TBPN Live - LIVE @ YC Demo Day | Nate Bosshard, Joshua Reeves, Joshua Browder, Burkay Gur, Theo Browne & MORE

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

(00:00) - Nate Bosshard (24:17) - Bora Mutluoglu (27:52) - Joshua Reeves (33:28) - Gaus (39:24) - Perseus Defense (44:53) - Meteor (48:31) - Pally (52:10) - mcp-use, inc. (56:18) - Slashy (01:01:21) - Closera (01:05:23) - Joshua Browder (01:12:06) - Normal (01:15:47) - EffiGov (01:22:10) - NOX METALS (01:27:28) - Paige Finn Doherty (01:32:57) - Orange Slice (01:39:10) - Burkay Gur (01:52:47) - Jack Raines (02:03:11) - Nozomio (02:07:19) - VibeFlow (02:10:10) - Veritus Agent (02:13:29) - The Prompting Company (02:16:50) - Theo Browne (02:26:50) - Embedder (02:29:24) - Elena Sakach (02:36:07) - Kalinda (02:39:52) - Kernel (02:45:48) - Agent Mail (02:48:10) - Riff (02:50:26) - Freya (02:52:37) - Juxta (02:56:36) - Casey Caruso TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.ai/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN! Today is Tuesday, September 9th, 2025. We are live from the Palace of Party Rounds. We are at YC Demo Day. The batch is fall 2025, right, F 2025, because it used to just be winter and summer, but now they've added it's a quarterly batch. And so I believe we're in fall, is that right?

Yeah. And so we are here with Nate. Introduce yourself, tell the stream who you are why you're here. Nate Ballard, friend of the pod. You yet the first time you came on was at the first time we did YCDemaday two quarters ago been in the Bay Area for Longer than I cared admit 2008 have bounced around a few technology companies spent some time at some institutional VC firms have dabbled as an entrepreneur and now have a seed fund take it back further how'd you make your first dollar on the internet I sold used records on eBay we used records yeah this is record one 2001 vinyl guy yes this is crazy because I sold record players on you

I sold DJ equipment as we know as everything becomes more digital tactile physical things become more important yeah so I was early adopter there is there uh what was the ARB is so my ARB was international shipping basically people wanted top tier DJ gear in Australia and they couldn't get it because the companies wouldn't export or was it more about like going in uh what do they call it like not crate digging crate digging finding stuff that wasn't available in you know in Ohio and then you ship it there or New York at L. Wisconsin. You would travel up and down the Mississippi River corridor, hitting up antique shops, getting rare soul, funk, jazz, and psychedelic rock records. And then you would sell them at a 10x markup

to our friends in Japan. That's cool. That's cool. We have one more lightning round question. Japan was your exit liquidity. We're starting with the lightning run. A most underrated or greatest entrepreneur of all time. Who you got? Oh, God. Underrated or greatest is actually kind of hard to throw on something. What's the actual? So we're going to ask, we're going to try and ask every single person who comes on the stream how they made the first dollar on the internet and what their favorite entrepreneur is favorite it could be anyone I'm going to go out the last decade the last five years I think Andrew Dudum from hymns and hers is incredible yeah fastest consumer company to go public yeah that's true the only successful

consumer stock trading at 11 billion dollars yeah they went out of this fact but then they actually held the price he is an absolute killer and he's got a retail army Exactly. Which is weird. Not every boardroom general can lead a retail, aren't? And I would just, I think Andrew is incredibly underrated. I'm not going to say all the time, but in the last cycle. But we're going favor.

There was some recent news that they didn't, didn't compounding, like generally get like a green light, which is very good for him. Yeah, they've had a great kind of new wave with the general. Yeah, like a regulatory royal flush has been kind of drawn. been a lot of uncertainty about which way the chips would fall and they got lucky. And I want to give one of the founders, Hillary Coles, who also doesn't get a lot of publicity, but she is also, you know, an incredible founder and, you know, important to the success of the company.

Fantastic. Well, I have to put you in the truth zone. This is Y Combinator Demo Day summer 2020. This is Summer. This is Summer. This is the end of summer. We're starting fall. Fall batch. We met some founders who had, I think, going into the fall batch, but they've been accepted they'll be joining the next batch. I believe summer. Yes. Oh, great. My first, my first Y-C was summer. Wow. I was summer 12. S-12. So just to me you're 13 years. Yeah, still kicking. But I mean, I was what, 21 at the time or something? Just a lad. Just a lad. Just a lad. Just a lad. Just a boy. What else is at the top of your timeline today? Did you watch the Apple event? Were you shaking? Were you crying? Were you, were you gasping? Were you

clapping, standing ovation from you for the iPhone and the iPhone 4,000. I was looking for more innovation on the wired headphones. And I didn't see that as a vinyl. Yeah. You know, I like analog. I know they released a new pair of AirPods 3s. I haven't gotten the full spec yet. I think we have it.

I think we have it. They released a newer, better iPhone that's lighter, faster, stronger, newer and better. Which we need. Which we all need. So MKBHD summarized the launch. He's been live posting fantastically. So AirPods Pro 3, new foam-infused ear tips, 2X, the ANC performance versus last gen. Live translation.

Oh, you're getting live translation in those? Yeah, right. They also get heart rate sensing during workouts. Gen Z, do they do Gen Z live translation? That's a good. Probably. And they'll sense your heart. rate during workouts, but most of the people that are doing that already have the Apple Watch,

but it matches what Marquez saw get added to beats. So is it actually an audio quality thing, or is an RF, like what, or is it losing it? I think the translation feature, I think, is the most interesting novel new feature. I think as we all travel more and explore the world, I think that becomes super, super important. I think the concept of like the loss in translation, you know, universe that we all used to face, like now things can just be super flowing and free. Yeah. That demo, I feel like the live translation demo was hitting kind of the AI circles. Like Google was demoing it like a decade ago, maybe five years ago. It hasn't like happened like live and free.

Yeah, I remember in college probably over a decade ago, there was a product called Google Lens. And you could take out your phone. It was visual intelligence. And you could take a picture of a sign and it would automatically do all the OCR, then translate it. And then it would actually Photoshop it back on to the, it would like put in the UI, the translation over the actual sign. It was very cool, but didn't really have breakouts. I think when you're just looking at text,

live dynamic conversation, I don't think is a promise fulfilled yet. I know that Latin-based languages are much easier with that. I think when you go to Japan, it's still not there yet. But as someone who travels and I've got Google Translate open and I'm trying to have live conversation, it still doesn't exist. I'm really excited to try that.

You invested in a company in this batch? Is that correct? We invested in one company. Can you break it down for us? Yeah, and it's actually an Apple team. Really? No way. Yeah. We've all been on our own personal vibe coding journey.

Sure. Right. And I think the thing everybody's looking for is a native mobile on device app that can push live to test flight. Yep. And so there's a team out of Apple. Apps is memes. Well, memes are the end state of all human communication. We know that.

So that's like important. This team came out of the Swift, you know, the Swift, like, language. They basically are responsible for writing that. Interesting. They've built this product, the company's called BitRig, and they've built essentially an on-device, you know, prompt to app live in the app store test flight from your phone. Yep. So, you know, last batch it was cursor for X, Y, and Z.

This bash, it's lovable for X, Y, and Z. Oh, sure. You know, if you look at all. I mean. Yeah, well, we'll figure it out. Find that out, but that's kind of my hunch. But I think everybody's been looking for this, like, true native mobile app product from your device. And so I tested it out.

I've got a child who's approaching. in college and I actually built a college recruiting task manager for her. It's really cool. And so it actually like loaded it up like very quickly. I was shocked. It was like a paragraph or two of prompting and it actually produced like a pretty good product. And if you have an Apple developer account, it just like pushes live.

Yeah. I feel like the there's going to be like a ton of opportunity. We saw this with the initial rollout of the app store like kids being able to build like Flappy Bird and then just go viral and you're going to see like most of the stuff is just, it's going to be so much slop and so much, so many zeros, but you're going to get these crazy, crazy breakout stories of like some kid just vibe coded something, had a really unique idea, and was able to execute it on so much faster. Already the barrier to getting an app in the app store is like way lower than boxed software,

like where you had to literally call Masayoshi Sown and get like physical distribution. Well, I think, by the way, this guy, stream was down the last five minutes. That was a fantastic conversation, but we're back. But I think what you said while we were out was apps as memes, I think the concept of like kind of transient ephemeral software, software as gifts. I mean, the original like things, think about like 10, 15 years ago, everyone had an app idea and like, I don't know, like 10,000 people in the world were actually like qualified to like ship something pretty decent, right? Maybe more than that, obviously. But but it was like the amount of demand, like the reason that companies like lovable have blown up is like the demand for. apps is like so much higher than the supply of developers that can actually like build these things

and then especially too like most app ideas are not worth investing $100,000 into or $50,000 or even $10,000 right it's just like something that should just be created for fun maybe it turns into a company maybe it's just a little piece of software yeah it is sort of a gauntlet being thrown down for the ideas guys because it's like John feel but like seriously it's like it's like Now you're in, you're going to be in a paradigm where like, oh, you have an idea? Okay, like you now can just put your idea into a text box and get it in front of millions of people. Let's see how good your idea really is. I think that's figure it out.

