SPEAKER_00: hey everybody welcome back to twist this is alex and today's show is all about founders what they're building what they're learning and how cool they really are so first up jason and i talked to a company called spatial gen this is from launch accelerator 35 and the company wants to make it possible and easy to both make and distribute spatial video and during this chat we also got to learn what it takes to go on stage at an apple event and how casual apple is when it comes to public relations then we're talking to the founder behind hux it's a personal voice ai experience that operates a bit like radio and a bit like a podcast kind of merger between the two now if you know notebook lm from google and like it a lot of the folks that built that are now building hux so stay tuned it's a really fun chat then to wrap up chess ever from our gamma pitch competition it's one founder's plan to shake up the growing chess market and make it better for both broadcast and better for your friendly local grandmaster as a long time advocate of esports i love this idea

SPEAKER_01: though i do need to work on my chess game all right let's learn let's talk to some founders let's have some fun this week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io hire pre-vetted remote developers and get 15 off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io twist this week in startups is brought to you by crusoe crusoe is the ai factory company reliable infrastructure and expert support visit crusoe.ai startup to reserve your capacity for the latest gpus today that's c-r-u-s-o-e dot ai startup interpret interpret turns feedback noise into customer intelligence so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next head to interpret.com twist to book a demo and see it in action that's e-n-t-e-r-p-r-e-t dot

SPEAKER_03: com slash twist i have a riddle for you who who is this gentleman here standing up at an apple event the

SPEAKER_08: other day i think you know this guy who's spatial gen yum yum yum for jcal in our accelerator this is a great founder when we saw this product we were like man ar and vr uh and all this stuff is gonna eventually land and you're gonna need tools picks shovels and partners speaking of partners to do

SPEAKER_09: stuff and you can go further with partners so let's bring on i guess well let's play the clip and then

SPEAKER_10: we'll bring on our guest next up jason we have a company called spatial gen which you can see here

SPEAKER_05: all about building spatial video for different contexts what's the thesis here so um people will

SPEAKER_06: want immersive content eventually and so imagine exploring you know uh sports is uh probably the one where people get a lot of um it's easy to imagine wanting to watch sports in an immersive way and being able to stream that is highly technical okay yeah welcome to the program zach from spatial

SPEAKER_12: gen you went through our accelerator yeah yes yes thanks for having us on love the talks about uh cloud providers one thing i i tried not to say publicly at the time was we were not down during

SPEAKER_14: the aws outage but we try not to you know make some enemies because we're certain there's going

SPEAKER_06: to be a time in the future where we may go down yeah not good for karma to poke the bear exactly exactly this aws thing is more a compliment than anything the fact that they went down for 12 hours like once every two or three years uh is totally you know expected all these clouds go down once every two or three years it's just the nature of it but hey welcome back to the program and you gave this great

SPEAKER_18: talk let's play the other clip uh which is you at some apple event what's the name of this apple event

SPEAKER_12: yeah so this was about immersive video experiences and how to create them and they brought on apple brought on a lot of third parties near the end like black magic design that does the camera system for this yeah and uh color front which does your onset dailies which is really something that a lot of production teams need and then we were brought on near the end of that about how to distribute your content and get it in the hands of your customers so so we gave i believe like a eight minute or so presentation on the apple stage live and um yeah i mean there's there's a certain level of precision

SPEAKER_14: that they require and um there's days of prep so it's yes i've heard about this like you get called

SPEAKER_06: down to cupertino or the mothership and you practice practice practice yeah and they give you tips and you have to basically try to hit uh rest in peace steve jobs levels of presentation yeah which is like weird presentation god level yeah where you guys put your feet on the stage go ahead go ahead alex

SPEAKER_00: sorry oh i was gonna say why don't we watch it while you guys talk over it because i had the exact talking right here all right sweet here it is from day two of the create immersive media

SPEAKER_29: experiences for vision os event here we go good afternoon everyone i'm zachary hanshu co-founder of spatial gen i'm honored to have been invited to speak today so we're going to talk about how to host

SPEAKER_35: and distribute apple versus a video that's how it is they uh they scrutinize everything you do which

SPEAKER_14: is is really cool um where you put your feet on the stage the punctuation in your slides let's pause the video the story yeah so where you put your feet on the stage so like this this was something we had to do where if there was a transition where logos start showing up you have to kind of walk with the transition and try and get out of the the text view so it's pretty complex uh there's two teleprompters actually that if if you need it you can write in your own stage positioning oh wow so now you're

SPEAKER_42: walking to stage left yeah and is stage left when you're in the audience left or when you're on the

SPEAKER_46: stage left i don't know um yeah i don't know either i just looked at the the slide on the teleprompter

SPEAKER_18: and i was like i should be over here over here it's the audience pov i'm going with editorial

SPEAKER_42: director lon not producer oliver i think it's the audience pov so you went from state center stage to center right then center left as the text moved across now when i see that presentation it looks twice as wide as my laptop screen is it too is it a different presentation spec for that it is it is

SPEAKER_48: they okay wait producer lon was wrong okay it's the actress point of view uh oliver was right so i take

SPEAKER_14: it back okay okay five demerits lon yeah yeah they send you a uh a template basically and it's it's

SPEAKER_12: their own stuff with their own styles their own fonts and everything the san francisco uh font group and

SPEAKER_14: then you have to build your presentation to spec and have all these review calls with them and then you go in person and you do dry runs um is it wider though is it a double white screen it's it's super wide the total screen resolution is actually uh very close to what the vision pro is so if you can think

SPEAKER_12: of that that entire screen shrunk down and put in front of your your eyes that's that's the level of

SPEAKER_14: resolution and fidelity you get inside of apple products so and so excellent segue jason into what

SPEAKER_06: spatial gen does so explain in plain english what you do for the nba or for tennis or for whoever uses

SPEAKER_12: your product or service yeah of course so we're building the spatial cloud and what i mean by

SPEAKER_14: spatial is really 3d media so 3d videos apple immersive videos 3d models uh gouging splats for the u.s air force really things that that live inside the 3d space there need to be tools that handle these type of uploads that are sophisticated enough to process them and cheap enough to stream because

SPEAKER_12: going back to old cloud costs if you are a developer setting up a apple immersive video the

SPEAKER_14: cost of just storing your video inside aws will eclipse a total uh spatial gen monthly plan to just get it up so there they need to be affordable solutions that have the technical resources to pull it off and

SPEAKER_03: and that's what we provide what's the demand like for spatial video because when i think about it i'm only thinking about through the context of the apple vision pro and i know you can watch the stuff on oculus headsets and so forth but yeah to me it sounds like a very much a like a champagne customer base

SPEAKER_12: as in small and rich well yeah i mean you can think back to the the first mac i think it's like seven thousand dollars in today's dollars right i mean this is a a flagship real product that's pushing the industry forward but yeah we cross stream there's a lot of demand in spatial video enterprise is is really where it's at so making sure that there's live apple mercer video which is that 16k ingest is

SPEAKER_69: is a huge priority 16k yes yes so it's four 4k televisions worth of data about about that much yeah so

SPEAKER_14: so if you think of um that and the bit rates are higher too so the the level of the data coming out is actually over 30 gigabits a second so you have to you just can't can't send that over the public

SPEAKER_12: internet so like you can imagine how does it get sent if it's not the public internet you have a direct fiber line and um that does the encoding on site and that is then sent out to the cdn where it

SPEAKER_75: is streamed from if you're not listening to your customers and iterating based on their feedback your

