SPEAKER_00: Okay, everybody, we have a really fun combo for you today. First up, The Verge's Ashley Carman is back on the program today. She's not talking about Clubhouse, but she's talking about Spotify acquiring Chartable and Podsites.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, we're geeking out big time on the podcasting industry because Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions in podcasting over the past few years.

SPEAKER_06: So we dig into Spotify's grand vision, how this industry is changing, and how YouTube could change the game even more.

SPEAKER_08: And then we have a couple of the best pitches from the Founder University's first class of graduates.

SPEAKER_10: If you don't know, Founder.University, that's the domain name. There's a .University domain now. It's a 12-week course. It's free. We had 100 people start the course. I think 92 finished it. And then we asked the people, we asked the folks running the program, hey, what were some of the best pitches? And we met with those companies, and we're going to share with you 10 of the best nascent pitches. These are very early companies. And you'll see myself, Molly Wood, and Jackie, who is one of our managing directors here, and Mike Savino, see the pitches, ask questions, and rate which ones were their favorite. It's going to be a great episode.

SPEAKER_13: Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by OurCrowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join OurCrowd for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash twist. Linode's startup program is built specifically for founder-led early-stage startups. It's called Rise, and it comes with a three-year discount program and tech consultants to help with infrastructure growth. Apply today at Linode.com slash twist. And Mercury. Question. How much time have you wasted managing your company's money? Answer. Too much. Switch to Mercury at Mercury.com.

SPEAKER_05: All right. We're going to get to the news with some help today. Spotify has acquired Chartable and PodSites, which means that Spotify is getting even more heavily into the measurement and ads product game and, you know, becoming a little bit of a black hole for sucking in all of the parts of the podcasting business. So today we're excited because we have a guest to help us talk about it. Ashley Carman is a senior reporter at The Verge, the lead writer at the Hot Pod newsletter, and she is here to help us talk about this today.

SPEAKER_16: Ashley, welcome back to the program.

SPEAKER_17: You were on episode 1292 talking to me about Clubhouse and the monetization problems back in the day.

SPEAKER_20: Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Finger on the pulse. Different era. Different era.

SPEAKER_17: Let me ask you a question before we get to the Spotify. When's the last time you participated in Clubhouse? Is Clubhouse dying here in the United States? I hear it's doing great overseas in some places, but all I see as a Twitter user is all that crypto grift and people talking about NFTs is all over Twitter spaces. And then all those tech conversations are on Twitter spaces.

SPEAKER_23: So I'm wondering what's left on Clubhouse. Is it just multi-level marketing and shoot your shot rooms?

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, I really don't. I do force myself to check in every once in a while. My job requires. Just for work. And for work. I don't see much happening there. I do believe internationally it could be big, but I don't really speak any other languages. Give it a little Spanish. But, you know, the countries that it might be big in, like India or something, or China or anywhere in Asia, like I can't really assess what's happening there.

SPEAKER_30: It really is fascinating.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's so interesting and also kind of a bummer because it seemed like for a minute there, Clubhouse had really become like a black creator hangout, right? It was really becoming like the sort of a cultural movement. It had been really embraced by black entrepreneurs. And there was just a lot happening there that wasn't happening on any other platform. Like, do you think that all went away too?

SPEAKER_26: I'm sure there's some community still there, but it was funny because my colleague at The Verge, Casey Newton, was like, all that Clubhouse needed to have happen is Twitter continue as it always has and not do anything new. And then Twitter, of course, actually did something with spaces and kind of ate Clubhouse's lunch.

SPEAKER_27: I think that's the right observation. For many years, people were able to take the Twitter social graph and use Twitter's feed as a way to promote new products.

SPEAKER_17: And Twitter just sat there and watched it. And this was like the one time they actually acted quickly to take a thread that was basically copying. I mean, your whole Twitter graph was just getting rebuilt over there and they stopped it. So that is a, maybe that's a sign that there's just additional confidence on a technical basis, on a product basis, on a Twitter over the last few years, which I think is true. New CEO, who this? Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. And the other observation I had there was I think Clubhouse really suffered in a way from, and this kind of is a little esoteric, but I do think the public is aware of the valuation of companies.

SPEAKER_50: And I do think that that absurd valuation, especially with those lead users, the people you're mentioning, Molly, you know, a lot of the black community. I heard so much backchannel, like we built this, it's worth $4 billion. So here we go again, a social network built off black culture or another business by two white guys built off black culture to make it a race issue. Not everything is, but I, in this case, specifically heard from tons of black creators and there were rooms like, what do we get out of this? And then I think Andreessen running that valuation up so quickly just felt like, is that artificial or real? And it just put this whole thing of like, I'm not getting paid for this. And that's what I kept hearing. Everybody's getting rich on this.

SPEAKER_17: I'm not getting paid for this. And I think that created a lot of weird tension in the platform. I don't know if you guys witnessed that as well. And then there was other weird thing. Andreessen Horowitz was like the top users on the platform. And so for the VCs to be the top users.

SPEAKER_52: And they maybe let it get a little ugly in there if we're being honest.

SPEAKER_50: Well, they also stopped, yeah, things got a little weird and then they stopped using it. So it was like, okay, so Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are the big draw and then they're not there anymore.

SPEAKER_17: And then I guess Ben's wife was, uh, Felicia was doing like a Saturday thing, which was the big tentpole every Saturday. And then they all just abandoned it. It's very weird.

SPEAKER_56: Life got busy again. That too.

SPEAKER_57: Could be that. Yeah. I mean, just for founders out there, don't look to your...

SPEAKER_49: your celebrity VCs, me saying that, like one of the original celebrity VCs, like, Jason's not going to help you.

SPEAKER_50: Well, I mean, you have to build your business on your own. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, the business has to be, you can use your VC to get the first thousand customers or, you know, just on the margins help, but it has to be sustainable in and of itself. And I think that was one of the also problems. If you have Mark Andreessen calling in favors with top flight people, and then they give up, all of a sudden you lost your marketing department.

SPEAKER_17: So anyway, so tell us about what's, what's, what's Spotify doing here in terms of buying Chartable, which I use, which seems to be like a database of the rankings in a way to do podcast discovery across both ranking lists.

SPEAKER_47: But I don't know what else they do in this other analytics platform. What's the background here?

SPEAKER_67: Yeah. So just to back up a little bit, Spotify has been making a ton of acquisitions and podcasting.

SPEAKER_26: I'm sure you've talked about it a bunch on the show, but like just quick, quick recap, they've invested in networks. So like Gimlet, the ringer podcast, obviously they're investing in exclusives, which they're licensing, like Joe Rogan and Dax Shepard. They invested in a hosting platform called Megaphone. So you can actually host the content. They invested in a creator platform called anchor. They invested in an ad, like building an entire programmatic ad marketplace, which is part of Megaphone. And then they recently, yeah, just made this acquisition of pod sites and Chartable. And the fact that you use Chartable, Jason is like, it says a lot because basically every podcaster uses one of these two services, if not both. And really what they do is they use different tags in podcasts to help you attribute different behavior. So in Chartable's case, they're really well known for their smart promos and smart links technology, which is essentially like if I run marketing somewhere, I want to know that someone's actually listening to my podcast from my banner ad or whatever it is. So they have a way to use their tag system to actually determine that and tell you for sure your marketing is working. Pod sites do something similar with advertising, which is like if I'm an advertiser, I want to know that the listeners are hearing my ad. So once again, you can put a pixel on your website, which will then refer back to this tag. And the advertiser can know, oh, like Ashley listened. They won't know me specifically, but this listener listened to our ad. She visited our website from it. And this is super important for any company that wants to actually build a huge advertising apparatus like Spotify does for podcasting.

SPEAKER_39: So, I mean, this was the thing that like enabled the modern podcasting boom and didn't exist for so long.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, we're going to talk about Apple and Google later, but it's it's a huge deal, right? I mean, it's sort of like it sounds esoteric. But first of all, when you list off all of those properties all at once, it's sort of like it's not even everything in dribs and drabs. Right. And they're like not even done.

SPEAKER_74: This is a huge deal.

SPEAKER_26: It's a very big deal, simply because, you know, we're seeing this huge gold rush in podcasting. And most of these companies like Amazon, who bought, has bought a lot as well, and Spotify and potentially others see potential here for the advertising, the advertising money. And you can't get advertising money and scale and grow if advertisers don't believe that they actually get anything out of advertising. So, you need this attribution.

