SPEAKER_00: a lot of vcs get obsessive kelly about oh you know is this venture scale i don't know if it's

SPEAKER_02: venture scale when you're early early early early stage like we are pre-incorporation of the company and at the incorporation you know years zero one two and three we get in at such a modest valuation typically low millions of dollars like y combinator and arc and you know other you know accelerators

SPEAKER_03: do we can be a bit more frisky a 50 million or 150 million dollar outcome for us could be a great

SPEAKER_06: investment this week in startups is brought to you by open phone brings your team's business calls texts and contacts into one delightful app that works anywhere get 20 off your first six months at openphone.com slash twist dot tech domains has a new program called startups dot tech where you can get your company featured on this week in startups go to startups dot tech jason to find out how and mercury 90 of startups fail just 10 out of every 100 make it mercury exists to close that gap helping companies succeed with banking and credit cards engineered for the startup journey join over 100 000 companies banking with mercury at mercury.com all right everybody

SPEAKER_07: welcome back to this week in startups we have a really fun show for you today uh people always

SPEAKER_08: ask me can i have money i've got an idea for a startup and i want to get started i need money uh and

SPEAKER_07: we say great what's your idea and we always try to figure out how can we invest in these companies but it's hard because as a venture firm we can't just be giving money to people with ideas that doesn't scale and it results in a lot of zeros in other words companies that never get their products launched so what should a venture firm do or an early stage seed fund do with the deluge of people coming to them with ideas or even an mvp but they're not incorporated yet or maybe they're incorporated but there's really not that much there to go on well what most vc funds do is they say come back when you have your product launch and subtraction was great to meet you if they even take

SPEAKER_14: the meeting well funny thing happened for us we started a program called founder university it's a 12-week course and we started an experiment where we asked them these same founders would you like to come to a 12-week course where you can learn all the fundamentals of starting a company and finding product market fit what is product market fit it's a very fancy term for building a product that customers actually like and get value from and they use in other words you know you made a hamburger

SPEAKER_08: people ate it and they enjoyed it and they came back again and ordered another hamburger product market fit um pmf is a term of art here in silicon valley so what we tried to do um with this 12-week

SPEAKER_17: course which you can find at founder dot university was see if anybody would come to this course we do

SPEAKER_14: two sessions a week at 6 p.m at night on monday and thursdays and you learn all the fundamentals with me

SPEAKER_08: uh to discuss our founder university program and for you to meet three of the companies that um we really liked from it is kelly schricker uh kelly has worked with me over two companies inside.com and now at launch she's what's called a principal a principal is not a um a school term like a principal or assistant uh principal like in high school no a principal is above um an associate below a managing director in the hierarchy of a venture firm associates are usually um lowest rung of uh venture firms we happen to have two rungs lower than that a researcher and an analyst so some firms have uh that kind of career path which kelly is on kelly uh welcome back to the program um tell us we're in the sixth cohort here of launch uh launch the launch funds founder university program and it's been growing quickly just some back of the envelope numbers here how many

SPEAKER_07: people applied how many did we accept and who are we currently accepting into the program absolutely

SPEAKER_25: thank you so much for having me jason i'm so excited to be here and talk about founder you so founder you we're in the sixth cohort we've had a thousand and two hundred and fifty companies actually go through the program we've done 46 investments that's a 25k investment signed and wired we have a few other offers out there um we also have had 12 companies end up going to our accelerator so that that's a big one for us as well we also have companies that go outside of us tech stars why i see some other really great programs um we have our next cohort kicking off in december and there we're looking for builder founders so folks that can actually get their idea out into the world um it's going to kick off the first week of december and we're currently

SPEAKER_31: reviewing applications and we'll get back in about a week or less once once we see that application

SPEAKER_17: come through and you can apply at founder.university we had 2 000 people apply uh this last cohort i

SPEAKER_08: understand so this is growing quickly um and what that means is you have a one in ten chance of getting in uh to the program now when we started uh you had a hundred percent chance of getting into the first two cohorts because we just let everybody in um and we now um are a little more selective so let's just unpack what we're looking for in terms of teams there's two key criteria here one generally solo founders um do not go that far in startups unless they've got a lot of experience uh or they have a lot of money to deploy to hire teams so solo founders um we're not as interested in uh for this class let's unpack solo founders versus two or three person teams of the 200 was it 220 teams that started this year uh in the sixth cohort is that the number that's correct correct yep of those how

SPEAKER_25: many uh had a solo founder i'd say less than 10 percent and then i think the reason we selected them was that they were a great fit for a lot of other reasons and were builders themselves so hopefully they can get a couple more people on board we talk about the importance of having additional co-founders in that first week and we've actually seen some folks uh team up during the program which

SPEAKER_41: is really cool and the importance of having a co-founder is what is that when you have a day that

SPEAKER_25: you're sick or burnt out there's still people working on the business if you're fundraising you know and then hopefully you have complementary skill sets as well so that when one person's building somebody else is maybe going out and talking to customers and and having those conversations so again the big idea there is that when you're out it doesn't all stop yeah and uh it's a lonely

SPEAKER_08: job to be a founder and it does seem like the teams of co-founders two three or even four uh they tend to go much further and so it's better for a founder to have a smaller piece of the pie in other words divide the founder shares by two or three uh and have a greater chance of success so programs like tech stars y combinator the launch accelerator we all prefer to see uh multiple co-founders because as investors well it's downside protection for us let's be candid the the attrition rate for solo founders is so much higher they go out of business at such a higher rate uh so it is a bit pragmatic on the part of investors also as one investor told me if you can't find a co-founder you failed the first test of

SPEAKER_14: being an entrepreneur so again people don't like to be super candid but if you have an idea an idea and you don't have any skills uh you are kind of worthless uh to the investment community

SPEAKER_02: that's basically how they look at you now that's not true you're not worthless but it is a competition for funding dollars a person with an idea is a hundred percent of the population a person with skills to build that idea is you know five ten percent of the population so and then three people getting three people together you know now you're talking about like one percent of the pool of uh potential startups we could accept and it's a competition right to get into these programs it's a competition why would it why on earth would one of these programs accept a solo founder with no ability to build the product over three builders two developers a designer a growth hacker so let's pivot to that next question what do we see results in product velocity in terms of the characteristics of a three-person team if you were putting together the ideal three-person team to build a startup an app company a marketplace a consumer product sas whatever it is um what would those three positions

SPEAKER_25: look like the skill set of the three the skill set of the three yep so i would say at least one of them has to actually be technical and be able to build whether that's you know kind of on the low end no code um hopefully they can get it out to the world and hopefully be shipping updates weekly um somebody who can talk to customers understand the marketing and sales side of it i would say last on the list would be operations again i i would prefer to stack either two of those skills on top of each other and

SPEAKER_08: then go for um that last role two developers a designer ux person probably going to go even further than the ops person you can always add an ops person so no offense you're an ops person

SPEAKER_03: i think you prefer the ops people i always look at the office people and i'm like add that person later uh you can always get an ops person uh they're i don't want to say a dime a dozen the great ones are not a dime a dozen but there's a lot of ops people out there um who are available to join startups two developers and a designer to me that's the ideal team somebody could do the front end and two developers because developers are so hard to find so i'll go two developers and design people have different views on this um if you want to get into y combinator or text if you want to get into y combinator specifically three developers they'll probably just accept you uh because that is such a rare combination uh so the more developers in their mind the better for me probably i'm a little bit of a design guy so i would probably go two developers and a designer you're an ops person so you're going to look at the world and say hey an ops person a sales person can get out there and a developer is a great combination all of those combinations are pretty good they're all better than a solo founder or two founders so um you know if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far

