SPEAKER_00: Now that you're doing so well financially,

SPEAKER_01: what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? Answer this honestly, tell the people what you, even Jason Calacanis, will not break out the checkbook for.

SPEAKER_02: It's definitely private aviation.

SPEAKER_03: I've been trying to hold off on doing this for a long time. The great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere, or 100,000 on a round trip, that seemed absurd to spend that. The other one I would say that I sometimes sweat

SPEAKER_06: is buying a really expensive sports car. I love Corvettes and I really wanna buy a Barn Dominium, which is like a big, open, fancy barn that's kind of like a man cave, but Texas style. Do I buy this ZRX1 for $250,000 or do I buy five $50,000 Corvettes and have a little collection?

Chamath Palihapitiya: A lot of these things become cognitive load.

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SPEAKER_00: Today's founder question, Jason, comes from our dear friends over at the r slash startups subreddit. And I found a question that I had absolutely never seen before.

SPEAKER_01: So I thought it was the perfect thing to bring to us today. From our dear friend, Entire Chest, quote, I signed a $20,000 paid pilot, but it's a shark bite problem. Interesting framing. Shark bites are big crises because you're bleeding versus a mosquito bite. Just kind of an irritation. They found a big problem to solve. What they did was they found that there's trucking companies that transport fluids, and often they get the wrong fluid in the wrong truck, or the wrong truck goes to the wrong destination. And so they made a product to fix this, and they signed a $20,000 pilot. They found a problem in the market. They made a solution for it. And then they went out and did more market research and discovered that other people in the fluid trucking industry don't have this problem. They seem to have found a uniquely messed up first customer. And so I was just really curious, how common is it to accidentally index on the wrong customer

SPEAKER_15: and drive in the wrong way? This is why you want to get two or three customers and validate it across them.

David Friedberg: If one person says like, yeah, you know, we have milk containers, and if somebody puts gasoline in them, it costs $100,000. It's not worth cleaning them and puts them out of service for two weeks. So we got to make sure nobody accidentally puts gasoline in here and it's a shark bite. It's like, you know how rare shark bites are? That's why when people are wondering, like, why don't we have shark nets everywhere? Why don't we have shark repellent? Why don't we have more shark? It's because it doesn't happen that often. Now, in places where it has increased, and I love the shark bite versus a mosquito bite. Mosquito bite, let me tell you something, out here in Texas, it gets pretty gnarly in the summer. You're going to sell a lot more of those candles and I have four, four electric mosquito bite killers in the house in the summer. Just the act of going inside and outside of your house lets mosquitoes in. I have these electric things, man, I hear the zap when these things, when we murder mosquitoes in the house, I leave them on and in the summer, it's like every hour you hear one of them get fried. Now, you don't see them, they don't bite you, but it's because they probably just got in somehow. There's more money spent on mosquito bites than there are in shark bites. But shark bites, man, my feed on TikTok and Instagram is all shark bites, bulldogs, and Japanese food. Why? Because I always watch a good shark bite. As far as I'm concerned, people are getting bit by sharks 10 times a day. And that's not what's happening. It's happening three times a month. It's happening 50 times a year, 100 times a year. Maybe it's 100 times. I think there's two or three fatalities a year. And I think there's like 100 or 200 bites a year. Somebody check as producer clock. The reason is it becomes top news. Now, in a bunch of places now, I think Indonesia, where there are a lot of bull sharks, in Australia, where there's bull sharks, great white sharks, tiger sharks, every shark loves Australia, they are putting shark nets in. And there's even shark circles, which are places to swim in the ocean that have a net around them. And you can jump into. This is like, I'm super fascinated by this technology. It's two different technologies. One is, so six fatal, unprovoked shark attacks per year, which is not many. So one every two months, every 60 days, somebody gets taken out. I don't know how many, 60, 70 bites a year from sharks. Yeah. So I think the shark bites are more, but okay, sure. U.S., Australia, South Africa, Brazil, that's where it's happening. U.S. because of Florida, and the number of people going in the, in Florida is the main reason. Florida is a lot of coastline, and people are in the water constantly there. But I don't think those are the fatalities. I think fatalities, Australia wins hands down. Some lunatic jumped into Sydney Harbor. This is dumb for three reasons. One, tiger sharks are known to feed in there. Two, it's polluted. Three, there are ferries and boats everywhere. If you want to die, one of three ways, like a bacterial infection, a shark bite, or getting hit by a ferry, by all means, jump into Sydney Bay. How much money to get you to swim across Sydney Bay? A billion dollars. I wouldn't do it. Oh, wow. Really? I might do it for a billion because you didn't put any conditions on there. I would do it under a billion, and I would create a net that goes underneath me and around me in reasonable conditions. I might, let me think about that. For a billion dollars tax-free cash, I'd do it for 10 million. I wrote actually a science fiction story. I was thinking I would do screenplays at some point, and I had this scene. It was kind of like a running man kind of take up or a dystopian future, and one of the scenes was, in order to pay back their debts to society and to their victims, hardened criminals who were on death row, could swim across the channel in South Africa where those air jaws were from one pontoon to the other in chummed water, and if they made it across, they would be released from death row, and at the same time, all the pay-per-view ratings, because they would have a GoPro on their head, there would be underwater cameras. It's just gladiators. It's basically gladiators, but modern day, they would be forgiven, and all the money would go to the victims. So if it made $100 million and there were 10 swimmers, or there were 10 victims and one swimmer, you get 10 million each, and the swimmer gets a million bucks and gets let out of there. We could call it Shark Tank. Shark Tank, there it is. To our founder, yeah, you learned a mistake, and then I think what you have to do is just the honorable thing to do would be to tell the person, listen, we're happy to finish this for you. We'll give you the source code. We can give you an employee to work for you. We can train one of your employees for $100,000. We'll make this bespoke software for you for the next two years or $250,000. We'll do this bespoke thing for you, this solution, raise the price to the point at which either it becomes super profitable, maybe one of your employees goes and takes it and does this bespoke software. Bespoke software is going to be the future, by the way. The fact that you can build software so quickly because of AI now, or you can build hardware so quickly because of Shenzhen and all this commodification of batteries and chipsets and Arduinos and Acceleramers and the iPhone, all of that means you can build bespoke businesses that make but a million dollars a year and you have a 50% margin. You know what? For two people, that's good money. It's good money. And when you can't get a job at Meta or Google, that's the future. That's why you come to Founder.University. Now occurring on three continents, the US, F-12 starting in March, Saudi currently underway, and our new one's coming. Go to mina.launch.co and our Japanese version. Everything available through links