SPEAKER_78: And these are the two big players that do that.

SPEAKER_17: Mm hmm. Yeah. And Spotify is worth $30 billion to put it in context. These are all very modest acquisitions. I mean, it was the biggest one, the ringer, maybe at 200 or so. I'm not sure what anger went for, but these all seem to be in the low nine figures. And they didn't announce the price of these two, correct? No, not yet. Not yet. And if they are, Molly, I think when a public company buys stuff, if it's under like 50 million, they don't even have to tell anybody, right? It's like, so they're probably not going to even do it. So, I guess for podcasters, this means you got to take Spotify seriously as a distribution channel. They're really committed to it. Therefore, podcasters at least need to start sharing their URLs on Spotify and maybe climbing up the rankings there.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, it sort of is unclear right now if, like, for example, you can use Chartable without having to have a Spotify account, obviously. So, it's unclear if they're going to lock all this technology down to their hosting platform. Spotify did tell me today that to use Chartable, you're going to need a megaphone login at their hosting platform. You don't have to be paying, but you need to have an account. So, we can already see a little bit of hints of this to use Chartable, their technology going forward. Wow. So, you can see a little hint of it. Podsites, it seems like it's going to be business as usual there for now. That's one, though, that's a little unclear.

SPEAKER_88: Like, if they end up being like, yeah, you have to host on our platform to use this, then, yeah, that changes the game significantly.

SPEAKER_05: That's a big deal because a lot of businesses, even really, really big podcasting businesses, use Chartable to get their data, right? And if all of a sudden it's like, you have to have this account, you're in their ecosystem, they're gathering data about what is now effectively a competitive product. Like, every podcast on earth that isn't from Spotify just became a competitive product and they want you to log in to get ad insight data. I mean, again, like, it just, we need to just, because it can sound a little boring or a little esoteric if you're not in this business, it's a, that's a, it's a big deal.

SPEAKER_93: Because there aren't that many of these products that exist, right? Right. And there, there has to be trust.

SPEAKER_26: And I think that's the other big question is like, do we trust that Podsites is going to respect the data and not share it with Spotify's publishing team, for example, because it would give them information on how well shows perform, how much advertisers are buying on it, all sorts of data.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, I, I've had these conversations with Daniel over there and, and the CEO of anchor, because we are part of their video trial with this week in startups and all in. And so they were like, I was like, here's the RSS feed for video. And they're like, no, you gotta have an anchor one. And I was like, no, I don't. And they're like, yeah, you kind of do. And I was like, why are you breaking the podcast standards? And they're like, we're fully committed to podcast standards. And I said, then don't break them. Like, why do I have to have two? I don't want an anchor account. And I have, we publish our own RSS feed.

SPEAKER_23: And I said, and I literally told him an email. I was like, Daniel on this. I was like, this is why you guys have a bad reputation in podcasting is because you do stuff like this. Like, just respect the RSS feeds. It's that easy. He's like, we're going to. And I'm like, well, then do it now. And they're like, no, for the trial, we're going to do it this way.

SPEAKER_50: And I was like, fine, we'll create another RSS feed. But I was really upset about it because if, and I'll just, just open message to Daniel and to anybody in podcasting, you know, we built this.

SPEAKER_23: It's great that you're supporting it, great that you're bringing customers to it, really appreciate it. Like, if Spotify didn't have podcasts, that would be a bummer, right? It's great that they're putting all these podcasts in front of people next to their music listening.

SPEAKER_100: It's a gift to podcasters. But also, and, as Molly would say, and, we were here first, don't break it. And I have a, you know, line in the sand. I don't want our users trapped, period.

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SPEAKER_23: That's rcrowd.com slash twist to sign up for free. And I think live red ads is the magic of podcasting. I think for the long tail of podcasting, these inserted dynamically ads that are all ROI driven, perfect. But for the high-end folks, and I'm curious what you think, it's not about the attribution as much as it is, hey, can I get Kara Swisher or Molly or Jason or Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro, whoever it is, call her daddy. And can we get alignment with that host to read the ad? And we kind of know the audience. We know Joe Rogan's audience. We know call her daddy's audience. We know this week in startups audience kind of baked into the content, right? If you're listening to call her daddy, you're into a certain amount of content that probably is different than this week in startups. May not be too much overlap there. So, what are your thoughts on the magic of host read ads in relation to these dynamic ads? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, this is a huge, huge, huge thing in the industry right now because players like Spotify, to make back all the money they've invested, they need to scale their advertising and they need to get a ton of ads in as many shows as possible. And so, again, this kind of speaks to what you're talking about, which is like, do podcasts lose something when instead of hearing you read an ad for whatever it is, I instead just hear like a random Bank of America ad inserted into the show at some point. There are a lot of people on both sides of this. Um, and yeah, as far as attribution goes, like Rogan, for example, is known to like, really, his listeners byproduct. So in that case, you're right, like the attribution in that case really isn't that important. And that's what podcasting was kind of built on is this direct response advertiser, the promo codes, the vanity URLs that we always think of. And that's how you got your attribution is you're like, I know that they're buying stuff. It's different when you're trying to, yes, scale and put all these automatically inserted ads in where Bank of America is like, how do we know anyone actually visited us? Because it's not so much about you buying a Bank of America, whatever product, it's about you coming to our website, exploring, learning about us. And that's where these tags come in. Totally different worlds. And yeah, people have really strong feelings on both sides.

Jason Calacanis: What do you think, Molly? Well, what is the I mean, I guess what I wonder is what is the promise for these small creators? Right.

SPEAKER_05: And so Spotify is presumably pitching the acquisition of these tools as a value add for podcasters who want to use the Spotify platform to build audience. Do you have any sense of whether that is going to work and has value for, you know, like, what do we know what the revenue share looks like? Or do we know what value it actually brings to somebody who isn't already, you know, me and Jason or whatever?

SPEAKER_118: Well, no, yeah, this is a better way to put it.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. Well, this actually speaks to what Jason was talking about with the fact that you're participating in the video trial, because I wrote a take earlier this morning that this whole acquisition is actually about competing with YouTube. Spotify wants to compete with YouTube and YouTube is the creator's platform. That's where people go to upload their videos. If YouTube allowed you to also have your audio there and you could listen in the background for free and all your analytics for both your podcast, traditional audio listeners and video listeners were in one place and it's Google analytics game over. Yeah. Programmatic is already happening there. So YouTube is ahead of the ball, even though they kind of haven't really done much here. So Spotify now is building these video, this video player that you're participating in. They are trying to recruit 50 million creators to the platform. That's their state of mission. They have creator technology and anchor. They're trying to launch programmatic like YouTube has with AdSense so that more people can make money on the platform. And that's what this purchase is about is trying to make sure that they know these ads work. Therefore, they can help smaller creators monetize.

SPEAKER_88: Therefore, these smaller creators come to the platform and use it maybe instead of YouTube.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah, this makes sense to me. Like if you think about a YouTube creator, do they want to have an ad sales team? Do they want to send insertion orders? Do they want to, you know, you know, write copy to do ad reads?

SPEAKER_23: I don't think they want to do that when they're starting their careers. So that is kind of the magic of YouTube. It's a really good point because on YouTube, you put a video up, you turn on monetization. And if you hit a certain number of subscribers, I think they'll let you in the program and you're off to the races. So yeah, this could be a long tail of Spotify and play.

SPEAKER_57: I like that as a concept. Super interesting. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: Also, it is interesting that YouTube seems to have no idea that it's also an audio platform, you know?

SPEAKER_126: I think they know. I think they have a complicated issue. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_93: So they've made a couple moves this past in 2021 that are really interesting. One is they hired their first dedicated podcast person. It sounds small, but that's like a big deal in our world.

SPEAKER_131: So they have some idea that they're an audio platform. It's a big deal for us. Somebody in the building.

SPEAKER_133: Right. That's a big deal for us.

SPEAKER_26: And then the second thing that's maybe more interesting is that in Canada, they made background listening free on YouTube music. Seemingly like a trial experiment. Again, we're speculating here, but I would not be surprised if they're seeing what happens there and then going to make it free everywhere else.

SPEAKER_16: But they have to pay for that because they have a music license deal.

SPEAKER_44: And that's why I think it's only for certain things probably regions.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah. But I mean, I know as a YouTube subscriber, I pay for the premium and whatever that is. And you should too, Molly.