I think the concept of social app marketplace, a la Etsy, where now you have this more artisanal software experience. People with ideas can iterate and build and ship things. I think that there's going to be some sort of new thing. is the app store, the next app store? I don't know, but I think when you lower the bar, super low, there's a lot of interesting ramifications of that. Yeah, I was thinking about that in the context of open AI. We've been in this era where, you know, it's like, okay,

you have this $200 a month plan. You get like the super frontier model in a fantastic iOS app. And if they go towards Agenda Commerce and ads and eventually they want to monetize fully, like do the paid plans go away? and does the product become more one size fits all, or do we continue to live in this world where if you have the budget,

you can get like a really, really, really special app experience? And the flip side of that is like, is like there are a bunch of pieces of software that I could imagine building that don't work as businesses, but would work essentially like as like a one-of-one piece of software. The example that I always give is like, if I hire an assistant, I can pay that person, to buy a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and print out

the articles, physically remove all the ads, and give me just a book of exactly what I want. Very expensive to do. It's probably, you know, like lots of lots of money. But like I could have a piece of software that does that. Now, I couldn't go and sell that software because I'm reselling subscriptions and I'm taking ads out of the product. But in terms of like a vibe coded one of one, there's only one person that's using it. Like it seems like potentially you could see more, more stuff that feels like the domain of only like you needed a person to do this. To take it even a step further, I just want, instead of you being on my contacts, I want the John app. Yeah, that's interesting. And so what would the John app have? Well, it would just be everything

you're into. Okay. Right? And I don't need to ask you any questions. I know what you're reading. I know what you're buying. I know where you're going. I know what you're shopping. And when you think about like contacts as this new dynamic piece of software, there's like a portal through you. Yeah, yeah. That's something that's super interesting. And I'm just riffing here. But like, Like I think that where you think where this goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be comes really trippy. You know, the language.

It's like Uber for John, basically. It's Uber for John. It's DoorDash for John. It's TripAdvisor for John. It's whatever workout app for John. Or is it more like, it's more like a return to like the old like, Tumblr?

2000s web. Yeah, exactly. Or something. Like, like we have, we have all been forced into expressing ourselves through these like narrow boxes and like, Yeah, you can put like any MP4 in there, any, any MP3 or any image in there. But you can't actually make any social app, like your profile, like fully your own and customize everything.

But you could do that on just a normal website. Maybe that's coming back. Think about every time someone asked you for advice. Sure. Oh, yeah. Or pings you. And it's just like, you just like, here's my app. Like, it's like you're just a proxy to your.

And you can permission things up. John and I are investors in Delphi. Yeah. Which is kind of a similar thing. thesis of you know making yourself available 24-7 let's switch gears a little bit are you going to be buying the Elon are you going to be signing up for Elon's SpaceX telecom Starlink direct about this yeah I'm a I'm a fan of rural environments oh you are you are and you need connectivity yeah and so absolutely

will be what's your do you do you travel with a Starlink set up much when you're going on escapades no but I would would say like it when I'm situated in place for sure yeah my my partner Dave who uh is a sprinter van guy is fully mobile mobile starlink on his van yeah yeah uh so what are your thoughts on nine nine six uh deep fates on x says yeah i work nine nine six nine minutes coding nine hours tweeting six energy drinks it's just it's just an extension of the performative mail meme let's just be honest so so i would totally agree with you but we had our kerosian from ramp the economist over there on the show yesterday he looked at the credit card data and there's

actually a meaningful uptick in in business activity in san francisco just san francisco on saturday just as up six months ago and it's like a meaningful uptick and so he says it's real sure there's always people that are living the realness sure and then there's the performative social media out chasing and so yeah of course there's always there's truth in every meme yeah it's like it's like maybe there's a 20% uptick in 9-9 And then that's been like five X'd by the volume of like post atlas Alice was joking. It was like the great lock-in and it's just like working Chinese hours for four months I mean I think you have to earn the ball and they've all had a some new some new press today said Naval Ravikon expects employees to work 24 seven at his new startup that's the next level after nine nine six is just don't sleep just stay at your desk just like 12.

12-7 12 12 12 12 I'm bullish on hymns and hers then for the kind of performance enhancing aspects required okay okay you think they might get into some some sleep deprivation tag back in the day people used to take pro-vigil yeah there was always that lore about like the motor air force pilots the most elite combat you know I've never done that but you know that was always Obama's hack as he would you know what yeah you came on we're not gonna talk about politics and here you are That's about performance. Performance enhancement.

And I'm, you know, I'm sure that, you know, provigial's not like a partisan issue. Yeah, for sure. It's bipartisan. Yeah, that's as far as we'll go on that. Anyway, do you want to run through the first Elon treasury company? Do you see this? Have you been following the, the treasury stock memes?

Is this like a micro strategy? Oh, it's micro strategy, but then there are a few that do ETH and Solana. There's five Solana treasuries that are launched within the same like three week periods. Like essentially, yeah, if you, if you track it, there's, there's one that Pantara launched. There's one that I think. Multi-coin. Yeah, Joe McCann, I think, was working on one. There's a few coming through the pipe right now.

I truly don't understand it, but maybe it's just because I'm aware of, like, you can buy crypto directly, but maybe it's like a tax thing. No, it's an on-ramp for trad-fi to play in crypto as a more safer play. Yeah. Because it's highly regulated, and so they, I think, instead of them just buying Solana, they can buy into this thing. Okay, okay, so it's a regulatory thing, more than a tax. For traditional finance, and I'm just being super reductive on that,

but I think that's the appeal. And then, you know, assume that they're just, if they're hoovering up as much of that. And then you give retail an opportunity for new forms of basically betting. It all comes back to that. It's all, it's all betting. But so we were talking about Echo Star, so SpaceX acquired a spectrum that's going to enable them to get into direct to sell. 17 billion? Yeah, it was eight and a half billion.

of cash, $8.5 billion of stock. Echo Star is not, is up 24% in the last five days, but is pretty much flat today. And people were starting, people yesterday realized they were like, wait, a $20 billion public company holds $8.5 billion of SpaceX stock. Like, this is an Elon treasury company. It's a treasury company. But small issue, they have $30 billion of debt. And so we were kind of like doing some rough math yesterday and realizing like SpaceX needs to be like closer to a $2 trillion dollar company for them to just pay off the and this is a company that's losing a lot of money in their core um core business i mean that spectrum purchases is highly strategic and makes me very very bullish i think people also should be looking at if they want a public market comp uh you know

more global play like look at rocket lab they're almost like a corollary every time Elon kind of does something publicly that's embarrassing or that is against you know the political zeitgeist that that stock like which one rocket lab rocket lab Yeah, it's also publicly traded, another successful deep tech SPAC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They started off like very- And they're actually launching rockets now, but there are a couple of those, like, the anti-E-E-Lon trade. Like there's this satellite company that's ASTS, and they've been like mooting in the, in the public markets,

but I don't think that they've actually like shipped any satellites. It's all like deals at this point. Rocket Labs, shipping. It's like $15 billion dollar market cap, SPAC. Yeah, done it well. Kind of like a rough period and now has been ripping. Yeah. Firefly also got out and did quite well, I believe, in the IPO.

So the SPAC universe, like, there's some winners. Yep. Let's be honest. Yeah. None of them, the. Somath was part of it. No, no, no. That's wrong.

Is that right? He did SOFi and Sufi's up. Okay. Yeah. So, truth zone. One out of. Yeah, it's like one out of eight. So that's like, you know, that's like two 50 for your playing baseball.

If you were even like across them, it was not a good time. But it was a rough time for a lot of people in a lot of market. Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. Sorry. Did you guys see this company yesterday alter ego? Yeah.

Yeah. it's like a telepathic like headset device that you can like think messages in thought it was pretty interesting it'll be big in the astrology community yeah yeah i can see that um went pretty got almost two million views since yesterday some people were pushing back and saying like you actually have to like mouth the words but i think it's fine like a fish is this actual shippable or pre-order somebody i don't know i don't know Yeah, yeah, it's not live, but I don't know how true this is somebody quoted it and said this is the same type of thing Aldman and and I ever launching by the way Future is here. I think that would totally make sense. And I think that's a good, good call. The question is just like, yeah, how quickly can like AirPod's 4 fast follow that technology? But if it's doing something else with like the electrical signals or like the mandible. This is a good. So we have to talk about this. Hunter SPX Thompson says, NVIDIA sells chips to Nebius to sell to Microsoft to sell to Open AI, all for open AI to burn

$100 billion between now in 2029 so I can ask Digital God for company primers and get answers in paragraph format pulled from seeking alpha toxin. Wow. Absolutely brutal. The Nebius deal that got announced yesterday, total, total retail. Yesterday was an insane day in the market, right? Yeah, Nebius is up another 40, it's 42% in the last five days, $22 billion. company right now. Retail, they had a retail army behind them.

And then that WorldCohen treasury company, did you see that? Oh, is there a treasury for that now? So there's a company, there's going to be a treasury for everything. So I wasn't familiar with these, these folks, but Dan Ives is Wedbush Securities. So he is now leading a crypto treasury strategy focused on WorldCoyne, the native token of the blockchain used in Open AI's creator, Sam Altman's identity startup world, and they bought, so they bought $250 million, they had a $250 million pipe into the company, into the public company, Octo. And the company, I believe, went up 2,500 percent, which is a lot. So Fartcoin Treasury, when?

Seriously. I'm actually not kidding. Yeah, well, we were pitching this idea of instead of focusing on these like crypto assets, you could create a a company that has a treasury that's just pure scratch-off lottery tickets. So you have like $10 million of lottery tickets in there? And it's like, who knows what it could be worth? It's hard to get to a book value on that. You could do the expected value, but who knows? Maybe the investors will just not do the book value.

