SPEAKER_00: impress candidly how big can this business get there's other tools like this out there you know we don't have to worry ourselves too much with that at this stage as seed stage investors what we need to do is find a great founder usually a great team with product traction with clients that's demonstrated they can build something understands the customer base and find good

SPEAKER_01: teams and back them this week in startups is brought to you by epo experimentation is how generation defining companies win accelerate your experimentation velocity with epo visit getepo.com twist eight sleep good sleep is the ultimate game changer now you can add the pod cover to any mattress go to eightsleep.com twist to check out the pod cover and get 200 off the pod plus free shipping and mercury 90 of startups fail just 10 out of every 100 make it mercury exists to close that gap helping companies succeed with banking and credit cards engineered for the startup journey join over 100 000 companies banking with mercury at mercury.com all right everybody

SPEAKER_02: welcome back to this week in startups today we're going to hear from three startups i'm going to

SPEAKER_06: decide if i want to invest in them with me is presh dinesh kumar he's been with me since he was 18 or 19 years old and he dropped out of school to come work for me this is a true story yeah brush this is true

SPEAKER_08: i turned 20 but yeah you turned 20 and then you broke your mom's heart and dropped out of school tell us

SPEAKER_09: tell the story yeah um okay listen to the pod this week in startups thought you were smart didn't like school um wanted to work for someone doing interesting things and the first thing i did was yeah find interesting people on twitter and different podcasts and so yeah reached out to you and long story short you let me help out at uh an event called launch scale we let you um volunteer or we paid you

SPEAKER_14: you just said come out and i just tried to help so you basically put yourself out there you said hey

SPEAKER_16: i'll do some free work see if i can impress this guy correct yeah a bit of a lesson there isn't there

SPEAKER_09: yeah just like trying to stand out like resume and stuff anything to you know beat the beat the noise is

SPEAKER_06: how i thought how i thought yeah and you know what you did you documented your trip on social media

SPEAKER_00: with short videos and i said anybody who's this thoughtful and energetic i probably want on my team so just for folks out there if you're just sending a resume in through the front door that's okay that's like a six out of ten if you've got a great if you've got a good social media presence your linkedin is tight your your social medias are tight i'm gonna get you a seven but when you start doing things actively you know you add like ten points so all of a sudden you go from a six or seven you know if you just listen to what the guidance counselor says if you start making videos writing blog posts doing social media about a topic you care deeply about or around the subjects and the people you want to associate yourself with who you think are dope intelligent driven smart whatever criteria you're going for could be artistic could be you know musical talent could be filmmakers could

SPEAKER_06: be actors whatever comedians uh once you do something like that you go from like a six or seven

SPEAKER_00: to like a 16 or 17 out of 10. in other words you're too good to ignore and pressure in that category

SPEAKER_06: so hopefully today we have three startups that are too good to ignore ignore they come out of our founder university program founder.university is the url i believe there's still time to accept some people but i think we've accepted most people in this program we call it a pre-accelerator this is what comes before tech stars before y combinator or before launch accelerator you don't need to be

SPEAKER_00: incorporated you don't need to have your product finished you don't need to have customers you just need to be two or three co-founders one of you is highly technical at least um and you have a great idea and you've been building and tinkering it's a pre-accelerator in other words we don't invest on you in the way on the way in typically we might do that once in a while um we tend to invest in the companies during the 12-week program it's a 12-week program you pay 500 bucks if you complete all 12 weeks by putting in a monthly i'm sorry a weekly report on mondays we give you the 500 back so literally we hold your 500 bucks to make sure you don't blow it off and then boom we give it back we're uh just finished our seventh cohort eighth one is starting uh presh and kelly run the program it is one of the great joys of my life to get to meet people in year zero i've personally made it my mission to be the first investor on maybe a hundred startups cap tables um in this fourth fund we're doing with

SPEAKER_06: deploying just over 50 million i think in our fourth fund we're just closing it up now and um i'm really excited to be the first investor in a lot of these cap tables not always so presh uh why don't you tell us about these three startups just give me one sentence in plain english don't even tell me the name of the company just describe the first one what they do in plain english the second one in plain

SPEAKER_23: english and the third one in plain english and why you brought me these three sure thing so first

SPEAKER_14: one is a sas tool to analyze your llm usage for ai tools got it it is a piece of software for businesses

SPEAKER_06: that helps manage their spend on large language models so that's what it is and then i'll ask you

SPEAKER_29: the second question why is that important to you to you crush why do you think that is important yeah so

SPEAKER_09: obviously a bunch of ai companies um that'll be like the next wave of companies all using ai and language large language models sorry and so they're expensive and founders startups but also you know big corporations will want to keep a tight eye on spend um as you know company scale great so the

SPEAKER_34: reason why it's important is because these services are expensive you can start spending wildly your

SPEAKER_06: developers could be inefficient you could forget you started up a job or something and money is

SPEAKER_00: important what a great summary okay let's keep going number two tell me in plain english no buzzwords you

SPEAKER_06: put a couple buzzwords you put sass in there so give me even plainer english brush it's important for

SPEAKER_14: investors to be able to talk to each other in plain english okay the second one is a marketplace for tabletop gamers to buy and sell their their pieces yeah got it so this is for tabletop games

SPEAKER_00: settlers of katan magic the gathering there's a bunch of these uh nerds dorks geeks and really cool people um who are closeted geeks and dorks uh who love playing these games they spend thousands of dollars a year it's collectible you'll find it on ebay you'll find it in different places but yeah there are a bunch of them so the reason this is important i'll do that this is important is um because having a dedicated marketplace for them uh means a hundred percent of the screen real

SPEAKER_06: estate community experience is tailored to their passion um and it's a high margin high velocity business people are buying and trading these things you know very frequently i would say