SPEAKER_08: go together is the uh the saying so uh everybody should apply to uh join us at founder.university if you are a solo founder don't not apply apply because um we're building tools to help people find co-founders and actually i think y combinator has a co-founder tool that's available to everybody right that tool is available to anyone so shout out to y combinator for building that that's a great program we love by the way um people coming to founder university which is a pre-accelerator of course um and going to

SPEAKER_03: y combinator tech stars um what's the new one that y combinator was trashing on twitter x uh neo is the new accelerator out there go to any accelerator we don't care if you come to founder university and we invest a little bit and you go to another accelerator we just want to see you be successful so we're not

SPEAKER_08: sharp elbowed um we're not getting into wars on twitter with other accelerators uh the more people supporting founders in my mind the better so uh there's always room in these early stages uh to

SPEAKER_68: find investment for these companies are you still using your personal phone number for your startup

SPEAKER_70: it's 2023 it's time to stop it is a huge mistake that founders make why you're just getting started with your company and you don't think about phone numbers as being an important part of the ip collection of your startup with open phone you can totally solve this problem they've rethought everything about a modern business phone and how it should work it's super easy you just download the app on your phone or your desktop and you pick a number and you're done and you do it for just such a low price it's so affordable and think about it if you have your sales team using their personal phone numbers a salesperson leaves and goes to a competitor you don't have any insight into what phone calls occurred what people's phone numbers are that's your company's database and if you allow the sales team to run them up or the customer support team it's just unprofessional be professional use open phone and we use it for things like event communication so we get one phone number but it can go to multiple people like a round robin thing we have a shared phone number do that for customer support and open phone is rated number one on g2 for customer satisfaction and you know i trust g2's ratings open phone it's ready it's affordable starts at just 13 bucks a month but twist listeners can get 20 off any plan for the first six months at openphone.com twist and if you have existing numbers with another service no problem easy peasy lemon squeezy open phone will port them over at no cost head to openphone.com twist to start your free trial and get 20 off

SPEAKER_02: now every week we ask people to fill out a form on mondays and this is the thing that i think has been

SPEAKER_03: a big surprise for both of us is that um we see a really high correlation between performance and

SPEAKER_02: people who fill out the weekly report explain what we ask people to tell us every week when they're in

SPEAKER_25: found university absolutely so we ask for just high level basics on the business they're one simple sentence did you add any co-founders or team members and then some metrics on the business of course so do you have um new users do you have new customers have you gotten new investment and then we ask them to share their wins with us as well and i think that question specifically allows us to see so much of what's going on behind the scenes and then really jump in and be able to be helpful to these businesses

SPEAKER_08: outside of those high level metrics yeah so explain your business in a sentence very hard to do what's really great you know i noticed with uh one of the companies um that we were investing in i won't say which one but the golf one that i fell in love with um you know they were um each week refining their

SPEAKER_14: simple sentence to explain what they did and when i looked at like uh the they had filled out eight of the 12 weeks uh 67 of their updates for us and i thought that was really great and um i watched their thinking change in that one simple sentence and if you can't crisply describe your startup it's probably because you don't understand your business or product yet which is fine you're in the product discovery phase uh we asked if you had a change in the number of founders that's an inflection point

SPEAKER_02: right if you go from two to three co-founders wow we spoke earlier about how important that is and then we also ask um is your product launched uh in beta and so that's a really interesting question as you said we asked basic numbers how many paying customers do you have how many users do you have users and customers obviously being two different things users are free free loaders that's fine uh none of us pay for instagram and then customers in the instagram analogy would be the advertisers how many customers do you have and then did anybody else invest so we want to know that too

SPEAKER_03: and you left out the most important part we have a check box that asks a question uh to each of

SPEAKER_02: the founders my understanding is 60 of them check yes for this very important question explain that

SPEAKER_25: question to everybody absolutely phrase it so we we phrase it as are you open to uh the friends and family round through launch which is the 25k investment we do i've heard you mention jason that you know not every founder has rich friends and family i certainly did not when i was a founder and so it's a really great privilege to to be able to offer that amount of money to these founders and be that first really vote of confidence for them yeah so we just asked very simply would you like to be

SPEAKER_08: considered for the 25 000 friends and family check from launch fund uh we do that at a million dollar valuation which is what you're probably your uncle would ask for your aunt or your rich parent or friend and uh as you mentioned we've done over 40 of those i think it's 46 now and um that's just an option for us really to get to know the company support them and then invest in the next two rounds as a venture capitalist owning 2.5 of a business that's a very small amount you really want to get your

SPEAKER_02: ownership to five to fifteen percent in the winners so it's just a starting point for us as a fund to get to know you get to join our founder slack and you get to be a launch company so founder university is best described for people who are wondering as a pre-accelerator it's something that comes before

SPEAKER_08: the launch accelerator tech stars uh neo uh sequoia's arc program and uh of course y combinator uh which is you know just the og amazing uh accelerator here in silicon valley so uh we have three companies today

SPEAKER_07: we're going to you have each one companies oh we're doing four today fantastic four companies yep

SPEAKER_14: and we do a two to three minute pitch in our programs founder university we do a two minute pitch uh and then at the accelerator we do a three minute pitch why do we do a two and a three

SPEAKER_08: founder university these companies are just in the product discovery phase finishing their product the accelerator they tend to have a little bit more going on in terms of products and go to market so we like a nice quick two minute pitch i call that the trailer of a startup what is the goal of the

SPEAKER_14: two minute pitch at founder university what is the goal of that two minute pitch and what should the person listening to it understand what are the basic things they should understand if the founder did

SPEAKER_25: their job absolutely so the the main goal is just to get another conversation you cannot introduce every character and every part of the story in two minutes so as long as you can get them on a call a zoom and in-person meeting you have achieved what you need to do achieve in that two minutes what we like to see covered is very short opening on the problem please don't go too far on that a lot of founders make that mistake early on we understand the problem we really want to look at that solution so show us that solution don't tell us about it get it on the screen bring it to life for us we definitely want to know about traction we would love to know about the team and then of course we want to make sure this is a venture scale business so if you can touch on your go to market strategy

SPEAKER_45: and that bottom up tam that's great if you don't have time for those i'd say definitely make sure you go through the solution the team and the traction first so here's the problem you can't

SPEAKER_08: get a taxi uh it's hard to find a taxi and get a ride here's the solution take out your phone open the uber app click uh and then uh here's the tam everybody who's trying to get from point a to point b uh public transit and you know cabs and and lincoln town cars and everything in between i just did uber in 60 i did it in probably 30 seconds uh you know pick a pick a random company kelly and i'll show you how easy this is pick a popular company we all know and i will do this for you for any company instacart they're big right now okay instacart they just went public fantastic um

SPEAKER_07: um you don't have time to go shopping for your groceries or you forgot three items from your cart

SPEAKER_14: take out your ipad put those in a cart and have somebody do the shopping for you and if they make a mistake and they're out of the type of ice cream you want they'll just text you and tell you which ice cream you want to substitute or if you don't want to substitute and then they'll be at

SPEAKER_03: your house in under two hours for ten dollars our go-to market is to go to um suburbs and uh you know cities are great places to do this and medium-sized uh supermarkets where they don't have the ability

SPEAKER_08: to build this technology for themselves like walmart does those are our ideal customers yeah and going

