SPEAKER_00: Hey, we have a great show for you today. There's some really positive, amazing news in mRNA. No, it has nothing to do with the pandemic. It has to do with cancer and the possibility that we can use this mRNA technology to cure and fight cancer to a

SPEAKER_01: level that we never actually thought would be possible.

SPEAKER_02: A dovetailing that Google has told unvaccinated employees that they're going to have to get vaccinated or figure out another way to either work from home or not work at Google

SPEAKER_03: anymore. Because Google is in a tough position. They're trying to comply with Joe Biden's executive order. And we have a follow up better.com CEO is taking a leap of absence. And then you're going

SPEAKER_02: to get to meet three amazing founders that I've invested in one of them is doing a product feedback analysis tool so you can figure out from feedback from your customers what to put in your product next. Very interesting. One's doing a sustainable shopping subscription service for all of those folks who care about the environment and want to buy sustainable well sourced clothing and then an app that helps you pay off your debt stick

SPEAKER_05: with us it's going to be a great episode. This week in startups is brought to you by snack magic is a stress free way to treat your global team clients or sales prospects with a build their own

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SPEAKER_05: market to hire need expert marketing help fast hire vetted marketing specialists this week from the company already used by Netflix all birds and more get $500 off your first hire at market to hire dot com slash twist and use the code twist and eight sleep good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the pod pro cover to any mattress go to eight sleep dot com slash twist to check out the pod pro cover and get a special holiday offer. This morning the Mayo Clinic published

SPEAKER_02: research that found a positive immune system response to an mRNA wait for it not COVID cancer treatment. Let that sink in for a minute. The pandemic has been horrific. Mental health, the economy, jobs, general strife, people losing years of

SPEAKER_03: their lives, kids losing IQ points. I saw some kids are behind like massively double digits in their IQ point development. It's been a bit of a disaster. But what if the advances in mRNA and the suffering of the last two years results in eradication of cancer, HIV and other diseases that we've really had a tough time with? Well, I think that's actually the possibility. I've talked about it on the show before and the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, and I have discussed it many times. The technology can also be used for other purposes,

SPEAKER_01: obviously, mRNA. And according to the Mayo Clinic's research, adding mRNA, messenger RNA, to cancer immunotherapy improves responses in patients who weren't responding to treatment. Untreatable patients, I think is how I would read that. Here's how the treatment works in plain English. Immunotherapy is supposed to help the body fight cancer, obviously. However, some patients don't respond to it very well, and patients that don't respond usually have weak T cells. You've heard this all before.

SPEAKER_03: Sadly, we've all had people in our lives suffer through cancer. And it was a death sentence for a long time, you know, just two or three generations ago. So T cells are

SPEAKER_01: white blood cells that attack cancer cells and help them stop from spreading. So this mRNA strategy boosts the T cell response in patients who didn't initially respond well to immunotherapy. So cancer stats from 2020, an estimated 1.8 million new cases diagnosed, that's 5000 new per day, estimated 1.8 million new cases diagnosed per year, and 606,000 cancer deaths in the United States alone, 1600 people a day. And

SPEAKER_16: we've been losing 1000 a day, I think from COVID, if we look at the numbers ultimately here in the US. So they're, they're, they're pretty close. In fact, sadly, and who knows, I don't

SPEAKER_19: want to get the conspiracy theories going here. But some number of people who died with from COVID would have been probably with COVID, or they might have died from the next flu or whatever, which we all know. But let's not debate that now, because I don't want to have the channel get sanctioned as fake news or

SPEAKER_20: something like that. We're currently seeing 116,000 new cases a day and 1700 new deaths per day right now COVID. Not all bad, though, our producers were shocked at how positive the stats were over the last couple decades in terms of cancer death rate, according to cancer.org, the death rate from cancer in the US declined 29%. 29% from 1991 to 2017. Again, generation to generation, the idea of your

SPEAKER_06: parents dying from cancer in their 40s, 50s and 60s is becoming a rarer and rarer occurrence. I know growing up that I had some friends whose parents when we were young, died in their 40s or 50s from cancer, tragically,

SPEAKER_01: and millennials and Gen Z, and my kids, they're going to have less of this experience 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017, the

SPEAKER_20: largest single year drop ever recorded natural why that happened. Here's a chart total cancer diagnosis and

SPEAKER_16: deaths among men and women since 1975. Obviously, some of these are going to be impacted by behavior. But this translates to more than 2.9 million deaths avoided since 1991. This was mostly due to the

SPEAKER_06: massive decline in lung cancer. Obviously, this is a behavioral thing, lung cancer death rates declined 51% from 1990 to 2017 among men and 26% from 2002 to 2017 among women. Other types of cancer death rates have been declining as well. I think a lot of this has to do from early detection, breast cancer death rates

SPEAKER_20: declined 40% from 89 to 2017 prostate cancer death rates. And my dad had prostate cancer and survived

SPEAKER_19: thank God 1993 to 2017. And my mom's a breast cancer survivor. So literally, both my parents still alive decades after having cancer. Thank you to science and doctors for keeping my parents around.

SPEAKER_01: And so the treatment is part of this and preventive measures like not smoking and early detection are the other ones. But MRNA is going to just take this to a whole nother level. The idea of dying from cancer could go away in our lifetimes. Is that possible? I've talked to scientists who think

SPEAKER_16: that's possible. If you think about the leading companies in MRNA, you know, Moderna, BioNTech,

SPEAKER_01: CureVac, and TranslateBio. These all have huge market caps. And Moderna is working on what they call an individualized cancer vaccine. This is where they sequence a patient's DNA from their blood and their tumor. And then once they can identify the cancerous mutations, they create a vaccine that encodes for each of these mutations and loads them into one single MRNA molecule. In other words, it's customized. And when that MRNA is injected, the hope is immune system will be better informed as

SPEAKER_16: to which cancer cells to go after. Pretty much like having some like, I don't know, military scout go out ahead of time and figure out like, here's the enemy's battle plan. And here's how we're going to counter it. Like it's like having a spy, right? It's like having a plant inside the enemy's strategy.

