SPEAKER_00: Okay, we have an amazing show for you today. First up, I interview Fahd Ananta for Angel Season 6. He runs Roach Ventures. Get it? Cockroach Ventures, founders with grit who will never give up. And he shares some really honest insights about raising your first venture fund. He did 25 angel investments, and then he raised, you know, somewhere around a $5 million fund, and he's in the midst of deploying it. Lots of lessons there. And it's Friday. So producer Rachel. Rachel Reporting is back with another edition of OK Boomer, and she

SPEAKER_02: understood the assignment. Stick with us. It's going to be a great show.

SPEAKER_03: Season 6 of Angel is brought to you by OurCrowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies

SPEAKER_04: 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 angel. Embroker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code TWIST. And LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash angelpod.

SPEAKER_06: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 6 of Angel Season 6. This is the series we do as an extension

SPEAKER_07: of This Week in Startups where we talk to capital allocators, a fancy word for angel investors, seed funds, and venture funds, even syndicates and accelerators could be considered part of capital allocation. What do capital allocators do? They pull together some pool of capital and they look for opportunities to invest it in high growth companies. In the venture space, private company space, we're looking for very high growth companies because most startups fail. You can look at them as experiments. That doesn't mean the founders are failures. It just means that experiment failed and they move on to the next experiment. Typically, we see founders on their second, third, fourth one. They can get on base or even hit a home

SPEAKER_08: run. And so it's very exciting to be a capital allocator. And one of the most exciting things over the past decade, and I'm in my 11th year now of investing, is that investing in startups and creating funds has been massively democratized. We're seeing many, many, many more people start their own funds, start their own syndicates where groups of people get together and invest. And we're seeing a ton of diversity, people from different backgrounds, different regions, genders, ethnicities. It's absolutely fantastic to see this kind of massive change. And it's been great in doing this series, the five interviews we've recorded already, Mac Conwell, Mac the VC from Rare Breed, David Rosenthal from Kindergarten, Paki McCormick from Not Boring, Paige Van Daugherty from Behind Genius Ventures, and she's like 23 years old, Monique Woodward, a good friend of mine who was at 500 Startups, which is now called 500 Global and Incubator here in Silicon Valley, and she has Cake Ventures.

SPEAKER_07: So we've been having this incredible parade of capital allocators. Some of them are on their first fund

SPEAKER_08: and did venture before. Other ones, it's their first time in venture and their first fund. Really amazing when I came into the industry 20, 30 years ago. If you wanted to join a venture fund, man, you had to be out of Harvard and, you know, and get your MBA out of HBS, Harvard Business School, or Stanford,

SPEAKER_07: GBS, Graduate Business School, maybe Wharton. And it was kind of an insider's game. You know, your fraternity brother basically got you the job or your dad or a cousin or something. Now, completely democratized and everybody's figuring it out. Today will be no different. In my little pre-interview with today's guest, he said, I'm figuring it out. And I said, you know what? Me too, and decade too. It's not an easy job. So Fahd Ananta, please tell me I got your name perfect. Thank the Lord. You know, it's very weird. They have, sometimes there'll be a name that's incredibly challenging to pronounce and I nail it. And then other times it's incredibly simple and my producers are just beside themselves. And Fahd is, and it's spelled F-A-H-D, if you're wondering, is a general partner at Roach Capital. You heard that correct, as in cockroach. And I'm guessing you named your fund after the phenomenon of the cockroach entrepreneur, which is the entrepreneur who will never be killed and never give up, correct?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, I think there's some hidden alpha in, you know, resilient, gritty founders.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And so you were a former founder yourself. You did a SaaS company, you sold it to a HubSpot. When did you first become aware of angel investing and start doing some angel investing? And then we'll get on to when you decided to move from an angel investor to a fund.

SPEAKER_20: We sold the company to HubSpot, I think in 2012 or so.

SPEAKER_22: Oh, okay. And then since then, I've kind of been a product manager. I worked at Shopify and so forth. And I, you know, one of the categories, and I'm based in Canada, I'm based in Toronto, Canada. I started to notice as I saw more and more founders here, there weren't a ton of great accessible angel investors or venture capitalists. I think a lot of the VCs here typically come from different

SPEAKER_23: industries, not necessarily from tech. And so as I started to see it, and I had a bit of liquidity

SPEAKER_07: myself, you mean strategic investors, like it's part of some big company has a little venture arm

SPEAKER_25: on the side and they're invested, or it might be like an oil and gas family or like a real estate

SPEAKER_22: family that sees the asset class. But they're not, you know, I don't think they're as like sophisticated as like understanding, you know, how to build a software company. And so as I start to kind of see that type of archetype more and more and more, I saw really compelling companies. And I just decided to write small checks. And I'd saved up a little bit, I was working at Shopify. And so I started to, I think the first time I wrote a check, I didn't know how to write a check. I didn't know like what, like, do you just like ask them like, hey, can I invest in your company? Or do they ask you or what that looks like? And so I just kind of just said like, hey, you know, I'd really like to invest in the company. And how much can I write, etc. And then I wrote a few checks that way. That started in 2016. And then over the last four years before I raised the fund, invest in 25 companies myself, and then went on to raise the fund.

SPEAKER_07: And when you make those angel investments, you're doing 1025 50k of your own capital, something like that.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. So initially, I started with 25k USD, which is as a Canadian, it's a lot of money.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. And, and I started to size it down a bit more. So I could have a like a bigger basket of companies. And as I start to learn a bit more, I learned about my investment type, what things I like in certain companies, what things I don't. And at some point, I started to learn about like the asset class, and think of it as asset class. To be very honest, I think when I started, I thought it was cool. I thought it was a good way to pay it forward. And I thought it was,

SPEAKER_20: you know, effectively, you know, tuition on in a different industry, with the call option at the end. So like it, you know, it might work out, and you might get rewarded. But either way, I get to learn a bunch about a specific domain that I'm interested in.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, if you think about getting an MBA cost a quarter million dollars to go to those schools that I mentioned. And if you were to angel invest 10k in 25 companies, I think arguably, you'd learn as much or more than getting your MBA just hanging out with those 25 founders. And you make these, you know, approximately 25 angel investments, at some point, you know, two or three years in, did you have any winners or start to become confident in this? Or were you feeling like some people do in the J curve, people can look that up. But basically, in years two or three, your, your investments, it's unclear how you're going to do because some of your early investments will shut down. And so you're in the negative zone. So tell me what was it like in years two, three, and four

SPEAKER_20: for you after making these bets? I think I actually got incredibly lucky that some of the first few

SPEAKER_22: companies invested in perform really, really well. And maybe because I wasn't trying to be an angel investor, I tried to meet good founders that are, you know, local in Toronto. And some of them, I

SPEAKER_20: even tried to hire Shopify, and they're like, No, I'm working on this thing, get to learn about their business as like, Can I write 10k? Can I write 25k? So I think the first like two or three companies have, you know, effectively returned my return and more my entire capital. Some of them are some of them are like, there's at least one unicorn, like I think, off the top of my head. They raised the series C last year. So they're performable. And then I think once I started to feel too comfortable, that's when I started thinking about like, you know, a little bit more formal, a little bit more,

SPEAKER_22: hey, I should get like access to this type of investment because it's cool. And then I think those types of investments are still TBD and figuring itself out.

