SPEAKER_00: three two hey everybody hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups we have a jam packed episode for you today first we're gonna chop it up we're gonna do a post-mortem on the

David Friedberg: weekend that was the bank failure weekend silicon valley bank uh going out of business and the fed back stopping everything on sunday this all happened in 48 hours i'm going to explain some of my tweets for those of you who are wondering why i was in caps mode and then we have a great

SPEAKER_02: interview with andrew r mccue he is the co-founder and ceo of wisk labs which is creating a vr technology that lets you record and then relive in 3d your memories record on your phone and then relive your memories in vr it's an amazing conversation and we're going to talking about

David Friedberg: not just reliving your memories and all the ethical interesting concerns that can come up from that but why now all the camera upgrades in the new iphone that enabled wisk's technologies and some startup advice on how to raise money and the ideal customers and some wisk labs use cases and features

Chamath Palihapitiya: it's going to be a great show so stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by pilot grow your business sustainably and operate more effectively pilot provides the most reliable accounting cfo and tax services for startups and small businesses head to pilot.com twist and get 20

SPEAKER_05: off the first six months linkedin marketing to redeem a 100 linkedin air credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com this week in startups and brilliant.org brilliant is the best way to learn math science and computer science interactively try everything brilliant has to

Chamath Palihapitiya: offer for a full 30 days and get 20 off an annual subscription at brilliant.org twist hey everybody

David Friedberg: it's march 13 2023 and it has been a long weekend for those of you looking back on this episode as a historical document this is the weekend uh the monday after the weekend where silicon valley bank went out of business was taken over by the fdic and we had complete chaos for startups investors and that chaos started to tip over into uh the civilian community and when i jokingly say civilians i'm kind of talking about the military talking about everybody who's not in the military i'm talking about everybody who is not in tech and capital allocators uh venture capitalists angel investors seed investors etc and if you follow me on twitter twitter.com jason i was tweeting up a storm with my caps lock on because it was a crazy weekend venture capitalists all over the bay area this weekend to give you the inside baseball witnessed on thursday the bank run of silicon valley bank this bank run did not occur on twitter because the wall street journal uh reporter contacted me said i want to talk about the impact of twitter on the bank run and i was like well the bank run happened in private on email and on group chats the and slack channels those kind of things the reaction to silicon valley going up going belly under on friday uh was what happened on twitter over the weekend on thursday we witnessed everybody talking about silicon valley bank potentially going out of business obviously on wednesday and we've been over this a couple of times on the friday emergency pod for this weekend startups and all in episode 119 this weekend it was uh chaos wednesday night into thursday and then into friday and what we witnessed was an absolute run for the doors at silicon valley bank and then that went to other regional banks and i don't want to single out specific banks but obviously you saw a lot of press around first republic uh which is a fantastic bank silicon valley bank is a fantastic bank i have worked with them both of those firms for maybe decades now uh and they have serviced all of our startups i love both of those firms both of them have been advertisers on this uh and supported different events i've done i have accounts at both of them i do not have exposure to either one i do not have a position i haven't j traded at either firm although i literally was involved in a discussion is now at the time with first republic bank being down 60 today on monday march 13th to buy first uh republic bank anyway long story short we watched as people fled silicon valley bank for first republic then we saw people saying hey you know what i don't want to be in any of the regional banks i want to be in one of the top four banks so if this

SPEAKER_29: is a bank run and it hits contagion then uh we can at least be in the top four banks and there will be

SPEAKER_02: like safety in those larger banks this was terrifying to witness up close and personal because it was the prisoner's dilemma where like either you leave or you stay in jail forever and your money's locked up

SPEAKER_27: so the logical thing for any founder to do was to get their money out uh and the logical thing for any investor or board member to do was to tell them to get their money out and this is the definition

SPEAKER_29: of a bank run it's why we have this term it's why it's so terrifying because it has to do with the psychology of individuals more than it has to do with logic if everybody acted logically like in

David Friedberg: it's a wonderful life and they just took out the money they needed uh you wouldn't have a bank run right

SPEAKER_27: so and and this precludes uh any post-mortem on silicon valley bank but on saturday we had no reaction uh from the president of the united states janet yellen just the fed everybody seemed to be asleep at the wheel and what we were doing in silicon valley to give you the inside baseball is we were looking at the companies impacted and we were trying to figure out which companies raising money in our portfolio had money at silicon valley bank and who was going to make payroll on monday and then we had identified six or seven companies in our portfolio that had what i would call significant exposure in other words they might have had all their eggs in one basket there were people who had exposure but it wasn't life-threatening it wasn't in the next week or two we're not hitting payroll so we had to do this crazy triage this is a very intense thing so friday night i'm in board meeting saturday board calls threads documents flying around how do we get two hundred thousand dollars how do how do we get two million dollars how do we get seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and so i'm saying holy cow uh and i just told my founders if anybody can't get their money out we'll do personal loans to um those companies not investments in the company for equity because then you have to decide

SPEAKER_29: well what is the valuation of the company and this could be particularly challenging because then you have to get a group of people who are on the board you might have five major investors a major investor

David Friedberg: as somebody with say over 250k or a million dollars in a startup so let's say you have five of them okay we're going to put a million dollars in this company okay what is the company worth well oh it raised money in the peak valuation market last year it's not worth that much okay now you have to have a have a negotiation and the talk the clock is ticking and what if everybody doesn't agree so somebody came up with a really good idea it was one of our founders in fact and i think other folks uh were also coming to the same conclusion we'll just give you a loan when the money is released from silicon valley bank which we all think it will be at some point and maybe it's 80 cents on the dollar or 90 cents or 50 cents whatever it winds up being oh you just pay this back we don't have to convert it into equity and so we started that process some people wanted to do uncapped notes which is very convenient for the founder uh and um you know just throw the money into the company but in some cases venture firms then have to make a decision do they want to own more equity so this is the chaos of putting a gun to people's head and saying invest in this company now or it goes away it's really really stressful so we offered all of our founders impacted a loan uh this would have equaled for our small seed fund half a million to a milli and that would have covered a couple of weeks and then we would have been back at the half million to a million train i think within a couple of weeks if this stuff didn't get released to say this is stressful is an understatement because you would have had people losing their they would have had to furlough their staffs they would have to say hey we don't have money to pay you in addition to that there are regulations if you have over a certain number of employees in your company you then could be responsible the board could be responsible management could be responsible if you didn't lay them off properly you know if you have over 100 or 200 employees you can look it up depends on the state there are plant shutdown laws where you have to give enough warning typically 60