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SPEAKER_08: so this is not a cheap thing to do if people are going to do this it's not going to be cheap yeah yeah they're going to do it live it's not going to be cheap it's going to be expensive um and you're also going to need um one of these ursa sin immersive cameras from black magic i believe that's right yeah so

SPEAKER_81: they presented right before us about forty thousand dollars for that guy so wow so i'm showing the

SPEAKER_42: camera here and uh just to describe this camera it's got two i guess those are lenses that look like eyes so exactly the best you can i know this isn't your product but this is part of the stack it is what is this camera it's cost forty thousand dollars obviously people rent these but

SPEAKER_08: how does it work uh and how does your system get this information and then get it to the customer

SPEAKER_14: so this this camera is a apple versus video approved camera which is we should we should be very clear about because there's a lot more to it than just a video feed there's what what apple will call it dynamic metadata that comes with every single shot and this will tell the the viewer how to unwrap the lens according to the uh the lens out of the manufacturing so each one of these cameras regardless of of um of unit have a different lens calibration so you need this dynamic metadata to be live streamed or pass through the system it's it's a completely different video workflow on the encoding side yeah so it's um it's it's quite a beefy guy as well big camera but you're basically with your

SPEAKER_08: company skating to where the puck is going which is exactly uh where i like to invest you had a heck of a time i think getting investors or people to understand what you're doing over the last couple years we met i was like yeah this is the kind of crazy i'm in for um how long is this going to take to build this into a business do you think you know you got a modest amount of funding from us i know you've got a lot of investors who've been interested but how do you think about being cutting edge technology and um you know on the hardware side right yeah and yeah you know you you have to figure

SPEAKER_48: out how to get to the puck puck being revenue and consumer adoption how far out are we from you know non-developer weirdos wearing vision pro prototypes on planes which i've seen twice

SPEAKER_08: in yeah over the year or two i literally saw two people in first class over the last couple years wearing these and i think they were working but when will consumers be watching nba games or you know one battle after the next or who knows what immersive uh content on this yeah well well we can

SPEAKER_12: jump straight to nba apple and spectrum announced that there's going to be live nba games early next year in 2026 so that that's a super exciting development along with the the past few weeks there was the new vision pro that came out with the m5 chip along with samsung and google's headset galaxy xr and on top of that there were you know spatial glasses smart glasses with meta and those are

SPEAKER_14: gaining a lot of traction so you know our vision is to be the the backbone in the cloud infrastructure for all of these devices and and all of the the apps people want to make both on the the regular uh video side to apple immersive video this like top of the line product and to 3d models meshes and gauges so what we're doing with the air force is is uh not necessarily always deployed on a vision pro or

SPEAKER_41: xr headset but actually run on laptops it just has to do with spatial data and i'm showing here the um

SPEAKER_48: the galaxy xr which is available to buy now as well yeah much cheaper yeah uh yeah it's only

SPEAKER_94: eighteen hundred dollars only eighteen hundred dollars yeah we're getting there we're getting

SPEAKER_42: there yeah we're getting there um so um compare and contrast uh apples and this one uh they're they're

SPEAKER_48: you know they're they're both two or three grand but uh when will these become um let's say you know the christmas present for you know the holiday present for you know the vanguard yeah or

SPEAKER_101: the technology early adopters when will they be buying this for christmas because they've been buying

SPEAKER_19: oculuses sure well what were uh what was your first experience with the quest because before the vision

SPEAKER_14: pro i thought it was kind of a gimmick in a sense i didn't i didn't like the resolution of the image it was very fuzzy but you know when you try this on it's a whole different experience oh interesting so

SPEAKER_08: you know my experience with it years ago was every thanksgiving or christmas you know somebody in the family member and i coined it try oh my goodbye they would try it yeah they'd be like oh my this is really interesting i'm in jurassic park and there's a raptor or t-rex chasing me and then it would go in the closet and nobody ever took it out again so what's gonna be the killer app in your mind having

SPEAKER_12: absolutely media 100 media so okay double video yeah yeah so so you you have uh i think i saw an

SPEAKER_09: iphone air earlier today yeah i just got it and i have to say the iphone air is completely inspiring

SPEAKER_08: um i'm putting it here between my glasses and it literally you can see both sides of my nose the battery life is obviously not fantastic but it's not terrible it's so thin and the only really i think bad decision is they went with this um very fancy camera that juts out i would have just put a regular camera in and just made it totally flat but it is the first time i held an apple product since

SPEAKER_48: maybe iphone 4 and said holy cow this is incredible yeah or maybe the original macbook airs i haven't said oh my god this is incredible in years for apple and this is insane how thin and

SPEAKER_35: lightweight it is continue yeah so well that that's a great um product let's say right so the iphones

SPEAKER_14: can take spatial videos and they can take spatial photos right now so you have the capability to already start capturing the media you want because you can instead of just looking at it on a screen later a photo of a family member you can step back into that scene with the vision pro and you know i brought up some of the the media's concerns about the vision pro being dead actually when i was in the green room some of the engineers and they just looked at me with this blank face like i was stupid and they said we just released another headset zach so so i don't i don't know if it'll be this year maybe not necessarily next year but it's coming and there is no lack of energy on the engineering side from apple they are on top of things yeah so the vision pro 2 is coming um they won't tell me if that's the

SPEAKER_123: case but i'm certain you don't get the free inside information when you show up to do all the all the

SPEAKER_124: demos no no no they tell me what to do yeah so it's their stage it's their stage yeah i i just pulled

SPEAKER_08: this up um yeah this is what people are expecting is an m5 chip in instead of the m2 and um this was

SPEAKER_26: the announcements yeah oh was this the actual announcement so they did yes this is this is a

SPEAKER_12: refresh really to give it some extra power especially ahead of their uh their deal with spectrum on on the mba side for later next year and the people have been talking about the weight this

SPEAKER_14: is actually increased but that's because of that dual knit band on the back so a more comfortable

SPEAKER_12: experience they actually have some metal inside the band this time to help counteract that balance

SPEAKER_42: on your head somebody was telling me that they had on a crane their vision pro they had

SPEAKER_48: attached something to the top of it to take the strain off of it but this would because there's

SPEAKER_136: a strap going over your head like um what are the things that people wear on the top of their heads to

SPEAKER_42: push their hair back i don't know headband oh heaven well jason you could uh headband would go across your forehead i'm thinking about the one that i you know my daughters might wear to they have long hair to you know just push yeah i forgot what they call that but then there's so there's a strap on the top and there's a strap on the back of your head this would balance out the weight it does apple has

SPEAKER_08: basically if i'm interpreting it correctly you tell me if i'm wrong here zach they've said this is a developer kit we're going to make it it's going to weigh a little bit more obviously components come down like the um iphone air so for now we want you to get as much resolution as much of the power

SPEAKER_42: as much of the experience we're not optimizing for weight we're not optimizing for battery life right now

SPEAKER_12: correct it seems like reputation i would i would modify the your interpretation a little bit i say they're optimizing for comfort in this latest release comfort and performance so even though that weight has gone up the distribution of it is much more comfortable to the wearer so you're going to be

SPEAKER_14: able to sit through a full nba game and i think that's really what they're they're going for in the

SPEAKER_48: upcoming year i think i'm going to buy this i think it's time for me to really start to embrace this and understand it and if there was actually contact i love the nba so i think yeah doing that would be

SPEAKER_42: fun and i also am a little jealous of people using it as their desktop when they're oh yeah yeah you know