SPEAKER_27: probably monthly or quarterly or maybe even some people do it weekly okay who's our third one and then

SPEAKER_37: i'll say why i think it's important i like that little back and forth here we're doing here a little

SPEAKER_09: pickleball okay all right cool so third one this is a software product we call it a business in a box and so it uh is a suite of tools um that entrepreneurs freelancers can use to operate their

SPEAKER_39: business um it's like operating system for founders business in a box it's still kind of

SPEAKER_34: so business in a box is buzzwordy when you said it's a collection of tools to help people manage

SPEAKER_00: their business i understood that uh pretty well and the only way to make that even better is it's a

SPEAKER_06: collection of tools for freelancers and small business owners to manage their business including i don't know if it has this accounting marketing and time sheets i don't know i just made three things up so um that would make it even tighter the reason that's important is um a lot of these businesses are very unorganized and chaotic and the software that you would sell to a small small business is probably too industrial strength you know if you're going to use some giant accounting software giant hr software whatever it is it's probably got 99 of the 100 features or 97 of the 100 features are not going to be used so a simpler way um and a broad collection of them means i don't have to hire i don't have to buy 17 different solutions i like that a lot i think

SPEAKER_00: that's one of the trends so we're going to meet them right now and then at the end i'll pick one of them to invest in so there's a lot of stake here folks let's have the first person present for but

SPEAKER_43: two minutes yes brush that's right two minutes and then i'll ask them two or three questions and then we will zip zip zip through them because the audience is busy but really it's important for us to

SPEAKER_00: understand how good they are at pitching their idea are you tired of slow a b testing do you have

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SPEAKER_46: experiments epo is going to centralize your experimentation workflows across your entire organization including product growth and machine learning teams this means better coordination and faster innovation their cloud-based system is all about empowerment easily run experiments with powerful analysis tools and it all integrates seamlessly with existing feature flags or epo's sdk if you didn't know stands for software development kit epo keeps you informed with automated updates and shared reports and the best part about epo is that it lets you go deeper into experiment results you can trust and understand root causes so here's your call to action experimentation is how generation defining companies win accelerate your experimentation velocity with epo visit getepo.com twist that's g-e-t-e-p-p-o dot com twist let's invite our first founder up i'm

SPEAKER_56: really excited to meet these three companies all right peter from props ai hey brush hey jason how are you

SPEAKER_59: doing good how are you i'm well let's get to it three two go hi i'm pizza i'm

SPEAKER_61: the founder of props a platform to help monitor and monetize your llm applications let me introduce you to one of our customers riley who's got an ai startup that's going viral but today they get their bills from open ai and it's thousands of dollars giving them no actionable insight into how that cost is broken down they don't know what their unit level economics are they don't know how to price their product effectively and to set up a more complex billing model like usage-based billing could be a lot of work they may assume that their cost is split evenly between all of their users but this is rarely the case often users will churn within the first time of using the product and the users that are actually paying them may be costing them more than they charge the solution to this is the ai proxy real-time cost and usage tracking enabling effortless usage-based billing we give per user cost tracking in our dashboards we integrate into stripe to enable usage-based billing and we provide observability across errors and latency it's all available and only takes two lines of code to implement we provide a free self-hosted version which is from our open source product and we provide a cloud sas offering for 47 a month and then 50 cent per billable user on the stripe integration so far we've processed 80 million tokens uh done 3 700 in revenue and we've just crossed 100 users in the seven weeks since we launched on product hunt we actually started before building the product by building our acquisition strategy the ai job board which is now the second largest ai specific job board in the us generating 15 000 unique users a month and props takes the native ad slot on that platform we built the proxy dashboard and continue to build our metrics and we've just launched usage-based billing into beta my background is as a software engineer working companies like ibm and amazon and taking leadership positions over engineering teams for the past five years

SPEAKER_19: that's props ai we help monitor and monetize llm applications all right peter kirkham you did a fantastic job presenting let me ask you a series of questions is this your first startup um this is

SPEAKER_61: my first startup that i've got to the stage of incorporating i've had a few different businesses

SPEAKER_58: in the past with sort of shopify stores and okay so you have projects in the past yes projects this

SPEAKER_69: would be the first startup fantastic um number two are you technical uh do you write code and are you

SPEAKER_72: writing the code for this startup startup yes so i've written uh all of the code so far we actually just brought on our first uh additional software engineer this week as well fantastic nice tight answers

SPEAKER_06: i like it and uh how many co-founders are there in the startup defined as only over 10 okay you're a solo

SPEAKER_53: founder okay um who designed uh your deck your website who did the design the ux the design i'm very

SPEAKER_63: fortunate uh my wife is a senior product designer fantastic i want to make some notes here presh you

SPEAKER_53: as uh my associate in the firm you're an associate you got to make investment decisions you got to say

SPEAKER_06: which ones we should invest in i want to point out some of the very strong things about this the design is exceptional this is world-class design um i think or it's it's getting close to world-class

SPEAKER_00: design and what i mean by that is shout out to your wife um this really does make a big difference at the early stages at the later stages anybody can pay a decent designer you know i would say for

SPEAKER_06: the design you have right now load thousands of dollars and get this outcome three four five

SPEAKER_00: thousand dollars with a designer two or three revisions you're going to get to this most startup

SPEAKER_06: founders don't do it they just push design down the road but design does say something about you just like uh you know your haircut your breath uh dandruff body odor uh something in your teeth

SPEAKER_00: um being overweight like i was for a long time and i'm going to tell it to you straight as i always do

SPEAKER_43: people judge books by their cover i hate to break the news to the audience brush but the don't judge a book by its cover is a classic saying because people do judge a book by their cover far too often

SPEAKER_00: but when you judge a startup and judging it by its ux and design there's a real rationale to it and the

