SPEAKER_00: Well, welcome everyone to the public demo day for our Launch Accelerator Cohort 33. Welcome to our guest investor judges, our syndicate members, and of course, our live stream audience on YouTube. For those of you who are new to this, our format, our founders will pitch for exactly two minutes. We time them and then I'll take a question for each founder from our guest investor judges. At the end, I'll ask our judges to give us their top three of the 11. And we will also ask our syndicate members who have joined us to vote in a poll for their top choice of the day. Before we get started, I do want to take a moment to thank our partners for the accelerator. That's both Fenwick and Silicon Valley Bank. We really love working with you for these programs. And to kick us off, we'd love for our guest judges to introduce themselves. Thank you so much. And Gary, we'll

SPEAKER_04: start with you. Hey there, Gary Benaroff from Mute Ventures. We are a pre-seed and seed stage commerce fund that invests in anything that removes friction from a transaction. Nice to see you all.

SPEAKER_08: Amazing. Thank you for joining us. And Nadia.

SPEAKER_10: Hi, Nadia Gale, currently senior vice president of strategy at Hitachi and independent investor.

SPEAKER_06: Awesome. Thank you so much. And Sandy.

SPEAKER_14: Hey, everyone. Sandy Cass from Red Swan Ventures. We are a fund focus on consumer driven businesses

SPEAKER_18: at the pre-seed and seed stage. Awesome. Thank you so much. And Stu, over to you.

SPEAKER_21: Hi, everyone. I'm Stu. I run Cough Drop Capital. We are a pre-seed and seed fund, mostly focused on B2B software. Awesome. Thank you, Stu. And Tyler.

SPEAKER_25: Hey, everyone. Tyler Crown with Unusual Ventures. We're a seed stage focus fund led by former founders.

SPEAKER_27: Great to see you all. Awesome. Great to see you. And okay, to keep us on track, we'll get started. Our first founder, we have David from Abacus.

SPEAKER_30: All right. Can everyone see me? Can everyone hear me?

SPEAKER_31: Yes, we can hear you. All right. I'll count you in. Three, two, go.

SPEAKER_32: Okay. I'm two Red Bulls in, so there's no telling what I might say on this call, but we're Abacus, enterprise virtual assistant for regulated industries. What's the problem we're trying to solve? The problem is regulated industries want LLMs, but cloud solutions are too risky. So think about banks, insurers, and credit unions. They want their language models that are completely under their control. That's where Abacus comes in. It's the first on-prem AI assistant built for regulated industries. Just to level set your expectations, we have 125,000 in monthly revenue and nine enterprise clients. And these are some of our clients. You might recognize these names that I have here on the screen. So why do our clients use this and what is Abacus? I want you to think of Abacus as three core components and one complete platform. The first is the virtual assistant that runs on-prem. Think of a chat GPT-like interface that gives employees at these institutions access to information and policies. The second is a decentralized indexer. Our indexer indexes over 500 data sources. This could be a company in and of itself, and many times it is. So the difference between our indexer and our competitors is our indexer goes out to where that

SPEAKER_37: information is today. It doesn't require any change in the company's setup or where they store policies

SPEAKER_32: or procedures, or it's decentralized. The third is Abacus Studio. Abacus gives you complete control over the responses that Abacus gives. So at any time, if Abacus gives a response you don't like or you want to adjust, you can override those responses within Abacus Studio. So it gives you complete control over the LLM model and how it responds. This is a breakdown of our monthly revenue. I mentioned the $125,000. That's down here. That's our recurring revenue. And then we have non-recurring revenue of about $1.2 million for a total of $2.1 million. Now you might be asking, David, how could that be? And here's the answer. We charge a monthly subscription of $10,000 to $20,000 per month and a one-time installation fee of $250,000 to $350,000. This is our monthly traction from Jan to December of last year. So we're doing terrifically well. And this is our team, my co-founder, Lisa. I say this with love and her permission, twice my age and twice as smart. And this is our fantastic team below. Thank you so

SPEAKER_27: much for listening. I appreciate your time. Awesome. Thank you so much, David, for kicking us off.

SPEAKER_00: And because we have 11 companies today, we'll just take one question per company. And just a reminder to our syndicate members, there is a Q&A box available. So if you have a question for a founder, please post it in there and take the company that you're asking. And then founders, keep your eye to

SPEAKER_27: answer those questions, please. All right. And we will flip over to Gary for your question for David.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, this is a relatively new space for me. So I'm curious if you could share what the

SPEAKER_47: competitive landscape looks like. Good question, Gary. Everyone and their mothers competing in this

SPEAKER_37: space. But what makes us different is we have a platform solution. So those three components that I mentioned, we have the decentralized indexer, we have the on-prem LLM, and then the response control. So I want you to focus on those three components as our differentiator between our other competitors, right? So a lot of those names are going to be very large and the ones that you would expect. But our solution, I think, for the types of customers that we're going

SPEAKER_18: after provides that end-to-end solution. Awesome. Thank you so much, David. And over to our next founder, we have Paul from InviteJet. Can we hear you, Paul?

SPEAKER_27: Can you hear me? Yep, we hear you. I'll count you in. Three, two, go.

SPEAKER_55: Hi, my name is Paul and I'm the co-founder of InviteJet, a marketing platform allowing brands to engage and convert customers by monetizing the calendar. Meet Jenny. She's a fitness influencer who's been waiting for Crossrope to have a sale on a weighted jump rope. They recently emailed her, but she gets 120 emails a day and never saw it. Andy's in charge of marketing at Crossrope and a real customer. His recent email campaign had a 30% open rate, meaning like Jenny, 70% of customers didn't see the email. Andy decided to give InviteJet a shot. And because Andy has an established email relationship with Jenny, he can leverage the power of InviteJet to make sure she doesn't miss out on the promotion. After he signs up and creates his first campaign, he simply adds the information for what will be displayed on the invite, schedules the campaign date, chooses his audience, and sends the campaign. Jenny gets a calendar invite and even gets a mobile push notification in real time and gets another reminder when the campaign launches. This allows Crossrope to be surgical and get the promotion in front of customers in the moment that it actually matters. Andy did a holdout test against email and the results are shocking. Even though Crossrope sent out 30,000 less invites than emails, his InviteJet campaign doubled the open rate, generated four times the conversion rate, and almost doubled revenue. 8 million invites later, we see that calendar invites are outperforming email metrics across all benchmarks. And we're doing this with some of the top e-commerce brands in the game. The average monthly contract of these brands is 250 per month and growing, putting us at over six figures in ARR with a clear line of sight to a million in ARR in the next 12 months. We've proved the power of calendar marketing and have built the core e-commerce integrations. We'll continue to expand our automations and integrations as well as open up a third-party API to allow other industries to monetize the calendar. My co-founder and I are repeat SaaS founders with multiple exits and over a decade of experience in our beachhead market. Our advisors include ex-Gmail and a former founder with a SaaS exit to MailChimp. And as of this week, we have a signed term sheet with a lead investor. We're InviteJet, a new way to drive engagement and revenue with calendars. Thank you.

