SPEAKER_00: building products and services there's a whole science to it but you have to pick the right problem right and the right problem at the right time is so powerful and all these kids who are at columbia who are at these like elite schools uh or even you know they're going to you know their local college they're all having the same profound experience which is well that was an interesting four years and here's this bill i have to hit every month for my student loan that i can never get out of and bankruptcy won't get rid of and what now and that fear and we and to to solve this

SPEAKER_01: problem right to be the painkiller here you know to be the medicine to be the solution it's just

SPEAKER_03: so profound it's so important what you're doing is very important this week in startups is brought to you by equinix the equinix startup program offers a hybrid infrastructure solution for startups including up to 100k in credits and personalized consultations and guidance from the equinix team go to equinix startups.com to apply today cla innovation takes balance clas cpas consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up get started now at claconnect.com tech and hubspot if you're fundraising be sure to check out the million dollar pitch competition from hubspot for startups and hubspot ventures apply now at hubspot.com million dollar

SPEAKER_12: pitch all right everybody welcome back to this week in startup sorry i got a raspy voice i was at the

SPEAKER_14: knicks game for that heartbreaker game five at madison square garden i went into overtime but good news i got to go to game uh four in uh at the 76ers when we had an incredible epic win in philly uh i'm still going with my original nixon six and uh yeah i'm not going to be going to game six i got to get back to my family and my business and i am in the business of investing in great founders building important

SPEAKER_00: companies and one of the most important things for young people today is to be able to get work experience we know that getting a degree means less and less to elite employers so everybody needs to have work

SPEAKER_14: experience well how do you get work experience there's a classic internship but internships are

SPEAKER_00: a burden for employers full-time the person's there for 10 weeks you train them up by the time they get to week 7 8 9 10 they might actually do something useful for your company uh and then what happens they leave maybe they go to a competitor maybe they take your competitive intelligence and go to a competitor it's a pain in the ass that's why i don't do them except for my friends kids so i can build up favors in the favor bank from when my daughters need an internship i'm not kidding that's how it works folks it's an internal uh system where ceos venture capitalists and elite people use these internships and trade them with each other i'm just telling you the honest truth i always call balls and strikes here

SPEAKER_14: what happens yeah then if you don't got connections like i didn't when i was an up-and-comer i didn't get the content asked internship i had to start my magazine on my own silicon reporter cyber server shout out my guy brian alvey putting all that aside what if there was a better way well today we're going to hear about extern ships and i'm really excited because as an investor we run this accelerator we had this company paragon one it was um making progress figuring out product market fit and matt

SPEAKER_00: wilkerson the founder who came to our accelerator during covet in 2020 he figured it out and then we get the updates magical when a founder sends you an update who went to your accelerator and they've just

SPEAKER_01: crushed it we're going to hear all about externships right now from matt matt welcome to this week in

SPEAKER_00: startups thanks for having me jason wonderful having you go through the program um and uh even more wonderful to see exceptional performance you know when you send these updates and our team is extremely as a fund we're extremely focused on hey we know 80 of the startups from an accelerator whether it's y combinator tech stars or launch accelerator or a pre-accelerator like our founder university we know you know most of those experiments go to zero ultimately 80 or 90 percent and then some survive the little turtles make it to the ocean and uh become wise and they survive and you are one of those great wise founders who's figured out a great business tell us about externships and your business

SPEAKER_24: what do you do who are your customers how do you make money thanks jason well as you've touched on students they're spending a hundred to two hundred thousand dollars for a four-year degree they come

SPEAKER_25: out you go on linkedin today you look for an entry-level job what do you see forty percent just about forty percent ask for three or more years of work experience so you you've you're an entry level higher you're not supposed to have work experience they're asking for work experience and internships are how many college students have you know addressed this problem today but the fundamental problem is there's not enough good internships so the demand for good internships outstrips supply and it's really i think this is one of the most broken marketplaces that hasn't been solved if you think about work experience as a as a market and as you mentioned internships are difficult to scale they favor students who already have social status or social capital and they're time consuming for employers to run so to fix this problem we created essentially a new form of work experience it's called the remote externship um can talk about how that's different from an internship but on the face of it it's a short online project-based work experience and instead of having a company just work with one to two interns they can now work with 100 to 200 externs for less time than working with those and we've now served over 25 000 students with multi-week externships but 40 of those have come this year alone so we've enrolled over 10 000 here today and who is your client how do you make money

SPEAKER_29: yeah so we to date we've mainly worked with large corporates so as a company you can launch a externship

SPEAKER_25: for free it's cookie cutter it's more of a constrained experience but we also have large corporates like home depot national geographic pwc at&t and many others who pay for a premium enterprise experience so about a hundred thousand dollars kind of starting contract value comes out to about two thousand dollars per extern and for that we will take care of everything recruiting training onboarding supporting the

SPEAKER_29: students and also giving them this more custom targeted approach to students they want to engage

SPEAKER_31: with okay cloud computing has revolutionized startups over the past decade you know that but the reality is hey a fully cloud-based solution is not right for every startup sometimes a hybrid solution is your answer like if you're working with sensitive data that can't be trusted to the cloud or if you need to connect to multiple cloud providers at once or maybe you just want a much more cost-effective solution in that case you need to check out equinix equinix metal will give you direct access to physical servers but you still get all the benefits of the cloud so no need to rack and stack your own servers no equinix provides on-demand infrastructure in over 25 major cities and here's the best part they have an amazing startup program for you the equinix startup program offers personalized consultations and guidance from the equinix team and of course you'll get up to a hundred thousand dollars in startup credits so here's what i want you to do head to equinix startups.com to apply and when you apply james from equinix is going to reach out to you directly that's equinix startups.com to apply e-q-u-i-n-i-x startups.com okay