SPEAKER_06: rationale brush is what why is really crisp clean design especially for a piece of business software

SPEAKER_53: like this why is that important in the marketplace not with investors yeah so it's going to come down

SPEAKER_14: to your customer and how they interact with the product so you've got a good good design customer

SPEAKER_35: wants to use a product um then you know that's beneficial fresh you've learned so much working with

SPEAKER_06: me over the years and startups you know if your customers see something that's really tight and beautiful um they can trust you that's why banking software all looks very similar and clean and

SPEAKER_00: perfect that's why uber and airbnb feels similar and clean and solid and trustworthy um if uber and robin hood and airbnb and mercury bank or wealthfront didn't feel as tight as they do people wouldn't trust

SPEAKER_06: them as much okay also you're a technical founder love that you're a solo founder don't love that um and it's your first startup but you get some projects so that kind of puts you in between you know having scar tissue and yeah just having a little bit of experience on the product side so overall uh this is absolutely fantastic well done i don't have any questions for you except

SPEAKER_53: if i put a gun to your head and said you must pick one business props and monitoring of llm usage

SPEAKER_43: or the ai job board and i'll give you a hundred thousand dollars to pursue it which one would you pick pros okay great awesome because i did see that job board and i want to make sure that you're

SPEAKER_00: not hedging your bets and you're thinking sometimes founders do this that hey that primary business i'm putting all my time into isn't working you're doing that strictly as a cheap quick way to provide a free service people come for that free service and they stay for the tool and most people say you come for the tool you stay for the marketplace here you're coming for a tool and getting free advertising for your tool so absolutely fabulous job press do you have any questions no questions i

SPEAKER_43: like it okay well done peter that's a really good presentation we're off to a strong start here

SPEAKER_00: and press candidly how big can this business get there's other tools like this out there know we don't have to worry ourselves too much with that at this stage as seed stage investors what we need to do is find a great founder usually a great team with product traction with clients that's demonstrated they can build something understands the customer base um and find good

SPEAKER_06: teams and back them so it does feel like we found something here now i don't know how big this can

SPEAKER_00: get but we do have a corollary there are companies that we've seen that do this kind of monitoring for your other web hosting so those will be competitors but this is solely for llms and i think this is unique enough that it could give you other options and say hey you're using chat gpt4 you might want to downgrade to 3.5 this is what you would have spent or you could have used you know an open source product with hosting for this price so just being able to compare and contrast what you're spending and give you the other options and then have those other options have uh either a cost per click or an affiliate program attached to them so if you do choose to use quad you know uh gemini or you know some open source one you would get a vig and then if it also had you know this list of people who are using this man there's so many ways to upsell them so i think we can figure that out later we know this can become low millions of dollars pretty quickly and we know it could become you know 10 million dollars and you know when we invest at the seed

SPEAKER_43: stage uh for low single digits you know upwards to eight million dollars typically that's what seed rounds are um you know you can you feel pretty comfortable taking a little bit of a bet and

SPEAKER_09: they'll figure it out later okay any questions for me about that sort of pressure no i also i think it like makes sense as a third party tool to be doing this because you'll get like open ai or different model have like let's say their own analytics but they're going to prioritize you know usage of their

SPEAKER_08: product right and they may push into a more expensive one right yeah yeah so i think it's interesting

SPEAKER_09: like as a separate party if they're optimizing for you and you just pay for that product objectivity

SPEAKER_06: it's great yeah yeah and if you could bid out the software you know you can have like for vip

SPEAKER_00: clients like big you know people spending a million dollars a month you just have some concierge there who says hey we bid you we bid your work out um we can save you 15 if we do that we want to take five points of the 15 you'll save 10. are you interested in that service click here and you click there and you sign an agreement and then they go shop your jobs so to speak elite performers have a

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SPEAKER_13: secondhand geek okay hey sir hello sir how are you i am a military guy calling me sir there or am i just

SPEAKER_92: yes i am uh i am a mustang used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes and command m1 tanks in

SPEAKER_53: the desert so oh wow so which branch is that if i may ask army all right well thank you for your

SPEAKER_94: service thank you for your support we enjoy all of our sister services that help us fantastic uh you

SPEAKER_96: do any tours there you get out you get to see any action uh desert storm so oh yes so kuwait yeah yep

SPEAKER_95: kuwait specifically actually wow okay there you go um well that was good work uh let's uh and a decisive

SPEAKER_53: victory by our amazing personnel and capabilities so absolutely fantastic job on that one um and again

SPEAKER_85: thank you for your service we love military uh vets because they have the discipline to do really good um now they might not be rule breakers and rebels so there is that uh well i was a scout platoon leader

SPEAKER_06: so i do break quite a few rules well i mean sometimes you got a freestyle out there in the field

SPEAKER_85: you know when i did my two imaginary tours uh in the cia um people always ask me if i'm in the cia

SPEAKER_00: that's ridiculous um so let's get to it um show us your product you got two minutes on the clock

SPEAKER_94: here we go three two go welcome to secondhand geek the first place to go to buy sell and trade your tabletop games millions of tabletop gamers worldwide waste hours searching through dozens of websites forums and trade groups to find products and services to enjoy their hobby meet henry he wants a new 40k army for his next tournament and wants to sell his old army and get a new army and get it all painted at secondhand geek he can sell his old army buy a new army and then find a painter before the next tournament all on one site our marketplace charges a five percent fee for all products and services sold over the last 90 days we have converted 194 people to our marketplace who have listed over eight thousand dollars inventory and items we are using our dedicated facebook groups gaming stores and manaverse podcast to go to market over the past 10 years our dedicated facebook groups have grown to over 16 000 members who have traded over five million dollars annually with over 200 000 listings the average gaming store purchase is about 40 and ebay does about 312 million transactions a year so our tam is about 12 billion dollars to earn 10 million dollars we are going to use our over 50 years of experience in the industry our relationship and knowledge of gaming stores and running local regional and national events along with our manaverse podcast for 100 million dollars we are going to consolidate the tabletop gamers and companies from ebay's and the etsy's with better margins and targeted marketing results utilizing things like youtube tick tock and twitch and our facebook trade group our leadership team has been there since the beginning of the tabletop gaming industry we have owned stores run events hosted gaming conventions and promoted the industry it started with dungeons and dragons and now with trading card games and miniatures it has grown into a 25 billion dollar a year industry we are the perfect team to make this change thank you for seeing secondhand geek