SPEAKER_27: days sometimes as long as 90 days i think here in america okay so uh we start trying to alert the public and so i went all caps and i said listen you should be terrified right now and you can go back

David Friedberg: and look at my tweets i did delete one tweet i'll talk about that in a second but i just really tried to make it clear to people that this was going to be a full contagion why did i think this was going to be a full contagion well because i saw silicon valley bank then i saw first republic bank and then i saw other banks and all of a sudden people were like you know what just go to the top four and when i saw that happen within 36 hours the money moving around it became clear that this was not going to be one or two banks and then i'm at a dinner party on saturday night and some people are in the industry some people are not uh here in the bay area and the people who are not we're starting to know about the headlines and then we start seeing pictures of banks where people are lining

SPEAKER_27: up at banks and i said oh my lord this is tipping over into retail or small businesses and of course

David Friedberg: silicon valley bank has a lot of small businesses they're just called startups and then it has you

SPEAKER_29: know there are people who are using silicon valley bank who have wineries or restaurants or other small businesses so it became clear this was a full-on contagion i believe we were already in a contagion

SPEAKER_27: over the weekend if you define contagion by this is going to other banks people told me i was being crazy people told me i'm trying to cause a bank run no i witnessed a bank run and i witnessed other

SPEAKER_49: bank runs underway and i told folks listen please don't blame the person who sees a fire and then sees another fire and then pulls the fire alarm all of this fud started coming out people are saying

SPEAKER_29: silicon valley is trying to force the government to do this because they have exposure i don't have

SPEAKER_27: any personal exposure most vcs are fine they have a couple of portfolio companies but again it's a portfolio by definition we are diversified as vcs who's not diversified the employees and the owners of these businesses are largely not diversified they don't have 10 companies they don't have 10 jobs there might be some people who work two or three jobs there might be some people who are independently wealthy and and are resilient but there's not built-in diversification so i didn't have a short position or a long position i was not talking my book i was literally trying to make sure everybody in the public people in washington people in our industry people adjacent to our industry understood

David Friedberg: that this was going to result in i believe thousands and thousands of companies going out of business and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands people losing their jobs and that on monday you

SPEAKER_11: could see a hundred thousand people lined up at banks now if that seems alarmist that was the intent

SPEAKER_00: i was literally pulling the alarm because when you see two or three banks starting to have these runs on them it doesn't take a genius to realize when the public finds out that smart people have taken their money out they should do the same and then the worst thing happened people started to hear that there were predatory hedge funds offering silicon valley bank customers 60 or 70 cents on the dollar that was

SPEAKER_05: even worse than is there a bank run or is there not because if you're saying there is a bank run or there isn't some people will believe there's a bank run and some people will say no these are too big to

SPEAKER_27: fail once you say people have valued the holdings there at 60 or 70 cents on the dollar i believe a hundred percent of people rush to the bank and say well at least i'll get my 60 cents it's better than

SPEAKER_58: nothing this literally is the plot of its wonderful life the the the the villain in it starts offering

SPEAKER_59: people 50 cents on the dollar my memory serves me correct it's been a decade maybe since i've seen it

Chamath Palihapitiya: hey everybody i'm here with basim dahir he is the ceo and the founder of pilot you know they provide accounting cfo and tax services for startups you work with a ton of founders how do you think founders

SPEAKER_61: should think about paying themselves this is something where i see founders get themselves in trouble yeah

SPEAKER_63: so there's a bunch of stuff here one is we actually have a bunch of really good data on this we did a founder salary survey to kind of give you the aggregate stats i think the the real take-home though is you don't want to pay yourself too much but importantly you also don't want to pay yourself too little like if you're agonizing about should i take the uber or the bus home that that's energy that you should be spending on making your company successful and so i think the classic trap and it's a little bit reinforced by some investors is you've got to make sure you're paying yourself enough to cover your expenses and if you're not it's not going to lead to good outcomes for the company

SPEAKER_61: yeah you don't want the founder worrying about how to make their rent every month nor do you want the

Chamath Palihapitiya: founder paying themselves nothing and then some balloon payment you want to just be on a nice steady reasonable salary that everybody agrees with and having the data to make that discussion just easy breezy is critically important totally all right everybody here's your call to action twist listeners can get 20 off their first six months at pilot.com twist that's pilot.com twist

SPEAKER_00: for 20 off your first six months thank the lord at 3 15 or so on sunday my time in pacific i guess 6 15

SPEAKER_27: in new york uh and you know early in the morning before the asian markets were about to open janet yelling comes out she had been on the morning uh press shows like face the nation saying hey we are concerned about the depositors but not the shareholders of silicon valley bank fair enough uh we all agree with that that and they said but that was also not convincing because she said we're aware of it but she didn't

SPEAKER_00: uh give the exact statement of course then we had um the fed and everybody do a joint statement that they would backstop this thank the lord if they had not bank stopped it i think we would have seen

David Friedberg: a half dozen a dozen or more banks uh go out of business uh this week and finally the president this morning on monday uh came out and took a victory lap and tried to calm everybody down this should have happened this should not have come down to the water this should have been done on saturday like if everything was done a day earlier or if on friday they said we're going to backstop this i i do i am reasonable enough to think that the fed or our government might need a day to process stuff but they need to act much faster in the future when this happens because apparently signature bank uh company none of us another bank that none of us had known was going to go under they also got taken over on sunday in this announcement so you had the other you had the banks that people were buzzing about maybe they're going to go out maybe they're not going to go out of business or have a run and then

SPEAKER_00: this other one comes out of nowhere so we had two bank failures one known one unknown in two days let it sink in folks uh this is a crazy uh turn of events thankfully i think first republic seems pretty

David Friedberg: secure uh and if there's a 25 billion facility i think we are good uh i do believe that the fed coming out and the president coming out saying we're going to backstop the depositors and the money in these banks not the banks themselves the management teams of the banks the equity holders of the banks they they take some amount of risk and have some amount of responsibility for running these companies so they should not get a bail out is the consensus in silicon valley main street and wall street i think we all agree with that we shouldn't be bailing people out if they didn't do a great job and i don't want to say silicon valley bank did a terrible job or a great job i'll let uh you know a couple of weeks go by for people to assess that obviously they didn't do an optimal job um but i hear people talking about fraud or malfeasance there's no evidence of that yet so i think people should really pause and listen i was on social media speculating all weekend but this was intelligent informed speculation based on what i was seeing so some of it was speculation hey i think there's gonna be a bank run on monday but it was based on i just witnessed two or three bank runs and i'm witnessing a contagion as we speak here is the president of the united states last week when