SPEAKER_12: so uh you have some pretty great clients listed on your website meta att hsbc the home depot pfizer hugo boss um how do they run a program if you can pick one that you've done a case study on that

SPEAKER_00: you're allowed to talk about i know people consider you an arms dealer you're like a secret weapon for

SPEAKER_14: them to beat their competitors so i'm not sure you know i see some quotes on the on the client page from att and other folks can you run us through how one of these high profile companies um uses your software and maybe if you could show the landing page or or what it is here for those of you who are not watching uh we will sportscast it which means we'll describe the product demo as we do it so don't fear but if you do and you're so inclined to go to youtube this week in startups search for the channel hit subscribe hit the bell to get alerts and you can listen to this uh and man you got a great

SPEAKER_36: domain name extern.com yeah yeah it was uh it took a number of months to secure it but um uh definitely

SPEAKER_39: worthwhile let me start off by showing you the student experience that's going to merge okay great

SPEAKER_12: yes that's yeah the student is in a marketplace you've got supply you got demand exactly um demand

SPEAKER_41: side in this case is the extern the student and supply side is the externship the company am i correct

SPEAKER_29: exactly that that's really how we think about it even though we we today monetize with the company

SPEAKER_25: and the future where we want to go is actually building this marketplace model and so it's there's a free version on both sides of the marketplace to get that supply and liquidity but then there's a kind

SPEAKER_12: of a premium tier on both sides so you could see a student saying i will pay some amount of money to have an externship at this company eventually well actually a big part of our mission is as you can see

SPEAKER_25: on our website professional experience anytime anywhere and that's for anyone so we actually

SPEAKER_29: want to keep externships free for anyone where anyone has a shot to do it but um we're you know

SPEAKER_25: because the model is evolving we we're running some experiments right now where um we might allow students to customize their experience or get additional support in ways that still keep keep it

SPEAKER_43: open and accessible for everyone but that might have a small fee associated with it to have them have

SPEAKER_25: skin in the game similar to um duolingo coursera where you know you can do the free version um but you might pay to say have a verified experience or get additional support um we're running some

SPEAKER_29: experiments in that realm because it's still really important for us that that this is accessible to anyone you know we work with a lot of underserved populations um and we just and your low income

SPEAKER_25: background students that didn't go to again the fancy school they don't have that network

SPEAKER_12: or as i said yeah the network as i said in my introduction here you know me growing up as a

SPEAKER_14: kid from brooklyn my dad a bartender my mom a nurse uh and my dad obviously a bar owner as well i don't want to sell him short um he owned a bar as well uh beards shout out to beards and beards cafe um

SPEAKER_00: the challenge there is i didn't know anybody i didn't even know how to get an intern i didn't know who condé nest was and then i met all these rich kids and their parents knew somebody at condé nest i wanted to be in the magazine business they were doing internships at vogue and vanity fair and i

SPEAKER_14: had no choice but to do my own magazines as zines turned out to be better because it was you know

SPEAKER_12: it wasn't pretty but it was gritty and you know it was better for me but most kids may not have that so

SPEAKER_00: you'd think hundreds of dollars is the accessibility point if you did experiment like this i could see like if i was a student i would pay 500 bucks or 50 bucks a month for for a service like you're

SPEAKER_12: providing if it helped with a little bit of coaching or whatever that's compared to the 50

SPEAKER_29: to 250k they go in debt is a pit yeah i mean look if if we wanted to and there you know if we wanted to just charge for that access of course you know or we could um we'd be flooded still but but i think

SPEAKER_25: something um in that kind of hundred dollar range you know maybe 100 to 200 um even as low as 50 i think we'll probably have different skews over time right i mean charging 100 bucks for everybody

SPEAKER_00: yeah that's that's kind of the zone where we're so affordable it's literally you know if you were

SPEAKER_12: driving an uber three hours of work if you were working at a fast food restaurant in new york city i think the minimum is 20 bucks or 25 bucks now but three or four hours of work if you can't do that you're not serious you know and so i think skin in the game is so important um and it's not like payola

SPEAKER_00: it's just to have a membership and get verified right and make sure you have good people in the system yeah and that's the big thing is that idea of like a base payment was as we grow um you know

SPEAKER_29: again we got 10 10 000 externs year to date um you know by the end of this year we want to be in kind

SPEAKER_25: of the 50 60 000 um number of externships given the the rate we're going we uh you know at some

SPEAKER_29: point we want to be able to distinguish the students um for the employers yes right and so that very

SPEAKER_12: seriousness level right how serious they take it like maybe even doing an onboarding where you know for a hundred dollars their accounts verify we know it's a real person but for five hundred dollars you do an interview with somebody on your site who helps them make a professional video where they answer seven questions and they just get a one hour or a half hour onboarding mentoring session you know like superhuman does when you go use their software and for 500 bucks they get some value out of that and plus the employers know hey these are the you know verified accounts and then

SPEAKER_00: these are the verified plus accounts where you know we we did an interview but let's let's see the

SPEAKER_55: portal yeah i think it's really great to show it sure so if you're a student today you can come to extern.com you can go to explore externships and you'll see the current externships that we have so

SPEAKER_25: we work with you know startups uh medium companies large fortune 500s um and a lot of the categories of work we've started in have been uh marketing bd product management data analytics uh finance and consulting later this year i want us to launch cyber security that's an area i'm really excited about there's a lot of demand obviously for cyber security professionals but uh we actually are working with um some industry experts here who have said the reason people aren't getting jobs in cyber security after getting a degree or a certificate program is because they don't have work experience and nobody wants to give them that that chance if they don't have the experience yet um so yeah so you go so you go to extern.com you then click on a program that you like so let's say i'm actually gonna switch here that was interesting you could pick a company like snap or