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SPEAKER_14: So Jason, one of the best questions

SPEAKER_00: I've seen asked around founder communities in recent weeks is what to do when VCs reach out to you. We often spend our time talking about how people should reach out to VCs, but sometimes the tables are turned. Now, in this case, Mr. Cheetah over on the Venture Capital subreddit had built a really cool open source application, hit 1.8 thousand GitHub stars, and suddenly people are reaching out to him. He doesn't know what to do with this. He's not quite sure what he should prepare, what they're going to expect of him, or really just even the kind of P's and Q's of dealing with cold inbound venture interests.

SPEAKER_14: So hit me with your top tips for founders who are dealing with VCs knocking on their door.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So VCs will hire associates, researchers, analysts,

SPEAKER_06: and they'll charge them with, go find me some interesting companies. Now, some people have a lot of inbound. I happen to be in that group, Y Combinator, Techstars, Sequoia. You're going to have a lot of inbound. Later in your career, when you're established as an investor, you get a lot of inbound. But when you're starting out, you need to get something going, and you want to have proprietary deal flow. As an investor, you need to master three Ds. You need deal flow, you need to make good decisions, and you need to know when to double down. So deal flow, how did you meet Uber? How did you get Robinhood? How did you get Calm? Where did Grin come from? Then, did you make a good decision to place the bet? And then finally, did you double down on that bet when you had a chance? And then my fourth D is distributions. DPI, pick which one you want. So those are the four Ds.