SPEAKER_85: we learned of the problems of the banks and the impact they could have on jobs some small businesses and banking system overall i instructed my team to act quickly to protect these interests all customers who had deposits in these banks can rest assured i'm gonna rest assured they'll be protected and they'll have access to their money as of today that includes small businesses across the country that bank there and need to make payroll pay their bills and stay open for business no losses will be borne by the taxpayers instead the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the deposit insurance fund second the management of these banks will be fired if the bank is taken over by fdic the people running the bank should not work there anymore third investors in the banks will not be protected they knowingly took a risk and when the risk didn't pay off investors lose their money that's how capitalism works and fourth there are important questions of how these banks got into the circumstance in the first place we must get the full accounting of what happened and why those responsible can be held accountable and finally we must reduce the risk of this happening again during the obama biden administration we put in place tough requirements on banks like silicon valley bank and signature bank unfortunately the last administration rolled back some of these requirements i'm going to ask congress and the banking regulators to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely this kind of bank

David Friedberg: failure would happen again uh the thing we haven't heard about right now is if silicon valley bank has a buyer there was supposed to be an auction all the bids were supposed to be in sunday according to bloomberg we haven't seen a buyer yet but i'm taping this at about noon pacific time we'll see on monday we'll see if somebody's going to buy it i think the um european uh portion of silicon valley bank has found a buyer already uh that's what i heard on cnbc late last night so that seems to be have seems to have been handled uh first republic sent out uh a notice that there uh they had raised a bunch more money more and they had 70 billion in unutilized liquidity to fund operations so it feels like

SPEAKER_00: everybody's shoring things up and i believe uh we are majority out of the woods here there are unknowns i did see some reports of people lining up at banks who knows what's true right now but it doesn't seem like it's chaotic so uh what should founders do at this point what should we take away from all of this

David Friedberg: well the obvious one is you can't have all your money in one bank and you can't have one bank doing this load balancing across other money market accounts because if that bank goes out of business in this test it turns out you can't log in and get access to those so you have to have access via at least two probably three or four banks and you should be load balancing your money across a couple of them it doesn't mean has to be equal amounts but let's just say the best practice is probably going to be you have one main bank and then maybe have three others those three others have one pay cycle each in other words two months worth of uh payroll and you're just sitting there with you know a bullet in each bank so you have three pay cycles six weeks you know uh safely tucked away i know this is a pain in the neck i know this creates extra work but i think this is what uh the new standard will be this is what i'm going to advise people this week when they ask me and i'm doing it right now here on the show for everybody i think let's say your payroll was a hundred thousand you're putting 110 000 in three different bank accounts that you don't touch uh that you don't have fees on and hey listen now you got three great banking relationships and then you've got let's say you had four million in total funds then you've got the other 3.x million in your main account some people might say put 500 500 500 and have 2.5 we'll we'll come to some reasonable conclusion of what makes sense what that also does is now if you have four of these bank accounts at least you have the fdic limit of 250k what should our government do i think that 250k needs to be a million uh or half million or two million and maybe there could be a way of paying for more in other words you have fdic insurance provided by the government but maybe there's an fdic pro and you know certain banks could offer that to certain customers and there could either be a fee for it that's paid for by the bank or shared by the bank uh and individuals but maybe it's time to think about raising that limit or having uh some way to engage in a higher limit i'm sure there's going to be third-party services that offer these kind of insurance uh products maybe they exist already i've just never heard of them somebody let me know if there's an insurance product that you know will give you your million dollars whatever is not covered the 750 of a million that's not covered instantly in the case of a bank run if that does exist i'd like to know about and how much it costs and it probably will depend on which bank you're in order and you know that can happen very simply one partner at a firm can just suggest that the monday morning meeting you know what this seems like a dicey environment let's circle the wagons let's focus on our portfolio companies insuring them up uh and let's just do that for 6 12

SPEAKER_29: weeks now when a lot of people start doing that then founders who are trying to raise money the competition for those dollars went from okay we've got let's just say a thousand firms actively investing it's more than that but i'm just gonna say a thousand okay half of them went into circle the wagons mode now it's down to 500 okay now the 500 half of those they got 250 funds that are active seed funds

SPEAKER_27: that are looking for deals okay if there were also um a thousand startups looking for funding or let's

SPEAKER_29: say 2 000 it was two startups for every one firm now it's eight startups for every one firm right and so your chances just dramatically dramatically got lowered i hope this is helpful we're going to be covering this all week long if you would like to send the producers any questions or ideas you have for segments this week as we work through this it's producers at this week in startups.com and next up a great interview with a founder i'm looking to have more seed and stage startups on the company we really do a great job of getting snowflake and public companies and legendary founders on the pod because i'm old i got a lot of friends who've been doing this for decades what i'd like to do is get the early stage founders back on this week in startups that's my commitment for this year so i'm looking for those seed stage really interesting products that are just coming to market have a couple of customers if you have ideas for really compelling interesting innovative not you know copycat products let's say just innovative stuff things that are unique in the world i'm looking for the unique new things that need support producers at this week in startups.com you can pitch your own company or you can pitch a company you find out there in the wild so uh more founders doing interesting things in the pod including our next one which has a science fiction like product that lets you relive memories in vr stick with us

Chamath Palihapitiya: let's talk about marketing to senior level executives you know the people that make purchasing decisions when you're selling business to business solutions or services software whatever your jam is you want to reach the decision makers right it's great to reach the end users that's part of the game but the decision makers who approve the purchase it's so hard to find those people but there is a solution and i think you know about it and that platform is linkedin now you know linkedin has almost a billion members but did you know they have 180 million senior level executives and the one percent those 10 million c-level executives they're on the platform as well and they have a ton of purchasing power and they use linkedin why that level of executive is obsessed with doing competitive intelligence on linkedin looking for new talent they're there they have to be there linkedin ads is specifically built for b2b marketers that's you no other platform in the world can offer you these kind of eyeballs and it's just so easy to do linkedin equals business business equals linkedin and you can slice and dice the audience by their title by what vertical they're in what geo they're in and listen they can back it up audience exposed to brand messages on linkedin are six times more likely to convert above average make b2b marketing everything it can be and get a one hundred dollar credit on your next campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit that's linkedin.com slash this week in startups terms and conditions do apply next up on the show

SPEAKER_11: andrew r mccue is with us he is the co-founder and ceo of a company called whist labs it's formerly known as vivid um tough name for a video startup yeah you know don't google it he first founded west

SPEAKER_111: in 2021 previously he was a senior at vr and ar design lead at samsung and when i saw this go by

