SPEAKER_00: let's talk about 11x the startup backed by andreason horowitz uh tech crunch put out a

SPEAKER_01: story about this in this case one of the things that they covered was the misuse of customer logos essentially 11x according to zoom info kept using their logo for at least four months on their site on uh it's ai dialer and sales calls and they spent four months demanding they stop they said and they're threatening legal action over this it's hard for me to believe

SPEAKER_12: that for four months somebody from zoom was angrily emailing any member of the team at 11x and that person didn't communicate to the website team hey pull this logo like that that to me is not

SPEAKER_14: a satisfying explanation on any level this week in startups is brought to you by open phone streamline and scale your customer communications with open phone get 20 off your first six months at openphone.com twist linkedin ads to redeem a 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups and brex the financial stack founders can bank on unlike traditional business banking solutions brex has no minimums and no transaction fees and you get 20 times the standard fdic protection get the business account trusted by one in three startups at brex dot com slash banking dash solutions all right everybody welcome back to this week in

SPEAKER_18: startups he's lon harris he's alex wilhelm we're gonna do this week in tech i heard in two weeks alex together i was talking to leo laporte oh and i i added you to my calendar invite just so you know

SPEAKER_19: we're both gonna do it on i think it's uh april 6th we're doing it on a sunday so you and i

SPEAKER_21: will be making uh we'll be bringing twist to twit to twit yeah we're just gonna drop the s and show

SPEAKER_27: up that's gonna be hilarious hilarious now we're gonna get mollywood to show up we'd have the great this week in tech this week in time by leo laporte he was the godfather of podcasting along

SPEAKER_30: with dave weiner and uh of course adam curry he tried to hire me away in the early this week at

SPEAKER_10: startups area you remember that oh i i didn't know that that's great yeah he tried to poach me uh i didn't actually i actually didn't know that story i didn't want to move to petaluma so i turned him down but okay petaluma oh god you've been there a bunch of times for for twit lovely not on my scene

SPEAKER_37: napa valley yeah but it's just you're an l.a guy you're an l.a guy i didn't want to go too small

SPEAKER_41: town for for the for the cosmopolitan lon harris exactly anyway long story short april 6th tune in

SPEAKER_19: uh twist on twit drop the s and alex and i will be there uh talking shop with our guy yeah leo laporte who you know really did inspire a lot of us he was a radio guy who then started

SPEAKER_18: doing tech tv and g4 tv kevin rose got inspired that's where date came from i got inspired that's where twist came from a lot of people inspired uh by leo laporte who was just the radio guy who

SPEAKER_19: figured out how to do live streaming and he has done so many episodes of twit every sunday i think

SPEAKER_44: he does it at uh 2 p.m pacific time and it's just a great roundup show uh wanted to uh thank the team for painting my shelf as you can see guys i have a new set beautiful blue beautiful blue and we're

SPEAKER_19: going to be suiting up here we're going to be taking the job seriously uh because we want to make clips that look extraordinary and let's face it like our clips look okay and the clip team's doing great but

SPEAKER_21: we really want to be tight tight tight 4k all the way all day and beautiful uh and you know how i got

SPEAKER_45: these colors lon that's how i picked the colors how how did you pick out those beautiful colors

SPEAKER_47: thank you look at those empty bookshelves it's coming to austin it's going to be on this road it's

SPEAKER_49: all in boxes they're all in boxes great so um i over the christmas holiday i was in new york i had

SPEAKER_46: christmas oh no sorry thanksgiving holiday uh i had uh uh this uh little you know holiday in new york see my family had my three daughters with me i'm a girl dad like kobe uh and they were going to do this color analysis so there's a color analysis that korean people use you can look it up online and and they have a storefront or they have an office in um in like midtown manhattan and we went to do a color analysis turns out my colors are these blues and so i'm leaning into my blues and my greens

SPEAKER_44: and uh my wife and uh the team here just spent weeks and weeks dialing in this beautiful blue and i'm getting the lighting right i'm just taking total ownership of set design for myself but i got the color analysis done and my daughter's got it done it's really interesting they put these

SPEAKER_19: little um swatches on you and then they move them back and forth and the uh the guy from cnn yeah there it is so this is like a color analysis so i did what you're seeing here where you sit there and they do this color analysis where they put these different colors in front of your lawn

SPEAKER_12: red's not your color no not your friend really it's not my mom the last time i wore this shirt on this show my mom wrote me and was like that shirt looks great on you no what it is is red is not

SPEAKER_40: good on anybody almost anybody because it creates too much flushness in your face and everything but

SPEAKER_58: this uh what do you have on there you have black or is that like a gray navy blue navy blue this is uh

SPEAKER_60: a blue green uh athletic shirt that i like because it breathes beautiful it looks good on you that color

SPEAKER_21: might be working there the red maybe creates too much vibration anyway putting all this aside it's a

SPEAKER_19: very cool thing and it actually works uh and so shout out to them and uh yeah you can go get your color analysis there's like a bunch of people who do this anyway that's how i got the the blue colors here a little announcement for this week in starters we do it live monday wednesday friday 12 p.m texas time 10 a.m left coast time 1 p.m right coast time i got it right okay um i decided i made a decision i

SPEAKER_41: was talking to leo laporte about politics and it's like ruining every conversation about tech and startups right it just it finds a way to inject itself right like we're all sitting here and we want to jump on the signal story i bet because that's the crazy story of the week and there's a lot there's a tech angle there's a tech angle obviously here's my announcement we're going to focus on founders startups how to build your startup how to build your team how to work on your product and how to really absolutely adore and study your customers we're going to talk about big tech obviously because that affects little tech right so and then we're going to talk about technology but i'm going to backload

SPEAKER_46: we're going to do ot twist ot i just came up with that right now that's the overtime where we will just go yolo at the end of the show about political topics about all this other nonsense pop culture etc so if you listen live you'll get ot but if you get the podcast we're not going to keep inserting this stuff into there because it's maddening we can't talk about tariffs every week when we've got so much other great content so let's get right to the great content if you want to do the overtime go to youtube search for this weekend startups go to x follow twi startups we're also streaming on tick tock and instagram so there's right now between zero and three people

SPEAKER_71: on each of those platforms please go search for us and follow us any thoughts on twist overtime

SPEAKER_74: my one thought yes is i feel like even though the you know the money angle we're not like desperate

SPEAKER_10: for the cash like a lot of other creators there is like this would be perfect for like a patreon or like you could have those youtube subscriptions where people kick in like an extra buck or two a month to like subscribe and then it's like if you subscribe then you'll get the extra 20 minutes

SPEAKER_75: like ben shapiro does this right exactly you're like caleb hammer that financial audit channel i like

SPEAKER_12: he does the post show but you got to be a member five bucks a month and then you get to see the post show yeah and that's where they delve into all the tea you know all the like all right so two ideas

SPEAKER_77: there we got twist over time we got twist over time pro what do you think alex i i think it's a

SPEAKER_01: really good idea and in fact when you said i bet you guys want to talk about the signal story i looked at the docket and what's interesting is that we don't have it in there jason because i i felt like i

SPEAKER_82: don't know if we could add much that would actually move the ball forward because i think every angle in that story it being such a bombshell yeah that it's been lights been shot in there from every possible side we could go over some stuff but i don't know if we could really move the ball forward for founders so i like it i want to ask questions though so i always try to find something that we

SPEAKER_86: can all kind of laugh about to start the show and love a little laughing yes please yeah and so

SPEAKER_89: when gamestop announced that they're going to become a bitcoin treasury company i found that to be