SPEAKER_03: And to be great at venture capital, you need to source a company like Grin. You can go look at Grin.co. This is one of our accelerator companies that became worth a billion dollars. We made the decision to invest in them because we believed in influencers as a marketing strategy 10 years ago when they came to the accelerator. Here's Grin.com. Company's doing phenomenal. It's been a great, great company investment for us. We doubled down. We invested in like three or four rounds of this company, not just from our fund, but when our fund was done investing and we'd hit our targets as a seed fund, we gave it to the syndicate. Then, so we had great deal flow. They came to us, they had applied. We made a great decision to invest. We made a great decision to double down. Then when it hit a billion dollars, there were people who wanted to buy some of our shares. We made a great decision to sell, I think 17 or $18 million in our shares during peak ZUR. Ah, nice. Now let's go back to the original question. Somebody's trying to get deal flow. You need to know who that somebody is. In all likelihood, it's not Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator reaching out to you, which means it's an up and coming VC. Does that mean you shouldn't listen to them? No. It means you should get curious. You should research them. You should put it into a database. You should have a CRM tracker of every VC that reaches out to you and you should figure out what companies they've invested in.

SPEAKER_06: Now, it is important that you not be distracted when you're building your company. So you don't want to be taking meetings with VCs in my estimation, unless you're raising. And a great way to handle this is to say, we're not currently raising. We don't have time to meet because we're busy building, but we plan on raising in Q4 of next year. A good time for us to talk would be Q3. Then if, you know, if you neg them like that, they're gonna be 10 times more interested. I will give a caveat here. There are nefarious people who are doing this in an automated fashion and they're just spamming anybody with a Crunchbase profile, an AngelList profile, you know, on some list. And so you will get spam and you will get people who look like investors who are maybe trying to sell you something. Real estate, maybe they're a broker. If you can't figure out who this firm is and who the person is, they don't have a LinkedIn page, they don't have a profile page, just throw it away, don't even respond. If it's a legitimate firm and you can say, hey, they have these other investments that are interesting, great, but do not give any information. And you can say, I'm too busy to meet,

SPEAKER_03: but this is a good time for me to meet. Now you have ball control. And, you know, that is like super important. You have pot control in, you know, a poker game, in a poker hand, you have ball control in a football or basketball game. You're kind of controlling this conversation and you're the founder. You have to understand you are the precious resource in this, not the investor. The investors are a commodity in, I'd say 70% of investors do not add any value. And in some cases, they detract value.

SPEAKER_37: The Vinod Khosla argument, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Vinod Khosla has said this many times. And so the top 10% of investors, they can be very helpful. I can be very helpful. You know, Sequoia can be very helpful. Chamath, Sachs can be very helpful. There are specific people. Steve Jervison, very helpful. Brad Gerstner, Altimeter, when he dips into privates. These people can be very helpful for obvious reasons. They have incredible networks. And they, if you can get through their filter, become a, you know, real validation for your startup that they would take the time with one of their bullets or one of their bets to place it on you.

SPEAKER_06: Fantastic. But these are going to generally be unknown firms, unknown quantities. So therefore, you stack them. And then what I would do back when I was an entrepreneur, I'd say, well, we're based in Santa Monica. I'm not meeting with people, but I will have time, you know, two months from now in this week. If you want to stop by for coffee, to have a quick coffee, you know, for 30 minutes, I can do it in February. And so it was December now. I'd say, yeah, second week in February, boom. And I would just, again, back to getting ball control. And I'd say, you know, thanks for your interest. We're not raising right now, but this is when I can meet if, and I would make them come to my office. They'd say, oh, can we jump on a Zoom? And say, yeah, I'm sorry, I don't have time for that. And how popular was that? You know, I was able to raise the Series B before I launched the company famously and was able to raise $20 million in a time when that was a lot of money and significant to raise. I had a really good idea, really good execution. So this is the best advice I have for this person.

SPEAKER_01: Next question comes from the entrepreneurship subreddit. I found a really interesting question that I'd never seen actually asked before, Jason. And I want to get your take on this because we have talked about a number of European companies. We also heard about a lot of people coming over from Europe to build in the United States. So here's a unique situation.

SPEAKER_00: This founder, they're from Europe. They're building in the United States. Their target market is for young professionals in US urban cities, but they're getting a lot of traction and interest from European VCs. And they say, we keep hearing the same thing. Do not judge the VCs money, but judge their ability to help you succeed. So what are people's thoughts?

SPEAKER_01: Is it a bad idea to take money from the Euro VCs when their target market is America? And I haven't thought about this, but I was just kind of curious, what would your advice be here to this founder?