SPEAKER_25: back to your question about what the listener should try to get out of it you know really thinking about you know do you believe in this founding team do you believe in the problem they're solving with that solution and also do you believe in the business model that they're proposing for this you know that might change later on especially with early stage companies um but you can tell a lot about what the founder is thinking about and how they're approaching the problem from the two

SPEAKER_31: minutes and again as long as you think that there's something there it's always worth another

SPEAKER_17: conversation yeah and and people are investors are very busy as we discussed being able to give

SPEAKER_08: them a two minute pitch a 10 minute pitch and a 30 minute deep dive those are three different

SPEAKER_03: opportunities and you know different vcs and investors um have different you know tolerances some want to jump on a zoom and do the 10 minute call some want you to come to their office and do the 30 minute and spend an hour with you and you pitch for 20 30 minutes that's how we used to do it back in the day tons of questions you really get a feel for you um and some like to come to a demo day and see two minute three minute pitches and just pick their three favorites to go to a deeper meeting right

SPEAKER_02: uh so there's all different modalities here and um in my case when i said it's ten dollars you made a very good point like do you believe that business model i probably wouldn't believe that it's too much work for ten dollars right it takes half an hour to shop and half an hour to get the groceries to you and ten dollars an hour is below you know what uh a door dasher or a shopper instacart makes so that actually business model doesn't work and they've pursued advertising as their business model and maybe they'll they're a break even business so there you go like even this like little brief uh back and forth we did here as a test you can see the power of really concisely explaining your model in the early days and all the way to the instacart ipo and sometimes you don't even as an investor even need to believe it i don't need to believe in your business model perfectly because you can change that but i do believe the problem yeah anybody who's a parent

SPEAKER_03: you and i are both parents like we forgot something we had you know dad or mom brain we just forgot the three most important things or we ran out of the three most important things and we need to refresh and we don't want to make the ride like everybody knows that problem's real then it's just okay can you

SPEAKER_05: actually convince the supply and the demand side to get together in a marketplace stop what you're doing

SPEAKER_93: right now i got great news dot tech domains is giving twist listeners a new platform to show off their startups and that platform is this podcast this week in startups it's a new segment we're calling pitch j cow i want you to go to startups dot tech slash jason startups dot t-e-c-h slash jason to apply there's only one rule you have to have a dot tech domain name to get featured this week i received a great pitch from hive power dot tech that's h-i-v-e power dot tech which you can see in the video right now if you're watching hive power is a swiss startup they're working on transforming energy management and their software platform helps businesses optimize ev charging distribute energy more effectively and more energy prices have gotten out of control they're volatile so hive power is saving businesses money by optimizing energy efficiently like all these different times when you can get discounts on your energy it's a huge market and they got a great domain name check them out hive power dot tech and if you're interested in getting featured on this week in startups go to startups dot tech slash jason and apply today that's startups dot tech slash jason so let's have our first uh company

SPEAKER_05: go we're gonna see four companies and then i'll invest 25k in one of them right here on the spot because

SPEAKER_19: hey 25k is a small bet and we know these companies so let's get started all right first up we're

SPEAKER_25: going to have jason with newcomer games three two go i'm jason and today i'm introducing newcomer

SPEAKER_111: which unlocks language immersion for every learner everywhere meet mac he's a language learner with two main problems lack of motivation and lack of conversation opportunities he discovers newcomer a cross-platform story-driven video game that immerses learners in their target language mac's a beginner so he uses phrase building a supportive mechanism to help him easily communicate in his new language he transitions to intermediate mode to practice speaking his current task to ask this character's name in french he's unsure how to say this so he references his dictionary for a translation he tries speaking finally checking his input for corrections on kickstarter i crowdfunded over 24 000 dollars i have 7 000 people on the wait list and lastly i've had multiple newcomer gameplay posts getting above 10 000 upvotes on reddit newcomers key strength is contextualizing language learning better than other applications it's a new market segment that i call video game language immersion customers purchase newcomer for twenty dollars with a ten dollar monthly subscription granting ai-enabled features newcomers not only localized for but supports learning spanish french italian and english in two weeks i release a paid beta to 7 000 wait listed i'll reach 100 million arr with 833 000 yearly subscriptions which would be 1.5 percent of my tam i'm jason and i'm unlocking language immersion

SPEAKER_124: for every learner everywhere thank you well uh this is a creative idea it's duolingo meets nintendo

SPEAKER_14: which i love uh it's immersive uh my kids are on minecraft or uh roblox all the time they love these games and i think there is a huge opportunity the question i'll have for you is um and by the way great

SPEAKER_08: job presenting you you uh are you a first time founder i am a first time founder great and so things that are great about this pitch number one you showed the product and the product super compelling

SPEAKER_02: number two you showed a lot of traction um but not um traction that uh comes from a launched product but like sort of the precursors to traction uh founders love when they see a kickstarter or a patreon why that shows that you have customers who are so interested in this product they're willing

SPEAKER_08: to pay for it in advance you know who else had customers who love the product so much they were able

SPEAKER_132: to pay in advance jason what's the best example um best example and by the way maybe i think that's

SPEAKER_02: actually in terms of it's a very expensive product it's an incredibly it's in fact probably the second or third most considered purchase a person can make in their lives and it wasn't for college and it wasn't

SPEAKER_03: for a home it wasn't for a marriage or kids those are other massive considered decisions there's another

SPEAKER_140: considered decision it's not a vacation either vacations are very considered decisions what's a

SPEAKER_03: really considered decision of something you buy that you have for a long time that you use typically daily um that is unless you live in a city um you didn't say a car a car wow elon musk very famously sold hundreds of the tesla roadsters and then a thousand of the um model s signature models for the

SPEAKER_05: full price of the car in advance so you are following in elon's footsteps of having such a compelling product that people will do that and you showed the reddit votes now the reddit votes that seems like you know who cares not me i know the reddit audience is very sophisticated and i know understanding how to market on reddit or i won't even say market engage with the community on reddit is not easy these people are insane like these are hardcore people i know because some of them are fans of the

SPEAKER_144: podcast and if and the other podcast and if they don't like it they go crazy so your pitch was great

SPEAKER_78: i'm just gonna ask you one simple question which is um games are a hit based business uh and so you

SPEAKER_08: picked one modality of game it's kind of eight bitty kind of old school games is that the best idea in

SPEAKER_14: terms of taking this to market or have you considered taking an existing game and adding this as a plug in to a roblox let's say and then capturing that entire audience and teaching people in who are already

SPEAKER_02: in roblox how to speak another language yeah well i i think that there there certainly is the opportunity

SPEAKER_128: to make something like this similar to roblox um when i first started not similar to roblox and remember

SPEAKER_02: you always got to listen deeply to my question so it is is it a hit space business was my first question the second was have you considered uh integrating it into roblox not replacing roblox but integrating it into roblox so those are the two questions to try to answer those two okay so

SPEAKER_128: addressing the first question um i actually don't really consider what i'm making i don't i don't

SPEAKER_111: consider that i'm necessarily in the the hit space business i consider myself in the the language learning industry and not necessarily the gaming industry and i strongly believe that people using my product are are language learners that um want to use it to actively practice using their second language so i think that there's always going to be a stream of people learning a second language whether

SPEAKER_151: it be they need to learn a second language so the game doesn't matter what matters is they want to learn

SPEAKER_03: and it's more fun to learn in any game so the game is not the most important part here yeah the game is