SPEAKER_18: Awesome. Thank you, Paul, and great job. Over to our investors. Nadia, your question for Paul.

SPEAKER_60: Hi. Similar question to last one. Can you talk about the competitors? I get the sense that you guys

SPEAKER_55: are in a very crowded space. Thank you for the question, Nadia. As far as calendar marketing is concerned. As of right now, there are no other players competing who are monetizing the calendar. Now, the ones that we are going up against now are really the ones that brands are utilizing within various marketing channels, so email, SMS. When it comes to calendar marketing, we're the first. Any of the other competitors, quote unquote, that would have any similar tech would be using that for webinar events and invites. But for the most part, those do not include bulk sending that go directly to the calendar and show up as tentative. You have to go through friction points where people have to add it to the calendar. So we're the only one that actually puts it on the calendar alone.

SPEAKER_27: Thank you. Sure. Thank you for the question. Awesome. Thank you so much. And over to our next founder, we have Luke from PodEngine. Can we hear you, Luke? Hey, how's it going? Hello. All right.

SPEAKER_18: Pull up your slides. Perfect. We'll go full screen there. Yep. We're good. Okay. And I'll count you in.

SPEAKER_70: Three, two, go. Hi, we're PodEngine, bringing podcast marketing intelligence to every business in the world. Meet John, a real customer who's struggling to market his gum brand to millennials. Even though 80% of John's customers trust podcasts over traditional media, like millions of other businesses, his brand has never sponsored, appeared on, or been mentioned on a single podcast. PodEngine creates a profile for John, including search strategies modeled off what real agencies charge thousands of dollars for today. John was surprised when one of his strategies uncovered face yoga. New to John, this subculture is all about building a healthy jawline, so it's perfect for his health-conscious gum brand. PodEngine tracks almost a million podcasts every day. We generate our own transcriptions and our own AI-powered analysis. John is assigned an AI agent that immediately begins using our filters and full transcript search to find the perfect podcast. Because PodEngine knows everything about John and everything about the podcast, it offers a quick opinion on every result. John was amazed when his AI agent used our transcript library to quote a podcast host on the health benefits of chewing gum. And finally, John's agent prepares him for every interview with a fully custom report and is always available for questions. After two weeks, John has two interviews, three podcasts to sponsor, and like you, now knows about face yoga. Last year, podcasting was the fastest growing marketing channel, and the election was even dubbed the podcast election. Yet this market's still dominated by expensive and manual services. We will capitalize on this podcasting and AI revolution. And to reach 100 million in revenue, we'll build fully autonomous AI agents that lower costs and bring podcast intelligence to everyone. To get there, our Beachhead strategy targets agencies with AI-native guest booking, sponsorships, analytics, and media monitoring with plans starting at $500 per month. In the last two months, our customer count has doubled and our monthly recurring revenue has tripled. And since launching in Q4, some of the biggest podcast agencies are so in love with PodEngine that they now only use us to power their business. We're serial builder entrepreneurs, and I had a seven-figure exit from my last business to a Fortune 1000 company. Thank you. We're PodEngine.

SPEAKER_27: Awesome. Great job, Luke. Thank you. And just a reminder to our syndicate members, we do have the Q&A box available. So if you have a question for a founder, please post in there and founders keep an eye out on that Q&A box. All right, we'll flip over to our investors. Sandy,

SPEAKER_12: your question for Luke. Yeah, thanks for the pitch. It seems like your technology would have value to a lot of different parties. You gave the example of kind of the entrepreneur and the brand,

SPEAKER_13: but I imagine the podcasters themselves might find value in your tools or like an investor like myself, the ability to get notifications when a company is mentioned in a podcast. Curious kind of how you landed on the, I guess, going after the agencies first. And have you thought about other potential customers that you might go after second? Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. Thank you,

SPEAKER_70: Sandy. So, um, yeah, there's tons of opportunities, but we decided to focus on agencies first just because they have the biggest problem with the biggest need and they have dollars that they're ready to spend. Um, and so by learning, working with the agencies, learning from the agencies, we're really building the platform and the agentic solutions. So they're getting easier and easier for people to use. And the eventual plan is we'll move down market and then folks like yourself, uh, other businesses, they can just log in and they can just use it and it will be fully automated. On the media monitoring side, same exact deal. We have the agencies are using it. We're learning,

David Friedberg: we're improving, and then pretty soon we're going to open it up to everybody. Thank you.

SPEAKER_27: Awesome. Thank you so much. You can pull down those slides. And next up we have Boudica from Layer Next. Can we hear you, Boudica? Yeah. Can you hear me, guys? Yep. We hear you. You're

SPEAKER_31: full screen. Amazing. I'll count you in three, two, go. Hi, everyone. My name is Boudica. I'm

SPEAKER_87: the CEO and co-founder of Layer Next. We built AI to run the CFO office. Imagine you are a CFO of a large vehicle service company. You need to understand what's going on my revenue. First, the root cause. Next, what can I do about it? This is where Layer Next is coming in. Layer Next runs root cause analysis with your both internal and external data. It also provides actionable strategies to mitigate those identified problems. Basically, Layer Next runs deep research on your data. This is an AI-generated strategy to boost revenue by 10%. First, AI discovered that customer dissatisfaction is the root cause for the revenue decline. More especially, long wait time and the price cycle of the tire service. Additionally, AI discovered that 10% stop reduction cause for the long wait time. Now, AI is proposing by adding seven more technicians to the tire service department can reduce the wait time by 33%. Before the Layer Next, this CFO office didn't have this level of visibility about their business. We charge $250 per month plus initial setup fee. All traditional BI tools only show you what is happening right now with their dashboard and the report, but Layer Next shows you why it happened and also what can you do about it. Our initial go-to market only focus for transportation and logistic business. The reason is these businesses cannot attract Morgan Stanley level analysts, so we are here to fill the gap. Today, we are attracting customers by hosting events by educating the market. We launched in last year June and generating over 54,000 ARR and with the seven enterprise customers. We are growing month over month. Both me and my co-founder work on the London Stock Exchange algorithmic trading platform development and also we had exit from our previous startup race runner. That's it for today. We are Layer Next, strategic intelligence for

SPEAKER_18: business leader. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much, Boudica. And we will flip over to our investors.

SPEAKER_91: Stu, your question for Boudica. Yeah. Hey, really cool. Curious, what would unlock hypergrowth here? How can you grow faster? What do you think is slowing you guys down on that front?

SPEAKER_87: It's an interesting question, yes. Right now, the biggest problem is most organization doesn't have enough clean data, especially in this industry, because they are low tech. And when we go there, we have to do a lot of prep work for them. That's actually slowing us down. Yeah. Thank you for the question.