SPEAKER_06: You know, there are great venture capitalists all over the world, and they do want to have, you know, they're just looking for great companies. So sometimes you'll have a European VC that only invests in Europe, and they'll be very clear about that on their website and their marketing. And they have other ones who are, you know, Australian VCs or European VCs or Singapore VCs or Mubadala, you know, in the UAE, and they're just looking for great companies. So there's no downside. And if they've got a great reputation and you vet their reputation by doing backdoor references from their CEOs, that's the best reference. So if you wanted to know if I was good, you would ask somebody at Uber, Robinhood, Com, Grin, et cetera, hey, what was it like having Jason as an investor? Did he show up for you? Introduce you to people? Did he add value? And so when I train my team, I'm like, these backdoor references are happening and we never hear about them

SPEAKER_03: or we rarely hear about them. And sometimes we do, you know, sometimes somebody will say, hey, this person called me to ask you. And I'm like, wow, that's a sophisticated investor. Before they took our money, they asked another founder. Other times, VCs will say, hey, here are three founder references. You can call these three people

SPEAKER_06: and ask them about us. So that's basically what you want to do. You should be doing as much or more diligence on your investors

SPEAKER_03: as they are doing on you. And that's something that founders forget because they get a little enamored when you're early in your career by VCs. Then later, experienced founders

SPEAKER_45: become cynical about investors. Oh, they're just a commodity. It's just money. Who cares? Just take it at the highest price. The truth is somewhere in between. Don't be enamored by them. Don't be intimidated by them. But also, you know, don't devalue them

SPEAKER_03: because they could be the person who gives you that one piece of advice, one connection, or accelerates the business in some way. And that's what the great investors do.

SPEAKER_14: But you had a take on it. What's your take? I'm curious. Oh, my take is that, you know,

SPEAKER_01: if you have great traction from European VCs who are going to have an extra amount of interest in you because of your European heritage, take advantage of that. Like, this is a thing to capitalize on, not to be worried about. If they can't offer reasonable terms or they offer a lower valuation, then cut them loose. But I would say, if you have an edge, ride it. Because right now, the market's very competitive. Then it seems that it's kind of feast or famine in the startup scene.

SPEAKER_06: The other thing is, you might be the best deal that they're going to get into. Whereas, you know, in, for Sequoia, in the heart of Silicon Valley, you might not rise above with Sequoia's deal flow, but you might be the top of this firm's deal flow. And that's not a dig to Europe in any way, but they may just have missed, you know, I don't know, Anthropic or XAI because they're not in the mix and they're not here and they didn't know about the Palantir round and just got closed and Founders Fund grabbed it. And so they might covet you in a way that, hey, maybe Founders Fund is too busy for you. Sequoia is too busy. They've got too high of a bar and you didn't hit the standard that YouTube and Instagram hit for Sequoia. So, you know, now you're number one with them. So great question. And all money's green at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_14: I mean, Lovable just raised from Menlo and Capital G. It's still based, I think, in Europe. So if American investors come back to Europe, to me, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: It's all about quality, right? I think what you're saying here

SPEAKER_03: is a quality company. They happen to be in Europe. Got investors from America. There could be investors over there who are quality investors who want access to American companies. Yeah. Great, great deals and great investors are not constrained by geography.

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SPEAKER_00: All right, Jason, pulling from our dear friends in the Nody gang, Royalion31, I think that's how you pronounce that, wants to know that now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? And if you say the jet, I'm going to say no repeating yourself.

SPEAKER_01: So answer this honestly, tell the people what you, even Jason Calacanis, will not break out the checkbook for. Oh gosh, it's definitely

SPEAKER_03: private aviation. You know, I've been trying to hold off on doing this for a long time. But, you know, as my time gets constrained and I become more successful, the great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere or $100,000 on a round trip, that seemed absurd to spend that. It can also, at some point, seem absurd if you have a certain amount of income and a certain amount of net worth to not buy $500,000 a year in a jet card, which would be 50 hours. And it doesn't make logical sense, but if it does make your life easier or your family's life easier, yeah, that's the number

SPEAKER_06: one one. The other one I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car. So I really covet this, I love Corvettes and I really want to buy a Barn Dominium, which is like a big open fancy barn that's kind of like a man cave but Texas style. And I love Corvettes and I've been on this Bring a Trailer website or Cars and Bids website watching Corvettes C2s and C3s going by and C6s, my three favorite gens. And I'm like, do I buy this ZRX1 for $250,000 or do I buy five $50,000 Corvettes and have a little collection? And so those would be high net worth problems. But, you know, a lot of these things become cognitive load and so I like to stay humble. I like to not have cognitive load and what I find is every time you own another home or you own another asset, it just becomes like a little bit of load on your processor. And so I had two properties in California that I rented and so they now become income properties. I wanted to sell them but they were coveted properties so I rented them instead. But now I have to worry about those. So I like

