own email
Speaker 1:inboxes. Okay. So you did it. This brings me to the lightning round question. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How'd you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business, like, as a kid or maybe took you a while?
Speaker 13:So I got cut from the basketball team. Mhmm. And I was like, damn.
Speaker 6:I wanna be a
Speaker 3:part of basketball?
Speaker 1:I'm kidding.
Speaker 3:I hope you know a lot about sports.
Speaker 1:I know the hedge funds and trading.
Speaker 13:Yeah. So I was like, hey. I wanna be involved, I wanna feel like I'm a part of something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 13:So I just said, hey, coach. What can I do? Okay. He's like, okay. Be the scorekeeper.
Speaker 13:That's how I made, like, my first $300.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 13:And there we go.
Speaker 1:That's an honest that's an honest living. Yeah. Second question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history alive or dead?
Speaker 13:I like Warren Buffett.
Speaker 1:Warren Buffett? Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 13:I think he's one of those guys who's like actually humble. Yeah. Right? Like, it's not like, okay. Hey.
Speaker 13:I'm worth a 100,000,000. Yeah. I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game.
Speaker 1:He does. He's in it for the love of the game.
Speaker 13:Hopefully one day, you know, I could be like that.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 3:the Great of the to meet you. Good to meet sir. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. You go. Let's bring on our next guest at YCWA twenty twenty five. We got eight minutes. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 3:What do do you do?
Speaker 1:Here. Sit down here. Shake my hand.
Speaker 3:It's time to meet
Speaker 1:with Riffin. Who are you? What do do?
Speaker 26:Hey. I'm Oddeth, building Riff, which is Cursor for music production.
Speaker 1:Oh. That's are you sitting so Cursor sits on top of an open source ID. Are you sitting on top of Ableton or something? That doesn't,
Speaker 26:exist for music. So we actually built everything from scratch.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 26:Trained our own models.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 26:We have our own, like, editor. It kinda looks like GarageBand, but you can use AI tools to generate sounds mess around.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you bring your own, samples or do do you plug into a sample library? Like, where or is all this are all the samples AI generated?
Speaker 26:Yeah. We have, a user community of samples Okay. But we also, let you generate your
Speaker 1:own. Cool.
Speaker 26:And also, like, lots of bells and whistles to make it easier. Like, for example, you can out a melody
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 26:And we'll play it on an instrument for
Speaker 1:you. That's very cool.
Speaker 3:What's your most popular song? You make music, right?
Speaker 26:Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I, let me see. I produced a song for this artist named Rio Craighan.
Speaker 26:He's he's pretty big. He works with, like, a lot EDM artists. Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's awesome. We'll have to play it.
Speaker 3:Off the screen. So so what's like how do you see the market here? Is there a million people that you think will pay for a product like this? Or do you wanna get go more enterprise, work with labels? Like, what's the play?
Speaker 26:Yeah. I mean, so like, you know, we're we're definitely targeting pros. It's a pro tool. Yeah. But pros for us means
Speaker 1:Pro tools?
Speaker 26:Oh, yeah. For that. A good one. Like, it doesn't just mean music producers. Yeah.
Speaker 26:It's really anyone who releases music on the Internet. Like, imagine you're just a singer. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for your producer
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 26:produce your own music.
Speaker 10:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 26:And that's like a, you know, 80,000,000 people release music Very. On the Internet. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How's traction? How's Demonday going?
Speaker 26:Great. Mean, yeah, we grew grew to 400 DAUs. People are already dropping songs on Spotify that were made on Riff and, getting some getting some listens already.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 26:Yeah. The the raise is fantastic. I honestly, like, have to, like, really pick the investors now. Like, the round is completely filling up.
Speaker 20:There we go.
Speaker 26:Great spot.
Speaker 3:Last question, wrist check.
Speaker 26:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 3:Got? What's What is this?
Speaker 26:Yeah, it's a bread link.
Speaker 3:Nice. Nice. Enough watches on the wrist here, Weiss.
Speaker 1:Lightning round questions, favorite entrepreneur in history, live or dead?
Speaker 26:Doctor Dre.
Speaker 1:Doctor Dre. Doctor Dre. You're so good. I knew I had to ask you. Anyway, thank you so much
Speaker 2:for your time. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Great to
Speaker 10:meet you.
Speaker 1:Let's bring in the next one. How are you doing? Five minutes left at the YC demo day livestream. Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself.
Speaker 1:Who are you? Time. Yeah.
Speaker 12:I'm Tunga, I'm the CEO of FRED. What do you do? We build voice AI for European enterprises
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 12:Especially regulated ones like finance.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 12:And we are pretty much a voice AI for Europe.