SPEAKER_23: It's worth it. You don't see ads. And then when you put it in the background, you can keep listening. Right. I do listen to many times podcasts on YouTube and I wonder if they could get around this music licensing issue because the reason they can't do in the background is so you don't, you know, all that copyrighted music on YouTube. All the music industry people claim those and they make the money off of it, but they don't want. It's a different license and a different fee structure when you're Spotify. You can do the background. So YouTube doesn't want to trigger that for 2 billion people globally. That'd be a big price tag. Yeah. But what they could do is they could do a flag where you said, if you upload something, I am a podcast channel. I certify. I do not have music in here. That's licensed music. And they could actually let people opt into that. And then they'd have to train users at some things. But the way I knew they were getting more serious about podcasting at YouTube is when they added the 2x speed. I think that's when you know somebody actually understands podcasting behavior. Because when you dip your toe into podcasting, people are like, where's the customizable settings? And you really need to set speed settings based on the hosts. So for like this week in startups, it's maybe 1.25, but you're not putting us on 2x. But if you're listening to some, you know, slow people, like you're going to put it on 2.

SPEAKER_144: I was really hoping for a name drop there.

SPEAKER_23: I was like, I was going to, but I don't want to be cruel here.

SPEAKER_27: But some people talk really slow. Molly. Do you guys change your speed on YouTube? Have you done that?

SPEAKER_133: I do.

SPEAKER_26: Because I have to consume a lot.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: I'd rather read that. That's the one nice thing for me about YouTube is they have transcripts.

Jason Calacanis: Yep. Transcripts and captions are huge.

SPEAKER_88: Spotify can really make it so much easier than I can. So that's why I have to use a fast speed to try to just get through these podcasts as fast as possible.

SPEAKER_05: Look out otter.ai. Spotify is going to acquire that next time.

SPEAKER_150: Oh, no. Don't even say that. I know. Right? Like, okay, so. Yeah. Let's get to the oh, no.

SPEAKER_153: People listening know what otter.ai is.

SPEAKER_05: The people. Right. Exactly. If you are a media person, otter.ai is like a real time transcription service. And you can also use it for some basic audio editing. Like you can highlight and move stuff around and actually use it for it. It's wonderful.

Jason Calacanis: Descript. Descript. Yeah. Like Descript. If you know that one. Yeah. We're our audio nerdery is showing here.

SPEAKER_151: Descript is a lot better. What's great about otter.ai is. I don't know if you've been in a Zoom room. Oh, it's Descript that does the basic audio edits.

SPEAKER_39: Sorry. Otter only. Transcribes. Transcribes. And I think plays back. But maybe I'm thinking of Descript also.

SPEAKER_17: The thing that's interesting about otter.ai, I don't know if you guys will try this is you can integrate it with Zoom. So if you do a Zoom meeting and you want to have a transcript, it says making a real time transcript. And like you can open up the other window and you see your transcript in real time. It's pretty delightful. It's getting. I don't know. What do you think, Ashley? Is you have when you do a quote from a podcast, you have to check it, obviously, make sure it's correct. But how accurate are transcripts now for journalists? I mean, otter. 90.

SPEAKER_67: Otter is great. 80, 90%. Yeah, it's it's up there. But there was actually just a piece published about this yesterday about the risk to journalists who use otter. Whole separate thing.

SPEAKER_162: Whole other source of anxiety. Whole separate thing.

SPEAKER_05: I shouldn't have brought it up because now they're going to definitely buy them and it's going to be ruined. So let's get to this idea that now Spotify is the company that definitely buys your thing and ruins it. Because Neelai from The Verge had an interesting take on top of your tweet tweeted article yesterday, which was like, look, yes, it's concerning that Spotify is like sucking up all of the pieces of the podcast industry and potentially breaking standards along the way and sort of like owning every piece of it and ruining it. And it feels anti-competitive and it's all these things. But like, why haven't Google and Apple done anything or much of anything in the last, let me think, almost two decades of podcasting?

SPEAKER_37: I mean, it's a good question. Apple, for what it's worth, like did launch subscriptions this year.

SPEAKER_26: Apple, though, if I understand, right, if I understand their ambitions correctly, like Apple will never be in the advertising game for podcasts like that's just not their thing.

SPEAKER_67: So I think they are making a play more for like, hey, if you want to offer the best subscriptions or something on the main podcast platform, you'll do it through us and we'll charge you to do that. Google, yeah, that's been a big mystery. And like I said, like we just got a YouTube podcast person last late last year or so.

SPEAKER_17: I think Apple, I think the subscription thing is interesting. I heard some people are paying for it. I asked my followers recently, was anybody pay for anything? And a couple of people mentioned podcasts they did pay for, like the Theranos one or something. So I think special series, like actually your series, Molly, like that you did with public radio, how we survive.

SPEAKER_23: Like I could see people buying the second season of that or buying like a companion, like get the first six episodes. The next six are paid.

SPEAKER_17: I could see people with the, you know, I don't know if you look at the top charts, but it feels like 20% of the top charts are crime podcasts. I guess people, people would pay for those too.

SPEAKER_23: Apparently. Yeah. But Apple, I think will do, you know how they, in the app store, they do premium listings. So you do a search and they have like a, an ad up there. I think that business has done well for them. So I can see them doing that in podcasting. So like overcast lets you buy like the tech category.

SPEAKER_17: We tested it and you know, whatever you get 500 clicks a week or something. But imagine Apple, when you went to the tech podcasts and you were on any tech podcast, if you know, you did a search or in the directory and it said, Oh, here's this week in startups feature podcasts. And we paid whatever for that, a dollar a click, you would have a dogfight for people buying those because the top podcasts do generate a lot of revenue. I think anybody who's a podcaster, who's listening. I think these, this is all great for people who are getting into podcasting.

SPEAKER_23: I think if you are a publisher in podcasting, you know, and you're at scale and you do it as a job and you're making over a hundred thousand a year, you should not use any of these tools. Uh, you should invest in having a sales team. Uh, you should represent yourself and you should build direct relationships with all advertisers. Because if you're going to be a publisher, you got to control your distribution. You got to control your relationship with advertisers. You got to control your relationship with customers. And what these platforms do is they abstract you away from that. So you have to kind of do the anti abstraction, which is collect emails, collect followers on multiple platforms, have direct relationships with advertisers and, um, you know, build those deep relationships with customers. That's my secret to all of this is you'd be a publishing as a three legged stool or a four legged stool. You have to have the talent. Molly and I are on the program, right? We work full time for this company. We're not like rented talking heads. We have direct relationship with all the advertisers and we build direct relations consumers through live events and email. Those are the three things you have to do as a podcast. If you're doing one, two or three of them, you're not going to have breakout success. You have very modest success. So this is, I don't know. I think it's great that Spotify is as committed. I just want everybody to tell Spotify open standards. Every time you talk to them, anytime they want to do stuff.

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SPEAKER_23: L I N O D E dot com slash twist. And then I don't want users tracked. I don't want my users tracked. I don't want other users tracked. I find it creepy. I don't want people knowing what pockets I'm listening to. So I don't use podcasts for I don't use Spotify for listening to podcasts. I use overcast, which actually takes it really seriously. Overcast removed all the pixels from the description page. So the way they they do this is in your descriptions, you're supposed to put the tags in there. So when you pop open that pixel sort of little wonky here, each pixels unique. It tells the server, okay, this phone picked this little tiny pixel, uh, and overcast, which is my favorite podcast player. Uh, then apples, then Spotify's overcast takes those out.

SPEAKER_47: So I suggest everybody download overcast and support overcast and independent players as well.

SPEAKER_124: What do you use? The founder was on episode 1096, by the way, apparently. Oh, Marco. Yeah.

SPEAKER_178: Look at Nick. Just boom, boom.

SPEAKER_17: I mean, that's going to be the one that's going to be interesting. I could see that them trying to buy overcast. And do you use overcast Ashley at all?

SPEAKER_133: My boyfriend does. He loves overcast. He's like a power, power, power user.

SPEAKER_180: What does he, what does he like about it? Does he tell you what, why he's so addicted to it?

SPEAKER_133: Doesn't it remove like the ums and all the filler words? They have something called smart speed.

SPEAKER_182: So there is a button you can press and it will compress empty space and make a podcast 15 or 20% faster.