SPEAKER_00: at&t or you could pick um marketing or development or whatever that's kind of interesting so you can pick what you want to do as a career or you could just pick a company that you have an affinity for

SPEAKER_65: i love that yeah and you know right now it's an application process so we accept today only about

SPEAKER_25: 10 percent of the application so the two you know 25 000 we've had about a quarter million applications of people that want to apply now when you apply we don't look at school gpa we just look for indicators of are you do you have the curiosity and determination to finish the externship there's a little video

SPEAKER_65: interview that we do today um and then once you get accepted you onboard to our platform

SPEAKER_25: um we you know we make sure we onboard you we educate you like what is this experience going to be like because it is a little bit different from an internship and how is it what you're looking

SPEAKER_14: lost the video for a second let's let's pause on that question internships you show up at an office you do your 10 weeks you get out um externship is something different going on here what is going

SPEAKER_65: on that's different well the first thing is oh it's from from a student's perspective it's just more accessible right you know you don't start from home remote exactly and it's more flexible so

SPEAKER_29: i can do we run externships year-round so it's not just i gotta wait for the summer i gotta go to a

SPEAKER_90: certain city uh there's a lot of friction with it's asynchronous and it's remote changes everything

SPEAKER_25: compared to an internship it's remote we run them year-round except we try to avoid you know student holidays and federal holidays and then uh it's it is asynchronous so there is there is a live component where you engage with the companies and a zoom session like this um kind of like they're doing a guest lecture um but then outside of that you're doing the work in your own time when you you know evenings weekends you know students are busy they might have another job or internship um and then you submit your work when it makes sense there's some collaboration with students as well um you know online as well as live but you're submitting your own work and the the training component

SPEAKER_65: of it is you know today what we do is and the example i'm going to go through is with hp's corporate internship sorry corporate x sorry corporate venture capital program and we've worked with them for

SPEAKER_25: about three and a half years now uh to help students go through deal sourcing externships so they'll so we'll break down all the components of okay well first of all like what is venture capital and how does it work and how should you be analyzing companies and they may have certain sectors that they want to do market mapping for so we'll break down all right how do you actually go into research how do you analyze a market

SPEAKER_29: how do you analyze the company the you know how do you analyze the problem they're solving the solution

SPEAKER_65: the team makes that curriculum so for for this example uh i was a vc associate for three years so i did the first version of it uh tcv technology crossover ventures big growth equity firm now

SPEAKER_25: but um i but we bring in since then we brought in experts so for all of our programs we work with industry experts to help us work on the curriculum and not just build curriculum for curriculum sake our requirement is we don't want to build any training unless it's directly relevant to doing the

SPEAKER_12: work so so yeah this is a super point that i want to pause on because you know when this week in

SPEAKER_14: startups the podcast we're on right now is at its best is when the founder and i are having a really good dialogue about what the important components of the business and and and why those create product market fit and alignment and i just want to pause here on product market fit i think what you've done here is brilliant when you're in school you you learn things that are academic and hey maybe a little history maybe a little english that's great you become a well-rounded liberal arts person and then

SPEAKER_00: you might have some computer courses or marketing courses but we all know that the gap between what you're learning in a marketing pr growth analysis class even at the elite universities is some number of years back from the market right and the market moves very quickly so what you learned as an associate at that venture firm and what they're teaching even at an elite stanford or harvard or columbia columbia used to be elite i don't know what's going on there now but at these elite universities uh quote-unquote elite universities i don't know what do you think the delay is between what they're teaching and how much the market has changed because things are very dynamic in the world right now ai distributed whatever give me your best estimate as the distance between curriculum and reality

SPEAKER_98: classic university even an elite one and uh actually what people are doing at the job

SPEAKER_80: look there's obviously some exceptions when you get into certain programs and you talk to certain

SPEAKER_29: professors and deans but in general on average it's way apart and you just give me a number of years man

SPEAKER_97: matt give me a number of years in your estimate because you're doing this every day but i i think that

SPEAKER_65: it's you know it's on average it's probably five years old because five years because you you well

SPEAKER_25: first of all the curriculum it it curriculum is sort of dictated by these committees right that um are you know they try to absorb certain things but obviously you have textbooks you have um homegrown

SPEAKER_29: curriculum and it just to to steer the ship that these large institutions takes a really really long right you gotta go there's an approval process am i right is there is an academic senate yeah there's a

SPEAKER_55: whole uh academic senate process um now we we've we've had and by the way there's some early adopter

SPEAKER_65: universities out there we've had some early conversations with how do we integrate externships into their curriculum oh and even the ones that want to do it have said well it's going to take a year just to like get through the senate process and man we said you know what we're going to come back to that it's important we do want to get externships integrated but first and foremost we're going to

SPEAKER_105: build this marketplace out just get it to the students you don't need the universities they're going to slow everything down they're going to muck everything up just route around them go direct

SPEAKER_39: that exactly that's what we go we go straight to the students we don't even market through universities

SPEAKER_00: no it's a waste of time you know these guidance counselors are so disconnected from reality in nine out of ten cases we've just established on average five-year gap what you're doing is just perfect but now i'm thinking even if you hire an expert like if you came to me and said hey jgal you do investing for a living can you help us with the curriculum yeah i could really help um but then you know one venture firm might have a different philosophy from another so yes or you know what so if it's goldman sachs or if it was you know some hedge fund it was tiger global and they wanted to do this they might say you know what jake house method early stage mine's late station when you make that perfect curriculum then you what you're telling me is you then go to the goldman sachs the hsbc the the