SPEAKER_06: How great is this? And everybody's complaining the world's terrible. Well, I do think that this pandemic is going to have a lot of silver linings. I think we're going to take education, health, health, work, and a number of these issues a lot more seriously and have a lot more innovation in them. So speaking of MRNA vaccinations, Google leadership has told the unvaccinated employees that they'll lose pay and eventually be fired if they do not comply and get a vaccine, as is the

SPEAKER_01: right of a private company. According to CNBC, employees received a memo stating that most US workers have to comply with Google's vaccine policy. And that stems from Biden's executive order. As you know, the Biden administration ordered companies with 100 workers or more to make sure employees are vaccinated or COVID tested weekly. So this order is on hold as the court deals with people

SPEAKER_16: contesting the legality of it. I heard Ben Shapiro and his podcaster is filing a legal challenge to it. And what a great way to get some interest in your podcast, you know, from a cynical perspective, but I think he actually believes that this is overstepping. And honestly, I can see both sides of the story. I don't think the government should be allowed to force you to get a vaccine, put a gun

SPEAKER_02: to your head. But I do think private businesses should be allowed to say who is allowed to work there based on vaccines. Both of these seem obvious to all of us, I believe. So we're probably not that far off on our belief in this if we talk to each other as opposed to using social media, the greatest

SPEAKER_06: evil, the cancer of our generation, social media and the and the sort of clickbait media, I would say are the cancerous part. Those are if you took those two, they're the cancer, the obesity and the jewel of the modern era, social media combined with the clickbait media, I'm not saying journalism, saying clickbait media, which some people might interpret as me saying journalism, but specifically the people who are just trying to whip things up and make you feel anxiety, fear, rage. And I put that in two buckets. Clickbait media, social media. And I think that's why Twitter is trying to move itself

SPEAKER_16: away from being toxic and really trying strongly to make a less toxic debate. So right now, as I said,

SPEAKER_06: that order is on hold. According to CNBC, the memo stated employees had until December 3, to show they are vaccinated or apply for medical or religious exemption. They don't show proof of vaccination apply for exemption or denied an exception. Google will contact them. If the employees do not get vaccinated by January 18, they will be placed on paid leave for 30 days. After that, they will be placed on unpaid personal leave for six months, followed by termination. So they are giving the most delicate landing possible here, it seems Google to comply with Biden's order. If they don't want to be vaccinated, they can explore roles at Google that don't go against the executive order. These would be roles that fall outside the executive order, independent contractors and leased employees.

SPEAKER_20: I've never heard the term leased employees. That sounds dystopian. They're human beings, you don't

SPEAKER_02: lease them. Come up with something else. If they do find a role, and it can be done outside the office, Google will make this employee permanently remote, which makes total sense. CNBC reported that Google is

SPEAKER_01: not delaying the return to office plans. Like most of the tech industry, they will require employees to come into the office three days per week at some point during the new year. That's kind of a big

SPEAKER_02: open statement. The new year, technically, is the entire year because it's a new year. So I don't

SPEAKER_06: know if that means the first 30 days of the new year or the first 100 days, but nobody knows what's

SPEAKER_16: going to happen. I'm super positive. I think this Omicron is like the end of it. I'm hoping knock on wood, it seems like the death rate from that just isn't showing up or people are saying like the first death.

SPEAKER_06: And I'm like, wait a second, if this thing is spreading like crazy, we've only had one death. What does that tell us? Either people are getting vaccinated, and it's working, or this thing is weaker, and it spreads fast. I don't know. Or maybe we're hitting some kind of herd immunity. I don't think anybody knows. And nobody's going to be able to handicap perfectly

SPEAKER_19: what is happening here. So we'll leave it at that. Also, there were a couple 100 employees who wrote

SPEAKER_16: some sort of manifesto that they were against the COVID mandate, you know, out of the 100,000 plus

SPEAKER_01: Google employees. So to me, that's an incredibly low number that only a couple of hundred people. And again, if you're care about my position, which you don't need to, I think my position fits with

SPEAKER_02: in all likelihood, the majority of you listening, which is the vaccines are safe and worth taking. But if you don't want to take it, I don't think we can hold you down in America and shove a needle in your arm. But we can incentivize you to get it. How are we going to incentivize you to get it? Well, you can't go to Cheesecake Factory. I saw a bunch of idiots sitting in a Cheesecake Factory without masks. Let me tell you something, if you want to protest, protesting to inside of Cheesecake Factory, I would do a protest to never have to go to a Cheesecake Factory. Are you guys crazy? That's your protest. It's 2021. There's a million things in the world you could protest. And you're protesting the

SPEAKER_00: Cheesecake Factory not letting you eat there in a mask. Oh, my Lord. This is horrible. Sorry,

SPEAKER_02: come at me. Let me think I might go on Jason's rules of never things, which is if the menu has more

SPEAKER_06: than 100 items on it. Yeah, no go. Yeah, no go spiral binder, not the restaurant I want to be at. Just pick your lane, do something well, do something better than everybody. But I am not interested in the

SPEAKER_09: Cheesecake Factory. If you're behind on holiday gifting, fear not. I have the greatest idea for you. I've got a great product that I've used, many of my friends use, and my bestie David Sachs

SPEAKER_47: actually invested in the company. It's called Snack Magic, and they are going to save the day. Snack Magic is a stress-free and customizable way to delight your employees or your customers, and you don't need to do anything arduous. What you do is, it's software, you put in the email addresses of the people you want to send a delightful holiday gift to, and they get an alert in their email box that you've given them the ability to build their own gift box. And then they get to choose from 800 snacks and beverages, and even office supplies and things they might be able to use. You will delight your customers with this. And when you send these

SPEAKER_06: gifts, I always have this problem, like I like to send chocolate, or, you know, I like to send something else. And then somebody's like, I hate chocolate. Oh, okay, I sent you coffee,

SPEAKER_47: a coffee selection, gift basket, you know, whatever. They don't like, they drink tea. All right, I sent you tea. How are you going to do this right? In today's day and age, everybody's got their own dietary restrictions. When you use Snack Magic, they go to this website, and they see all this amazing candies, cookies, protein bars, beef jerky. The world is your oyster. You can just pick from all these amazing, amazing products, and then you get a box, and you got snacks for the next three months. It's awesome. So whether you want to delight one person or 1000 of snack magic needed so easy, get 10% off with the code twist, by going to snack magic.com slash twist snack magic.com slash twist. Once you have this up and running, you're going to use it all the time, you're going to get some new customer, you know, write them a nice note, you send them a little link, boom, and it makes people feel so great.

SPEAKER_48: All right, great job snack magic. Love the problem. So anyway, totally fair asked from Google.

SPEAKER_02: Google. And there, if you look at it, I know the clickbait media, and the social outrage media,

SPEAKER_06: they will be dunking on this. But when you break apart what Google is doing here, they're trying to

SPEAKER_19: comply with Biden's mandate, and they got to stay on his good side, because, you know, antitrust,

SPEAKER_16: etc. They need to play ball, let's be honest. And, you know, I want to acquire something big again,

SPEAKER_06: like YouTube. So they're trying to play ball. That's what's happening here, trying to be supportive.