SPEAKER_11: my feet on the socials i said um find out who built this and get him on the pod and here he is andrew r mcgue welcome to this week in startups yeah thank you jason yeah all right let's just get right to it um let's tell the audience what you built and for those people watching the video on youtube or spotify they can see it so we'll roll the tape and you can sportscast it yeah definitely

SPEAKER_119: so vivid is a great way to uh step back inside your memories just by capturing a video as this video starts playing you'll see my wife she's pregnant at the time she has her phone out she's capturing our cat there there's a little bit of processing and then she can walk back through that same memory

SPEAKER_122: in mobile ar or here in vr so she's putting on a quest headset she's in this virtual world and that like memory video is like re-projected back into space again yeah it's like a really powerful experience um in some of these captures you'll see like my wife had an ultrasound at a certain point in time and so i was able to like capture that in 3d and then my mother who's back in missouri she

SPEAKER_123: could like step back in that memory again with me as though as though she were there okay this feels

SPEAKER_39: like science fiction in fact yeah absolutely there's a couple of movies uh strange days and a minority report which i think use a very similar format or either of these and i'm asking genuinely if you're a fan of these films or if either of these were in some way inspirational or

SPEAKER_127: uh yeah yeah i mean i think i think there's like um a large amount of like reference in popular media

SPEAKER_122: so also including like black mirror um there's a video game called cyberpunk that has like a similar idea um harry potter there's this idea of like a pen sieve where you can like pull a memory out and save it somewhere um so yeah i think that's kind of just like in the background yeah okay so people are clear

SPEAKER_11: what we just saw looks like a dream it's kind of fuzzy on the edges a little bit of blur here and there but the magic here is what we're seeing is the vr experiment experience wearing a vr headset and to

SPEAKER_133: be clear you're capturing on your iphone or android phone right now yeah iphone right now which has

SPEAKER_135: a fantastic phone and i believe some some sensors for depth and whatnot so we'll talk about how this

SPEAKER_133: is done but you walk around a scene you use your proprietary app so i'm not taking an old video and

SPEAKER_119: uploading it am i uh not yet um that's on the road map but yeah right now it's just that would be

SPEAKER_133: feels just like a regular video yeah so you take what feels like a regular video when you're taking that capture video is it coaching you to hey go to the left go to the right or is he giving you

SPEAKER_119: some instruction or he's just uh no no um and i think that's something that will be like uh observing how how people are using it i think there's this desire for us to make something that feels as

SPEAKER_123: close as possible to what people are already doing um and i think that's like in part how how we'll be

SPEAKER_39: successful so then your software does something to the video and perhaps other data captured on the sensors on the phone so why don't you explain technically what happens between taking a video of your wife you know uh getting the ultrasound seeing the baby's heartbeat for the first time and then grandma or your grandchild someday yeah absolutely watching their mother their grandmother with their

SPEAKER_149: uh getting an ultrasound with their mom right yeah yeah yeah it gets a little weird yeah um yeah so

SPEAKER_150: basically like i mean you did see strange days yeah um i so i've not seen strange days oh my god

SPEAKER_142: see this is really crazy people have not seen the film the capital bigelow film strange days this is

SPEAKER_39: your homework assignment yeah absolutely it's like the original uh black mirror the the premises you

SPEAKER_133: could put on a headset that connects to your brain and it would not only make the video of what you're seeing it would have the actual feelings oh so if you were a boxer and somebody had you you had done a box boxing match i could put on the headset and relive the boxing match so people who were thrill seekers would use these and of course then it goes into dark areas of what else could you record

SPEAKER_142: horrible things happening to people like murders and other horrible things and then relive them uh

SPEAKER_147: vincent d'onofrio tom sizemore uh just i mean the cast is ridiculous ralph um oh vines angela bassett juliette lewis i mean i think it came out in uh 95 96 somewhere in that time frame um it was like yeah

SPEAKER_158: really early i was 24 years when it came out you weren't born yet i don't think uh i was born in 90s so

SPEAKER_39: yeah yeah you're five or so when it came out yeah too young okay so let's talk about the why this is what what technology makes this possible today to go from an iphone to a vr headset because my

SPEAKER_133: understanding normally you would be doing something like this you would be stitching it together

SPEAKER_163: yeah so there's some like with very unique cameras or using what's the unity or something to stitch it

SPEAKER_119: all together right yeah so there's like a technology called photogrammetry that allows you to capture a

SPEAKER_122: lot of static images and stick it together um and that gives you a static model back um a static 3d model so like i could scan my house and walk around it but it's not alive like our memories are alive and so yeah what we're using using right now is um something called depth video and so we're capturing the video feed as well as a stream of depth data and so that allows us to reproject that that video feed back into um back into 3d uh we do a couple other things to kind of like clean up some of the data and package it in a format that allows us to play it back more easily um and then yeah longer term like yeah looking at yeah how can you how can you upload existing captures and use some of the modern ml techniques to kind of synthesize some of the depth data that wasn't captured originally um and so that's something like yeah we're very much looking at for this year's roadmap and the depth data that

SPEAKER_133: the iphone can do this is a relatively new uh set of sensors it's only the most recent ones yeah so

SPEAKER_11: these allow that blurry background to be so perfectly done am i correct uh when people do the portrait

SPEAKER_142: mode is that part of what absolutely what why this technology was so important for them i think because people love that blurry background portrait mode that makes sure the the person pop right yeah right tell us about those sensors and that technology and the api that apple has to do that and then maybe

SPEAKER_122: some other uses for it yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i think um yeah right now it it kind of feels a little bit like apple is um you know maybe preparing for a larger project maybe glasses that um yeah right now a lot of the use is around um you know mobile ar you're on your phone um you're maybe in your living room and trying to place furniture again maybe you're trying to test out different like paint swatches on your wall maybe you're trying to like try on shoes or something like a virtual try on or like warby parker uses the front facing uh camera to um like mock glasses on your face um so yeah those are some of the current uses around mobile ar um as well as some of the like scanning and 3d scanning stuff like

SPEAKER_11: um in our relation yeah i think is it is is this part of the true depth stuff that's also on the face camera that lets it do the face um it's two separate sensors so there's like yeah there's like one depth

SPEAKER_119: sensor on the front for your face and then there's on the pro model iphones there's a depth sensor on the back

SPEAKER_133: right yeah my understanding of this technology also is hey when you're doing the face recognition

SPEAKER_39: one of the key things here is the depth so it knows the depth of you know how your eyeballs and your nose and all this stuff it can really start to build that model so if we put this all together there there was uh breaking news just yesterday that uh tim cook um was saying you know what we're

SPEAKER_11: gonna we're gonna get our our um apple goggles out i'm not saying you said any of this this was breaking in the news i don't want to screw up your relationship with apple this is me talking not you