SPEAKER_110: the snap and you say hey how does this vibe with your system is that right yeah so it's it's a little

SPEAKER_29: bit iterative right so we you know we work with companies right now we understand what are their

SPEAKER_65: needs but what we're finding is for certain categories of work the needs are consistent so let's just take for example even within deal sourcing there might be a component of um now not

SPEAKER_29: all of our some of our vc externships have a component where they talk to the startup some don't but if you're going to go talk to a startup that's customer discovery right you've got to be really good at running a customer discovery interview turns out that skill set can be applied to a lot

SPEAKER_65: of places product management obviously if you're a startup you need to do customer discovery well should start with the founder but at some point you might need to talk to hundreds of customers or small businesses well time is money you've got to move quickly so how could i leverage a team of

SPEAKER_29: students to learn about how to do customer discovery right it's important for them to learn if they are

SPEAKER_65: interested in product and build a a process for them and this by the way is where llms are perfect so this is the this is where we're going actually is we're running experiments around um you know today we have a team supporting students and helping to answer questions we promote students to tas teaching assistants so they help other students but the next step is if we're going to go from a hundred percent or sorry ten percent acceptance today we're going to we want to accept a hundred percent and what that really means is enroll enroll a hundred percent to start the journey we need to support those students and what better way is this example you mentioned where you might have different perspectives on how to do deal sourcing from different firms um those

SPEAKER_25: experts we can bring together you build a prompt around hey here's how to do jobs to be done for customer discovery here's how to um you give them some examples so funny you mentioned that i just

SPEAKER_113: had bob from the rework group with the jobs to be done framework on the pod so you guys can get that

SPEAKER_115: up as well all right everybody welcome back to the program steven estes is with us again he's a principal at cla they're a professional services provider they specialize in cpa tax consulting and wealth advisory his areas of expertise lie in vc-backed startups vc funds high growth startups with complex tax issues in multi-state and international filings welcome back to the program steven hey thanks jason appreciate it all right give us an overview of how cla works with startups what kinds of companies do you like to work with is there like a specific zone where you like to engage with

SPEAKER_119: startups one of the great things about cla is that we're nimble enough to work with two startups right so whether that's a seed round or series a company but then on the flip side we're large enough that we really have the depth of expertise that's needed to help companies when they become you know multinational entities with a lot of tax complexity or audited financial statements consolidated corporations you know mna due diligence whatever it is right so we can truly take them from incubator all the way to ipo and then really kind of come alongside some of the founders with our wealth management platform also like after the exit so i think cla is really unique in that regard like there's not a lot of firms out in the us that can really operate with that sort of breadth and scale helping companies that early stage and also being able to help partner with them as as they become

SPEAKER_115: really large and complex all right you need a trusted advisor taxes accounting you don't want to play games with this stuff get it right get a great partner like cla go to cla connect.com tech and let them know your boy jake al sent you once again cla connect.com tech now i'm looking at this again when

SPEAKER_14: this week in startups that's best we're talking about the business we're doing a little brainstorming and doing a little ping pong back and forth here maybe a little pickleball i'm wondering hey you put all this work into creating how to do discovery product discovery you have this one on how to source could

SPEAKER_01: we not take that i'm using the word we because we're investors in the company and and we are on the journey together that's how our firm launch looks at it so we could we not take that module and say to

SPEAKER_00: people you can we're going to teach this module and we've got a teacher associated with it this module is you know five hundred dollars and there's a collection of modules here and together they're three thousand dollars there's ten modules so you can take one for five hundred you can do the collection for three thousand and as you do those we put these badges on your page and there's a teacher who's going to check your work and we we we do them rolling so you know like a sourcing is going to happen you know the first week of the month this one's gonna say and then we pay those teachers and so i

SPEAKER_98: don't have to wait to be at a company i can just grab that skill and put it on my page put it on my linkedin and get a certificate what do you think that idea that must have come up oh it's come up we we've

SPEAKER_24: definitely talked about all sorts of ideas around monetization i think that so i need to answer that

SPEAKER_25: in two ways the first is um we want to go to this model where again mission a hundred percent of students can give it a shot because you might have a student that doesn't have that five hundred dollars but they're super talented they're super hungry they're super motivated we want to give those students a chance to just plow through prove that they're they've got what it takes and keep leveling up keep getting verified because if if we go to now a goldman sachs or morgan stanley uh you know in the finance world or you know or we want to go to a uh let's say a crowd strike you know when we're we're talking about doing a cyber security externship they're going to want to know all right who are the just the genuinely like great students and talent not based on what school they went to but hey maybe they did five six seven externships now in a short way shorter amount they're optimizing for most

SPEAKER_94: motivated they uh yes and so and skill so this combination of the skill plus the grace now this

SPEAKER_132: is something that we're shifting like the mindset traditionally is well just go after the top 20

SPEAKER_29: schools right we're saying no no no no no no this is the new way is look at who first of all we've got a we're bringing this kind of training and experiential uh aspect of students they they

SPEAKER_65: graduate they go to work for a year then they're like ah this isn't what i wanted to do now i'm gonna leave and companies are like ah everyone's not sticking around well because they didn't have the chance to figure out what they really want to do and so we're bringing that forward got it while you're in college do eight externships you have a killer resume and you actually know what you probably want to do because maybe the first four were just test runs of okay not what i thought it was going to be like now you've built this verified skill set with the real work experience not a

SPEAKER_29: simulation not a course because employees have been engaged here and now when you apply to a job if i'm in a recruiter uh i look at this and i say ah you've got verified work experience through

SPEAKER_65: through extern who i trust because they're actually monitoring and you're getting structured training now i have more faith to bring you in when i would have never caught you before got it love it genius