Well, then you securitize it. Exactly. Get derivatives against the right to scratch off. Something there. I do want to cover a bit more nebious. There's some coverage here from TechCrunch that's pretty solid, because we covered this company earlier this year in a different context. Nebius is a real company.

It's hyperstate, right? Or NeoCloud? No, so I'll get into it. So Nebius has actually been public for 13 years, floating in May 2011 as Yandex, NV, the Dutch holding company of Russian internet giant Yandex, which is the Google of Russia. Remember?

That's crazy. So at the tail end of 2021, Yandex hit a peak valuation of $31 billion, but in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in early 2022, everything changed. change NASDAQ halted trading on Yandex shares in February due to sanctions imposed on Russian affiliated companies. And a year later, NASDAQ said it would de-list Yandex altogether. But Yandex successfully appealed on the basis that it was restructuring a process that would take an additional 16 months

to fully complete. Part of this included offloading all of its Russian assets, which was where most of the real business value lay. What remained under Yandex's ownership was a random assortment of infrastructure and business units that just so happen to be located outside of Russia. That's crazy. So they had set up data centers outside of Russia and everything effectively in Russia was seized and sort of like pulled back into the country. What a wild story. This divestment concluded in July with Yandex changing its name to Nevis AI, a cloud compute platform with its own Finnish data center. Finish. So we saw a billboard for Nebius on the drive.

Yeah, so the new business was to be spearheaded by Arcady, the Russian Yandex co-founder and former CEO who is removed from a European sanctions list in March after he publicly condemned Russia's assault on Ukraine. The core nebius business sells GPUs as a service to companies need to compute. And that is, I don't need to continue that. So anyways, crazy, crazy story. Highway 101 Billboard? Yeah, maybe, maybe not, not 101, but we saw it rolling in today. Yeah. Where did I, I took a picture of it because I love advertising.

Anyway, the East Bay people coming in. Yeah, exactly. That's us. Yeah. It said AI runs better on us. Echo Star has a wild story too, Brandon Gerell dug into it on the substack. Go to substack. What is it, TBPN.substack.com?

Yeah. Subscribe. I believe we have our first guest. So thank you so much for coming on. Great to see you. Titans enjoy the rest of your demo day get out there your founder makes on the show I will find that team bring him over you bring enough checks is your checkbook full I hope you're not running out of checks all Apple pay okay all Apple pay now we need a

ping sound effect ching anyway if you're just tuning in we are live from YC demo demo day summer 2025 and we will bring in our first team look at this how you do you do you want to bring over another chair for them here you can grab this We'll bring in one for you. We'll put this here. Last, last, last. Are we going to space? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interview yourselves.

Outfits because our logo is a rocket. Okay. Okay. I help, I need to talk to this Mike. Yeah, as much as you can. Yeah, so I'm Bora. This is Jerry. We're co-founders of Reacher.

And the outfits are because we help brands reach more creators. Okay. And make viral content to help them reach more people. How do you do that? Like, what is the actual product? Yeah, so we build AI agents to help brands find the right creators, personalize the outreach, get them to respond, pay them,

and then also generate scripts and hooks so that they can make viral content. Got it. Is the long term a marketplace for brands to connect to creators? Do you want to create liquidity, two-sided marketplace? Definitely. Right now, let's build as much tools for brands as possible.

There's so much work there. And then once we have a critical mass of, let's say, 50,000 brands, we open up the deal marketplace to creators, and that's when they can make money. Okay, first question. I'm going to hit you with a hard question. I'm bullish on the tool in its current state. there's been so many attempts to build creator marketing tools over the last decade.

None that I'm aware of have become, you know, truly, truly massive companies, right? What do you think has changed now that can enable this to be sort of a billion dollar company? So I would say one thing is the fact that TikTok's job exists and social commerce, it's like the first real social commerce platform. Everything is native, native checkout. out, the attribution is really dialed in in terms of everything happens on the platform. And it's the first real attempt at getting anybody, like you, me, regular creators that don't have millions of followers to make content. And with the algorithm, the way it works is you can

go viral, right? So I think that's one big aspect of it. And the other part is AI, and I'll you speak to that. So you guys, just, just one second, so you guys are focused on TikTok, TikTok shop initially just as a category? Currently, currently yes. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, you said agents going around finding creators. Is there pushback from scraping TikTok? Like, what's the actual interaction like there? No pushback because we're number one on the TikTok shop app store. Okay, there you go. So we're in the back end. We help TikTok make money, so they don't want to push back. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. We have some lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur, what you got? Oh, you go. You can say anybody. Yeah, I know. I was going to say, Elon, but I think

it's Jensen. Jensen. There we go. The first Jensen. Let's start counting them up. Yeah. Also, we've been asking everyone, how did you make your first dollar on the internet? Oh, just dollar in business?

Dollar in business. I was fixing people's iPhone crack screens. No way. That's a great story. Awesome, guys. Traction, what kind of numbers do you report on for demo day? Demo day was great. Alumni Demo day was great.

Our traction is $137,000 in my next. thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. Whoa. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Series B tears already. Wow.

I've seen enough. Give them a hundred million. Oh, we heard series A and B investors don't like outfits, so we're going to see about that. Okay. Well, we love the aesthetics. Thank you so much. Awesome, guys. Tremendous.

Cheers. Thank you. And we have a surprise guest. We have the CEO of Gusto, I believe. Josh is here. We're going to bring in Josh. There we go. How you doing?

It's been too long. Good to see you. It's been so long. I'm so glad to see you. Good to catch up. It's good to be here. Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly. Hello, I'm Josh.

I'm a CEO co-founder of Gusto and we are right across the street. No way. Literally my team walked up and was like, they're across the street. Do you want to go say hi? I'm like, sure. There you are. Incredible. I have zero prep.

Good placement too. Did you guys do that on purpose? Well, we were an early adopter of Dog Patch. We came here 2017. Okay. We were surrounded by Jewel. Oh yeah. No way.

This building. Crazy. That's crazy lore. Uber autonomous cars. Okay. Yeah. Now it's Astronis and YC. Okay.

Awesome. What batch were you in? It was 2020. Winter 2012. Yeah. Winter 2012. That must have been just after summer 2012 when I went through now. Because I remember we used custom.

Yeah. How did Demo Day go for you? Yeah. So first off, it was smaller. Yep. It was down in Mountain View. But it was still like, it was still like 70 teams. There was about.

50, 60 in the batch. And it was twice a year. Yeah, it's four times a year. And yeah, I mean, the shift was just starting to San Francisco. So we were actually still based in Paul Walto up until four employees. And then we moved up to the city and then a lot of companies are now here. Were you, did you guys start with the payroll? Was that the thing you were planning to build or did you kind of pivot into it?

We were before YC, definitely iterating and experimenting. Once YC officially started, we were like heads down. Okay, so were you running payroll prior to Demo Day or did you need more time to build? Did you ever not dog food the product? So we decided we weren't going to pay ourselves until we can use our own product. There we go. That's great. There we go.

And then we had two milestones. I like it. We didn't pay ourselves until we could use our own product and then we onboarded like 10 other companies. Okay, but that was during YC. That was during the back. For Demo Day, we had to be able to say to everyone, yeah, yeah, we're using our own product. can process payroll. Otherwise, you have to put a clown mat, you know, outfit on.

We were three electrical engineering PhD dropouts. What credibility do we have building payroll software? What's the, the craziest MVP version of running payroll? Like, legally, can you just hand someone cash and fill out a form? Aren't there, aren't there stores? How do you ramp up? You can do it on a spreadsheet, obviously you should use gusto, but like, legally, legally, can you just do it on a pay?

When we started the company, 40% of, of businesses in the US, we're doing it by hand. Wow. And you can, there's like physical businesses out there in the world that still like run, they do payroll as a service. And you can like go into them and it's not a tech business.

Yeah, exactly. And it looks more like retail. Yeah, about a third of companies are still using that type of system. No way. It's error prone. Mistakes get made, you get penalized, yada yada. That's wild.

Insane. That's crazy. How was, how was, how was raised, did you guys have any trouble raising or, Or people by that point were pretty bullish, I'm guessing. I think we stood out. There was luck. There was hard work.

A lot of stuff has to line up, because you're raising at the same time with a bunch of other founders. Instagram had just gotten bought in the last year or two, I think, before that. And so a lot of the companies in the batch were in the social, mobile, local kind of craze. So low-mo. The best time to build SaaS is when everyone... We stuck out as like, we're building a business that has like very concrete need, very, very established market. So we ended up doing really well in the batch in terms of the fundraising process. We raised a $6 million seed round.

Wow. No way. That's great. Back then was a large amount. And then it wasn't about spending it. Like when we did our Series A, we still had two-thirds of that in the bank. But yeah, we had some great investors get involved, and we're really grateful. We have a lightning round. We have two questions.

We've been asking everyone. Favorite entrepreneur, doesn't have to be greatest. It can just be anyone, but who's your favorite entrepreneur? Can I be snarky in my answer? Please. Tomor and Eddie are my co-founders. They're amazing. I think really highly of that.

That's a fair. That's a fair. I mean, I can go with a classic. Any biographies that you are on your nightstand? Here's the personal story. Graduated 2005, Stanford, and the commencement speaker that year was Steve Jobs. Wow. That speech was live.

It's like a viral video. And that was a formative moment. And I really admire, like, that customer centricity that, like, imagine the future aspect of Steve Jobs. aspect of Steve Jobs. Wow. Yeah, that's great. And then what's the first dollar that you made online? Was Augusto?