SPEAKER_18: Awesome. Thank you so much. And our next founder, we have Daniel from Bricks. Can we hear you? Yeah. Can you hear me? All right. Yeah, we hear you. Let's go full screen. Okay. And I'll count you in three, two, go. Hi, good morning. My name is Dan Fritz. I'm the

SPEAKER_97: co-founder of Bricks AI, an AI orchestration and workflow tool. Currently, what you've heard from the current past four companies, agents and AI taking over the world, or everywhere from companies looking to disrupt legacy software, to enterprises looking to build over 100 AI agents over the course of 2025. The problem is those building and deploying bespoke production-grade agents with the current tools available is challenging for development teams in enterprise. 8600 enterprises require tech stack upgrade to actually properly deploy these systems. This is where we come in. We're building the ultimate AI runtime for developers and enterprises alike. We build for a future of fully integrated production-grade agents into the world. Our bigger vision, though, is computers that build computers. The end-game piece of software that allows living, breathing code bases to execute as the LLM itself and build its own tools and functions and basically spin up entire back-ends and front-ends for users with the agents that correlate with that software. The next slide, you're going to see a custom agent integration in Google Sheets. What this does is it replaces the work of a $60,000 a year data analyst at a company. On the left-hand side, you're going to see the project-grade agent and the architecture behind it. On the right-hand side, you're going to see it actually executing within Google Sheets. So as you hit run, you're going to see it start executing all the charts, cleaning the data, building pivot tables, and executing the work of that person who would be doing this work manually. So as you can see, these systems can be extremely powerful, especially when they're bespoke and built specifically for that organization. Our goal is to empower every company in the world to build their future of agentic AI. Our traction will be 5.7 thousand users. We have $60,000 in revenue, 20,000 of which was closed in the past 30 days, and three customers paying $200 a month as small package users. Why we win is because we've been heads down focusing on what development teams truly need in order to build and deploy agentic systems. It's precision. Agents have been revisions since 2021. We're building much more than just an agentic playground, but the future of AI. Some may say the GitHub for AI. Our market is companies racing to adopt AI agents. It's driving huge demand of the market, and tools are necessary now to secure the future of LOMs. Our team is Jake and myself, and we're looking to scale in the next three months to a larger team of six people. But we have a strong team of advisors behind us, helping us navigate this deep tech landscape. Thank you.

SPEAKER_18: This is Bricks AI. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dan. And just a reminder to our founders, there's a few questions in the Q&A box, so please go over there to answer those questions. All right. And we'll flip over to Tyler, your question for Dan.

SPEAKER_101: Awesome, Dan. Great pitch. I'm curious how you think about longer term differentiation and winning in this market overall. Yeah. So long-term differentiation,

David Sacks: what it's going to be is we've actually, it's coined a unique term. It's code to action. So it's

SPEAKER_97: allowing code to be actually executed within the prompt engineering. What this is, is phase three of phase five of what we're building. I kind of hinted at in the middle of the pitch. What our real end game is, is essentially building the compiler for LOMs. So if somebody wants to execute as a generic non-developer, an end game system of building an entire backend in front of an application, as well as agents to manage that. So think of this as an autonomous system to build every piece of software that you would need to run in a company or an application. This is what we're building. We currently have a functional prototype of this. So right now in phase three, we're very focused on the agents. As we're building up that agentic portfolio in the database, we're able to execute stronger within that phase five approach. So our future is really, it's not building the workflow platform, but it's building software that builds software. It's a crazy thing to say out loud,

SPEAKER_98: but it's the future that's coming upon us. Great. Thank you. Of course.

SPEAKER_27: Awesome. Thank you so much. And moving along to our next founder, we have Parth from Prandtl Dynamics. Parth, can we hear you?

SPEAKER_107: Yep. Hello. Let me know if you can see this.

SPEAKER_31: Awesome. That is up. I'll count you in. Three, two, go.

SPEAKER_109: Good morning. We are Prandtl Dynamics and we protect against drones with sound. Traditional counter UAS systems cause collateral damage and are illegal to be used by the public. Our tech is non-lethal and legal. Drones are a growing threat from the New Jersey drones or the Canadian Olympic scandal. And as the countries armed with drones goes up, the need for a counter drone system also goes up. The current counter UAS market involves radio frequency jamming, lasers, or kinetic measures like bullets. These are either illegal to be used except for the military, cause collateral damage, are expensive, and are just generally inaccessible. So where do we fit in? We don't. Prandtl Dynamics has its specific acoustic defense technology. What sets us apart is the fact that we're safe and the fact that we're legal. Our story is we want $270,000 and diluted funding from the Canadian Department of Defense. We're featured on the Wall Street Journal and The Economist for the novelty of our technology. And this is how our tech works.

SPEAKER_111: We've shot drones down. We've taken them out of the sky and we've also disabled their cameras. We can put a system on a truck that works autonomously and it can find drones in the air using acoustics.

SPEAKER_114: Now we're diversifying out and developing technology which can be mounted on humans. The idea is to create kind of a bubble around the soldier so that drones cannot get close enough to launch an attack on that person in the field. There's the other variant which is also the rifle

SPEAKER_111: mounted system that we're developing. Now this is an attachment that you can add to your existing AR

SPEAKER_114: and send out a burst of sound which disables the drone mid-flight. At Prandtl Dynamics we're making

SPEAKER_111: technology for the military, law enforcement, commercial applications like hospitals, sports venues, concert arenas to protect against threats that we don't see in. Thank you for your time. We

SPEAKER_27: are Prandtl Dynamics. Awesome, thank you so much Parth. And we will go back around the horn to Gary,

SPEAKER_120: your question for Parth. God this one is so outside of my jurisdiction here but I'm going to try to have

SPEAKER_121: something thoughtful. It looks super interesting. I guess like what does the sales cycle look like

SPEAKER_04: and what does it go to market for for the people who are interested in buying this? Thanks for the

SPEAKER_109: question Gary and yeah that is a question that we have been working on recently just because of how niche the tech is and how niche the solution really is. So our strategy right now is revolved around government contracts, government stakeholders and commercial entities. Our first go to market involves certain demos coming up in this summer. We have demos planned worldwide including the US, UK and Canada. After those demos we expect to take in pre-orders and the cycle revolves around us creating a stable revenue base and having recurring revenue with a customer base by June of 2026. Great, thank you.

SPEAKER_27: Fantastic, thank you so much. And just a reminder Syndicate members if you have a question our Q&A box is available there for you. Amazing and we'll move on to our next founder we have Kiana from Indigo. You're way ahead of me, all right. Can you hear me all right? Yeah we hear you, awesome. I'll count you in.