SPEAKER_39: um but that he had said hey we're releasing it it's been seven years according to these reports that apple's been working on it and a lot of these technologies that have been dripping out are the

SPEAKER_11: precursor to hey you might be able to use a tool like yours make this somebody has the apple um glasses and then all of a sudden this gets built so you start working on something like this and what is the business model today for the product and then how do you think about it you know in in a bigger picture of building a sustainable business in the face of well is this something that's going to be built into an apple or an oculus product is this already built into the facebook oculus product uh and how do you

SPEAKER_187: think about being in an emerging vertical as a founder yeah yeah yeah um few questions there so like

SPEAKER_119: uh in in the middle one around around risk um i mean i think that's something that that everyone

SPEAKER_122: faces sure that like um yeah almost anything we're building could become of interest i think a advantage we have is that we are independent from any of those companies right now and so if you capture with us um our goal is to uh yeah release um apps on all of them so you can like view across you're not like locked into a particular ecosystem um yeah which is incredibly important for your most intimate moments uh yeah for like building in an emerging market i think i think it's very exciting like it's something where um yeah we can see things take off extremely quickly if you think about like the first iphone launch and getting in early then um getting familiar with how to build for these kinds of devices um because yeah it's not it's not like a mobile app it's yeah it's a spatial computer it's the the stuff is back in your world and that's just a very different experience

SPEAKER_190: um then yeah i think i missed part of your question oh business model like this is short term long term

SPEAKER_192: you have to be thinking about that because when we think about funding of companies yeah you have

SPEAKER_39: deep tech this isn't ex this is deeper tech right uh certainly but let's say you're not in a laboratory at berkeley doing this right you need to figure out a way to get a little bit of oxygen to keep the the vision going here so i guess you know product roadmap wise what do you ultimately see this as going

SPEAKER_119: forward yeah yeah definitely so like very short term as in what we're shipping today is is free to

SPEAKER_122: use um in medium term as in sometime this year um we are expecting a freemium model um so we're still figuring out still talking to to customers and stuff but um yeah our expectation is a freemium model uh kind of thinking about like uh like dropbox or google drive or icloud something that allows you to use a service for a while um especially as an emerging technology and especially because we're yeah trying to capture your most important moments um we think it's important for users to like get familiar with it like really understand the value and then those who are capturing a lot um are probably those who want to be subscribed and like get either additional features or yeah storage

SPEAKER_13: consumer subscription storage additional features they all seem like uh the big ones standard when you have a great idea like this and you build a mock-up that's so compelling and i really do encourage

SPEAKER_147: people to go um visit uh the product and download the app where can they do that what's the website

SPEAKER_177: yeah so uh they can sign up for the waitlist at wistlabs.com um w-i-s-t list yeah got it so we're

SPEAKER_13: we're not officially launched yet but you can go see all this yeah so you want to get in there and

SPEAKER_142: be part of the private beta if you're listening to this podcast in all cases if you're listening to

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Chamath Palihapitiya: to brilliant.org twist to start your free trial and for a limited time only twist listeners will get 20 off an annual subscription i'm an investor in the company it's a brilliant company and i really want you to try it for you and your company for kids college everybody in between everybody should get smarter let's all get brilliant together brilliant.org twist for 20 off today one of the great things

SPEAKER_135: about an inspiring demo and this is in that category of inspiring demo is everybody gets 10 ideas

SPEAKER_142: yeah and says well oh you know what you should do yeah you know so it's like when you open a restaurant you had a hit restaurant you know like you make burgers and fries and people like you

SPEAKER_151: know you should do hot dogs you're like yeah but it's called jason's burger joint like it was

SPEAKER_208: kind of the burgers okay sure thanks for the recommendation oh add on your rings okay got it wow you're a genius so i'll add myself to the people telling you you should add on your rings to the menu yeah

SPEAKER_11: go for it um i was just thinking if i had my child uh when she was six year old six years old uh and you're a dad congratulations thank you thank you i would love to take my 13 year old make her a six

SPEAKER_142: year old again and then make a video of my six seven year old twins playing with my six seven year old

SPEAKER_39: now 13 year old yeah or take me as a child and have me and i know i'm sounding like a lunatic right now but have six seven year old jason you know playing or having uh hamburgers and french fries

SPEAKER_142: with my kids uh or skiing with my kids it would be mind-blowing to see that yeah absolutely yeah and i

SPEAKER_119: i mean i think um yeah definitely impossible possible today like my wife has talked about um so i've uh

SPEAKER_122: i think my oldest capture right now is like february 2022 um and yeah like she's been captured all throughout that so um like throughout the pregnancy and after pregnancy and stuff and yeah she's talked about um yeah it's just like a really powerful and moving experience to see her own body again and see how it's changed and see like see herself become a mother like from an outside perspective um and yeah it's wild that like yeah our son will grow up and he can go back to all these moments like he can see his mom before she was pregnant and wow yeah it's like mind-blowing yeah wild mind-blowing

SPEAKER_11: well i mean there is something about reliving stuff in fact there is a in trauma work or in therapy uh i was a psychology major and i was actually going to go for clinical at one point or industrial and i remember there was a technique uh where they would ask people to bring photos of themselves as children yeah and to talk about themselves uh and inevitably you know some percentage of people would burst out crying because they would see themselves as a child and it would pull them into a memory or if you took somebody to a location uh like their high school or their elementary school with a therapist or if they were trying to work through trauma they could actually go to the location they would feel that sense and then the memories would come back could be quite cathartic right yeah well here we are reliving the moment and then you add ai to this and there's generative ai

SPEAKER_39: so you could take these videos and then say you know what let's we have a small video of this child you know eating a hamburger let's have them playing with the dog that we see in the background and you could actually make memory so have you has the concept of generative ai um so into these models

SPEAKER_119: yet right yeah so i think the generative ai side is something that is both um incredibly crucial to

SPEAKER_122: the success of wist um but also something we want to be cautious about right like i think our goal is not to generate new memories that did not exist um but we can do things like fill in holes so um yeah if i'm like capturing in my living room but i only capture one side and not the other um we could take captures or we can take data from across all of your captures to kind of like fill back in the living room um but yeah i think we want to be cautious about like generating totally new memories or like bringing someone back from the dead like that i think that's an area that um yeah we would just

SPEAKER_147: want to tread very lightly well i mean you're now in blade runner territory there's a scene in blade runner uh where decker goes and he has a stack of the memories of you know the the the replicant that

SPEAKER_27: doesn't know she's a replicant i mean you sort of get into really crazy territory and they had actually put their memories in there uh into people and these replicants were so desirable to extend their