SPEAKER_93: intrinsically hilarious and so i stuck it in the intro section is that too far away from

SPEAKER_41: the founder focus this is an interesting commentary because you know founders aspire to be public

SPEAKER_18: companies and founders fail um and they have to pivot so i do have a take on this uh for those of you don't know uh michael sailor friend of the pod uh invited him on a million times he hasn't come on he begged to come on and then when i invited him on he unfollowed me and i haven't reached out to

SPEAKER_99: him i mean i'll keep reaching out to him i would love to talk to him i don't have a personal problem

SPEAKER_41: with michael sailor i think he's doing the most audacious betting strategy i've ever seen in public markets i don't know why more people are not talking about it it is audacious and insane and brilliant depending on if bitcoin hits let's call it five hundred thousand dollars sure bitcoin never hits five hundred thousand dollars or it crashes he'll either be a modest success or it'll be a complete disaster and everybody will say who didn't see this coming right so it's it's got basically three possible outcomes if bitcoin goes down to thirty thousand dollars a coin again and he gets liquidated or some craziness happens and the stock collapses and it trades at eighty percent of the five hundred thousand dollar five hundred thousand bitcoins he owns people are going to go well we all saw that

SPEAKER_46: coming didn't we he's speeding into the turn of course he flipped the car founders every time you

SPEAKER_104: miss a call you're losing an opportunity and we all know customers are busy and if you don't pick up somebody else will they're going to move on to the next product or service that is not yours so with open phone you're never going to miss another call and you're not going to lose track of who followed up with you it's the number one business phone system it's the one i use at my companies because it's built for entrepreneurs 15 bucks a month what a deal for open phone you get a dedicated business line and that lets you keep your business and your personal life separate plus you get ai powered call transcripts and summaries so you never forget something in the call that you needed to follow up on maybe there's action items maybe your customer wants you to follow up with pricing or a feature set you're going to know exactly what was discussed and what to do next also you can set up automated messages to ensure no customers left hanging and open phone works through an app on your existing smartphone or computer and this makes it easy to manage your calls from anywhere whether you're on a desktop you're on vacation you're a remote worker you're on your phone you're in the car you're at an airport it's just easy to manage so here's your call to action open phone loves this week in startups open phone loves startups they love founders so much that they're offering 20 off your first six months when you go to open phone dot com slash twist that's o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e dot com slash twist for 20 off for your first six months what a deal and if you have an existing phone number with another service open phone will port those over at no extra charge thanks again to our friends at open phone dot com slash twist for supporting independent media like this week in startups if it hits 100 200 300

SPEAKER_41: 400 000 he's going to look like wow that was a really good trade yes he figured out how to triple people's money in a time period where it doubled right and he basically has to double from here to hit

SPEAKER_46: break even because he's trading at two times i believe the value is is roughly two times roughly

SPEAKER_41: yeah um so if it was two times he has to hit like i don't know bitcoin has to hit like 150 000 for him to have the valuation of mr mstr is his stock general um for him to be like at one to one is the value of the company equals the value of the bitcoin something like that ballpark and there's a

SPEAKER_19: bunch of websites that show you the the net asset value nav to evaluation so what is it now it's one

SPEAKER_114: point i was trying to find it for you jason but i i ended up on this chart here and i'm not entirely

SPEAKER_115: sure where i'm supposed to look so if you've seen this this is net asset value right so he has 500 000

SPEAKER_21: coins and at 500 000 coins at 80 000 right five times eight is four so we know it's got to be

SPEAKER_46: something like um the value of the company is 40 the value of his bitcoin is 40 billion correct yes

SPEAKER_21: the value of his company if you were to look at a stock ticker right now might be 80 billion i'm

SPEAKER_118: taking a guess right now i don't follow the data deck you're you're so close to nailing this without

SPEAKER_01: even having the numbers jason i found the data point in the chart that i showed for a second and

SPEAKER_122: according to um msdr-tracker.com the finest of all resources uh the nav premium or nav premium is 1.93x

SPEAKER_46: today okay fine so he's trading roughly at double the value of the coins it's 80 billion dollar company 40 billion dollars i think because it's in a publicly traded company and you don't

SPEAKER_21: control the bitcoin he should be trading at point eight if you believe he's trading at point date the value of the company is like 35 billion or something in that range so i believe he's doubled the value uh on the public city stock so essentially if bitcoin was worth 160 000 coin i think the valuation makes

SPEAKER_41: sense let's put it all aside for a second the company mr um which is short for they call it microstrategy right with the short for microstrategy microstrategy existed for i think 25 years as a

SPEAKER_19: public company a long time and as a public company they had a software product that is now i would say i don't want to say failing because it's hundreds of millions in revenue but it's stepping down it's deprecating this happens from time to time right you have some big successful thing that deprecates over time blackberry you know whatever it is um so he started buying bitcoin inside of that company now the company has this huge resurgence other

SPEAKER_41: people are watching this and he is goading people encouraging people or running a ponzi scheme

SPEAKER_133: depending on how cynical you are it's a little yeah he's pumping he's pumping hard it's definitely a at a minimum it's a pump you can call it a ponzi at max if you want right right so at a minimum he's

SPEAKER_41: pumping and and then the center so you know an objective person says he's pumping a cynical person say

SPEAKER_46: it's a ponzi i say there's also peer pressure now so what he's been doing is this peer pressure and this is where i this is where i don't want to say distasteful but this is where i get red flags concerns when you start pumping and peer pressuring people to the extent he is so he had just in recent history he's been telling people like how much will you respect gamestop as a bitcoin maxi how much bitcoin do they have to buy for you to respect did you see that survey that he did today you can throw it up that's a massive amount of peer pressure he's trying to goat the ceo of gamestop

SPEAKER_41: into buying more and being part of the bitcoin again you could be a cult whatever so he says what's the

SPEAKER_19: minimum amount of bitcoin gamestop needs to buy to be respected by bitcoiners 50 million just larping 250 million uh mr starter kit 1 billion 3 billion so 47 of people want him to do 3 billion

David Friedberg: 30 want to do 1 billion put those two numbers together you got 77 78 78 78 of people doing

SPEAKER_10: this full court press press but of course the people following michael saylor and voting on these are bitcoin people who are desperate for more people to buy in so their prices go up we're not saying

SPEAKER_133: this is a a poll that is representative of the national view the max right yeah this is the maxi

SPEAKER_00: i do think the 3 billion dollar number is very interesting because i looked at gamestop's cash holdings at the end of their most recent quarter around 4.8 billion in cash jason note that really

SPEAKER_142: turns out that at today's prices is 55 000 bitcoin if they spent all of it okay we should be 10 of the

SPEAKER_19: the bitcoin uh he owns and then he personally owns like 20 000 bitcoins or something in that range maybe

SPEAKER_41: the 17 000 or something which is the of course huge conflict of interest i've explained here before

SPEAKER_19: no matter what happens with mstr he will have taken his bitcoin which i think he said he owned on average for like 10 000 a coin yeah every thousand dollars it goes up he makes 20 million dollars if every 10 000 he makes 200 million every 100 000 i think he makes 2 billion so no matter what he does

SPEAKER_41: he's gonna personally make essentially hundreds of millions to billions that is such a conflict of

SPEAKER_46: interest that he disclosed it in a tweet and said before he moved mstr and i retweeted this tweet it's like an ancient tweet from the 2020 era i think uh you can find it maybe um i've retweeted it

SPEAKER_41: it's basically he said he informed the board that he owned these before he went on the strategy that was his cya right if you have a conflict now people are saying it's not a conflict it actually is a reason to believe that he believes what he's saying but it's a conflict because you know like