SPEAKER_111: not the primary focus but okay yeah now to the second question um i mean yeah i mean i think something like this could be could be built on roblox potentially i just in terms of my my own personal experience with the newcomer um i immediately defaulted to building this in 2d with pixel art because it's just really easy to scale pixel art and i guess i wonder how easy it would be to scale a game like this on roblox considering i know that roblox is is 3d so um it was a strategic choice to

SPEAKER_14: basically be able to scale the game quicker so i'm immediately kelly here getting to the scale of the business right it's pretty clear that there's something here because you have people paying for it in advance you have a kickstarter so i'm immediately trying to think um how big can this get and is there a way to accelerate the growth venture capital and raising money from venture capitalists and seed funds is about building large businesses and building them quickly speed matters and the scale matters in order to have great outcomes for our lps the investors who give us money that then give to you jason we need to find founders who are going to build very large businesses so that's great that you had a path to 100 million it takes 800 000 customers that's great that you're thinking that big fantastic and it's actually kind of believable right like sure why couldn't you get

SPEAKER_08: to 800 000 paid subs we've seen other people get to you know millions of paid subs for products

SPEAKER_14: like com.com or you know uh hundreds of thousands of subs so it's a believable story uh in that regard uh and you're thinking big but then we're thinking hey accelerant if you became popular and there are already you know 10 million 20 million 30 million people playing a certain game and that game

SPEAKER_05: has plugins if you know now you get uh one percent of those people to start playing the game and and becoming subscribers and you know it's it's just a go-to-market strategy like your go-to-market

SPEAKER_02: strategy of kickstarter and you go to market strategy of reddit okay well done uh let's get

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SPEAKER_108: fdic all right next we have matthew with scrumly all right three two go hi i'm matthew and our company is

SPEAKER_163: scrumly an ai planning coach that helps teams maximize performance with over 200 000 people already being laid off in 2023 organizations are running lean these teams have gaps and we built scrumly to fill them with scrumly's interactive planning and ai-powered coaching teams can easily plan tasks and get real time insights now they can have all the benefits of facilitator without the overhead to date we've launched our beta and implemented it at five organizations serving a total of 27 team members our business model is sas we offer a 30-day free trial and then 15 a month per user teams often using km tools or spreadsheets for planning however these tools require a manager to maintain them and provide guidance scrumly complements these tools acting as a layer on top supporting teams as the facilitator our marketing strategies are focused around four pieces paid media cold outreach and tailored content and organic network effects support these flattening organizations recently shopify revealed average meeting costs exceeds 1300 and our vision is to help teams collaborate asynchronously saving them time and money if we focus on the 485 000 companies using scrum today our total addressable market is 1.1 billion dollars a year and that's just the initial niche market we also have the team to execute like a certified scrum master with over a decade of delivery experience dave is a lead engineer with over eight years of product engineering experience and i'm a creative director with 15 years of brand and product design experience and the question we are answering is what if your pm tool came with pm scrumly an ai planning coach that helps teams maximize performance reduce costs prevent burnout and set expectations thank you so much okay great uh presentation

SPEAKER_14: very tight uh you're reading from a script which i don't advise so always um take this one piece of advice um so you don't sound like you're on a script which is to let the slide be your guide when the slide changes just organically read what's on the slide if you get into that monotone where you're reading a script

SPEAKER_02: we can kind of tell this is a very tactical tiny note for you on presentations and people tend to zone out because they're like well i'm just reading the screen alongside it and you're just like a voiceover actor we want to actually hear the founder talking in a normal voice and so you're it wasn't bad in

SPEAKER_03: any way but it could be better if you're just more natural and so it will go much smoother if you just describe it um i believe what you're saying i believe there is a market for this but you didn't give an example and so um i think when you showed that screen moving around and it was kind of you know either

SPEAKER_08: changing people's tasks or priorities or i'm not sure exactly what was happening they're giving an example here the ai sees that this person um has you know time on their schedule and reassigns this automatically this person sees this product this these two things are behind schedule and it asks everybody in the group why are these two things behind schedule so we're training the ai on these conversations that typically occur in scrum meetings in project management and then doing this and the questions so that that's where you know one of my rules those are two of my rules and presenting um one of them is let the slide be your guide don't use the script slide comes up it should trigger in you as the founder what to talk about and it's okay to you know have ums and ahs in terms of like this podcast the fact that i might misspeak on a podcast and it's not scripted is why people love podcasts they love that dynamism if podcasts were people just reading position papers and from a script you'd be like i'll just read that right so the ums the ahs a little bit of awkwardness a miss slide or a transition that's okay it's just like us getting to know your personality so slide be your guide and then examples matter two very important rules of presenting a really great example here would be what what's what's an example you've seen your software do that you said wow this is kind of cool is there is there an awesome moment or what's the most awesome moment you've seen ai do

SPEAKER_14: as a product manager because i believe product management is a skill in ai could do right that

SPEAKER_140: doesn't seem crazy so what's an example you've seen already yeah implementing it in um delivery teams

SPEAKER_163: what we've seen is that our ai can actually call the personnel out and say this person is looking heavy or impacted and then also call the person that might benefit from having more tasks potentially put on their plate so it really allows for that specificity and using the data that we have in those tables to let you know kind of how to shuffle things around and optimize things

SPEAKER_17: and this is a co-pilot that exists uh inside of jira or is it you're building project management software

SPEAKER_03: as well how do you look at that are you taking them on or are you adding a product to their platforms

SPEAKER_163: the latter we're going to be a layer on top of the existing project management tools out there i think there's a level of complexity there that people experience when they use jira and click up and they're not very focused on sprints necessarily even though they have some of those features our ai is going to be a complement to those and allow people to hone in on agile methodologies

SPEAKER_22: and then finally uh you had um a slide i think you have two co-founders so there's three of you is

SPEAKER_173: that correct that's correct uh dave uh product engineer and then uh blake which is he's a scrum master with over 10 years of experience and then what are your what's your skill set so you got the

SPEAKER_17: person who under who is actually uses this product you got the engineer and then what's your skill set

SPEAKER_173: my background 15 years in the product brand and product design space got it uh and uh in particular we all use it as managers and executives in our companies uh with with a lot of the ships currently

SPEAKER_163: ongoing we were seeing people in roles lead roles taking on extra responsibilities and so the product in some to some extent is designed through our experience great so kelly and i you you and i talked

SPEAKER_08: earlier about like what is the team composition here and here you have like a pretty great team composition and they're building a product that they want it's an itch that they want to scratch so those are all things going for the startup so uh well done matthew great job thanks jason thank you so much

SPEAKER_108: okay who's next kelly all right next up we have jared with homescore all right three two go hi i'm

SPEAKER_192: jared the ceo of homescore personalized report card for your ownership journey so josh and dana are an

SPEAKER_194: anxious couple looking to buy their first property they start their journey by researching over 95 listings and doing 18 different tours but it's really difficult to know what it's like to live and own a specific property homescore is your personalized ai home management platform for a successful ownership journey all powered by verifiable first-party data josh and dana use homescore to upload all the relevant documents they've accumulated for the four homes they're seriously considering additionally our personalized intake quiz illuminates insights that matter most to their lifestyle like which home is best for entertaining or if a property is infant safe josh can also dive deeper into let's say air conditioning issues using our native ai chat we meet homeowners during the buying process but our vision is to have an ongoing relationship for their entire ownership journey we have 75 home buyers and owners on the waitlist and are planning to go live within the next six weeks we plan to start with a three dollar per month price point for our beta home buyer customers and we'll

