SPEAKER_00: hey everybody welcome to this week in startups i am super pleased to talk to the founder of running tide today because i care about climate change like i'm sure all of you do i believe in climate change uh and solving uh that problem um as best we can and that there must be solutions to it but i'll be honest i feel like a neophyte i feel like i don't have the education i need i trust the scientists but as an investor and a technologist i would really love to be able to invest in some companies and some visions and see people take some uh big swings and some risks and uh build companies around this and my friend chris sacca who's a big fan or big friend of the SPEAKER_01: pod i should say uh i assume he's fan of it but i know he's a friend of the pod um tweeted out from his at sacca account recently that running tide was the kind of company we're hoping we would find SPEAKER_00: when we started lower carbon everybody knows chris sacca retired from angel investing he did well enough with instagram and uber and decided hey uh i'm gonna just cash in my chips and be done but then he said you know what nah i want to do a carbon based um venture fund investment fund uh and he says here bonkers scale unreasonable ambition massive impact on the planet during insane times it's entrepreneurs like marty odlin that fire us up and uh he linked to a story about running tide and i thought uh even though it's early days i would uh have the founder marty odlin on the SPEAKER_02: program to talk to us about what he's doing with running tide welcome to the pod marty thank you very SPEAKER_07: much how many of these stocks would i as an american average american need to put in the ocean to just be carbon neutral would i need to put a hundred stocks one stock okay great question let me work it SPEAKER_10: out really quick geez this is actually my nightmare when i was talking about coming on this SPEAKER_11: uh coming on the pod is actually doing like real time i really shouldn't ask it this way it was kind David Friedberg: of a jerk way to say it but another way to say it is how many stocks would it take for the entire planet to be yeah i'll tell you that i already have i have that figured out tell me that okay well SPEAKER_16: this is interesting the average carbon footprint for someone in the u.s is 16 tons 16 tons wow yeah SPEAKER_18: and the the global global average is four tons so we're 4x worse than the average okay so if we went to SPEAKER_20: eight tons as a global you know if we or whatever well like that i mean we know i know exactly how SPEAKER_23: many buoys it would take to get to 40 gigatons uh okay so that's 400 billion okay so that's a lot that's a huge amount of effort um but it's it's possible but it's possible and the possible and the ocean can absorb it this is the most important thing right we have there are only so many places that you can take this carbon that's in the atmosphere and put it where it's out of the carbon cycle so right you can plant it into trees you can put it into soil those are like somewhat temporary solutions because you know they're still in the carbon cycle where people could go cut down the SPEAKER_25: trees or burn down the forest or like over till the land and release the carbon so those are great we need to do those as fast as possible we need to plant trees yeah we do we need to do all of that but then there's also this other type of carbon sequestration which you call like permanent removal from the carbon cycle and that's critical because that's what we have to do to get back into balance SPEAKER_23: and so we need permanent removal um so you know you can divide up the climate climate work into like SPEAKER_18: three parts you have uh behavioral change so we release less carbon right always like eat oysters they're really good for you low carbon footprint fantastic thing to do it offsets potentially uh you SPEAKER_23: know more carbon intensive protein sources that you could you could be eating right so those things are important to do and scallops as well yeah absolutely those are all super important things to do um and we we need to do those then the other bucket is like pulling climate down or pulling carbon down out of the atmosphere and then you put it in and you want to do it into permanent places so permanent places would be turning into rock or like calcium carbonate um where it's going to be super stable and it's not like it'd be take a ton of energy to get it out so it's unlikely people would do that in the future then you have um you could turn it back into oil or like a gas and inject it SPEAKER_25: deep underground so there's some really interesting companies like charm industrial um that's that are SPEAKER_23: doing that and then finally you could sink it to the bottom of the of the deep sea which we're doing SPEAKER_38: so yeah and it doesn't harm the ocean to put that carbon down there no i mean it's a natural SPEAKER_23: it's a natural process and no like once the carbon gets down there it's down and to when you talk about harm like one of the things we have to be like super disciplined about SPEAKER_25: is like we have to we have to acknowledge that like no matter what level of effort we do into reversing climate change there will be externalities but what's the option what what's the option we let the ocean acidify and die like that's insane like no that's completely not an option yeah right so like SPEAKER_43: 400 billion to sequester everything in there or just to be neutral for the year that's