SPEAKER_48: when they're um you know on a plane or something like that i can imagine like sitting there in first class and you know i was in uh a business class seat you know i just went to uh palm beach to give a

SPEAKER_42: keynote at morgan stanley and um i you know have my laptop open i'm going over some sensitive stuff the guy next to me goes i'm freaking out right now i'm your biggest fan i said let's take the selfie

SPEAKER_48: and get it over with and uh let's be normal and he left i said it's just a podcast and uh but sure

SPEAKER_42: enough i then had to get in my head oh my god what was on my screen that this person saw you know who was i dm'ing with and i think the privacy aspect of having these is also kind of rad because you could be

SPEAKER_06: watching you know sometimes i'm watching a show you know if it's an hbo show you know i was watching um uh industry great show i think yeah yeah i was watching hbo industry and this is a spicy show and all of a sudden you know it goes you know from pg-13 to r and i'm like oh my god are people thinking i'm a creep watching the show i didn't know there's gonna be a sex scene in the middle of it um and what if there's a kid who's looking over my shoulder i was like i can't watch this show on the plane i like it for that reason too it's like your own world you've heard me talk so much on the pod

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SPEAKER_161: i mean there's a lot of of use cases to it we have gotten a lot of traction on the media side just for

SPEAKER_12: the videos apple immersive video and so on but you know like a fun fun fact about it they just kind of gives you some shock factor is your passwords when you're entering them in the vision pro are actually in plain text they don't have the password blocked outfield because you're the only person that can

SPEAKER_14: see it yeah that makes total sense why bother yeah yeah so it's very shocking when you're first typing in your password in the vision pro and and you just see it in plain text out and there's no like blurred field or anything it's it's pretty funny but it's like oh wait who's gonna see it

SPEAKER_08: is this going to um at some point intersect with my insta 360 and my gopro cameras that do 360 degree like my insta 360 does 360 degrees when i'm skiing and i i i record these ski videos i

SPEAKER_42: never look at them because i look at them and i'm like it doesn't look very good i don't have time

SPEAKER_08: to edit it but i mean maybe if you had this immersive experience it'd be kind of cool yeah with the with

SPEAKER_12: recent announcements on our end we're automating support for those actually so you can upload those types of videos that don't have to come from that forty thousand dollar camera can come from an insta 360 or gopro and you can have a what they call a unique field of view so we will handle all that

SPEAKER_14: complexity for you and you can just get a video file or stream that works right out of the box and

SPEAKER_106: how can people find you and learn more about spatial gen yes you can you can send us an email at

SPEAKER_12: contact at spatialgen.com or you can go to our website and even just book a call directly there

SPEAKER_177: i wonder if you got first name at spatialgen.com as the ceo founder we do we do it's a zach at

SPEAKER_08: spatialgen.com but awesome you know are you hiring now anything you need that we can be helpful with as investor early investors in the company or a shout out we can do right now do you need any

SPEAKER_12: particular positions raising we're currently raising but we're not hiring just yet we will after the race

SPEAKER_14: but i'm gonna stay pretty lean just the two of us right now oh wow yeah good man yeah well this is

SPEAKER_42: when we like to invest in startups when they're in year zero or year one uh because we feel like if we're involved we can really help uh hopefully with our whisper network uh introduce you to the right people people don't know about the whisper network it's been helpful been using it oh you've been

SPEAKER_116: using it we have described for people what we built and how it's helped you and anything we could add to

SPEAKER_12: it yeah basically you you can go into the whisper network and you can look at investors that you may potentially want a connection with and you can find out if someone on the launch team has you know

SPEAKER_14: a relationship with that person and then you can reach out to that individual on on the launch team and ask for an introduction and you know give your reasoning behind it and hopefully they introduce you

SPEAKER_35: yeah um i have been a little aggressive with it there's a warning not to send too many so i sent quite a bit last week or the week before but i think they've been sending them out so it's been cool

SPEAKER_42: yeah so what we did was alex uh just to help founders because of our track record um in the

SPEAKER_08: industry investors like when we send a warm intro but you know we we needed to have a way to track this and process it and build systems so i've been building software internally we built this whisper

SPEAKER_42: network software so when someone like zach is looking through our database it's probably got

SPEAKER_192: it's getting close with hundreds and hundreds yeah i think it's getting close to a thousand i set a goal

SPEAKER_08: of getting to a thousand for the team we don't want everybody we want people have relationships with so i told the 12 members of the investment team if you each have 50 people in the whisper network that you've built relationships with i want you to email them and just say hey you know here's where we invest would love to understand where you invest or we're co-investors in this company so if let's say spatial gen were to have sequoia and the partner at sequoia was stephanie and i was the contact with stephanie because i have the best relationship with her when the

SPEAKER_48: next spatial gen comes out and you know this other firm oh we have 1090 in there great um so we broke a thousand good job new goal 1500 let's go um then instead of having somebody email stephanie as sequoia cold i would say stephanie uh you know congratulations on the spatial gen announcement at

SPEAKER_42: the you know apple thing by the way we have another company in our portfolio they're doing something in ar and they would love to meet you would it be okay for us to here's the capsule from the founder if

SPEAKER_08: you'd like to take the meeting we can introduce you click here or you can just reach out to them here's their contact information here's their mobile phone number here's their email so we're just trying to creep that velocity but the other important thing is something alexis ohanian inspired me to do he built a software system where they keep track of everything they're doing for their founders so that they can say to other founders hey you know for zach we did these 17 things here's the evidence of it you know alexis retweeted something for him he came on out you know in our case he came on this week in startups on these two dates oh they spoke at this event and we introduce you to 72 investors through the whisper network kind of keeping track of all the work we try to do for founders sometimes founders zach you're not going to believe this but if they become incredibly successful they're like what have you done for me and uh quite helpful to have the dossier and say well we did all these things we would like an allocation in the next round we have our pro rata but we want to go super pro rata we want to increase our ownership from four percent to seven would that be okay with you and by the way here's everything we've done for you maybe you could compare that to your other investors when you become outrageously successful and you are over subscribed we want to make our case to you for you know a little extra investment so we're building those systems zach it's great to be on the cap table if you ever need anything you have my

SPEAKER_09: mobile phone number text me anytime yeah one uh one last note is the whisper network is also a

SPEAKER_12: really great resource for investor discovery as well because the database is so large and you can

SPEAKER_14: filter by sector and thesis and focus so yes you can find people who you may not know of that are

SPEAKER_106: already in that network so yeah thank you for having me on yeah zach it's been great um really rooting for

SPEAKER_09: you again if you ever need anything from us the firm launch launch.co uh you you let us know immediately and if my team takes more than seven minutes to get back to you just cc me we'll we'll do i'll help test

SPEAKER_08: them at like 3 a.m for you i'll just send them a few things i'm trying to explain to the team that we need to match the work effort effort speaking of 996 we have to match the effort and the responsiveness of our founders when our founder when we ask our founders for something they get back to us in minutes when they ask us for stuff are we getting back to them in minutes or are we getting back to