SPEAKER_02: They're giving their employees just a ridiculous runway here to get this done. And then they're

SPEAKER_09: saying, wink, wink. If you can't, you know, see a way to get this vaccine, and we've got to work from

SPEAKER_02: home rule as a consultant, sure, we'll try to work it out with you as long as we're respecting Biden's executive order. So that's kind of the wink. What they're saying is, if you don't want to get it, stay home and be a consultant. But we're all coming back to work. Be respectful. Everybody coming back to work gets the vaccine. The end. Perfectly played by Google. I know everybody on Twitter and the clickbait media is going to do fake news headlines and be outraged on social media. Just read the facts, people, and think for yourself, what would you do as the CEO of Google? You do the exact same thing they're doing. Please get it. We're coming back at some point. And if you don't like it, and you really are opposed to the vaccine, you can work from home. That's basically what they're saying here. And they're just trying to if you have any level of insight here and just think what Sundar

SPEAKER_06: is thinking for a moment. Sundar is just thinking, how do I gain this so the few holdouts if they're absolutely exceptional employees and still work here? That's what he's thinking. He's like, is there anybody in the 1% of people at Google or 2% of people that don't want to get vaccinated that are critical? If they are? And we can keep them as consultants. Great. Switch their contract from salary to consultant. Figure out how to do it. HR, you take care of it. All right. Speaking of HR, better.com CEO is taking a leave of absence. It's taking time off effective immediately. In case you missed it, Friday's clickbait media reported that better CEO Vishal Garg was taking a leave of

SPEAKER_19: absence. Motherboard gained an email. I'm calling mother for the clickbait media motherboard and vice are just like, everything's the end of the world. It's exhausting. How everything is just a disaster

SPEAKER_16: with those folks. I mean, just the same as like on the other side, Fox and Oh, and is how you pronounce

SPEAKER_02: it? One America News Network. I mean, it's who named their network. One America News. Now I mean, these people are just based on the title they gave their network, I can tell you that it's terrible

SPEAKER_06: content. Putting that aside. Here are some quotes from the board of directors. Vishal will be taking time off effective immediately, yada yada. The board has engaged an independent third party firm

SPEAKER_16: to do a leadership and culture assessment. That's nonsense. They're just going to hire a firm and give

SPEAKER_15: them 50 grand and the firm's going to whitewash the whole thing. No big deal. That's how it works.

SPEAKER_19: I mean, if you're paying for it, how independent is it? Right? Think it through folks. The

SPEAKER_20: recommendation of this assessment will be taken into account to build a long term sustainable and

SPEAKER_16: positive culture at betterment. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Here's a 33 second clip of my suggestion

SPEAKER_20: from December 8. Just a couple days ago. I'll see you on the other side of 33 seconds. You're a

SPEAKER_48: terrible leader. I can tell you that. And if I was on your board, I would have the board fire you for that email. And for that performance. Those are unacceptable performances as a CEO. That's just bad leadership. You're unfit to lead. But anybody who's working at this company, I should leave immediately. Because I can tell you from just these two instances that this person is not a leader, you should be part of this person, you know, likelihood will repeat these same mistakes. Because for somebody to change, they need to want to change and they need to take deliberate action

SPEAKER_70: to change. I don't see that in this individual. Okay, they have it. I mean, I was kind of beating

SPEAKER_47: around the bush. They're trying to subtly get my point across. But the guy's a disaster. It's so

SPEAKER_01: clear. He's a disaster. Just from, you know, all the things that have come out. Now, you could say it's a hit job and he's being misinterpreted. But you know, to fire people on the zoom, I don't want to beat the dead horse here. But to fire people 900 people on zoom right before Christmas, it just shows a lack of empathy. And the person needs to go to and I don't mean to make this too personal. But you're going to have to go to therapy. And you're going to have to talk to a leadership coach and or a therapist and say, How did I miss this when everybody else saw it? Doesn't it's not like a debt

SPEAKER_02: sentence or anything. Listen, I had blind spots before in my life. And people need coaching. And you know, listen, I used to fight too much with too many people I was fighting on all fronts. So you know, over nonsense when I was a kid and an editor of a magazine, everything was I saw everything as a

SPEAKER_06: battle, right? And I don't see it like that anymore. I have a sense of humor about stuff. And I pick my targets, you know, in a very considered way. So I have had blind spots, you have blind spots,

SPEAKER_09: this person has just like a major blind spot, that could cause a risk of ruin inside their own company, which is talents, not gonna want to work for somebody like this. That's the big problem for

SPEAKER_06: the board. If I was on the board, as I said, I'm thinking about the next five hires, you know, the bar raisers, as we talk about, you know, Amazon's bar raisers, we're gonna hire somebody who's better. Somebody who's better than the CEO is gonna look at that CEO and say, Why would I work for them? I'm bet I'm so much better than them, that I'm gonna go work for somebody who's flawed. And that is the key issue here. The article says, three high ranking employees resigned after the layoff fiasco, top talent does not want to work for leadership that is not worthy of, you know, being

SPEAKER_72: in the captain's chair. That's just how it works, folks, you're gonna lose great people, people don't

SPEAKER_06: want to work for somebody who's that flawed. They don't mind a leader, you know, just as a caveat here, a leader who knows their blind spot and says, Listen, I'm not organized. I'm a vision CEO, or somebody says, I'm obsessive compulsive, but I'll leave the vision and the product stuff to y'all. I'm a sales driven marketing driven CEO. People love that. People love a CEO who can be introspective, criticize themselves and be aware of their blind spots. That's showing vulnerability. This person didn't show that. And that's why I think I'm being compassionate here. And if he wants to come on the pod and talk about it, I assume this person is a good person who just has a blind spot and needs to evolve. And who knows what's going on in the personal life, they could be under a lot of stress, they could be going through some personal turmoil. So you have to have a little compassion here. But

SPEAKER_02: there's a higher level of responsibility when you choose to be in the captain's seat of a plane,

SPEAKER_09: I think we can all agree on that. So if you're the pilot, and you're going through some, you know, terrible, you know, depression, anxiety, personal problems, whatever existential crisis,

SPEAKER_06: you don't do your job as a pilot, you say, Listen, I shouldn't be in the pilot seat. If what I'm doing, what's going on in my personal life is too acute, to ensure the safety of everybody on the plane. That's how you have to think about a CEO. Right? That's having a CEO. And you got to think about the folks who are on the board as like air traffic control. And, you know, the people running the airline and the maintenance crew there, they're kind of ensuring that the pilot has everything around them, they need the people who set the rules, the training staff, the people who do maintenance, all of them are just trying to make sure that the pilot can pilot the plane. And they did the right thing here. Because you can't have a pilot in there who's going to, you know, make the plane spiral. And this plane was about to spiral. So a great job. And if you've ever had to deal with a CEO like this, you know, it's a good indication for you to move to a different company, right? Leadership matters. If you think the CEO is flawed, you can just have a conversation with them and say, Listen, maybe it's not my place. But I think as a leader, you're not the right person here. And I'm going to

SPEAKER_16: make the choice to go to another company where I can believe in the leader. And in today's

SPEAKER_06: competitive environment, there's more expected of leaders, I've tried to up my leadership game, you know, just because I look at how the world is working right now, if people don't want to go to work, and people want to start their own companies, people are independent, and 25 year olds are starting