Or were you doing anything before that? I mean, back in the 90s, I was building websites. Yeah, I got a website for a coffee shop. For a coffee shop. So I mean, that was, I got paid for that. Do you remember how much you got paid? I think I did it for like 500 bucks. That's pretty good.

In the 90s, with inflation, that's like $25,000 today. I mean, yeah, if you just waited some time, bought Bitcoin, you'd be a trillioner. Well, you put it all in a payroll and I think it worked out. Maybe I'm Satoshi. Fantastic. Do we have more guests just ready to go? Okay, perfect.

I got a lot more questions. Good to see you. Yeah, yeah. Good to see you. Thanks so much. Congrats on all the progress with what you guys are doing. Yeah. And yeah, good luck out there if you're, if you're,

what percentage of the batch is already using Gusto, do you think? We tend to do pretty well with YC batches. It's fantastic. And we also do a Boba Get Together. Ooh, there you go. Okay. Boba. Yeah. Yeah.

Boba Gusto, make payroll easy, set of healthcare really easy. We're here to serve. Well, thank you so much for hopping out. We'll see you soon. We'll see you. And we will bring in our next guest. We'll also tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both.

Go to ramp. What's happening? Welcome to the show. Hello. Nice to you. Hey. I'll give you a salute. I'm a big fan of the show.

Thanks so much. There we're being for the stream. What are you building? What are you pitching here today? So I'm Bruno. We're building Gauss. personal AI investment analysts for retail investors. Oh, interesting.

There we go. B2C, if you invest in stocks, you're welcome to join our platform. Yeah, I mean, there's been a ton of moves in the retail world, tons of meme stocks going on. Is this gonna help me find the next great meme stock or avoid getting caught up in the meme stock? Is it more for the retail investor

who doesn't wanna get burned, or the retail investor has to go risk on? Can I tell the apps and not make mistakes? Exactly, that's actually our number one use case. We want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes. Emotional mistakes. Right now we're focusing on thesis driven investors, so not the meme stock buyers.

So you have a clear thesis, you wanna monitor the market, but you're a busy professional, you don't have time to keep track of everything that's happening. We can find opportunities, you know, you connect your portfolio to us, and we can start giving tailored advice that fits your financial profile. Talk to me about the puzzle pieces

that you're putting together. I imagine plaid's important, there's probably some broker dealer at some point, there's probably a frontier model that you're partnering with, you're not training your own models, but what are the puzzle pieces that you're putting together to build a platform?

Yeah, exactly. So Plaid is part of our platform. We have read only access to your accounts so we don't do trades right now. You just recommend right now. We recommend it. So we're an advisor, basically. We want to tackle the advisory market

and replace RIAs with agents. So what kind of, what's the compliance framework if you're giving people investment advice as an app? Everyone always says, so you just say not investment advice and then you're fine, right? And then you can just give as much advantage of investment. Yeah, yeah. Right now, that's what we do.

But we're in the process of getting the RIA registration. And hopefully by the end of the month, we will be an RA. And we can give advice. Did you come into YC with this idea, or did you pivot into it? We did, yeah, actually. We've been, Michael Farr and I have been working on this

for the past three, four months. We apply with this idea. We're one of the few B2C companies in this batch because most companies have been B2V. But it's been exciting. We got like 1.7,000 users using our platform, generating revenue. Yeah.

And is your KPI like assets that are linking on Plaid? Is that what you shared today? Yeah, that's one of the KPIs, but right now we're focusing on signups and retention. Just totally users. Yeah, we want to get, you know, users coming to our platform and staying with us, and we want to eventually be the best in giving like tailored investment advice for people. That's great. Lightning round?

Yeah, I was going to say, how are you monetizing today? It's a subscription model. So we're charging $19 a month for customers. And, you know, we'll plan to continue with this for a while, and then eventually we're going to switch the more RIA. like model free plan or everyone paid free plan you it's a freemian you can just like sign up the platform use the free features and you can pay an x more i like businesses like this because people run the calculus of like if i pay $19 a month but i can make a slightly better investment totally also i mean you can definitely i don't want to you know degrade the business anyway but

uh you can also underwrite this as uh almost like an edutainment product like even if i'm not always making the trade that it recommends if I'm just saying, okay, here's my thesis, walk me through the stocks. That's almost like a deep research type product. That's something that somebody can read like an investment newsletter. Exactly. What were you doing before this? I was, so I started my career at NewBank. Oh, yeah. Nice. Wow. I was doing data science there. Then I moved to VC. Yeah. I did three years of fintech investing in Latin America. Thank you for work. I like Bsies. I was in the industry, you know, I and then I switch to the other side of the table. Now I wanted to start.

something on my own, the two years of business school at Stanford. Oh cool. Just graduated two months ago, did YC and now we're here. Non-traditional background. So how's the fundraise going? We close around. Oh, let's go. Okay.

Still undisclosed, but we have a small location for smaller angel checks. Oh, okay. You know, hopefully that's good, good runway for us. He's like, call me, but not financial advice. Also, it's going, it's going to be a thousand bagger, but also not financially nice. Dude, congrats. A couple of lighting around questions. Favorite entrepreneur.

We've been asking everyone who comes to mind throughout history? I have to say, Davy Valles from New Bank. He's an inspiration for me. He challenged the most traditional industry in Brazil, big banks, and he managed to create a generational company. Fantastic. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? Oof. So when I was a kid, you know, I started kind of like the small e-commerce shop to sell materials for, you know, school materials.

Yeah. It was just like a very simple website in Brazil. I was in Sao Paulo and, you know, kids were always like, they asked their moms to buy school materials. And I was like, I think there's a way to just like sell directly to kids. And they were like starting to go to these websites. And I was just like, and it was like there was no payment system or anything. It was just like a storefront. and they could select a material and they pay me cash that's cool but you use the internet as yeah it's like an order management system wow that's amazing that's a great story thank you so much

for helping thank you so much thank you so much thank you so much congratulations on the round that was uh not general solicitation by the way he was not saying to reach out to him if you want to invest in the company uh but uh love to see it i'd love to see a non-traditional background into uh You can see some Stanford representation. Stanford MBA, worked as a venture capitalist, worked at a at a hyperscaler. We loved to. Not a hyper scaler, but just like one of the power law outcomes.

Welcome to the stream, Perseus defense. I saw your stuff on X. I saw the image of this massive weapons. It should be percyous warfare. Oh, yeah. Wow. Got to update the shirts. Welcome to the show, guys.

Welcome to the show. No, you're good. Yeah, you're good. Cool. Welcome to show guys. We're going to kind of have you pass back to the mic. back and forth. Just get it as close as you can. Sure. But introduce yourselves. Who are you? What are you building? Cool. So my name is Jason Cornelius. This is Steve. Hey, what's up guys?

Steve with Percy's defense. What's that? And we're building 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. Okay. What, what? Like, do we not have 16 inch missiles in the arsenal currently? Is this something that's like, like, we're familiar with like the Patriot and then the bullet? How much do they cost? And how do you feel? And how do you fire them. Yeah, it's a good question. So there are some existing solutions for like the counter UAS problem, right? We see. Walk through it. Well, yeah, walk through the solutions. For sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare. Sure. Yeah. So GPS jamming, there's unreliable, right? There's the, there's easy ways to defeat them. You know, you could make a more

advanced drone and this is what we see. And then you have the fiber optic cable. There's fiber optics. Oh yeah. Already defeating some of those solutions that we have. Yeah. And then there's like the Death Star laser beam, which is very expensive, immobile, very heavy, requires a lot of power. There's AI machine guns. Yeah. So like there's a million solutions. Who's your buddy that does that? ACS. ACS has gone on in the truck, yeah. And so there's some really good solutions out there

for different use cases. But we need more. We need more and they all have pros and cons and they have like a layered. So some of them like ACS is very short range. Some of them like a Patriot is very long range. And so we looked at it who's going to fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend

a $10 million missile to shoot it at 10 miles away, but we also don't want it to get so close to us that it's right on top of us. So what's the range? It's a 16 inch missile, missile half mile half mile okay and is the benefit of that the payload like you can blow up a bigger drone or you can just fly farther like what are the tradeoffs that go or what are the benefits yeah really the cost the cost yeah so if you look at like the best solutions today you know

raytheon has something called coyote that's still 250 000 per drone that we take out the drone that we take out cost one thousand dollars yeah so it's like not a great scale right so we're building these things for sub 10 000 a shot trying to drive that cost down and then you have a How does it do targeting and actual fire? Yeah, so there's a thermal seeker on board the missile. All the computes onboard the missile, it's fire and forget. So it just seeks out the drone. So you can just shoot these out.

Yeah, and so we have the display out back with like the missile pod mounted on some unmanned vehicles. And we got some Navy SEALs to send us. But you can see like these things could, they're cheap, they can pop off. You can have like, they're only a pound each. So you can have like 25 missiles in one pod that's only like 30 pounds or so. So a guy can carry around like a mini surface. missile site basically that's crazy crazy what's the progress of the business are you going straight to program of record are you doing some uh some different grants what what what's the business

model sure it's a good question so you know typical way to do this is you apply for a cibber small business invasion project i mean we've so we've done some of those applications we're kind of trying to attack it from all different possible angles so i was in the pentagon three weeks ago i carried missiles inside the pentagon cool to show two offices there we're working with fort hood so first cavalry division down there they've been super helpful giving us feedback on our solution, trying to help us accelerate it into the DoD. So we're talking to the soldiers of the ground level. We're talking to the Pentagon. We're talking to the science and technology communities inside the DOD and really have a list of supporters. They're just waiting

for us to get a technology ready so that they can bring us out. We can demo it and get it ready to rock. What's it like testing a product like this? It's yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot of your batchmates here can go and just ship a product, you know, to make make an edit, ship it to prod, and then the stakes are a little bit lower. So, like, where are you guys even testing and all that stuff? Can't say on here where we test at, but every two weeks we do a long drive very far outside of San Francisco and we load the truck up. We take a bunch of missiles out into a very far away land and we test.