SPEAKER_11: lifespan and their memories were so important to them that the ability the the fact that they were going to lose their memories which they knew were manufactured was heartbreaking to them and that's where the famous poem at the end all these memories are now gone like tears in the rain right right

SPEAKER_236: right yeah uh so yeah what do you what do you think you you could get into some dangerous territory

SPEAKER_122: there just people yeah definitely and psychology yeah like it's it's um like so i i lost my grandmother in middle school um and we have some like photos and videos of her but it just like it doesn't feel the same as being being in a room with her again um and so i think like yeah i would be interested in like up converting those photos and videos um it like it would be interesting to be able to like have a conversation with her but i think that's that's all of a sudden in a territory where i know like because she didn't actually answer those questions then it's not actually her and so yeah i think there's like a lot of ethical questions that um yeah are probably like we can we can engage with ethical questions but i don't think that's something that we want to build yeah yeah i mean somebody's

SPEAKER_13: going to build it um or actually people could do it right now you could literally just go to chat gpt right now right give the data set of everything i've said on my podcast yeah i think one of our

SPEAKER_122: in one of our reddit comments someone mentioned that they had like they had done that with their grandfather um and after a few interactions they were like oh this is this is too much i will not show my grandmother this i'm just going to like close it and never look at it again um oh wow so they

SPEAKER_147: they literally made uh a a natural language model yeah yeah and i don't know too much because it was

SPEAKER_243: just like a reddit comment but yeah yeah it's like no i mean it's a lot why we think about the trauma you could cause by having this you know magic box that is really like a fun toy then trigger the

SPEAKER_142: memories of your life partner for 50 years coming back and people are so desperate i mean we're basically writing black mirror episodes here people are so desperate for these memories they're so desperate for that lost connection we're talking about in in grieving when when we all lose people and that's part of life um that people would do anything to bring people back in fact i think there's a stephen king novel about this yeah in a movie about bringing people back from the dead and and now you're

SPEAKER_111: you're starting to get into some unnatural areas that could be super traumatizing and right yeah and

SPEAKER_165: that's like that's not our goal our goal is to yeah help you like honor and cherish all of your

SPEAKER_125: memories happy and sad um yeah yeah so how is the business going how is fundraising going for a

SPEAKER_142: business like this you're obviously it's a down market but this is this week in starters i'd like

SPEAKER_11: to talk candidly yeah about um you know building this this is something you could build with i would guess two three four people you know as a weekend project but i think you've moved over from weekend

SPEAKER_39: project to to full-time status this is moving over in that direction yeah yeah yeah definitely um so i've i've been

SPEAKER_119: full-time on it since uh uh what was it may or march of 2021 i'm sorry i before i was at samsung

SPEAKER_122: leading a small group of arvr designers and developers um and yeah left to kind of build a bunch of prototypes um i knew something about memories and like spatial computing was important but didn't know exactly what that would be um yeah and then in 2022 really like started building out the alpha on ios and quest um found my co-founder um yeah and then we did this uh we did a small angel rage

SPEAKER_119: in the fall of last year oh great the down market was not great uh in 2022 you did an angel round wow right yeah yeah and it was kind of like well done it was kind of like just as the news was coming out

SPEAKER_122: that you know valuations were decreasing people were less excited to fund stuff um yeah it was just about

SPEAKER_165: then that that was when we were starting to reach out to people so um bad timing but you know

SPEAKER_39: well you know bad timing in some ways but there are not i can tell you there are not as many people

SPEAKER_27: in market uh not as many entrepreneurs in market and then since investors are taking a little longer to make decisions or some of them are frozen so then you don't have like a crazy market just to

SPEAKER_39: tell you the express on the other side of the table you can get to know a founder yeah you can have them on your podcast you could you know meet them and then say hey when you get it launched let me

SPEAKER_27: look at the first hundred data and if anybody subscribes you know and right if you can convert

SPEAKER_39: this via paid or whatever they need to see in terms of traction that gets them off the bench ensure a lower valuation but i think you may have seen there's maybe more people available to work on projects now because people have been laid off and yeah you know that there's a lot more talent available today and they're not going to say to you this is your first startup uh this is my second

SPEAKER_142: major startup yeah yeah um so the whole concept over the last five years was to convince somebody to not go to google or not go to samsung yeah and you know depending on you know samsung to google is probably a factor of 2x in terms of organization at this point or at that point and you're you're basically competing against a person with a literally a money printing machine and you have like a a bag of shekels and you're trying to make something happen so yeah now it's like people like yeah i'll do it for equity you know valuations might be lower but money goes further

SPEAKER_39: um right yeah this is all it's really interesting this is all possible because of the depth cameras uh and this new sensor set and the progress on vr do you think it's ultimately the the consumer experience is going to be vr or do you think the entire industry is going to be this mixed reality

SPEAKER_122: leaning towards ar experience uh yeah i mean i definitely think we are we're going towards ar glasses um yeah because that's like yeah it's like the the holy grail it's like the device that lets you see and experience and interact with anything um and so yeah like that's that's where we're going i think some of the timeline is open um and we'll find out what happens like uh yeah apple has been working on something it seems like forever um and yeah hopefully they talk more about that um meta of course had that leak recently that um yeah like they will probably have another headset on the horizon for for this year um and oh they are gonna release one yeah and i mean i at least there's there's

SPEAKER_119: like there's rumors of that yeah rumor yeah yeah yeah okay i'll keep you safe yeah yeah for people who

SPEAKER_39: don't understand why i'm trying to def deflect any rumors to myself is because if you are a developer uh and i don't know the situation here you might be under nda with a company and you might be working

SPEAKER_135: on that with your product on their new things so we're always very sensitive here on this week in

SPEAKER_142: startups to make sure we don't put a founder in a position where they um break their ndas or right you know

SPEAKER_39: mess up their um relationships in any way but they released like a three thousand dollar developer kit this year correct over at meta there was some like really high-end one right so there's a um there's

SPEAKER_122: a quest pro launch um and that was for um between 1000 and 1500 and basically what what's different about that is that um yeah so it's still like still kind of vr because your eyes are covered but there are cameras on the outside that kind of like project what those cameras are seeing back into the headset so the experience ends up being kind of like ar glasses um and we we on in february we shared a video of our beta working on those and so it's like you see my living room you see my couch um and then the memory of my wife holding our son is like re-projected into that space and does it sink does it

SPEAKER_278: know the couch or you it just sort of you look that direction right now it's manual right now it's manual

SPEAKER_140: but yeah um near future will be yeah like so this gets really interesting i did use those that quest uh