SPEAKER_19: uh say i don't know a president or something you know if you were owned a certain number of coins and you put them in the treasury that'd be good for you here some have asked this is dated

SPEAKER_154: october 28th 2020 2020. just somebody read it and let's see what it says how much btc i own i

SPEAKER_12: personally hodl 17 732 bitcoin which i bought at 9882 each on average i informed microstrategy of these holdings before the company decided to buy bitcoin for itself okay so alex you know what that is that

SPEAKER_18: tweet yeah that's insane cya don't sue me yes don't sue me bro i told the board and he you know as if

SPEAKER_19: he's not in control of the company right he's not in control of the strategy pretty clear he controls the company i you know i don't know the exact governance but he's he's he's he's the ceo he's

SPEAKER_164: on the board i don't know how many shares he owns i don't know if he has super or is he just the

SPEAKER_82: chairman there's some strange names they have inside of the org but like let's be honest if you think about microstrategy do you even know the name of the man who runs the software division no no okay

SPEAKER_79: couldn't tell you anybody yeah he's the executive chairman and co-founder okay great of microstrategy

SPEAKER_41: so who knows what level of control he has over it but he wants to make sure people know hey it is a conflict he's admitting there it's a conflict and it's a serious enough conflict that i have to inform

SPEAKER_18: the board and make sure i get their approval because if he didn't and he did it covertly that would be like sec or like the classic sec i don't know about this new sec you know come down on him with a bag of bricks pressuring gamestop into it i think it's a great move for gamestop to

SPEAKER_176: put every dollar they have into this all right so because gamestop has no business right yeah i mean

SPEAKER_10: gamestop's got to do something because it's like going to the mall to buy a physical copy of a video game is just that that's done that model's not coming back so they need they need something else to do

SPEAKER_01: this is the if you're watching the video this is the gamestop uh announcement from their investor relations page it reads in full gamestop today announced that its board has unanimously approved an update to its investment policy to add bitcoin as a treasury reserve assets they are going to do this in some capacity hence the sailor tweet jason the thing that i'm curious about just bringing this back to found founders um is simply have you heard of any non-public company putting bitcoin on their

SPEAKER_82: balance sheet and as a follow-up if a launch accelerator backed company said jason we're going to buy a bitcoin to have on our balance sheet just cash what would you say to them hey founders i want

SPEAKER_80: to share with you an experience i love it's when i get an ad that is relevant and not some nonsense like the other day i got an ad for a fund management platform and it was like a new one i'd never heard of i clicked on the ad because well i manage four venture capital firms we scheduled to call with them and it was amazing how did this happen well i was on linkedin because i like to share links from the podcast this week in startups right on linkedin in fact we live streamed to linkedin three days a week and we get a great audience over there and i happened to be presented with this fund management platform and

SPEAKER_181: it was a direct hit like i mean talk about hitting the bullseye if you're in business and you're making a product or service it's really hard to find customers in the business to business space and doing b2b advertising is hard but linkedin makes it so easy because you know their tools let you target people by job title industry company size and more so this fund management platform obviously was looking for

SPEAKER_182: people in venture capital who had a fund size and a number of people maybe 10 people maybe 50 people and they found me they got me they split the arrow boom right on target and there's two things you really need to know about linkedin going into 2025 first they broke a billion members and 130 million of those billion are decision makers and 10 million of the billion are c-level executives like myself where can you get to those people it's really hard and the second thing you need to know linkedin makes an impact b2b markers report two to five times higher return on ad spend or roas return on the ad spend you should know that acronym compared to other social platforms 79 of b2b markers say linkedin

SPEAKER_181: is the best platform for paid media linkedin is going to let you build the right relationships it's going to drive results and you're going to reach your customers in a super respectful business environment it's not a place where people are dancing around saying inappropriate things or debating politics nope linkedin equals business business equals linkedin start converting your b2b audience into high quality leads today we'll even give you a hundy a hundred dollar credit on your next campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit that's linkedin.com slash this week

SPEAKER_41: in startups terms and conditions do apply if it was less than five percent of their holdings i'd be

SPEAKER_19: like strange but okay um you know uh i do see frequently um companies with a large treasury buy treasuries buy municipal bonds of short duration so because you need the money so if you buy two-year treasuries one year whatever and you can get three four or five percent on ten million dollars you get an extra five

SPEAKER_41: hundred thousand dollars into the company you have to pay tax on that interest typically unless it's a

SPEAKER_19: non-taxable muni bond i've done that in the past myself when i did that i had to go to my you know board and say hey i'm going to put of this 15 million dollars we have seven and a half of it into bonds we can't touch for you know between one and three years or one and two years and they're

SPEAKER_31: going to roll every quarter off and every quarter they mature and we get that money whatever and it was nice we had like you know at some point you know maybe it was 50k a month in interest coming in so

SPEAKER_41: it's just nice when you're it winds up being five more you know developers for your team that are being paid for by the interest but the the vcs don't give you the money and investors don't give

SPEAKER_19: you the money to be a hedge fund manager so they're giving it to you to grow a business that goes 100x that's the problem here but for gamestop if they can't come up with a good idea

SPEAKER_41: and the best idea they have is to follow michael saylor and the trump administration down this crazy

SPEAKER_18: crypto rabbit hole which i think is going to blow up inevitably and when it does blow up it either can be uh the total risk of ruin look up risk of ruin uh when you have a bankroll you have to be careful

SPEAKER_41: to avoid the risk of ruin that means you don't put all your money on one bet you need to be able to weather the storm risk of ruin is what happens in poker when you take your entire bankroll if let's

SPEAKER_46: say you were a professional poker player with a million dollar bankroll and you play in a million dollar buying game people with million dollar bankrolls play in 25 000 buying games and they limit themselves to four buy-in so the most they can lose in a single session is 10 of their bankroll you know and if you wanted to play a million dollar games you want to have a 10 million dollar bankroll so you're not putting more than 10 on the line anyway risk of ruin interesting concept for people to know but if you were pivoting you don't have any ideas and if i was a shareholder in gamestop let's say i was the co-founder and i own 10 i'm watching these folks for years try to get out of the retail game

SPEAKER_191: and they don't have a visas and they can't get out of it sure why not let's talk about 11x the startup

SPEAKER_01: backed by Andreessen Horowitz uh tech crunch put out a story about this some of the notes included that the company had customers signed one-year contracts with a three-year three-month break and that it may have been misreporting revenue uh after customers had broken essentially they turned their annual products into trials um an employee said that they uh were kind of massaging the numbers they may have left some logos on their site too long after they weren't really customers the company

SPEAKER_133: has pushed back jason but i want to start with that and get your feedback okay so it's all alleged

SPEAKER_12: right yeah and the allegation the platform is denying the tech crunch report that's important to point

SPEAKER_46: out yeah okay so the companies made the company made they had customers sign a one-year contract with a three-month breakup clause this turned uh the annual contract into effectively trials this is not in and of itself anything problematic when i do one-year contracts with people i'll have a 90 day out i'll sign a three-year contract somebody with a 90 day out a 30 day out what it means is i just have to give you notice so we can off board and then that company doesn't have if they had dedicated some resources to it let's say you know an account manager or you know a contractor to work

SPEAKER_19: on your thing you just have 90 days to let that person go and to inform them hey you know we're going to just off board you whatever so that in of itself not a problem but when you start using the

SPEAKER_41: logos of customers uh and you start using weird terms contracted arr car this is a very abused number

SPEAKER_19: i have been getting uh and i have had situations i'm going to make an amalgamation okay the founders told me they had this amount of revenue and what they meant is the contracted revenue and then the contracted revenue didn't match the money coming into the bank account when you're dealing with any