SPEAKER_55: and and we can still again there's still a revenue model on top of that but what are these what is

SPEAKER_12: a great candidate worth to your elite employers you know the top 20 of employers if they were to look and say hey you brought me somebody for you know had done these modules you know in the venture private equity you know investing space you brought me these people in cyber security those are really well-paying jobs those are six-figure jobs out of the gate so for those people if you bring somebody who does get employed what is that worth in a dollar amount to that employer well we know

SPEAKER_29: that if you look at um an internship um which does translate to full-time hire we know that it costs anywhere from four to ten grand to support on the upper end is where you're talking about software engineers uh and then for a full-time hire um just to hire them the recruiting costs can be

SPEAKER_25: basically the same amount like if you were skipping the internship you go it's going to be and uh you

SPEAKER_144: know close you know five to ten k call it depending on the company that's gonna be 10k if you fully bake it with the attention it takes from the company to do the work that you're doing if you're adding that

SPEAKER_65: in so this is why the internships are better because when we look at the internship costs it's

SPEAKER_25: the cost to recruit um which is what i was talking about for full-time but for internship it's cost to recruit and then costs for an employer or employee to support the student so when you make that implicit

SPEAKER_29: cost in um yeah it's easily 10k some could even be more than that so uh but you know we've and even on that point you know we we spent a lot of time exploring how do we sell into large recruiting

SPEAKER_25: budgets in hr budgets um because our our early customers the big corporates we work with the budgets have come from more kind of a kind of recruiting adjacent budgets um employer branding corporate social responsibility and they want to run maybe a pre-internship program for instance but you're the typical company we went after we would have deals i i mean i would cold email

SPEAKER_29: ceos at fortune 500s i cold emailed jamie diamond michael dell i don't know if they read the email but their team followed up we would get on phone calls um and ultimately uh a managing director would say we want to do this we've got budget we're going to do this but hr would would pause it or block it and if it was happening enough where i thought why why does this keep happening and and i talked to some hr experts and i got some back channeling that said when they hear that we do all this work they hear that we're kind of taking a chunk of the their kind of fiefdom away got it okay so that's uh

SPEAKER_14: political and you got to route around them and you got to make them advocates because yeah you're

SPEAKER_132: you're taking the freedom but that's okay you know it's like arms we'll get there you'll get there

SPEAKER_65: it'll be i think when we build the marketplace eventually we'll get big enough you you you'll

SPEAKER_25: have to recruit on extern because we'll have the best talent that's been verified yeah i mean having

SPEAKER_14: a profile page for each person you got to get the name space nice and tight so i can be extern.com

SPEAKER_01: slash jason calacanis you got profile pages for these folks and no for the students yeah not yet but

SPEAKER_160: that's definitely on our on our roadmap when we get there it's number one it's number one if you

SPEAKER_14: have a paid account you have the hundred dollar account you get to make a page extern.com slash your name and it can't be slash a slash your name it's got to be extern.com slash so they can remember it and send it that becomes a thing and you tell people you put that in your um your bio you you put it on your linkedin page you still have a linkedin page right but um it just has all your badges your

SPEAKER_162: skills etc i'm so excited about your business all right calling all seed stage and series a startups you've been working so hard tirelessly and you've locked in the perfect pitch you're pumped and ready

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SPEAKER_14: dollar pitch how does a company uh deploy this what does it cost for them ballpark to get involved to create a course give me the the current pricing because there's a lot of big companies

SPEAKER_00: who listen and i know nickel dell i could i could forward an email on to him and just check in with

SPEAKER_98: them on this but the first thing they're going to ask is how much and how do you charge is it like a platform fee or is it per externship that's created with the curriculum this has got to be at

SPEAKER_00: least 50 100k right to get up and running because you can't do this at a quality level i think for less than minimum of 50k i would think a minimum of 100k but it pays for itself after five people come

SPEAKER_25: join the company yeah so we do have this kind of base version that's free but it's very constrained it's very restricted and the goal of that is if you meet certain requirements of jobs that we want to see on the platform we want to bring you in to build that market liquidity but if you want to

SPEAKER_65: target a certain group of students you want to give them more support you want to kind of this additional custom experience that most big enterprises want um yeah it's basically about a hundred grand to get going and that's because we want to bring a big enough cohort of students in there's some startup costs but for the company all that all that it takes is we just need step one is give us some goals for a project you don't even have to have it fully fleshed out most people

SPEAKER_132: they don't have the time to do that we'll we'll do that yeah you got to do all that that that's the

SPEAKER_146: whole point here matt it's like they just want it done and only just one champion in one important

SPEAKER_00: vertical cyber security comes to mind as like those people are rare you know like elite developers in a certain vertical rare and so once you get the rare thing like and and and big impact players man you

SPEAKER_14: just yeah i think if the salary is over 100k that's where you got to focus yeah we're focused on where

SPEAKER_25: you know one given where ai and generative ar are going you know what's what skill sets do you need to

SPEAKER_29: have for that future but also what are the skill sets that generative ar is not going to replace and how do we double down on making sure you're really good at that for instance students learn in college i got to write 20 page you know essays and just i got to fill up space with

SPEAKER_25: words to you know meet the make the professor happy and then they show up on an externship and

SPEAKER_29: it's like you've done all this work now the top students have to synthesize that in three minutes and you know that that's new i mean that's that's new for for most people uh but especially students

SPEAKER_25: to really think about how do i synthesize how i'm communicating um so yeah it's both the kind

SPEAKER_80: of the technical hard skills and soft skills you know i just think like when i hear your business