neutral for the SPEAKER_23: year so you have to do that plus you have to decarbonize and if we decarbonize and do that then it would take us 20 years to get it all down i mean it's it's like conservatively it's going to be you know and this is like a huge number but it's like people talk about like 40 trillion dollars to get the carbon out of the atmosphere down and doesn't actually seem like an impossible number i'll be totally honest yeah it's possible it's possible it is possible the technologies are not necessarily fully baked but no no one no one has this fully baked nobody has a style nobody's like hey you give me 40 trillion dollars this is done you know what i mean like right we're not there yet but we SPEAKER_07: need to get there really really fast so what would it take what what is the cost of today to drop a SPEAKER_23: stock is it a hundred dollars is a thousand dollars um yeah i mean it's on the order of um SPEAKER_18: uh i mean it you know it's on the order of like 150 to 200 um oh per per stock i'm sorry yeah i was talking per ton um but per time it's interesting too to look at yeah i mean it's so let's do per ton because then it's apple to apples when you have other people on board right so yeah we're looking SPEAKER_25: like 150 to 200 a ton we think like as we scale you get some economies of scale we get better at this we're better at our selection of species etc we get better at our deployment locations we refine our models and you know i think it's totally reasonable for us to get under 50 a ton i think SPEAKER_58: 50 how many tons did an average american use did you say before uh 16. okay so it's not a crazy amount SPEAKER_59: i mean so if i spent two thousand if i gave you two thousand dollars i could be carbon neutral with this SPEAKER_60: oh i don't know your lifestyle but yeah actually probably i'm probably gonna give you 4k i'm not SPEAKER_01: flying on private jets but my house yeah yeah totally so i mean i do drive teslas but you know SPEAKER_16: yeah that helps that's how it helps i don't i'm not making any judgments but yeah i mean you have to SPEAKER_61: be no i think we do need to make judges i think everybody needs to be judged on this yeah i mean SPEAKER_23: you know it depends on what you eat you should uh yeah that's a bit of a challenge for me SPEAKER_07: eat a lot of shellfish and uh um yeah you know in robots and you know automation i would think if we SPEAKER_01: really took this seriously building or taking an old oil rig or an old platform that's already in the ocean and having robots build and do this work and just throw it over board yeah i wonder if that would work too barges doing this on bar could you take an old oil tanker and make that into a um you know greenhouse to build this stuff so it's just permanently out there oh okay is that the road map SPEAKER_23: um yeah there's uh i mean there's a lot of ways to scale this type of effort i mean what we're doing i i don't want to like it's there's a lot of sophisticated modeling that's going into this in terms of deploying in certain locations that are able to like have the correct nutrients and the biogeochemistry of the ocean bottom where you deploy is very important so there's a lot of like um you know there's a there's a lot of like ocean knowledge and ocean data that gets crunched in order to make something like this um viable but yeah i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of ways that we can scale this up and i think that it's we have to and you know one way you know 400 400 billion is not an insane number it isn't because like think how many coffee cups get made or think how many yeah trivial things that get made that don't like aren't necessarily gonna like you know for lack of a to to not be too over dramatic but like you could potentially like have a huge impact on the future of civilization like i mean elon musk says all the time right doesn't he say like climate change is one of the filters it's like one of the great filters if you if you're if a civilization can't SPEAKER_25: get control over its atmosphere and the concentration of gases in its atmosphere then it SPEAKER_01: doesn't pass the great filter yeah and and what we mean by great filter in the sense is the filter of does your species make it to the next level one of them is like can you not kill each other with war there's one filter can you can you build a society where warring factions don't destroy each other nuclear weapons that's one fusion nuclear weapons whatever i guess you know being able to contain SPEAKER_37: pandemics like we're in the middle of right now is another one it's an emergency podcast apple has SPEAKER_76: released the new iphone 12 and for the first time i'm not buying the new iphone this really jumps the SPEAKER_80: shark when they went to their virtue signaling we're gonna save the planet shtick which is you know in SPEAKER_00: fairness to them they they do talk the talk and walk the walk they are going to be carbon neutral they do care about the environment they will take their your products back to recycling that's all uh fine and David Friedberg: well but when they went to this shot of the roof of the mothership headquarters and i couldn't believe what they were telling me here but listen to this folks we've also been transitioning our iphone SPEAKER_83: manufacturing partners to renewable energy okay that's great renewable energy is perfect we looked for ways to cut waste and use less material okay i'm with you cut waste is a great idea over 700 million