SPEAKER_69: all right well done uh so when did this product launch this marketplace when it when did you launch it

SPEAKER_06: i know you have the facebook podcast november last year november last year okay great so it's it's very nice and you got six months of data yep well tell me honestly what have you learned about running

SPEAKER_08: a marketplace what are the top lessons two or three lessons you've learned so far getting this product

SPEAKER_94: into the market you have to have a balance between both sides of the marketplace both the products and services provided and the customers to consume the product that you have got it and there seem to be

SPEAKER_119: stores that do this yeah there's still a lot of stores out there uh roughly 45 000 stores in the

SPEAKER_06: u.s that have a brick and mortar location yeah and these are typically comic book stores that have this

SPEAKER_94: section no actually there are five things in the industry there's miniatures trading card games role playing games and board games sometimes a lot of the comic book shops are just standalone comic book

SPEAKER_06: shops got it okay and so what are the lessons have you learned here um in running the marketplace um

SPEAKER_115: that the having a lot of pictures and a lot of descriptions um will push somebody to do a sale

SPEAKER_112: online versus going into a store to pick something up got it okay so you learn supply and demand matter

SPEAKER_06: both sides matter you're gonna have buyers you're gonna have sellers second thing you uh learned here is that the descriptions and the landing page really matter yes okay how many listings uh have been uh added to the system to date in the six months you've been operating uh to date we have twelve

SPEAKER_94: thousand and nine hundred dollars worth of listings okay so you're giving me the dollars which i always uh

SPEAKER_43: 351 items okay so great um what happens with founders and you know uh you are using the jedi mind trick doesn't work on sith lords uh we invented it um so that's not gonna work on a jedi fellow jedi so when you give me the number the value of it i immediately say oh there's somebody put a ten thousand dollar thing in there this number is going to be low hundreds and i was right

SPEAKER_00: so um this seems to be your biggest challenge what is your solution if i asked you right now to come up with on the spot how you get 10 000 items in this marketplace in the next 30 days how do you do

SPEAKER_109: it we have created an upload system with share tribe that allows gaming stores to upload their entire

SPEAKER_94: inventory that they have in their store instead of going to amazon or ebay and sell on our platform and only give up five percent instead of fifteen percent of their margin okay so number one you're not

SPEAKER_06: going to win them by the margin necessarily um the margin isn't what matters finding a great buyer at the right price is what matters when you talk to your customers that's what they're going to care

SPEAKER_00: about most is like getting the best price they're happy to pay 10 15 5 even 20 probably if you get them a buyer um quickly and so um i think what you need to think about here is finding a way to have either offshore individuals who get paid a dollar or two dollars an hour or software or both to make uh this marketplace have a dramatic number of listings which will do extraordinary things for your seo

SPEAKER_06: because you have a long tail here there's some you know character in some card game that somebody looks

SPEAKER_00: for you know that 10 people look for and there's not that many pages of it so um on a software basis

SPEAKER_43: there's a very simple tool you could build which is export your ebay listing and post it here so a bulk editor to export that could be a toolbar whatever you know and you can probably build that

SPEAKER_22: very simply where the toolbar goes in and moves it over or you do something even a little more sneaky

SPEAKER_129: and this is where like sneaky well it's a little bit gray hat a little bit freestyle you know like when

SPEAKER_00: you and i were were in the field you know what i'm saying yeah you were you were on the front line i was behind the scenes you know cia stuff um sometimes we got a freestyle sometimes there's people who can do things for us you know and we can uh you know grease the wheels so to speak yeah

SPEAKER_85: you know what i'm saying we don't talk about this stuff uh in public you know this is the job so um

SPEAKER_00: imagine there was a third-party company in manila that you could pay and you could say hey hey this person is the best seller on ebay i want you to go to their ebay bank and take their 20 listings and move them over to ours and then you as the founder say you saw your great listings we're building this startup um you know and hey we really love what you're doing took the liberty of showing you how much better our landing pages are by moving your inventory over here if it's okay with you i'd like to give you zero commission for your first 10 sales and we have a team that will automatically move your inventory over here and you don't have to lift a finger we'll just camp out on

SPEAKER_06: your you know google cognizance you know how we do this but put up put up a bird you know we watch it snipe it fresh this is stuff that's like just don't ask questions just enjoy the peace and prosperity

SPEAKER_43: that you get to live in the free world stuff alan and i do or i'm sorry alan does it i'm not involved anyway now you just took the 10 best sellers and you took their 20 best items and you did them

SPEAKER_00: a solid you did something really gracious for them and you're a founder they're a found you say hey i want to get you the best price we're really trying to own this specific category i'll make it super easy

SPEAKER_43: for you if you just give me your email address and phone number stripe account whatever i'll put it into the

SPEAKER_135: account for you but now you just hire somebody in manila for a dollar an hour two dollars an hour and

SPEAKER_00: they do it overnight and you just tell them move these into here and then find the seller and then you as a buyer could then go buy something from them put it into your house inventory so now you're selling it so now that you're a buyer you have their contact info so this is like a really interesting thing um i had a friend who was trying to figure out how to sell a piece of um uh they were struggling