SPEAKER_196: move to ten dollars a month and launch our home owner pricing when we add additional document analysis features

SPEAKER_194: we see homescores competition as contractor marketplaces and some of these upstart home binder solutions our go-to-market strategy will focus on seo content and online community participation then we plan to scale with digital ads we'll reach 10 million in arr by capturing only 0.5 percent of the market and 100 million with only 5 our initial audiences are 11 million serious home buyers and 25 million recent home owners myself and charat are the pb and j founder combination i've built and launched a lot of culturally relevant brands and products and charat has a deep ai and machine learning experience

SPEAKER_02: and that's home score okay and home score is a personalized report card for your ownership journey a bit of a mouthful um so it's a report card we can take out the word personalized it's a report card for your home so um a report card is how your home is doing do this is to help people buy a home or after they've bought a home understand the value of their home what what what problem are we really solving here because a report card for your home is like a description of something but it's not exactly a problem so what's the customer and what's their

SPEAKER_196: problem is it in the selection of a home so you when you're looking at zillow you get this massive cvs receipt of everything that it has in it a lot of it is third party information what we're doing is adding first party data you're collecting hoa documents pictures of the home uh you know other

SPEAKER_08: again not my question so you're describing what's wrong with zillow always like not a great way to pitch a business best way to pitch a business what is the problem the customer has and how do you what are you solving for there so listen one more time deeply to my question is this for people who

SPEAKER_07: to help people make a better buying decision for their home or to maintain their home in some

SPEAKER_196: better way who's the customer what's their problem so it's to buy a home that's our initial audience we then will focus on homeowners as we get a lot of that first party information got it okay

SPEAKER_08: so you want to help me buy a home and so the way you're going to help me buying a home is by

SPEAKER_02: inputting all the documents i get the floor plan the zillow listing the reddit listing the materials maybe the home inspection i put that into your ai and it tells me buy or don't buy or what what does

SPEAKER_196: it tell me it tells you just you're someone that has a new infant and is there you know in the inspection report if there's issues with mold it'll kind of compare that to the other insights that we've gathered and give you a recommendation based on is this the right fit for your needs got it

SPEAKER_03: uh people buy homes pretty infrequently they tend to live in them for you know sometimes the their entire lives so i wonder if the market of people who buy a home one time uh if you haven't what we call in the industry or what i call the e-harmony problem e-harmony helps you find a spouse if they do the job they've lost you as a customer so the better they are at solving your problem finding a spouse uh and finding a long-term spouse they lose you as a customer so i'm curious why you picked home buyers as opposed to say real estate uh investors um or something a little bit more um you know somebody who could pay more money

SPEAKER_08: and maybe cares about more granularity maybe making less of an emotional decision and somebody who's going to be making this decision every week or every month when they buy properties or every quarter so have you thought about those two different markets and the e-harmony problem yeah we we did

SPEAKER_196: think about a couple of different markets and you know we see that once you get uh you know appliance data you can look at recalls once you look at contractor data you can make decisions on stability of a porch for example so for us we saw that reaching a home buyer at when they're obsessed with that process was advantageous to minimize churn for homeowners so therefore you can manage you know the various projects that you're doing and at some point down the road would be relevant for contractors and and investors as well so we would be wanting to have a recurring relationship

SPEAKER_08: for homeowners as well and the reoccurring relationship would be the maintenance of the home so what you're really doing is not a report card on the home what you're really doing is help me um make a better buying decision and manage this asset uh better yes so it's a tool for buying and managing your greatest asset your home yeah we're getting you when you're obsessed with the home

SPEAKER_196: buying process because that's when you're each sleeping and breathing and stressed out about it scanning everything uh and then that way we make it more frictionless you mentioned like the home

SPEAKER_222: book did you say a home book or an estate book as a what's it called there's some of these home binder solutions where you home binders yes what is a explain what a home binder is to me so it's you upload a bunch

SPEAKER_196: of documents and it's just kind of your repository of pdfs it's great kind of a dumb interface but we're looking to inject ai into that and make it searchable and smart and relevant yeah so this is a

SPEAKER_08: very interesting moment in your talk that goes by really fast the home binder um kelly is a new home buy homeowner correct kelly correct and i own a couple of properties now three properties and i am

SPEAKER_03: using notion um to make home manuals right for all the stuff so i'm putting all that stuff into and

SPEAKER_08: when we bought our home the person who bought it gave us like a google drive with some documents in it and they had a home and then we bought our ski house they gave us a home book uh which was just a book of like a bunch of the stuff that they had there so i actually think um you know the home book of every home is really interesting so you are in the product market phase uh product market fit phase here you're still trying to figure out what the the product is correct yes yeah we're working to develop our our v2 after the mvp yeah and so even with the mvp i wonder if like there seems to be two m

SPEAKER_14: there seems to be two products here and i don't know what the overlap is going to be but the product to help you buy the home and the product to help you maintain the home i like the maintain the home product better because that's something you would pay for every year so kelly you bought a home

SPEAKER_229: do you have a home book i don't and i have been desperate to get one for example we've got a refrigerator that needs a filter replaced and i just don't want to have to google it to find where to

SPEAKER_45: buy the right filter and i wish i you know that information is in my home inspection if i would have just uploaded that somewhere it should tell me where to do it and take my money interesting so this is i

SPEAKER_14: think really interesting um you know for you to think about um jarred on your journey your your ai can apply to both of these processes we see a lot of people going after the home buying space and the speculators that's you know if there's tools to be built zillow and reddit really are going to help you with that and we see very low and then for people who are in the speculation and airbnb market there's a lot of startups now emerging to help you make buying decisions there but i see very few in fact i've seen none of the maintain your home we we did have an investment in a company i think it was called butter um and they were kind of trying to make a virtual real estate manager so rich people

SPEAKER_08: have estate managers if they have multiple properties they pay them whatever 100 000 a year 150 000 a year if they're full-time to just go between four or five estates and make sure everything's perfect right and maintained um but that's out of reach for most people so they were trying to abstract that and make it um a little bit uh different but this idea there's something there in the maintaining the

SPEAKER_03: home after you buy it um and like that's really interesting so congratulations on that i wonder if the person selling the home if they had this book and they shared it with people if that would help sell

SPEAKER_236: the home so that's where we want to get to yeah so there's kind of an immutable record i uh know now

SPEAKER_03: like as i'm gonna uh sell our property in um san francisco that we don't use anymore that was our office previously i'm trying to put all that information in and then i would like to just give the google drive or a notion or coda instance and just say to the person here um is uh a notion instance here's a coda instance and if you're buying it here's all the information here's the security cameras

SPEAKER_02: here's here's the you know the hvac here's the washer dryer here's the every maintenance record so

SPEAKER_05: you're on to something and i really love your idea and um it's early but i i think you do have to make that key decision because startups are can't be doing two or three different things i was talking about airbnb last night they have they added a second business experiences you know and they've been at this for 10 years plus and they're global they have two you're going to start with two i always like the idea of starting with one and nailing one so either the buying or the maintaining two different markets i think maintaining is a hundred percent of the market and buying is three million transactions that occur

SPEAKER_03: a year i'd rather see you go for the 70 million people who own homes is is there 70 million households

SPEAKER_08: in the united states i think um so i'd rather see you go after the 70 million then the three that turnover every year well done jaron thank you that's just one person's opinion okay kelly one more let's

SPEAKER_37: go all right phoenix you are our last to pitch today phoenix is with fitted in three to go okay hey jason