Chamath Palihapitiya: the stay focused on the thing and the thing is really just two things for me

SPEAKER_06: being on podcasts and talking and then two investing in companies and hanging out with those founders. Everything I do that's not that becomes cognitive load and does it actually

SPEAKER_03: add value to my life? That's what you really have to that's what you really have to you know wring your hands about so it's obnoxious to even talk about this kind of level of stuff and I'll be honest

SPEAKER_06: putting buying a $50,000 1970 Corvette Stingray would give me some joy but putting 225k first checks in Founder University would give me more

SPEAKER_03: I'll be totally honest so that's what I try to you know stay humble and stay focused I'm 55 I'd like to put another 10-20 years into this and yeah if I'm gonna put 10 or 20 years into it it's important to not get distracted by earthly possessions

SPEAKER_01: Jason over in the

SPEAKER_00: noties our dear friend Pilgs wants to know what is a common industry belief that you currently disagree with or what is the biggest risk that you're taking right now?

SPEAKER_59: I would say the application level of AI is something I believe is gonna provide

SPEAKER_45: massive value and SaaS enterprise software will continue to provide massive value

SPEAKER_06: I do think the industry is down on these things because they think that you know the large language models will wipe those things out I kind of think the opposite there's always a way to create a more refined product that solves a singular problem for a small group of people and you add features and community and design that speaks to that group so as an example when we made the investment in calm.com the meditation app people were like why would you invest in that you could just get meditation videos for free on YouTube which is true you could talk about ToneBass or Musician or Steezy or Brilliant.org all of those

SPEAKER_03: are educational type vertical apps that have had massive success FitBot as well you know but again people said well you can just learn how to play an instrument on YouTube or for free or you can buy a book or this or that why would I need a verticalized one well if you look at those verticalized ones ToneBass and FitBot as just two and Brilliant.org they're so dedicated to those verticals of so here's ToneBass they know who the best classical violinists are you know clarinet players trumpet players and if you know this is something that OpenAI is not going to get to there's something YouTube's not going to get to could you find on Instagram or TikTok how to play you know a Louis Armstrong trumpet solo yes you're going to be able to find that but if you want to go deep and you want this trumpet player and you want to take it to the highest level ToneBass is the place to go if you pull up Brilliant.org as an example you know could you learn how to do some math problems from Khan Academy or other places on YouTube for free of course could you have ChatGPT explain it yes but Brilliant.org is going to verticalize these and they've gamified them and man these questions are so well thought out and the way

SPEAKER_06: they've done personalized learning here and adaptive learning they're just going to have a nuance and a fit finish and polish that those other platforms aren't going to have and what happens is people will use the large language models get to a certain point and then they're going to want something more if you're charging below hundreds of dollars why wouldn't you spend it you can get calories from any number of food sources that doesn't mean people are not going to spend you know $50 on an amazing you know steak from Long Hill Wagyu or Miyazaki beef they're going to want that as well even though they can get hamburgers for you know from Shea Jack for nine bucks okay I think I think I made the point maybe I beat the point to death

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SPEAKER_66: all right next up we have

SPEAKER_01: a Gamma pitch it's time to bring Zach Kidd from Ask Humans up on the show Jason this is our final Gamma pitch this is number 10 of 10 and don't forget we'll be backed in the new year to crown a winner and that person will receive a $25,000 prize slash investment from both launch and Gamma

SPEAKER_05: Zach welcome to the show man

SPEAKER_68: thank you so much Jason nice to see you

SPEAKER_06: rockin peptides

David Friedberg: I'm GLPs I got everything going on row.co shout out to my friends over there who are providing my GLPs so Ask Humans really interested in getting the update here so we'll give you two minutes on the clock for your presentation if you go a little over that's okay three two go

SPEAKER_75: Ask Humans is a platform that helps organizations collect open-ended feedback and act on it at scale so this is Jenna