SPEAKER_129: Three, two, go. Awesome, hello everybody. I'm Kiana co-founder and CEO of Indigo where we believe small teams can do big things in the age of AI. Our mission is to unlock AI's full potential without the complexity. We unify organizational data with advanced models and frameworks in a single no-code workspace because right now small teams love AI but they're stuck with fragmented tools resulting in lost knowledge, brand anarchy and a complete lack of executive visibility. So we built the AI workspace for teams. Everything, meetings, chats and AI interactions generates memory. This is like ChatGPT's memory but now for the entire org. So important details from meetings, Slack threads and emails never slip through the cracks. Let's dive into the product suite. First up is our data layer. We pull info from Slack, Notion, gmails, calendars and more into one searchable AI friendly knowledge base. Indigo's productivity suite is built on top of this data layer to enable powerful automations across a company's entire stack. Next are commands. Indigo's AI doesn't just chat, it executes. You can automatically generate on-brand marketing copy from product imagery for instance or turn live excel sheets into an investor update in seconds all in a simple no-prompt UI that every team member can use. We also handle meetings. Indigo turns call transcripts into summaries, tasks and follow-ups automatically generating actionable guidance for your team and delivering real-time insights for leaders and that's crucial in a remote first world. Through dozens of pilots and interviews we've learned that most remote leaders have no idea what their teams do day to day. Indigo's team insights feature solves this problem by enabling leaders to ask questions like what did marketing accomplish this week and which features are customers requesting in sales calls lately. We launched our alpha last July and since then we've onboarded 32 paid users across five companies, secured a product of the day spot on product hunt and usage is growing 300% month over month. Our founding team combines IPOs, exits and deep AI expertise. We're now fully committed to on building the best AI orchestration platform for small business. Thank you. I'm Kiana from Indigo where we help small teams do big things with AI.

SPEAKER_18: Great job. Thank you, Kiana. And we will flip over to our investors. Nadia, your question for Kiana.

SPEAKER_132: Can you tell me how do you guys are different from like, for example, Copilot? I mean, I have Copilot

SPEAKER_129: in my laptop and kind of does the same thing. So the main differentiator, Nadia, and thank you so much for the question, is that we're focused primarily on small business and startup workflows. The reality is most of those are in the Google workspace sort of ecosystem. And by having a fully integrated system, whereby all of their key tools, like notion, you know, external tools, like their meeting transcripts and things like that, all feed into one centralized data layer to build, you know, commands agents on top of that. That's the real differentiator.

SPEAKER_18: Of course, thanks for the question. Awesome. Thank you so much, Kiana and founders. We do have some questions in the Q and A box. So please flip over there to answer those. All right. Next up, we have Sergei from orchestra. Can we hear you? Hello, everyone. Hello. All right. We see your

SPEAKER_31: screen. Amazing. I'll count. Yep. I'll count you in three, two, go. Hi, I'm Sergei, a founder of

SPEAKER_139: orchestra. Most teams spend their days using tools like Slack, Notion, and Zoom. This constant app switching consumes too much time, energy, and focus. We face this too often. So we decided to combine all these tools and build orchestra and all in one workspace that bridge the gap between communication and productivity. Imagine you need to create a new landing page. With orchestra, you get the channel that's focused, not clouded. Here you can chat, hold calls, set up fields, create documents, and manage sub-tasks. It's not just a channel. It's a work Lego block with all the context inside. Switch views with a click to see communication organized by projects and tasks. Track your progress, create customized views, switch between layouts, and much more. With orchestra, you never lose a thread and always have designated tasks from every current conversation. Orchestra's uniqueness lies in blending task-focused communication and integrated task management, merging high engagement of messages and structure of task trackers. With all the work context inside, from communication to documents, orchestra becomes the ideal place for AI agents. These agents will help you with your work and can be a third-party solutions or custom-built by us. Currently, Orkitsa offers one subscription plan, $10 posted per month. Later, we are going to add more plans and pay add-downs. We're in Open Beta, made 15K previous year and have 1.7K MRR. Our target market includes over 1 million hybrid and remote-force companies with 2.5 billion TAM. We are currently focused on small tech and product teams with up to 50 members. Our next step is medium-sized companies to reach our first 10 million. From there, we'll target the enterprise segment to achieve 100 million. We are serial tech founders with over 10 years of experience in tech and entrepreneurship. We have been working together for over seven years and have already built a company with 1 million ARR. I'm Sergei, co-founder of Orkitsa, all-in-one

SPEAKER_143: communication and productivity tool for modern teams. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much,

SPEAKER_27: Sergei. Great job. And we will flip over to our investors. Sandy, your question for Sergei.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the pitch. So it seems like there's a handful of components to the product,

SPEAKER_13: you know, AI agents, task management. How do you think about like the core kind of hair on fire problem that people are going to be willing to pay for out of the gate? Is there one particular feature

SPEAKER_80: that you think is particularly compelling or there's been a demonstrated willingness to pay for?

SPEAKER_139: Yeah. The main problem where we address is the collaboration gap problem, where you have a lot of tools and a lot of data between them. And what you need to do is to hope to jump from one tool to another to track all this info to sync it and so on. So our main distinction from other tools is that we think that communication and productivity is not a separate process and it don't have don't need separate tools. In orchestra, we have all these tools together and this helps teams to be more productive and to have

SPEAKER_149: greater velocity. Just not to spend too much time on routine work that costs too much for them. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you.

SPEAKER_27: Awesome. Thank you so much. And we'll move over to our next founder. We have Kaylee from Hook Hub,

SPEAKER_31: you're way ahead of me. Awesome. And we can hear you. Okay. And I'll count you in three, two, go.

SPEAKER_156: Hi, everyone. My name is Kaylee and I'm the founder of Hook Hub, Airbnb for parking your RV.

SPEAKER_157: Meet Adria. She's a single mother living full-time in a travel trailer. She is one of 11.2 million RV owners struggling to find RV parking. Why is that? There's not one place currently that you can find RV parking and book it all in one spot. Surprisingly, most RV parks don't have full websites and you still have to book on. You have to call on your phone and wait for a callback. And if there is availability, most of them have restrictions such as 55 plus community or trailer year restrictions. There's no singular source for all types of RV parking and demand is much greater than supply as you can see here. On the supply side, our housing economy is in crisis and debt is continuing to rise. That brings us to 18.3 million landowners who are land poor and need extra income, but they don't know how. That brings us to Hook Hub, a marketplace where landowners rent out their land to RVers seeking RV parking. And that can be for nightly stays, long-term stays, or storage parking. Here you can see the view for Adria. She was able to scroll through the app and within a few clicks, she was able to find the right parking spot, and she was booked and ready to go. We take 20% of each booking. And you can see here we have three ICPs, our beachhead being full-time RVers. When you break down the numbers and consider our Hook Hub take, that brings us to 12.36 billion. Here you can see our competitors. Hook Hub is the only one where you can book for all types of RV parking and you can book within the platform and there's no membership fee. We're proud to say we've had at least 40% growth quarter over quarter. And our go-to-market strategy is to continue our multi-channel marketing with influencers and SEO and organic content. We're going to hire more team members, begin our partnership with a few companies, and we will reach our 512 million in revenue by capturing 2% of the market. Our team consists of me, the founder and the software engineer that built Hook Hub, and Evan, our co-founder with over a decade of startup ownership of a seven-figure ARR company and management experience. Thank you. We're Hook Hub, Airbnb for parking your RV.

SPEAKER_27: Awesome. Thank you so much, Kaylee. Great work. And we'll flip over to you, Stu, your question for Kaylee.