SPEAKER_14: and you're in the thick of it i always like to open the aperture up a bit um because you're in the weeds you're standing right next to the elephant so you see a big gray wall and uh i always try to get founder step back 10 steps and then see what you see you may see the trunk and the whole picture of like an elephant or maybe a herd of elephants very different right and when you're looking at it from here oh yeah i know for people watching that i'm showing me uh i'm showing like a six by six inch

SPEAKER_00: piece of the elephant so let's step back a second here and first principles what is extern.com actually doing for the student what is it actually doing i want to hear you answer that it's taking

SPEAKER_29: that despair away of i've sent out 50 job applications or internship applications my friends are getting internships i know i need to get something my parents are hounding me um and i'm not hearing

SPEAKER_155: anything back okay i want to pause right there this is so important you've identified because you talk to

SPEAKER_00: these customers right the students are your customers ultimately um they have fear this is very profound

SPEAKER_01: and so everything uh that's one group they have fear and the fear is manifested from their parents pressure and that parent pressure is because they want the best for their kids and they want their kids to be safe and they have parents are part of this equation what an incredible discovery we just made

SPEAKER_98: in having a really first principle discussion and i'm trying to teach a lot of founders in our portfolio about thinking from first principles and and stepping back from the gray wall and seeing the elephant and then seeing the herd and then seeing the serengetti so now we pause for a second the parent has a fear

SPEAKER_01: for their child and being secure in the world in an ever-changing world a dynamic world and the student has a fear and they have peers and they have peer pressure so there's anxiety there's fear there might even be shame confusion and what this does is our solution at extern.com our solution lowers anxiety and gives them a plan and it helps them have a strategy and you know if you want to reduce anxiety if you want to reduce fear

SPEAKER_00: the first thing you must do is define reality great leaders to find reality in this case a parent might

SPEAKER_98: be a leader or you might be a leader an educator might be earlier the reality is the market is changing the reality is there's competition in the market not just from the students on your left and right but students around the world low paid workers in manila can or you know people living in canada portugal lower cost of living they're competing for these jobs because a lot of remote jobs

SPEAKER_00: so once we define that reality um and that you overpaid the other reality you overpaid for your education right and you've got a student 200 000 and it does not get you the job you made a mistake and it's broken okay so now we've defined a very scary reality but if you define reality and it's just such an important thing for people to do in their lives and for founders to understand and i'm taking this from your profound insight of fear just so well done matt if we market this as the world's changing what you did in terms of getting an education does not get you a job it used to it doesn't anymore let's just take that as table stakes in reality so then how do people select to give a job to somebody and make them safe in the world they do it based on their skill and the skills are ever changing they're dynamic but the good news is they're learnable and they're actually easy to learn if you come to

SPEAKER_01: extern.com we've defined this ideal customer profile and the parents are part of this so now if we were to manifest this into a landing page it would be a picture of two parents sitting with their kid and just a little blurb we spent two hundred thousand dollars on this degree but we still don't have a job what do we do now imagine how profound that messaging is right and then imagine i'm a parent i'm a parent i got three daughters i see that ad i'm like you know what extern.com is right and this is really first principles wise i think you nailed it what's the

SPEAKER_98: second reason your customers tell you students that they've had a great experience and what your product did for them what's a is there another cohort and we're trying to find here in this dialogue matt the constellation of reasons because what we just did is a constellation of fear anxiety confusion the parents the student everything now give me another constellation in your mind of a of a situation and a collection of circumstances yeah as i do that i'm actually just going to share

SPEAKER_29: um you know on linkedin we don't ask students to do this um but they you know when they're done we just

SPEAKER_25: have so many raving fans um some of them become ambassadors and they want to share um because what we've done for them is we've now given them a pathway and a jump start we've we've solved this what i call the experience paradox you need experience to get experience and so now they have

SPEAKER_29: a story they have confidence you know it's one thing to yes having this experience on your resume you get you know interest from employers but the other thing people don't realize is the confidence being able to go into an interview speak confidently about a real work experience that you had that changes the game so okay so this is the moment in time

SPEAKER_00: on completion this is a different moment in time so yes contextual reasons when we're thinking about building startups i want everybody to understand when you're building a startup your customers have different life moments uh you know if you're looking for a mate versus having cohabitated with your mate to having had a child or a dog first then a child and then have the child with school these are all different moments in your life so this is a different moment this is i've completed an extern.com ship and here i am and now i've gone from fear to confidence this is super profound what happens next in that moment of confidence is they share it why are they sharing it it's because they're proud and it's because they

SPEAKER_124: want the world to know that they're available for work with the skill i'd sing am i right is that why

SPEAKER_29: they're sharing it well there's that um and then on the ambassador side they want to be uh leaders in

SPEAKER_181: their student community they nab grab this opportunity and they know that as an ambassador they could

SPEAKER_143: potentially bring other friends in to share that experience later on super profound i have confidence

SPEAKER_14: i have a skill and i want to be a leader i want to be a leader and i want to be the top of my class and

SPEAKER_00: there's something in this competition with peers that came up in both situations did you notice that matt yes we have this dialogue in the first one there was a profound moment of my my friends are getting jobs i'm not and in this one i'm getting skills you guys don't have them i can be the person to introduce you to this i'm the vanguard i am in the you know bell curve of adoption uh crossing the chasm

SPEAKER_14: style i'm the vanguard i am the what do they call those users in the clayton christianson uh the early adopters basically i'm an early adopter i'm a vanguard i'm a leader so this is super profound your peers