lightning headphones okay we got headphones yes customers have moved to a wireless experience yep i bought three pairs of airpods wireless headphones definitely and there are also over two billion apple power i know i bought all these adapters from you i got them in every room the billions of third-party adapters yeah i buy the anchor so we're better than yours these items from the iphone box what reduces carbon emissions and avoid the mining and use of precious materials when i SPEAKER_78: when i pay these items also means a smaller lighter iphone box and this is where my head's like they're charging you twelve hundred dollars for a phone but they took out the charger because there's already two billion on the planet and they took out the headphones because they want you to buy the 300 ones i mean and then they're explaining to us that it's a smaller footprint and the box is smaller because they David Friedberg: took stuff out but this is in your best interest and better for the planet okay i get you apple uh i see what you did there you're basically took everything out except for and this is where you know everybody went crazy uh on the twitter not only to have the audacity to tell you you don't need a charger with your new 1200 phone and you don't need headphones with your new 1200 phone it's not like they lowered the price on this thing it's still expensive um but then the audacity is they still use SPEAKER_00: a lightning connection so if they actually did care about chargers and they do care they do care about the environment why not go with the standard usbc then we don't need as many of these you make us buy a usbc for our ipad pros you make us buy it for our macbooks and our macbook airs and macbook pros and every other device has moved to usbc except for this one device which still makes us buy redundant SPEAKER_43: lightning cables so forgive me but i find this ridiculous let's watch the rest of this video shot on the uh solar panel roof of the mothership we can fit up to 70 percent more products on a shipping SPEAKER_83: palette great reducing carbon emissions in our global logistics chain that's why i'm buying an iphone i want to get that global logistics we've made for iphone 12 cut over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually great it's like removing 450 000 cars from the road per year this is huge and we're really proud that apple is taking the lead we hope others will follow making this impact even bigger for SPEAKER_38: our planet all right so i thought that was like ridiculous and disingenuous they should have said hey we took the 50 off the price of it because we're saving so much money for you but they didn't say SPEAKER_58: that uh but you know there's a lot of human um components to this i know people who are in the SPEAKER_106: service uh of saving lives it is always very personal um my grandfather a firefighter my brother a firefighter my uncle a cop cousin a cop two other cousins in uh let's just say uh federal law enforcement i'll leave it at that uh so we got a we got a irish family filled with service uh in firefighting and police in law enforcement which informs a little bit of my thinking about the world i'll be honest um but you you have a personal connection to this steve you were a banker i believe for 20 years uh you left south africa uh to go to london and make some bank in banking as one does uh but you had some personal tragedy and and i know yeah that you've talked about it before yeah yeah not the personal SPEAKER_112: tragedy of working in banking for 20 years to be clear well my karma restoration project is still ongoing so SPEAKER_110: uh we we know about that right so and i laugh because you're so self-aware of this uh and i SPEAKER_106: have heard you on some other podcasts or other videos that your company has produced in my research and and i've watched you kind of lament your 20 years in banking but this is personal for you let's SPEAKER_119: get into it um yeah i mean like i would also argue that the 20 years in banking kind of prepared me for this journey as well um well you know actually in interesting ways uh there were there was parts of my journey in banking when i built my own systems and realized i could disrupt my competitors by building my own options pricing models and suddenly knowing that you know number one is not always number one forever if you have better technology it's actually it's a huge game changer and you know when i when i met uh when i went brett i'd realized that and brett's the original founder who built the initial system but how i got on this journey um uh in 06 i lost my brother to a drowning accident in cape town uh just very near where i have my holiday house in cape town near where i grew up and uh in 2015 i took time out uh after capping a 20-year career in investment banking i was like i've got to go back to my roots take my kids get the feel of africa under their feet and as soon as i arrived there i realized i now have time on my hands and i wanted to do something to honor the men and women who had been volunteering on the national sea rescue institute which is a completely volunteer-based organization that helps offshore rescue in south africa so it's the equivalent of SPEAKER_127: the royal lifeboats in um in the uk i don't think there's quite an american equivalent we don't SPEAKER_129: have that i mean we have lifeguards of course yeah um and we have yeah yeah but we don't have a volunteer service like this there might be on some lakes or something like