SPEAKER_02: their first funds or syndicates, you know, they're on podcasts, they don't need to come work for for me, right? There's a lot more choices out there. So all CEOs, all leaders have to up their game and be worthy of talent coming to work for them top town. So this person, I think maybe got a little

SPEAKER_06: high on their own supply. Again, I don't want to beat them up. But there's the follow up there. And again, I'd love to have him on the pod when he's ready to reflect on this, and I will make it I don't want to say safe space, but I'll make I won't dunk on the guy any more than I have, I do have compassion in my heart, actually, for people who have success, but have blind spots, because listen, I invest in entrepreneurs as a living. So I'd love to have him on the pod. That's an open intro. And it would be respectful. And I tried to I would try to make that an actually positive experience for him and for the audience. Like what can we learn from this? What would you have done differently? So to my producers, let's get them on if anybody's personal friends with them, send them this clip. Okay, next up,

SPEAKER_36: you get to meet with a couple of the companies I've recently invested in stay tuned. Are you falling

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SPEAKER_87: marketerhire.com, M-A-R-K-E-T-E-R-H-I-R-E.com slash TWIST. All right, next up on the program,

SPEAKER_01: I'm going to introduce you to three companies I recently invested in. The show is called This Week in

SPEAKER_03: Startups. I used to always have the founders I was investing in on the program. That was kind of the whole purpose of the program. I'd meet people who were capital allocators, we'd talk about our portfolios and investing generally. And then we'd talk about the companies we invested in, sometimes we'd have them on and then invest in them, like Comm. And sometimes we'd invest in them and then have them come on the program. And so we had the Launch Accelerator's 22nd cohort back in March to July of 2021. And I just thought, let's have a couple of them on, give them 10 minutes each, they show their product. These are early stage companies. The thing you can do as a fan of technology, early stage companies is just go try the product and give feedback to the founders. They always love that. As I always say, founders spell love, just like kids do, T-I-M-E. Give them a little bit of time, try their product, give them a little feedback, always helpful, could be critical, they can all handle it, could be what you love, could be a combination of both. But we want to have people out there making great products and services to delight companies, create jobs and move the

SPEAKER_54: human species forward. First up, Oliver Rowan, who is with Support Trends. Oliver, welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_90: Hey, Jason, doing great. How are you?

SPEAKER_01: Uh, good. So tell everybody, what does Support Trends do?

SPEAKER_94: Yeah, Support Trends processes all of your customer feedback and tells you what matters, you know, regardless of whether it's a few thousand conversations or a few hundred thousand conversations,

SPEAKER_97: we help you understand the important stuff. And why is that important to companies?

SPEAKER_94: Yeah, customer feedback is, is everything. You know, you, you can, you can listen to customers that, that have opinions about, um, all kinds of things, both good and bad, and it affects your, your ability to revise the product to make it better, uh, next time through. And when you release products, it helps you release better products, helps you un-kink wrinkles and, and the customer service or customer support experience. Your customers tell you all of these things and it's important.

SPEAKER_101: So how do you do it? Uh, how do you take this big corpus of customer requests,

SPEAKER_03: which I'm assuming are sitting in some, you know, Salesforce or Zendesk or whatever, you got all these customer tickets laying in some SaaS software. How do you, uh, analyze all that and, and tell people what's important?

SPEAKER_94: Yeah. So with Zendesk, for example, we connect to, to Zendesk and then as a ticket comes in, it's processed by our platform. And over, over time they, they accumulate. And what our platform does is each time a ticket or other customer conversation closes, call recording, social media, whatever, uh, the, the platform processes it for, for natural language, it structures that unstructured data and organizes it by importance so that you can view reporting and insights over time that, that tells you essentially what the most important things going on with your customers are.

SPEAKER_01: All right. So why don't you show us a demo of the product and remember people are going to be

SPEAKER_106: listening to the podcast. So make sure you sports cast it. In other words, explain what's happening on the screen in detail.

SPEAKER_108: So first thing I do is connect all of my customer communication platforms that, that I talked about survey responses, tickets, call recordings, things like that,

SPEAKER_94: essentially anywhere customers talking to you. And then here we can see that support trends ingests, all of these conversations, as they happen, they analyze for churn likelihood, sentiment, KPIs, things like that. Most importantly, it flags what customers are talking about, regardless of whether or not I'm looking for it. So I know why customers are upset or why they're happy. And then, you know, here you can see, I'm, I'm telling the system to notify me when a certain criteria happens again,

SPEAKER_108: so I don't have to sit there staring at screen. It tells my team,

SPEAKER_06: What is the example there? This is where you can do better presenting. Always tell them what the example is. So here, you'd say you just said an event, but it would be better to say exactly what event. So if more than 10 people mention a keyword, or if this specific keyword cancellation,

SPEAKER_03: or competitor name. So if I was, you know, Instacart anytime DoorDash comes up, I want to know or anytime Whole Foods or Amazon comes up, I want to get an alert as a CEO. Uh, so is that the case of what we're talking about here?

SPEAKER_103: Yeah. Yeah. You have the idea. You can tell that the system, Hey, I know these things are important

SPEAKER_94: and look for those, or you, you can view, uh, certain reports that tell you what is important to the customers that they're just talking about. You know, it could be, you know, master pin or something that you had no idea was important. It'll surface there.

SPEAKER_03: Got it. And do the existing platforms do this yet? Cause this is where I think VCs will give you the classic, isn't this just a feature? Like what happens when Zendesk and Salesforce and HubSpot or whoever does CRM software, what happens when they add it? So I guess, how did you, did that question come up a lot from downstream VCs we introduced you to, or you met with, and then how did you answer it?

SPEAKER_108: It does come up occasionally, but each, each platform is interested in kind of keeping

SPEAKER_94: you beholden to that platform. So, you know, let's say Zendesk, who's a partner of ours, you know, they're collaborative with us. Um, if they're going to offer natural language processing of some sort, they, they're going to make it work on Zendesk, uh, support trends. On the other hand, work works with Twitter. It works with all the ticketing platforms. It works with voice over IP

SPEAKER_117: system. It works with survey platforms, and we are not stuck to any one of those. So that's a big

SPEAKER_03: differentiator. And most of those, uh, most of your customers are obviously enterprise customers, and they will have multiple streams of information coming in from customer support. Like you said, Twitter, people might be emailing. Yeah. Some of that gets forwarded into Zendesk. Other stuff might be surveys. So you want to have all those different rich data streams coming in. Um, and so how do you charge for the product? What's the exact pricing for people? And who's the ideal customer pro, uh,

SPEAKER_06: profile? We talk about that a lot. Who is the ideal customer, uh, for your

SPEAKER_108: product? Yeah. Pricing starts at $499 a month. Um, and it's a flat rate service starting at 499.