SPEAKER_21: Very cool. This is not my world because I don't do any consumer, but I have actually had this problem before, so totally get it. How do you, can you just talk a little bit more about how you will cheaply acquire customers? Because I'm worried it could be really expensive to get customers, especially because you have to get them at the right moment. And then how do you prevent them

SPEAKER_157: from disintermediating your platform? Absolutely. So for your first question, right now we've just been doing organic social and surprisingly that we've seen a big bump already in that. So there's really no cost there. When we do like paid marketing or we're looking at some influencers, that is a jump, but we're hoping that'll have enough return. It'll be worth it. Sorry, I'm trying to remember your second question. Can you repeat your second question?

SPEAKER_91: I think I'm only supposed to ask one question, but it's just like, how do you prevent them from rebooking? Yeah, we do have it in there before you rent or before

SPEAKER_157: you host your property. You know, you have to agree that not to take any communication or bookings off platform. If they do, then we're just going to have to boot them. So when we kick them off, covered by our insurance or any of our other securities for them. So that's really the best way. We just try to incentivize them to stay on because we provide that extra security. Cool. Thank you.

SPEAKER_27: Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much. And reminder to our syndicate investors, get your questions in the Q and A box. Awesome. And we'll move over to Chris from Nerdcrawler. Hey everyone. How's it going? Hey Chris. Good. Awesome. We see the screen. Okay. I'll count you in.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Three, two, go. Hey everyone. I'm Chris. I'm the founder of Nerdcrawler, the marketplace that helps creators earn three times more starting with comic book artists. So first and foremost, I am a huge nerd. This is me in high school meeting Frank Cho, my comic book hero. And I promise this will all make sense very soon. But since then, I built my career in tech, working on amazing startups like diapers.com, Bonobos and Comixology, and building product and teams at Google and milter.com. I'm also a self-taught programmer and I found it and I sold two SaaS apps, but I wanted to build something bigger. I knew that artists like Frank are underpaid by publishers and are looking for ways to sell their art online, but they waste a lot of time and money juggling point solutions. So I use that old photo from high school to get an intro to Frank, and I said, I can make a better way to sell his art. And he was in. And so I built Nerdcrawler. You can visit it right now, nerdcrawler.com. It's a marketplace. It's great to use. The sellers can easily create listings. It's about five times easier to make an optional listing compared to eBay. And sellers earn about three times more because with our soft clothes and our bidding technology and creative marketplace, we add time whenever someone bids. So since being founded in 2024, we have a million dollars in GMV in the last 12 months. We've helped 183 unique sellers on Nerdcrawler, and we have 14,000 monthly active users. Our compounded monthly growth rate on our orders is 30%, our marketplace take is 9%, and our annual revenue run rate is $100,000. But all of that was just the MVP, because we knew that we can go bigger because of one universal truth. Whether it's the Duke of Milan commissioning Da Vinci for The Last Supper, or Taylor Swift superfans buying out her VIP packages instantly, fans have and will always pay a premium rare products and experiences from the creators that they love. And the $250 billion creator economy is only growing, and creators haven't had an easy way to auction high-priced rare products and experiences until now. And so with our MVP proven to help artists earn three times more, we will scale and become the marketplace for rare products from all of your favorite creators. And so in this year alone, we've already launched our live stream. We will then be rebranding and launching our native apps with a goal of hitting 6 million in GMV by the end of the year, and then tripling GMV more or less every single year by expanding new categories and launching SaaS products and other additional services. We're backed by Jason Calacanis and Yuri Kim of Forerunner Ventures, and thanks for the time. I'm Chris, building Nerdcrawler.

SPEAKER_27: Amazing job, Chris. Thank you so much. And we'll flip over to our investors. Tyler, your question for Chris.

SPEAKER_101: Yeah, Chris, great pitch, and congrats on the traction so far. I'm curious how you think about

SPEAKER_103: kind of your long-term distribution strategy and getting in front of those users, particularly building a marketplace can be somewhat tricky sometimes.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. Thanks for the question, Tyler. Yeah, we found success really with sell-side growth. So our sellers are top-tier creators. They have hundreds or thousands, tens of thousands of followers on their Instagrams and social. Our job is to be the best platform, so much so that we then own their LinkedIn bio. Then every single time they make a listing, they drive traffic to us. We acquire those users, registrations and buyers. As we get more demand side, that makes the marketplace more valuable, which makes the supply-side growth even easier to acquire, and that becomes our flywheel, and that's actually proven out. We only spent $4,000 in marketing of all of 2024, and that's how we acquired 183 sellers, and we did $750,000 in GMB on just 4K in marketing spend. And so I think we just do a great job with sellers. They love us. We own their LinkedIn bio, and that's how we continue to grow. That's awesome. Thank you.

SPEAKER_27: Thanks. Awesome. Thank you so much. And over to our last founder of the day, we have Mariano from Prosperous AI,

SPEAKER_184: Hello. My name is Mariano Apodaca, and I'm the co-founder of Prosperous AI, where we give companies information, time, and leverage in material negotiations. After interviewing hundreds of companies like our customer, Steve, we identified one common pain point. Manual workflows were causing a 30% more cost in their material spend. This all changed with Prosperous AI. Simply, Steve had to upload his bill of materials and attach all of his systems of record. Prosperous went and did a market analysis, a demand forecasting, and a time series analysis for him, giving him full insight within his business and where his materials were operating. These turned into beautifully designed real-time dashboards, necessary for supply chain decisions, rather than lag data where they're doing analysis a month after the events. We then organized all of the materials into their categories, paired them with their suppliers. And the best part is, Steve didn't have to carry out the negotiations. The AI did it for him, doing the basic due diligence and selecting the optimized supplier before he made a human selection. This leads into optimized scenario planning of delivery of materials. All of this for an unbeatable price and 30% savings on all of his materials. Our traction since April of 24 is $141,000 in ARR, 283% growth since Q4. We have 2.8 million in weighted pipeline with 12 active pilots. In 2026, our go-to-market will focus on a $2 million ARR as we close those pilots. And what will carry us to a $50 million ARR is a multi-channel B2B approach as we use network effects doing up and downstream mapping of the supply chain. Legacy software needs to move out of the way. No reason that a human should be sitting at a computer, let Prosperous AI manage your supply chain workflows. Myself and my co-founder have a background in supply chain of large tech companies like HP and Microsoft, and we're working day and night to make Prosperous AI analytics

SPEAKER_18: amplified, sourcing simplified. Awesome. Thank you so much, Mariano. Great job. And back around to Gary, your question for Mariano. Yeah. Can you explain sort of where in the

SPEAKER_44: procurement software space this lives like competitive set-wise? We've got a few bets in

SPEAKER_184: the space, so curious sort of who you bump into. Yeah, great question, Gary. Thank you. We are, we're really focusing on the areas that I think that current software is like ERP systems are missing, or just intake and approval softwares. We're really focusing on how do we optimize the decision making and actually acquiring new materials or the raw inputs that go into your goods. What we've realized is these are still pretty manual. They require people to go and run analytics and kind of make their decisions based off of their gut feeling. Well, we're removing that and actually setting up the data pipelines to make optimized decisions for them based off of any array of metrics, like lead times, pricing, quality standards, relationship, and you name it. There's about 10 variables in that algorithm. So really focusing on that source of procure aspect.