Speaker 1:How's traction?
Speaker 12:Traction, eight pi paid pilots converted to 24 k MRR.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 12:Within the past four weeks.
Speaker 1:And the rest of the demo day, the week
Speaker 3:ASML in the round. Are you Yeah. They're the hot investor.
Speaker 1:Champion. Say goodbye to the tier ones. ASML's in the business.
Speaker 12:You didn't get ASML?
Speaker 1:Not yet. Yeah. Next round. Next round. We're rooting for you.
Speaker 1:Are you GPU poor by any chance? Do you want a GPU poor hat? I might as well be.
Speaker 3:Are you so so what's the strategy? Are you gonna build a company here? Are you moving back to to to to Europe?
Speaker 12:Back and forth. So we have office in San Francisco and in Istanbul Mhmm. As well as San Francisco. Prague. Yeah.
Speaker 12:We're based in three places. So our go to market is Europe, especially finance Yeah. Industry. But since we started working with banks and insurance companies there, especially we're working with some of the biggest banks there. Yeah.
Speaker 12:In US, we got some interest with some of these neo banks
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And credit unions. So Who's
Speaker 1:your favorite entrepreneur in history? And I would love a European example if you have one.
Speaker 12:European example.
Speaker 1:But but you can say anyone.
Speaker 12:If there were if there were good European entrepreneurs You wouldn't
Speaker 1:be doing would
Speaker 12:come to SF.
Speaker 1:They would come to SF. So Mocked. Okay. Well, yeah, just zooming out. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?
Speaker 1:Entrepreneur.
Speaker 12:I would say
Speaker 15:Alive or dead? I'm I'm impressed by
Speaker 12:what Elon Musk has done.
Speaker 1:There we go. It's a great one.
Speaker 12:So yeah.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Track record is very impressive. How do you
Speaker 7:make your
Speaker 1:first dollar on the Internet or in business?
Speaker 12:In my own business?
Speaker 1:Or Yeah. Just no. In once. Any You know, like, as a kid, did you make any money on the Internet?
Speaker 12:Yeah. I mean, on Internet, pretty much I didn't make my first money on Internet. I was doing sales.
Speaker 1:Sales.
Speaker 12:Yeah. For I was trying to get, some people to a real estate shop.
Speaker 3:Okay. Nice.
Speaker 12:Pretty much what I did.
Speaker 1:There you go. That's fantastic. Yeah. Nice. Well, congrats on the progress.
Speaker 1:Thank you We'll talk to you soon. Alright. Congrats. Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest.
Speaker 1:How much more time do we have? Four minutes. Let's keep going. We're going. We're going.
Speaker 1:We're going. Bring him in. Bring him in. How you doing? Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 3:Well, it's happening.
Speaker 1:Long time listener,
Speaker 10:first time caller.
Speaker 1:Thank you for coming on the stream. Introduce yourself.
Speaker 3:Great to have you.
Speaker 1:Who are you? What are you building?
Speaker 10:I'm John Ferrara. I'm building Juxta, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth with no hardware.
Speaker 1:I feel like I've seen this on x.
Speaker 10:You might have seen our we had a pretty cool launch video.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Yeah. Okay. So, how does it work? We there there's some company that spun out of Google that just sold that does something similar, like magnetics.
Speaker 1:But what what what how do you how are you doing it?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we basically use simulated technology to basically render any environment using satellite imagery or indoor floor plans into three d.
Speaker 1:So you're a geno guesser?
Speaker 20:You could you could put
Speaker 10:it that way. Yeah. We should make the company that way. Yeah. And then we simulate millions of people or objects moving throughout a space.
Speaker 10:Cool. Simulate their sensor measurements, like accelerometers, gyroscopes. Okay. And then train models on that and then basically deploy the software.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 10:we can leverage the IMUs which are like sensors that are already into every phone Yep. And most other devices today to track you.
Speaker 1:Is adjacent Like to like I can see you through your WiFi. Lots of people love this.
Speaker 10:Yeah. If you've seen that film in like, The Dark Knight, there's like a scene where Batman
Speaker 1:kind of Yeah. I know the one you're talking about. That's how you can envision it. Yep. That's gonna be entertaining on the Internet.
Speaker 3:What, who who's the who's the buyer here?
Speaker 10:Yeah. We sell a lot to like, actually at this point, like warehousing, manufacturing, logistics because 90% of all movement happens in GPS denied areas.
Speaker 1:Inside a building.
Speaker 10:Indoors. Yep. Underground. Defense is a big one. Sure.