So that's been the entire YC batch every two weeks we've done it. So four or five cycles. And then in between those two weeks, we have the entire team doing major iterations to the design, improving it. So in the 10 weeks of YC, we've done five major measurements. missile iterations, launched over 30 missiles, and it's progressing quite fast. I will say the first thing that we bought with the YC company, or with the YC money, was a forward expedition.

And so we just packed that thing full of all the things. That's crazy. And then we blew it up. Lightning round. Favorite entrepreneur. Who do you look to for advice or as a role model? We're looking at Dino at Serronic right now and trying to match that growth trajectory that they're having a lot.

Makes sense? And I'll say Steve Blank, we're kind of friends with him down at the Stanford. I love him. I love him. Yeah, I interviewed him a while back. He's great. Second lightning round question. How do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

I used to wash horse trailers. Wash horse trailers. There we go. There you go. Let's give it up for people who made their money. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks guys. Good luck at the rest of the demo.

Cheers. Cheers. We will talk to you soon. If you're tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We are going to have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tan stop by. The team's going to bring in Gary Tan as soon as he's available. But up next, we have Meteor.

Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Nice to meet you. Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? Yeah, I'm Prunov. We're building Meteor, and this is for Han.

The AI native browser that's going to kill Google Chrome. Oh, okay. We got the browser wars going to go. Let's go. That's right. Yes, this one. Okay, okay. Meteor.

Are you guys going after a comet too? Yeah, absolutely. Everyone, yeah. Okay. Well, what's the plan? I mean, everyone is installed Chrome at this point. Everyone runs it. It's so hard to rip it out.

How do you create a solution that's 10x better? Yeah, well, I mean, we all spend seven or eight hours every day on our browser. We spend, we do most of our work on the browser. Yep. Most of it is redundant work. Yep. We're saying we can automate all of that away. Okay.

We're saying we want AI, we want to spawn AI agents that that work with you as your co-pilot to the web that can do your work for you. So you don't have to waste your seven, eight hours. Okay, but like what does that look like as I use the product? How do you pitch it to somebody who says, Chrome works well enough for me?

Right. Chrome does work well enough for you if you're okay wasting many hours a day. But worst thing is we're giving you time savings. It's sort of like people pay thousands of dollars for personal assistance. Sure. Right, people pay thousands of dollars for employees to hire, like to create automation.

Yep. We're saying, we want to create virtual employees. Sure. That run on your browser. Yeah. And that's Meteor. So like, let's say you want to handle your calendar. Sure.

Right? Just automate all like meeting creation, you know, based on your emails. Like if you want, you know, some kind of like data entry, just hand out like tell media and we'll handle it for you, right? How is the AI agent interfacing the actual data? Are you screen scraping, taking screenshots, trying to interpret it that way? Are you doing computer use or, you know, interacting with the HTML or API underneath? Yeah.

So we're in alpha right now. So we're trying out a bunch of things. Right now we're primarily using vision. So we use screenshots. Sure. Also helps a little bit with like some of the prompt injection stuff. So definitely, we're primarily using vision, but you know, we've been playing around with a bunch of things. Yeah.

What's the best frontier model right now for what you do? Right now it's probably Claude Sonnet. But, you know, we use a mixture of models, right? We use GPD, we use God, we use all of them. And we are state of the art. Yeah, so. What were you guys doing before YC? Yeah.

We were at the UW. We were both studying computer science. Oh, no way. There you go. Amazing. We have a lighting round. Who's your favorite entrepreneur? It's got to be Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs. Okay. And how did you make your first money online, your first dollar in business or online? Selling Pokemon cards? Selling Pokemon. There we go. There we go. Congratulations on Demo Day.

Thank you. How's the race going? First year, college dropouts. You're here. You're going through YC. Oh, it's been going great. Yeah. We're both second time entrepreneurs.

We've been a bunch of push in the past. First time. dropout second time. First time dropout, yeah. Unfortunately, you can only do that once. Yeah, this is all. No, you could go back and you could get an MBA and dropout. Yeah, you'd go to med school at 35 and drop out.

What was your last company? So he built Maxima, which is an FPGA ID. That was 10 times faster than the industry standard. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, a lot of code optimization. I've built a bunch of projects at UW that went viral. Awesome. He almost got kicked out twice.

No way. Yeah, I did. What was the worst thing you did to get picked out? Okay. The thing that went most viral was, I figured out there was a data leak that allowed students to get access to their professors before Udub published it. And I published it within eight days, it got taken down, I got called in, but, you know, everything's okay now. Okay, everything's okay now. Congrats, guys.

I appreciate it. Good luck out there. Good luck. Thank you so much. If you see Sundar Pashai, just run the other direction. Just run the other direction. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for coming on.

We have our next day. trying not to do handshakes people are insisted on handshakes we're gonna do handshakes we're gonna do handshakes okay welcome to the stream how you doing how you doing cheers uh congratulations on fantastic demo day why don't you introduce yourself and just literally came directly from the stage fantastic we love to see i think it was really good you look calm and collected okay that's good introduce yourself in the company um cool i'm has hobble i'm the founder of pally we're bringing every contact and every conversation from every platform into one place okay and using AI to help you keep track.

Okay, I message. How do you get my eye messages? Modern, modern work. I got eye message. There's signal. There's XHA. There's LinkedIn. There's email.

Tell me about it. And there's been a few people that have like tried to crack this. I think like text.com. Yeah. Maybe highest profile solution. There was Eric Kikovsky, the YC founder working on something like this deeper. Yeah. So what's the unique insight and what kind of value do I get from connecting all these services and giving you

all my data. Well, one, you don't give us all your data. We do it fully locally on your device. On device, LLM, on device back to databases. Your data remains local, which is amazing for you guys and for us because we don't want to see your data either. So I have to run it on a computer that's always on, basically? No, so it's on your MacBook and then it syncs to your iPhone as well. Okay, but if my MacBook's closed right now, it's not going to sit to my phone? If it's switched off fully, it won't sync. Oh, but if it's chilling like that, it's okay. So never turn off. Yeah. But realistically, if I really cared about this, I could get a Mac Mini and throw it, and then it's just running.

Yeah. Okay, got it. How are you actually scraping? Can you share how you're scraping out of I-Message? It's very clever. Okay. I don't know. Everyone always has one trick that Tim Cook hates. And good luck to you holding on to that. What's the traction been like? What kind of metrics were you reporting? Yeah, I mean, so we launched two months ago. We reached products of the week on product time. And it's since going to Ava. Thank you. Fantastic. We've since growing over 3,500 users, 125K of ARR. Oh, so people are really paying a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Growing at 22% week over week. That's fantastic. Double kill. We have some lightning around questions for you. Who's your favorite entrepreneur, who you learn in a lot from? My favorite entrepreneur at all time. Actually would be like Richard Branson. And here's a fun story.

So when I was, I dropped out of high school. And I remember when I was like 14 to 15, speaking to my mom about this, I pointed to him as someone who was successful who dropped out. Yeah. Did he drop out of high school though? Yeah. Oh wow. And then 10 years later, I was invited to spend a week on his island with him.

No way. And I spent actually time with him on Necker Island. And so it was like a very cool full circle moment. Totally. He's been a great, great mentor over the years. That's amazing. That's amazing. So I can lightning round question.

How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? I was 12 years old and I sold FIFA Ultimate Team coins. No. What do coins mean? Basically, it's like you can buy and sell players and create a team. Sure. And I would, um. It's like virtual currency inside the game.

But how I'd do it is I'd find a player and buy up every single version of that player and then price fix three times higher like classic price. And so it made so much money, definitely illegal in the real world. But on this game, it was fair game. Fair game. Fair game. Well, uh, how's the raise going? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we're ever subscribed. And we're still deciding on who to partner with. So reach out if you want to chat. Not very good. Not financial advice, but super bullish on this. Thanks so much. Great to meet you. You too.

Can't wait to test the product out. We will bring in our next guest, and we are live here from YC Demo Day. Welcome to the stream on Jones. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. What a direct name, let me guess, model context protocol, AI, something like that. What's going on? Introduce yourself.

What do you do? Yeah, my name is Peter. I'm the CEO of MCPU. We help people use MCP, of course. Be an open source, that tools and infrastructure. I was going to say, what's the open source? What's the open source strategy? Yeah, open source, I mean, is a no brain.

The strategy is to open source. Yeah, MISD license, everything is free. Okay, everything's free and then there's probably GitHub repo that's growing and some measured by stars or something like that. Yeah, 7K stars. So there we go, I know, let's hear it for 7K stars, congrats. And then at some point, do you want to be more like Red Hat Linux? Like who are you looking to in terms of well run is a GitLab?

Superbase. Superbase, okay. Break down. How will their business model look like yours? Yeah, because they have a bottom up approach. you get developers and then those developers introduced inside the company, the tool. Sure. And I love it. And is the goal there to sell a non-self-hosted version long time? Yes, yeah. Got it. Like, cloud, you know. Great. Yeah. What else is driving adoption right now?