SPEAKER_00: in all of this really do matter one out of fear and shame and then one out of pride and competition perhaps or leadership um and so that's a different marketing that's a different landing page if we just i think a landing pages sometimes or i think in tick tock ads yeah so we just think in two different shorts and tick tock gets one of them is the parents discussing this with the student and the fear the other tick tock ad or short ad short youtube video whatever it is landing page is hey um i added a skill and you can too and when i added that skill i put it on my linkedin and i got three job offers the pride maybe a little bit of uh showing off being part of the

SPEAKER_98: vanguard being an early adopter being a leader really two different contexts right and this is like you know part of the jobs to be done customer discovery framework you know um that we all talk about at the accelerator and found university actually we've when you went to our accelerator i didn't have as much focus on this had to focus very much on fundraising and i've since added this because the people who didn't clear market didn't understand what we just did i just want to pause here and just if you're a founder get your team together and your co-founders and just watch what matt and i just did i had a first principle discussion about what this product is actually doing through the eyes of the customers and people being impacted and there are five more we could do because there are five other contexts now the first one might be 60 of the population the second one might be 20 and then there might be a long tail of contextual reasons timing uh etc but you know this is what makes me super confident in you as a founder matt is that you understand this so deeply when i ask founders these questions sometimes they answer with buzzwords and they talk about their competitors and they talk about fundraising and they talk about nonsense and 30 under 30 it's all about understanding your customers isn't it it is and i've been focused on

SPEAKER_24: these customers users the student pain point for for years actually you know three of our leadership

SPEAKER_25: team members also prior to this were working on apprenticeships job matching um but paragon one which was the kind of precursor to extern we were trying to solve this problem by career coaching we thought okay well how do you help someone get an internship or a job well career coaching let's make that more on-demand match you with industry professionals but what i learned there was coaching is a vitamin for a

SPEAKER_65: student it's not the painkiller because they kept telling us you know the coaching is great but i'm still not quite getting the interviews because my resume doesn't have anything on it or i go into an interview and i don't anything to talk about and i thought okay what if that's it i mean how do we just give them the internship how do we make that the product yeah so brilliant matt so happy uh for

SPEAKER_00: you and the team over there uh what's next for the company and and how can people become involved are you hiring and you know any any uh thing here that uh would be helpful for you um i know you've got too many customers in some way so you're dealing with a little bit too much supply side of my understanding

SPEAKER_25: yeah so on the on the well starting on the student side the big goal is by the end of this year we want to move the product to a place where we can go from 10 acceptance to 100 enrollment and then you can start going through extern academy you can talk to a kind of an ai extern career advisor that can match you and then you can start just doing externships and leveling up um so that that's like the big product focus on the company side we do have a wait list of companies uh obviously for the for the free version um and so we're being a little selective there but once we get later in the year we're going to ramp that back up again on the supply side um we're not making too many hires right now we're we're continuing to try to just stay pretty lean and you know we have enough revenue coming in um from the enterprise uh portion right now so it's really going after this marketplace model and

SPEAKER_14: that's the main so you need to you need time to build this product and it's basically what i'm hearing as a founder and you need cycles to do that you have a business that's running support the

SPEAKER_25: growth because we we enrolled uh we had 160 quarter-over-quarter growth in externs we enrolled in q1 uh and we're on track to double that number okay so supply of students not a problem

SPEAKER_14: economy's a bit struggling it's been a bunch of layoffs so that makes sense to me but supporting them yeah yeah yeah because you gotta you don't want to take them in here and have them have a bad experience and then churn or become a low net promoter score you don't want detractors we have

SPEAKER_65: a 71 net promoter score students and 90 with companies so yeah and so this is important to measure and

SPEAKER_04: this is another important thing for people listening to this week in startups if you're going to be a

SPEAKER_01: founder and you really want to grow a company understanding how you're perceived and accepting that

SPEAKER_00: reality is critically important the gold standard for doing that is something called net promoter score we'll put a link to it in the show notes uh which is super critical however things change i'll end

SPEAKER_98: on this however things change since you started the company in terms of operating a company the growth techniques and everything because uh this has been a couple year journey here and into how the

SPEAKER_01: game on the field has changed in 2024 versus what year to just i know you went to the went to

SPEAKER_00: our accelerator in 2020 the super capital efficient but and the company existed before that so you've been at this for a number of years what's changed as a founder in your mind if you give advice to the

SPEAKER_98: young founders first-time founders listening here what really matters today and what's changed over

SPEAKER_29: the last five or six years i think that what i've just been learning more and more and you know obviously i started by solving this problem of how do you get more work experience for students is just picking a really hard problem that at first you know picking a really hard problem and then never stop iterate because i think if you really break it down we've done a ton of iterations and a lot of pivots including a hard yeah a super hard pivot and then a lot of little mini pivots and if you're focused on a problem that that you know as we talked about causes enough despair when it's not solved that's hard enough you like that those are the problems that are worth solving um i think it's what's led us to also build and we have an incredible mission driven team that has enabled us to get this far yeah and so i think just you know what's changed is there's just more noise right with with ai you know it's it's easy it's easy to launch a startup it's easy to get something going

SPEAKER_25: but are you working on a problem that's deep hard enough that's transformative enough to to really matter and that that's kind of my that's why i keep doing what i'm i'm doing and yeah

SPEAKER_12: well uh matt well done it's great to be in business with you uh hopefully uh we've been helpful to you

SPEAKER_00: and if i can ever be helpful to you in the future you have my phone number i think if you don't they're

SPEAKER_55: getting at you right now when when we met i mean we were pivoting but we were uh we were running on

SPEAKER_29: fumes so we were you know we were at that time um uh you know we were down to like three people

SPEAKER_25: we had uh you know the original idea hadn't been working but we knew there was something in this new direction of we at the time we were calling it virtual internships and uh and so we just kept plowing through and so yeah your investment was um you know came at a at a great time because i think you