SPEAKER_77: she is the director of membership of the Neds club which is in Washington D.C. the Neds club is owned by Soho House now these high-end membership private clubs when they're really trying to understand what members think or what staff thinks really they have collected information very anecdotally in the past basically through conversation what's been heard in the lobby and the challenge of that is really to sort of speak to ownership and speak to management in terms of how they should run their club better so that members are happy so we've worked with them over the past four months and we've integrated Ask Humans into many points throughout the club so they when you check out and you get a check our QR codes are integrated into their POS system they're effectively now able to really understand what people think within their clubs at scale this is Jenna speaking to that

SPEAKER_82: humans is such an incredible tool for us to be able to gather member feedback all in one place and have a live sentiment analysis of what our members are happy with or what they're disappointed in we deliver our transcripts by department on a weekly basis to our team so that they understand exactly what

SPEAKER_86: so I really appreciate sharing that with us really showing how they're

SPEAKER_77: integrating Ask humans into their operations Jason they're now actually extending Ask humans into London New York and potentially even Dubai but what we are doing is we're taking this open ended feedback technology that we're integrating and we're actually building an entire suite now of applications that could integrate more deeply into any organization so we are bringing together in which you can look at your day and then sort of gather feedback from your colleagues we are also doing meetings so we basically clone granola so that you can record conversations that integrates into your workflow one of the big things here Jason is that we really believe that feedback given LLMs can now more deeply ingrain into an organization's team and workflows so it's not just external feedback it's reoccurring check-in questions for your team to give feedback that runs on cycles so let's say it kind of replaces your stand-up where your team members can give feedback and see what's changed from one week to the next week and then of course studies which runs with all of our clients and also something called presentations all of this we're building with the ability for you to talk to the data and actually to listen to personal podcasts as a summary of all the feedback that's coming along and our clients are loving this so the Washington D.C. economic partnership is using Ask Humans now where they're integrating it into their workflow so whereas before they were sending surveys or hiring consultants to recording that with Ask Humans that's being transcribed and integrated in that's being paired with the studies that they're doing to collect overall feedback and of course that's also sort of integrating into the presentations and showing alignment around feedback too so the last slide here is just of course you non-public is incredibly valuable we've basically built the suite to allow teams to gather open ended feedback that's not found anywhere else and then to act on that we've done over a million minutes in recording over the past 10 months and we're just loving the success our clients are having and again just thanks a lot to Gamma for sponsoring this

SPEAKER_95: and Jason thanks a lot for your time

SPEAKER_45: wow platform has really internal products that do this we

David Friedberg: are investors in one for a long time 15 five and that's performance management of team members roll-ups very sophisticated you know based on like Google philosophy etc and then you have surveys like famously Survey Monkey and other ones that people will roll their own you're building an AI first solution here and so that means you go to they are not using this and the AI is giving them sort of a reason to engage with it because

SPEAKER_06: it's more powerful which is it are you displacing people typically or are you coming in and it's like blue ocean

SPEAKER_77: this is a totally new capability for some of the organizations that we're working with generally speaking when you think about measurement and management the practice of management and the practice of measurement is generally rooted in computers not understanding language right and so with management you have management by walk around the CEO actually having to walk around or the Steve jobs having lunch at the cafeteria to hear from what his employees think or if you think of measurement you're sending out a survey and you're asking people on a scale of 1 to 10 what do they think well of course all of that occurs because it's rooted in computers just tabulating not understanding language and so it's a complete blue ocean when you understand operationalizing the fact that computers can now understand language and so measurement and management is absolutely being rewritten with

SPEAKER_03: audio text or video feedback what what is the modality that people prefer most do they like to be anonymous do they like to have their name attached to it because you know they they want to close the loop on it or do they want to send it into the void and just make sure

SPEAKER_77: how to sort of exactly phrase what they're saying they just want to talk I'll give you one tidbit we work a lot with the Department of Buildings in Washington D.C. They have gathered 7,000 responses from over 40,000 of permit applicants at Department of Buildings they basically have a 60% increase in their feedback through Ask Humans than that's to the general public that's not like one specific cohort of people

SPEAKER_03: does the AI

SPEAKER_06: ask a follow-up question or is that not is that is it too early to do that with you know fidelity

SPEAKER_77: we released thank you for that softball question Jason I appreciate that about three months ago we actually built in AI follow-up again everything is configurable you asked the question about anonymous or non anonymous we really let clients choose if it's anonymous maybe because you're asking you're doing a town hall with all of your employees and you're the world bank and like that's what they've used maybe it's non anonymous because you want to be a little bit more customer focused and you