that but uh you know SPEAKER_130: growing up in cape town you grow up on the water and you grow up kind of like the water is a big part SPEAKER_119: of the of your life correct is my understanding 100 yeah i mean i grew up i remember the first time SPEAKER_132: i went to london and i couldn't see the sea and i couldn't work out who would have a major city without an ocean just it doesn't make sense it doesn't compute but also as beautiful as the oceans are SPEAKER_106: there uh there there there is a respect you have to have for those oceans those oceans are particularly i mean historically known as the most dangerous oceans in the world coming around that SPEAKER_119: cape is it called cape horn the cape around storms so it's called storm storms right so the cape of good hope was notorious for wrecking many merchant ships over the centuries and your brother went out for SPEAKER_141: a swim and uh he just yeah there's also notorious wind in cape town and the sea is also frighteningly SPEAKER_119: cold it looks great in photos it's instagram friendly but like yeah super cold and um anyway he got into some some difficulty swimming offshore and it took a while to i mean for for that to all trickle down and get the response going and um yeah and i realized he went out alone for one day for a swim yeah like he swam in a bay nobody swims at and uh you know they might dip their feet in but no one tries to swim across this particular bay unless you really know what you're doing so right uh but the point of that was you know i landed back in cape town and i know that these men and women who are volunteers that they have to go you know if it's an unsuccessful rescue like it was my brother you can imagine just normal people have normal jobs in 95 and suddenly they have to go you know pull a body SPEAKER_150: from the bottom of of the ocean and and do all that and become the trauma associated with that SPEAKER_134: is uh nothing can prepare you for right yeah it's it's one of the life-changing experiences you can have as emergency service person the first time you get called to a call that you know ends in a death SPEAKER_106: and i you know every single person you've talked to who works on an ambulance or in any volunteer or firefighter they can tell you in detail about that first time and i could tell you my mine as well and you know it's it i wouldn't say it haunts me to this day but it is something i've carried with me for 30 years of my life since i've watched somebody you know pass or you know wasn't able to in this case resuscitate somebody who you know was having a heart attack and who was very old but you know did cpr on them and it is a it is a traumatic experience for sure and you mentioned just think about that job think about that work that people do to go and try to help somebody in SPEAKER_02: that moment it's just it's it really is it takes a tremendous fortitude as an individual and we SPEAKER_150: could expand on that and say you know it's unbelievable you think about your 9-1-1 the SPEAKER_119: first person you speak to when they you know take your 9-1-1 call yeah i mean they they've had literally thousands of those and only recently just in california and now in the last few weeks they could recognize as first responders before they were classified as as clerks or admin and you SPEAKER_134: can imagine yeah yeah which is ridiculous i mean the dispatchers are such a critical role in this the dispatchers are negotiating you know the where who to send and then where to send them to and then communicating all these services in the back end it's they're they're they're the conductor of this SPEAKER_07: orchestra of services whether to deploy a helicopter or a boat or firefighters i mean it is SPEAKER_150: or talking to cpr right i mean oh yes it gets really hand on and then uh hands on i mean there's a anyway like we're going down another rabbit hole which i can kind of the point of the show but i SPEAKER_118: mean just to put a note in it i'm very sorry about your brother and then thank you to do something this meaningful for with the rest of your life as opposed to trading options which you you know uh SPEAKER_106: are pretty self-aware of is you know like a video game right i mean yeah compare and contrast SPEAKER_129: waking up every day and going to work for the audience who is wondering about what they should SPEAKER_134: do with their life's purpose you're you're now in i guess the the you know the third half of your life like me the importance of finding something that you wake up every day and and the passion you SPEAKER_106: have for this versus maybe the level of passion you had for you know playing the the options video SPEAKER_164: game as it were yeah so i mean the options video game i just wanted to win right i mean that was SPEAKER_119: pretty much and you could only measure your wins and losses by your p l how much money you made and you could let one me personally i always say that i i created nothing other than revenue in those first 20 years of my life obviously a lot of experience that i i've garnered over the years but certainly if my kids asked me what i would do for a living i would have to tell them i you know dad talks a lot on the telephone and he gets paid i mean that's like the sum total of of my net contribution to society and when i went to so i landed up volunteering at that agency in cape town right wow and the same one that had tried to rescue your brother the same crew and boat that had gone i tried to rescue my brother so i