SPEAKER_01: you and your team saw the the vision as well the business we're in is squinting i tell people um you know you got that great founder and they're pointing and they're saying you see that and i said what i said no right there and they're pointing to the horizon it crosses great wide ocean and i said i don't see it they said squint a little harder right there on the left past that wave that's where we're

SPEAKER_97: going they tell me about where we're going and they tell me and i say oh and then i stopped squinting

SPEAKER_01: i see it i got it how the we get there and they say uh i don't know and i say great let's let's chop it up let's talk about it because there's got to be a way to get there and what do we need to get there right and so once we under i find when we understand the founder's vision truly um then we can get to planning then we and this is why these conversations and just stepping back and stepping back and

SPEAKER_98: opening the aperture you know and i'm trying to train my team to do this more and more and the reason i had this dialogue with you is i'm cutting this and i'm sending it to my investment team literally while we're talking i said take this i want it in the investment team room immediately and i want them to have a discussion about it the investment team meeting which we do on tuesday and

SPEAKER_00: thursdays um because this takes a level of thoughtfulness what we do as the early stage investors um and and people don't know the technique to do it you know and it's like just slowing down what's the problem you said it perfectly matt when you said like pick the right problem building products and services there's a whole science to it but you have to pick the right problem right and the right problem at the right time is so powerful and all these kids who are at columbia who are at these like elite schools uh or even you know they're going to you know their their local college they're all having the same profound experience which is well that was an interesting four years and here's this bill i have to hit every month for my student loan that i can never get out of and bankruptcy won't get

SPEAKER_01: rid of and what now and that fear and we and to to solve this problem right to be the painkiller here you know to be the medicine to be the solution it's just so profound it's so important what you're

SPEAKER_00: doing is very important and you know it in it didn't start that way right you were triangulating around problems and then over time what the great founders do is find the most important one you know travis is like getting that cab when it's raining in paris and i need to get somewhere and i'm frustrated and if i don't get my ride to that location i'm not going like a very profound simple thing and then how many people have that experience well if you lived in brooklyn of the boroughs you have an experience every day it's hard to get a cap so you know profound experiences and glad had it at robin hood like how do you get young people to trade stocks how do you get young people to invest in their future so get rid of the 35 fee to trade a stock and give them one free stock in their account and they just kept thinking about that mission how do i get people to become educated about finance and you know a lot

SPEAKER_14: of dipshits professor galloway whoever derided robin hood oh my god these young men are gambling whatever you know like okay sorry professor let's step back for a second they could gamble on you know any number of sports games or in casinos but what a little trick to get them to gamble on

SPEAKER_01: stocks gamble because then they learn investing and if they lose their money on a stupid you know

SPEAKER_00: meme stock then they say well what's after meme stocks what aren't meme stocks right you know the best way to be good at poker is to know like what are the mistakes that people make and poker is a game

SPEAKER_98: of eliminating your stakes so you're not exploitable so that you have a chance to beat the exploitable players right so uh profound and important what you're doing i'm really excited um more so now after our conversation than ever to be in business with you so you know any way we can be helpful just always ask uh you know we have we got a 21 person team here and we want to go to work with you on this so i'm always good for a tweet for my team and uh it's been a great hour with you matt congratulations on this you can find out more at extern.com e-x-t-e-r-n am i right extern yep e-x-t-e-r-n what a great domain man when you told me your idea and you you asked me if you think of this domain i was like buy the domain i don't care if it costs a million bucks i'll give you the million bucks i don't know what the cost but literally if it costs a million bucks i would rally the the fundraise to get that a great domain name headphones.com my friends over there some guy told me he was listening to this big startups he heard my conversation with com.com inside.com he had like a terrible domain name to sell headphones and nobody trusted him and then he found the guy who owned headphones.com

SPEAKER_00: and he built this gigantic business i'm not an investor in it yet um and just the great domain name and great branding built trust so amazing this is such a better name than paragon one i know no

SPEAKER_24: people give me a start i've been wanting to change that forever people were mistyping it um long hard

SPEAKER_230: to spell yeah what does it mean exactly extern.com i mean i was able to negotiate it for 50 grand

SPEAKER_25: i mean oh my god yeah i would have wanted a hundred and which i would have yeah but you know i was like let me see what i can do it yeah it it was i couldn't believe i got it for that one great

SPEAKER_00: job we'll see you all next time on this week in startups if you want to be like matt and uh be in business with us go to founder.university that's our pre-accelerated that's for people you know

SPEAKER_14: earlier than matt startup then we have the launch accelerator that's for people who have you know a couple customers tens of thousands of revenue a month maybe even 5k a month something like that product and market and then we do direct investments uh you can learn more at launch.co

SPEAKER_98: and we have the liquidity summit coming up that's only for gps and lps you can go to liquiditypod.com summit there's 10 tickets left or so i'm capping it at 125 people i think so 10 tickets left if you're

SPEAKER_14: an lp or a gp or an angel investor a high net worth individual interested in going we turned down half the applications because it's service providers and founders trying to raise money this event in napa

SPEAKER_98: january 2nd to 5th learn more liquiditypod.com summit i'm there for all three days some of the besties are coming tomorrow freeberg gavin baker just tons of amazing speakers and then all in summit is happening in september i cannot help you with that i am not the ceo i do not run it anymore i am just a pretty face on the pod but uh 7 500 bucks a ticket and i think it's like basically sold out i'm sorry but they will be doing a small number of scholarships we're doing a bigger event on all in uh when we hit uh a million subscribers i think tomorrow's going to do something in vegas he said so you know that's going to be super accessible ticket price we'll see you all next time on this week service bye bye