Speaker 10:I grew up in a military family, so we sell a lot to like try to sell a to like DOD, stuff like that. But right now, we've made a lot of progress, like, selling to companies who wanna, like, ship thousands of pallets or containers or move around the warehouse, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Do you require any custom hardware or could this be distilled at some point into just an iPhone app?
Speaker 10:No. It's just software. That's just software. So, like, it actually was almost we were this close. If you come next demo day Yeah.
Speaker 10:We're actually gonna be in demo day app. We were Gary and Jared wanted to track all the investors and founders to see where they were going, but we weren't able to work with their app team quite in time. Next demo day it'll be there, but that's already existing. We're building actually small asset tags that are like two inch by two
Speaker 1:inch Yeah.
Speaker 10:That allow us to basically Yeah. Stack
Speaker 3:I was gonna say lot of stuff is important, but doesn't have software type.
Speaker 10:And so that's where, like, we'll get to the point where
Speaker 3:we can
Speaker 1:do that sort of thing. That's super, super cool. Lightning round questions. How did you make your first dollar Like traction and how does it make progress?
Speaker 10:Sure. Yeah. We've we've, done about a $150,000 in revenue in last six weeks.
Speaker 1:That's pretty good. Congratulations.
Speaker 10:Thanks. And then, we're actually on pace to be at like 500 k in the next two months. There's a lot of demand. We have like hundreds of thousands of of these tags pre ordered. Wow.
Speaker 10:That's fantastic. And, yeah, we raised our round, 5,000,000 at 40. It was what our
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 3:Here we go.
Speaker 1:Drop
Speaker 3:the I'm honestly giving it away. Sorry.
Speaker 2:I didn't
Speaker 10:mean to maybe that was too much.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Sorry.
Speaker 3:Give it away.
Speaker 1:We try not to drag it out of people.
Speaker 10:Oh, my bad.
Speaker 1:No. No. But it's helpful. It's very interesting.
Speaker 3:So did you back on the show when you wanna announce the actual round? Yeah. I guess you kinda preannounce.
Speaker 1:Can I
Speaker 10:get a gong?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can get a gong.
Speaker 3:We'll we'll get the gong for
Speaker 1:you. Appreciate it. How'd you make your first dollar on in life?
Speaker 16:In life?
Speaker 10:Or as a kid? As a kid, I would well, I worked a lot of really weird jobs. I got my first one when I was 13 working at a working 13 at a hot dog stand in a shack in Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 4:Let's go. So it
Speaker 10:was shoveling hot dogs and it was gourmet hot dogs. Like Fantastic. You basically paid $9 for a hot dog that got wrapped in naan bread instead of a normal bun. Yep. We charge you $9.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 1:Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history?
Speaker 10:Live or dead? Oh my god. I would say I would say I know the Riff guys just said Doctor. Dre, but I'll say Drake because he just came out that Amazon store. Oh, And Drake's my favorite artist.
Speaker 3:Oh, there we store.
Speaker 1:I don't know You
Speaker 14:haven't seen this.
Speaker 10:This is his actual plot to take over Amazon Music as a distribution platform, but he's working with Amazon to sell all of his merch and all of his goods through their storefront
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 10:And basically, like, facilitate all their distribute distribution through there. So Yeah. That's my cop out answer, I just love Drake.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming six.
Speaker 3:Great to
Speaker 10:meet you. Thanks.
Speaker 3:Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:We have our next guest. Casey, let's bring her in. How are doing? Welcome. Final
Speaker 3:guest. Closing it out.
Speaker 1:Closing it out.
Speaker 32:Saving best for last. Nice to
Speaker 1:meet you. Welcome. Introduce yourself for the stream. Tell us who you are.
Speaker 32:My name is Casey Caruso. I'm the managing partner of a fund called Topology. Fantastic. Psyched to be here.
Speaker 3:Reaction to demo day?
Speaker 32:Electric. Electric. Electric. More
Speaker 1:electric than the last demo day? Particularly electric. What is what about it is electric?
Speaker 32:I just think the founder quality is so high and I think it's just an incredible thing that YC does for the Valley. Yeah. And it's very unique. I mean there's a lot of things that are like this and still the essence of YC has been I think retained.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally. Totally. Were you at the last demo day?
Speaker 32:I was.
Speaker 3:To me, like the it seems like the bar is like consistently higher across this batch. Don't I don't know if you feel the same.
Speaker 1:Feel like the the founder
Speaker 3:Maybe maybe it's the founder the same but the the quality of the company
Speaker 4:and the traction.