SPEAKER_07: You know, that is a lot of the journey of being an investor is I think if you get lucky on the first couple of investments, you all of a sudden conflate, like, Oh, maybe I'm good at this. And then it gives you motivation to do it more. And if you get more focused on it, and you're super positive, well, you can get this very positive feedback mechanism going where you meet more founders,

SPEAKER_44: and you work harder at your job and your luck increases. And I think that's possibly what could

SPEAKER_47: have happened to you, huh? Yeah, I think a lot of it was probably just thinking that that exact

SPEAKER_22: same direction. You know, one thing I tried to do was be trying to add this like view of like, at the same time, you know, I'm working as a product manager. So I tried to help out these founders with a bit more product strategy. Once I learned that, you know, maybe I'm getting a bit too excited about my own luck. I want to learn a bit deeper with these companies that work closer

SPEAKER_20: with them by helping them with their product strategy, get to like know how the founders work, etc. And that gives you a bit more conviction in when I make the investment.

SPEAKER_07: Okay, so you get the angel investor resume dialed in, and you got some wins under your belt, perfect setup to start a fund. So when did you decide, hey, instead of just taking my own capital and recycling it, and you know, hey, one of these unicorns pays off 50 to one or 100 to one, you can now make another 50 or 100 investments and keep that, you know, momentum going, when did you make the decision, I want to invest some other people's money and start a fund?

SPEAKER_20: Yes, I would say, just to caveat all this, but there's a lot of like serendipity and luck involved. Sure. You know, I happen to work at Shopify during the time the company was in the hyper growth. A lot of my friends ended up becoming people who would be LPs in funds, because they themselves got,

SPEAKER_22: you know, fairly rich and have liquidity. And so I happened to be, I guess one of the first PMs that

SPEAKER_20: left and, you know, I guess started taking angel investing a bit more seriously. And as I started to do that, I started to kind of like think about how do I build a brand here in Canada? How do I kind of think of myself as I kind of like doing this full time? And a lot of my other peers would come to me as like, how do I do this? How do I learn my angel investing and so forth? And I've learned from other mentors at Shopify as well, other mentors in the community. And, you know, once that started to happen,

SPEAKER_22: some of them are like, Hey, do you want to manage my capital for me? Do you want to take a little bit of capital here and there that started to kind of put it in my head, I was always, you know, I was always pretty hesitant because I had a view on these, like, you know, early stage funds where, you know, I thought, I guess like in the long run, you know, there's a lot of responsibility involved in like running these funds. And from what I saw from a few funds that I've seen personally, I think a lot

SPEAKER_20: of capital gets deployed early on into, I guess, like hot trending companies. And then a lot of times,

SPEAKER_22: like the, you know, GPs will go on and go get a job at a larger fund. And then the LPs are kind of like in this like limbo state. So I didn't want to do that at all. So I wanted to kind of think about it myself, like, do I want to do this long term? You know, will I do fund one, fund two, fund three, if I have the right track record? And once I knew that myself, and I started to learn more and

SPEAKER_20: more, I spent about a year actually learning closely with a bunch of other funds from early stage to late stage to crossover funds, some hedge funds, and some real estate funds. And I started bringing some lessons back to like early stage investing. And then I started kind of like, I guess, exercising the relationships I've built with some of those larger funds, with some of the people that met at

SPEAKER_22: Shopify, and started to kind of formalize this idea of like, hey, maybe I want to start a very, very small find. And you know, set the initial target around 3 million and then raising around

SPEAKER_54: five to kind of take that thesis to the next level. It's time for another our crowd deal of

SPEAKER_56: the week. Right now you can join our crowds investment in future family. According to the

SPEAKER_59: deal memo future family provides millions of families with access to affordable treatment through buy now pay later financing or BNPL if you're in the industry, and they power 15% of the fertility clinics in the US and last year they grew patients served by 300% according to the deal memo. And you can invest right now in future family at our crowd.com slash angel. All around the world, companies like future family are innovating and driving returns for investors. Our crowd analyzes many of these companies, then they select the ones with the greatest growth potential and they bring them to you from personalized medicine to health tech, which is tackling the $60 billion global IVF and fertility treatment market in state of the art labs, startup garages and anywhere in between. Our crowd identifies innovators. So you can invest when growth potential is greatest and that's early. So here's your call to action. If you're an accredited investor, you can join our crowd for free at O U R C R O W D.com slash angel and review the current deals. That's our crowd.com slash angel to sign up for free. So when we look at your journey, you build product, you sell it to a big company, you become a

SPEAKER_07: product manager, a surging company, and everybody around you starts to do well. And you have access to companies and maybe there's not that many people investing in Toronto. So you've got this, you know, great wide open space to operate in. You make 25 bets. Hey, you hit a couple. And now the momentum's building and the people around you are saying, Hey, you know what, I would love you to manage some of my money. So you decide you're going to pop up this, you know, three, four or $5 million fund.

SPEAKER_08: And, uh, tell me about the moment when you closed your first check. Do you remember where you are? Do you remember who it was? The first commitment is always for your fund. It was actually, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_22: funny enough, I got this email one day. So, you know, I think there was a feature on like Shopify angels. So again, this is what I mean by the serendipity part. Um, there's a feature on the people that are like leaving Shopify, what the Shopify mafia looks like and what they're doing. And, uh, they happened to feature me. Um, and then, so this, uh, one of the partners at tiger global happened to read. And, uh, so then a few days later, I got this email in my inbox, like

SPEAKER_20: tiger global intro. And, um, I thought it was spam click on it. Uh, it's one of the partners there. And we, we started going back and forth, started building a relationship, share some notes about a few companies they were looking at. And from there, um, I think over the course of probably

SPEAKER_22: about two months, uh, you know, we both figured out that we probably want to figure out a way to work together. Um, and then I, I kind of went on a limb and said like, Hey, I want to raise a fine. Um, this is kind of where I'm at. And, uh, you know, they kind of like did their own reference checks. Uh, they ran their own little process. Um, and they came back to me and was like, you know, myself and a few other partners, uh, want to be the largest LPs in your find. Um, so that was my first check. I was, you know, I was, I was at home. Uh, you know, they gave me a call. They did a few reference checks and they're like, cool. We're in for, uh, yeah, this, this amount, um, will be the anchors in the fund. Um, and then from there, I got a lot of confidence. Um, you know, kind of being this like no name, effectively no name angel in Canada. Um,

SPEAKER_63: so having one of the largest, um, you know, institutional funds in the world, um, you know, kind of finding that confidence in me. You were anointed, um, of, you know,

SPEAKER_07: it's interesting, your story, similar thing happened to me. Sequoia said, Hey, you know, you, you've introduced us to so many great founders. Would you like to be a scout for us?