SPEAKER_245: i'm phoenix and i co-founded fitted we help gen z discover buy and share outfits fitted started when my friend emma realized our generation needs a social shopping platform where she wouldn't have to learn learn about the roman empire fashion needs a dedicated space to exist so we built that space whether she's going to pilates or grabbing drinks emma can share photos and details of her daily outfits categorize them based on the day occasion and weather and build a virtual lookbook for her and her friends with our library of outfits our ai stylist fiona will make sure emma looks her best so she can feel her best our alpha has attracted over 1300 users who have shared thousands of outfits and people are obsessed with the 15 daily retention rate and 40 weekly retention the fits are fitting we're a low-stakes space for creativity culture and commerce we're making fit check shoppable and will take about 20 of gmv the fit checks also train fiona plus which will be 4.99 a month our competitors are social apps or shopping apps fitted as a social app with a native checkout experience giving gen z the social validation around what to wear and the one click shopping experience we want while our current growth has been word of mouth our go-to-market strategy is building college ambassadors and onboarding creators with brands native checkout is coming soon next year we'll add generative try-on so you can see your favorite pants with your friend's shirt and being apple native means ready to help you shop with your friends on apple vision pro with a 20 take rate we need a hundred thousand users and 50 million gmv to hit 10 million in revenue to hit 100 million we need a million users and 500 million gmv we've been bootstrapping and went full-time end of september we're excited to leave the matrix and enter the arena so download fit in the app store today share your fit check with your friends and stay to check the fits okay well done

SPEAKER_08: it's a consumer product the behavioral uh loop here is i share my outfit and i get ai feedback on how to make it look better or i get feedback from my friends on am i fit or not both kind of like hot or not fit fit or not so what's the primary behavioral loop here what are most people doing because it really is two different behaviors yeah so um as a as our slogan

SPEAKER_245: implies you come for the fit check um you it's a low-stakes space to share your outfit with your friends over time as you get that feedback and build up that content library of outfits um fiona will learn your preferences and then you'll be able to get that feedback from our ai stylus and

SPEAKER_03: your friends as we build that have you built the ai stylus yet or is that like kind of the ultimate dream and you're telling us the 2.0 product that's coming down the road yeah fiona's in the app right

SPEAKER_245: now um we just need to do some fine tuning without llms to actually get it to know your preferences better

SPEAKER_17: which is part of the content flywheel so you're actually doing a fit check with your friends

SPEAKER_14: and fiona yeah the ai stylist um and so then your friends and is that feedback in one thread or is it

SPEAKER_245: two separate behaviors yeah so you get the feedback in like a feed from your friends you get to see your outfit as well as your friend's outfit and then we have a separate tab in our messages where you can talk to fiona ask her what your favorite what your most liked outfit was what you wore last week what you

SPEAKER_02: wore uh when it was rainy a couple days ago so fiona fiona's an agent that sees all this stuff and then

SPEAKER_05: you can have a private conversation with her and say hey what should i wear tonight i'm going on a date what should i wear tonight uh for lunch i have a bit important business i'm i'm doing a job interview tomorrow fiona can look through theoretically your entire fit checks and as you put more fit checks in there she says hey your friends love this for business and they've responded this was business stuff so over five years of putting fit checks in it might say hey you know you look great in this blazer and jeans combo everybody said that looks great business casual you know maybe think about that one

SPEAKER_08: that's the the concept here um and what fit check what do i what is the behavior i like uh the the fit check or do you prompt me to say oh you know kelly i love your tie-dye shirt and whatever and that's super cool and retro uh and then she's like oh i love your plain polo shirt that looks really crisp and whatever like how do you structure or format the feedback from your friends on are you fit or is it fit or not where it's just like either swipe left or right up or down yeah what's the device what's

SPEAKER_245: the behavioral device here yeah so right now you just go you take your outfit picture take your fit

SPEAKER_14: check um no no you keep saying get your fit check i'm asking you what is the behavioral device there is it a like is it a heart is it prompted feedback okay yeah yeah what does that mean because you're

SPEAKER_02: using a term that i've heard the term fit check but i'm trying to get at is what is the behavioral loop what do i do in the app what is the action that i take so i just described kelly's tie-dye kelly puts

SPEAKER_274: the tie-dye shirt now what do i do as her friend yeah don't say don't say fit check what do i do is

SPEAKER_253: it a comment is it a like is it a retweet what is the device yeah you can do all three you can like

SPEAKER_245: kelly's outfit um you can save it into your own uh look book that you've amassed from all your friends um and you can also type in like hey kelly i really like that shirt so there's no new device

SPEAKER_14: here you're just copying what is kind of the best practice on twitter let's say or facebook bookmark like

SPEAKER_03: comment interesting um i think that how is that going so far how how many times do people uh how many fit

SPEAKER_05: checks are occurring a day and what's the average response to those fit checks what's the engagement

SPEAKER_245: like yeah so right now we have about 1300 people on the app uh 20 of people come on every day uh just to see the outfits i think of that number a couple of hundred people 200 people want to see

SPEAKER_05: the outfits and so how many people share an outfit of the thousand users you have 200 are active so of the 200 active users every day how many share an outfit i believe that number is around like

SPEAKER_245: 10 to 20 of those 200 people um following the standard like parade of principle 28 year so you have 30

SPEAKER_08: people share an outfit a day and how how much feedback do they each get i guess uh a good bit with their

SPEAKER_245: likes um so far we've had like a good network on trying to attack colleges so it's just like they're a small group of friends um a couple likes here and there a few i see everybody's or do i just only do

SPEAKER_08: i only share with my friends my circle or does everybody get to see a main feed there are two

SPEAKER_287: feeds so there's a feed with just your friends and then there's a feed with everyone on the app

SPEAKER_245: is this the first social app you've built uh technically not uh me and emma built another app in college called uh atlas which is like gen z yelp unfortunately we had to shut down because of covid but it was a really great experience awesome so the reason i'm going into all these details is

SPEAKER_07: i'm trying to figure out if you actually understand social and if there's something unique here um and

SPEAKER_14: you know you do understand social that's why i said hmm i wonder if they've done this before social apps are very unique they have there are certain devices that really work and it's you know very um particular which things drive engagement and which don't and then getting the flywheel started the cold start problem super important and so i think it's a very tactical important uh obsessive compulsive approach you need to have to actually get a community started it sounds like you've got a good start it sounds you actually have a good plan to do it on campuses and to you know just get a group

SPEAKER_08: of people and i wonder about the device you know fit check great i wonder if prompting people and people

SPEAKER_14: saying you know um love it like it you gotta be careful because you don't want people to get smashed and you know destroyed over their outfit but you know somebody being able to say like meh you know like there might be some clever ways to kind of prompt people where they don't have to type a comment because typing a comment means i have to think it through but if you had five vectors cute meh um you know try again i'm not sure what it is i keep working you know there might be some fun clever ways to say you know uh like but don't love uh and then you it would prompt you if i kick like but don't love what would you improve you know so like there might be ways to you know structure this to make it more interesting have you thought of like a new device other than bookmark like comment not yet

SPEAKER_245: but uh that's really good feedback we'll definitely take that back to the drawing board

SPEAKER_14: yeah and then i mean giving people permission to be candid uh you know it's another kind of interesting device so like you know roast my outfit be brutal permission granted to be candid please be candid you know and you could i think being a little cheeky could be interesting uh being a

SPEAKER_03: little you know uh more uh the uh having a little more fun in the app is what i would say so like hot

