SPEAKER_00: welcome to this week in startups everybody we have an awesome show for you today we're going to be doing this in front of a live youtube audience i am going to hear four pitches and these are two minute pitches and i'll ask some questions after those two minute pitches from founders who have attended founder university you can find some information about founder university at founder dot university it's a 12-week program and we invest 25 000 in five to ten of the companies we thought it'd be interesting to take four of the top companies from our fourth cohort of founder university and invest 25 000 in one of them live on the air and we'll do that at the end of the show

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SPEAKER_00: at fennel.com twist i have with me two of my favorite people on planet earth who work with me at launch that's our investment firm that produces founder university presh and kelly uh welcome to this week in startups thanks for having me there you go all right so fresh let's start with you uh introduce yourself to the audience you can explain how long you've been working at launch and our history together briefly but then maybe talk about what occurs in the 12-week program kelly then i'll have you introduce yourself and how long we've been working together briefly and then maybe you could go through what are the qualities we look for in this 25 000 investment we've been doing first money in the essential friends and family round you can talk about what we're looking for and then

SPEAKER_09: things that are maybe signals that we will wait on investing we'll you know wait for some things to

SPEAKER_12: change okay presh you have the floor cool thanks jason yeah i'm brush i've worked for launch and jason for

SPEAKER_13: just over five years started last name two last name i worked at launch and jason for jason for

SPEAKER_12: the past five years started uh on the media side doing marketing and growth then later transitioned to the investment team and now help with running the program with kelly found university so the program really as jason mentioned it's 12 weeks and it's for founder builders and it's to get their mvp uh or initial product off the ground and get them to get users so it's 12 weeks we have live sessions both async and the live sessions with experts the expert topics are really focused around getting users and building your product we also do the live sessions with which are midweek sessions and this is where we get to communicate and build community with the founders in the program and really the the core benefit we hear from founders about the program is the community and accountability aspect um with these live sessions and so we do that for 12 weeks and and the goal is really to to find companies that will potentially invest in maybe go through the accelerator and write a larger

SPEAKER_09: check down the road and maybe press you could explain um how we charge for the program because

SPEAKER_00: we don't want to make money our founders but we do charge 500 to come and then we do something

SPEAKER_17: really interesting uh with that 500 at the end so explain our pricing i'm using air quotes here for

SPEAKER_11: founder dot university yeah that's a good point so we charge uh unquote five hundred dollars to

SPEAKER_12: participate and it's really just an accountability charge so we 100 refund the charge at the end of the program we just want to see that everyone is taking this seriously and they attend the weekly sessions they send their investor updates at the end of the 12 weeks we refund the the payment of 500 so it's a free program um you just have a 500 let's say hold on your credit card and that 500 kelly has

SPEAKER_00: resulted in approximately what percentage of completion uh over the first this is the fourth cohort right

SPEAKER_27: we're above 95 i think it might be 97 completion wow now if we didn't charge 500 bucks

David Friedberg: then i think the completion rate would be like 30 so this is one of the more brilliant ideas we stumbled upon we're like if we make this free we're gonna have a thousand people sign up and a hundred people complete it if we have if we make it 500 we'll only have 300 people sign up but we'll have 97 completed it will have 285 people completed or something in that range uh which is exactly what's transpiring it is a little bit complicated because we have to refund three 300 people attending with stripe and give the 500 back so our stripe credit rating might be crazy at this point because we refund so many people's money so i'm not sure exactly how to make that work better um but we never want to charge founders but we don't want them to burn the slot and then in order to get the 500 back if people have like a death in the family or a kids rehearsal or something we'll give an excused absence and

SPEAKER_00: people can have one or two of those i guess but explain um what people have to do in order to check in every week to ensure that we take attendance as it were on mondays we only take attendance on mondays

SPEAKER_12: right yeah is that the way it works yeah you know that so the live sessions around halfway 30 minutes into the presentation we'll drop a link and it's a type form and really this acts as two things one to get attendance the other is it's just a accountability update of your the progress the company's made so we'll ask questions like if you've added any users this week um if you've made any changes to your landing page things like that gets us a better idea of how the companies are progressing

SPEAKER_09: through week over week now kelly let's talk about what you and presh do and you can introduce yourself

SPEAKER_00: as well um what you would do with that data uh from those weekly check-ins and then the the 25 000

SPEAKER_27: investment and how we make that investment yeah absolutely so i'm kelly i am a previous founder last names as well sorry i'm kelly schricker i have a background as a founder and an operation specifically around scaling startups i've been working with jason at uh launch for about a year a little over a year and a half and in total i used to work with him at inside so just about five years all in uh with jcal these days so to speak yep so now talking about founder university what we do is we like to keep an eye on the progress you know jason is all about do the work right so we love to follow along answer any questions along the way we do a lot of one-off calls with founders in the program just if they get stuck on anything if we see anything we can be helpful with in those updates we like to jump on it very quickly the 12 weeks tends to go very fast and then from there

SPEAKER_49: at the end of the program we like to make these 25 000 bets again hopefully that is just one step of