SPEAKER_48: them in hours or days you know like if it once you get into like days to get back to somebody i just think it's disgraziad you got to get back to people at the pace they get back to you zach continued success thank you all right i'm so excited about this startup i'm so excited i mean the crop of startups we're hitting right now i was telling you before we got on air that um you know things are firing on all cylinders uh our founder university program where we work with you know companies like zach before they're even incorporated you don't even have to be incorporated to come to founder.university we do it three times a year uh here in the us it's a virtual program but we do have some in-person components and the first week in november november 3rd 4th and 5th i will be in riad mina dot launch.co this is the founder university website we've had thousands of people go through the program and then if you go to mina.launch.co you'll see that we partnered with the pif senable specifically which is their venture arm to bring founder university to the city of riad i will be there for three days uh and we're going to host it at senable's offices i'll be doing three dinners monday tuesday and wednesday night with different nice uh you know so many fascinating interesting uh people in the region doing great work so i'm very

SPEAKER_42: proud of that and um just this week we signed another city oh i didn't know that two congratulations we're not going to announce it yet but it's providence rhode island yes no it's another international city so the founder university program continues and the empire the sun will never set

SPEAKER_48: on the founder university launch empire and we're also going to be announcing another city for this

SPEAKER_08: week in startups so there will be a regional weekly version of this week in startups in another city soon so we're going to take this week in startups the franchise and have it in hopefully there's like four regions i really want to do so there'll be an alex and jason not us in each of these different regions you can imagine maybe one in the middle east one in asia one in europe et cetera so that will franchise in a way uh this week in startups and then we'll have those alex and jasons come on the program alex this is my grand vision i love it you know there'll be like an alex and jason pairing or jason and molly or molly and alex pick it um and they'll come on the show with us and we'll do a little promo for who's on their episode this week and what's going on in let's say china japan singapore yeah what's going on in europe what's going on in south america so we're looking for those type of partnerships typically we partner with a government agency that's trying to grow the region or yeah a top sovereign wealth fund that's looking to increase

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SPEAKER_217: big fans of notebook lm here at the show it's google's research assistant and as it turns out

SPEAKER_00: three of the folks behind that app actually left google spun out and decided to build something for themselves so what did they come up with it's an app called hux it's essentially an audio forward personal ai app that i've played with and i really really like to tell us more about hux and the company behind it please welcome to the show it's co-founder ryza martin hey how you doing hi alex thanks for having me i'm so glad that you're here because i love playing with new apps and i got to play with hux and frankly i really like it but instead of me butchering an explanation of what it

SPEAKER_221: is and what it does why don't we just ask the expert what have you built oh amazing well again thank you for having me uh really excited to talk about hux it's super new but what it is is it's personalized and proactive audio and so it's a little bit of a mouthful but the way that we think about it is instead of writing prompts to try to get value out of ai yeah what if we could just

SPEAKER_224: generate interesting and thoughtful content for you automatically without you having to do anything

SPEAKER_01: so one thing i have noticed when i'm talking to ai with typing is that it does feel kind of slow at

SPEAKER_227: times even though not to brag but i can type pretty quick and so well i mean i get paid to type for a living so you think i'd be good at it but but people who aren't us type more slowly so they're probably dealing with quite a lot of lag in their chats so moving to voice allows people to have a more

SPEAKER_229: reactive experience or a more personalized one that's right and i i think there's also a little bit more

SPEAKER_221: there where you know we talk about sort of how we use ai today and it's a chat and it's almost like i can only get as much as i can based on how much i'm willing to type right and it feels like there's some sort of like clunky thing we're describing which is like i have to write a prompt i have to ask the right questions i have to do this sort of like back and forth with chat gpt before it's actually like truly useful and so i think your mileage really varies but with hux we're trying to see how

SPEAKER_233: do we standardize that for everyone so when i signed up for hux it said hey can you connect your calendar can you connect your email and then what are your major interests and then from

SPEAKER_227: there it started to essentially tell me about things that i'm interested in we're talking about apple and stock market and startups and i was like okay well fair enough that's pretty much dead on um why do you need the information and how much can you personalize this for the average user to make it feel like uh their own corner of the ai internet yeah i i love this question

SPEAKER_221: because we started from a really simple place which was we tried to imagine if you'd wake up in the morning and there was a friend that was ready to get you caught up right because we realized like especially when you work in tech i feel like everybody has this funny habit where you wake up you grab your phone you check your email you check your slack oh what's going on twitter and it doesn't always feel great but we all do it so we were like why don't we do this like really small simple thing which is have a friend just do this pre-read for you and then just read it out to you when you're brushing your teeth when you're driving to work when you're having your coffee and it's such

SPEAKER_238: a small like little experiment but when we've talked to the people who use hux people love it

SPEAKER_227: right it's like truly different and hux came out um in september out of kind of early access or beta

SPEAKER_221: how has the market response been to it i i think it's been really exciting i was actually i was bragging to some of my friends recently which i don't do too often but i was like guys oh

SPEAKER_233: you made a product that everyone knows i've actually like no joke notebook lm is in our circles a smash hit so i really do feel like you could you know brush a little dust off and be proud of it

SPEAKER_221: well thank you thanks for saying that and i and i did the thing i was telling my friends i was like it feels like early notebook right where it feels like the next stage the next chapter where people are really turning the page you know more or less people have heard about ai at this point but now we're getting to this place where it's like okay what can it really do right aside from me just sort of like trying it out one time how does it become an actual habit and so it feels like we're

SPEAKER_247: actually getting there on the habit point you guys had to make a choice between text and audio and you

SPEAKER_00: made the decision to have hux talk to you and not only in one voice but one thing i noticed was there was a back and forth between a male voice and a female voice on my end and that did make it pretty darn engaging um but i can also read faster than i can listen so i'm kind of curious

SPEAKER_250: about the trade-offs between those two mediums uh in the case of hux i i love this question because i

SPEAKER_221: think one of the things we really considered was like what is most effective for the user and when you read something really quickly like it feels really productive right it feels like okay i got a lot done i went through it now i can go do this 10 more times right and i'm like super smart i'm super charged but for the most part what we realized about audio is that even though the throughput feels a little bit slower it actually is a passive medium which means i can actually do something else whereas like reading is a thing i have to sort of sit down and do and it's the only thing i'm doing

SPEAKER_227: so then therefore hux really is uh something you take with you as you drive as you cook as you eat so it's designed to be an additive to your daily life so it can fit into time that you already have you

SPEAKER_00: don't have to make room for it i quite like that okay one thing you guys talked about though was this uh this this live element to it that is kind of like almost like almost like a live radio station for you what does that mean does that mean that it's constantly finding new stuff to bring to me

SPEAKER_224: and there's no end to my stream yes well half of that is true which is always live we're

SPEAKER_221: experimenting with like how we describe some of these concepts and we're borrowing from a lot of stuff that we might recognize right so the concept of live i feel like people understand really well which is if something is live it's happening right now and we use this concept because what we're doing is when you first play this station you know based on your stuff your topic it will research right now to get the latest for you right and you know does the stream end it does end because it can run out of info and say well that's all there is on the topic let's move on to the

SPEAKER_258: next thing and so i think it's just like how we think about information so in early usage and i

SPEAKER_233: know it's only been a couple of weeks so i'm really asking an unfair question here but when people use hux let's say in the morning what's the average session length is it five minutes is it two hours i have no idea how long they're sticking around i mean i feel really good that i know the

SPEAKER_232: answer but but the the average so the average daily is about 15 minutes so the average hux user listens

SPEAKER_265: for 15 minutes that is a quarter of an hour so it's a quarter of 25 is like one percent of their day wow that's great math but yeah i think yeah i'm pretty tired so that could be wrong but i think

SPEAKER_221: that's right yeah that's not bad and we discovered that most people listen to a combination of their daily brief which usually happens in the morning and then later on in the day they do a little bit of exploration into like a topic that they care about which to me is like super cool because you imagine