SPEAKER_23: And then. Really? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Um, smart speed is awesome. And then they have another thing, uh, called voice boost. Voice boost. Just, you know how sometimes podcasts people talk low and you, if you press the voice boost, issue, it just raises the level of, you know, whatever the wave signal is of people's voices. It goes just a little bit hotter, um, which can be hit or miss. I'll be honest. And then the other thing is custom speed. So you have a speed that you play all pockets on. Mine's like 1.5. And then if I'm listening to Ben Shapiro, which I do once in a while just to hear like his wacky craziness, I'll put that on 1.2. And then other people who are slow, I'll put it on 1.8. And you can actually make the speed setting custom to the podcast. And then you can make lists of pockets. So I have a list of pockets of thinkers, tech and capital allocators.

SPEAKER_17: So sometimes I want to geek out to capital allocators. I'll just listen to all the capital allocator, you know, finance people's podcasts.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. It's the ultimate. I cannot say enough about overcast. And then I, I think this is, there's a little, you know, that little speed player where you can fast forward 30 seconds or rewind 30 seconds. YouTube has added that to the app for premium users. So you can actually do the 30 second fast forward. That's the other way, you know, somebody's taking their podcasting app seriously is they put the fast forward 15, 30 seconds in.

SPEAKER_88: My prediction is just a total prediction is Spotify will remove the skip 30 second button.

SPEAKER_05: Mm hmm. I have been wondering about that also because advertisers obviously, I mean, spent decades suing DVR makers over exactly this issue. And I was wondering the same thing, especially now that they, I mean, again, Spotify by consolidating so much by, you know, buying and choosing and publishing its own content by owning the tools like puts itself in a position where it's going to increasingly have to make decisions probably that are a little unfriendly to consumers who are just like, I want to, I want to dumb pipe. Like Spotify is no longer a dumb pipe.

SPEAKER_194: Well, and like, just with someone like Rogan, if you want to listen to Rogan, maybe you don't want to hear the ads and you want to skip them.

SPEAKER_196: But if Spotify gets rid of that skip ad function, where else are you going to go to get Rogan? Exactly.

SPEAKER_17: It's like Hulu. I don't know if you guys use Hulu, but I bought Hulu with ad free and then certain networks can override that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: And it's just so oppressive that you can't go backwards in a sports game. And I'm like, just tell me what the number is, please. Hulu. I don't want whatever it is.

SPEAKER_50: I just want my, and then they put it in yellow and it's like, you're stuck in this yellow zone of like, you know, two minutes of ads. It's just, here's what I really want to know though.

SPEAKER_05: And I'm assuming that the answer is no, but does anybody here use Amazon for podcasts?

Jason Calacanis: And more importantly, does it, yeah, Amazon bought.

SPEAKER_05: So Amazon is trying to be like very quietly and with not, I apparently not much consumer success do Spotify things, right? They acquired Wondery, which is a big production studio. They've been acquiring exclusive content. They do have a player.

SPEAKER_206: You could say, um, do you think they're a serious player, Ashley?

SPEAKER_208: I do.

SPEAKER_26: Um, I look like, for example, I listened to the show nine 12 when it came out and they did a thing where, well, what they've been doing mostly like that one was where you can binge it all on Amazon music and that, or you could wait to get it week by week everywhere else. But Amazon music, instead of going full exclusive, like Spotify has instead been signing deals with people like my favorite murder and smart list where it's a week long exclusivity window or how I built this as the most recent one. So I think that's really smart because they get the best of both worlds. If you're, if you are a diehard fan, you'll come that week early and you'll use Amazon music. A hundred percent. If you're not, you weren't going to come ever. So they get to benefit with you as an app to like get you as an ad.

SPEAKER_88: Like you're listening to ads everywhere else and they're making money off those ads. So yeah.

SPEAKER_176: We almost did that deal with how we survive. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_217: Interesting. So we should talk after this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: That's it. I, I've had Amazon people. I mean, I've had everybody reach out. Amazon reached out at some point and. Yeah. I just didn't understand the offering yet. Like exactly what the value prop was.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think that hybrid exclusivity is super smart. It doesn't seem to be getting a ton of traction so far, but again, it's like pretty early. And Amazon has, I mean, I guess the fundamental question is like same with Google and Apple, right? If this isn't your core business, are you going to be able to devote the time to really make it the Spotify killer?

SPEAKER_26: So the thing that's interesting about Amazon is they own all the Alexa devices. And during the whole Rogan scuff, scuff up like with everything that happened with Rogan over the past few weeks, Spotify had a leaked internal town hall transcript. And in that Daniel Eck explained why Spotify signed Joe Rogan and got into the exclusives game. And he specifically says it is because of hardware partnerships. They needed leverage in those negotiations. So, you know, Amazon could remove Spotify. Yes. They mentioned Tesla, they mentioned Amazon and they mentioned Google. So just using Amazon as an example, if I want to play a podcast and they don't have Spotify, but I listen to Joe Rogan, I'm going to be angry at Amazon and be like, Hey, I use my Alexa and I want to listen to Joe Rogan. This is leverage for Spotify to be like, see, you have to keep us on Alexa. But you could see how Amazon has this huge advantage, which is that if I say any other podcast that I want to listen to, they can just play it from Amazon music, because presumably you're a prime member and you're just in the world already. It just gives them that. It just makes sense for them to have podcasts there.

SPEAKER_234: Yeah. Who's not in podcasting now, Ashley, that people are buzzing about might dip their toe.

SPEAKER_17: I noticed Kara Swisher did for HBO, like one of these, like, you know, talking dead kind of things for succession. So that was interesting. Like, uh, and then I, I watched a show called insecure, which just had season finale. And they did a like wine, you know, kind of wrap up where Issa Rae would, you know, have a glass of wine with one of the producers and talk about the show. I found it actually very compelling. Uh, these products, uh, if you're into the show because the shows are complex. So HBO max seems like they're dipping their toe. Who's a wild card here. And do you hear any buzz about anybody hiring for podcast positions that you're like, Whoa, why are they hiring for podcast positions?

SPEAKER_237: Like your little catch on the YouTube. Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: I mean the companies, so just to like, finish your thought. Yeah. Like HBO and Netflix, the streaming platforms are all investing in podcasts. They have hired people to do that. You have all the major tech platforms playing in the South. Facebook is supposedly doing something here. Amazon, Google, Spotify, blah, blah. Apple. The one that I'm kind of watching a bit is the music labels.

SPEAKER_242: Oh, really? Like Sony and universal Warner.

SPEAKER_26: They have teams, but I'm more, I'm kind of curious how music labels are notoriously great at, um, getting money out of streaming platforms. So I'm very curious if they're in this for podcasts to be free or how they are thinking about, I mean, we're seeing this with comedy right now. Like there's a movement in the legal world to get comedians paid. Like songwriters are paid like for the material from streaming platforms. So there's kind of this movement around spoken word royalties.

SPEAKER_246: And I am curious if the music labels are playing a super long game here and thinking about podcasts as like some kind of spoken word royalty payment thing.

SPEAKER_17: Oh, I see. They want to get their claws into that so that every time it's played, they get a mechanical or something. I like that. I'm just thinking through it.

SPEAKER_26: Like, I don't, I don't know.

SPEAKER_95: This is just me being like, I'm kind of curious.

SPEAKER_249: How much time have you wasted managing your company's money? Come on. We know it's too much.

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SPEAKER_17: And what was the company that had raised like a hundred million dollars to kind of, I had written a blog post about like somebody could make the HBO of this if they just raised a hundred million bucks. Oh, Luminary. Were they the ones who raised a hundred million and it just didn't work and they were like trying to charge fifteen bucks for? There was two. The hundred different podcasts.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, Luminary was one that did, no, it's Luminary and Himalaya. The Luminary is the big one then, yeah. The Luminary is the one from China. And then Luminary was the one that was, yeah, like VC funded and doing- Netflix of podcasts. Yeah, subscriptions. They're one price, get everything.

SPEAKER_263: They still exist.

SPEAKER_264: They're partners with Apple, which I think has been really good for them. But yeah, it's a little unclear what's going on there.

SPEAKER_197: Oh, right. They had, what's his name? The comedian there under the skin. Russell Brand. They had Russell Brand.

SPEAKER_266: Oh yeah. So that was super frustrating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_267: They still do.

SPEAKER_23: Well, no, I would, I would see a clip of Russell Brand and I would want to listen to his old, because sometimes he gets, I find him very entertaining. And sometimes he gets a good guest and I see a clip of it on YouTube in my stream, because he's in my algo. And I'm like, how do I listen to this?