SPEAKER_27: the success as you could call it uh you know companies will either get that 25 000 check they'll get to know us they'll continue on maybe they uh get into the accelerator or even one of our syndicates

SPEAKER_00: later on in life as well and so that every time they give that attendance they fill out a couple questions about things that have changed and we review them or i should say you and fresh review them and then you'll come to our investment team and you'll say hey i identified one that looks like it's making great progress i think you know you the two of you will then have a little dialogue between the two of you you'll present it to the investment team and say i think we should put 25 000 into this company we do it at a 1 million valuation many of the companies are not yet even incorporated so we are literally acting like the friends and family check and not everybody's got rich friends and family to put in a 25 000 check but we like to be the first money in why do we do that well it just to me is my roots i gave these 25 50k checks to amazing companies like robin hood uber etc and just took a lot of flyers we're doing that now but we do that with the expectation that we'll be able to invest a second third or fourth time in the company and maybe get past the 2.5 ownership up to maybe 10 or even 20 in the winners so that is our fun strategy is to have so people understand i'll explain our funnel 50 million people watch all in and this week in startups 15 a year 15 000 people contact us at launch about investing in their companies launch.co apply is where people can apply to take a meeting with our team then of those 15 000 will that apply we'll have 3 000 that we do meetings with including

SPEAKER_17: founder university folks and then that results in 50 to 100 investments per year and that'll probably grow to 100 to 200 investments per year because we want to do sincerely 125 000 investments every year and then in our fourth fund which we're raising right now launch fund four which is launch.co slash f-o-u-r if you want to be an lp we're raising publicly we want to have in that fund 200 to 300 of these investments so if it winds up being a 50 million dollar fund or a 75 million dollar fund a full uh five to seven and a half million of that cali impression will be these checks that you are shepherding and so those we hope if we had 300 of those would result in 50 of those getting further funding from us and this is what we call a milestone um based funding system which silicon valley is predicated on friends and family seed or pre-seed investing then seed funds investing angel investors investing and then series a series b etc so we really want to put ourselves in that funnel all the way to the point of series a and then if you were to take our funnel it would be like the top of

SPEAKER_00: the overall funnel from incubators seed rounds series a series b c and then eventually public companies or an exit so let's talk a little bit about the criteria we look for so pressure when we're looking at companies i'll go back to you for a second what are two or three things at this early stage that we look for now these are not series a companies this is when we have very little information on the company but what are some of the early signs that we've identified as potentially driving future success and the future success of a founder university company would be getting into y combinator tech stars launch accelerator or even doing a seed round of 500k that would be success coming out of founder university

SPEAKER_12: so what do we look for yeah so a couple things that are super important is even if they haven't started a company like previous projects that they've built um so this can be a simple website that does a specific task or just any prior building experience um and the the reason we look for builders is because um you've mentioned this a bunch of times jason but it's like the founder without any funding can work on this project and build it themselves and they aren't reliant at the very early stage to uh use capital because the capital that they're using is essentially just just their time um so builder founder is very important to the program and then the other thing is just early signs of traction if they can maybe even build a wait list um any signs of yeah people wanting to use the product that's going to be another tell um and what we're prioritizing kelly uh other than

SPEAKER_66: they built previous products and they have some signs of customer traction what else do we look

SPEAKER_00: for what are things at this early stage that would make us interested in making that 25k bet

SPEAKER_27: yeah i think another interesting one to think about is founder problem fit right and so when they have really interesting experience and a really good reason for why they want to build this product and have it in the world i think that always jumps out to us as well yeah another thing we look for

SPEAKER_00: builder founders we talked about that and multiple founders so in the early stage if you have two or three founders working on a project if they've worked together before on a project maybe they worked at google maybe they did a college project that failed um that shows that they can work together and that you have multiple points of redundancy three people two or three people grinding on something is obviously better than one because being a solo founder is really 10 times more difficult than having two co-founders

David Friedberg: and being a builder means you don't have to go find people to build your vision you can build it

SPEAKER_00: yourself the best titles i think product manager developer designer ux all of that is you know a creative towards getting an mvp to market and we like to offer that 25k check to people who have

SPEAKER_17: those qualities those are the things that y combinator tech stars in the launch accelerator look for or seed funds look for so what we're describing is not just because we like them for no reason kelly crush the people who are downstream of this 25k friends and family check it's really a friends and family check those downstream investors including our accelerator are going to look for those qualities yeah yeah

SPEAKER_72: absolutely yeah okay we're about to announce the winner of our second show us your space competition

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SPEAKER_17: get started we have four companies here they're gonna have two minutes to present each i'll have each one of you introduce the company then they'll present i might ask them a question or two or we'll just have a dialogue about that company and at the end of the four companies i will rank them and give the number one company 25 000 i kid you not there's a guaranteed 25 000 bet going in here and all of the founders had said they would accept this 25k bet so they're all open to it now some of you're saying hey it's at a million dollar valuation 25 000 that seems low for this stage of company it's not low that's what you would offer in a friends and family round but we do not force anybody to take this it's just an offer if they need it some people are rich already they can they have 25 000 or their aunt or uncle can give them the 25 000 or they just want to go directly to a seed round or they want to go directly into an accelerator and that's fine with us too we might