SPEAKER_06: they were trying to sell a button that you could put on a table it's very popular in asia but you press a button and the server comes to you when you press the button in the back room this is 25 years ago in the back room it um puts a number there now if you go to any chinese restaurant or you go to china hong kong every table has a bell on it you ever been to asia and seen these bells no okay so if you want your waiter like just press the button and then 17 happens the person races to your table this is before smartphones and ordering through you know ordering services and qr codes and they couldn't figure

SPEAKER_53: out how to sell i said it's very simple you go to the bar you talk to the manager you order a drink

SPEAKER_06: chat up the bartender give him a nice tip so can i ask a question who's the manager here um you know um

SPEAKER_43: to want to leave my card and and and this little bell for them and uh it would be real solid for me um if you could do that um this is a crazy idea but it really increases tips because people get better service and hey you're the bartender you understand how important that is if they can't find you if they can't find the waiter right you probably can't find the waiter sometimes you've already made the drinks and the ice is melting so i just gave him that script he went out

SPEAKER_06: and did it but it worked now why did it work because you bought a drink and you gave a tip so for 30 or 40 bucks he would go into a restaurant bar whatever have a little snack you have to eat anyway and you know he had done reciprocity he had done something nice for them which then meant they

SPEAKER_00: wanted to reciprocate it's very powerful device so anyway you got to start thinking about acquisition you got to start thinking about really building up the inventory i gave you a couple strategies here

SPEAKER_06: but you you you you can't go to market without this being 10 000 20 000 you got to come up with a really great system so it could be done with software could be done with you know um humans um that are just going to be faster to be totally honest than you know getting the software out there and trying to explain to people how to use it and um you know pick a beachhead where you think it's over under service is there you mentioned so many of these things which one do you think you can crush uh ebay and other places on that's under service that's high velocity high margin whatever

SPEAKER_94: is it the figurines is it the card warhammer games workshop they are the number one seller

SPEAKER_96: at 312 million dollars a year um i have a facebook group over the last 10 years that um

SPEAKER_00: has a lot of margin there so critically important you own that category every item possible is in there the top sellers are in there and then you go find the buyers which you seem to have done because of your facebook groups which is also a brilliant strategy people are also hanging out a discord but you know the the two other growth hacks are like having a podcast having a discord

SPEAKER_06: slash facebook groups and facebook groups are brilliant at this so i just love everything about what you're doing great job i'm really interested in your business so great job good

SPEAKER_27: start oh by the way let me ask a couple questions you have a developer on staff or how are you doing it

SPEAKER_125: you have a full-time contract uh how many co-founders you got we have four all together perfect so four

SPEAKER_27: people own over 10 of the business each correct something in their range okay great 20 20 we keep

SPEAKER_94: 20 for an equity pool for employees for okay so it's chopped up five ways got it i love it that's

SPEAKER_27: perfect so we love having multiple co-founders as you know you know spent a little time in the field

SPEAKER_00: got to have my squad you know you're only as good as the the weakest link in the chain and uh you know they you got to trust they got your six right yep i'm talking about yeah this you don't you translate this later fresh but you got the guy whoever's got your six this is important

SPEAKER_135: thing he's a great guy yep exactly uh and you have his six by the way so absolutely all this is uh

SPEAKER_43: you know you get if if something happens you know they they got to protect your back you to protect there so that's great we love having multiple co-founders you have deep expertise and passion for the space this is like normally as a business you'd be like why would you do this what i love about your businesses you understand how much money is at stake you understand the customer base really well um and now you just got to understand how marketplaces work we've invested in a couple we have one that matched drivers of cars passengers of cars it did well we had one that did service providers with homeowners thumbtack we have one meowtel meowtel matches people who own cats and cat sitters we have another one called gigster it matches spaces where you could go rent a pool a tennis court or a location shoot uh by the hour for a photo shoot or a movie they're crushing it with people who want to rent a pickleball court or who want to you know make a movie or a television commercial or social media influence stuff uh we've got another one that takes diamonds from all different sources puts them into a

SPEAKER_06: marketplace called stone algo we love a good marketplace we've got the playbook for your

SPEAKER_00: partners one of the things we try to do is um introduce you to people maybe who are one two three

SPEAKER_43: four five years ahead of you in deploying these marketplace strategies and who are non-competitive

SPEAKER_53: and let's face it it's not like there's going to be 20 of these startups coming to our accelerator next

SPEAKER_148: year this is true all right good luck with it thank you sir being a founder can be overwhelming don't i

SPEAKER_44: know it you know i get those phone calls on the weekend sometimes people are a little overwhelmed they need to talk to jcal they got my phone number i know the reason why there's a hundred different

SPEAKER_150: things you're responsible for you got to take care of your office space or remote workers hr

SPEAKER_44: software raising money products customers it never ends and i know you just want to focus on your product and your customers well fortunately mercury is here to help simplify your banking and finance operations complete any banking task in just a few clicks streamline your operations with real-time data from your bank account and they've got an amazing interactive demo right on their website that lets you explore all the tools and how it works with mercury you're going to pay bills faster you're going to stay in control of company spend and you're going to speed up reconciliation the end result is the precision control and focus your startup needs to transform how you operate join over 100 000 startups that trust mercury for financial excellence growth and of course the community mercury the art of simplified finances apply a minute mercury.com and start transforming your startup's journey today let's have our next founder man two strong companies pressure can make my life

SPEAKER_07: hard if i only pick one of them all right next up alex from zwieley let's keep this train moving hi jason