SPEAKER_260: you start your day with this but then later on when you have downtime you're like i don't know i want to hear about the history of porcelain like totally random thing i did yesterday but it was

SPEAKER_271: amazing i mean i too like to read wikipedia late at night so yeah i'm with you my wife once called me

SPEAKER_233: looking at like the list of larger ships by gross tonnage and she's like what are you doing i'm like important research you don't know don't judge me um so what i'm trying to figure out there is it's just

SPEAKER_00: and i do not mean this in a mean way but but what it is it's almost like an am radio station for your mornings it's almost like a podcast for your interest it's almost like an ai chat buddy but it does seem to kind of meld all of those together into like my personal chatty research assistant maybe

SPEAKER_221: yeah i mean it's so funny that you mentioned this because this is the thing that even when we were building notebook this was true right the executives would come to me they would say well what is it what is this thing and i'd be like you know i don't know but i'm sure we'll find out if we keep

SPEAKER_274: going long enough and that was not a sufficient answer at any point in time really the google

SPEAKER_221: execs didn't appreciate that i i don't think anybody does but i think only i do but it is i think one of the things that when you're building something new like i could give you an answer like i have a real answer which is like i think it's like i like what you're going with that yeah i think in reality when new things are being invented we don't really have the words for them i think we try our best so that somebody will hear it and then they will try it and they'll be like oh okay i kind of get it right but in real life i think it's exactly what you're describing like when you first try it you're like oh i don't know what that is but i kind of like it and i think that's the type of thing you should

SPEAKER_233: be building it's cool it's weird yeah pushing the boundaries means you're outside of normal definitions or normal taxonomies you can't be the uber for ramp if you're doing something actually new exactly exactly we've all watched yc demo day you know what i'm talking about okay so there are

SPEAKER_00: some competing offerings out there there are voice ai tools and i haven't actually gotten to play with this yet but i know that uh open ai put out chat gpt pulse so where does hux fit into the um

SPEAKER_227: competitive landscape and how are you worried at all that open ai might kind of come along and

SPEAKER_286: step on you i mean i think that's probably one of the things that could keep me up at night and not just open ai i think open ai google apple perplexity right anybody who's like big and is

SPEAKER_221: looking to turn the page on ai and i think this is because more and more people are saying it right the next wave of ai is personalization it's proactivity and i think that pulse is one example of a product that is trying to do that for the user and so i think about it two ways i think on one hand like that's super exciting because it val like they have a tremendous user base it will certainly help me validate whether or not people really want that yeah um and on the on the other hand i also think about it as how different can we make our product right not not out of principle like i don't want to be different like for the sake of it but it's like it is interesting to think about what what things could we learn that open ai is not learning and so i think about it very simply i try not to lose any sleep about it and just keep going so one thing i've heard from a lot of

SPEAKER_227: founders that are building anything consumer facing that is distributed to the app store is that it's just super hard to break through i'm curious what you guys have done to try to apart from i saw your coverage in tech crunch and so forth and coming on the show but like how are you breaking through to the the mass market on the app store because it's fine to be eventualized to us in the tech world but

SPEAKER_258: we're already all tweens who love to try things yeah well i i do think of it sequentially which is

SPEAKER_221: hey if you can win some of the early adopter audience and you can really understand what's resonating with these people i think what that allows us to do is to lower the bar more and more and more and more right because i think that's what early adopters are really great at is really saying hey this was great for this reason and it was really terrible for this reason and that helps us think about well for the every next user that uses it how do we make it easier for that person and ultimately if the product is good i think it will just spread right like we all know normies and so imagine as we meet these people in our lives we're like hey have you heard of hox yet have you tried hox yet and i think that if you can accomplish that organically then i think you think about okay how

SPEAKER_227: do i break through and amplify it yeah yeah actually when you put it that way my spouse who is not a technology first person she's in the medical world i could see you're actually using this on her commutes because she does like to listen to podcasts here and there and often she runs out of episodes of the shows that she likes to commute to and she's also i mean she's got more advanced

SPEAKER_00: degrees than i do so she's very smart and so probably tickling her brain would be a great way to spend her time in the drive so yeah i can see it spreading that way but is word of mouth enough

SPEAKER_224: is that enough in 2025 or is that i mean that to me it's a great question but i think it also speaks

SPEAKER_221: to where we're at and i i experienced this on notebook lm which was like especially at google where i feel like the urge to pour money on something is like right there's there i certainly could you know and you just like go and you say i need marketing budget that's the thing i need but i think you need to have a lot of discipline in the super super early days because it's easy to sort of artificially grow your product but i think the question is why would you i think that ultimately you do need to put some gasoline behind it when you feel like you're onto something but i think you need to have a lot of conviction about what that loop looks like before you do it and so for me i think definitely need to spend money but for us not yet totally so then i guess what are the signals

SPEAKER_227: that you are looking for to confirm to you in the next i don't know two three four quarters that you have reached sufficient product market fit that you do want to put marketing behind it maybe

SPEAKER_221: raise more capital and so forth i mean to me the only thing i really care about is retention you know i think of all the metrics that i look at i only really look at retention like everything else is sort of a supporting metric that explains it you know or the lack thereof sure and um i think once you have retention you organically have the next thing which is you start to have organic growth which is every new user you onboard creates whatever two new users right and so i think you just want to make sure you have both of those things um and hopefully it doesn't take us you

SPEAKER_309: know two three quarters to get there hopefully a lot sooner i was trying to give you a lot a lot of

SPEAKER_227: room to experiment and play and i mean i mean i mean two quarters in ai time is like five years in

SPEAKER_00: the sass era so it's a fair point it's a fair point uh what's going to come next in the app because i know that i can talk to it i know that it can read my email on my calendar um what other data might

SPEAKER_227: you bring into play and then does it ever start to ping me without me going into it to say i would like

SPEAKER_221: my my personal live briefing now yeah i actually feel like that's a that's a bit of a read into our roadmap and so there's a couple of things that we're going to start doing i think one is just applying overall polish on the experience because we've hit this interesting milestone where we have

SPEAKER_00: really good retention now but people is that a 30 day number 60 days that a daily usage how do you guys

SPEAKER_221: measure that i look at it at the daily weekly and monthly retention periods but the the funny part is we're now at a point where the people are sticking around but they're angry you know when people write to you every day and they're like hey what's the deal did you fix this yet it starts to feel quite different right where you're like wow these people are are the loyal core users we better start fixing some of this stuff and so that's the first thing um the second thing is exactly what you described which is okay now that we've had an opportunity to really understand sort of the timeliness that

SPEAKER_286: people expect from this type of data now we can start doing notifications in a not so annoying way

SPEAKER_321: so essentially prove that you're that you're delivering what people want and then if you send it to them

SPEAKER_227: they won't be annoyed unlike for example the uber eats team by the way uber eats team back the

SPEAKER_272: off uber eats sends me a notification like every hour and i'm like guys i'm not that hungry like

SPEAKER_274: dude sometimes i ordered dinner on uber eats guilty and then like an hour later it's like hey did you know kfc has 10 for one way and i'm like i can't move right now i'm full i'm glad that it's not just

SPEAKER_330: me i was starting to feel a little sensitive i was like no i do not need a bogo on wings like i'm about to go