SPEAKER_192: So is there anybody doing that also, or is it kind of white space as you see?

SPEAKER_184: Yeah. So there's two companies that I've identified that I think are well aligned with our value proposition. Potentially a company called Pivot. They're out of Europe, but a lot of their messaging is around intake and approvals, and they're kind of shooting for an acquisition from potentially SIP, who's also focused on intake and approvals. When it comes to negotiations, there's probably, there's one others called Pactum, and they basically do negotiations on commodities. So a little bit different, but kind of the same methodologies that we've identified, and they're all pretty early stage. Thank you.

SPEAKER_27: Awesome. Thank you so much. And everyone that that's our cohort, that's LA 33. So investors now comes the hard part. I am going to ask you to give us your top three of these amazing 11 companies in backwards order. Typically, this is through the lens of investment, but if a pitch really resonated with

SPEAKER_00: you, feel free to throw that founder a vote. You can just say when I come around, you know, my number three is, my number two is, my number one is, and you don't have to say why for three and two, but when you tell us your number one, maybe just say a few words about why you chose that company or founder. In the meantime, syndicate members, we would love for you to take our poll that should be launching on the screen right away, and you'll be able to pick your number one. You won't do three and two, you'll just do your number one there. Guest investor judges, please don't let those polls influence you. And we'll have that launched. I see it's ready. Perfect. And I'll do a quick recap of the companies that you all saw today. So first we had Abacus, generative AI for regulated industries. Next we had InviteJet, a marketing tool that helps e-commerce brands connect with customers through calendars. PodEngine, a podcast research and media monitoring solution. LayerNext, an AI platform for generating business insights. Bricks, a developer platform for shipping production AI agents. Frantal Dynamics, using acoustic wave technology to defeat drones. Indigo, a productivity app that allows users to automate repetitive tasks. Orchestra, an all-in-one communication tool with built-in task management. Hook Hub, a marketplace that connects RV and trailer owners to parking hosts. NerdCrawler, an auction marketplace for creators to sell rare products. And finally, Prosperous AI, simplifying procurement with AI-powered sourcing, supplier outreach, and negotiation. Okay. I think I've

SPEAKER_27: hopefully given you enough time for voting, our investor judges. So I will call on you.

SPEAKER_198: I just want to say, well done, Bianca. Is this the first time you've hosted?

SPEAKER_200: This is my first demo day host. Yes. Wow. You did great. I know Jackie's coached you a whole bunch, but great job hosting. Great job to the companies. What I will say to our investor judges is we have over the last, I don't know, five years gone from accepting, you know, one in 50 to

SPEAKER_198: one in 200, one in 250. So if you've been coming to this over the years, what you'll see is the benchmark gets higher. It's more competitive to get in. Um, and we're doing candidly a better job identifying great teams. Uh, and so almost everybody here has three founder co-founder, sometimes two, almost everybody has a technical co-founder. Although with vibe coding, we're seeing that, you know, that may be a criteria that we don't have to worry about, but most of all, an obsession with customers and product velocity. So we make our investing decisions and I'm just doing a little filibustering here while y'all make your decisions based on, um, you know, a criteria of 13 different variables that our team sorts through 20,000 applications a year, uh, for our firm and the criteria, you know, of those 13 in this stage, when you have a product in market with one customer, we're really looking for, um, you know, well-rounded multiple co-founder teams with technical co-founders, world-class design, product velocity, and a customer obsession. I think that's what you see here. You know, if they, if they make it to our accelerator, we have another program called founder university. That's a 12 week course. We don't invest in every company that comes to it. We have 250 teams that go there, but a lot of the teams that go through founder university, which is our pre-accelerator it's for, you know, half the companies aren't even incorporated to give you an idea. Um, some number of these 11 went through founder university. I don't know what it is, but it's typically three or four of them. So do we know Bianca off the top of your head, how many went to founder university first? We do. Yeah. Six out of 11. Oh, so double great. So 60% of the companies are going to our pre-accelerator. What that means is the pre-accelerator is training them on a curriculum of how to incorporate, how to manage a cap table, how to raise money, how to find product market fit that curriculum. I would say the average founder here, they can put it in the chat room. Actually, what percentage of the curriculum for the six people who went, did they know, uh, during that 12 weeks. And what that does is, you know, maybe even goes 14 weeks. We now get to spend 14 weeks with those six companies twice. We're spending, you know, 30 weeks with them really looking at, Hey, here's where you're weak. Here's where you're strong. Here's, um, some resources for you to get your design better. Some people come out of the gate with great design, but maybe they, they don't really understand their customers. Other people, you know, they, they really understand their cup. Um, they really understand their customers. Nerd crawler comes to mind, uh, but they're polishing the design hook hub comes to mind. I'm not saying that they have bad design. What I'm saying is, um, you know, everybody's got strengths and weaknesses in this early stage. Everybody is a little awkward in this early stage of investing in my experience, uh, kind of like teenagers, right? You know, like they might be great at singing and then, but maybe they're not good at math. You get the idea. Um, so we, uh, really work deeply with our 21 person team to understand where they're strong, where they need improvement. And, and a key part of that is y'all meeting with them. So if I can have one ask of our syndicate community, 11,000 people, um, and they'll be getting the video of this afterwards and to our investors. If you got 20 minutes to really jam with the, with the, with the founders, man, that's so appreciated by me personally, or if you want to, you know, have them come by your office and do a two hour session where you have your team meet with their top two or three people, this is where you can really help support new founders, um, with new ideas and new companies. Even if you choose not to invest, you could invest an hour or two with them. And then you never know some of my best investments. Um, Uber comes to mind.

SPEAKER_200: I knew, um, Travis from his first two companies, superhuman Raul. I was in a tiny investor in his first company. Uh, and then the first investor in his second company thumbtack. I was the first investor in Jonathan's company, which is doing great. They're probably going to go public. I hear, um, which would be nice. And then I was the first investor in Athena, his second company.

SPEAKER_198: So you really just advice for folks here, be great to the founders because man, you never know who's going to create the next 10 hundred billion dollar company. And sometimes what you're seeing now might be, you know, might be that billion dollar company, or it could be the prequel. It could be the epilogue. Hey, I met them when they were doing reportive and then I invested when they did superhuman. Hey, I met them when they were doing scour and red sushi, but I invested when they did Uber. So just keep that in mind. All right. I filibustered enough. People should have their three, two ones. And at the end, I'll do a couple of questions that people want to hang out and talk shop. And let's give

SPEAKER_206: it up for Bianca. Everybody, give her some snaps. You can undo your microphone. We'd like to give

SPEAKER_198: those snaps up. Great job. We, we have this incredible system at the company. I'll end on this where we hire researchers at a school, typically maybe one year experience, then they become

SPEAKER_200: analysts and associates, principals, managing directors, partners. So we, we, we actually have our own training program. We don't hire people with experience in venture. We make them. And Bianca broke the system. She, she went through these levels so fast that we had to redo the system to make it Bianca proof because she just works seven days a week doing incredible work. All right. Enough of me talking and praising everybody, but Bianca is amazing. Great job, Bianca.