SPEAKER_05: or not had a playfulness to it that you know made it super addicting um and then tinder stole that and made it into a dating app so here i wonder if swiping left or right on it love it like it you know hate it or not for me you know there's something there that could make this even more fun and then allowing people to upload other people's outfits and comment on them could also be a breakout for you so if i take jennifer aniston's outfit that she wore on her date with you know some famous venture capital that was in the deli mall this week uh and i you know you're like hey what do you think of this vc's outfit what do you think of this person's outfit some famous person uh then you don't have to worry about that cold store problem you're putting in 10 outfits that you found on the internet that were iconic you could take a presidential you could take vivek uh you know um had some outfit

SPEAKER_08: he wore the other day uh you know brown shoes with a blue suit i was talking to somebody on twitter about brown shoes and and blue suits and they didn't like that combination somebody posted a picture of vivek like okay yeah let's talk about the presidential candidates so i really you know i like where you're

SPEAKER_14: going with this um uh and i like the little ai sprinkle but i think getting that device is kind of interesting and then having 20 people who really understand fashion and seeding the app with them

SPEAKER_08: um they don't necessarily be stylists but they just need to be opinionated cheeky people the reddit team they all created fake accounts i'm not advising you to create fake accounts but they created fake

SPEAKER_14: accounts to kind of get the cold start problem there are ways to solve the cold start problem so i'm

SPEAKER_02: just giving you a couple of them you know putting in 20 outfits that you saw today or having you know these these street team people your ambassador program on the college campus having somebody go around and ask people can i take a picture of your outfit uh for my social app that you know gives feedback on and then they hand them a card with the qr code of the app uh i love your outfit can i take a picture of and share it uh on fitted um where people give feedback on great outfits and fit checks

SPEAKER_03: that's kind of cool so yeah you know like the street team method and then this is where you know you have a great idea is when investors um or users have a lot of i punch-ups for you i have a lot of experience in consumer apps and um you know there was confetti inside of uh robin hood when you made a trade it's

SPEAKER_230: a little tiny thing people just look up robin hood confetti people got upset about it like oh my god

SPEAKER_08: you're making it you know too much fun to invest and i'm like really i mean people give people high fives when they bet on blackjack i don't understand why robin hood putting confetti is a problem but anyway um i think a little more playfulness a little more fun and then really that love your street team idea so there was a new york times style section would do like fashion on the street and there is um

SPEAKER_03: the guy on tick tock who just runs up to people in nice cars and says like what do you do for a living

SPEAKER_14: yeah daniel mac became very famous yeah so there's an equivalent to that for you and maybe it's a tick tock channel where it's like the fitted fit check and so i i'm immediately going to the behavior in your app and then the go-to market strategy i think having a tick tock where you just had somebody who was fearless going through cities and videotaping people be like i love your outfit can i take a you

SPEAKER_03: know uh who's it by or you know well you know i love your outfit this isn't this like um there's this guy who is uh a comedian who runs around on the street with celebrities and um yeah he's like

SPEAKER_144: oh do you do you love john oliver and people are like who oh yeah he's like right over his shoulder he runs around you know like ma'am for a dollar tell me like what's it like to be a new york elitist and they're like it's great they just take the dollar i forgot that guy's name

SPEAKER_310: but he's hilarious um anyway no it's really sharp feedback um because a lot of that a lot of fashion

SPEAKER_245: and shopping for outfits is like reinforcing your personal and social identity so building those like mechanisms and feedback loops within fitted uh to continue reinforcing like that self-expression has a really good notion right there and in terms of like the tick tock marketing um emma has like 12 000 followers on tick tock and now that we're going full time she's going to be doing a lot of that content marketing or going around manhattan and saying like hey like i like the outfit where is it from um and you know trying to get that social motion billy on the street is the guy who does

SPEAKER_14: the the street stuff so i think i'm just a long way of saying consumer is lightning in a bottle and i don't know that you have lightning in a bottle yet but i could see lightning uh you know going into your bottle here so trying to give you permission to have fun with it be controversial you know dave port and i everybody knows the rules one bite of pizza and then he takes like he proceeds to take six bites of pizza and like when you first watch it you're like you just broke the first rule

SPEAKER_93: like everybody knows the rules one bite and it's like on dave wait a second dave you just took three or four bites wait how is that the rule that's the kind of playful marketing and then dave portnoy

SPEAKER_317: just doing pizza reviews like people lose their mind yeah yeah but it's like i don't know what

SPEAKER_93: percentage of barstool is people watching him interact on the street with that but man there is

SPEAKER_08: something about that man on the street is the term they use uh forgive the gender specificity of that but man on the street is a um a very popular device uh for hundreds of years and uh you could really smash it and there's always chaos right and new york city is the absolute best place to do that because chaos will ensue i don't recommend doing it in san francisco because yeah you're gonna just

SPEAKER_02: get assaulted and robbed no they'll steal your camera but great job all right well done i love all four of these companies kelly do this to me every time um you can drop off the video and kelly and i

SPEAKER_07: will have our little deliberation here so let's talk about these four companies and what the attributes

SPEAKER_08: are that investors will like about each one uh we'll go through the four companies and uh maybe just

SPEAKER_14: give me your i always like to challenge my team your description of each company in one sentence you see

SPEAKER_07: me do this all the time kelly now it's your turn tell me the first company and your one sentence crisp

SPEAKER_25: description okay so based on this discussion yeah yeah so newcomer games is a let me see a video game

SPEAKER_124: to learn and practice languages okay uh it's duolingo in video game format uh so uh looks like the person

SPEAKER_08: can execute uh looks like they have early product market fit and there's definitely consumer demand and there are equivalents of that business in the real world language learning has always been

SPEAKER_14: uh a mid-sized business um it could easily get to tens of millions not easily nothing's easy but it could get i could see it getting to millions and then tens of millions in revenue and that for us as seed investors is enough to maybe want to make the bet uh second company all right so scrumly i

SPEAKER_30: would say is a company that is removing the scrum master by using ai planning okay ai scrum masters um yeah

SPEAKER_03: replace your product manager with ai uh this makes a lot of sense to me you know people are uh restrained

SPEAKER_02: in terms of costs certain positions are going to just go away in the future is the product manager scrum master actual job function going to go away will that be like an operator a telephone operator and we just won't exist or receptionist or cashiers which are quickly going away the idea of like a cashier at mcdonald's is going to be like what why would i talk to the

SPEAKER_14: cashier that's annoying it's going to go to the kiosk uh so i like the idea i believe the idea and a really good team so you know the team there is i think really compelling to me whereas their product progress is very early so you know you you see different things early on for the first company duolingo for games duolingo in games they seem to have a lot of product progress uh and then in this one we see a lot of team progress uh but the product's a little bit further behind just how

SPEAKER_25: great the team is so that's good you know like both of those next one all right next is home score and i would actually say that they help you manage your home yeah great see now you're saying it's

SPEAKER_07: simpler than the founder it's very easy for you to describe a founder's company it's easier for you

SPEAKER_14: to do it than the company and it's easiest for the customer to do it so when you build a company

SPEAKER_333: you should just say to your customers what is founder university and they say oh it's a course on how

SPEAKER_14: to start a company like we would be like oh it's a 12 week but we'd be describing all this stuff and we give 25k and they'd be like it's a it's a they teach you how to start a company so like our tagline

SPEAKER_333: for founding university should be we'll teach you how to start a company the end like your customers

SPEAKER_62: describe your product better than you and your investor if they're you know good at what they do