Chamath Palihapitiya: how are you i'm well three two go hi i'm alexana founder and ceo of zwieley we help you run an awesome business by giving you all the tools you need in one place meet emily emily's two-person consulting firm is bogged down by overpriced complicated software with scattered data running a business takes many tools emily starts with one and the cost just adds up connecting them together also costs more it's really cross integrates tools like tasks emails presentations crm and much more we launched march 2024 and have six customers with over 4 000 in ar and five products and more on the way we offer bundling with savings for three or more subscriptions products range from 15 to 100 a month and without fees for seats so these customers end up saving an average of 50 to 80 percent based on competitor posted pricing we are target freelancers small business owners and startup founders using linkedin and word of mouth for growth to hit 10 million dollars in ar we need 4 167 smbs at 200 mr i'm a two-time technical founder with john a marketing expert and hashi a business consultant on my founding team we are zwieley and we help you run an awesome business by giving you all the tools

SPEAKER_158: you need in one place great well done have you raised venture capital before on my last one yes private

SPEAKER_159: but private equity no we see oh private equity got it have you had a successful exit defined as

SPEAKER_06: selling a company to another company and returning capital to the investors or equity in the next

SPEAKER_159: company no not on the last one not yet we didn't get how many co-founders do you have on this one a

SPEAKER_06: three uh two other ones yeah two other ones are how many of the three are technical and writing code

SPEAKER_85: for this product or otherwise doing the ux design and uh yeah i'm the only one like i'm doing okay

SPEAKER_163: what are the two other people's expertise in the world where they exceptional uh one of them is

SPEAKER_156: business uh development and sales and the other one is marketing social media marketing uh perfect

SPEAKER_159: growth okay so you got a growth person you got a sales person you got a tech person nice trio uh which

SPEAKER_06: customer just tell me a description of the customer who's getting the most value who's the most addicted

SPEAKER_53: who's giving you the most great feedback out of these five or six customers you got just describe

SPEAKER_169: yeah we have uh i had a customer about two weeks ago who just sent a referral video like a recommendation and he was like uh he loves the customer support from me it's like that's what

SPEAKER_158: number one okay that's what he loves what does he love about the product and what is his business describe what he does for a business true so he's a sales director for a a company called becoming

SPEAKER_169: institute they offer therapy to universities colleges and using crm he was using a cell

SPEAKER_06: spreadsheet and he's using crm to keep track of all his leads got it so you think your beachhead market is people who have service businesses perhaps who have customers who have to be managed and then everything that's downstream of that and the current collection of crm like salesforce is awesome everybody loves salesforce there's a bunch of other contemporaries in that space of course there's hubspot and other uh tools uh but you think you can carve a niche because you will be cheaper

SPEAKER_172: and better am i correct yeah yes uh not necessarily cheaper but uh all these other companies don't have

SPEAKER_158: that founder-led support but also um they're very bloated that's what we're hearing um people just

SPEAKER_06: don't want all the bells and whistles got it so you want to build a tighter collection of software modules

SPEAKER_43: that are easier to use exactly so simplicity is really important here zendesk was one of those companies that tried to simplify all right well done alex thank you that's all my questions for you fresh um we saw

SPEAKER_06: three great companies here um all three of them have their product in market all three of them have a

SPEAKER_00: couple of customers kind of our sweet spot if i'm being honest um rank these three in order of how

SPEAKER_43: much money and the likelihood of um the likelihood they could be a hundred x so if we're investing in them in our accelerator whatever uh making some small bets and then bigger bets let's assume we invest

SPEAKER_06: in them which one has the most likely chance to return a hundred times our money which is what our

SPEAKER_00: lps are entrusting us to do is to find in every 25 or 50 companies a company that will return 100x

SPEAKER_178: that's the math of what we do i think i'll pick props ai um to return yeah okay great uh and then who's

SPEAKER_179: second oh uh second i'll go with zwili and third second and geek got it okay um and i can only pick one

SPEAKER_43: of these companies to invest in that's the hard part here for me and all three of them are worthy of

SPEAKER_181: investing oh wait a second i can do whatever i want i can invest in all three if i want to

SPEAKER_53: all right pressure you know what get these guys the paperwork i'll invest in all that's my decision i feel like all three of these companies are worthy of investment so let's get going let's figure out

SPEAKER_06: um you know where in our program they want to go to uh let's get the diligence done we got due diligence all this is pending due diligence i'd like to place a bet on each one small bet grow

SPEAKER_53: because they're very early stage and and let's see if they can hit a series of milestones let's bring our three founders back for a second here and i will let them ask me one tight question each one tight

SPEAKER_00: question each about startups uh and being a founder so take a moment to think it through raise your hand

SPEAKER_43: when you've got your question locked and loaded okay alex your question keep it concise yeah you've

Chamath Palihapitiya: had uh other companies before so how do you navigate shifts in strategy while staying true to your vision

SPEAKER_156: considering all the constant changes that may occur daily okay mission strategy tactics okay the mission

SPEAKER_06: for your firm is to help small businesses operate more efficiently whatever it is to help your uh businesses become profitable you have to figure out what that north star mission is

SPEAKER_00: so let's just say we want to help small businesses grow faster and profitably well that leaves any piece of software you can build or service you can create on the table and that gives you permission with the mission with your team to say hey we're here to help people hit profitability and to help them run a more efficient business that grows fast so we're going to help you run your business more efficiently grow faster and grow profits specifically so if you set that mission

SPEAKER_06: well then strategy becomes pretty easy because you just make a list of here are all the different products people told us they want and we did customer interviews with a dozen people and this is what those dozen people told us was important to them and then we did second meetings with those 12 people

SPEAKER_00: it doesn't have to be a ton of customer interviews who used our product and man four of them said you know crm was really important but sequencing tools and prospecting and finding the next lead were like they're really acute problems so we built a software and uh human service that allowed us to help them get more leads and tell them these are the 10 people they should go after next whatever it is um and then you can just move things up and down the strategy pole and just watch engagement and do that now tactics