SPEAKER_00: to bed or my favorite is as a recovering alcoholic they're like hey hey hey alcohol delivery 21 plus 50 off and i'm like guys you do know i don't want to go back to rehab it's rough jesus uh where were we oh right okay so thinking about the company i know you guys raised uh 4.6 million conviction genius ventures dylan who i like and uh jeff dean from google solid set of folks good amount of money lots of runway to experiment i presume um how long does that capital last you guys well

SPEAKER_286: we still have uh as my investors call it pretty much all of it so i i think you know as we start

SPEAKER_221: to turn the wheel on maybe more complicated things we want to do maybe we'll eat more of this this capital um but yeah i mean the way that i think about fundraising is really just as a function of like do you know how to deploy it right do you have a plan for how to deploy it and so i think that will coincide with sort of the next phase of like once i feel like we've squarely got a loop we've got

SPEAKER_309: great retention that's when we'll do it we'll raise more money all right one last question for you which

SPEAKER_233: is about the underlying models that power hux i couldn't find anything about this so i'm curious

SPEAKER_00: uh what technology are you using you better say gemini or your shares will invest and and also um through your time at notebook lm and through into hux how quickly have the models that you've leaned on to power the underlying intelligence improved because from where i sit they seem to be improving pretty quickly but i'm curious in a more real world application if that holds up

SPEAKER_221: i i really appreciate this question and that's a keen eye in terms of like how we never talk about the models that we use the main reason is because we probably use most of them most of the commercial models we we've discovered that they're really great at individual workflows in the app but not all so not one of them is great at all of the workflows that we run um and that to me sort of speaks to your next question which was you know are are the models really getting better and i think the answer is yes but they're sort of not um kind of uniformly getting better across all the things that we do so one big you know thing we do in the app for example is writing content yeah right and trying to write really good engaging interesting content that humans are willing to listen to like i don't think even humans have figured that out and so it's it's quite funny to try to be like oh yeah right i'm gonna go get a machine to do this um but it's really quite difficult and we spent a very long time trying to do that across all the things and what we discovered was we kind of have this sort of like hodgepodge approach and so i would just say that the models are getting really good

SPEAKER_233: but it still requires a lot of engineering okay well there's also an implied point in which you still have most of the capital that you raised and you're using a bunch of models from different providers

SPEAKER_00: and you haven't torched all of your money which implies that not only are the models getting better in certain places but they're actually cost effective to run as a as a group do you guys ever

SPEAKER_227: make model selections based on cost or is it currently more predicated on uh quality as you see it

SPEAKER_221: so right now we over index on quality like super super strongly we almost i would say like the top two things we index on are quality and latency because of the live component right and so those are the two things but cost is real especially as we you know have higher and higher retention

SPEAKER_309: the cost goes up and up and up and we were like okay now we have to try to optimize this and make

SPEAKER_233: it a little cheaper all right actually i'm gonna squeeze in one more here how long until i can pay for

SPEAKER_221: hux or are you going to charge me in a different way we've thought about it i think there's definitely a subscription model that we could probably deploy in the very near future i really would like to hold out for something that allows it to be free like better ads for everyone that's not annoying um i would really like to because i think we have a really really good foundation for that okay one request

SPEAKER_227: then if you do go the advertising route please allow me to give you money and not to listen to

SPEAKER_345: insurance advertisements oh yeah for sure for sure i think we will do it as long as i have the option

SPEAKER_227: to opt out of state farmer and all state telling me that i should swap my car insurance we're good

SPEAKER_00: uh folks if you're listening to this you want to check it out it's huxe.com ryza thank you so much and uh congrats on leaving mountain view and going off on your own amazing thank you alex thanks for having me so today taking part in our ongoing gamma pitch deck competition is our dear friend it's vasif drabaili he is a chess grandmaster and he's building something called chess ever and it's actually uh i gotta look at the deck jason pretty freaking awesome so vasif are you here i'm i'm happy

SPEAKER_349: to be in the show i have been watching you guys and first time to be here a nice nice feeling all right

SPEAKER_352: so you have your deck you built a beautiful deck using gamma visit gamma.app and let's hear a quick pitch

SPEAKER_42: from chess ever and remember most people are listening so vasif if you can describe what

SPEAKER_355: you're seeing that would be great all right so i am showing uh the my pitch at the beginning it is my app chess ever our our motto is follow chess better i am a chess grandmaster and i think in the pitch uh yeah whatever uh is on the pitch i should say something about that so it will be clear whoever listens okay keep going hello everyone i'm grandmaster vasif drabaili if you are not deep in chess grandmaster is the highest title in other words i have beaten a lot of people today i'm here to talk

SPEAKER_359: about chess ever a platform redefining the online chess experience chess is a 1500 years old game but the way people experience it has changed dramatically since the pandemic and queen's gambit millions of new players who have never touched a physical chess board play and follow chess entirely online the global chess market is booming it was 3.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach 7.6 billion by 2032 nearly 11 percent annual growth rate here's the problem since pursuing the big market is enticing every major player does it this means serious players about 70 000 worldwide are underserved they are a small but very influential group that's the weak link and our opportunity they need complete event coverage with no missing tournaments pro analysis tools searchable archives and more chess ever solves this we are building a pro-grade broadcasting platform designed for serious players without entering too deep into chess let me illustrate simple flow of our beta app so in this video i am searching for the latest event where my country participated i type the event name open it and my countrymen are already auto pinned at the top i can swipe between their games to see what they did this is the core function simple and effective i can do the same for any player and instantly find their games interestingly what i am showing in our beta app either cannot be done or is very hard to do in the established apps our mvp release is in q4 chess ever will outperform current platforms in event coverage and pro tools our ai futures will come soon our vision does not end with serious players it starts with them where they show up casual players follow we add ai that makes broadcast truly engaging blunder prediction prediction position aware pools instant highlights from there we build it brick by brick into content community and education with over 350 early signups including word number five on iskiri and having four grandmasters and three masters as our early investors we are proving the demand is real as a grandmaster i know my audience firsthand my co-founder henning an ai specialist brings our vision to live with his technical expertise together with our team we are building the platform the chess world has been waiting for starting with serious players and growing from there we are chess ever follow chess

SPEAKER_352: better thank you okay the pitch here is that chess.com which is an incredible app which i use and everybody i know uses and um people rave about being able to get matches really quick and being able to get trained all the amateurs i know absolutely love it i was literally over the weekend with in a group of ceos and vcs and people are raving about paying for it using it and uh getting their scores up but it turns out the experts the grandmasters like yourself they want something more than what chess.com provides do

SPEAKER_359: i have the pitch correct yes you do so chess.com uh is a huge company and they are very successful one uh but they focus on everything especially for casual players um and their main product is playzone so here we are bringing a different angle that chess players were looking for it is like over the board games when we play serious players it is getting broadcasted and you want to follow those broadcasts and chesscom uh platform so the number one thing missing from chess.com for the top one percent

SPEAKER_42: of the audience uh for experts is that they don't uh do commentary on live chess matches in a way that a

SPEAKER_355: grandmaster would want to receive it am i correct yes uh you are overall correct but not commentary

SPEAKER_42: but they don't have tools for serious players okay so there's the commentary on live events and the coverage of live events is one aspect that chess.com do but tools for experts are different what is the tool just describe it to us in plain english as non-grandmasters what are they trying to get out of their tool that you don't get out of the chess.com tools so for instance even even a simple

SPEAKER_359: function that i showed i cannot just enter chess.com and search name of a player and find their games

SPEAKER_374: and easily go okay so the archive of of important games is one got it uh so their engine tools are