SPEAKER_237: And it's like, they pace, they play seven minutes and like, oh, if you want to go listen to the rest of my podcast, I'll go to Luminary. I'm like, yeah, you know what? Too many choices. I'm just not going to listen to it.

SPEAKER_23: I think this is what the future of podcast is going to be. These people with these exclusive deals are going to realize after they secure the bag and they get a little bit of money. It's really about maximizing listeners and because of relevance and the people who come to podcasting have an ego, you know?

SPEAKER_05: I mean, this is where YouTube, if YouTube really, really gets serious about it, since they already have creators, they have massive distribution, everybody goes to YouTube for everything. Like YouTube could just stop that. And frankly, I would be delighted to have somebody come and stop this kind of exclusivity bucketing trend in its tracks because I don't it's not good for audiences. And it's not so either YouTube should get super serious about podcasting and just like shut down or somebody's going to come along and be the cable TV of podcasts. Like sell me the bundle, I guess, because I don't want to I don't want to have to like have Luminary and have Amazon and have Spotify and have this and that. Right. Like.

SPEAKER_37: And you as a user, like a listener, that's one whole separate thing of just like, I don't want to go to 15 different apps just to hear the shows I want to hear.

SPEAKER_26: But then you as a podcast, there's a whole different struggle where it kind of like what Jason was talking about. If you can't just use your one RSS feed, press one button, it goes everywhere. You're instead going to have so much more manual labor of collecting all your stats from all the different platforms, uploading your show to all the different platforms. Making sure QA, like if you do ad free stuff, like making sure there is no ads in there. So I'm thinking about this also from a labor perspective. Totally.

SPEAKER_234: That is like a really great point.

SPEAKER_23: We started experimenting with a patron because we'd be like, hey, can I get an ad free version? I'll pay you for whatever. Like, okay, we'll try doing a Patreon. And we produce so much content, you know, five days, six days a week. Now, like, you know, like, are people going to pay for it without ads or pay for an extra 20 minutes? Like, it's the amount of work it took, you know, some editors got to spend two hours managing it, then some marketing person's got to manage it. It just adds so much complexity. And that's, you know, was my message to the anchor folks. It's like, please do not add complexity to what we're doing yet. We got to do clips. We got to book guests. Like, don't make our lives harder. Just because you want to, you know, get your pause into here and try to get a stranglehold on stuff. It's really annoying, but I could see YouTube being a big win. I agree that they, if they really took this seriously and they just actually, there's a really easy way to do it. Actually, there's a really easy way for them to take this seriously. They should just put podcasts along the left-hand side. And when they have trending, they should have a podcast tab. And just by doing that, all the podcasts are like, well, I got to be on the, I got to be on the ranking. So if they did their own podcast ranking charts, just copy that YouTube and everybody will come running. So whoever's not publishing their full podcast to YouTube will absolutely come running. The second there's a tech and a finance and a comedy ranking, they'll be like, ah, and then you think about Joe Rogan's relevance. He was owning YouTube. And I think he must have lost some amount of audience by getting off of YouTube. I don't know what, but.

Jason Calacanis: There was a piece. I feel like it may have been in your publication, Ashley. Yeah. I wrote that piece. YouTube and Gimlet.

SPEAKER_05: Rogan and Gimlet. It was you, right? About how the, you know, the Gimlet thing wasn't working out that well.

SPEAKER_95: I wrote the Rogan piece where I did a data analysis looking at the number of, okay. So I looked at Rogan's show for like 19 months or something.

SPEAKER_26: And all the guests that came on, I looked at how many followers these guests had on before they went on Rogan. And then how many they gained a week after going on Rogan. And I saw a 50% reduction in their Twitter, like the amount of followers they gained on Twitter after he went exclusive.

SPEAKER_260: Makes sense. Yeah. That does make sense. The Jordan Peterson effect where he anoints somebody and they become, you know, really popular.

SPEAKER_26: And actually today Bloomberg had a really interesting article about the guy who's made a full-time job recapping Rogan episodes. And he averages a million downloads a week now. And he said that his numbers skyrocketed after Rogan went to Spotify because there was such an appetite for people who don't want to just go to Spotify. So they were like, I want to know what's going on.

SPEAKER_295: It's really interesting. Wow. That's some hustle. We should get that.

SPEAKER_23: I, I, yeah, that's my prediction is Joe Rogan leaves Spotify after this deal. Um, and then either does his own platform where it brings a bunch of people together, or he just goes super distribution again, and then brings his ads back. And doubles his audience again. Well, listen, Ashley, you've been great. Uh, thanks so much for all of your time and for writing all these great pieces and keeping us informed.

SPEAKER_187: You're really got yourself plugged into this audio space and we appreciate it.

SPEAKER_300: Yeah. It was great talking to you guys. We should all talk about podcasts more. Us and everyone else. So yes.

SPEAKER_301: How is it affecting journalism?

SPEAKER_23: It's like, now, if you are going to work at like the verge or Vox or Buzzfeed, is it like, oh, you don't do podcasting. You're second class citizen and then the people who have podcasts become like these elite people in the organization because, you know, they're more forward facing.

SPEAKER_187: Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: I think, I mean, everyone probably, not everyone. I can't speak for everyone. A lot of people would like a podcast probably, but I mean, just because even if you were someone with a big following, it doesn't always translate to success on a podcast. So I think it's always about having a really good idea and I feel like anyone could have that.

SPEAKER_77: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: It seems to me like there's, there's been a bifurcation of like journalists, like people who are good on camera and podcasting are just becoming super valuable to these. You know, brands and they're just getting compensated differently. Like, you know, Kara Swisher being the, the ultimate example of it, like where she can just dictate her terms or Molly would.

SPEAKER_57: You know, like there's a class of folks who are just, you know, trend, they transcend. Journalism now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_246: The star journalists and influencers.

SPEAKER_311: God help us.

David Friedberg: Well, I mean, look at the New York times, like their number one podcaster, I believe is Kara and she's not an employee. Like they can't make her an employee and she's got swag.

SPEAKER_06: And they're just grabbing up everybody and turning them into a podcaster.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, they got Ezra Klein from Vox, right? I was gonna say, I feel like Ezra Klein just got super mad somewhere out in the universe because it was like, come on. But yeah, very similar, very similar model. All right. Thanks, Ashley.

SPEAKER_313: Appreciate it. Thanks.

SPEAKER_02: Ashley Carmen, just dropping great knowledge as always. Great guests. Great guests.

SPEAKER_10: And now we're going to toss to the 10 pitches and the feedback we gave myself, Molly, Jackie, Mike Savino, the new president of launch and Charlie Cuddy, who runs founder. You did just an amazing job coaching these founders and teaching them what it takes to get to product market fit. These are very nice and startups are very early. But if you're thinking about starting a company, this is how it starts. And so these companies are going to be applying to go to accelerators. That's how early they are. And we really loved hosting them for our 12 week founder university course. Enjoy the pitches. So Charlie, let's get started. We're going to see five companies in a row, two minutes each. I'm going to ask Jackie, Molly and Mike and myself to each pick their number one in each cohort. And the number one is the one they think is got the greatest chance.

SPEAKER_314: This is the lens of like the four of us to look at it through of getting into our accelerator and then eventually getting a seed round complete. So those two things being able to get into an accelerator, hopefully ours, but could be any, and then eventually raise a seed round of a million dollars.

SPEAKER_10: So that's kind of the idea who's ready for that seed round or accelerator check.

SPEAKER_04: Are we ready, Charlie? We are ready.

SPEAKER_316: Seth with gifting is up first here. All right, here we go.

SPEAKER_04: Hi, I'm Seth Brown and my company is gifting.

SPEAKER_316: Gifting is an on-demand gift giving marketplace.