SPEAKER_79: offer them a spot in our accelerator y combinator might give them 150 000 and we're fine with that

SPEAKER_17: as well so let's get started uh who would like to introduce our first company all right we'll start

SPEAKER_01: with george from fantastic funding welcome to the program george from fantastic funding and he's going

SPEAKER_74: to present and what week is this right now george for the founder university so we've completed the

SPEAKER_85: program oh right yeah we've completed the program and uh we we actually built this whole mvp everything i'm going to show you during the program so started the program we had nothing then we built the mvp we launched it kind of halfway through the program and then right we obviously have progress to show and what was the number one thing you got out of the program would you say the permission to build an imperfect mvp i think oh i used to you know i used to work at a at a big tech company we have a lot of you know clients and projects we already do so i always felt really awkward about putting out an mvp with sort of imperfections and things but then because you're in this program with 300 other folks and really supportive people like kelly and presh that say just launch just you know do something get some results that's what we're looking for i think that really helped sort of clear my mind just like okay you know what i'm just going to build something and we're just going to put it out there

SPEAKER_01: okay we'll put two minutes on the clock and uh when it's time to wrap up you'll see kelly or presh

Chamath Palihapitiya: make the wrap up signal the universal one which is a spinning finger three two go hi i'm george

SPEAKER_90: founder of fantastic funding meet johan he's an actual creator on our platform he built this super cool self-balancing robot and it's going viral on social media he wants to turn this into a real product into a real business but here comes the problem he has all these different platforms like shopify wix kickstarter patreon that he needs to use to raise funds and start selling online this is way too much for him to do by himself and the fees and commissions are insane he also has all his customer data spread across these different platforms and all of them give him a new url so his seo is terrible luckily he's now on fantastic funding the first all-in-one platform where he can turn his idea into a real product he starts off small with our community pages feature here people can donate a small amount to validate his idea once he has a thriving community he can now start taking pre-orders to fund his first batch of manufacturing now that he has his inventory he can fulfill his pre-orders but he can even continue selling with our storefront feature he keeps the same url he's had since day one so his seo is fantastic we charge a five percent commission on storefront sales and we offer all the services a creator might need directly through the platform that gives us 21 000 in annual revenue per creator so when we have 5 000 craters we'll hit 100 million dollars in revenue just for context that's only 0.2 percent of all the creators that shopify alone has so there's room to grow in this market we're also exploring the idea of seeing if we can get paid in equity instead of just cash imagine if all birds or ring funded through our platform and we had that upside we launched our mvp as part of founder university and we have grown our users our creators and our revenue week on week the team and i have raised over 20 million dollars for crowdfunded projects as independent crowdfunding consultants so we know this space like no other and we really know how to build a platform that our creators would love to use on top of that we

SPEAKER_85: have great relationships with creators so it's very easy for us to get new projects onto the site thank

SPEAKER_00: you so much for your time okay uh just to start off what a great presentation we understand what you do we understand who your customer is and we understand how you make money just amazing

SPEAKER_17: progress and you have domain expertise so you understand the challenges that people who are doing crowdfunding they face right because you're consulting with them so i guess what i have a question about

SPEAKER_00: is how is this different than me putting my project on kickstarter what would you say if somebody was coming to you saying i'm considering kickstarter and i'm considering your startup fantastic funding uh did i get that correct fantastic funding yeah absolutely why should i what are the top three

SPEAKER_01: reasons in order of why i should use fantastic funding so there's a very specific type of question

SPEAKER_90: i'm asking and let's see how you answer it absolutely so a site like kickstarter basically is just like a hosting provider it just hosts your project but it doesn't help you it doesn't support you and it's only for that 31 day campaign of your multi-year journey fantastic funding actually helps you before your campaign by building a community which is super important and then after your campaign with your fulfillment and actually continuing to sell so that's both important for the creator because they're supported throughout the entire journey but it's also important for us as a company in terms of revenue because we can continue making money with these creators

SPEAKER_00: for two years instead of for 30 days got it so you are like the amazon fulfillment for them yeah as well as the consultant for them and kickstarter is but a platform they don't offer consulting services and they don't offer ongoing commerce those are two amazing differentiators well done let's

SPEAKER_82: meet our next company all right next up is naman from promptify okay i like where this is going uh

SPEAKER_101: promptify this sounds really interesting to me we are promptify an ai prompts as a service marketplace

SPEAKER_103: that enables prompt engineers to turn their gpt prompts into paid apis let's jump into the product and see how easy promptify makes it to turn your prompts into apis let's go to the create prompts page let's say i want to make an api pro ai prompt that takes in a number and outputs a joke about that number using ai i enter the title and name of the prompt then i enter the actual body of the prompt from which the input variables are automatically extracted then i enter the price per api call and just like that in a few clicks my prompt api is live and i can get paid for it let's now test it out using the playground we enter the number four and there we have it the joke about the number four anyone can now integrate this api into their app any developer using this code snippet middlewares went live last week the core functionality we are working on them on the ui of these middlewares these enable prompt engineers to build non-primitive applications they can do things like input manipulation they can make external api calls they can chain prompts one after another all of this using an extremely simple interface we are really excited about this feature we launched on 17th february so about one month and we have steady number of signups happening every week and we are in talks now with two clients who want to integrate ai capabilities into their organizations and we are creating those capabilities for them in the form of prompt apis we are the only marketplace that is focused on prompt apis without ever having to open your ide this makes us different from all our competitors developers we are a team of two experienced software developers who are childhood friends and we are excited about the future of prompt engineering thank you okay well done so if i'm understanding