literally went up to their door and i said what do you need you need money or people they said we need people and i said i volunteer and i started SPEAKER_141: the next saturday yeah but what was more interesting is about three days after that was their first well SPEAKER_119: it was my first monthly meeting every first wednesday of the month all the volunteers that particular station got together and there were about 20 people who'd been coming there for between SPEAKER_154: 20 and 30 years like every weekend volunteering giving up their weekends so these are people to SPEAKER_133: be clear who are putting in their 40 50 hours a week and then in the small amount of time they have a week left they're getting on a boat to go rescue people who are drowning yeah extraordinary i mean SPEAKER_141: as a guy who grew up in like five different swiss banks between london new york to hear people talk SPEAKER_139: about volunteering their time like this was like a total moment for me and realizing that there was so much more to my life than how many toys i could accumulate and and the high score and i mean basically SPEAKER_00: you're trying to get a high score in banking so for young people listening do something meaningful with your life that also could result in a high score these are not two disparate things correct SPEAKER_139: you can there's there's two opinions i have on this one is even when i was in banking i would i'd be sitting in the city of london and i'd have all these oxford grads with a double major in you know physics and chemistry coming and trying to get a job on a trading floor and even then i would say listen guys i don't care what you say to me it's interview i'm not hiring you go go you know go fix cancer like yeah the the brain drain within the financial community is just uh you know it's it's terrible how that's kind of siphoned off the best of the best and i think it's maybe redressed now and maybe consumer internet is having its moment taking the best of the best out of there but i think a mission SPEAKER_00: that's interesting yeah no if you're facebook or google and you're printing money at the velocity they're printing money you literally have people who have phds in computer vision computer science who could be literally curing cancer like doing computer vision models or doing drug discovery models uh or SPEAKER_58: creating you know that the next um you know device used on an ambulance to save people and instead of doing that hard work they're going to optimize the percentage of clicks to an ad for some racist russian paid for anti-hillary clinton ad like literally that's what you're doing with your life really you got a graduate degree from stanford or harvard or mit and you're going to work at SPEAKER_119: facebook optimizing the ad network really i mean it's well jason i mean this is why um you know we've been able to grow like this uh we moved our company to austin in jan 2019 and i've recruited out of ibm apple like all the all the big guys in austin and that was largely because we have a mission-driven business right when your mission is i want to reduce response signs for all and improve situational awareness for first responders it's not i want to make sure that your eyes never leave you know the SPEAKER_43: little black mirror in your hand welcome to another episode of this week in startups i'm super excited to share with you the top three vote getters at the launch accelerators 18th cohort we run an accelerator and we used to do that in san francisco and have everybody come out for 12 weeks but during the SPEAKER_00: pandemic well that ended and we went completely virtual the accelerator is just like any other top accelerator you've heard of like tech stars or y combinator uh we put in 100k we work with the company over four months uh it's now a 16-week program essentially and we try to help them raise money we introduce them to every investor we can imagine and then when they invest each week they present to SPEAKER_58: investors so it's like a demo day each week with 10 to 20 investors present by the end they've done this 16 times so they've presented to likely 500 investors if you can't raise money after you've pitched 500 SPEAKER_00: investors that should tell you something about the business uh either um the business it doesn't have product market fit or doesn't have that uptick that would lead investors to want to make a bet maybe the investors don't like the space it could be you know a space that's been uh where the well has been poisoned maybe like a um we were kind of situation uh but in general uh the companies that go through the accelerator they raise money and they tend to do it uh pretty efficiently that is kind of the point of our accelerator other um programs are more like incubators we're not that we're not incubating ideas and getting a product launch we're looking for companies that have a product in market that have some base level of traction that can be 2k a month it could be 50k a month um typically it's somewhere in between those two numbers and we work with them we you know put a stamp in their book hey launch jason are involved that helps a little bit on the margins in terms of getting a meeting SPEAKER_58: um and that selection process where we pick seven companies out of 500 or a thousand applicants that really helps other investors know that we ran a process and that we work deeply with these SPEAKER_43: companies and we diligence them so next up is sherry sherry atwood is from support pay she was also