SPEAKER_94: Um, we, we work with a lot of customer service and customer experience departments. Um, and we're starting to work with a lot of marketing departments too, that run high, high volumes of surveys through the platform, uh, so that they can process, um, and, and see, you know, the trends and, and all the

SPEAKER_03: demographics that are important to them. Got it. And, uh, OG Bob G asked a question. Uh, is this bottoms up product strategy? Uh, can lower level employees, uh, start using the software in big companies and then, you know, like Yammer and Slack move it up or is it too expensive for that pricing?

SPEAKER_108: Or, you know, how do you think about that? Yeah, we, we actually just, just released a survey

SPEAKER_94: only price point of $99 a month. Um, and, and that's the bottoms up opportunity because lots of folks have access to surveys and have a lot of survey data that they can't analyze. So that's our play there. And it absolutely can be, can be bottomed up. So if I'm using survey monkey type

Chamath Palihapitiya: form or just a Google sheet, I can ingest that into support trends.com and analyze it for just 99

SPEAKER_03: bucks a month. And if it works great, then maybe I want the full package to go and I get the authorization to ingest other sources of data inside of my organization. Absolutely fantastic. Uh, you guys are doing great from what I understand getting close to that 50 K a quarter in revenue. So you're very early about 80 customers or so. Is that about right? Uh, fewer than that, but, uh, growing every week. Ah, got it. Okay. And so at this early stage, how has your experience been with VCs? Obviously some of them want to see, uh, a bigger base of revenue. A lot of people say like, Hey, series a starts at a million dollars in ARR. I don't know if that's no longer true or whatever.

SPEAKER_06: What are you seeing out there? What a series a investors and seed investors expect from a SAS company in terms of the annual run rate, how much money you're making each month times 12 in terms of subscriptions. If they were monthly subscriptions or just the total annual value of

SPEAKER_124: all the reoccurring contracts, what are they looking for? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question.

SPEAKER_94: So we, we encountered sort of a $10,000 a month threshold. You know, that's where, that's where a lot of folks, you know, want to see, see you pass before that the justification is, is that, you know, you could get your friends and family to sign up or something and kind of almost get

SPEAKER_06: there. So that's an important one. And you just blew past 10K a month. So that's great. So now conversations are qualitatively different for you as a founder? Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of,

SPEAKER_108: or people just take the meeting, I guess. They take the meeting and it usually goes a second

SPEAKER_117: meeting at that point, um, beneath that threshold, it's a little bit harder. Uh, and then what do you

SPEAKER_06: think the threshold is as a slam dunk in terms of month over month growth? Cause they are looking for month over month growth, have investors giving you feedback of what they look for in terms of month over month growth to make either a, you know, a big seed round, a couple million bucks or a series

SPEAKER_94: A, which today's market is five to $20 million. Yeah. So we're, we've been around, you know, 15 to 20% month over month. And I think that's the threshold, but because we're there, it doesn't really come up as an objection. You know, we kind of checked that box. They do want to see your go to market action. That's a popular one. You know, they want to see that mean to somebody who doesn't

SPEAKER_03: know your go to market plan, your border market action. Yeah. How are you going to sell this

SPEAKER_108: thing? How are you selling it now? And how are you going to sell it six months from now? And you know, 10 exit. Um, so it needs to be a scalable thing. It can't be the founder. What was your answer to that? Um, so initially it was tough, you know, because it was just me. I was the founder and I was

SPEAKER_94: just reaching out to everybody good on LinkedIn, but, um, you know, we've outsourced our, our SDR process sales development rep process. Um, and we're scaling that. So that's been our answer.

SPEAKER_122: Got it. So starting with SDR sales development reps, these are people who typically get paid,

SPEAKER_03: you know, in America, $30,000 a year, plus a 10 K bonus to just find leads and just introduce them to the product. So that could be from email that could be on the phone, whatever. And then SDRs is one of the highest churn positions in sales departments. People either quit because they hate doing it, or they wind up becoming account executives because they want to close and they want to double their salary. So SDRs are a great way to just increase the number of leads. And so that's a great answer. If you say you have SDRs, at least you know how a sales team works and you

SPEAKER_49: understand the value of leads. So great job. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. We all know that.

SPEAKER_47: And according to eight sleep over 30% of American struggle with sleep and temperature is one of the main reasons. I know this because my wife and I, listen, we run at two different temperatures. I like it nice and cool. And she likes it toasty warm. And then we get into the thermostat worst. The thermostat wars are over. They take out the app. And then I can set on my side, I want to be plus four. Then the algorithm gets to work. It studies my sleep and it knows what temperature I should be. And I don't know how the algorithm works, but I sleep better and I wake up more rested. And then my wife, she wants it a little bit warmer. Domestic tranquility soon follows. And if you don't get sleep, you're going to be cranky. We all know that you're not going to be as good at work the next day. So eight sleep is an investment in your ability to perform at work, your marriage or partnership, if you're in one of those, and just generally getting better sleep and being healthy. And now eight sleep is offering a pod pro cover. If you already have a mattress, it's super easy. You just buy the cover and you can still experience all the magic of eight sleep. That's one of the great innovations.

SPEAKER_06: The pod pro cover is the most advanced solution in the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating, and then that biometric tracking. So you can look in the app, it tells you your sleep stages, biometrics, the bedroom temperature, and it reacts intelligently, creates

SPEAKER_47: that optimal sleep environment. Eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster. It also reduces your

SPEAKER_49: sleep interruptions, according to our friends at eight sleep, by 40%. You can overall get more

SPEAKER_47: restful sleep. Listen, I'm no expert on this, but I use it. And when I sleep on a bed that doesn't

SPEAKER_06: have eight sleep, I don't sleep as well, period, end of story. So go to eight sleep.com slash twist to check out the pod pro cover, get a special holiday offer. You're gonna love it. Just trust me, I love it so much. I put a little placed a little bet. I wet my beak. I invested a little bit in eight sleep. A lot of my friends are investors in eight sleep as well. Great job. Erin Houston of

SPEAKER_03: Wearwell is on the program next. She's co-founder and CEO of Wearwell, which you can see at shopwearwell.com. So tell me, what does Wearwell do and explain to the audience why you created it?

SPEAKER_153: Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Jason. Wearwell is a membership platform to shop for sustainable clothes. More than ever, people want to know that they are making a positive impact on the world when they choose to make a purchase. Nielsen released some research about a year ago saying, this is the decade of the sustainable shopper. Yet, if you are a sustainable shopper, you know just how utterly frustrating that process can be. Not because that the products that you want don't exist, but it's just too time consuming to be able to find them, especially when it comes to your clothing and accessories. And we also know that the fashion industry is one of the largest polluting industries of our planet today. There's a whole lot going on that can be transformed to be more sustainable. There are about 34 million women in the US today who identify as sustainable shoppers. They spend about $2,000 every single year on their clothing. So my co-founder Emily and I decided to build Wearwell to make it really easy for them to build a sustainable wardrobe and to support the growth of emerging brands that are really walking the talk when it comes to workers'

SPEAKER_159: rights and the environment. And for people who don't know, young people

SPEAKER_03: are very concerned about the planet. Increasingly, it's generational and millennials are getting older and they care about the planet in a deep way. Gen X, maybe a mixed bag, boomers, you know, maybe their

SPEAKER_02: kids harangue them into it. But this is really a millennial-driven and a Gen Z-driven phenomenon.