SPEAKER_44: Um, and that was the first scout program ever created, you know, just over 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_07: And so you, you call it luck. Um, I call it action. I call it energy. Um, I call it, you know, some people might say hustle. I just think it's like when, when you're of action, when you're in the mix, when you're doing things in the world, people get attracted to you and then opportunities come to you that you might not have ever anticipated. So one interpretation could be luck. My interpretation of what's happening to you is you're doing so much good action in the world that it's attracting, uh, people who do good things in the world to you. Tiger's not looking to give you a handout or a donation. Uh, they looking at you saying he's going to find something that becomes a unicorn again in Canada. And if we're LPs, we got some early signal. That's, that's their intent,

SPEAKER_00: right? When a big fund like that backs a tiny fund. Yeah, of course. And just to kind of comment on that,

SPEAKER_22: um, you know, uh, I think a lot of it is like planting these seeds. So I spent, you know, 2019, I left Shopify and I spent, um, I was pretty lonely because I have no core workers. So I spent a lot

SPEAKER_20: of time on Twitter. And so every time I had like a thought in my mind, whether it's wrong, like product, uh, strategy or investing, I'd share it and started to build an audience there. Um, and then from there, I started to meet with a lot of different funds and planting these seeds of like, you know, how do you think about investing? How do you think about building conviction? Um, and then, you know, once you develop these relationships, um, then I think that I can, um, you know, go back to them

SPEAKER_63: when I'm thinking about raising a fund myself and, uh, and a lot of them ended up becoming a piece of

SPEAKER_07: my fine, um, you know, down the road. And I, you know, this is another theme that keeps coming up, uh, Mac as well. Um, and other folks, Hey, if you're good at Twitter, all the VCs and investors and founders are hanging out there, you following me, me following you, us talking to another, talking to Packy, talking to Mac, talking to Monique, everybody's kind of at the same cocktail party. It's called Twitter. And if you get good at Twitter, uh, you're going to make friends. And if you can write intelligent observations and maybe even a tweet storm or, you know, heck, even do a podcast, you might build your brand up a bit. So how are you thinking about brand building today? Uh, and building up your brand. So instead of you chasing deals, Hey, maybe some

SPEAKER_32: deals are chasing you. Yeah. So for me, um, you know, but I think I saw this like Justin

SPEAKER_22: Kahn video a while back and he basically, I think it was just con and he basically said like three things. So like, you know, um, as an angel, there's like, as a fund, there's three things you can offer, which is, uh, um, a capital. I don't have a ton of capital. Um, you know, any other large firm will have more, uh, brand. Um, you know, I'm, I'm one guy running Roach capital. I'm not interested in or benchmark. And then, um, you know, the other thing is time. And that's probably the one area where I could probably compete. And so for me, it's like, if I can start offering, um, you know, good product strategy, um, sessions with a lot of these founders I've made for, for just goodwill, that starts to build a reputation, um, with a lot of these founders, they might be like, and then a bunch of deals that I've invested in now have been like, Hey, like, let's, let's talk to thought about how we want to build our product team, how we want to hire our first PM, um, how we want to think about product strategy or growth. And so that's been like one angle of alpha. And the other area is like, I've been trying to play up until like, up until this fund into the area where I have, um, less competition. And so in Canada, um, you know, I find that there's not a ton of people, or at least when I started, there wasn't a ton of people at like the early stage to an angel investing, building a brand, working at, um, you know, like, like one of the biggest companies in the country. Um, I think that goes a long way. And then the last thing is, um, I never wanted to,

SPEAKER_20: you know, pretend to be a VC. I want to be myself. And I think, uh, that, that goes a long way. I've seen the same in your work. I've been a big fan of your work, Jason. Um, so I've seen a lot of that.

SPEAKER_22: And, and, uh, I think that comes across much more natural. It's just like, Hey, I'm just a dude. I've done some work. I have some money and, uh, you know, maybe we can get along those cool stuff

SPEAKER_07: together. I mean, authenticity and keeping it simple essentialism, right? Like is, a key part of, I think being successful in life, you know, venture capital aside and capital allocation aside, but in capital allocation, you know, you don't have to overthink this. And I think a lot of people do, you have to meet a lot of companies. You have to place a bet on some of them, and then you gotta be as helpful as possible to those companies. And if you just do that consistently, uh, you don't need to hit a ton of winners. In fact, you need hit only one and maybe one per fund or maybe one, every couple of funds, you know, that's a super outlier to build a career. And, uh, it seems like you're well on your way. So you raised this 5 million or so, uh, just over 3 million or somewhere between three and five.

SPEAKER_76: About 5 million.

SPEAKER_07: About 5 million. Congrats. Perfect size. Uh, solo GP. There's not a lot of fees off of that, but it looks like you did. Okay. And you, you sold your company.

SPEAKER_22: I think what I wanted to do just to kind of comment on that bit. Um, I want to align myself with the LPs as well, because I think a lot of these LPs are taking a bet on me and I want to build for the longterm. Um, and, uh, and I have like a little bit of cushion myself to like kind of make it work and better myself. So I set it at a 0% manager fee and only carry. Um, because I think

SPEAKER_80: if I build a successful fund here, the manager fee will not matter. And if I don't, then also won't

SPEAKER_07: matter. Yeah. I didn't do one on my first fund. I kind of regretted it only because I could have had a couple of support staff, uh, like maybe one or two. Uh, and, uh, that would help me service founders and LPs better. So, uh, my best advice to you on the next one is they want you to take those, uh, fees because you're going to pay them back anyway, and it may help you build a little more infrastructure. And you know, when they call, you can respond quicker or if you need to do reports, the reports can be better. Yeah, totally. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial

SPEAKER_59: type of insurance that all startups need. Just one E and O insurance. This covers errors and omissions, and it helps you scale your business because any major customer that you have is going to ask you, do you have, you know, show it to me, let's close this deal. And listen, if you don't have business insurance, you failed one of the first steps of being a founder and startups should look no further than in broker. When they're looking to get their insurance dialed in in brokers, technology saves you time and money. Prices are up 20% lower, better coverage than incumbents. You can go from signup to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. It's easy breezy. And when you work with in broker, instead of the incumbents, you're not dealing with large, slow corporations up. Nope. Signup takes days, not weeks. And the process is completely transparent. There's no opaque pricing. Here's a really easy call to action to instantly buy custom built insurance for startups. Just go to in broker.com slash twist. And while you're there, you can get an extra 10% off by using the promo code twist TWIST. Thanks and broker for sponsoring everything we do here at this week in

SPEAKER_07: startups and providing insurance to many of my startups really appreciate it. So take me through, uh, do you have a specific thesis on verticals stage or type of founders? We obviously know on a geo basis, you're, you're, you're, you're it in Toronto and people are looking for that early stage check. It's a great place to go, but putting geography aside, how do you think about your zone of excellence?