SPEAKER_17: correctly you allow a marketplace of prompts and for people who don't know what prompts are prompts are the conditions that you would give to something like chat gpt in order to make the work product coming back better so an example of a prompt might be explain to me as if i was a five-year-old how uh the united states um government works right and that would be a prompt but there are much more sophisticated prompts that can be made a limit the data set um you know respond in this specific format respond in this tone and these are constantly changing and if you were a neophyte to chat gpt it's easier to have somebody refining a vertical like say hr or programming or journalism or copy editing is that correct

SPEAKER_103: that's exactly right my pit seems to have done the job quite well then yeah so this is a fantastic idea

SPEAKER_17: there are multiple people working on it in this space so what i'll ask is tell me a little bit about your background and your team's background that makes you uniquely qualified in the world

SPEAKER_79: to go after this opportunity which is a clear opportunity in the world in my mind so you got me on that yes i believe it's an opportunity i believe the product is reasonably good already so i want to

SPEAKER_42: know why are you and your team the ones to uniquely go after this in the world we are a team of two

SPEAKER_101: people we are childhood friends and we both have experience in software development combined experience

SPEAKER_103: of 15 years i am an entrepreneur this is my second company before this i had a game studio where i delivered over 50 games with top publishers in the world and my focus was on extremely fast product iterations and this is what i'm bringing to promptify we're launching new features new products new spin-offs every week and this is the thing that is so exciting for us because ai is so dynamic right now and my my skill set my partner skill set who is working in enterprise software he is also very

SPEAKER_108: experienced with scaling systems so combined we do the job you had me at rapid iteration

SPEAKER_00: startups as we talk about kelly and presh are about uh product velocity and here we have a

SPEAKER_97: founder who's focused on product velocity in a great category so well done all right everybody i'm here

SPEAKER_66: with asim dahir he is the ceo and founder of pilot you guys know pilot they help everybody with their accounting cfo and tax services welcome to the program thanks for having me a lot of talk about burn rate how can a startup in this kind of climate reduce their burn and extend their run yeah it's

SPEAKER_117: a great question so burn ultimately or increasing cash in your bank account is a consequence of four basic levers the first is revenue can you sell more to your new customers or existing customers can you raise prices can you do things that actually increase the amount of revenue you take in the second is gross margin can you reduce the cost of providing your service so the same customers generate more cash for you the third is payment terms can get folks to prepay you annually maybe can you negotiate more flexibility with your own vendors and the fourth of course is just

SPEAKER_120: decreasing costs are there expenses you can reduce or cancel are there investments you can defer until

SPEAKER_66: subsequent years yeah great advice and you got to look at all four of these things man sometimes a customer can pay a little bit more and founders are scared of raising their prices and sometimes they're lowering their prices when they should be in fact raising them because they're providing more value so really think that through not just cutting costs but also maybe look at how much you're charging maybe it's time to increase it a little bit great job all right listen if you're a twist listener you can get 20 off for the first six months of doing your accounting with pilot pilot.com twist that's pilot.com twist for 20 off your first six months who do we have next next up is phil from

SPEAKER_00: open spot okay moving right along here i like the pace and we limit these presentations to two minutes for a reason we want the founder to be able to explain their product and their business and their customer basically in two minutes or under and that means they have to leave out all the other nonsense they can't talk too much about the total addressable market they can't talk too much about themselves they got to just be very efficient here in giving us the information about their product customer and maybe a little bit about their team etc but uh this uh creates what we call internally the trailer of a startup it's not meant to be the comprehensive pitch it's the trailer that gets you the next meeting so the goal of a two-minute pitch what you might call an elevator pitch we call it the trailer is to just get the founder good at explaining their business in a short period of time so they can

SPEAKER_17: get a real 20-minute meeting with a vc or seed fund okay who do we got next and let's get let's keep

SPEAKER_124: the train moving here hey everyone my name is phil boucher i'm a pediatrician and i created open spot

SPEAKER_125: which is a weightless management platform for healthcare practices to fill last minute appointments i want you to meet donna she's a practice administrator for a thriving ear nose and throat practice her practice is booked out three months but they have many last minute cancellations each day and they lack the team bandwidth to start calling those patients to fill last minute open spots so they end up with holes in their schedule those holes in the schedule cause delays in patient care and health outcomes frustration from the staff and from the clinicians who are left twiddling their thumbs instead of practicing their craft and lost revenue on the order of 200 to over a thousand dollars per in revenue per visit with open spot donna's team adds new patients onto their cloud-based waitlist when a cancellation occurs any team member can immediately start going down the list sending text messages to offer the spot to waiting patients no phone calls no voicemails no phone tag and no hassles over 85 of the patients reply within 10 minutes so they can quickly run through the list until they fill that spot we're a sas business that has started and we charge based on our monthly fee based on the number of clinicians that are in the practice and we set our pilot pricing to ensure that even minimal use pays for itself each month i'm a pediatrician and so our first vertical focuses on private practice physicians and mental health care practitioners but we plan to branch into other adjacent verticals like aesthetics speech therapy physical therapy anyone whose clients book out three weeks or longer i took this this from idea to mvp to sales during founder university i built it myself and