SPEAKER_161: Am I correct, Erin? Yes, that's absolutely correct. And what we find is that we're most successful with

SPEAKER_153: millennial women because they have come into more spending power. But we're seeing a lot of indicators that Gen Z, they want the same type of positive impact. It's just they're just a little bit behind the curve in terms of that spending power and obviously headed that way. And this is an amazing,

SPEAKER_122: I hate to say something positive about humanity at this point because I know we all have to be so

SPEAKER_47: negative, but we literally are living in such a time of abundance that people at least in America and

SPEAKER_09: maybe some other developed countries are willing to pay two to three times as much money to eat a fake hamburger that's better for the planet than to eat a real one that nine out of 10 people 95 out of 100

SPEAKER_02: people would say tastes better. You could get an amazing, you know, four or $5, you know, five guys or In-N-Out burger eight bucks. I don't know if inflation has gone up a little bit.

SPEAKER_06: Shake shack, whatever it is. Shout out to our guy, Danny Meyer got to get him on the program. Legend, but people will actually pay two or three times to eat something that's objectively worse.

SPEAKER_09: Here, people will pay more money, limit their choices dramatically, in order to buy something

SPEAKER_164: that's better for the planet, but objectively no better for themselves. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_153: Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I think, you know, there's what I have seen over the past five or six years is there's really this missing market and sustainable fashion. There are people who are shopping luxury who have always wanted to spend a whole lot more on clothing and people who are used to fast fashion and want to be more sustainable. And so now where we're at is people are recognizing, okay, I can spend two to three more times on a shirt, for example. And it's really around, you know, J.Crew's pricing, anthropology's pricing. It's not runaway costs here, but it's better for the planet. They feel better about it. They feel better about spending their money that way. And it's typically better constructed. So it lasts longer for them.

SPEAKER_09: That's the key for me. I have decided now that I'm old, that I want to buy like the best version

SPEAKER_02: of everything and see if it can last 20 or 30 years. In other words, what I got left on the planet.

SPEAKER_03: So like I buy Danner boots and I buy Crockett and Jones shoes. Danner boots are known for the brand from the Pacific Northwest at a Japanese company bought and I buy my Danner boots. Hey, listen,

SPEAKER_02: James Bond wears them too. Daniel Craig, my style icon. And I buy those specifically because I know I'll have my Danner boots until I die. Like I will stop hiking before these Danner boots will and

SPEAKER_03: I'll hand them off to, you know, somebody and they will use them. They can last for 30 or 40 years. And the Crockett and Jones shoes. They last a decade and you just get the soles redone and they typically cost a little more, but they last a lot better. So this is an absolutely awesome innovation. So how, what is the mechanics? Let's take a look at a demo of the product again.

SPEAKER_06: You've got over 1000 people who are paying a monthly membership. I know you got over 90%

SPEAKER_03: retention rate. You're doing pretty good. You're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, obviously. So walk us through the product and explain every detail for people who are just

SPEAKER_169: listening, please. Yeah, absolutely. So a customer comes to our website and they click a button that

SPEAKER_153: says start your style quiz. They take a quiz telling us about their sizing, their fit needs, their style preferences, budget, and what they care about most. And then they choose to sign up for a monthly membership. That membership is $8.50 per month. And as a part of that membership, they receive a monthly selection of ethically and sustainably made clothing and accessories that is curated for them by a personal stylist. They can browse those six items that were personally curated alongside other products of the moment. And they can click in and read about the social and environmental impact of each one. For example, the green skirt that we just saw on the screen there, it is made of tensile. It's a fabric that uses less water than most fabrics that are created. It was made in a factory that pays its garment workers a living wage. They add what they want to their cart. We ship them only what it is they've chosen to buy. And in addition to this monthly selection, they also have a lot of other members-only perks, such as free shipping, access to new product drops. So lots of reasons to come back and shop with us every single month. And ultimately, you can see what we're doing there is just simply making it easy

SPEAKER_111: for them to build a sustainable wardrobe. It's just asset heavy or asset light. Do you have to put this stuff in stock or do you just partner with these brands and then drop ship them from them? How does all

SPEAKER_153: that work? Yeah, great question. So we know that it's really important to control the customer experience and make sure it's a seamless one for them. So what we've done is we have a blended approach to our inventory. So leaning on the asset light side, we've got about 45 brand partners today. We carry some of their products. Most of it is on consignment and a few trusted brand partners we have drop ship with.

SPEAKER_01: Fantastic. And going out and raising money from Boomer and even Gen X folks for a narrow vertical

SPEAKER_02: community, I know from my experience, and delivering goods is going to lead to, oh, we don't do that. We're not in that category. We want you to service everybody, not just the niche. And then I think, you know, a lot of people will want to take the meeting and feel good about taking the meeting and giving you all kinds of free advice. But let's face it, you want the do re mi you want to secure the bag, you want to get the money. So how does one with a mission driven company in 2021, overcome the fact that hey, sometimes a mission driven company coming in with an initial audience that obviously is growing? How do you overcome those type of objections? Did you actually get those kind

SPEAKER_06: of objections? Or did everybody just know you and tell you you're like amazing for doing this? And it's not a

SPEAKER_127: fit. I couldn't get my partners over the over the hump. I wish I wish it was just, you know,

SPEAKER_153: you're amazing. Here you go. But what we found to be most successful is really, you know, leaning into the the mission is what gets people hooked and gets people interested. But when we're actually pitching, you got to lean into the business aspects. So, for example, our average order value today is $136. Our retention rate is 94%. That makes a great business regardless of whether you're focused on social impact or not. So the way that we pitch when we're when we're pitching that type of investor who you painted that picture of is really leaning in and saying this is a great business, we just happen to be doing good by being in business. Got it. So you flip it, like when you're hiring an

SPEAKER_47: employee, you might talk about hey, the mission, the mission, the mission that helps you get employees when you're talking about the customers mission, mission, mission. When you talk to investors, you shift the gear a little bit and say, look at this incredible business metrics driven by our mission. It's like a little subtle flip. And absolutely fantastic. And so people are essentially paying you about 100 bucks a year to be their personal stylist and just present them with opportunities to buy stuff that has a great margin. That's what they're paying for for 100 bucks a

SPEAKER_06: year. Yes, absolutely. So the question is, are there a million people in the world, or at least let's say

SPEAKER_179: the United States, that would pay 100 bucks for a stylist to give them really great sustainable

SPEAKER_152: choices that look great on them? Yeah, so when we've done the analysis of our market, there are

SPEAKER_153: about 34 million women who fit the demographic that would pay for what we're doing. We have to then break it down, look at income, look at what do they have around them in their geography. So we absolutely believe that there are a million women in particular, which means the next frontier for us is moving to gender neutral, and men's and also extending into other categories when we're able.