SPEAKER_317: Meet Alex. Alex lives in New York and just remembered today's her brother's birthday, but Brett lives in Florida. So what can she get him? And will it even arrive in time? Luckily for Alex, there's gifting. Let's see how it works. Alex enters in Brett's interest. He loves music and electronics. From there, our machine learning algorithm analyzes his interests and provides a single curated list of items available in his area. Had Brett been a gifting customer, Alex would have seen his wishlist pop up when searching for recommendations. Each gifting order is accompanied by a digital card or premium video message, which we believe is a real game changer. And to top it off, all this can be delivered in as little as two hours. As for Brett's gift, that's accompanied with a text message containing his personalized greeting, similar to the email that some members of the lunch team just received. Brett can confirm his delivery or reschedule, leaving them both happy customers. I conducted research with over 2,500 consumers like Alex and compared it to the competitive landscape. We found there really wasn't an app that checked all the boxes until now. Our go to market strategy includes a localized consumer campaign, retail partnerships targeting inventory from over 800 brick and mortar stores in our launch market of South Florida. A product built for expansion and made operational by farming out our deliveries. We built a pre-launched community of over 11,000 members. Once launched, we'll focus on our 2x growth model where we'll incentivize every gifting recipient like Brett to becoming a gifting customer like Alex. We're targeting an ARR of $10 million in 2024 and $100 million by the end of 2025. Traditional gift giving costs $20 can take 43 minutes and not knowing what to get could be frustrating. With gifting, you can save close to 20%. It could be done in a fraction of the time with access to personalized gift recommendations. Our team has experienced grown companies from startup through exit, resulting in combined sales of nearly $6 billion. Gifting is an on-demand gift giving marketplace. We obsess over delivering the perfect gift so you don't have to. Thank you.

SPEAKER_320: Nice work, Seth.

SPEAKER_321: If you want to go ahead and stop sharing your screen, we'll move on to Teresa. Ready? Go.

SPEAKER_324: Perfect. Hi, I'm Teresa. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Choyu. We personalize and digitize breathing training to help people live longer and better. Breathing is the foundation of life, and we do it more than 20,000 times a day. Yet 9 out of 10 people do it wrongly, and this can lead to deadly chronic diseases, the number one cause of death worldwide, lost years of life, and for companies, financial losses of millions of US dollars per year. That's how we developed a personalized and digital training as a solution. Let me show you how this works. At the bottom of the screen, people get a prompt to inhale or exhale. That's the breathing training part. They then blow onto the microphone of the smartphone or headset. When they follow the rhythm correctly, they steer the object on the screen in real time. They're literally blowing up a balloon. We offer this as holistic breathing training to businesses. We integrate the training into the browser. We have an analytics dashboard. We offer coaching and webinars. And people can train their breath anytime and anywhere because we also have a mobile app. We compete with expensive hardware-based breathing devices, human, analog, not scalable breathing trainers, and existing meditation and lifestyle apps where there's either no clear breathing focus or no real-time interaction with the user. The joy of breathing training however works because it's sticky, it's fun. We've literally millions of ways of doing the breathing animation. We don't need any additional hardware, just a regular smartphone or headset is enough. Last but not least, it functions. It works. It's based on more than five years of research at leading universities like MIT or ETH Zurich. We follow a bottom-up B2B sales model. We charge private customers $5 per month and business customers $10 per month. We focus on B2B clients first and plan to have a revenue of $50 million by the end of 2025. We currently have 250 beta testers for the B2C app. And we have acquired our first B2B client, a corporate global insurance company, where we will integrate into their corporate wellness platform. They already have a million active users there. We are further in advanced negotiations with another clever insurance company. A potential other client of ours says that our breathing training is so easy and fun. It's like Candy Crush for health. Us, that's me. I did my PhD at ETH Zurich and MIT in digital health. David, who works for top-tier strategy consulting and fitness startups. And our CTO, Stefan, who did his PhD at ETH Zurich in machine learning and quantum chemistry. Thank you for your attention. We adore you and we digitize and personalize breathing training. Excellent.

SPEAKER_330: Nice job, Teresa. Harry, why don't you go ahead and share your screen? You're up next. Ready? Go.

SPEAKER_332: Hi, everyone.

SPEAKER_333: I'm Harry, founder of TACO, an AI conversation hub that manages all of the professional communications in one place. Meet Joey. Joey is a VC who plays different roles. Joey needs to juggle between Gmail, Slack and LinkedIn on a daily basis. All Joey wants is a single interface that consolidates all of the messages in one place. And now with TACO, he can. Joey simply uses one tab to connect any account from any platform. He can then customize the connection details. TACO will then spin up an NLP model in the backend to figure out what's important. Joey can then directly reply within the app or go straight to the specific Gmail or Slack. TACO then plans everything on the trackboard list. Joey's time and mine are saved. We are a consumer subscription model and we charge $10 per month. Two weeks ago, we launched our private beta. And now we have 150 users with 100% week-over-week growth while spending $0 on marketing. We've received positive feedback on our AI algorithm, unique product positioning, and also our UI. We outcompete power products like superhuman by integrating with more platforms. And we outcompete all-in-one chats by having an AI-driven backend. We've been growing from free high-converting channels. These channels drive organic word-of-mouth growth. We've also been growing our brand and community awareness by issuing membership NFTs. This year, we plan to penetrate the entrepreneur group and grow our MAU to 100,000. Next year, we'll move to B2B with a product-like growth fashion. And we are the team to do this. I ran into the problem first-hand when I was studying AI and LP at UChicago. My co-founder has a background of building consumer-facing tech product at Amazon. And once again, I'm Harry.

SPEAKER_332: This is TACO, your AI conversation hub. Thank you. Excellent job, Harry. We'll shift to Tracy. Ready? Go.

SPEAKER_336: Hi, I'm Tracy, the founder of Term Payments, the payment processor that allows a customer to shop online and pay in person.

SPEAKER_338: Because people like Ari don't trust websites with his card information or only has cash. But with Term, he can select to pay in person and receive a QR code by email or text with a link to a map that shows the closest payment location to complete his purchase. Term makes money by charging vendors 3.6% to process payments and a one-third split of the collection fee with physical locations. But we also give customers the option to have the full Term Payments app with additional features for our annual membership of $28. With strategic partners like Stripe, Spare Cash, and Green Dot, Term will soon be able to serve our waitlist of over 200 shopping customers and 17 e-commerce stores, online marketplaces, and SaaS technology companies registered and waiting on standby to use Term as their payment processor. Our closest competition is eBanks, Paysafe, Cash App, and Amazon. eBanks and Paysafe are outside the U.S., collecting over $1 billion in annual in-person cash payments and U.S. companies are racing to develop and launch. These companies are great, but Term Payments can beat them to market by introducing ourselves to our customers where they are with posters at grocery stores, check cashing centers, billboards at bus stops and train stations, and social media outlets. We may be starting as a payment button on e-commerce websites, but we'll grow to process payments for utilities, school tuition, vacations, and even mortgages. Because in the U.S., 35% of all transactions are still done in cash. And when you expand to the rest of the world, that number jumps to over 80%, making it a trillion-dollar opportunity. To reach our first milestone of $10 million in annual revenue, we need to process approximately $1.5 million per day. And to get to $100 million in annual revenue, we have to process almost $9 million per day. Our team is made up of seasoned veterans of retail management, corporate sales, logistics, and operations and software engineering. Term is the bridge that connects the digital and physical payments world. Thank you.

SPEAKER_321: Awesome job, Tracy. Thank you. And we'll go one more for this first group of five. Chase, ready? Go.

SPEAKER_341: Hi, I'm Chase, founder of Fix 6. We're measuring the world's carbon to bring more people into the carbon economy. People like Jesus, who wants to bring his reforestation projects to a carbon offset marketplace. In order to do this, he needs a measurement, reporting, and verification solution. Currently, the cost of these solutions limit the number and types of projects that he can start. Fix 6 offers an affordable and scalable solution to this problem. To work with us, Jesus just uploads the geometry of the project. We then go and gather years worth of satellite data to train a scientific model which calculates the water, energy, and carbon budget of his land. We use this model to measure carbon sequestration, which is then reported to carbon offset marketplaces, allowing Jesus access to the capital that he needs. We currently have two customers and unpaid pilots with more in the pipeline. We're also partnering with carbon offset marketplaces to offer a scalable MRV solution. We have a SAS model, charging per acre per year, with many of these projects spent multiple years and up to a decade. One thing that sets us apart is the wide number of practices we support by monitoring both forest and croplands. This allows us to be an MRV provider for nearly every acre of land on the globe. We have seen intense interest from people in the regenerative finance and regenerative agriculture communities, as well as marketplaces looking for a scalable MRV solution. There's also the opportunity to expand into new verticals as more natural capital is backed with monetary capital. The carbon offset markets are expected to at least quadruple by the end of the decade, with each of these tons being backed by an MRV solution. For the land-based practices that FIX6 covers, up to roughly 850 million acres of land will be put in practice by the end of this decade. That represents an $850 million TAM at our dollar per acre pricing. The team is me at the moment, but we have a unique advantage since I have a PhD in peer-reviewed research and creating scalable solutions for measuring carbon and water budgets. Because of this, we're positioning FIX6 to get more people into the carbon economy by measuring the world's carbon. Thank you.