SPEAKER_127: we launched in our first clinic on february 1st a urology practice with 16 clinicians they added over 100 patients to their waitlist they had 20 patients reply yes i get a text every time somebody says yes and they're they've had four people say yes today to get into those open appointment spots and so open spot has generated way more revenue than it's cost the the practice to do that my team right now is myself but i'm actively interviewing and speaking with co-founders with the for the opportunity to

SPEAKER_125: join as the coo and then our next hire will be sales the first half of the year our plan is to optimize our client workflows and feature sets and then develop direct integrations with emrs and then

SPEAKER_127: incorporate ai into open spot so that we can take the staff and completely out of the picture so that these appointments can be handled without anyone having to touch the patient scheduling that's it

SPEAKER_09: awesome awesome so at the end here's your tip just i'm phil we're open spot we blank blank blank right um

SPEAKER_17: so always end with the chance to reinforce your message this is fantastic you're an md you found a customer let me ask this in the first month what was the total value of the meeting slots that you saved

SPEAKER_09: for that customer what was the total value if you had to estimate it how many slots and what would the dollar value be of those i would say burned right they're burned forever otherwise burned so

SPEAKER_125: they're lost forever so for urology for a specialty practice is probably 500 on average per slot and we

SPEAKER_135: have filled over 20 spots during the month of february so that doctor's office just to meditate on this only using this product for a month and this is something you hand stitched together just during

SPEAKER_17: founder university congratulations thank you you were able to save what would be a hundred twenty thousand dollars in pure profit because it's a fixed cost business the doctors the receptionist the lights the rental of the space that's all paid for so this is a hundred twenty thousand dollars in

SPEAKER_79: pure profit for that practice um that they otherwise would not have had already correct well i think it's

SPEAKER_17: 500 times 20 is ten thousand ten thousand but i times it by 12 months oh okay yes now i understand now what would that practice that was one a one doctor practice i take it 16 doctors oh 16 doctors so across all of them so a 16 practice what do you think that 120 if we were to look at how much that practice made per doctor is it a million dollars per doctor typically two million dollars probably two million yeah got it okay two million dollars per doctor and what's the average margin what's the profit margin of a two million dollar office a two million

SPEAKER_79: dollars for a doctor is it ten percent margin at the end of the day twenty percent it depends on the

SPEAKER_127: specialty with if they have a surgical suites and everything like that for probably 15 to 30 percent

SPEAKER_148: depending on the specialty so it might profit six hundred thousand dollars or five hundred thousand

SPEAKER_00: dollars so this you know extra money that could have been wasted you know depending on how many doctors you're across could be significant in terms of increasing profitability right and the thing about

SPEAKER_127: healthcare is you can't just raise your prices like you can on eggs because insurance companies lock in those rates and are slow to adjust so they don't have the ability to just you know jack up the price of

SPEAKER_00: surgery or whatever amazing so well done really appreciate your time congratulations on graduating

SPEAKER_153: founder university did you get your five hundred dollars back not yet but i have i submitted the

SPEAKER_00: stuff perfect okay well done okay who's our final contestant here uh with founder university and again we're going to give twenty five thousand dollars to one of these four founders at the end they've all agreed to take the 25k and uh let's see who our final contestant our final founder is hi final

SPEAKER_159: founder is matt from renegade labs take it away hi i'm matt adminster co-founder of renegade labs and

SPEAKER_160: we're building the world's first interactive drone gaming experience we combine the thrill of video games with the acrobatics of drone racing at the scale of swarms into a new category of entertainment our first game drone hunt consists of 10 drones four players eight levels is a 15 minute long experience that can be played day or night think of it as duck hunt plus drones in real life future titles include alien invasion tennis baseball and buck hunter meet larry larry owns an amusement park and is looking for his next big attraction he's not alone grace the musical festival planner steve the go-kart track owner and helen the outdoor bar manager all have common needs they have an open space they want to commercialize they don't want high upfront costs and they want something that'll increase existing foot traffic to their businesses so they can make money off admission sales food and beverage and advertise revenue sharing our solution is to take the open space they want to commercialize provide an easy to set up low risk and safe eye-catching one-of-a-kind experience that keeps getting better we feature a b2b business model using off-the-shelf drones for twenty thousand dollars per month that provides everything you need to get started in phase two we looked at additional games virtual tournaments and larger swarm size and in phase three we'll move on to permanent locations start introducing intermission advertising as well as start collecting game licensing by opening our platform to other developers we believe there's over 2200 customers in the united states alone with one customer bringing in 240 000 in annual reoccurring revenue we capture 20 of the market will bring in 105 million dollars in annual reoccurring revenue that's only one unit per customer and doesn't include additional game subscriptions or advertising and licensing our team has over 25 years of combined development experience with 15 years in robotics alone and we're willing to learn anything to get the job done i'm matt edminster co-founder of renegade labs and we're building the world's first interactive drone gaming experience okay so would you say this is a franchise