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. So I, um, tend to be a bit more broad now, or at least I thought some of my thesis like fairly broad. Um, it's like early stage companies for the most part, um, and, uh, building internet businesses that are high growth, um, and, uh, you know, pretty open to geo like trial. Yes. I think I have like a great center of gravity here, but kind of across North America and, and, uh, anywhere else really. Um, and then the other thing I look at is, um, yeah, the namesake of the fund. I want to find people that are really, really gritty and these like roach founders. And, uh, you know, that, that term, I kind of picked up a bunch from like the Paul Graham essays, like hearing about the Airbnb founders. Um, and I think that actually goes a very, very long way. And, um, there's a lot of founders that are actually like super greedy and can build a business in the longterm that are maybe discounted

SPEAKER_63: today. And I think that's where I kind of want to find, um, a lot of that value.

SPEAKER_93: Yeah. I think that's a great, uh, thesis to have. If you're looking for, I always talk about

SPEAKER_07: resiliency and grit and, you know, most startups fail, not because they run out of money or they didn't get to product market fit. It's because the founders gave up. That's the number one reason. Founders sometimes will work for a year with no salary and they pull a rabbit out of a hat and, you know, optimizing around grit is a really brilliant thesis. Uh, I've refined mine over the years, uh, to be focusing on people who build. So we back builders is my new credo because all of the success we've had has been around that. Right. But I think it's important also for you to figure out who do you like to work with? I get the sense that you are the cockroach founder. You are in fact, the gritty one. And I think you probably might be annoyed to work with somebody who's

SPEAKER_97: incredibly entitled. Am I correct? Yeah, I think, um, I, there's actually this fascinating essay

SPEAKER_22: that, uh, home, um, uh, the founder of also also ventures, um, he was called, uh, foxes and hedgehogs. And, um, you know, I think the, the, you know, the TLDR of it is that there's a lot of people that are foxes that are actually really, really good at fundraising. And then there's people that are hedgehogs who are actually like, not that good at fundraising. They're not that presentable, but they're just like kind of in the corner tucked away, like doing their work. Yeah. And I think that's the type of people that I want to try and work closer with. Um, that's the type of people

SPEAKER_100: I want to continue to like invest in and, and, and build with. Yeah. They don't have the big fluffy

SPEAKER_07: tail and they're, they're not a peacocking out there, but they're getting, uh, stuff done. Hey, when you look at your, um, uh, portfolio and I have it up here, maybe tell me about, uh, which company out of all of these has had the most markups valuation increase for you since you invested in

SPEAKER_22: them. Yeah. So, um, actually it's one of the first investments I made of this one is this company called Vin, uh, they're based in Victoria, BC. They're basically building a, uh, online car marketplace. Um, they work directly with the dealerships and then over time, um, you know, they, they become one of the largest sources of referrals to these dealerships. Um, they kind of have a concierge experience for the, for the car buyers. Um, and then, uh, you know, there's kind of repeat their playbook for city over city. And they're looking at expanding more into some of the services, uh, beyond just buying the car. So things like warranty, insurance delivery, Vin auto, Vin auto. Yeah. So I, I met the founder through, um, another friend, uh, pretty much on that exact same premise, which is like, I think they're think they were thinking about some product strategy, like how to scale the product team, um, how to think about their product in a more, uh, concise way and how to, how to position their, their business. Um, so I met the founder, I spent more time with their, but their co-founder was the head of product. Um, and over time, you know, we built a relationship. I actually ended up building more conviction in the business because we got to see how they work, how they think. And, uh, you know, I discovered that they are indeed roaches. Um, and we built a good relationship together. So when they're raising capital, it just happened to line up with, um, when I have just started, uh, raising the fund. And so they ended up being the first investment on the fund. Um, you know, I invested 200,000 in that company, um, out of the fund, which is, uh, one of

SPEAKER_20: the largest checks. And, um, and then, you know, Caleb was the CEO. He came to dinner and Toronto, um, you know, we kind of got to meet with a bunch of other investors. Uh, you know, they're,

SPEAKER_22: they've had some markup since, um, since that point. Congratulations on that. And then when you

SPEAKER_07: look at all these ideas, which one do you think was the not, which one is the non most non consensus? In other words, other investors didn't get it, but you thought, Hmm, this has a long chance is long odds for this one. It's going to be challenging company and challenging product to build a challenging vision. But if it does succeed, oh my could change the world. Do you have one of those in the portfolio?

SPEAKER_112: Yeah. That comes to mind. I don't know if they changed the world specifically,

SPEAKER_22: but I think it changed the industry. Um, so this is, so there's this company called base station.

SPEAKER_20: And, um, it says founder that I met again, like he used to work for this company called GFL. Uh, they're like waste management company. Um, I think they're based in Canada and, um, he left,

SPEAKER_22: uh, he, he was like working on their core deaf team. And he basically started seeing all these, like SMB, um, holders, like these recycling and like garbage haulers. And, uh, he realized that

SPEAKER_20: a lot of their operations are run on Excel and paper. And so he just wanted to build this like back office management software for these, like, like, like SMB, like garbage and recycling haulers. And, uh, you know, he started to build that. He learned how to code. He, he built the first

SPEAKER_22: version of himself. He did direct sales and grew the company to 50K, um, ARR. And then, uh, then went on to, to raise the capital. And I think that's the type of business where, um, I think it's like tremendously undervalued. It could be kind of like positioned across from like one industry, like not just, you know, kind of, um, you know, recycling and waste management, um, maybe to like

SPEAKER_20: pest control and some of these like other, other businesses. Um, and I don't think they have a ton of competition in that market. So I think one of the non-consensus things there is I think a lot of

SPEAKER_22: investors will kind of see that market as like really small or like kind of price sensitive,

SPEAKER_114: but there's a lot of adjacent markets where the exact same product can, can map onto

SPEAKER_07: Fantastic. And so looking at this, uh, deployment, when do you think you'll be finished deploying the capital and, you know, uh, raising the next fund? What's the next challenge and adventure for you?

SPEAKER_22: I think for me, the most important thing is to build a hall of fame find out of this first one. Like I want to build like a three to 20 X here. Um, you know, I think, I think everyone does. Um, so, so hopefully we, we, we, we get there. Um, I don't want to rush any deployment. Um, I mean, I've, I've also learned a bunch, like, you know, reading, um, stuff from, from people like you, uh, on Twitter, um, just around like, you know, vintages, um, you know, investing in like, you know, let's say you deploy your entire capital in a certain type of market, um, that, that may not work out really well for a fine. Um, and so for me, I want to kind of find good businesses. Um, ideally if we kind of continue on the same place, pace, uh, probably by the end of, um, this year or early next year. So about a year from now, um, I think we'll be in a position to deploy the fund.

SPEAKER_07: So two years to deploy the fund basically about two, two and a half years. Got it. So 30 months for 3 million, a hundred K a month, and you're going to do 30 companies,

SPEAKER_120: 40 companies as you're about 30, 30, 40 companies.

SPEAKER_07: Great. So a hundred K a company, you just got to find one company a month. Yes. To find one great investment. How many do you need to meet with on average?