SPEAKER_13: vr pro whatever it's probably yeah yeah pro one uh over thanksgiving and you know this is basically my

SPEAKER_11: my yearly thanksgiving or christmas uh my my brother-in-law ryan always has the latest greatest and we put it on and i was playing a game like a star wars game uh was quite compelling i did for about half an hour and then i started to feel a little nauseous which is i have i get motion sickness but it used to be i would get motion sickness after like the five minutes of beat saber i had to take it off right yeah but this is really compelling when they when you can press a button and turn it off very quickly and without taking the headset off which is a little bit of work um it builds a 3d model of your or just does the pass through video and you can see the space yeah that's really compelling because if you're starting to feel nauseous you don't know what's happening and i was playing some game where you throw a it's like a racquetball kind of game you throw a ball up against the wall and it breaks stuff it was kind of like breakout but in 3d and it's and it's behind you too so you're playing like in an arena yeah yeah um i was getting a little addicted to it but again 20 30 minutes in it was enough for me but really does change the game when you can turn it off and i could see

SPEAKER_27: a bunch of folks having thanksgiving and saying you know what um we're going to record some memories of thanksgiving specifically to document these and then if people weren't there uh in future thanksgivings you could pull up that memory and just say hey let's have a memory with this person who who's not here anymore and we'll yeah we'll play back their toast right i mean how great would it be to have the toast my dad would give a toast every christmas i don't have any of them but if i had them from the 80s and 90s and my dad's still with us so he still can see of the toast but i would love to have those toasts where he gave a toast at christmas time and just replay them yeah yeah definitely and i think

SPEAKER_119: around use case like we are thinking about it as you know anytime i'm hanging out with my son and i

SPEAKER_122: would pull out my camera just to record something for like my personal use um basically what we're seeing is instead of opening my like iphone camera i open the wist app and then i record in there and so it's yeah like all those times that you would capture something for yourself um or maybe share with close

SPEAKER_27: friends and family that's kind of where where we're targeting all right listen this is great work i'm very

SPEAKER_11: excited that quest headset also by the way you know as these things do is now down to 999 for meta meta quest pro man too many names for these products drop the meta just call it the quest and the quest pro you you don't need to have this many names facebook let me just help you quest is enough or call it the meta one and the meta probe don't brand things three times this is the facebook meta quest pro two no five names not good and and how does the login work on those that was the other thing that i thought was challenging is it now a meta login when you log in or your facebook login or instagram

SPEAKER_177: login you can log in with anything um that is a good question i think right now it's uh the meta login plus maybe instagram but yeah i do not know exactly this was the other problem i had with it is just like

SPEAKER_11: getting the thing up and running yeah finding apps getting login who's login am i in and all that kind of stuff becomes super complex complicated with these things but i think they'll get there eventually and

SPEAKER_122: right yeah i think that's something that like yeah we're we're thinking about too because um our yeah our goal is to kind of bring more people into the space um but also be easy and accessible so that yeah you're not overwhelmed but um yeah definitely we need the the platforms to be easy to use so that

SPEAKER_111: once you get in our app it continues to be easy to use you know what would be a great paid feature since i'm going to tell i told you about the onion rings i think now i'm going to tell you about chili

Chamath Palihapitiya: fries or something yeah they could add to the menu is uh the ability to give prompts so i think there's

SPEAKER_11: a you know i always think about beachhead audiences when i'm working with founders yeah and then there's

SPEAKER_27: this group of people who are obsessed with archival stuff right yeah and they're the people who pay for ancestry.com and other services like that genealogists right and there's like yeah one person in every family who takes on this role sometimes two or three people do it and then they bring it to everybody on the holidays if you had prompts and you said here are prompts for you know a grandma grandpa here are prompts for for siblings when they're sitting next to each other here are prompts about childhood here are prompts about college for your sorority for your fraternity and you just had

SPEAKER_39: people tell stories you know here's a prompt for work culture and your startup then you could make

SPEAKER_27: that like those little templates like if you have notion or coda it comes with templates those templates and the audience being able to build them and genealogists being able to build them that could be like your app store so you you know you have an app store where it's like here's what a genealogist would ask here's what a documentarian would ask yeah okay here's the here's their top 15 questions by the way here's their next 25 questions for 25 and i think the genealogy people they're used to spending lots of money hundreds of dollars a year getting document requests so for them like something that costs 25 bucks a month is not going to be crazy so highly recommend

SPEAKER_45: um yeah yeah unless you have another beachhead market i think parents are another good one because

SPEAKER_122: some of the some of the early signals um yeah around people who yeah feel the passage of time uh yeah just feel the passage of time and so yeah like parents with um younger kids or families with aging parents i think is um like two categories that kind of have bubbled up um but yeah you could also think about uh maybe i'm younger and i'm like traveling to a place and this is like the first time i'm there and i really want to like capture all of this and remember as as i get older or like maybe it's high school and um you know this is like the last summer with my friends before we all go off to college um and so yeah trying to find those moments and and weave our way

SPEAKER_147: in i wish you great success with the startup everybody please uh go ahead and uh oh you did you have questions for me i saw in my notes that you might have had a question or two for me

SPEAKER_11: sure yeah i mean you want to reverse the tables which i always just so for founders who are listening to this week in startups of which there are many if you want to use this time to ask me a question at the end i mean i'm here to promote your stuff and learn about what you're doing but i'm always open

SPEAKER_122: for an ask jason at the end yeah yeah yeah definitely um yeah and closing out like some of the interview um yeah people can reach me at andrew at whistlabs.com um right and yeah that like yeah happy to to field any questions there um yeah but then for you yeah thinking about some of the um stuff with svb and yeah fortunately it feels it seems like all that's um at the high level is taken care of um yeah we are kind of like at the very early stages of a raise um and thinking about yeah i guess just how how do you think vcs in the next like two to three weeks are thinking about funding new companies versus still perhaps shoring up their existing portfolio so it's a great question

SPEAKER_332: andrew um and by the way the twitter handle is whistlabs w-i-s-t-l-a-b-s so you follow whistlabs as

SPEAKER_147: well that's a great way to follow startups in my experience um it's a great question whenever there is a

SPEAKER_00: scary cataclysmic event like the one of this weekend it will distract uh vcs and angels and seed investors

SPEAKER_11: and make them want to uh focus on their existing portfolio uh this is the circle the wagons type moment okay we're we're not in explorer mode we are in making sure everybody's at camp we get a head count everybody's safe right so i think that could take a couple of weeks for people to kind of like the shock grenades went off um and we people's ears are ringing and there's a little fog of war right now yeah i think if we don't see another two or three banks go under this week uh or get rescued whatever you want to call what's happening now to the two banks that this has happened to already