SPEAKER_00: model where they pay uh a percentage of their revenue or a flat rate sas model with hardware as a service

SPEAKER_160: if you had to describe the business model yeah i mean i think the one that we've looked at so far is the hardware as a service i mean i'm not completely set on it i've looked at some like revenue sharing type franchise models as well you know i'm really just focusing on the product at this point and making it you know good enough to make people want to pay that much or produce that much capital um but you know i would definitely say hardware as a service is where i'm leaning right now just to try to be lean and mean and get profitable how much hardware what's the hardware investment for somebody who about 30k 30k and that's with labor to go set it up and stuff oh okay so maybe

SPEAKER_00: 20 25k and then some labor to set it up yeah and then some training etc so i'll tell you what i like about a franchise revenue sharing model is you might be able to say we'll give you a loan on the 30 000 we'll take the first 90 of revenue for the until we pay back we'll take the first 80 and you take 20 until you pay it back and then we flip to 80 20 the other way so there's all kinds

David Friedberg: of interesting things you can do if it's a qualified person if you had 500 000 in seed investing you could float the first 10 people for 25k and get this going and then you could name it something really great like mcdonald's does and then you could put the cities on a map and then you could give people a franchise where they have you know uh the only location within i don't know 25 miles or some amount of density and then they have first right refusal on stuff that's within 25 miles that one or within a probably would do it based on i think population okay so you have the first 250 000 people around this location and we'll open up locations that have 250 000 people so for example in new york city you might have five locations in brooklyn but over the same square mileage you know in boise idaho you might only want to have two right because it's about density brooklyn you could have one in downtown

SPEAKER_42: brooklyn one in flatbush and they would not compete against each other because it's so far away

SPEAKER_74: but absolutely brilliant idea what's your background how did you come up with the idea

SPEAKER_163: my wife yeah my wife actually came up with the idea we were talking one night and she thought i thought it was a great idea we started building it um the end of 2019 um and then covet happened and i had young kids so i put my family first and really focused on them and uh but i have a working prototype now so it's real um i started with a prototype and i kelly had the great idea thank you kelly to use uh off-the-shelf drones instead of building all the drones myself so i'm buying drones from manufacturer um drone light show drones um so i can scale faster yeah awesome is drone light show drones the one that

SPEAKER_160: does the burning man drone shows they're not that particular brand of drone right they have their own i think verge arrow did their show this year but um that it's definitely an evolving space i think

SPEAKER_79: kimball has a company doing it as well i i literally uh have seen kimball's drone shows so tell me how meaningful would it be for you to get this 25 000 first money in how meaningful would that be for you

SPEAKER_163: i think it would let me get my first customer um which would be cool because i have to go through the faa certification process i'm ready for that and i you know i think i could become profitable

SPEAKER_147: from it and tell me found university how meaningful was that program to you and your journey as in a

SPEAKER_186: founder i don't think i'd be here without it i think i'd still be playing with my backyard toy

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SPEAKER_00: twist for your first month free all right so here we go thank you so much great job you can turn your camera off and now we'll have our deliberations that you all can listen in on kelly when we uh recap the four companies and then tell me which company you think will return the most money for us i'm going to ask you these questions different ways but the first lens just tell us the four companies which one do you think will return the most for our limited partners and these are the limit partners in launch fund four which is currently raising if you want to be a limited partner in launch fund four launch.co f-o-u-r so we are promoting three things on this podcast you can be an lp in our fund you

David Friedberg: could join founder university and then eventually we'll probably syndicate these companies or one of these

SPEAKER_189: companies to the syndicate.com which you can join if you're an accredited investor okay and you can

SPEAKER_00: watch this podcast and you can advertise on it so i mean there's just like five ways for us to win in this but recap the four companies and tell me in your version of the world which one you believe kelly will

SPEAKER_98: return the most for our limited partners cutthroat decision i'm asking you to make i will make that

SPEAKER_27: decision so our four companies were fantastic funding they are the ones that are working on helping folks bring products to life you know promptify which is working through chat gpt engineers and getting those to market we have open spot which is a b2b sass for healthcare companies to fill their wait list and renegade labs which is hardware as a service bringing drone games to the world and so for these companies i think the one that has the biggest potential for rlps is fantastic funding i think it's a really interesting position okay and what do you love about that why do you think

SPEAKER_00: it's going to return the most money for us i want to hear your thinking as an investor and you are uh an investor who's learning dare i say the j cal playbook so what in the playbook gives you signal that this is going to be a great investment i think it goes back did i just talk about myself in the

SPEAKER_176: third person sorry about that you're learning my playbook i'm trying to teach everybody who works