Speaker 1:Industry has kinda figured out, like, how to tell the story that's not just, like, AI only, and it's actually, like, putting going back to the basics of, what's the problem we're solving? Yeah. And so when I talk to a lot of the founders, come in and they lead. Yeah. There's AI being said, but it's almost in the background and they're more focused on the market or the problem or the product.
Speaker 1:So I've been I I feel like all the stories have been a lot more tractable than just like AI infrastructure stuff.
Speaker 32:Agree. I also think the founders are getting younger and younger. I honestly feel
Speaker 3:They're high school dropouts.
Speaker 32:Yeah. Yeah. There's like 14 year olds out there and they're like, we just launched three seconds ago and we have 10 k in MRR.
Speaker 1:And I'm like,
Speaker 32:oh my god.
Speaker 28:Like, it's
Speaker 3:strange. Skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker They're just going straight into enterprise SaaS. It's absolutely beautiful. Where have you been most excited to invest broadly just outside of YC over the past year?
Speaker 32:Yeah. I mean, so the fund is a 75,000,000 fund one.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 32:And we're backed by people like Marc Andreessen, founder of OpenAI. And we really focus on technical founders
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 32:That are commercially minded, building cool shit. And that's really important. Commercial. Back cool shit. And so we will look everywhere but that's like the motto or that's the one liner.
Speaker 32:We spend a lot of time in neurotech. We spend a lot of time in maybe less popular AI categories.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Any reaction, since you said neurotech, there was a company that went pretty viral yesterday with doing like telepathy. Yes. What what what's going on there?
Speaker 3:How proprietary do you think that Is that is that something that we're gonna see more of as like a form factor?
Speaker 32:Absolutely. So actually if you go to topology.bc Mhmm. Slash neuro dash map, you can see a really sick Market visualization map. Of all this.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 32:It's but it's more than a market map. Okay?
Speaker 1:But I love market maps. We're we're pro market map here by the way.
Speaker 32:And if their crowds are us even better, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 32:But that specific technology is called silent speech.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 32:Yeah. And it's becoming more popular.
Speaker 1:Very
Speaker 32:cool. It's actually
Speaker 3:Do not have to actually move your mouth in order
Speaker 32:That's right. So it's using muscle movement instead of brain signals. And there's some that are trying to do silent speech with brain, but like alter ego is going with the muscle approach.
Speaker 3:And to actually get it with like the EKG don't or not is is it an EKG? Not EKG. What whatever
Speaker 32:like EMG maybe?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. EMG? So you need you need like 60 sensors or something like So it's not necessarily
Speaker 32:Yeah. Right now the biggest thing in neuro is to become what's called multimodal kind of like what happened with AI. So people are using things like ultrasound with EEG which is one of the most popular non invasive technologies with you know, with muscle movement and combining them all together. The other cool neurotech company though that we're investing in is Sam Altman's new company called Merge.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 32:And that one's gonna become really popular too. But I thought they killed that demo on Twitter.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Was very demo. Was a great demo.
Speaker 1:Lighting round?
Speaker 3:Lighting round.
Speaker 1:We gotta get out of
Speaker 32:do need to get out
Speaker 1:of here. Favorite entrepreneur alive or dead?
Speaker 32:Oh, can't do that. All my children, I love equally.
Speaker 30:My Oh,
Speaker 3:wait. Non portfolio companies.
Speaker 1:Read a biography of who's like from a hundred years ago.
Speaker 3:You're like, no, my favorite my favorite entrepreneurs are only the only the the companies I invest in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Not favorite entrepreneur that you've necessarily
Speaker 32:No. Are you then you gotta go Einstein.
Speaker 3:Einstein. Einstein.
Speaker 1:That's good. No one said Einstein yet. And how did you make your first money, first dollar either on the internet or in business?
Speaker 32:Yeah. I I started coding when I was really young Yeah. As an anon because my mom wanted to keep my, like gender kind of under wraps. So I, you know, didn't get any like creepy messages. Yeah.
Speaker 32:And I used to, yeah, do website development as I'm
Speaker 3:That's great one. Nice.
Speaker 1:I love that. Great. Fantastic. Awesome.
Speaker 3:Great to have you on.
Speaker 1:So much for coming on the stream.
Speaker 32:Nice to
Speaker 1:meet you. Have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 3:Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Cheers. We'll talk to soon. Thank you for
Speaker 3:That is our show. Show. Thank you. We will see
Speaker 1:you tomorrow live from New York City.
Speaker 3:Live from New York City, maybe live from New York Stock Exchange. You never know.
Speaker 1:We could very well happen.
Speaker 3:We could very well be there. Thank you to our incredible sponsors for making TBPN possible. We love you all, and thank you for watching. We'll see you, we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow. Have a Cheers. Good Bye.