David Friedberg: if we don't see more rescues i think the ear ringing gets done in two weeks or so and then

SPEAKER_11: we're back to business close to normal yeah uh everybody will go through these two weeks saying okay how many bank accounts should you have right how should you manage a treasury of you know a million dollars that's obvious two or three bank accounts how do you manage a 10 million dollar one do i need to have five bank accounts do i put money in bitcoin or you know starbucks gift cards i mean people are losing their minds a bit yeah and so that's that's probably the the path forward i think most people in your stage now you've done this before so you probably don't need to do that you raise some money

SPEAKER_142: during a down market so you're obviously good at raising money you did it in 2022 so kudos on that

SPEAKER_13: well maybe yeah maybe we'll find out we'll find out sure i mean it's like the degrees get harder

SPEAKER_142: sometimes um not easier so but i do think it'll get easier in the second half of the year the

SPEAKER_11: interesting thing that i think will um i think for most people in your position i'd say go to an accelerator uh if you can get into one because it's 100 or 200k for five six seven percent and then you get validated you get introduced to more investors in a cat you know uh as a catalyzer but if you already know how to do this and you feel like your product is on the cusp of maybe getting 10 paid customers i think you will separate yourself with a product like this by being able to

SPEAKER_27: show just a trickle of revenue just 10 people buying the pro version and knowing who those 10 people are and having them in a slack room or a signal room and being able to talk to them and understand them

SPEAKER_00: now why do i say this a lot of people in your position will get on the feature uh the never

Chamath Palihapitiya: ending feature trail yeah and they're like well if i get this feature it's going to blow up if i get this feature it's going to blow up and then it's the signaling from seed funds which is where

SPEAKER_27: you're going to kind of live right now is the 250k seed fund check uh or so and then plus angels or syndicates that 250k seed fund people are going to want to say okay if i can't get to series a at least if they're burning 25k a month or 50k a month can they cut that in half and get 10 or 20k a month in revenue so that the series a investor or future seed investors can kind of imagine oh they got 10 people they could have a thousand and that's my best advice and you know sometimes you'll see that action fact the generative the thing that the generative ai folks had going for them was some of them had apps in the app store that would make pictures of you and they got 10 000 people to pay for it because it was so compelling and it's like well this person can build something compelling so that's really going to be the litmus test for you is this compelling enough yeah definitely yeah and i i think

SPEAKER_350: that like 10 moms pay for it or 10 dads rather right yeah and it's like it's so it's a little early

SPEAKER_119: for us to do the subscription yet um just because we haven't built it but um yeah i think i think

SPEAKER_122: with that twitter post like our wait list increased um over a thousand percent week over week and so

SPEAKER_123: yeah it's like uh yeah it's clear that we are starting to get that signal that there's this this thing that is resonating with people and yeah we'll continue to dive into that people do sell

SPEAKER_11: the wait list i will tell you like when when you have revenue you sell revenue and then you can even talk about the quality of the revenue when you have earnings when you have profit we have gross margin top line revenue whatever people will sell the revenue when you don't have revenue people will

SPEAKER_39: sell the wait list or the user base they'll sell the user base and then before that they'll sell the wait list and before that they'll sell their pedigree right right so you're kind of always moving on to

SPEAKER_11: reality and the closer you can get to the actual reality i would say you know if you made it so

SPEAKER_00: the product let you do five of these and then after that you had to have a pro version um that that could be a very easy way to test how it works you can do five a month and then we ask you to pay

SPEAKER_11: sure um or the watermark kind of situation or you could do it based on the length of the video so you can do 10 second videos but you can't do 20 seconds and right you know hey contributes to the product

David Friedberg: for this amount and we can do more than five a month or more than 10 seconds unlock yeah

SPEAKER_11: you have unlocking frequency and you have unlocking time because it's a video so there's that's a really nice thing about where you're at and i think most and then there's the watermark which some people care about some people don't and then there's also sharing the link right yeah yeah and i think

SPEAKER_119: sharing in multiplayer is um yeah can be really really core to us multiplayer is just such a great

SPEAKER_11: multi-district people know multiplayer means multiple people can work on the same project like a shared document or a shared folder so if you said hey i'm going to start a family one and this is a great

David Friedberg: device for virality by the way if you said hey um uh this um i want to if you presented the family tree people will fill it out and you say hey who is this you say this is my my daughter and then it says oh do you have any other kids and then who's your spouse who's the mom okay what's the relation my partner my spouse would rather not say whatever is there a grandma is there a grandpa is there a

SPEAKER_27: cousin and then you start adding those and then when you add the cousin says hey put their email in

SPEAKER_11: and share them and do you want to invite your first level family tree or your second level family tree and i would just look at how the genealogy companies have figured this out

SPEAKER_119: um yeah yeah i think i think with the genealogy direction that's that's something that we are open to and exploring but yeah right now the product is more about like here's this camera for your memories and it's like straightforward easy to use familiar yeah yeah all right brother i am rooting for

SPEAKER_11: you congratulations uh and thanks for having me on oh i mean here's an easy way to get on this weekend startups make something that's really effing compelling if something's really compelling and you see it in people's social feeds you've now put yourself in the bucket of people talking about ideas and who want to have coffee and chew your ear yeah like literally i could live in a coffee shop for 10 lifetimes based on the number of people want to have coffee with me but then once you put something in the world and i saw it go by on my feed i was like okay that's that's good enough yeah that's super fascinating i can i can ask 20 questions about that and here we are 30 or 40 minutes

SPEAKER_00: in of what was supposed to be a 20 minute you know quick hit so well done brother uh and everybody go uh follow andrew he is andrew r no his uh he's arm the thinker if you want to follow his twitter

SPEAKER_326: and whist labs and is the name of the company whist labs on twitter and whist labs dot com yep dot com

SPEAKER_371: oh why you got that dot com whist labs dot com we'll see you all next time in this week in startups bye

SPEAKER_05: bye okay that's it for today folks but before we go make sure you check out the founder university podcast founder.university slash podcast each episode is a quick hitting tactical talk from entrepreneurs and operators i created this new podcast because i didn't have room inside this week in startups to basically do tactical talks right these are really tactical you might need one today you need a different one tomorrow so we're going to build a library of these and there's an amazing talk with richard wang from pilot he walks us through how to understand your startup budget and optimize it for the current economy also you'll get some tips on how to extend your runway that can be found at founder dot university slash podcast please go search in your podcast player and youtube for founder university podcast and like it subscribe to it and give me your

SPEAKER_373: feedback i'm jason at calacanis.com for life