SPEAKER_27: Thank you so much, Jason. And, and thank you everyone. All right. We've given you enough time. So investors reminder, top three in backwards order. My number three is my number two is near one and why your number one will go in backwards from the question order. So Tyler, you're up first.

SPEAKER_25: Awesome. Well, great job, everyone. Thanks Bianca, Jason, everyone for having me on. My number three, I, this is very, very tough to, to order you all. So, but for me, I'd say number three is, is nerd crawler. I think really interesting, great opportunity, Chris. Number two, I would say is abacus. I think going after regulated industries, really massive opportunity. But my number one is going to be, uh, Mariano and prosperous AI. Uh, and the reason being, I think I can really see how this could become a massive platform from the AR AP automation to the government contracting, procurement, document extraction, and kind of what you've proven already, uh, really excited

SPEAKER_27: about the opportunity. So that that would be my number one. Awesome. Thank you so much, Tyler. And we'll flip over to Stu for your ratings. All right. Thank you guys. Thank you all for

SPEAKER_21: having me and, um, congrats to all the founders. Really, really cool. Um, great stuff. Uh, Jason said I could do an honorable mention, so I will give honorable mention to prosperous AI. Uh, number three is hook hub. Number two is layer next. Uh, and number one is abacus. Um, um, actually for similar reasons that Tyler just, uh, uh, just said, so I won't, uh, repeat that, but, um, good job to everyone. Really, really awesome stuff. Awesome. Thank you so much, Stu.

SPEAKER_13: And over to you, Sandy. Um, awesome job, everyone. Uh, and thanks for having me. Uh, number three, prosperous. I think could see that being a massive business, massive market to nerd crawler. Um, as a nerd myself, one is hook hub. I just love the idea of activating all this latent inventory of, of folks that have spots in destinations you want to go to, um, that they can now turn into a revenue driving opportunity for them who doesn't want to make a little extra money. Um, yeah. So love,

SPEAKER_27: love it. Uh, thanks. Thank you, Sandy. Amazing. And over to Nadia.

SPEAKER_132: Hi, uh, Jason, every year, every, every session you make it more difficult because my goodness,

SPEAKER_225: the quality of these startups is just higher, higher. So very hard job. Um, number three, hook hub housing crisis is real. Oh my goodness. You are tapping on a niche. Number two, brand and

SPEAKER_227: dynamics. I'm chopping your name. It's very good. Great idea. Um, and number one, abacus for the

SPEAKER_154: reasons that Tyler mentioned. Awesome. Thank you so much, Nadia. And last we have Gary.

SPEAKER_229: All right. Um, I'm quickly doing two honorable mentions, Chris from nerd crawler and David from

SPEAKER_04: abacus. I'm unlikely investor, but thought the pitches were incredible. My number three is pod engine. My number two is prosperous. My number one is Paul from invite jet. I love the, the kicker of a term sheet being signed. I thought it was a strong pitch to market. I know well, and I think anybody's got a product that can sort of inject themselves into people's lives on the cost of acquisition is

SPEAKER_18: super high is super interesting. Awesome. Thank you so much, Gary. Tons of different number ones.

SPEAKER_27: That's awesome. And we will flip over to Erica, three things that we will announce in terms of voting. So we'll announce the scores from the judges for today, and then the poll from our syndicate members and then overall from the cohort, we do this week over week, everyone gets scored every single week. So we'll announce those results as well. Over to you, Erica. All right. So I'll start

SPEAKER_234: with the votes for today's session. So it looks like in a third place, we have prosperous and second place, we have hookup and in first we have abacus and then going over to the syndicate poll. Um, we have a tie for third place. So it's a third place for abacus, bricks, AI, and hookup. Second place goes to nerd crawler, and then first place goes to parental dynamics. So good job, all of you. Um, and then for the overall score for the whole cohort and first is our in third place, we have prosperous and second, we have parental. And then in first we have abacus. Amazing. Thank you so much. Lots of variety in

SPEAKER_27: there as a signal of a strong cohort. Um, well done founders. Thank you so much investors, syndicate members, and everyone on our lives for joining, um, syndicate members. We will follow up with today's recording and also a pre-commit form for you to indicate your interest, uh, if or when we run a syndicate for any of these companies and over to Jason for any questions.

SPEAKER_236: Well, I, you know, I, I would just start with, um, maybe for the investors, uh, I can ask a question

SPEAKER_198: to them. Um, what are they looking for in 2025 when they're evaluating the companies? I talked a little bit about maybe three factors. So maybe you could just tell us two or three things you're looking for, either in the chat room, or you can undo your microphones and we can have a little round table,

SPEAKER_240: but we're looking for multiple co-founders. We're looking for product velocity and customer obsession.

SPEAKER_43: What are you all looking for? I'm curious. I'll start with one. So for me, it's, it's net new

SPEAKER_121: ideas. It's not adding AI to an existing market and making it better and faster, but it's AI created a net new market, novel transactions that can happen. That's where I'm focused.

SPEAKER_243: Really give an example. Maybe it's that, that's a really interesting thesis. I like it.

SPEAKER_121: Um, an example would be a company we have on our portfolio company in our portfolio called mutual markets, where if you wanted to do co-marketing at scale, like back in the day, um, you know, Bart Simpson and Butterfingers, they created an entire platform where you could do that without

SPEAKER_04: having to find the, the, the, the network and the people at the network to do the deal and how to get a pixel to figure out CPMs completely digitized previously.

SPEAKER_200: Wow. Impossible. Impossible. So you've, they've productized collabs. Yeah, exactly. Collaborations. Wow. That's a really interesting idea. How is the company doing in terms of, uh, who are they getting to engage in this concept? Are they launched already or is it still in the lab?

SPEAKER_248: They've launched, they've had a bunch of like fortune 500 companies take a try. They, they have some

SPEAKER_121: work to do to figure out like how to remove friction from it. It's still not easy. It's a million times easier than it was, but I think there's some go-to-market and some product work that they

SPEAKER_04: still need to do, but the future is bright if they can crack that nut. Yeah. We have one company grin

SPEAKER_200: that came out of our accelerator, became a billion dollar company, G R I N dot C O. You can take a look

SPEAKER_198: at it. And what they did was they, they did a spin on that, which is, um, it's SaaS tools for like, if you're a watch company and you want to manage a relationship with a thousand influencers or 500 influencers, it's hard, right? Maybe a hundred of them, you pay 300 of them, you give product and

SPEAKER_200: affiliate links and a hundred of them, you know, you, you, um, sponsor them and you, you, you, you, they're part of your core group. How do you manage all that? How do you measure it? And then they did that. So I think there's actually something very interesting about this group and what they're doing.