Like, who are the key businesses or customers that are really going all in on MCP? Enterprise. Enterprise. Enterprise. Enterprise. 20% of Fortune 500, yes. Is there any, is there, is there any, like, specific subset of enterprise that's particularly all in on AI or MCB. Like we saw this data point yesterday that when the census polls people, maybe enterprises are less likely to adopt AI, maybe they got over their skis. But you can imagine that it's different if you're a farmer adopting AI or a large, you know, agricultural conglomer or chemical plant or a widgets business versus like your visa or your fintech company.

And like AI is, it's already already a digital business. So is there, are you, have you noticed any trends in who you're coming? customers are. Yeah, I think what you said makes a lot of sense, like tech forward enterprise are doubling down. Okay. Like PayPal, this kind of companies, because they have like a very software, like they have a very valuable software. MCP allows to expose this software to agents. So they're the ones, you know, doubling down. How's the raise going? Very good, very good. You raised six already. What? Six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars. How many times did you have to apply to Y.C. to get in? Oh, three. Three of three. Let's go. Never give up. Never give up.

What were you doing? What were you doing? I was in Zurich, you know. Oh, nice. So fire there and we got me virtual trial for e-commerce. Okay. Oh, virtual trial. Did you just say miserable? Yeah. It's very hard to sell the fashion. Don't do it. Uh, it's totally hard. It's crazy how many companies have taken that crack. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, no, it's getting better, you know. Yeah. On the banana. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you always wonder if it's going to, is that functionality going to live like at Shopify or at an independent enterprise? What's the, uh, what's the AI scene like in Zurich? I think there's that team over there poaching all the time, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. It's great.

Top people. It's a great. Yeah. I think last year you had another Zreek guy. Yeah. There we go. So we're also getting it. But you're staying in the bay.

Yeah. Yeah. We got a good one. We got a good one. We got a good one. Thank you. We have a lightning round. We like to ask two questions.

First, who is your favorite entrepreneur or someone in business that you look up to? Yeah, Brian Chesky, I think. Brian Chesky. There we go. And then our second question, how do you make your first dollar online or in business? Converting on open source user. Really? Yeah.

That was when you first. No, so I thought it was like a hypothetical question. No, no, no, literally, like a lot of people, they sold records on eBay or they, you know, set up a website for a friend. Everyone has an interesting story of like their first taste of entrepreneurship. Could just spend a job, I don't know. I think it was an app where people could create picture of their kids. Oh, yeah. I made it with a girlfriend at the time.

No way, okay. Cool. Yeah, and you got your first dollar. Well, congratulations. Have a great rest of your demo. We will talk to you soon and we will bring in our. our next guest at YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream, how are you doing?

Thank you for hopping on the stream. I'm John, nice to meet you. Please introduce yourself. What do you do? What are you building? I'm Prongeli, I'm building Slashy. What is Slashy? Slashy is a general agent that connects to your apps.

Okay. Your calendar, Gmail, Notion, Slack. On Android, iOS, both? It's on the browser. It's on the browser, okay. So is this a Chrome plugin? Or are you engaged in the browser war? So you're going up against Chrome directly?

We're not in the browser of wars. We're actually built on APIs. API. Yeah. No MCP, no browser. Wow. So does that mean I have to go through like 25 different OAuths to actually log in to every single app with you once,

and then you have the freedom to move around with your agents inside my life? There's ways to get around it. Oh, okay. You know, Google. Sounds like some Stift Lord magic. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Right now it's very basic. We just don't want to, you know, unleash our power to the world.

Of course. Well, speaking of power, how powerful is the business now? What is the value that you're telling users they'll get out of the product? Is it more B2B focus, more consumer? Where's the focus? The focus is just, you know, you're 9 to 5, the shit that you don't like doing, and you just like have Sashi do the automating of the repetitive tasks. So specifically, I have a workflow that I'm doing where I'm going from this document to this app,

to this calendar, to this email, and I do that every single day. And so I'm going to use Slashy to automate that. Well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, of course, yeah, except slashy writes the prompt for you and thinks of the edge cases for you as well. And, well, one thing you should try on it is people search. I know you're meeting lots of founders today. But yeah, we made, we made a specific template for you for we season alike to be like find everything about ex-founder. Okay, okay. Atlasian just bought the browser company.

Do you think they're kind of going after a similar opportunity to what you guys are going after? I think the issue is just it's really hard to build habits around browsers. It's really hard to get people to use browsers and switch from like what they've already been using. Yep. So better to integrate at a deeper level. That's exactly it. You really need to just, you know, be like useful and be something that people want to use. So once I authenticate and you're hooked into my digital life, are you going to just automatically detect things that could be workflows?

You said you're going to write the prompt to yourself. So you're going to notice that every time I get an email from someone saying, hey, I'd like to meet. I open up LinkedIn and I search them and I go over here and I look at their website and then you might do that automatically for me in the future. Is that the goal? Ask last you to do one thing and it'll be like, do you want me to set this up for you every single day? Fantastic. That's nice.

How did you meet your co-founders and what were you guys doing before this? We met at college, all three of us. I'm 18, freshman. My co-founder is sophomore and the other one is junior. Wow. What school? Georgia Tech. Nice.

Yeah, before that I had another. And you guys dropped out? Sorry? Dropped out? Dropped out. There we go. Freshman dropout. Freshman didn't make it very far.

It's fantastic. How do your parents feel about the dropout? They're both PhDs. It's a little bit of an uphill battle, but, you know, they're supportive. Thank you, Mom. What metrics did you share during your pitch? What metrics I share?

Well, 40% of the batch uses us. What? Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Growing 30% week over week. 3% of the BCs in Demo Day are using us for meeting prop. No way, okay.

Crazy. Crazy. Very cool. Yeah, you came in with a pretty broad pitch, but you narrowed down really well. I like this. Amazing. How's the fundraise gone? Fundraise going well, we're almost, almost done with closing.

Yeah, yeah. Be here, be square guys. That should make your parents feel a little bit better. It's like, okay, like she dropped out, but she raised, you know. The bags in the river. We have a lighting round. We asked two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?

Who's my favorite entrepreneur? What's what you look up to? Elon Musk, Lucy Guo. There we go. Lucy Guo. Whoa, love that. Wait, somebody's asking your question, freshman dropout on September 9th is wild.

Did you go for a week or were you a freshman last year or not? I did a year. You did one year, okay. It would be funny. And then the last question we asked is, how did you make your first money online? Although normally that's like people much younger, a decade ago.

But yeah, what was your first introduction? entrepreneurship was it this company or did you make money in some other ways some people you know did some stuff on eBay or built an app or built a build a website or something you know I started a company when I was 14 that Lucy Groll funded no way oh there we went to age of zero very cool yeah what did you actually do how'd you make a money like what did someone pay you for summarizing research papers well crazy all right well legend in the making well congratulations thank you so much for coming on the show

We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your demo days. If you are just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025, and we are bringing in our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? I'm John. Please sit down talking to that microphone and introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do?

Hey, everyone. I'm on the CEO of Closera, and we build AI agents for commercial real estate. Ooh, okay. What part of the commercial real estate stack? The actual transaction, do you sit on the buyer side, the seller side? like yeah it's a great question administration there's so much for that in commercial real exactly it's a huge industry so yeah my co-founder and I our families actually grew up in the commercial real estate space our both our families are developers cool um but you let's

hear it for the developer we like to build developers developers um usually say that in a different context exactly yeah um but yeah we we kind of did a survey of the whole market and we realized actually the most insane amount of manual tedious boring work that of course can be automated with AI agents, is actually done by brokerages. And so that's where we decided to focus. And so where in the brokerage stack, do you say, is this somebody who's, who's, they never actually take possession? They're just facilitating the buy and sell. Yeah, exactly. So our, our customers are commercial real estate brokers. So both on the buy side and sell side. Very cool. And that's, yeah, that's what we focus. Then in terms of where we're talking

AI agents, are you trying to build an RL environment for some of the other platforms and and kind of, you know, throw your own agent on top, or are you just building, like, SaaS that pulls the different AI tools off the shelf as needed? Yeah, it's a great question. How should I think about the business? Yeah, so you should think of us as kind of like AI employees. We automate entire end-to-end workflows. And so for commercial real estate brokers, there's two workflows in particular that take up

the most amount of time and money. And so, for example, one of them is creating sales materials for buying and selling buildings. So today, on average, teams spend about four weeks, making these materials and spend about 5k in design fees. And with us, they can do that entire process in about five minutes. Very cool. There we go. Progress on the traction. The traction, how's the raise going? How's the day? Yeah, raise has been great. We were done in 48 hours. What? It was nice. Yeah. I think with raising, it kind of either goes one of two ways. It's either like, you know, you're hot. Or plateau of productivity. Exactly. Yeah.

What were you doing right before this? So I was at Google. So I was a P.S. working on monetizing Gemini, notebook LM, NVA. No way. That helps with the funer. Yeah, you got $200 out of me. Thank you. Amazing. Yeah, so that launch was super fun.

It was like we were in chats with like Sergey. It was crazy. Why were you rate limiting us so hard? John was paying $500 and you could. I wanted to pay you more. I feel like you weren't monetizing hard enough. Come on, man. Yeah, you know, I don't work there anymore,

but I can take my own manager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have two lightning around questions we like to ask. One, favorite entrepreneurs. someone you look up to. Yeah, I think, you know, classic answer, definitely Steve Jobs. Like reading that biography in middle school

is like, well, it got me to want to move to the Valley, go to Stanford, D.YC. The Walter Isaacson book. Fantastic book. Second question, how did you make your first dollar on the internet? Yeah, how we made our first dollar on the internet was actually we cold called.