SPEAKER_27: for me my playbook so go ahead what do you think i think in very true j cal fashion a lot of people want to be entrepreneurs and it's it's hard to bring ideas to life and i think having opportunities like this that not only are that that one piece that already exists in the world but providing more comprehensive services i mean similar to how we do even in founder university and a lot of our other programs makes a lot of sense and i think could return a lot of money especially with that new uh addition he made to his pitch and how they might make money in the future fantastic fresh which one

SPEAKER_11: will return the most money for our lps and why uh so my pick for returning most capital to the lps is open spot and the reason being is the problem they're solving just based on the pricing i think

SPEAKER_12: they can 10x their pricing so they're they're charging 150 right now and they're saving with

SPEAKER_11: your back of the envelope math jason 120k a year um that's a huge huge savings um so they're um

SPEAKER_12: essentially making the the the practice more money um by using the tool and i think they have ton more room to grow on their pricing um so i'm gonna pick up if they're making 10 000 a month

SPEAKER_00: and they're charging 150 they are charging 1.5 percent for those open slots it's i think a better pricing would be 500 a month which is about five percent of those slots and then anything over ten thousand dollars they get another five percent which would then give them the ability if they did twenty thousand dollars to make a thousand and and that still would be five percent right so they could come up with like a little bit of a sliding scale maybe they get seven percent of everything over ten thousand who knows uh but enough to make it so people think it's too cheap uh so i like your answer there now i'm going to ask a different question which one of these companies has the best product velocity and is iterating on their product the fastest which would be a signal for us that despite the early signal they could pivot or and or the team could find other opportunities right because we have limited uh ability so i'll let you do this first questions kelly got to go first last time which one of these companies has the most product velocity which is to say the product gets better

SPEAKER_09: really quickly which one has the best product velocity do you think yeah i'm i'm also going to

SPEAKER_11: stick with open spot uh just doubling down there okay reason being the product also was

SPEAKER_12: kind of incepted in the program and also built throughout the program um and so and and after being built also sold in the program so they went from kind of idea to building product and to selling um in that 12 week um 12 week program so i think i think in terms of product velocity there up there great all right so now the audience are we have a live youtube audience

SPEAKER_00: for those of you who are listening to the podcast or watching it here and i'm going to ask the the almost 300 people watching to take part in this poll which company should jason invest 25 000 in for the uh moderators who are doing this can nick or one of the moderators do a poll which startup would you invest 25 000 in fantastic funding promptify open spot or renegade labs everybody take a moment here i'm going to answer as well in which one i think we should do and we will uh see if we can get

SPEAKER_01: to 100 votes here hopefully we can get one out of three people i see we have 29 votes and it's moving very quickly right now we have 137 votes 42 votes and i will read them off when we hit 100 votes so

SPEAKER_00: everybody who's in the chat right now youtube.com this weekend is a great way for you to subscribe to our channel hit the bell and when we do live stuff like this you can participate okay we're at 103 votes so we made it there 58 of you said open spot uh 21 said renegade labs 11 said fantastic funding and 9 said prompt five i will go through each of these companies right now and tell you the right answer fantastic funding has unlimited upside because like etsy or airbnb they are enabling people to be entrepreneurs when you enable people to be entrepreneurs my lord is that one of those unlimited opportunities uber also allows people to be entrepreneurial airbnb etsy so many of those platforms allow people to take control of their life and destiny as you correctly pointed out kellen so that's why i love that company now promptify these are two developers who have crazy fast velocity i love that in a space that has unlimited upside as well we all know chat gpt4 and the prompts

SPEAKER_17: are essentially how you your output is going to be based on how good those prompts are so this is a brilliant idea the ability to again make somebody into an entrepreneur you're enabling somebody else to become an entrepreneur on your platform platforms win so instead of trying to make the products on fantastic funding or instead of trying to make the prompts and sell them both of those are platforms that enable other people to create product and they take a marketplace fee essentially and we go to our third uh startup the waitlist startup this is a classic sas business they sell a sas solution but they could also take a little bit of the margin again there's so much money at stake this one has unlimited upside i believe and all three of those first ones are executing now we get to the final one uh with renegade drones this is a fantastic business because although it's hardware based and i didn't want to like it the idea that this could be franchise based and people like mini golf which is uh an incredible business uh small business this one could enable i believe a thousand people to have small businesses

SPEAKER_79: that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year which collectively means a billion dollars four amazing startups all four worthy of investment all four uh share that they uh or three of the four

SPEAKER_09: enable other people to build businesses and one of the four enables you to optimize a very robust business i'm going to ask you for your number two and then your number one kelly your number two out of these four that you most want me to make the decision to invest in is your number two only my number two only is

SPEAKER_27: promptify why why it is because i didn't get to say this a second ago they also actually pivoted in the program and so their velocity on this has been insane i finally got on the phone with him he showed me the demo it's incredible it's very well built i'm very impressed with what they've been able to do

SPEAKER_11: in such a short time fresh who's your number two and why number two also promptify um building on the

SPEAKER_12: ai craze and hype but also just you know navigating the the current cycle and basically i think what kelly said is they've been iterating quickly um and also there's there's multiple solutions in uh being built currently so it's kind of there's room for more than one player to be built here okay now who's your