SPEAKER_124: Um, I think sometimes it's a bit like sporadic, especially for someone who's like, um,

SPEAKER_22: building their brand. Um, and I think sometimes like I won't get a ton of deal flow and sometimes I'll get a lot of like in Mount deal flow. Um, I think on average, we'll probably talk to about like, I want to say like 30, 35 companies a month. Um, you know, some months it's, it's more, it's about like maybe, maybe 50, uh, it's actually going through some of these numbers last night. Um, and then I think one month I only got like 10 companies. Um, and from there, um, again, I think the deployments are also sometimes like, sometimes there's a month where I'll make like, you know, one, two, three investments. And sometimes it's like, you know, a month or two,

SPEAKER_07: where, where I don't make a single investment. Uh, well, listen, continued success here. Uh, congratulations on, uh, going from an angel and getting your first fund up and running. And, uh, we wish you luck if you find a great company and, uh, they're looking to do, uh, you know, a little syndicate, uh, you know, another 500 K check to 3 million email your, your new bestie. You got my email. You got my more following each other slide into my DMS and then let's do a deal. Let's go. It's great to have you and really continued success. It's, uh, you're off to a great start. I looked through all the companies and I didn't, I, all of them were very interesting to me and, and most of them are in Canada. Uh, I'd say maybe about like 30% of them. Oh, only 30%. Okay, great. Um, so yeah, just looking at them, I was like, Hmm, there's a Dow one, huh? That's interesting. Oh yeah. Backend for Dow. Is that like that too?

SPEAKER_139: Yeah. Really good stuff. Hey, Tom Eschbacher is here with us again. He's a senior sales manager at LinkedIn marketing solutions. And we're talking about their amazing report today in startup

SPEAKER_138: marketing, as well as how to use LinkedIn to grow your startup as an angel investor. I like to see revenue early and often from startups. How can LinkedIn help with that?

SPEAKER_143: Yeah. The short answer is LinkedIn lead gen forms. 89% of our startup advertisers utilize them. And I'll tell you why think about all the effort that goes into creating interest within a prospect. You have to nail the value proposition, create compelling content, find them, and then message them with enough frequency so that they engage. You do all that. You get them to your signup page and you know how many of them are going to convert just 2%. That's so much value that marketers are failing to capture. And it's a big reason why LinkedIn marketing and specifically LinkedIn lead

SPEAKER_139: gen forms are so popular with startups. So people know a lead gen form lives on LinkedIn. They click one time and boom, the email is sent to the company. By using LinkedIn lead gen forms, you're ensuring

SPEAKER_143: they're coming from an audience that you care about. And then we're pulling the information right from the members profile. So it's great. Your SDRs are going to be thrilled with that info. They're going to want to follow up. That's the improved lead quality. And as you say, Jason, it all takes place in just two taps

SPEAKER_147: in the LinkedIn newsfeed. So get $100 off your first ad campaign and get access to that LinkedIn report today in startup marketing. And I want you to get that right now at linkedin.com slash angel pod, a n g e l p o d slash angel pod. Okay, Rachel, it's time for you to shine in your weekly segment,

SPEAKER_00: where you talk to the next generation Gen Z millennials about the future. Who's on okay,

SPEAKER_149: boomer this week. So this week, I got to talk to john harrick. He is the founder and CTO of dive chat.

SPEAKER_151: I actually met john when I was at Miami Hack Week a few weeks ago, because I made a funny tweet about him. We were at a social gathering, and he had his laptop out at a party. And I thought it was really funny. So I videotaped him. And that is how we we met dive chat is a group messaging app for organizations that allows the users to also see events happening within the app. And during hackathon that that app is what we use to converse. And it was really cool just being able to see the events and not having to switch over between like a calendar app or a Facebook invite and group me. I used group me in college and invites always got lost, especially if you were in club or in Greek life where you have a bunch of events happening all the time. It's also really cool. My favorite feature is you get to react to like these messages as many times as you want with emojis. So you know how you can like heart a message and I'm in an I message, right, you can react as many times you want with whatever you want to chat. Yeah, so that's a big way to get Gen Z is really into

SPEAKER_153: your app is to just, you know, just take the throttle off the emojis. But what you're saying is,

David Friedberg: hey, this chat app, instead of you having to invite everybody, it's for that geolocation,

SPEAKER_157: or it's for that specific event. For that specific organization, I believe they're targeting Greek

SPEAKER_151: life organizations within colleges. But at hack, it was a great use. I've been seeing a lot of apps coming up at trying to basically annihilate the use of the Facebook invite, which I personally hate, because I don't use Facebook anymore. I don't know if that's ever happened to you. But you get a Facebook invite, and you end up missing the event or not knowing about it to like the day of because you don't check Facebook. Yeah, that's a problem. Right? And another app that I saw killing it in this space is Partyful. I know producer Justin has also checked out Partyful before. Their whole tagline is Facebook events for hot people. And I think that's really funny. So that's pretty

Chamath Palihapitiya: hilarious. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the problem with Facebook. I think if you think

SPEAKER_00: about on a product design basis, Rachel is they flooded us with notifications to get us to engage. And then we're like, this is too much. I got to turn off notifications. So if you play your notification hand too strong, people turn them off. And then for things that they would have actually responded to, like a wedding invite or a Greek invite or something, they basically ruin it because who wants to go into Facebook and just get annihilated with notifications? I mean, the notification anxiety I get when I open up that app is just like, oh, it's too much.

SPEAKER_151: I totally agree with you. I actually don't have any notifications on for any social media at all, because I find them all to be really annoying. Partyful definitely also goes against this. We were talking to the dive chat co-founder, but I'm plugging Partyful a lot here, but they use SMS, which is really smart because I never turn my text notifications off for my calls because what happens if your mom calls you, you know? Yeah. So that's a really cool way. And dive chat has the event feature and the messaging feature for groups. So I feel like a little bit more incentive because there's not any other noise in there. All right. Shout out Rachel's mom. She's doing a great job.

SPEAKER_07: All right. Clip this, send it to your mom. She's doing good. What is this? I don't know what month

SPEAKER_149: you're in now, Rachel, but started in July and it's February. I'm not as good as mental math as you.

SPEAKER_07: So whatever you're at your six months and Rachel's mom, dear Rachel's mom. She's a hard worker. You raised a good kid and she's got great potential. Nothing to worry about with this one. I don't know if you've got any siblings. I can't vouch for them, but I can vouch for this one. She's got a bright future in podcasting and reporting. Okay, let's go to OK Boomer. OK Boomer. I understood the assignment.

SPEAKER_173: Thank you everybody for listening to another segment of OK Boomer. This is Rachel reporting. And today, I have on John Herrick from Dive Chat. He is the founder and CTO and has his undergrad and master's degree in CS from UT Austin. Not to be confused with the alma mater of previous guest Ben Awad, who went to the University of Texas at Dallas. He made it very clear. He's like, I do not go to UT Austin. I go to Dallas. And previously before Dive Chat, you entered at some pretty cool places, including Microsoft and the company that made Pokemon Go. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_177: Yes, that is correct. And also, it's so funny you mentioned Ben, because literally right before

SPEAKER_178: this, I was on GitHub in one of his repositories working with one of his packages. So that's so

SPEAKER_182: funny. Oh, no way. Wait, that's so insane. That's so cool. So obviously, being a technical

SPEAKER_173: founder must have habits pros. Do you think that there are a ton of technical founders in the Gen Z

SPEAKER_178: community? There's definitely a lot, especially as I'm going to a lot of these in person networking events. I'm finding a lot of people who have very similar experience to me who are also Gen Z, really ambitious builders, and it's just really cool to see.