SPEAKER_41: type of investor who is um let's call it a smart yeah any of these words you'd like to use alex

SPEAKER_46: any smart investors who say what was 2024 revenue what is 2025 projected revenue give me a chart of monthly revenue i have had people's then give me a chart of contracted revenue and i said no no no who's your accounting firm i want the actual accrual based accounting where you take your 12 month contract let's say they paid it in advance they gave you a hundred thousand dollars in advance it's ten thousand dollars a month give them a discount of twenty thousand dollars i want to see that hundred thousand divided into 12 and i want to see it you know put into each month that the service was delivered and we know that it could get canceled so if you have churn which people do typically five ten fifteen percent churn a year um some people have negative churn which because people are adding uh to their existing contracts so you have the same number of contracts long but you go from 10 people to 50 people in your slack account so you're paying five times as much so ten percent of people you know leave the product but then fifty percent of the people you know 10x their usage of it you get just all this sure you know math and fun with numbers

SPEAKER_21: you know just fun with numbers a very dangerous game because if you're selling shares of a company

SPEAKER_46: and you confuse a person buying the shares then you will get uh a knock on the door hello sec here

SPEAKER_30: we would like to talk to you about a special term called uh securities fraud that's you never want

SPEAKER_115: to hear those words by the way those are not good words is that not coming up on the microphone oh it

SPEAKER_208: absolutely is we can hear the sec hello

SPEAKER_210: log alex is the sec here yeah it's a scary moment i remember opening the door and somebody oh really you've had the sec knock on your door for security served you've been served boom and i look at this piece

SPEAKER_30: of paper got the sec logo on it when i pull it out of the back that's no good whoa yeah exactly just sit

SPEAKER_10: down breathe you got you have to go in your box of documents stacked in the powder room and start going

SPEAKER_41: through them no this isn't mar-a-lago what is this what is this turns out i had somebody on the pod they were telling me we had invested in the company telling me what incredible prospects they had they didn't have their accounting dialed in perfectly oh they ran out of money it was during a down market nobody no white knights come to the rescue the sec had somebody tip them off

SPEAKER_19: that not only the company claimed to be profitable or break even but then they are out of business

SPEAKER_41: because they couldn't make payroll well and then they submitted uh jason's an investor the person

SPEAKER_19: was on the podcast you know 30 days before this whole thing blew up oh wow and they said the following things so the sec says we would like every correspondence we would like this with this i gotta hire

SPEAKER_229: i kid you not an eighteen hundred dollar an hour attorney it's the most i've ever paid

SPEAKER_234: you start getting into this level so now thirty dollars a minute that's why that's that's fifty

SPEAKER_236: cents a second when founders ask me what corporate cards should they use i tell them brex b-r-e-x that's

SPEAKER_104: what all founders use and when founders ask me where should they store their cash well think of brex why because it's specifically built for startups from the ground up and that's going to help you take your dollars further and it's going to protect your cash while extending your startup's runway how do they pull this off well they offer startups the best parts of checking treasury fdic insurance in a single powerhouse account knowing everything about your money is non-negotiable nearly 40 startups fail because they run out of cash and a hundred percent of startups can't afford to make financial mistakes don't i know this i you know who founders call when they're running out of money or they make a mistake they call me and i have to deal with it if you need the best of the best because you're doing something big with your startup brex's banking solution is going to get you 20 times the standard fdic protection through program banks also they have the ability to send money worldwide at lightning speed so here's your call to action very simple brex is used by one in every three startups in the united states let's let's get that up to one in two get the financial stack that founders trust at brex dot com slash banking dash solutions once again b-r-e-x dot com slash banking dash solutions thanks again to our friends at brex who make a great product that we use every day

SPEAKER_242: i mean i'm trying to think of when i've lost

SPEAKER_15: they come into the office set a briefcase down take a sip of water you're you're already out like yeah yeah that's like that's a car payment you're out five grand just for that this guy a tomahawk steak

SPEAKER_246: every 10 seconds that's i was eating lagu for a year anyway happy to pay it uh

SPEAKER_252: better than prison

SPEAKER_41: i'm like they're like you have no exposure don't worry about it then i get the 30 000 bill for my no exposure i paid that i i give i buy a prius to my attorney's son or daughter or their housekeeper

SPEAKER_257: got a prius on jcal yeah happy to pay it so happy i'm not grimacing at all here i'm not in pain no and uh i'm like okay well did they clear me and they're like oh no they don't do that

SPEAKER_262: what happens next just what you're seeing here is a shrug i'm doing a shrug in front of my beautiful

SPEAKER_99: blue shelves yeah it's just a shrug it's just like they don't tell you they leave you on the hook indefinitely there could be another knock hey remember we talked to you 10 years ago about the startup turns out oh we we pinched this person we would like to talk to you again that's the problem

SPEAKER_46: i think with how the sec is run respectfully is that they have so much power and they have a very

SPEAKER_21: important mission and they're very principled people but man it's they they need to be a little

SPEAKER_241: more interactive you know and like maybe wrap things up so i'm not sitting here sweating bullets

SPEAKER_74: i don't know i think they might want an environment where people feel like on edge and scrutinized you

SPEAKER_12: know like they don't have that many agents working the way to enforce these rules is to make everybody feel like you could be being watched at any time yeah well they did also tell me if i didn't get

SPEAKER_274: the paperwork to them in time i was going to go to el salvador to stay in a camp so that's what you

SPEAKER_276: get for your tweets i was going to be going to camp i want to go back deeper i want to go back to

SPEAKER_00: contracted arr jason or carr versus arr my my understanding of this is that contracted arr includes future annual recurring revenue that has not yet manifested as cash so my question is if if if i signed up for you know jason's sas product on a monthly account say yeah i haven't paid yet for some of the arr you might count if you presume that i'm not going to churn if i'm monthly so to me that

SPEAKER_280: actual distinction between carr and arr is a little bit muddy can you an idiot turns explain to me because

SPEAKER_19: i was trying to prep but i couldn't i think the way most people do it uh and this is a term that

SPEAKER_41: i've only seen the last couple of years people lean into okay any contract sign i sign a 10-year deal

SPEAKER_19: with you for a hundred thousand a year i have a million in contracted revenue so now my contracted revenue number which was nine million is now ten now what are the chances you stick around for another nine years and 11 months i don't know what this does is it incentivizes the team of sales executives i think if you have an incentive if you show me an incentive i'll show you a result right i'll show an outcome this is not the incentive you want you don't want your team to start playing fun with numbers there's a pipeline report the pipeline report is how much is the contract's worth so now you've got sales people they have a pipeline report so there's a hundred possible customers i'm in

SPEAKER_41: active discussion with now lon and each one of them's worth a million dollars have a hundred million in pipeline and then there's uh the people who sign contracts and how much revenue that will generate uh this year okay great so now i can look at those two numbers a hundred million in contracts you signed one of them in the first quarter you signed one each quarter you signed four of the hundred so we know that a hundred million in pipeline results in four percent on average in closing so now we judge you 90 you have a four percent close rate so either those hundred million in the pipeline you didn't actually qualify qualify means they can afford the product it would be like me saying you know a bunch of people come on the lot and they look at the corvette and they all want

SPEAKER_46: to test drive it and they all look at and say they're interested in it and i convert

SPEAKER_289: four percent of them maybe the people that were there not for a chevy corvette they were there for

SPEAKER_290: a chevy i don't know what the volt i don't know what the lowest chevy is i'm i'm gonna be a driver