SPEAKER_346: Awesome. Thanks, Chase. I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing your screen. Jason, there's your first group of five.

SPEAKER_08: Very strong presentations, all seemingly real businesses that customers could be delighted by and spend money with.

SPEAKER_10: To recap for Jackie, Mike, and Molly, we have Company One, Gifting. It's an app that lets gift givers quickly send memorable gifts on demand. Company Two, Choju, is a breathing app that competes with Comm, Apple Watch, and some other services. $10 per user in the enterprise to help you learn to breathe better and reduce stress. Company Three, Taco, which is an AI conversation hub that consolidates your Slack, LinkedIn, and other messaging platforms into one. Apps, ostensibly so you could triage it better, I think, with some AI doing something in the backend, but I wasn't clear on that. 150 users in beta. And then you have term payments, which allows you to shop online, pay in person with a membership fee of $29 and some service fees. The audience for this, I believe, would be the unbanked. And Company Five, Fix Six, which is measuring the world's carbon footprints by analyzing land. I think using computer vision to figure out its carbon footprint costs a dollar an acre. And I think MRV stands for measurement reporting and verification. So I'll start with you, Jackie. When you look at these five companies, which one stands out to you that if it was in the accelerator, investors would want to take a follow up meeting and then subsequently would have the best chance at raising that million dollar seed round? Which one?

SPEAKER_349: I can only pick one. Only pick one.

SPEAKER_350: But you could take us through a dog process of your top two or three. Such a strong cohort. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00: You can tell us the two or three you're particularly narrowed it down to and then which one is the best and why. Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_355: So I think if I were to do a one, two, I'll do two. Okay. So for me. Sure. Let's all do two. Let's do two. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. It's such an important issue. You know, it's just and I love this this angle on it. And my one would be Taco because, you know, it's such a cool space. And there are so many tools now and no one's really figured out how to consolidate all these platforms. So we would love to dive into that product a bit more.

SPEAKER_362: Mike, which one do you think could get a million dollar seed round if you're going for an installer?

SPEAKER_364: So my two favorites to this cohort were Shouju and term payments. I think for me, the number one was term payments.

SPEAKER_365: I think she's identified a very, very interesting space that, frankly, I was not aware of. It's fascinating to dig into that deeper. And I think for us, you know, fintech is a big focus.

SPEAKER_366: Shouju is in the consumer space, which is also an area for us. So I think both of those would be the winners for the accelerator.

SPEAKER_314: Okay, which one is your number one? You said term payments? Yeah. Okay, and Molly, if you looked at these two, based on your tremendous knowledge of the technology industry and your growing knowledge of investing, which two?

SPEAKER_57: I have a feeling I know which one you like best, personally.

SPEAKER_200: I mean, I think you think I know, you know, but you don't.

SPEAKER_05: Number two for me is Chouju, actually, particular because you're in talks with a global insurance company. I think there's a huge opportunity there for businesses who are investing in wellness for lots of reasons. But number one for me is term payments. I do think that that identifies a real need. And also that Tracy did such a great job of exactly at the point when I was thinking, wait, do people really want this of saying people really want this? And here's why.

SPEAKER_00: Great. And then for me, I went again, not my personal feelings, but what I think would clear market with investors in the seed community.

SPEAKER_10: I think fix six would be number one, because it feels like a software platform doing computer visualization. It feels like it's technically sophisticated, which makes it defensible, hard to do, and that there'll be a growth market. They're kind of like you're skating to where the puck is. And I struggled with my number two. I think all four of them could have been number two. But there was something about gifting that I felt like the founder understood his market had a had a level of passion for this idea. And I'm not sure it's polished enough yet, but I could see it getting super polished and taking off in a metropolitan area where people might really value gifting and if it had very unique things. So that would be my number two. I could see it actually working. So great start. One of the interesting things here was you saw a different perspectives, right? And so that's one important thing for all founders to understand. You don't have to win over every investor.

SPEAKER_314: You need to win over one investor.

SPEAKER_372: Let's go to the next five companies. Charlie, great job so far. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_374: Graham, why don't you go ahead and share your screen and we'll jump into remote space. Ready? Go.

SPEAKER_376: All right. Hi, everybody. My name is Graham Caro, the co-founder and CEO of remote space, a shared space remote team to talk to whoever, whenever. How does it work? Meet Eva. She's a product manager at Apple. She works in a large organization, uses remote space to remove barriers between cross-functional teams. Today, she has a question for Stella, a software engineer running a sprint. So she joins remote space to ask them. First, Eva accesses the spaces within our network and specifically the product space. She discovers that Stella is unavailable and she sees Ken and Erica talking already. So she decides to talk to Zane instead. Eva joins the space and drags her avatar over to Zane to start a conversation. Separate from others in the space and without ever needing to send a calendar invite. She learns from Zane that Sam in marketing really needs her help and asks her to join the marketing space. Eva says, sure. Eva accesses the marketing space, joins the space, then moves her avatar over to Sam and solves their problem. Remote space removes barriers for Eva's team and saves valuable time when working on their next product release. The business model is freemium SaaS. It starts free for networks up to 10. Paid starts at $10 per user per month, and it gets cheaper as the networks get larger. Traction bottom up customer pipeline is 121 email signups to date with the logos on the right hand side. No paid customers yet. There are four main competitors in the space for remote spaces uniquely positioned to be professional for enterprise, simple and efficient without distraction. Free step onboarding and quick navigation to other spaces. Our go to market is organic network effects, peer engagement, and paid advertising. Our five year vision is to be the global leader in remote work engagement. And our journey to 100 million ARR is 125,000 paying customers to get to 10 million, and a million and a quarter gets 100 million. This is our team. I'm the CEO, three-time founder, six years experience in consulting, product and design. Routan Schervetius is CTO, two-time founder, five years experience in software engineering. That is remote space, a shared space for remote teams to talk to whoever, whenever. Thank you.

SPEAKER_384: Thanks, Graham. We'll move right on to Andrew.

SPEAKER_386: Hi, I'm Andrew, founder of Savvy Team, the platform that helps you create career paths and upskilling opportunities for your employees. Meet Ran. She's head of engagement marketing at Airbnb, and she aspires to become a global head of engagement marketing. She's managed by Brian. Brian has a one-on-one with Ran and then creates a career path for her. In this case, we're going to edit the one that he already started. It's a typical job description, which allows him to put the required skills, competencies, and outcomes required for that position. And it has a recommendation engine in case he's not sure who to give this path to. Once she's given the path, Ran is able to designate that, her interest towards it for her dream role. From there, she's able to decide maybe she doesn't want to do that next. She wants to make her next path the national head of engagement marketing, which gives her time to pick up special projects so that she can do a few things. One, prove that she has certain skills. Two, upskill herself so she can be ready for that position. And three, give her and Brian conviction through updates on her progress. We charge $50 a month currently after a five-seat trial, but we're planning on quickly switching over to a per-user per-month subscription. We've already onboarded three companies and they're currently creating ladders for their employees. We have four companies in the queue and a handful of larger companies that we're working through on the pipeline. Two of our companies switched from our biggest competitor, Lattice Grow. The major difference that our customers are seeing is that between us and Lattice Grow is that we actually focus on the person, the employee first, and let the employees take control of their own destiny and their careers. We currently are doing cold outreach right now through email and LinkedIn, but I plan on switching over to leaning more into my growth background and trying a lot more different tactics. I'm currently a solo founder. I'm in on deck looking for a co-founder. I founded a company called Someone New, which is in a similar space, and I've led growth for companies like Job Today and Warmly. The major thing that's next for us is we're going to start with peer mentorship to help match employees for upscaling and career development, reducing friction so that managers can create paths easier, and going after enterprise customers because they feel this pain the most. We're Savvy Team, the platform that helps you with career paths and upscaling opportunities for employees. Thank you.

SPEAKER_330: Excellent. Thank you, Andrew. Great job. Monica, you're up next. Ready? Go.