SPEAKER_06: far too crowded and there's not enough staff to get food out in time on the weekends it could say okay

SPEAKER_45: have you experienced this at other times or is it just on Friday and Saturday nights it could yeah or is it specific to the bar or specific to the tables it could come up with maybe a good follow-up question and as long as it doesn't do something embarrassing I

David Sacks: end users really like it because they recognize that they have been heard at the end of the day we all want to be heard

SPEAKER_116: yeah Zach so going back to the presentation itself watching this as someone who's new

SPEAKER_01: to ask humans and didn't have a lot of prior context I thought we were going one way to start the presentation here's a club here's a you is maybe a place you could bridge a bit more and explain how the club example maybe better fits into the rest of the other features because it did seem slightly distinct to me does that make sense oh

SPEAKER_118: it's definitely two chapters of a longer story

SPEAKER_01: okay so is the first couple of slides is that still core to what the company is doing or are you now more focused on the internal context of helping companies better understand their own staff

SPEAKER_77: Alex when we launched studies we launched studies really for to be to gather external feedback for organizations and what we found specifically with the World Bank is they used our studies for their own internal staffing to gather feedback from their global staff around the world and then we saw that and we said okay we know that there is a straight line with using studies for external feedback but there's an entirely new set of opportunities for collecting internal feedback and really allowing for organizations to collaborate around the best ideas that people have and so that's why we established loops and presentations and meetings and when you think about how the studies that you're doing on a monthly basis plus the presentation you sent potentially to a prospect if all of their verbal feedback can come in onto one platform that you can then interact with that's a very powerful and entrenched solution that really drives collaboration and knowledge forward for that organization so

SPEAKER_01: instead of me thinking this is really two different products that seem to be sitting next to each other you think they actually are quite connected and you really want to have both the internal and external feedback in one place to

SPEAKER_06: management has to decide when to listen to things and when to ignore things and when to ask follow-up questions so none of this is like you're going to blindly follow it but if you start thinking about the job of managing an

SPEAKER_03: organization feedback is critical and then what happens in these organizations is feedback becomes politicized so a CEO asks for feedback and then feedback comes in it gets massaged and the seventh item and

SPEAKER_45: this is why I always insist in our organization that the feedback for everybody who speaks at the accelerator or founder university etc gets ranked by the people who heard this

SPEAKER_06: talk and then that gets put in a database and we just track them hey remember we told you in rehearsal or we asked you to do a rehearsal and you skipped the rehearsal we think this 6.5 could really be a 9.5 if you just did one rehearsal with us and we talked about it so yeah that's going to be the key to the software in my the

SPEAKER_03: customer support person has the keys to the kingdom and they give like a roll up report and it's like nope I and I had people oh you don't need to get feedback at and I'm like no I we ask founders how likely are you to recommend our firm scale of 1 to 10 and we ask them for some color commentary whenever it's 7 or less it goes into one chat room and if it's 8 and above it goes to another one founder tomatoes or founder applauds or whatever it is with an emoji and then we have a follow up system

SPEAKER_06: for it so just these tools are great you just got to make sure that nobody tries to massage the results to protect the guilty

SPEAKER_121: I mean I would just say your prior friend Ray Dalio at Bridgewater in Radical

SPEAKER_77: Transparency he ran his firm with honest open-ended put your ideas ahead of you and let it be judged so this is the type of culture that we're pushing forward and people's ears that is the most valuable thing that they could bring to a table I'll also second you know going back to you know your hometown of New York City back in the day Theodore Roosevelt when he was police commissioner you probably know this story too he would actually put a coat on at 2 o'clock in the morning and jump into the police cars and talk to the officers because

SPEAKER_01: in a lot of your slides you showed the red yellow green and that to me seems so incredibly useful if it's accurate so how confident are you in

SPEAKER_77: better and make sure that doesn't make your product less relevant and at the end of the day what you think Alex or what Jason thinks or what producer Marcus think if you're able to put that into Ask Humans regardless of

SPEAKER_01: and if you're feeling inspired head to gamma.app and start working on an idea of your own and maybe we'll see you here on a future episode of twist all right bye everybody bye bye everybody