SPEAKER_41: corvette anyway putting that aside then you could look at the contracting so now you start getting into the fun with numbers on the contracted out you follow me here those four million dollar contracts

SPEAKER_46: are 40 million so now the sales executive when they go into their review and they want to get a raise or whatever i had a hundred million in pipeline it resulted in 40 million i'm closing 40 percent like you close four percent of the names you close 40 percent of the dollar value per year but actually you said you were going to have a billion dollars so you're still at four percent so people get into weird fun with numbers and then they start playing games to build the pipeline up or to build the

SPEAKER_21: contracted when in fact you actually need to know just how much money you're making every month that's why subscriptions are the truth the subscription business model it really does give you a center of gravity as an investor as a team as a board so just look at the monthly quarterly and yearly numbers of money into the bank account i go directly to the accounting firm so when we're on the board of companies and they're giving all these presentations say hey you know to somebody on the team make sure you talk to the accounting firm you know once a year once every six months if you can if they'll give you the contact info and just check the numbers check the numbers i'm trying to weigh jason the reporting

SPEAKER_01: which comes from two people dominic majority davis and marina timkin who are both very serious people and they're not they don't report frivolous things uh and the company's response so in this case one of the things that they covered was the misuse of customer logos essentially claiming customers that may not have been the right customers to claim for example zoom info uh used 11x and this is a quote from the company um well actually no they used it for basically it looks like a month and then 11x they trialed it and then oh it was a pilot there you go and then the 11x according to zoom info kept using their logo for at least four months on their site on uh in its ai dialer and sales calls and they spent four months demanding they stop they said and they're threatening legal

SPEAKER_00: action over this and then the company's response 11x said just to be fair here uh 11x said we have never claimed customers we did not have the customers named in the article paid for used our product for a period and then churned we regret not having better processes to remove logos from our website more

SPEAKER_01: promptly but they said uh that they told them over a multi-month period to stop doing this we spent the

SPEAKER_00: last four months demanding they stop displaying our logo and falsely counting us as a customer the spokesperson said so to me even if you're willing to go the carr stuff is just accounting nuance and maybe it's a little more aggressive but it's kind of inside the normal realm of normalcy to me that

SPEAKER_302: shows either incredibly poor internal organization or too much rule bending for my tastes

SPEAKER_44: the appearance of impropriety is impropriety i keep saying this on a range of subjects to people um just if it appears to be inappropriate it is just take that philosophy in line right i have to say it is

SPEAKER_12: hard as an outsider who knows nothing about these companies and has not been part of any of these interactions it's hard for me to believe that for four months somebody from zoom was angrily emailing any member of the team at 11x and that person didn't communicate to the website team hey pull this logo like that that to me is not a satisfying explanation on any level obviously they're in a slack room somebody sent that message this it was deliberate it wasn't just like oh we don't have

SPEAKER_306: a good process said another way if you can take the time to put the logo up you can take the time

SPEAKER_308: to take it down could take it down exactly so they had the procedure to put it up but they didn't

SPEAKER_310: have the procedure to take it down doesn't make sense to me doesn't make much sense doesn't cut

SPEAKER_170: doesn't yeah then there's air table which they also had on their site for a while air table

SPEAKER_82: told tech range it wasn't a customer and never gave 11x permission to use its logo air table conducted a quote very short trial of the product and yet as of march 21 11x was still claiming

SPEAKER_01: air table as a customer on its website so to me it's hard to say that all the accounting stuff should be obviated as a concern here because there seems to be a pattern of i would say lax management

SPEAKER_82: so i i guess what i'll just say is this everyone's going to give early stage startups a little bit of breathing room to be bullish to be enthusiastic to go fast to try stuff shout out people who are building stuff from the ground up but if your last round was 50 million i think andresen led it you're no longer a scrappy startup with one or two people you need to behave like a real company

SPEAKER_19: because you're almost a scale up at that point i mean just the fact that we've spent 15 minutes of it on this weekend startups and tech crunch wrote an article like is it really worth it to keep the logo up for whatever number of months and then just create the appearance of impropriety the founder whoever the ceo is has to be fired i mean just accountability wise we live in an age where there is no accountability i do think like there is something to be said for just owning your

SPEAKER_251: mistakes please just own your mistakes folks man it's just we made a mistake we'll do better i i just want somebody just will somebody say that anybody on any topic just say you know what yeah i could have done better i say it all the time i say it all the time i could have done better i would change my behavior there i would refine how i said something you know i'm always like trying to just be a little

SPEAKER_00: bit better anyway let's keep going here uh all right jason you want to talk about uh chinese ai there was a great piece in bloomberg uh digging into a a diffusion of ai technology across china in the wake of deep seek and also a a deluge of releases yeah from leading chinese companies in the tech space uh i had

SPEAKER_82: been keeping tabs on this but i hadn't actually quite noticed how many big things had dropped so just to give people a little taste in the last couple of weeks uh alibaba dropped qwq32b this was a new 32 billion parameter reasoning model that was quite good and cheap uh also ernie x1 and ernie 4.5 dropped from i think it was baidu that was a new reasoning model and a new foundation model and then uh alibaba's former subsidiary ant i'm not quite sure how the corporate ownership there works today

SPEAKER_00: uh they came out with a cool new way to train models more inexpensively and also use a mix of homegrown and nvidia chips to do so so the ai market in china is cooking yeah the way i would um

SPEAKER_317: you know position this is in the same week we have grok dropping stuff i think chat gpt dropped some

SPEAKER_12: image stuff that's going viral today they baked in uh basically like a dolly type image generator into the main chat gpt so you can request images right from the main interface all right they're

SPEAKER_170: doing them in this example oh okay go ahead i have an example of jason and i so i'll bring it up hey look at that so i uploaded a picture of a still from twist to test this out and uh you guys are the

SPEAKER_15: film guys studio ghibli ghibli thank you there it's miyazaki they the princess mononoke spirited away

SPEAKER_18: question are they paying studio ghibli for the rights to this opportunity i'm sure they are not i'm

SPEAKER_182: sure i don't know i mean this is so such a copy this is if it's studio ghibli's iconic style i

SPEAKER_21: assumed that they're making money from it that was my assumption all right that is i i don't have

SPEAKER_10: i don't think there's a lot of basis for that assumption i don't think i've heard about a licensing deal and i honestly feel like miyazaki would have put the kibosh on a license yes i think

SPEAKER_12: that's absolutely correct he's not an ai fan i think this is a lawsuit then uh and one that they

SPEAKER_19: will win because an iconic style like this that confuses the user i'm the user here i know studio ghibli my my kids have watched their movies sure i know that this is something that people have made

SPEAKER_41: money from in the past there are people who've made like a south park character generator and i

SPEAKER_343: south park released that themselves so you can in fact copyright an iconic style you can copyright that

SPEAKER_345: well we're going to find out in the court of law but i will say though that i did do jason a little bit dirty because it made him look like a grandfather it does yes it is what it is it

SPEAKER_309: doesn't have to be perfect right now but i do think they should pretty good i mean it's recognizable

SPEAKER_41: in that style for sure why wouldn't they pay them as for a license and have an exclusive why wouldn't you reach out to them say hey we want to do this it would be a business opportunity if they

SPEAKER_104: for every time they do this i think studio ghibli should get like a buck or 10 cents

SPEAKER_353: it's like 10 cents yeah i think i think their argument would be how is this different from an

SPEAKER_12: artist watching their movies and then teaching themselves how to draw like that because an artist

SPEAKER_317: doing it is going to not be doing it at scale and not confusing the public um and then this is an