SPEAKER_359: basic and uh you i mean i'm talking about the broadcasting function so let's let's make a distinguishment and also we are entering through app so there is a website and there is app so app i'm talking about the app part so you cannot easily analyze and save and go between the game so chess players are like professionals or serious players they will go one game and after another we added for

SPEAKER_352: instance swiping function we are gonna make it okay so where your pitch breaks down is that you

SPEAKER_42: you set it up really great but you don't explain for the lay person the investor uh who might want to invest in the company there are three things missing from chess.com let me show you what they are you need to slow down during that part one the archive of important matches they simply are not optimizing for these legendary uh matches that's what i'm looking for as a grandmaster i want to look at every time magnus carlson has played this opening i want to sort by those openings and then i want to take notes on them and i want to watch all of them in succession and i want that database to

SPEAKER_352: be available to me and really easy this would be the equivalent of the elite poker players wanting to see all the hands with the opponents they might face in their next cash tournament or their cash game or in a giant 100k tournament at the world series of poker great now we've established that number two when they're doing a live broadcast they're broadcasting to the lowest common denominator what we want to see is the experts who are not explaining things for the average chess player we want to have broadcasting tools and uh commentary that's really elite level so this is where the the pitch could be greatly um greatly improved you're talking about like all types of different features that are dead but you have to step back and big picture it big picture and eventually all the people who are uh we want to build this into a community we believe that they will pay not just a hundred dollars a year we believe they'll pay five hundred dollars a year is that true will these folks pay more money than the average chess.com person or are they cheaper uh thank you for the

SPEAKER_383: feedback uh so i i think one of the goals we are going we are trying is not to have a much higher than

SPEAKER_359: chess on price monthly fee and yeah the mainly you you have a good point that we are going to target serious players and we will offer them tools that are not offered right now additionally we are gonna add since my co-founder is ai specialist and currently you cannot find ai in any broadcasting we are gonna make also very engaging uh but our goal is not charge very high fees no it's not so our goal is simple we will make our free version is better than anyone else and our premium version will be better our this is basically freemium a model that we are so the challenge with this then becomes

SPEAKER_352: if chess.com is making 100 million a year um you're going to take the top 10 of the market and make 10 million a year if you're going to raise venture capital that's a challenge because you've basically said we want less customers at least to start and then we're going to go to the other customers i think

SPEAKER_42: you should i think you're onto something with getting the elite people i wonder if there is a way once you have the elite people hanging out here to figure out a way so just think this through for a second i was talking about a company called tone base we have uh that we've invested in and we've invested in the company four times i think we're so enamored by it pull up tone base alex this is a really good corollary for you tone base is not for people looking to learn to play guitar or piano that's another one called musician we are investors in musician as well one of them is for it's like chess.com and one of them is like chess ever and as you can see here learn learn from the world's best musicians and so if we scroll down here or actually just pick an instrument and let's see who picked the most interesting uh yeah guitar or piano yeah sure now let's go down here and see who they have i wonder if they'll show you the actual yeah here we go so if you look here they now have very famous people uh from legendary pianists and i think you could scroll to the right and see more of them and you can go to training with them if you click on one of those and you did claire de lune you picked the right one now they've made these so they've made masterclass vasif as you can see and this for the person who is a serious musician has never existed before this is what you're building i wonder if you could say here are the greats and here are their classes and then you could split where like live classes or tutoring once you have all them on it instead of trying to make a hundred bucks you could let them in for free and you have to be approved to be part of the community and the way you get approved is you

SPEAKER_352: apply and the way you apply is you have to play three games and you have to beat at least one of the people who are in the community already now it's like it's hard to get into you have to be invited or you know each grandmaster can invite two players you build this community and then if people like myself want to come i can buy my daughters a chess lesson if they really got

SPEAKER_42: into it with magnus or whoever the great one is what do you think of this idea of win the elite the top 10 of the audience and then bring everybody else in to have access to the elite uh that's uh so when

SPEAKER_359: i i mean we our goal is just the beginning it is uh it's our wish head but uh at the at some point we will enter the market for education that which you are talking about uh to have access to elite players that they can so right now we have other platforms on the market that sells um some stuff that amateurs want to have access even talk to them etc yeah that's a um that's in our roadmap at some point but as the beginning you know it is easier to start where there is no competition so that's that's my goal uh with this broadcasting feature is that there is almost no competition because no one builds for

SPEAKER_351: serious players uh and okay i love your yeah i love that you're going after the high end i think you

SPEAKER_352: haven't figured out what the killer app is yet and that'll take a little time so you're in the phase we

SPEAKER_42: call triangulation and finding product market fit so when you're triangulating this and trying to get to product market fit it's good to try a couple of different things and see which one actually clicks

SPEAKER_48: one of the things i noticed um when i just typed into producer claude claude ai um how um what do grandmasters want to know when they are uh watching grandmasters play live one of the things it said is

SPEAKER_42: they want to understand their tactical strategies etc their emotional control all that kind of stuff but one of the things it said is they want to guess the next move uh and compare their move to what the grandmasters were doing here's an interesting idea if you watched it on time delay and the live person instead of watching them play this you know 10 minute match i don't know what what's the what is

SPEAKER_352: the average match when magnus plays what is the time that they typically oh magnus magnus recently is

SPEAKER_355: against the classical control which is a gold standard in chess we play uh five six hours basically perfect

SPEAKER_352: okay so he likes the speed chess classical it's a five-hour match but let's say it is a five-hour match

SPEAKER_42: i think or if it's even if it's a 15 pausing the telecast and then allowing the community to talk about like if you had five people and the five people each gave what the next move which should be what they what they would play and what they believe magnus will play and then they lock it in and then you actually play the hand and you see if there's consensus there is a version of this which is when you're watching poker commentary they'll be like well this is obvious there's two choices here one is they could slow play this hand they've already got the nuts the other one is they could put a small bet out but that might look suspicious so i think what you want to put out here is a you know 50 of the pot bet and hope the other person raises then you can call and now it's going to maximize whatever i love that idea of being able to watch a group of experts and then reveal it so i'm thinking like a tv producer here to make it even more exciting and unique in the world this has been amazing alex um what are your thoughts here you've seen this great pitch and you've got this great founder lots of energy yeah you have anything that would be an interesting

SPEAKER_48: question for him or a note about you know giving your your startup experience that would be yeah

SPEAKER_03: well i was curious about the overall market's growth because one of the earliest slides in uh the pitch deck was how much chess is going to grow by 2032. my question though is if we're focusing very much on the the top end the you know the one percent the grandmasters like yourself uh how much does the aggregate growth in the chess market matter to chess ever's uh success um that's overall showing the

SPEAKER_359: interest growth and it will matter eventually when we are targeting uh the bigger group casual players at at the beginning it doesn't matter as a stage one uh our group uh uh for for us it doesn't matter

SPEAKER_220: right now okay and then the other thing that i wanted to just throw at you jason's making a lot

SPEAKER_03: of poker analogies he and i are both uh big fans of card games um have you ever seen i can't believe i'm going to say this have you ever seen hustler casino live it's a poker live stream you might want to take a look at it because they managed to take poker which is sometimes a slow and boring game to watch and turn it into an absolute circus by bringing some of the world's best players and throwing them at one another and they've really made something that's streamable watchable and enjoyable so given the focus that you have on observability and so forth i you might want to take a page out of