SPEAKER_06: they're going to change frequently so mission doesn't change if you change the mission it's like well are we shutting the company down are we getting permission from our investors you know to to to pivot

SPEAKER_00: hard here that's a hard pivot changing the entire mission of the company second piece strategy well that's

SPEAKER_06: just something that would change quarterly maybe every couple of quarters tactics could change weekly hey you know we're we're going to try this week um knocking on doors and physically going to storefronts next week we're going to try uh inviting people to a webinar the week after we're going to try cold calling the week after we're going to do email sequences so you say okay this month we're going to try four different sales strategies we're going to push as hard as we can on each and then we'll

SPEAKER_00: figure out which one works and then that moves into a strategy right so you try different tactics you moved into strategy so just keep that framework that i talk about often m s t ms t mission strategy tactics um and you know your team can change the tactics anytime they want you can empower them just

SPEAKER_43: say hey listen you can try all kinds of different tactics you want just don't do anything unethical moral et cetera leave that to guys and you know cia you know doing stuff we we have some gray areas we can work operate in that you can't um and then strategy well you know we have to have a thought out meeting about that because that's a quarterly you know making a big plan and mission you're not touching that obviously you know rank and file and touching the mission okay great job

SPEAKER_61: thank you uh peter you got a question you don't have to yeah um keep it tight the at the early stage of a company when we're talking to customers every day and building real relationships uh at our stage we're onboarding everyone uh personally at the moment and having regular conversations with them how when you when you also mentioned pivots how do you um balance supporting those early adopters

SPEAKER_74: and those initial customers that you build really deep relationships with with uh new opportunities that arise to serve a wider audience of customers yeah you're gonna have to figure out who your ideal

SPEAKER_06: customer profile is great question you'll figure that out over time typically customers will they'll

SPEAKER_00: fall into buckets right um and so we did that with startups there are startups at the early stage like yours that come to founder university and they're trying to figure out if there's a business here and how to get customers they may or may not be incorporated we have the accelerator you all are

SPEAKER_06: kind of accelerator moving into the accelerator phase hey i got five i got ten i got you know 10 you know 3k a month 10k a month in revenue i need to accelerate this i need to get a proper seed

SPEAKER_00: round of a million to three million dollars done you know and then there's like growth after that so bucketing your customers and then understanding those personas and this is you know stuff that's been going on in sales for a long time and then figuring out what um you know why they use your product and what the sales pitch is to them so you know for you guys in founder university like you want to get to know our team you might want help on growth you might want help with strategy figuring out how the businesses work asking hard questions getting some knowledge you know when you move into the next phase you know and you're like a seed stage company from this precede stage to see stage you might be asking us hey can i how do i how do i double my revenue every month and how do i find a great sales manager or first sales person you got a different set of needs that are more operational and then you might have scaling needs from us you might have fundraising needs from us so we can craft products founder university launch accelerator or direct investing or our syndicate for each of those early stage moments so you'll do the same there might be somebody who's a startup with two people using your product and you're going to grow with them they're not going to be hard to service they're going to only have like a small number of jobs running who knows and it might be series a people who are already been spending a million spending a million dollars a year for the last two years they might take longer to make a decision but they might make a bigger decision they might want more white glove service and then there's giant companies that might be a three to six month sales cycle so you have to pick and learn about each of those different customer segments right and then decide which one you're going to focus on in which order perfect example uber went after lincoln town cars the highest and highest margin elite service bc ceo showing up the airport with the person at you know baggage claim with their name and they you know they walk up and they get out of business class and

SPEAKER_43: they hand the person their bag and they get back on their phone and pound out some messages got the earpiece in and you know they're not going after like the family you know on a budget spirit airlines and coach you know looking to get a minivan and save money and you know that kind of thing right and they want to add three extra people even though it can only fit five it was critically important for uber to do that because those customers were profitable from day one massively profitable uber x customers modestly profitable uber pool or lift line and those kind of things

SPEAKER_00: not profitable so you have to make that decision who you're going to go after first the big customers might take a long time and you don't have the time to do that the small customers might not ring the register enough and so maybe it's you know uh um you know um who is the porridge

SPEAKER_136: is too hot too cold just right goldilocks goldilocks you got to find your goldilocks customers boom

SPEAKER_94: boom okay last question alan um with all the experience that you guys have with marketplaces

SPEAKER_109: what you think is either the best piece of software um or partnership to have in trying

SPEAKER_06: to create a scalable marketplace i think you got to really you know and there's a group of people who say you got to have the customers and then the supply you know the demand the supply side takes care of itself um the truth is in talking to travis long times about this you got to have a you got to have a certain amount of supply um and in your case is a long tail of supply

SPEAKER_00: so i'd really work on supply once you get some supply cranking you can fake demand how do you fake demand you got 20 important customers putting stuff on there you create 20 accounts with your friends your team whatever and you buy one item or two items from them you know each month now they're like oh wow people are buying our stuff then you take it you resell it on your own platform whatever you know and you just get them used to oh my god they got a booking they got a sale right uh and the way uber did this famously was they went to some mid-sized cab companies when they

SPEAKER_06: opened in la my understanding and they said hey we'll pay you for 10 drivers on the road 24 hours a day this amount of money all you got to do is put these phones in your cabs can we buy that from you now we'll pay you up front and the capcom was like yeah dummy um we'll take a guaranteed payment and they just bought out the 10 cars boom and then venture money to do that so it was no big

SPEAKER_00: deal there's equivalents here for you okay where i explained it earlier right so i think it's really about getting the great supply then you know you could always buy ads so you could buy google ads you could buy you know make youtube videos of what's for sale and then amplify those um you could do