SPEAKER_02: Honestly, if you could tell me like, hey, this t shirt, because I'm you know, guys wear t shirts, and I don't know what happened. But I used to get three for 10. And now I'm buying 60 and $90 t

SPEAKER_06: shirts. But I don't know if that's a function of my me doing better in life, or just I'm being suckered for this new casual stuff. But I do see like a distinct difference in the t shirt wars. I am now I went I am Mack Weldon. I enjoyed for a long time James purse. I'm now very focused on Vince as a brand. I like Vince as a brand, and page PAIGE, which I guess was a women's brand. But I don't know if they're doing what they're doing to the environment where they're making these. And I actually would like to not buy things out of China. But is it even possible to buy clothes and not shop from China? Because I like Nike. And now I'm just like, I kind of feel like I don't want to buy Nike anymore because all the factories are in China and the human rights issue.

SPEAKER_153: Yeah, so I deeply appreciate this question, because the country of origin doesn't tell you much at all. It can be a good indicator if you're looking at the country of origin and the price point that you're paying. It's pretty easy to say, okay, they're probably not paying their makers a living wage with those two things in consideration. However, you can absolutely make an ethical t shirt. Vince can do that page can do that in China. It's a matter of having transparency into the factories. And then beyond transparency, actually asking the questions of how are these garment workers treated? What wages are they being paid? Do they have things like the right to unionize? We go through that with all of our brand partners. We developed a unique process of vetting our brand partners to see who really is walking the talk in that space. And there are ways to do that with bigger brands. You just have to really dig in and spend your time doing that, which a lot of people don't want to do.

SPEAKER_09: Hmm. And you know, I've been pitched on these virtual stylists for a long time. Can I like move up

SPEAKER_02: the stack with my stylist as it were and say, Hey, listen, for me, like I know that you have like this very high benchmark, but sometimes I might want a little more styling and I'm okay opening up the aperture of what's allowed in terms of my sourcing. Do those requests comes in or come in? Or are people

SPEAKER_03: sort of like really narrowly focused on this? And I just want to hit this very high benchmark of,

SPEAKER_153: you know, yeah, so we quality, we hold our stylists to account to make sure that they're really hitting the mark, of course. However, we get customer feedback twice a month from members where they can tell us, Hey, I really liked this piece. I want something that goes with it. Or I have this gap in my wardrobe. Can you find me the perfect black t shirt? And we have our stylists go and find those types of items and what's available to them to be able to show to the customer.

SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. Fantastic. Congratulations on your success. Pleasure being an investor in the company and wish you great success. All right. Next up on the program, we are going into another great category. We had SaaS and now we have consumer memberships, right? I would consider it a consumer subscription product that we just saw. And next up, finance. So when you think about really the four or five really great categories that investors like software, typically SaaS is how we refer to it today, but we'll just call it software businesses, SaaS, software as a service, reoccurring subscription revenue, consumer subscriptions, calm, Netflix, again, subscriptions. So the revenue just keeps coming in. People love that. And there are consumer that are ad driven, you know, social networks, etc, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, then you have FinTech, which would be Coinbase, Wealthfront, Robinhood, then Square, whatever, you have marketplaces, which would be Airbnb, Uber, eBay, Craigslist, two sided marketplaces, buyers and sellers coming together. Uber is considered that DoorDash is considered because you're putting restaurants and drivers and consumers who want to get food shipped to them or move themselves from point A to point B. Those are marketplaces. And so those are the big ones. And FinTech is the one that's particularly hot right now. So Amber Masters is with Payback. She's the founder, and they charge $1 a month to make paying back your debt

SPEAKER_57: easy and fun. It's a motivational tool. And I believe affiliate revenue is a big part of how you make money user base growing 15% a month. Maybe you tell us a little bit about why you started the

SPEAKER_06: company, what the mission is, and who are your ideal customers? Yeah, of course. Also, hi, Jason,

SPEAKER_192: how are you doing? Great to be here. I am doing well. Good. Well, it started from my own journey, paying off $650,000 in student loans. So I was experiencing- Hold on a second. You had $65,000

David Friedberg: in student loans? $650,000. How is that possible? Did you buy, did you go to graduate school twice or something? $650,000, 65% of a million dollars is what you got in student debt? Yeah. How is that even

SPEAKER_192: possible? Yeah, it's wild. It was between me and my husband. So I went to law school. Yeah, I went to law school. He went to dental school. So we went to- Oh, dental school is very expensive. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_201: So that's like $300,000. Okay. Now that makes sense. Okay. Yeah. And, and there's a lot of people

SPEAKER_192: in that boat. Like when we started sharing our journey, we were realizing like a lot of people have six, not just six figure debt, but like half a million dollars in debt. And so we kind of came out, came up with these principles that we were using to pay off debt, which was we're sharing our journey on social media. We're tracking our debt. We were refinancing for lower interest rate and finding other ways to save money. So we kind of wrapped those principles into that, into our app.

SPEAKER_03: And, um, and that led us to where we are today. Okay. So a key principle is knowing what interest rate you're paying for various things, whether it's your school debt, uh, your home, I guess, credit cards, uh, and then trying to find lower ones. So that is a key driver in success in paying down your

SPEAKER_192: debt. Definitely. It can save you a lot in interest and in your monthly payment as well. Got it. And

SPEAKER_01: then just, there's a behavioral thing here about learning how to save and to budget and to pay down

SPEAKER_03: debt. Is that part of the product as well, or is it more about just other optimizations? We don't do

SPEAKER_192: any budgeting in the app. We have AI recommendations. So what a user does is enters in all of their debt accounts. And then we have AI that figures out, Hey, like you're paying 15% on your student loans.

SPEAKER_19: Like that's ridiculous. Here's 20 offers. Really? People are paying 15%. That's like a credit card. It's crazy. So why don't you show us the product since we're at the product demo phase?

SPEAKER_210: Yeah. So when a user first logs in, they're tracking their debt so they can see all of their

SPEAKER_192: debt in one easy to see place. Um, they also can do things like browse our feed where other people are paying off debt and they can like and comment on other people's journeys. They can actually make their debt payments in the app. And then here, when they do make an extra payment, um, they can enter that in the app and then we'll send them a congratulatory message for doing so, which we display in our feed. And then they can also share it on other social media, like their Instagram or TikTok or whatever behooves them to get more like, I call them attaboys, but when you're liking and commenting on other people's progress, it helps you keep going, um, on your own

SPEAKER_16: journey. Got it. So a little, um, gamification as it were. Exactly. How do you make money?