SPEAKER_359: that kind of proven book thank you for the video by the way i want to add that what jason said uh the idea of guessing it's called guess the move and we do wanna have that we want so right now i that's one of the things that it comes also from my frustration that our broadcasts are quite basic and not enough entertainment for me like you know guess the move compete with others there is pool so we i i passed very fast so we want to have a like a imagine the two grand masters playing and there will be a blunder alert we are gonna predict blunders are coming and ask the community like what's the chance of the blunder uh this kind of stuff we are gonna try to make gamifying yeah it is gonna come uh it is on our roadmap and yeah we will we will follow some ideas

SPEAKER_410: that you talked about i have one i have one suggestion when you do this just hire the botez sisters

SPEAKER_352: botez sisters came to all in summit played the four of us they smashed us or although i think she ran

SPEAKER_412: out of time i think i think they yeah well she ran out of time play because she played on a clock

SPEAKER_352: versus four of us i think i was the first out um and the videos out there but people love that so i think there's another one here which is celebrities you know the schmoes versus the pros is also very exciting and i just played in the nbc heads up telecast as one of the celebrities that's how hard up

SPEAKER_413: they are for celebrities i guess to play in these things now but i was one of the top five celebrities there i guess maybe i'm a micro celebrity in podcast land and amongst poker people maybe um but i think

SPEAKER_42: you just hired the botez sisters you do a deal with them i know them they're awesome they're entertaining they're spicy they get into it um they're they're just great like youtubers so i would try to find those type of folks to build this you did a great job uh you went to founder university you went to our

SPEAKER_416: founder university yes i am learning and uh it was a great opportunity i have already learned quite a

SPEAKER_418: lot and still learning when did you go are you in the current class yes in the current one in the

David Friedberg: current class f11 fantastic whose pot are you in whose pot are you in maddie oh maddie's awesome

SPEAKER_352: that is in the hq and she is running the syndicate for me just so you know so we have our syndicate i think if you can get this tightened up into like one really great device that you can ride to sustainability which would be 500k a year in revenue a thousand dollars a day in revenue if you can get to that sort of level coming to our accelerator and then we could help you with the

SPEAKER_42: pitch to really try to get vcs to understand it and it's the reason we started founder university alex is because we meet founders like vasiv all the time they know the market they know you know what people want but they have to get product market fit they have to build a team they've got to get their first couple of customers and they also have to understand how to pitch vcs to bring them along and that's where you're at that's where we can be super helpful where are you based vasiv uh illinois illinois yes fantastic um i think you got something here tell me about your

SPEAKER_359: team is are you a solo founder you got co-founder i have my co-founder henning he's a ai specialist and chess enthusiast actually he it sounded to me like he came during the pandemic boom he learned chess so that's another great thing that it brought like actually another uh developer who also watched the

SPEAKER_355: queen's gambit and got into chess so amazing that helped us to build the team actually without so i

SPEAKER_410: want you to have another tip for you here since we're going deep um if you pull up fit bod for

SPEAKER_352: me alex the fit bod team um uh i want to show you a picture of the fit bod team uh retreat which i don't know it was in austin um and i'm trying to find a picture of it if they actually had a fit bar if they

SPEAKER_413: actually posted it maybe one of the founders posted it to their um uh one of the fit bod founders posted pictures of it to their social media anyway going through them the fit bod team uh and it's i

SPEAKER_42: think it's fit bod app let me find their um yeah fit bod dot me this reminds me of you um this is another elite group that went after the top one percent do you see my screen yes i do awesome so like tone base fit bod which also went to our accelerator just like tone base went to our accelerator we have you know some great uh expertise and affinity for what you're doing fit bod um is for people who are really into weightlifting and people who want to design their workouts and then see their progress and they used ai machine learning previously five years ago and they started saying this company's on a tear they're making lots of money just like chess.com they're very similar to chess.com in that way uh 15 million downloads 120 million logged you need to meet the founders of these two companies tone base and fit bod because you're doing what they did which is they said this is not tone base is not for people who want to learn how to play dylan songs on a tar or just play brown eye girl and fit bod is not for people who just want to have great biceps it's for people who are really into it but the less invested was one you've innately learned which is when you hire people hire people who have the skills you need great developer great marketer whatever but also have passion for the topic so if you made a four quadrant chart and one of them was how qualified they are at their job and the other one was how passionate they are about the topic if you can find somebody who's a 10 of 10 developer and who is obsessed with chess you don't have to motivate that person to do great things that's why when we hire people here at the launch fund we need people who are obsessed with entrepreneurship and technology and startups then i don't have to tell them hey you should wear 50 60 hours a week and make this your career they're like i want this as my career i love startups so when you meet somebody like maddie she's obsessed with entrepreneurship she's obsessed with startups i don't have to push her i have to keep up with somebody like maddie i have to keep up with somebody like lucas or oliver or marcus on my team because they're so passionate about it that's a key key um you know hidden skill you'll have all

SPEAKER_413: right great job um it's a lot of show today we did a lot of show we did too much show we've been talking for some time it is true i love doing too much show vasif congratulations enjoy your time in the

SPEAKER_42: founder university if anybody wants to come to founder university founder.university if we do a good job the only thing i'm going to ask of you vasif is two things one you write us a testimonial and two you

SPEAKER_355: tell us what we could do better do we have a deal yes you do and i using the opportunity i would like to thank thank you i was listening your um all-in podcast at the beginning for for several years

SPEAKER_359: i believe and you keep advertising uh the twist and then i was like let me give a shot for two years and i listen and then i i was like okay founder university i should try and since i joined i have already it exceeded my expectations and i think everyone who is trying to learn business uh and creating a startup i should try to apply uh that's for sure and uh i think yeah you you overall i i don't have much to uh give a feedback i am really enjoying and maddie also i think she was a some

SPEAKER_366: she did some volleyball in university she is she is very competitive and this is also great yeah

SPEAKER_381: shukran i will give you the thank you in arabic shukran there's a su sh sh sh yeah shukran yeah

SPEAKER_355: we have some similarities in my language from arabic oh what's your language where you are it is i'm from

SPEAKER_359: azerbaijan originally and our language is azerbaijan it is in turkish language group yeah but we got a

SPEAKER_42: lot of words from uh i'm your great i'm your greek cousin i i this is the thing i'm so ashamed that i never learned a second language alex that i've decided i'm going to try to learn the two hardest

SPEAKER_454: arabic and japanese that's my oh oh my god for the next five years five five years out of zero baby

SPEAKER_456: you're going to be at that for a minute if i could just speak conversationally those two languages i

SPEAKER_459: would be so proud of myself this is why you never come home you would just live in north of japan skiing year-round and i'd never see you again look at this you would see me equally i gotta pay for the you

SPEAKER_460: know it's expensive to ski cat skiing is not expensive it's 1200 a day i need to do some andreeds

SPEAKER_00: in order to afford it speaking of which if you're feeling inspired head to gamma.app and start working on

SPEAKER_42: an idea of your own and we're going to give away thanks to our friends at gamma who have the best presentation software i've ever seen people love it they're going crazy for it beautiful beautiful

SPEAKER_48: presentations and it's so fast to make a gorgeous one you're going to be like steve jobs on a nicotine pouch or two if you use gamma.app gamma.app i love it and they gave us 25 000 to invest in one of the great companies so asif you're in the running for a 25k check from your boy jacow thanks to our friends

SPEAKER_465: at gamma.app i'm excited to have chance thanks a lot for listening to me i appreciate you pitching us

SPEAKER_145: and uh yeah you're doing great keep going you