SPEAKER_182: That's so awesome. So I guess I'll give everybody else some context. I met John at Miami Hack Week. So that's how I know who is a technical founder. And I made a really funny tweet about him when we were at a social event, and he had his laptop out and it was really funny. But I actually knew about dive chat previous to coming because dive chat was what we were using a few days before going to Miami to where everybody was conversing and RSVPing to the different events.

SPEAKER_188: Can you talk about what is dive chat? And why do you decide to dive right into this?

SPEAKER_178: Yeah. So dive chat is the platform for in person communities. So the kind of idea is right now in college, if you have a fraternity, if you have any sort of student org, almost all of them are using GroupMe. And GroupMe has been around 10 years, it is kind of dated at this point, and everyone really hates it, but people keep using it anyway. So kind of the goal with dive is build something that's like GroupMe, that's very simple, easy to use, low friction, but also extremely fun and

SPEAKER_173: tailored towards Gen Z. That's awesome. I think my favorite part about dive chat actually is being able to see the event aspect of it. I love going to a bunch of different social events in college because I went to Penn State in the middle of nowhere. So the university had a lot of sanctioned events, which was incredible. And it would have been really helpful to have these all in one place, rather than just on a bulletin board in the dining hall. So I definitely see a use case for this. I think it was really cool when we were at the hackathon. Can students currently use this right now? Like, are you guys on the App Store? Yes, we're currently on the App Store. We're

SPEAKER_193: partnering with different student organization leaders. There is currently a waitlist code to get

SPEAKER_178: on. But if you're interested in getting your organization on board, contact us and we'll be happy to

SPEAKER_182: let you on. That's awesome. So how do you guys make money was my big question, I guess, too.

SPEAKER_178: So that's one funny thing about consumer that I didn't realize until recently is most business models who actually need to make money, you need revenue. But for consumer, you actually don't want that, at least at the beginning. Everything matters about users. And anything that slows down user growth is basically the death of the startup. So you want to focus all resources on getting as many users as quickly as possible. So any sort of attempts to monetize there end up slowing down user growth, slowing down retention, engagement, everything there. So basically, we actually want to hold off from monetizing for at least a few years down the line. And then it's so funny, it's so counterintuitive. And then once you reach scale, once you have a larger amount of users, then there's a lot of different ways to monetize. One example is with premium groups. So like the Patreon approach, having discord communities where you have to pay to enter, just building that premium community model. And then as well, because we have the event side of things,

SPEAKER_197: there's a lot of ways to monetize that. I definitely know a lot about that,

SPEAKER_173: because I have used Slack groups that don't have like the premium Slack. If you don't have the premium Slack, then a bunch of your messages from a certain time period, I believe get deleted. So that is super interesting. How did dive chat come to be? Because when I was doing some in-depth stalking of you on the internet, I noticed that you pretty much went to school, undergrad, grad, you had your internships here and there, but it looks like you went straight into dive chat. Like, what was that process like?

SPEAKER_178: Yeah, so there's a really funny story of how it started. Actually, I was in university, and I met my co founder in an intro to Buddhism class. And it's so funny, we both just took it as kind of a one off elective, just because we had to do a social science. We met each other through the class, we were studying for an exam. And we started talking entrepreneurship, I mentioned I was doing a hackathon next weekend, he talked about how he had some previous experience at startups. And he said, Hey, we should grab a coffee tomorrow or something like that. Now, most people when they say that, they never follow through. And then you never end up meeting, but he actually did follow through is like, Hey, let's go to Einstein's coffee tomorrow. Noon has a sound. We went there, he pitched me the idea was very different back then. But overall, I could sense his incredible enthusiasm, his drive ambition, and I wanted to work with him. And that's how dive started.

SPEAKER_182: I know we've talked a lot off of the show about pivoting, especially looking back on life,

SPEAKER_173: like one year later, and just seeing how in the past, like, how could I even thought that, like looking back, hitting that one year mark, especially maybe as a grad student coming out of school completely, just seeing how far you've gone and how wrong you're going to be. Can you talk about how you guys have been able to pivot and many, maybe even some advice you have for people that are scared to pivot?

SPEAKER_178: Yeah, I didn't realize until I did it, but pivoting is absolutely so important and that any successful startup is going to need to be able to pivot many, many, many times, if not minorly, then majorly. So originally dive was a ticketing platform for college parties. And in retrospect, looking back on that, that's a really bad idea. College students are some of the stingiest market anywhere. And so trying to monetize college parties in particular won't really work. And then we pivoted towards kind of an event discovery app, which every single college student has tried. But event discovery apps don't really work either, just because people aren't checking them. So then we thought, what has really good retention? What app do people check all the time, which is messaging, but then messaging is also an incredibly crowded space. So then how do we innovate on messaging where there's so many other messaging apps, when there's so many other startups that have tried in this space and failed. So now we have kind of this hybrid approach of the hole in the market. It's kind of like Slack and Discord, but for parties, for social, for Gen Z and consumer that hasn't really been filled before. And that's kind of our unique take on it. And then leading into that, just having really good design and making it really fun for Gen Z

SPEAKER_173: in particular, I've decided that the one app, if I could just have somebody come in and redo the whole thing is fidelity. It's like a finance app, like I just do my retirement account in it. And the usability of it is so bad. It makes me not ever want to use the app. Your guys's app is incredible. It's really pretty to use hasn't crashed on me yet or anything. And it's funny that you mentioned ticketing apps and things like that. Because I actually, there's only one app that I know that's ever really worked with ticketing. And it's line leap. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I think again, it was one of those startups that might have come into inception off of college students. But I don't know if that's like Penn State specific or not. It's just such a hard area to break into. Another one that's really difficult is to see that I've seen students like try to iterate a lot on is like how crowded restaurants or bars are in the area. So you know when to come. So dive chat, obviously being able to integrate two crucial parts, I feel like has made you guys really fun to have, especially at places like Hack Weeks, definitely would have been very, very helpful for me in

SPEAKER_182: college. Have you guys ever used this at any other events outside of Hack Week?