So brokers are, you know, they always pick up the phone. And so, yeah, anything as a kid? So people like sold eBay or like, you know, did like websites as a kid. Any, any stories from childhood? In high school, I made a nice school, app. It was a free app, but it used AI to help the visually impaired. And so basically, this is like pre multimodal models and stuff and you could take a

photo. And if you're blind, like it would tell you, you know, what you're looking at, like say like a can of Coke or a can of Pepsi. Wow. Yeah, that had users in about 120 countries. It was named one of TechCrunch's top AI stories of the year and was also in a Google commercial with Jeffrey Hinton and Justin Trudeau. No way. That's amazing. Well, that's a fantastic story. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations on the day. And yeah, good luck out there. Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Cheers. Nice to note all the VCs that couldn't fit in already. Yeah. RIP. Anyway, we are live from Demo Day, YC, 2025. We will bring in our next guest whenever they are ready. In the meantime, any breaking news, Jordy, anything we should run through before we're bringing in the next guest.

I think we have our next guest right here. Hey, Josh Browder, how are you doing, man? There we go. Good to see you. What's happening? I wasn't expecting you. How many? back all the winners already I'm no I'm here mainly for social okay okay yeah

just hanging out just hanging out there's some amazing companies there are there are yeah what what trends do you like we heard that last batch was cursor for everything this batch is lovable for everything have you noticing trends I'm seeing a lot of boring software AI just because with amazing founder working on waste collection AI software that's and and you and you're using boring as a pejorative or not as a pejorative No, I think more of these businesses need to be built. Less jargon and more boring stuff.

More boring stuff. Just find a specific. Yeah, I've been impressed with the traction so far. There's been a couple founders that have come on that cool ideas expected to not necessarily have like a bunch of like real traction with businesses. Yeah. I mean, you've obviously been working in like the application layer of AI for what a decade or something like that now. getting old you're still teal fellow right yes uh young at heart uh but but does the uh does this

idea of like going after bore boring kind of vertical SaaS vertical AI uh does that fit with a world view that uh maybe like we're not just going to get the the the foundation model labs to one shot every single business opportunity and in fact it is a great time to build a niche business i think that there's opportunities there are beneath the foundation you're seeing them now get into like coding and things like that. But those are huge opportunities. They're not going to go into waste management. I agree.

And so you can build 100 million, 200 million business doing this sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I looked at Fiji Simo when she became the CEO of applications at Open AI. She had five things that she was going to knock down. And it was like, you know, knowledge retrieval, health, you know, coaching. They're getting into talent now. Talent, coding. But then waste management's not on that list.

And so I think you're safe for a little bit. for a little bit. Anyway. What's happening in your business that's exciting? I imagine there's every time the models get better, your product gets better. Yeah. I think you constantly have to be innovating. We're like always worried about what the big companies are doing to detect our AI robots. There are now SaaS startups that detect our robots. Sure. As a service. Yeah, exactly. Anti-robots as a service. Fortunately, we're more motivated than the average, like Comcast, SaaS, Fender. So we stay ahead. And then on the product side, when Do Not Pay Start, it was just like templates. Now you could just ask ChachyPT to generate a template. So we're trying to go deeper, try and go

more in the background. And build really exciting things. Yeah. Have you been talking to founders about where prices are sitting? Do you have any sense of what a, you know, median valuation is for this round or, or, you know, high end of the batch pricing. I remember when I went through, you know, raising it like 12. It's great. I think any company raising below 20, there's like a problem with it. So I think 20 is now the baseline. 20 is the base and then high end, what were you saying? It's 40, 60. I mean, sometimes even 100. 100 already. Yeah. I'm trying, I'm here to me. 100 people at once and then I can relax. I'm very introverted. So this is my one

social event of the year. One of the year. One of the year. There's four of them. You got four batches. You got to keep some of the tank. This is my first YC demo day. It's amazing. You can just meet everyone. That's great. Yeah. We've been doing a lightning round with everyone that comes on the stream today. Favorite entrepreneur? Someone you look up to. Who comes to mind? I guess in this batch, there's an amazing founder from Kazakhstan. Nozomio, I think that's the name of his company. His name's Arlen. He's just such a hustler. I'm not I'm an investor in his company, but I wish I was. What about throughout history?

History's greatest entrepreneurs, who sticks out to you? I think Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is an inspiration. He's very kind of pricing focus. Did your other guests say that? No one said Larry yet. But we've been talking about Larry for a long time. As a deeply underrated founder, just fantastic.

An absolute animal. Oracle will sue its customers. They're so focused on money. Also, I mean, the fact that he's just like never really sold it and like really just the position that he has in that company is just remarkable. There's just a bunch of things. Also, he just looks great at his age. You can just tell that like a lot of things are going on. There's a headline from the LA Times in the year in June 29, 2000 called Oracle Defends it's spying on Microsoft as public service. They also called it their civic duty. That's great. That's great. The other, the other lightning round question. This one would be fascinating for you is how did you make your first dollar ever on the internet so I was jail-breaking phones there we go and selling themes on Sidia so this was before the days when the Apple operating system allowed you to change Apple icons and so I would sell a Disney theme and this was

like a complete copyright violation because I take all of Disney's IP and make it but I guess they weren't detecting it and it's very lucrative yeah how old were you at the time maybe like 13 13 and there's different waves so he's worst nightmare so I was in the jail breaking wave and then there was the Minecraft way okay then there was these people making money on Minecraft a Minecraft server businesses okay so you said that server so that was Adam Guild's generation with owner that's the Wonder founder the amazing TPPN sponsor yes yeah they were making money with servers yeah then there was sneaker bots and that's the WOP founders yep and now what's next

uh Fortnite anything in fortnight I think it's right Roblox. Roblox. Yeah, yeah. Roblox. Yeah. Fascinating. People that are printing on Roblox today will be here in five years.

Or maybe just SaaS startups. I mean, there's like a 12-year-old who's viral on X with his stuff. I subscribe to his product to be nice. I don't even mess around the video games. I just went straight to enterprise. Yeah, there you. My first dollar? Yeah.

A business deal between me and Oracle. Yeah. To build out a new data center. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on this too. Thanks for having me. Yeah, good to see you. Enjoy demo day. If you're just tuning in,

we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Nice to meet you, I'm John. Pleasure, welcome to the stream. Great to meet you. Please introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? How's Demo day going?

Yeah, hi, do I look at you? Whatever you want. Okay, I'm gonna look at you. Fantastic. I'm Anson. We're building normal and we're automating hardware testing and compliance. Hardware testing and compliance.

Any specific verticals, are we talking like semiconductors, semiconductors, rockets, spaceships, cars? Yeah, we're starting with like robotic, robotics and drones and other any electrical components that have like a radio part to it so that's mostly it so there's like a test stand where you need to actually see does the motor work and pick up the robotic arm yeah basically and it needs to be and there's someone there testing that robotic motor like every day they get a new robotic arm they test it and then they need to put that into some sort of database to manage and and you kind of provide the software suite they interact with

on the day-to-day basis awesome when you pitch it back through it's very similar to that so So basically, as people are trying to build more hardware and try to build more hardware here, a lot of the testing infrastructure is either overseas or it's not like very nice to deal with. It's kind of like working with the IRS a little bit. So just kind of streamlining the process so that as teams go through and like they build this like wonderful robot or wonderful like drone like subassembly, they're able to actually get that tested in like a facility and through a process that is like deserving of the thing that they've made. Yep. Who are you selling to right now? Do you want to start with, like, go figure out how to work with big manufacturing, the big auto maker OEMs and primes or startups?

Like who's the ideal customer to work with at this stage? Yeah, so the people that we're working with now are mostly like early stage startup companies. So if anybody's watching, like we'd love to work with you. So yeah, mostly drone robotics, toys, cameras. Yeah. Yeah, anything with like an RF component. Okay, great. How's Demo Day going?

Did you share any sort of headline KPI or news on the raise? Yeah, we're wrapped up. So this is kind of like, nice. It's a celebratory stream. We don't need to be. Oh, I'm even talking. We can get back to building. Yeah, yeah.

So this is my co-founder. He's outside. So we're just going to put him on the street. His name is Hudson. Yeah. Wait, I've seen him on apps. He had some wild post just yesterday. I was watching it.

He was wrong about something. I didn't put him in the truth. I got to debate him. Bring him into it. Come on. I don't remember anything other than that he was wrong. I just remember seeing his post and being like, what about traction?

What about traction though? What were you guys able to do? Yeah, what did you share? Yeah, so we launched three weeks ago and we have 35K in revenue. So fast. So it's. Congratulations.

Yeah. It's fantastic. Thanks. And then Ray's wrapped up. We do have a lighting round. We've been asking everyone two questions. First is who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to?

Can be anyone. Favorite founder? Favorite founder? Can I say Sir John A. MacDonald? Who's that? First Prime Minister of Canada. Okay. Oh, wow.

Started a company. Did he started Canada? Okay. We don't have any buttons for Canada. This is somewhat on American. I don't know if I could fully endorse it, but it's outside the box. I appreciate it for that reason. The second question is, how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

Like as a kid, did you do anything interesting? Some people set up websites. Some people. I taught kids how to argue. Okay. Wait, what? No way. No way.