in the launch accelerators 18th cohort we do these monthly or so we're trying to get to monthly uh and sherry you had a company called support pay explain to the audience what support pay is SPEAKER_191: yeah support pay helps parents manage child support and share expenses directly with each other SPEAKER_134: so it is a uh an app that people pay for what do they pay for it correct they've starting at 7.99 a SPEAKER_191: month or 79 a year and that way they can manage their child support their finances with their ex ultimately never having to talk to their ex about money again for the audience i've been very careful SPEAKER_00: to not savage people and i and i taught this in the angel university classes when you're meeting with founders before you've invested do not savage them do not i in fact they try to give no feedback uh in terms of what to fix in the business i just try to before i invest i just try to learn about the business and the founder but i'm not prescriptive i don't give them too many notes or tell them changes changes you should do that when after we invest then i feel like well they've opted in to SPEAKER_58: getting the candidness for me and they kind of expect it so i'm going to be full bore candid as brutal as i can be so that they succeed down the road better to fix your shot or whatever little mistakes you're making in practice then when you're on the court so what what was the experience like SPEAKER_193: when i savaged you well i think that was exactly the point right when we were interviewing with you you didn't give any feedback and it's very similar to me fundraising before people don't give feedback uh i think the key areas where you really really helped me was one just the way that my pitch deck looked uh making it much more simple and um being all virtual and presenting virtual is very different and that's what i don't think people understand is yes um we've gone into this virtual investing world but your slides and how it looks and even how it sort of what i'll call animates but doesn't really all of those things are much more important um we realized for example we did this test of how many slides should be moving and how the in real world right you want less slides but in virtual we realized we needed it to um you know move every three to four seconds else people like lost interest so things like that so the way it looked and then the big one was focusing on where we're growing not trying to go into every go-to-market strategy and then finally really nailing the uh question and answer because if people aren't familiar right after we pitch then the investors get to ask questions and we have two minutes to answer all of their questions and so being able to be really um concise and clear on your answers was also something that your feedback was uh you know even throughout the weeks was amazing because it really helped narrow it down yeah i mean just to give SPEAKER_01: people a background on this you really want to give short tight answers when you're talking to an SPEAKER_00: investor because the investors tend to be really smart they've heard everything they don't need you to explain basic stuff to them so when they say how many customers they have it's great to just give them a number we have a thousand people subscribed when they ask you what's your best marketing channel or what's your go-to marketing strategy you say we're doing paid ads on facebook and instagram and our cac is 72 you answered their question and you gave them one little extra data SPEAKER_193: point the cac right but i'll also say what you also helped with was how to answer more difficult questions or maybe questions where things aren't as great or wonderful so how to reframe the questions that they were asking in order to make sure it promoted the business and put you in the best SPEAKER_199: light from those quick answers what do investors want to see what do they need to see um investors SPEAKER_201: need to see some growth the idea of you having zero growth and saying it's coming is not convincing to anyone and that's what we had the first year that's where i was you know talking to 300 investors and not getting anywhere uh was that we were flat growth and we had reasons for it and stuff like that but no one really cares about your reasons if you aren't showing more revenue the next month the next SPEAKER_204: month after that like we don't care that's fine cool let us know literally proven to them to not SPEAKER_205: invest you're like i can build a business that doesn't grow right you know to be hard take away yeah David Friedberg: but that is like to be super harsh and like part of this program is to be harsh right like yes i always tell people like be sure you wanted to have this experience because we're gonna be we're gonna we're gonna be brutally honest here what non-growth founders prove is that they don't deserve capital and that's a harsh way of saying it but you actually realize that you've taken it to heart haven't you SPEAKER_201: gabe i mean i i've certainly seen the difference between trying to come to investors with zero growth month over month and coming to investors with 20 growth month over month i mean the responses are very very different tell us tell us well i mean you have to bat people away when you're growing 20 month over month i mean we are turning away more than a million dollars now and we turned away more than a million dollars a few months ago but at that point we were growing 15 month over a month at this point we've been