SPEAKER_03: should be able to describe your business better than a founder and for founders that's super humbling why i always like ask your customers to describe your company right because they always focus on the benefit that they get not the how the sausage is made correct yes and the last one our last one

SPEAKER_45: here is fitted which is a social app to share your outfits and make sure you're not going to look silly

SPEAKER_03: okay great um and so you know we look at each of these and we have to ask ourselves is it a great team all four cases these look like really great teams um is it a real problem in the

SPEAKER_05: world or four are real problems managing your home uh making sure you look good in your clothes you know getting that fit check looking good and because we see analogies to both of those things in the real world people hire language coaches they use duolingo they used to do rosetta stone people hire stylists

SPEAKER_08: people hire house managers or estate managers to manage their homes and people hire pms and and

SPEAKER_14: scrum masters so all that exists in the world so we know there's a market for it and we know that there's always like the question then becomes are these better solutions are these good teams

SPEAKER_02: so in all four we have checked all those boxes you know this is the cream of the crop that you're presenting to me so for an early stage bet of 25k all four of these qualify so then you know the question then becomes are they venture scale businesses and i believe all of them you know

SPEAKER_14: can get to millions of dollars in revenue and so when i feel they can get to millions of dollars in revenue i actually don't worry too much about the hundred million because founders who can get to

SPEAKER_02: millions in revenue they typically get a bit frisky and frustrated that they're not a tens of millions and then they add to their product so a lot of vcs get obsessive kelly about oh you know is this

SPEAKER_00: venture scale i don't know if it's venture scale when you're early early early early stage like we

SPEAKER_02: are pre-incorporation of the company and at the incorporation you know years zero one two and three we get in at such a modest valuation typically low millions of dollars like y combinator and arc and

SPEAKER_03: you know other you know accelerators do we can be a bit more frisky a 50 million or 150 million dollar outcome for us could be a great investment so i like all four i think all four will get to could get to millions of uh millions to tens of millions in revenue now do they get to billions like uber or tens of billions like uber we'll see you know that's really hard to do that that's lightning

SPEAKER_05: in a bottle for sure uh but i like all four and so if you ask me uh i would probably invest in all four which one was your favorite which one do you think will get the biggest return for our lps that's always the question we should ask ourselves what's going to get the biggest return for our lps

SPEAKER_229: because we work for them too absolutely i'm a little torn on this one i would say

SPEAKER_25: either a thought process yeah absolutely so with scrumly i love it because it's a problem that companies are facing right now and i see this i was actually certified as a scrum master and so a lot of my scrum friends are seeing where they used to manage two to three teams now they have six or eight and they are struggling and they might not exist at all in that role it's a very expensive role so i think that the fact that they're building on top of the existing tools and then helping to eliminate the human work is you know a great start to planning a really good business that that can grow and scale in this exact moment um i really also like newcomer games and i don't have as much personal experience on the consumer side with my own startup and things but i really love that um you can start with this niche that are obsessed with these games and the way they look and it's really nostalgic for for folks our age i think um you know kind of seeing that that 2d version and you are building a skill set for them and people are happy to pay for that type of a tool so i think there's really

SPEAKER_341: something there as well okay um i you know have uh i love consumer products i think fitted is you know

SPEAKER_124: got the chance to be pinterest or instagram like i could see that you know being lightning in a bottle it

SPEAKER_08: might have the lowest percentage chance of the other companies but it could have a very big outcome chance uh and um you know scrum ai makes total sense to me the home book makes total sense to me and of course the language makes total sense to me so um i think i'll just invest in all four so once again you've presented me with four entrees and i just ordered all four of them so hey here we go just give each one 25k and let's see if we can help them uh raise their next round or hopefully you know maybe if there's an accelerator watching who wants to join me and kelly in growing these companies we like to work with other seed funds we'd like to work with other accelerators we're not sharp elbowed i encourage other people who are sharp elbowed in the ecosystem to maybe be more collaborative with other

SPEAKER_144: people and that's coming from me i'm a lunatic and i'm telling everybody you know these these startups

SPEAKER_03: need a lot of help and so you know if they can go to one or two accelerators or go to founding

SPEAKER_02: university then accelerator or seed fund wants to jump in and give them a 250k check all good you know we'll introduce you to any of our companies we want to see more people who have great intention on the cap table would love to see one of these companies go to tech stars one of them go to neo one of them go to y combinator one of them go to launch if that that would be an amazing outcome for for us if uh you know they went to all different places and got all kinds of different help and if there's a seed fund

SPEAKER_03: out there that likes to put 100k or 250k into a company uh kelly at launch.co jason at launch.co you can email us for an intro or you can reach out to the founders directly if you'd like to come to

SPEAKER_08: founder university founder dot university apply apply apply apply and keep applying and then we email

SPEAKER_03: that list um content from time to time and we email that list who we're investing in so if you join the fat if you go to founder.university can they join our mailing list there as well is the sub stack listed there i wonder if we did that yet we have i know we have a founder university sub stack and we

SPEAKER_08: have a founder university twitter x handle let's put into our show notes uh all of this and let's just make sure founder.university has a sign up for the sub stack it does if you it does okay so go to founder.university there's a dot university domain apply to the program but also from there sign up for all of our different social channels but most of all sign up for the email because we're going to start sending content there uh all right it's been another great episode kelly a wonderful job um you

SPEAKER_03: impression doing a great job on founder university 2 000 applicants 450 people attended 220 teams i think 200 you know 250 teams each time is the right number which means 10 000 applications a year resulting in a thousand people coming to the program a year and we invest in let's say out of the gate during the program 10 of those 100 investments a year 2.5 million a year in those 25k checks and some number of them so that's kind of the marching orders over the next three years let's invest 300 times 25k checks 7.5 million dollars and see if we can be the first check into a lot of companies and hey if we do 300

SPEAKER_02: of those and we hit one unicorn but one it will have been a 3x fund so just so you are thinking the right way 300 companies and then 2.5 ownership we get cut in half along the way but we might keep our percentage because we like to keep investing so let's uh you know just assume we own i don't know 1.5

SPEAKER_08: percent if one out of 300 become a unicorn and our 1.5 percent becomes worth let's say it's a 22 billion dollar company 30 million dollars 30 million dollars 7.5 invested 30 million that's a 4x fund a 4x fund means we have returned four times the capital that would put us in the top quartile top 10 percent of venture funds in the world we need but one out of 300 to become a unicorn uh out of

SPEAKER_14: founder university investments over the next three years it's a ton of work i thank you for doing it the founders thank you for doing it but you need to start thinking like i do about the lp side of the business and then we have to prove this model works we're doing something new nobody's ever done this 25k check at scale it is a new product in venture capital it's part of the launch fund four you can read about launch fund for launch.co memo this is a new thing that we're doing that nobody's

SPEAKER_08: ever done before and i think it's going to become um you know like a really great i'm sure a lot of people will copy it which is fine with me but i think this founder university program is really going to help a lot of founders and that's what it's all about okay kelly great job thank you so

SPEAKER_37: much jason so glad to be here and please apply to founder u we would love to have you all in our next

SPEAKER_324: cohort yeah and do it with two of your friends yeah yeah and if you're an idea person go learn a skill

SPEAKER_93: please i i don't know how many times i got to tell you this but be good at something have something to add to the table be useful in the world have a skill and you don't need to be like

SPEAKER_14: the 10x developer or like the master designer just at least have the ability to design something have

SPEAKER_02: the ability to write some code have the ability to architect a product or do growth etc so we'll see you all next time on the swing stars bye bye