SPEAKER_392: Great. Hi, I'm Monica with Ga'an, which helps travelers, which helps people to travel more lightly and sustainably by providing locally sourced clothing for rent at the traveler's destination. We currently have beta testers in the Bay Area, and our first trial customers were Becky and Bill, who are semi-retired musicians and Airbnb hosts. So with Becky and Bill, we collected their information, their sizing, their preferences, and about five days before they landed in the Bay Area, we presented them with some options for their nine-day stay. Becky and Bill really enjoyed the service of Ga'an, and they shared this picture of some suitcases. They were very happy not to be schlepping themselves. Ga'an is a marketplace where we will take care of logistics and cleaning and hold some limited inventory for basic capsule clothing and also sign up boutiques, department stores, brands, and peer-to-peer creators who might have some really unique pieces in their personal collection. We are taking some waitlist customers, and not all of them currently are traveling to the Bay Area quite yet, and we have one who's upcoming in March. There's of course Rent the Runway and a couple of smaller companies that are designed for travelers, travelers specifically, but none of them source at the local destination. They ship from their headquarters and also currently offer only women's clothing. Our go-to-market plan is to go city by city and actually drill down airport by airport, and here's a quick snapshot of what an opportunity at SFO might look like. This is our plan to hopefully crawl, walk, and run to $100 million in annual revenue, which requires about 2,600 daily deliveries. And here I am and have some co-founders that I am currently recruiting, almost founder official, not quite yet.

SPEAKER_387: Awesome. Thank you so much, Monica. Great job. And Scott, ready? Go.

SPEAKER_397: Hey there. I'm Scott, founder of TimeWell, the legacy platform to capture family memories with their voice. You can upload photos or ask a question, then record your loved one's thoughts in their own voice. So meet Jenna. She has a lot of great memories with her dad. And as he ages, Jenna wants him to capture his stories. But the places they store photos don't make this easy. So she chose TimeWell because it's super simple and will save stories in his voice. And Jenna now has a single place to save answers to questions and stories behind photos. It helps her whole family get to know him better. And TimeWell is a B2C SaaS with three subscription plans and a flexible one-time payment plan, all starting with a 14-day free trial. I launched on January 10th of this year with over 50 people on the early access list. And I have 15 active users with forward paid accounts. And the consistent feedback is that it's really easy, even for Richard, who is 90 years old. And there are a number of strong legacy platforms already focused on capturing loved ones' stories. But my ultimate goal is to make it ridiculously easy for people like Jenna to record her dad's voice. And I'm targeting others like Jenna and her dad. They believe memories are worth saving. And I'm focusing on making collaboration sticky by showing value at a life event like a wedding. And the next two years will be focused on distribution and expanding my team. And the following years on expanding my platform. The market size is over $30 million. And I'm setting myself apart by focusing on life events and scanning businesses that will channel photos into the TimeWell platform. And the team is me. I have over 15 years experience in design, branding, and photography. And I'm obsessed with creating great product experiences. So thanks for looking at TimeWell where you can capture family memories with their voice.

SPEAKER_388: Excellent. Thanks, Scott. I've got two minutes for you, Regina. Ready?

SPEAKER_400: Go. Hi, I'm Regina, CEO of Inocuous AI. Our mission is to help companies productionize AI faster for less by providing a no-code DevOps-as-a-service platform for AI developers. Meet Joe. He's a data scientist. As a data scientist, Joe is great at building algorithms. But to build an AI product in the cloud, he has to read through tons of documentation and spend many months figuring out DevOps work. The solution is Inocuous AI, a cloud platform for AI developers wanting to keep a small AI team so it's more manageable, scalable, and affordable. It is easy to use even without going through lots of documentation. It makes it fast and easy to onboard new data scientists. When Joe uses this platform, he can focus on what he loves, which is creating algorithms. With Inocuous Book, Joe can now bring models to production rapidly without the need for a large DevOps team to support him. There are multiple revenue opportunities, and the main one is an upcharge on infrastructure spend. Others include storage fees and more. Each customer represents north of $370,000 in annual revenue. Unlike competitors that can only take in tabular data, Inocuous Book is more flexible as it can take in both structured and unstructured data. The no-code platform makes it effortless to use in comparison to competitors. Our first $10 million will be from well-funded, US-based startups building AI products. We scale to $100 million by expanding to larger enterprises incorporating AI into their products. The vision is to ultimately become the next AI-based cloud provider. Right now, we're in private beta with one customer on the free trial that has expressed an interest in a paid pilot. I'm a second-time co-founder with two successful exits and over 20 years' business experience. My co-founder has over 10 years' AI experience and is a thought leader in the data science community. We are Inocuous AI. We help companies improve the time to value for their AI investments with our no-code DevOps-as-a-service platform for AI developers like Joe.

SPEAKER_330: Excellent. Thanks, Regina. Then stop sharing your screen. There's our group of five for you, Jason.

SPEAKER_10: Okay, well done. We had remote workspace, an old-school palace-like 2D chat space for business. We had Inocuous AI, which we just heard from, a no-code DevOps platform for AI. We had Savvy Team, a SaaS platform that gives people a career path, improve your skills, up-skill yourself. And then we had Gan, which is to rent local clothes when traveling to a location. You travel lighter because clothes are waiting for you.

SPEAKER_314: And then, finally, Company 10, the fifth in this cohort, TimeWell. Capture family memories by adding voice to pictures.

SPEAKER_10: Let's go in reverse order. Molly, did you have a favorite two that you think could clear market and raise that million-dollar round after going through an accelerator? The lens in which we're looking through it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I just want three. I know. That's why it's two. Wow.

SPEAKER_02: You can give a honorable mention. All right.

SPEAKER_05: You can give three honorable mentions. Honorable mention to Gan, because I especially like the hyperlocal part of local clothes rental. My number two is Savvy Team. I think there is such a use for tracking that specific. You don't have to rely on just people and their feelings about you. You literally have milestones on the back end. That's outstanding. And then number one, so glad that Regina recovered. It's innocuous AI for me. That is incredibly complicated, and I hope you can actually pull that off. But if you can, people are going to pay a lot for that.

SPEAKER_411: Okay. Mikey, I think you went next.

SPEAKER_413: My two had a common theme.

SPEAKER_365: I thought both RemoteSpace and TimeWell had really great design. I think both products visually looked really interesting. And that stuck out for me. But my number one was TimeWell. I just think the market's bigger. I would be a little concerned on RemoteSpace competing with the slacks and the teams of the world. So TimeWell is the number one. And RemoteSpace, number two.

SPEAKER_416: Great. Jackie.

SPEAKER_355: Yeah, this is tough. My honorable mention would be Innocuous, which I think looks really cool. I didn't quite understand what the product was. So I'd want to dig into that. But it looks like it's very cool. And then my two, I'm actually going to mic here. Same RemoteSpace for me was two and TimeWell was one. Great.

SPEAKER_10: For me, this was a really interesting group. Some very creative ideas. I'll give an honorable mention to Gan, which I found fascinating and scary and creative.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Like I'm going to show up somewhere and I'll have no clothes with me. And then maybe I'll have clothes, but it'll be sustainable. Maybe I take some back. I buy them. Anyway, there's something there.

SPEAKER_10: And it just, you could tell everybody's attention was like, huh, something interesting there. But my number two, uh, was savvy team. It does seem like they understand the space and, uh, you know, enterprise is like planting seeds in a farm, you know? And then like, you know, building consumer products is like finding a needle in a haystack. It's like really much harder. Um, or finding a truffle maybe would be a really good analogy. So like you could be a truffle under, not easy, or you could like plant seeds and build enterprise software. So that's my number two. My number one, I was absolutely taken and inspired by time. Well, because I just thought, why isn't there an audio feature built into all photos where you could give an audio caption? Uh, so I think there's a chance to make a standard here. I think there's a chance to make a new media format. I thought, you know, people on TikTok are doing kind of reaction videos. So maybe you could actually have grandma's camera on, let her talk in about the photo and who's in it and what happened that day in 1972. And then, uh, save it for all time. So I love this archive, this kind of thing, uh, or maybe saving it for your kids. Hey, we went skiing this day. I'm going to give this to you on your 21st birthday when I took you skiing when you were five years old. That's immediately what I thought of was like taking some of these photos and putting my memories on it now. And then time bombing it to my kids in, uh, five years. So just wonderful ideas. So time was my one savvy teams. My two cannot wait, uh, to spend more time with each of you. We'll be in touch and get to know our team members. And, uh, entrepreneurship is really hard, but as you can see, it gets a lot easier when you got a tribe and you got a group of people you can do it with. So keep building that tribe and, uh, keep, uh, helping each other.

SPEAKER_314: You know, you all get there together. Nobody gets there alone and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.