growing 20 month over a month and it's like the the difference in desire from investors and just like oh no please let me in let me in it's just night and day just from hitting just SPEAKER_58: from between like low single digits and 20 percent it's not that big of a difference in terms of a SPEAKER_197: number but it is very different in terms of the reception and it's very different in terms of running a company what how is running a company change for you now that you have a north star that you want to SPEAKER_201: be a high growth company um i mean i i think the idea of having a bunch of capital and having having access to capital and whatever capital you want that that changes things i mean then you have to start making decisions about well what do you actually want what do you actually need and what is what is the right path for this company and so it frees you up to be really really strategic with this stuff in a way that just trying to get whatever you possibly need because otherwise the company's going to fold like that kind of panic space gives you a lot fewer options and a lot less time to make strategic decisions uh so at the point where you get to actually start turning down capital and saying no what capital do i want and who do i want it from and why and what are we going to do with it like those yeah being able to earn luxury of time like that's that's what you get yeah you've earned SPEAKER_216: the ability to take a bigger picture to think more strategically and you know this is what elon always SPEAKER_00: said about tesla and their journey is well the way capital allocation works is the more success that you have and the more you prove that there's a business there the more capital allocators will give you tokens to put into the video game so in the case of tesla like when they sold 2000 roadsters it was like that's an achievement here's some more money but not all of it when they got the model s it was car of the year it was like oh let's take this company public here's more money and then they get the x out and then the model three eventually they're like okay this company's unstoppable now they can start thinking in a decade-long way instead of you know in in the early days of tesla they SPEAKER_58: were looking at you know month to month life they were they were literally hand to mouth so how has that changed for you jeremy i'm curious um in terms of thinking about life as a growth company versus SPEAKER_197: you know the reality of like hey maybe the product isn't finished or it's not you know like you can't just all of a sudden you know put the car at 100 miles per hour if it's only got three wheels on it so SPEAKER_219: how do you think about that yeah it's so true like i always think like everything's falling apart internally right like we're we're building companies within companies like there's companies built around being a form builder and we have a form builder inside our app builder so like there's there's always things that are like like three wheels and you're trying to like put the best face on you possibly can while you're still trying to grow the the funny thing that has happened since launch is the the outbound that i learned in launch that i that i keep uh uh having it has it is slowly pivoted to getting the most inbound interest from partners at tier ones like vcs that i've ever had in my entire life so like as you start to grow and like people are interested in the no code ecosystem like building the business does back that thesis that i was talking about earlier that if you focus on the business and make sure that that's growing and wearing that pressure people will find you somehow some way SPEAKER_00: yeah there are smart people out there watching you uh and what those investors are sometimes watching is oh you raised a seed round so as i i was you know i was training in the angel university course somebody asked me a question like well how could i find companies to invest in i said well that's very easy go on crunchbase say in your state or just in the united states let's say if you're in the united states and that's where you want to invest do the united states take two month period january and february of last year and take any company that raised uh between fifty thousand and seven hundred fifty thousand which your companies might have fell into at some point yeah and then if they're in there and they've raised that amount of money that's not enough money to last three years so if it was last year a year ago or maybe 15 months ago they're probably looking now if they're still SPEAKER_197: alive and then go see how many employees they have if they've got 12 employees and they only raised 250 well 12 employees times you know five or 10k a month each they're gonna they probably have revenue if they or maybe they raised money you don't know so it's just teaching my angel investors how to find companies but that's what that's just so you guys know how that's happening that's how they're finding you yeah and that's why it's important to keep your crunch base and to write a blog post about your fundraising and to keep that cadence of news going gabriel with your monthly updates SPEAKER_228: the best of this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin marketing to redeem a free 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups silicon valley bank for over 35 years silicon valley bank has helped thousands of tech and life science companies plan for the 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