SPEAKER_46: opportunity for studio ghibli to make money from their ip so derivative works and ip like this it should be uh the opportunity should be given to the ip holder so if you made it one that was disney princess you know um then the disney princess opportunity should be disney's i think we would all

SPEAKER_21: agree uh yeah of course and here to make a twink ghibli yeah so i i i shared this relatively

SPEAKER_01: whimsical tweet from sam altman just to point out that he is very aware of the trend so it's not like this is something that open ai is trying to like pretend isn't happening i mean in fact his

SPEAKER_46: is his avatar on x now yes now he has studio ghibli no i think he paid for it this is the exact same as using scar joe's voice it is literally the exact same you're you're taking somebody's ip like um you know uh michael buffer owns his catchphrase what is it um are you ready to rumble or something like that let's get ready to rumble let's get ready to rumble yeah let's protected ip like he's it's his brand he owns it uh now i can say let's get ready to rumble here describing his thing or i can make a joke about it on saturday night live but if i started doing it at the beginning of every nba game or the beginning of any episode here i should pay uh some license to him

SPEAKER_19: for that since he did take the time to trademark it uh you can't trademark styles uh so i think that they paid for this if they didn't they should well well we'll find out i i don't see any news about

SPEAKER_366: that exact point but i guarantee i guarantee studio ghibli will be in touch with them uh let's um just

SPEAKER_19: talk a little bit about chinese um the pace at which they're going yes there's no reason for an american to use any of these um products coming out of china because their security concerns

SPEAKER_41: and they're not hosted and easy to use and you have a hosted free version you can use anytime called gemini or grok or chat gpt so the fact that they're copying stuff at an incredible pace and doing some of their own innovations let's give them credit for that it doesn't really matter all that much it just shows that everybody all at once is making apps in like in the previous thing or everybody all at once is making websites or everybody all at once is making movies we should expect that um the question becomes at some point will they with these free options if they are flooded free open source with the mit you know whatever license license will they then have downward pressure

SPEAKER_19: on pricing so i don't see americans going and using these things because like who's going to go seek

SPEAKER_104: them out or whatever but i do see them creating downward pressure because if you're a developer and i did see a developer saying this in a forum recently why would i pay this amount for this many

SPEAKER_41: tokens from chat gpt if i could install this on five m4 minis or i could buy two nvidia cards and run it on a local pc ah so this is where you do start to see downward pressure on pricing i think some of these models will be good enough to do things like let's say the studio ghibli thing studio ghibli would partner with chat gpt or their team would pay to use gemini's you know backend or an aws or an azure version of this but if somebody who's a developer at studio ghibli says you know i can set this up and stand it up for ourselves on an open source server here and we can do it for a hundred grand instead of giving a million dollars a year in licensing fees or whatever to pick your

SPEAKER_46: hosted version and we can save the 900 000 here we go and as derek is saying in our chat room we do this live three days a week for those of you listening to the pod and you're part of the replay gang in the pod you know uh derek says hey age of abundance and that's what's happened there is another corollary

SPEAKER_343: to this uh type in um if you don't mind uh we'll pull up xiaomi's website which i think yeah i don't know where to find it i think it might be mi.global um okay um now xiaomi makes incredible vacuums

SPEAKER_379: electric toothbrushes scooters camping lanterns have fun going through their website yeah this is insane like go to lifestyle for a second air compressors okay sunglasses i'll just do this live routers lifestyle printers hair clippers scales massage guns anything sunglasses this is what chinese

SPEAKER_182: companies do uh just like sony might if you go to their massage gun page did you know xiaomi who used to make your android phone has massage guns okay that's like the vera gun that i use that's incredible shout out to them awesome gun and they just knocked it off now are some people going to buy these in china of course i would like you to now it's not on their website i don't know why but type in xiaomi su 7 ultra yeah i know i know where we're going with this su7 ultra well the wikipedia paid for the su7 show

SPEAKER_393: people what we're working with here i'm gonna pull it up now and you're going to be it's not just

SPEAKER_19: camping gear or massage guns lawn or smartphones the ambition of chinese companies has been unleashed and if you go look at this car um this xiaomi uh su7 car it's a luxury um version of the porsche

SPEAKER_164: i forgot what porsche named their four-door uh not the panamera is it the other one is the panamera okay you're right yeah it's not the suv this is like a four-door sports car people are losing their

SPEAKER_19: mind about xiaomi's cars they're making a range of cars now this is a phone company let me say that again xiaomi auto xiaomi auto which is xiaomi ev.com we pull that up which people know

SPEAKER_44: is spelled x-i-a-o-m-i i'm gonna let long long pull that up while i just point out that the su7 ultra

SPEAKER_01: we just showed on screen uh opens at 530 000 rmb which is about 73 000 usd which is which is not that

SPEAKER_104: much for a car this is a 300 000 car in america if you were to you know buy it uh this we're getting

SPEAKER_19: to like a level of oh my lord i don't know that's and that's the that's the ultra i don't know what

SPEAKER_21: the su7 goes for these cars are being sold at some de minimis amount of profit right um and uh obviously

SPEAKER_46: the other main company in this regard is um byd and the su7 starts at 30 grand usd there we go okay thank

SPEAKER_21: you um here we go this is like next level this is a phone company 10 years ago is now making cars that will rival germany america and japan and these cars are cheaper i don't know that they're better

SPEAKER_251: they're certainly not safer but if you are living in brazil or you know in germany or in africa or

SPEAKER_19: singapore maybe this is the right car for you maybe this is half the price and so the copying now is getting faster and better we had tk uh travis from uber on all in a couple weeks ago and he was talking like he said i can't understand i can't overstate how quickly this all occurs and that was his experience 10 years ago building uber in china they can copy so fast and so great that um they will create downward pressure which then of course makes more choices for customers

SPEAKER_407: and you're not going to need as much money i just want to say to underscore jason's point about deep seeks uh really rapid rise in the ai game to make the point about xiaomi getting into cars i put together a timeline just for our notes but i'm going to share here because it's pertinent so uh i didn't realize it was only back in last may that deep seek dropped v2 of its foundation model family then

SPEAKER_82: september was two and a half december was v3 that was the real kind of breakout moment for deep seek i think in the ai community then they dropped r1 their reasoning model in january that's the one that blew up globally in march they dropped an improved v3 and r2 supposed to be coming quickly so inside of

SPEAKER_407: one year we could go from deep seek v2 to r2 that's insane and i think it's very bullish not for the price of ai models not for the price of ai inference you can charge commercially but for the impact of ai technology writ large and if i was a startup that used ai models in my tech i would be stoked because everything i build is going to get five percent better a month for the next couple of years and that's just a great technology tailwind to have underpinning your products um i want to jump to

SPEAKER_156: this israeli vc uh gilly ronnan yeah i think it's probably uh i'll look it up it's probably gilly

SPEAKER_19: renan that sounds right he um i guess was an investor in whiz he was on invest like the best a

SPEAKER_44: really cool podcast that i've been on from patrick o'shaughnessy uh and he explains um really how unique whiz was because they were selling into we talked about sales earlier in the program how they were selling into four different personas and that those four personas were actually one let's just do 30 seconds from uh gilly when you sell a product you are going to face four personas the person that

SPEAKER_421: has the pain point that has the problem the person who has the budget the person that has the authority the person that would actually use the product now as a startup if those four personas map into a single person in real life that's a mega heat okay um so we were to look at something like um i

SPEAKER_19: don't know hubspot right it's a marketing solution you might have a marketer on your team who is on the front line who does email marketing and builds your mailing list and does you know uh marketing online