SPEAKER_27: number one kelly all right my number one is renegade labs i think there's really something special about spending time outside and a group environment with friends and family or anybody else work environments uh so i think anything that can get us outside has a big upside okay and who's your

SPEAKER_11: number one pressure number one is open spot for me um okay similar to the reason said before i think

SPEAKER_01: unlimited upside all right so let's bring our four founders on air turn your cameras on

SPEAKER_00: and i'll just ask each of you to maybe uh tell kelly impressions we have this moment here um what the founder university program has meant to each of you uh we'll start with you matt from renegade labs just the pressure and kelly know um what the program has meant to you yeah it's been amazing uh kelly impression

SPEAKER_163: you know i miss you guys every thursday i'm kind of jumping on the thursday calls there too but the amount of guidance and feedback and networking i've been able to do through the program have been awesome and the lens you've been able to help me focus um on has been been great too george

SPEAKER_00: we can give kelly impression feedback on the program yeah what you enjoyed about it what was

SPEAKER_90: meaningful to you for sure so kelly personally helped me a lot she's she's just been super supportive

SPEAKER_85: in one-to-one sessions um so thank you kelly for that um both fresh and kelly and the whole program has just helped me so much kind of structure things be accountable didn't want to lose my 500 i had a ton of fun met great people met great uh other uh you know other founders as well which has also helped me a lot in building a great network that will continue to stay with me even when

SPEAKER_237: founding university is over great phil any thoughts on the program i am a pediatrician and physicians are some of the worst when it comes to business education and so this program has just been so

SPEAKER_127: helpful to me to learn all those things that i was never exposed to in my my years of training and so i'm just grateful for the opportunity and for all the learning and ability to grow so quickly through

SPEAKER_241: the program okay and is it niman am i pronouncing correct my name is naman that's not an answer thank

David Friedberg: you yes yeah so maybe tell us a little bit about what the uh program has meant to you and what's uh worked

SPEAKER_101: really well for you yeah the program was simply excellent and it was quite insane because we had

SPEAKER_103: a huge pivot about three-fourths into the program but kelly was so helpful so supportive she was available and you know we had calls with her and she was really able to guide us and give us some great feedback which helped us build our product so i would say if you are an entrepreneur and if you're

SPEAKER_106: trying to build something this is definitely a program you want to join all right thank you so much if

SPEAKER_00: you want to join the program we're looking for uh founders hopefully if you have a co-founder or two that's even better um who want to build an mvp over this 12-week program you can apply at founder dot university slash apply i'm guessing that's right yep uh founder dot university so instead of dot com you do dot university slash apply it'll be in the show notes as well here and we're pretty permissive in terms of letting people in uh and i think we just ask you to fill out a simple form pay the 500 bucks if you come to all 12 mondays and you just give us a tiny update that takes less than a minute to fill out that's your attendance card we give you back the 500 we don't want to burn the slots because we can only accept a couple hundred people reasonably because we have to review people's work so i think you know if we can get another 300 or so people into this we're going to do it three times a year maybe even four eventually but we love being the first check into these companies and now i will make my decision these four companies each have shown that they are capable of building a product they each have shown they have the ability to make a product that customers want and that delights customers to a

SPEAKER_09: certain extent they each have shown as founders the ability to consistently perform week after week

SPEAKER_00: these are the three things that we're looking for we want founders who can build product who can build a team and be accountable and who can delight customers right because there are only three things that ultimately matter for an entrepreneur their team the product that team builds and the customers who are delighted by that product now i could tell you that i know which of

SPEAKER_09: these products is going to win and return the most for our investors but i would be lying because if you told

SPEAKER_00: me that my two or three greatest investments in history would be a meditation app a stock trading app that didn't charge users and a cab company i would literally be tell you i was lying i didn't know which companies of those first 50 that i invested in would turn into unicorns but unicorns and just game changing decacorns in some cases uh they became which then leads me to my big announcement today i am

SPEAKER_01: not investing in any of these companies i'm sorry guys i'm not investing in any of your companies i'm

SPEAKER_00: investing in all of your companies all four of you are getting the 25 000 so congratulations you are all getting 25 000 from jcal i am now officially your first investors i'm on your team and together we will change the world and then we will move on and raise more money and get you into accelerators etc thank you so much for doing the program i am so proud of each of you for focusing on those customers and getting that product built and i just want to say thank you to crash and kelly who have done an extraordinary job of uh this is their first founding university that they're managing so

SPEAKER_09: great job to them all right that's it everybody thank you jason very excited and everybody is accepting it so literally right now in your emails will be your documents to sign and then probably within

SPEAKER_00: 24 or 48 hours 25 000 will be in your bank account and uh we'll start doing the real work then you move over and you get to be in our founder slack this is where the 500 founders across 300 or so investments hang out and discuss how to you know scale their companies together and you'll be in there with the founders of companies like superhuman or com etc and be able to talk about your startup with them and then we go on to the next phase which is scaling your company and then helping you raise your next round to funding great job everybody and we will see you next time on this week at startups bye bye