SPEAKER_251: Tell me the name of the company again, uh, mutual markets. It'd be very interesting if somebody

SPEAKER_198: put up, Hey, we're the watch company. Um, we sell these watches. What are your best ideas? Pitch us, you know, kind of a situation, reverse it. Um, and that might actually spark, uh, people to get

SPEAKER_243: creative, you know, like pitch us on what you think we should do, you know? And that's actually

SPEAKER_121: what happens is you upload your brands sort of, you know, metrics, and then it uses the AI to create

SPEAKER_04: the co-marketing ad units with the series of shows and movies that they have relationships with.

SPEAKER_200: Love it. So brilliant. All right. Great. Yeah. And some of them put out the collateral, like there was an interesting moment where star Wars, uh, star Trek sued people making fan films. And then Lucas actually sanctioned it under certain circumstances, you don't do commercial stuff and they actually taught people how to do lightsabers. So they just taught them in after effects or whatever it was here. Here's actually the best practices in making good looking lightsaber. And that's why you see so many star Wars fan films. Okay, great. Anybody else have thoughts

SPEAKER_132: on how they pick companies in this day and age? I, I, I quickly, uh, based on the investments that my companies do, um, I, I work as, at large companies and our investing ideas are basically

SPEAKER_225: what the hyper scalers are not going to give away for free. So let me give you an example. Uh, we were looking at a vision, uh, machine vision company and we rejected it because there is a very high chance that Google is going to give away these for free as part of Google lens. Um, so why would we invest or pay for that company? Um, same with Honeywell, we, you know, Honeywell, I, we were looking into co-investing with, for something, um, and, uh, whoops, Microsoft copilot already just released it. Um, as they are selling it, they are not giving away for free the technology, but it's like, you know, um, so if, if there is a chance that the hyperscaler is going to give it away for free, or we're going to be competing with a hyperscaler, we, we do not, um, touch it. With that said, we look into niches that, that are big enough. So for example, print and dynamics is a big niche. I don't see the hyperscalers getting into it and, uh, it's not going to go away anytime soon. And as always, it's all about execution. Um, so yes, maybe, you know, the hyperscalers get in, but if they, the founders and the company is great and passionate and aggressive for the execution,

SPEAKER_260: nobody's going to beat you. Awesome. Any questions from our founders? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_238: Thanks for coming, Stu. As I see, he's taking off, uh, any questions from our founders or our syndicate members? Maybe they, I don't know if they're in the Q and a for Jason thoughts on biotech. You know, we, um, we don't do biotech. It's such a Francis. Yeah. It's just, it's, you need to have so much domain expertise that we don't actually do it, but I do think there'll be opportunities there. Also, man, it's such a, um, regulated space with such a long time horizon. Um, so not for us, uh, which companies offered AI in a regulatory space? That's interesting. I, I haven't seen too much of that. I think with the hallucinations, um, that was an anonymous

SPEAKER_198: attendee. Yes. That I would be very concerned actually, um, to be in a regulated space like

SPEAKER_200: healthcare or financial advice and be giving, uh, and building product around that. You'd have to really, really be thoughtful, which we have tax GPT, um, and there's legal LLM. So they're really thinking that through because hallucinations, if you're giving legal health or tax advice could be lethal. Uh, so yeah, we've got to really, those, those, and also I've, we've gotten pitched on so many people doing like therapy with LLMs and I'm like, yeah, that's not a good idea. Like character AI had a suicide tragically. Um, so, um, now whenever you have a million people using a service, somebody, uh, in that group, you just look at the statistics of, uh, how many people commit suicide, somebody using your service, like somebody who has stayed in Airbnb has committed suicide. Somebody who has taken the New York city has committed suicide. These things are not well correlated there. There's not causation necessarily. So you've got to be very careful, but, uh, founders need to understand that, right? Like, Hey, you know, if my Uber kills somebody, cause it's self-driving, it's going to be on me, even if it was the person ran in front of the car. So, yeah. And abacus from this cohort, uh, working, uh, in regular space and doing great. Yeah. Great point, Lucas. Uh, so there's gotta be extra thoughtful, extra disclaimers, extra, uh, training maybe for users and level setting and expectations. All right. Uh, I don't think we have any more questions. Oh, we do two more came in. Okay. Um, for Jason, how are you seeing the monetization model of SAS changing impact of AI less head count? Yes. All of this. What's the smartest way you're

SPEAKER_238: seeing founders shift the monetization model? Really great question. Um, a lot of people are

SPEAKER_198: starting to work on consumption basis. So if you were going to charge people per seat to create some reports, right. And you had, you know, 10 seats, you sold, but that company now has three people in it because people are doing more with less, maybe a charge based on the number of reports they're doing, or maybe you raise your fees and charge, you know, Hey, it's $10,000 a year for this product for up to 10 people and up to a hundred reports. You know, you, you kind of blend the models, which is how they used to sell client server software. They'd say, how many lawyers do you have? How many documents do you have? And they would come up with some blended model. The most important thing I'm seeing is smaller teams getting to revenue and basically break even. And then maybe they'll become Pegasus instead of unicorns, which is they fly over funding round. So we've had a number of companies come to founder university or the accelerator and all of a sudden

SPEAKER_200: they hit, I don't know, 30 K and monthly reoccurring revenue with three people. And they're like, yeah, we don't need to raise money. And we're like, oh, well, we'd like to give you money. And they're like, yeah, we don't need it. And we're like, okay, well, here's the valuation. They're like, yeah, no, we don't like that valuation. So, you know, that's going to be an interesting trend, um, interesting strategy for founders to pursue in my mind. All right. I think we'll let everybody go. Thanks so much for doing this, everybody. It really means a lot to me personally and great job to my team on selecting and supporting the founders. And most of all, great job to the founders. Um, really, really excited for their journeys and, um, you know, raising money as part of it, but it's not the most important part. The most important part is building a great team that builds a kick-ass product consistently over time with product velocity, and that obsesses over customers. If you're trying to figure out what to

SPEAKER_198: do today as a founder and you're anxious, it probably means you need to talk to your customers a bit more and probably means you need to make your team a bit better, but through professional development, firing, replacing, or hiring people, those are hard things to do as leaders. Um, or, um, looking at the product and saying, is this as good as it could be? Can we make this one part, the part that people love the most 10% better? And that's where people, I think, sometimes get tripped up. They do everything, but those core things, team product customer. If you obsess on those three, you'll get that flywheel going. You will figure something out, whether it's, uh, that you don't have a great business and you pick the wrong vertical product, whatever, or, uh, you'll find something in your peripheral vision. So at this stage, we've seen many times somebody, something comes along, you know, uh, in the peripheral vision,

SPEAKER_200: that's a better opportunity than the one you're doing. But the fact that you got on the road and you did the journey gave you the opportunity to see the new world before other people. So don't be afraid to do a mini pivot or full pivot or a reboot. Okay. Great job, everybody. See you soon.