SPEAKER_46: and they need a crm okay they have to go to their cmo who has the budget and say hey can i buy hubspot and i buy hubspot and they got to do a little justification there then the cmo has to either have the authority or they may have to go to the cfo i'm sorry um then the person with the

SPEAKER_19: budget has to go to a person who is the it manager who manages saas software at the company and say hey can we install this solution and put our customers data in them oh the customer data is already in these three different places so yes but we've got to build a bridge to do that and then finally uh who's going to actually use this well there might be another person who is in the sales team

SPEAKER_41: who has to use hubspot to send out their mailing to come join a webinar right could be four different

SPEAKER_19: people have to get involved now what he says here is when you have a mega hit a mega hit um and i've never heard anybody frame it this way so that's why i wanted to bring this up a mega hit in uh the business like wiz is that the person who has the pain point was this security person the

SPEAKER_41: developer of some type who also had the budget to buy it because they were the one installing it point three and they were going to use it every day and that means the product ramped very quickly we were talking about wiz on this program and on all in a week or two ago and just saying how did they ramp so fast you guys can pull up the chart of the revenue wiz's revenue over the years we were

SPEAKER_46: stunned when we talked about it here alex of just how quickly wiz had gotten to a hundred million and whatever it had gotten to this is an incredible insight that i have never seen framed in you know

SPEAKER_41: my 30 years in the business that i have heard of course you have to get consensus in the sales process and there's multiple people but i've never heard of like oh there's a product that boom you can just

SPEAKER_46: buy it is the equivalent in consumer we see this all the time you need to get a ride you download uber and you buy it now in some cases a kid might need to get a ride so they have to get their parents involved and get their credit card to set it up so there's two people involved in the decision you do see that in consumer sometimes yeah kid wants disney plus parent has to sign up for it yeah maybe there's a technical person in the family who has to put it on the tv so you have to get three people in the

SPEAKER_21: family to you know one person's good at installing it but there's a very interesting framing that i'd

SPEAKER_01: never seen and here's the chart of the wiz revenue how this is and then we'll go to sakura and essentially just shows them ramping i think they did a hundred million arr in 18 months and then they scaled to i think it was a half billion and they're looking to hit a billion this year in arr and then they

SPEAKER_82: were going to go public before before sundar pachai ceo of google somehow thought it was the right thing to do to remove what would have been the hottest ipo of like the last 10 years

SPEAKER_166: and instead bought the company for a paltry 32 billion dollars ruining my fun and taking away

SPEAKER_21: my good newsletter fodder thanks pull up the um fastest to 100 million it's in the slack chat room

SPEAKER_343: got another really good image to take a look at you know people were really amazed by how quickly

SPEAKER_46: uh shopify and slack had you know gotten to a hundred million in revenue and then whiz just boop straight

SPEAKER_343: up i think there'll be a moment in time where there'll be a consumer product that goes right to a

SPEAKER_432: hundred million in a day or uh yeah we're getting closer to that yeah this this is sas products i

SPEAKER_19: wonder like if somebody were to release a really cool product like tinder or i don't know chess.com

SPEAKER_41: all at once as opposed to iterating and it just caught fire went viral it'll it'll happen i mean i

SPEAKER_12: think we've seen exponential growth like that all the time like i remember the era when it was like posting a video and will a video get a million views in one day and like now that's it get a

SPEAKER_437: million views in uh 45 minutes if you play your cards right and you are a k-pop act or something

SPEAKER_01: let's just go to show how much the bar is changing i mean the old you know have a million arr raise a

SPEAKER_177: series a just feels about as archaic as a buggy whip now one thing i would add is gilly does say if

SPEAKER_10: you watch that whole clip uh that like not every successful company needs like all four of those

SPEAKER_12: personas to map onto one person it's just when it does it's like this magic formula like there was

SPEAKER_407: one guy people talk a lot about icps or like ideal customer profiles yes and when i was at crunchbase

SPEAKER_01: we actually had a number of different icps at the time that they were kind of going after a sales

SPEAKER_82: perspective um is it possible to have like too many icps in question because it feels like in the whiz example they discovered that they felt they had four but they really had one and that was a

SPEAKER_317: turbo charging element so how far down should you boil that yeah so you the concept between the ideal customer profile is that that's one single okay got it and that there are other customer profiles of

SPEAKER_46: course so for something like crunchbase people didn't know this but i had built that business

SPEAKER_445: like 20 years ago we called it venture there was venture source venture wire and we did venture

SPEAKER_21: reporter and we would sell for 500 bucks a year the ability to go into this database

SPEAKER_46: and see all of the people who had raised money in the management team and we did a little interesting thing we had a v card v card was this like thing you could click on it would add it to your address book so this is 20 years ago i did 25 years ago this in 2000 i created this little database and we had sold like a thousand people had paid us five hundred dollars you had a half million dollars in revenue for it um and it would turned out sales people all wanted this and what they would do is they would sit there all day and we told them they could download up to 20 v cards a day for 500 bucks and there were people who bought four of these gave it to four different sales people and they

SPEAKER_19: and they hit the limit every day including weekends and they're like can we just buy the entire database we're like no we don't want you spamming everybody in here but people were doing it to get the email

SPEAKER_41: addresses so sales people for crunchbase is one of the ways they sell it if you were to pull up crunchbase and they probably have a sales page or they if you just typed in crunchbase for salespeople or account executives there's probably a landing page that sells them on it and it says hey you can find people who've just raised money etc and then there's vcs and then there's people at corporate development offices so you work for corporate yeah so finding new prospects yeah there's

SPEAKER_46: like literally a landing page for this customer yes i'm gonna guess oh yeah here we go for prospecting

SPEAKER_451: for investors for market research enriching your own database and yeah so exactly what you said

SPEAKER_46: so you know one of these is the ideal customer profile uh and that would be the one that you go after first and you spend most of your time on and then of course you go down the line right people the ideal customer profile for uber black was and for uber at the early days was a ceo or a vc a finance person somebody with a six-figure salary who traveled that was your ideal customer profile you get the ceo vc who does two trips a month they need to get picked up at the airport those are big ticket items and you know they're going to be driven to the airport driven from the airport and their destination to their hotel driven from their hotel back to the airport and from the airport at their home back to their homes four rides of 150 bucks each 600 every month seventy two hundred dollars a year just for that one monthly travel that doesn't count when they go to dinners and want to have a glass of wine so that's another 50 of those you know so 100 rides there and those are 50 rides so that's another you start to get into like how much is that ceo worth a lot worth a lot you know they're they're spending literally two thousand a month they're

SPEAKER_458: worth 25 000 a year minimum that's a prius sorry i think everything now comes in prius size

SPEAKER_71: 30 but yeah it's close to a price you're right it's upwards of a priest so that's what you're

SPEAKER_460: doing with ideal customer profiles we should talk about founder friday before we get out of here for

SPEAKER_12: today we've got the founder friday bracket uh ready to go we have 16 companies so just to give everybody a a little bit of background here we're doing a founder friday city based bracket march madness competition we had founder friday events happening all over in cities around the globe not just america

SPEAKER_10: okay uh 16 of these cities picked a winning startup from their community those 16 are now competing in the this weekend startups look at this march pitch madness uh bracket and i've got uh i've got a little

SPEAKER_12: bit of info i've got the log line for all 16 of these companies wow look at this we have houston boston

SPEAKER_76: austin quincy new york philadelphia zurich zurich versus florianopolis brazil brazil brazil sydney

SPEAKER_241: arlington chicago denver yuroban armenia armenia look shut up san francisco and portsmouth and

SPEAKER_10: portsmouth they're very excited in portsmouth i saw a few tweets from them today they're fired up