SPEAKER_06: content marketing and you know say hey here are the five coolest items on the marketplace this week we think these ones are really good value and have a great price we think these ones maybe you want to put an offer in for 10 less so you you can juice the marketplace but it all starts with in your case a decent amount of supply that people can peruse right does that make sense yep

SPEAKER_00: no perfect sense but i'm happy to be on the adventure with you and put you in touch with some of these great uh marketplace founders um who might be able to give you some tips and you know

SPEAKER_06: i i really think when you got to set like an unrealistic you know i want 10 000 items in this

SPEAKER_00: marketplace by may first and then you get to may for or i'm sorry june first yep and then on june first you see your team hey listen we we got to 7 000 we didn't get to 10 we got to seven now i want to get to 25 based on our lessons here and this is just you know unrealistic sometimes you know when you were in and put that out in kuwait sometimes somebody gave you an order that you know two guys in the squad were like that's not possible and your job as a leader to say yeah okay on the surface perhaps not let's get creative right come give me some ideas here folks no is not an option we got

SPEAKER_06: to take a shot at this the odds are long there's a certain amount of risk involved here let's get creative let's figure out if we can we can figure it out right and so i always like to set those

SPEAKER_00: unrealistic goals i told my team i want a hundred first person i want a hundred meetings introductory meetings per week i got so how much pushback did i get pressure a lot yeah how many did we do last

SPEAKER_43: week 60 50 60 yeah 60. okay so we're almost there we got 60. when i tell lps we did we're doing we're

SPEAKER_00: on pace to do 3 000 meetings a year and put them in our database people are like whoa that's a lot of meetings and i say yeah and you know the denominator is 20 000 applications and so i keep pushing and pushing and we're going to hit 100 meetings in the next couple of weeks i think we have we have three

SPEAKER_43: more researchers coming on board so if if two of them click and do a good job we'll hit my goal of 100. now that i set that goal a year ago but here we are and mission accomplished and so it's going to

SPEAKER_00: be great to be in business with all of you i hope we can work all these details out if you are a founder and you're listening we are passionate about helping founders like peter like alex like alan we're passionate about rolling up our sleeves at launch at founder.university at the launch accelerator we and this week in startups of course we want to help you succeed most startups fail we know this going in

SPEAKER_43: we don't mind we're okay with failure we just want to work really hard alongside driven people who are accountable and set really great goals if that's you apply if you want a bunch of money you want a

SPEAKER_00: handout you don't have any skill please go to apply.y combinator.com apply somewhere else apply go to techstars.com apply if you're hardcore like pressure and i are and the founders start today and you really want to win and you want to work hard and you're willing to work 60 70 hours a week if you're checking your email and pushing code on the weekends and at 1am you're waking up getting out of bed to write that extra email and hire that extra person and you want to win if you're part of the

SPEAKER_43: one percent of founders um that really pushes hard and we invest in one out of 200 so it's really 50 bips uh one in 200 we invest in you can apply at launch.co apply launch.co apply that is our global application correct fresh that's the one place we send people to yep um you can go to founder.university to learn more about the program uh you can go to launch.co to learn more about our firm we also have a syndicate the syndicate.com 11 000 members over 4 000 of them have made an investment in a startup so far on average they invest these high net worth individuals seven thousand dollars each on average they put in 500 to 750k into startups so we offer our startups if they're hitting certain goals and

SPEAKER_00: there's a quality company uh to syndicate to the syndicate after our fund has made their investment decision it's two separate entities so we we really work hard for our founders and you'll see them many times uh on this week in startups we love what we do we're looking for passionate hard-working

SPEAKER_159: people with skills if that's you you know what to do we'll see you all next time on this week

SPEAKER_207: startups bye bye okay everybody i want to tell you about founder fridays what are founder fridays this is an opportunity for you if you're a founder to get together with a half dozen a dozen other founders on a friday the first friday of every month why is this important well if you meet with other founders you can talk about the things that are working at your startup and the things you're struggling with everything else in between and then you can trade notes and you can make friends it's really hard to be a founder isn't it you're alone all the time you've got to solve all these problems and other founders are having the same experience you're having it's isolating it can be

SPEAKER_211: scary it can be thrilling and people don't understand what you're going through if you go to a dinner party and there's one founder and seven other people you feel like a mutant you feel like somebody who doesn't belong there nobody understands why you're doing your startup why you're taking this risk the problems you're facing right they're npcs this is a non-npc event every first friday of the month we do founder fridays we're doing them now in 71 different cities and if this sounds appealing to you well you're a founder and you want to hang out with maybe seven other founders around a round table you can have breakfast you can have lunch you could have dinner you could have coffee you can co-work dinner however you want to do it and it's free we've been doing this for a couple of

SPEAKER_207: months now we've had 71 meetups around the world and 929 founders have joined i want you to join and i want you to come to the next one it's friday may 3rd now if your city's not on the list what are you going to do you're going to apply to run your city with two or three other founders again four founders by founders from the number one podcast for founders this week in startups comes founder fridays.tech go to founderfridays.tech to sign up and you're going to meet all these great founders and we give like a little uh prompt and this founder friday taking place on may 3rd we want you to bring two things with you your most significant challenge and one thing you wish you'd learned earlier we're going to go around the table and each person is going to do that and then you'll get feedback from your peers it's incredible it's magical and we don't want this to get big we want to keep it small so if you plan on going and you're interested and sounds appealing to you just go to founder fridays.tech t-e-c-h right great domain name founder fridays.tech and please take pictures and then share those pictures on twitter at mention us at twi startups at jason and it doesn't matter you could be in san francisco new york chicago la paris tokyo dubai these things are happening all over the world again 71 cities let's get it to 100 cities we've got over 900 members let's get it past a thousand go ahead and sign up and you'll be in touch with my team and we'll see you there once again founder fridays.tech