SPEAKER_178: We have one really large group for kind of just Gen Z tech Twitter as a whole. Oh, cool. That group has around 400 people. And that's a really fun group for us, just because it's a lot of our friends, a lot of people in the tech community, as well as a lot of other founders. So when we're looking for feedback on the app and being critical in UI, UX and everything there, people who have been doing that for years and years and years, all being located in that one

SPEAKER_173: group is just really fun for us. That's awesome. So I did not realize that although it feels like a very large community when you first enter, I've noticed that as we continue to go to different social functions, to different events, I see you at all of them. And it's kind of like the same group of people. I'm sure that everybody in that dive chat, it's kind of like just a subset of those that group of people that continues to come up on my radar as like Gen Z kids in the tech and VC community. A lot of people have different thoughts on what the community of founders is like. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_178: I've been consistently blown away with how nice and how giving the Gen Z founder community has been. Honestly, it just seems like everyone wants to help everyone out. Everyone wants everyone to succeed. Anytime I'm going to these events and meeting people, almost always they'll say, Hey, how can I help? Can I introduce you to this person? They have expertise, they might be able to help you out. Just the amount that they're willing to give in terms of their personal network, their connection, and even their time

SPEAKER_182: has been absolutely amazing to see. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I always tell people I squat at the WeWork because I don't have a WeWork pass, but there's so many people in the tech community that do that everyone's super welcoming. And it's like very much like, Oh, let's co-work together. And being able to have that support,

SPEAKER_173: especially like I said before, like, especially because the group isn't that small, like the Gen Z founder community, you know, few and far between. They're incredibly supportive. And I think it would be a really sad place if we weren't all connected together. So very happy that I met you. I kind of want to pivot a little bit here. And speaking of pivoting, I have been doing a lot of research on remote work, acing communication, especially in the workplace. This week in startups, we are all remote. I very much like that. Don't think I would have moved to San Francisco right after college. I'm from the East Coast. My family's here. So I enjoy being a remote worker because I think it provides a lot of opportunity. And I've been seeing a lot of commotion as well about async communication. What are your thoughts on async communication? More importantly on that, though, how can we make

SPEAKER_178: it easier? Async is so important, especially now. So dive started with me and my co founder in person at university. But since then, we've basically been living in different cities. And all our employees, everyone else working on it has also been in different cities. So basically, everything in the company is online, everything's remote, and everything's through Slack. And that is really drilled into me the importance of async communication, being able to over communicate as opposed to under communicate and do so really concisely to the entire team has proven extremely valuable just to make sure there's no miscommunications that everyone's on the same page for everything. And then one other thing I'm really passionate about is cutting down on meetings. Any friend I talk to who works at Microsoft or Big Tech or any of those companies there always complains about meetings and how they have way too many meetings. All the meetings don't have clear agendas, they don't get stuff done. So one thing that I'm really particular about is having really efficient meetings. If a meeting can be done async, then moving into async as much preparation that can be done as well moving into async. So oftentimes, we'll have stand ups in the morning, and we'll cover everything so well async that the stand up itself is only five minutes, it's a quick check in, and that we're able to get most of it done without using people's time in meetings.

SPEAKER_173: I love that. I think being in control, as Molly Wood says, her time is her greatest asset. Molly Wood is our co-host. And it made me think a lot more about my own time now that she's come to the show. And she's been reiterating that to us. And I definitely agree. My favorite memes have been lately, this could have been an email. But now in 2022, this could have been an email, even emails. Sometimes I'm like, oh, this could have been a Slack. Like going one step further, like I've noticed that like our abbreviation with communication is going further and further and further to the point where it's almost like in order to create like a well functioning team, how much communication is needed. Obviously, that's based on team to team. I like do you ever see yourself as a team, though, going in renting out an office space, because I do think that human communication and human interaction is important just for humanity, like to not go insane, like working silent in my bedroom alone sometimes gets a little crazy. Do you ever think about you guys getting office space?

SPEAKER_178: We've definitely thought about it a lot in the past. And there's definitely that extra spark that happens when doing collaborative work in person. I think especially creative work, when brainstorming and bouncing ideas back and forth, that being in person is extremely valuable. And it's oftentimes those little moments, like when you're both grabbing lunch, and then you have an idea, and then you start talking about that idea how those little moments kind of spark into really great ideas that you don't capture through a zoom meeting that's forced 30 minutes blocked off at either end. So from that aspect, it's extremely valuable. So if we didn't get a remote office, or if we didn't get an office in person, what we could do is have a bunch of retreats. So office space turns out is really expensive, which I didn't really know until I started looking into it. But it's around the same cost of doing some just really cool retreats throughout the year. And those retreats offer a time to basically do the same type of work in the office, except a more memorable experience there. So those are kind of the two

SPEAKER_219: options. And we're thinking about that now. That's so cool. So how often do you see your co-founder?

SPEAKER_178: I see my co-founder every few months. We bounce around different cities a lot, just because everything's remote, and we have full flexibility. We like to travel a lot. So I'm actually going to be seeing him next week in Colorado. He's running a little ski house right now. I'll be dropping in for a week. Then he'll be doing a house in LA later this summer. I'll probably drop on by he'll probably drop on by New York. So we definitely make sure to see each other in person.

SPEAKER_182: So that's good. And I know you're based in New York, like myself as of now.

SPEAKER_173: Although you've obviously popped around a lot. Do you think that you have to be in a particular city in order to get integrated into the tech world as a Gen Z? Or do you think that we can solely survive off of platforms like dive chat in person community, I think is really,

SPEAKER_178: really valuable. And that's one of the main kind of guiding theses of dive chat is that in person community is more powerful than digital community. And by building for these orgs that are already in person that have a really tight in person aspect like fraternities and sororities, we double down on that. So I would say for someone wanting to break into the Gen Z tech community, it dramatically helps to be either in SF, LA, New York, or Miami, just because those are the cities where it's really happening. That is slightly mitigated, though, by Twitter, and that the Gen Z tech Twitter community is absolutely thriving. It is crazy. I meet people who aren't in tech, and then I tell them about this phenomenon where everyone in Gen Z tech is on Twitter, and it is the go to platform and networking events. They just don't believe me. It's absolutely crazy. So because of Gen Z tech Twitter, I met so many people online before meeting them in person, like at Miami Hack Week, I met at least a dozen people. I'm like, Oh, I know you from Twitter. And then I would meet other people. And they're like, Oh, I know you from Twitter, which is so funny. So because of Twitter, I think it's much more possible now more than ever to be connected to that scene, even without being in one of those big major tech cities.

SPEAKER_182: It's so funny, again, so I went to Miami Hack Week with you. That's where I met you. I didn't, I was kind of actually hesitant to tell people like where I worked that I was at this week in startups, just because I wasn't a founder, it wasn't in tech. So I was like, you know what, I'm just not gonna tell. I'm just gonna wait till people ask me if it comes up in conversation. I was looking to record with people too. While I was there, I got the awesome tap co founder on

SPEAKER_173: Eric button before he was a great person to speak with. But I wasn't really like telling people like what I did for for work or anything like that. I was just kind of like showing up places and talking to people to see who would be interesting to have on the show. I even with that,

SPEAKER_182: even with kind of like trying to ride like on the down low, I went to Miami Hack Week with 300 followers and I left with 1000, because everybody on is on Twitter, I was just talking to somebody

SPEAKER_173: about how we should pivot the recruiting platforms like and start going to these different hackathons and events. And then pinpointing these people mostly software engineers on Twitter, because I think it is just an incredible place to try to find not only like co founder if you're young, but also trying to hire in the tech community. Were you guys able to hire at all? Or was that a part of your

SPEAKER_178: agenda when you guys were at Hack Week? Definitely currently on our horizon, we're currently looking for some full stack engineers. But I totally agree with that sentiment. Anytime I'm meeting someone in person and I say, How do you want to connect and they say LinkedIn, I kind of shake my head internally because Twitter really is what's happening right now. I completely agree with that sentiment that the best people you're going to find either on Twitter or in person at these networking events.