SPEAKER_192: Let's go to the business. Yeah, we had a big change. So at the beginning, you mentioned the dollar a month. Um, we are now free. So what, what we've offered, uh, that we used to charge a dollar month for is completely free. And at the new year, we're actually charging $8 a month for our users to be able to, um, link their debt accounts, get custom AI recommendations, um, access to lower interest rates from some of our partners. And then they can text our debt experts so they can ask us questions about their debt. Um, sometimes it's just, you know, like is, is refinancing a smart decision or what should I do with my student loans while student loans are on freeze and that type

SPEAKER_01: of stuff. So you're charging a dollar a month. Uh, you also make a nice commission if somebody was to use one of those products, but you're going from a dollar to $8. So $12 to a hundred dollars, but

SPEAKER_06: you're adding something to the service, which is this new concierge that will talk to somebody on the

SPEAKER_192: phone or over, uh, chat. It's actually, yeah, through text. So we're not, it's not even in the app. It's like texting directly. So that was the feedback we got is when they're laying in bed, freaking out at night about their debt, they can just whip out their phone and text us.

SPEAKER_179: Great. Awesome. So that means the product could exist just as a text product.

SPEAKER_06: Okay. So how is the response from the investment community? What bucket do they put you in? I would assume you're still trying to get product market fit. You're changing the pricing. So venture capitals who are looking for a business that has really tight product market fit and is ready to scale and has 10,000 members. Yeah, no problem. But you're in that sort of in between zone, I would say as a tweener, how are seed funds, how are angels embracing the product now? And what

SPEAKER_192: has your experience been raising money? It's been really good. We actually kind of latched on to a, another fintech company who we kind of considered selling to. And in the end, they're going to fund our round. And so it worked out really well. So we were really early.

SPEAKER_02: A strategic. Yes. So there's an another fund, another product that you can do a strategic

SPEAKER_54: partnership with, I'll leave it at that. And they will fund. And the strategic will have a small amount of the ownership, I'm sure. Exactly right. Yep. Fantastic. Because that's always the concern is,

SPEAKER_03: do they get any rights or not in your round? And you got to be very careful about that when you

SPEAKER_89: let the fox in the henhouse, as it were, you got to be careful that they don't see data that would let them let them replicate the product, right? Right. Or something. Right. Because that's always their motivation. Absolutely fantastic. So let's bring all three founders back for a second here.

SPEAKER_03: I'll just go around the horn. Now, you came to the accelerator for 16 weeks, and you got to learn from each other. What did you learn? And this is like one of the great parts about being part of an accelerator, I think, or that I hear back, you know, obviously, we introduce you to people, obviously, we talk about growth and help you with pitching and answering questions, put all that aside for a second. I'm curious if you learn something from other founders in your cohort or being part of our founder slack where we have, you know, 200 founders, 300 founders talking all day long. So

SPEAKER_221: just going around the horn, what did you learn from other founders?

SPEAKER_233: Um, have your fundraising plan together, you know, as a first time founder, I think, you know, amongst

SPEAKER_94: several other first time founders, you don't know how to do a lot of things. And that that was how we started, we didn't really know, know how fundraising works. So I got a lot of feedback from from our cohort members on, you know, what, what if you looks like, if you have a plan, things tend to go

SPEAKER_03: better than not having a plan and hope is not a plan. And the plan we teach people very specifically is to start with, it's like, basically a basic sales plan, hey, have two or 300 targets, you know, get introductions to them, get those emails out, probably have to email them three or four times, you're thinking about a long term 10 year relationship with the investment community, because you may go out and fundraise multiple times. And you may start multiple companies as founders, you really gonna play that long game. And then knowing how to emailing and knowing what

SPEAKER_06: to email them, it's really a great answer, I think, I think most people think you have to meet 20 investors to find an investor. And I actually think it's kind of need to add a zero to that expectation. How many investors? Have you pitched? And then how many have you done one on one

SPEAKER_57: meetings with if you look back over the past year? Yeah, lots, I think I'm probably in the 100 and something range. Amazing. In terms of one on one meetings with? Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. Thanks for that, Oliver. Aaron, what did you learn most in the accelerator from not me, not my team? But from

SPEAKER_169: your co founders in the in the accelerator? Yeah, how to best answer questions, we did a lot of talking through, you get a tough question from an investor, how do you share what's going well, and be, you know, very transparent and truthful about the business that you're building, but keep them

SPEAKER_153: interested, you know, and and do it in a way that's compelling and succinct. I loved the one we were able to ping pong about that after one of the sessions of pitching together. Yeah. Answering questions

SPEAKER_01: concisely will build your credibility. We talked about this a lot as a concept and give you more

SPEAKER_03: time to get more questions, specifically in the format of an accelerator where you might be limited to two or three minutes of questions. But also even in a meeting with a VC over coffee or at their office,

SPEAKER_02: the more concise you are, the better and what people do is they get a little nervous, don't they? People ask them like, hey, how many paid customers you have? And you're like, well, you know, I was born on a farm. And I walked to school two miles and there was snow and it was a hill and my math teacher talking like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was looking for a number, not your autobiography. And the same thing holds true for when I get emails. I mean, I get emails sometimes and I just see that there's no links, no charts. And it's 1000 words. I'm like, I got to read a book for, you know, an interview next week on the podcast. I don't have time to read this email, short email,

SPEAKER_06: concise, some charts, same thing with your answers, tight as right. Okay, Amber, what did you learn from

SPEAKER_210: your classmates? It is not an exaggeration to say I literally learned everything. Like I was probably

SPEAKER_192: the greenest, newest newbie, new to like the entrepreneur investor world ever. And like how to make my business plan better, what my business model was, honestly, everything, how to interact with investors, how to talk up your company for what it is, but not sounds like a tool for lack of a better word. Everything I it was an amazing experience for me. Absolutely fantastic. Well, listen, it's

SPEAKER_03: great to be in business with you. And I hope you guys really have success with the investment community. I hope we did a good job helping you just, you know, get get that little catalyst, that little acceleration is the goal here. But it's ultimately, you got to run these companies, it's up to you to make it happen. And so I wish you great success for the people who are watching, you have the URLs, we'll throw them back on the screen here. The best thing you can do to help a founder is to try their product, the payback app.com the payback app.com. Go ahead and try that go to shopwarewell.com. Try that sign up for a membership. And of course, if you are have any customer support, email your customer support team right now, just say, Hey, check out support trends.com. And that's one T in support trends, s u p p o r t r e n d s.com support trends, always a

SPEAKER_16: tough decision to make. Do you put the extra T in there when you have to look at what domains are available? But support trends redirects for us. Oh, does it? Okay, fantastic. All right. Well done, everybody.