SPEAKER_19: we're going to see each of these pitches for two minutes on this week in startups and then i pick

SPEAKER_10: the winner i've got i've got all the videos so if you want to watch the pitches on friday's show we

SPEAKER_42: absolutely can i also have just like a very quick description of all the companies if you'd rather do

SPEAKER_10: it that way well i think the way to do it is these are two minute pitches we've got that not everyone said we've got two minute pitches from i believe 14 of the 16. nice so what we should do

SPEAKER_39: is on friday's show monday show wednesday show friday's show four shows 16 we just have to do

Chamath Palihapitiya: two brackets a show or something like that to get to the next round so maybe we could go we could do

SPEAKER_440: two match-ups per show and that would be that would take us four four episodes yeah so we do four match-ups

SPEAKER_343: per show two minutes each four times two is eight minutes eight minutes of deliberation we're doing

SPEAKER_01: 15 minutes per show why don't we have lon and i each assign one of us one of the two companies that's going up against each other and then why don't we also help kind of pitch them and then jason

SPEAKER_440: can kind of but one issue with that is monday and wednesday show i will not be here because i'm driving

SPEAKER_12: to that's okay i can do it with alex yeah yeah i trust you two to do it in my scope i mean we could

SPEAKER_19: we could also try to go faster we could dedicate a half hour to it and do eight of them and just

SPEAKER_46: boom get through it monday wednesday and then have the excitement for friday or something so why

SPEAKER_435: don't we um start monday okay today's today's wednesday so we'll take friday off and then we'll start this monday next time okay we have friday we have friday off no i mean we we're doing a

SPEAKER_10: show on friday we won't do this bit on friday well we could start on friday maybe and we'll see

SPEAKER_21: how much show we have let's get around yeah so let's start friday we'll just get started immediately

SPEAKER_46: this is great fun we could do this you know twice a year or whatever yeah all these companies are getting a great promotion go to founder founder fridays dot tech is our website what is founder

SPEAKER_41: fridays you get six founders around a table no more than six i'm locking this in it has to be six

SPEAKER_46: going forward and then you have to start a new pod so you could have multiple pods but i want a leader per pod so let's just make sure we communicate this with ray who's managing with us and whoever maddie and uh corinne from our team or i think are doing this as well we want to lock it into six always six we know that's what works because six people can go around the table and talk for 10 minutes about their startup their wins and their losses their wins and fails that's the format of a founder friday you can do it every friday you can do it every other friday but we're doing first fridays is what we want you to commit to with six founders you could start with two the format is it has to be this you go around a table you talk about your wins and your fails one or two minutes for

SPEAKER_21: each then you have the remaining seven minutes in your 10 minute allotment for the other five people to give you feedback on your wins and your fails i think the best way to do it is to go around the

SPEAKER_46: table two minutes each wins and fails wins it fails wins it fails everybody writes that then anybody in the six you go around the six again they ask people and they give their best advice to the other five people pick one of them that you can give great advice to so for example lon let's say you

SPEAKER_74: had a startup and you had a fail give me a typical fail uh i uh you know i we our runway is uh down and i didn't let go of any people so now i'm uh behind the eight ball got it you're running out

SPEAKER_21: of runway perfect let's say you have a fail alex what would your family i did not properly manage

SPEAKER_345: my cyber security risk and i just leaked half my customers information thanks to a leaky aws

SPEAKER_46: database thing perfect okay so you got a cyber security she got a runway issue now i'm in year

SPEAKER_21: three as an entrepreneur i got hacked and i had less runway i say after we go around the first 10 minutes you know one and a half two minutes each i say you know what i have a cyber security expert who helped me and we did and i hired this crisis pr firm here's how we handled it i'll put you in touch with them you take out your laptop you go do the intro right then and there boom you've now taken something that's really hard for alex then lon says i don't have a lack of runway and say well how many employees you have you have seven great uh wanting to put four of them onto an hourly basis for 10 hours a week each starting next week two weeks from now you give them a little bit of runway and you tell them hey i can only keep you for 10 hours a week is that okay if not i understand and then you've extended your runway from two months now to seven and now you have the time you'll hit break even and

SPEAKER_118: then you can raise money i did this it's hard to do and you get that encouragement that's what i'm

SPEAKER_19: looking to happen here if you want to sponsor a pod as a lawyer accountant cloud company you go to the founderfridays.tech site you pick what city you want uh you'll wind up on river river is our platform we're using to do this if you have a podcast or a community you want to build i think somebody's

SPEAKER_31: going to instead of taking a podcast and building a community about it i think somebody's going to

SPEAKER_19: just start by building a community i think somebody will be like i want to create a community of vibe coders and they create a vibe coding community on river i'm not going to do this i don't have time but you know ours is for founders who have existing companies so start a founder friday chapter has to be six people has to be one hour you have to report back the reward you get is you get to be on the program so we're going to start having also cities come on the program every two weeks and talk about their biggest lessons so lon i think this should be a pre-produced package they can either come on live or we can just have them do a video where they say you know hey wanted to let you know these were the three biggest challenges we had and here's how we handled them and we just play that video for a minute and then we respond to it or they can just give it to us in text and we respond to it or they can come on the show have three founders come on the show they explain their problems and how they solved

SPEAKER_343: each other's problems but i want to kind of i want to know the top one percent of the audience that's

SPEAKER_499: the goal of more excitement to come more excitement to come i love a bracket i have my uh my college

SPEAKER_474: women's basketball brackets so filled in so i'll do another one lon thank you for putting this together

SPEAKER_10: yeah yeah yeah and we really i mean we put a lot of thought to do it we this bracket is seated like we

SPEAKER_440: didn't put the numbers on it we don't want to hurt any feelings but we really thought out how this is

SPEAKER_46: organized to create the best competition let's also put this in the docket at the top of the docket so people can see it this week in startups.com docket you can do the docket along with us also loss uh launch accelerators 34th cohort is starting in mid-april and we're still taking applications you can apply at launch accelerator.co launch accelerator dot co it's going to be in the notes how does it work just like white combinator tech stars or any other accelerator we give you 125k we work with you for 14 weeks we introduce you to hundreds of investors we help you with your pitch we help you with your growth we tell you how startups are made you get exposure to a bunch of speakers and uh hopefully you raise money of the people who want to raise money 60 70 80 percent of people who intend to raise money raise money within uh in the accelerator or within like six months of graduating so we have an incredible hit rate of people being able to raise money because we accept people who are kind of trending that way 5k a month in revenue 25k a month in revenue product in market product market fit heavy light somewhere between those two and then we help you grow it we introduce

SPEAKER_19: you to founders we have something called the whisper network which is a database we created where you as a founder can come in and say i would like an introduction to this person or i want to sort the database by investors um who invest in consumer products versus sas or sas versus consumer and marketplaces you click who you want to um an intro to and we automatically send those and we track how we're doing that i was inspired by alexis ohanian who created cerebro where he tracks all the work he does for his startups um now we don't track every tweet we do whatever but we're just tracking how many intros we can do for you we probably do on average for each of these accelerator companies 100 or 200 intros these are warm intros they uh turn into meetings often and then sometimes meetings if you've got a compelling product will turn into investment our mission is to support founders

SPEAKER_343: and inspire innovation thank you lon thank you alex follow uh lon's l-o-n-s on twitter follow alex and uh unfortunately i have one more character 20 25 less efficient than my guys here i'm at jason

SPEAKER_505: how dare you i blame your parents disappointing and should have been named bob all right everybody

SPEAKER_21: uh we will see you next time bye bye bye