SPEAKER_232: Yeah, I didn't realize how important important in person networking was because when I graduated,

SPEAKER_173: it was 2020 came here to New York. And now it feels like because you say yes to one thing, you're actually saying yes to three every time you meet someone in person. And when you say yes to a zoom call, which is virtual, it doesn't open necessarily any other doors except for maybe another zoom call. It's not that same communication you get. Has dive chat been performing well, even since students have been traditionally not attending college as much as they used to?

SPEAKER_178: Yes, I think. Even though college is online, that makes people kind of strive for in person community now more than ever. So people that are in fraternities that are in sororities, they're placing even more importance on that, because now that's even a larger percentage of their in person interaction from day to day, just because they're not seeing other students in classes. So those in person communities that people are already integrated into are even more of a part of

SPEAKER_234: their lives. That totally makes sense. So are people at UT currently using this platform?

SPEAKER_178: Yes, we have a few different Greek orgs at UT that we partner with.

SPEAKER_173: Awesome. And what has been the best thing that they've liked about dive chat so far?

SPEAKER_178: The number one thing I hear over and over again is about our reaction system. So unlike any other messaging app, you can actually react as many times as you want. So like if you have a heart emoji and you really love a message, you can just keep pressing that heart emoji until it's 10, 20, 30, 40, as high as it goes. And everyone can be doing that. And every time you press it, there's a little explosion. So hearts fly across the screen that other people, if they're in the chat, they can see that. So it's created these really magical moments where you have maybe 10 people in the chat. They're all reacting at the same time and everyone's screen is just

SPEAKER_187: absolutely blowing up with heart emojis, which is so, so fun.

SPEAKER_182: I love that. I love that. It's like the little things, right? So you said Greek life is pretty heavily integrated on your platform. What's your guys' marketing partnership strategy to bring people

SPEAKER_173: and like groups onto the app? Like you said, you have codes. I believe that's how I got in. I found like the Miami hack week code and that was introduced into that community. There's a code also for the tech community. Like you said, how are you reaching out to these people and giving

SPEAKER_178: these people though the access? Right now it's a lot of warm intros through social chairs of Greek life. So for example, we'll go to the social chair of a fraternity and say, Hey, here's this thing. It's like group me, but 10 times better. And the social chair has been used to using group me and they'll throw parties and then people miss the message. And so there's a lot of frustration, especially by the organizers with group me. So if they find kind of the solution that makes everything a lot easier on their part, it makes it easier in the members part. A lot of times they're willing to try it out. And then once the fraternity is on board, they'll end up loving it. Then we'll have a really good relationship with them and they can enter us to other social chairs of other fraternities. So that's kind of been how our marketing has been progressing.

SPEAKER_232: Yeah. The network of social chairs throughout state school Greek life. I know this would perform

SPEAKER_182: super excited for this to get to Penn state. I know it's going to perform really well there. We have these things called like thon orgs, which are student run philanthropy organizations that

SPEAKER_173: always have, um, little, I mean, philanthropy events like throughout the year in order to raise money for the big one. Um, like the total they do with like a dance marathon where they stand for almost 48 hours and they raise a lot of money then, but, um, all the money that they're kind of collecting throughout the year is like presented at the end of that dance marathon. Um, and they host so many events. Like I know dive chat would absolutely freaking kill it. Producer Justin, who is another producer on the show also had a question on kind of the college realm. So we see all these Gen Z founders dropping out. We obviously met a lot of them when we were hack week together. Why did you decide then to make college students, your target audience?

SPEAKER_178: College students have a very tight sense of community and very similar values. And because we're building for in-person communities, we wanted to start with kind of the best example of really tight in-person communities that are really, really kind of dedicated to their community. And Greek life is just a really strong example of that. Greek life has been around for so many years at this point. People in fraternities have their brotherhood that goes even as they get to late ages, they'll meet people in their fraternities that are younger. And there's just that kind of link between all sorts of different ages and just a really tight community. So because of that, because we are college students ourselves and we relate very much to them, we thought it would be a really good kind

SPEAKER_173: of target beachhead market. That's awesome. And I guess at Penn State, there's been a lot of talks about like banning Greek life as a whole. Are you guys ever worried that the use case in your target

SPEAKER_245: audience might cease to exist on college campuses in the next few years? I think Greek life is here to stay,

SPEAKER_178: even as much as people want to get rid of it. I think there's definitely a lot of bad in Greek life. I think there's a lot of good in it as well, especially in the community aspect and lifting each other up there. And even if Greek life were to go away, there's still a bunch of other different opportunities in college, like student government, for example, is a really tight-knit group, student athlete organizations, and then just broadly any sort of student organization as a whole that meets in

SPEAKER_173: person is a good use case. Awesome. That's so cool. Do you have any advice on community building? Because it seems like that is a huge focus of your guys' time.

SPEAKER_177: Yes. So at the very beginning, one slight pivot we made is we originally wanted to build an app to

SPEAKER_178: help people build communities. And we realized that that wasn't really a good idea. And it has been tried many, many times before and failed. And it all kind of ties into the realm of habit changing. If you try and build an app that changes people's habits, it is very hard to do successfully. And you're going to need a lot of momentum. And it's a lot easier to build an app that already aligns with what people's habits are, and then helping that out. So instead of helping people build their own

SPEAKER_197: communities by targeting more established communities and building tooling for them,

SPEAKER_182: we found that that's been a lot more successful. Awesome. I think that is super incredible. And thank you so much for being able to come on and talk about dive chat. I'm super excited to see where you guys go. Again, like I said, cannot wait till you hit more college campuses. I think this is a really awesome tool that's going to benefit a lot of Gen Z organizations and and maybe like older people's general like organizations too. I don't know. I don't know what's out there. Where can people find

SPEAKER_178: you? And what is your Twitter handle? Twitter is definitely the best place to find me. It is the John Herrick. H-E-R-R-I-C-K. I do fun little random side projects that I'll occasionally tweet about as well. But definitely shoot me a DM and always happy to hear from anyone.

SPEAKER_250: Now you need to say some of the fun little side projects.

SPEAKER_178: My favorite one I made is, you know, when you're at a restaurant and you're trying to split the check with three friends and you have to figure out how much people owe and there's tax and tip and it's super annoying math and it takes around two minutes to do super annoying. There's a bunch of apps to try and fix it. All of them have really bad UX. And so I thought, what is the quickest way I could possibly solve that problem? And so I made an app where you can do all that math in less than 15 seconds and figure out who is who what so i use it absolutely every single time super super fun and just little random ideas i have that i decided to build up what's the app's

SPEAKER_252: name no hard name i called it quick pay okay it's not available anywhere right now but potentially

SPEAKER_182: in the future that's so sick well thank you so much for being on that sounds cool let's try to get that to the app store too i know i would love that i've been using uh uh split wise i think it is and like you said not super how to use um so yeah thank you so much john and can't wait to hear what jason thinks about this interview thank you so much for having me