Arguing lessons? Debate. Okay. Debate. Okay. And so they pay you like on an hourly basis. Yeah. That's fantastic.

There you go. That's great. Watch out. Don't get an argument with her. Congrats on. Congratulations on getting the round done. And thanks for coming on. Yeah.

If you're, if you're co-founder, of course. Yeah. If your co-founder wants to debate John to send. Yes. Yeah, I'll bring him right off. I don't remember what he said, but I know is wrong. I'm ready to debate.

You said something wild. Nice, nice. Sorry, what was that of all time? Oh, favorite, favorite entrepreneur of all time is what we're going to be asked. Okay, thank you. We are clarifying our questions. We will talk to you soon. Have the great rest of your day.

We are live from, breaking news from the timeline. There is now a $2,000 iPhone to the iPhone 17 Pro with two terabyte to storage. Two terabyte. Two thousand dollar iPhone dropped. Welcome to the stream. Nice to me, John. What's happened? Nice to meet you.

Will you be picking up the $2,000 iPhone? Just dropped minutes ago. This is breaking news. I'm probably sticking with my- You're good. He's sticking with his old. Short the stock. I feel like the incremental.

What's going on? This is a disaster. It's pretty small. Yeah, we look to YC Founders is the future, the tastemakers. If they're not adopting the latest and greatest, what's going to happen? Introduce yourself.

What are you building? So I'm Aiden the CTO of Effigo. We're doing the AI operating system for local governments, starting with a 311 in a box. 311. What do you, is that information hotline? Yeah, it's the informational counterport to 911. Okay.

So interestingly, only around 2% of cities have a 311 line, even though every city has 911. Yeah, yeah. And what we're doing with our first product is creating a 24-7 call center that's available to anyone from, if you're in San Francisco. Yeah. Or if you're in like a city of 10,000 in the middle of Iowa, like you should have the same level of service. service call through and one it automatically routes you to your service and then if i'm in my city it'll give me information what what are the what's the obviously everyone knows

textbook 911 call someone's breaking into my house what's the textbook 311 call yeah i think is this road open or when does the trash pick up come stuff like that stuff like that definitely varies a lot more city to city so we're live in florida and we're taking calls about alligators roaming around the city yeah yeah and it can kind of route and and i'm sure you've set the system up so that you can route to 911 if you need to absolutely right to animal control kind of sit above the rest of the stack of all the different city services yeah and that's kind of why we started with this is because it gives us a really great insight into what are the calls and services that the city's providing so now we can go down and actually handle these workflows

end-to-end yeah with our agents what's the secret to actually having like high nps i imagine that like people are not very happy with robot phone trees you're literally in the clanker business you're You're like the, you're the meme of like when a flagger picks up. Phone trees are, phone trees are terrible for decades. But this is conversation. This is potentially, what's the secret? Most people don't realize they're talking to an AI. They don't.

No. Okay. Why is that? Are you, are you building on top of a particular foundation model or specific APIs that just sounds so good? Who are you using? How do you piece things together to make it great? Yeah, we're using a voice from VAPE. That's just, we've, great.

trial that a bunch of different voices that be that be another Y-C company oh cool okay is that in this batch another I think winter 24 okay okay we'll have to check them out but yeah there you just trial all these different voices and this one has a bunch of stutters and makes it sound supernatural okay so it just feels completely natural got it very cool traction yeah you've been lining up cities yeah we're driving around yeah yeah what did you share do you share like an like an R or just like number of cities like what yeah what's the headline number that you share today we shared um live in one city and 80k a r so two contracts that have yet to go live but yeah yeah we signed but in the pipeline let's go let's go we are you're charging is it is

40k per city effectively 60k and then 20k yeah no way yeah yeah I mean I can imagine this replaces a you know potentially replaces a job or make somebody a lot more high leverage and if you want like round the clock coverage on a help line which I'm sure these cities don't offer, but even if you're offering like a work day, that's just somebody who has to sit there. I would flip it around and just be like, if I'm the mayor and I'm charging every single person in my city, some sort of property tax, and I'm taking in millions and millions of dollars and my citizens can't get information, but for whatever price he's charging, I can offer this service to my population. It's very valuable. They're going to be like, wow, the city feels so

much more responsive. Like when that tree fell down on my street, I was able to just dial 3-1-1 and send it to the right thing instead of like going to an archaic website. It's an interesting execution challenge where you can literally create a database of like every potential buyer for your product and then just hound that on day one and then hound them. Like it's not like a mystery of like, who are we going to sell to? Oh, the perfect client doesn't know, I don't even know that they're in the market. No, it's like you know who's in the market. They're doing how the state by state go to market motion. sure sure because a lot of the first question they'll ask us is okay what other cities in

sure florida are you are using because they can also do this um thing called piggybacking where they literally just copy and paste the contract from a no way no way so that's kind of you know little hacks like this i think will help us conquer the gov tech market where historically it's been hard to break in but now you have this AI obviously land and expand yeah uh how how does the how has the fundraise gone it's good we're around three quarters done uh There you go. Honor. We have a lightning round that we've been doing.

Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Someone you look to for advice. Peter Thiel. Oh. That's good. That's good. First person. Mr. Teal.

Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Flipping Supreme T-shirts. There we go. There we go. How did you acquire, did you have bots that would buy them? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. It was like during my lunched in high school. So I would just like monitor the site and the situation. Monitoring the situation. I love it. Thank you so much. Congrats on all the progress. We'll talk to you soon.

Have good. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. If you are just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We will bring in our next guest when we're ready. Just, oh, we got, oh, here we go. here we go we got waiting for you all have been waiting will they bring it massive block oh boy metal onto the stream that thing looks

great to see you you got a little workout on the way and look at this how many how many pounds is that no clue no clue a lot I borrowed it from astronomers oh okay yeah would you sell it to them and then you brought borrowed it back or is this is just there this is theirs they wanted to help the cause yeah it's illustrated it's not so yeah why why is this sitting here what do you do introduce yourself Who are you? Yes. My name's Zane, founder of Knox Metals, and we cut metal.

So we're trying to build the most efficient metal service centers in America to empower every factory in America to work with better margins and to move faster. Okay, there's a lot of ways to cut metal. He's doing the meme. He's doing the meme. He's re-industrializing. Also, to be clear, this is Zane from X. Yes.

Probably if you're on the everything app, you've seen him before. He's been on the show via his post many times before. So it's great to finally. I've been printed a few times. I remember one time I was watching tvpn and i was like for some reason there's i had to go somewhere and i was like i just skipped to the print section but you guys would print the best tweets and i was like who they got today that's fantastic okay so there's a lot of ways to cut metal hadrian's doing a bunch of cnc machines uh there's other people that do an additive

stuff we've talked to 3d printing guys who build the metal structures up uh what is your specific like like put it in like lego terms for me like a how are we actually cutting this metal. Okay, so to be clear, we would sell this to Hadrid. Yeah, to someone like a Hadrian. Okay. What we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an F-150. Okay. Put it on our saw, which is about the size of four F-150s. Wow. And then we ban saw cut it. Yep. And then we sell, like, and then it can go into a CNC machine. Yeah. So if you want to make an F-18 part, a component for your washing machine, you name it. This is incredibly deep in the stack. I love it. So, like, the operation's really simple. What we're working on is like the complex operations of the

factory. Like, I'm sure you guys know the cliche. I never want to hear anyone say why Combinator just does consumer apps and more. Look at this. This is pure metal. This is insane. Yeah. So, so many steps away from the mobile social local app. It seems like obviously like it's not easy to just cut through metal, but it seems like that's relatively solved. Yeah. What you're trying to solve is like the efficiency in the factory. Because even if you make this block, then how do you get it how do you store it yeah you trans you know it so like the metal service industries is like 300 billion dollars these guys do a year like if you're a metal service center that's the total of the market yeah we we strongly believe that

they are yeah john lift them actually it's gonna destroy no it's gonna destroy his suit we need it for tomorrow we basically strongly believe that they have a ton of overhead and lack all the technology in the world that puts a tax on every metal sold in america Yeah, that's where you're seeing more metal bought from the USA or bought from China Yeah, coming in like I worked in like a small PE shop like everyone I talked to they're like okay, how do we get stuff in from China So like we want to read shop like private equity yeah okay we want to like reindustrialize the metal service center later Yeah, so so how much of the value is just there's going to be a bigger buy by American wave there might be more regulations more tariffs and so it makes more sense now to do this work in America versus you think the you could long-term go toe to toe against a Chinese metal shop and just with better, better workers,

better automation, better technology, you will just have a better product, even in a completely level economic playing field. Exactly. And like the key thing you said there is product and what is product, the factory. So everything that goes into it, procurement, inventory management, like you said, estimating. So how do we get blocks, the cheapest block to any factory in America next day? Yep. That's the goal. Got it. We have a lighting round that we've been doing. First question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur Alex Karp of all time Alex Karp? We've had him on the show last week I think that's a great pick. Bold, good pick. How did you make your first dollar online or in business? My dad had a machine shop and he made me scrub the floor. I was 14 years old. No way.

Family business. Let's go. 80,000 square foot facility. One man of the mob. Incredible. Wait, how's the fundraise gone? Oh. It's good. We closed like, Yeah, we had like an initial goal and we closed that, but there we go. Let's go, go on. There you go. Just break the table. It's liftable. All right, it's liftable.

I would put that over on your butts. Yeah, and it's such an awkward. My guess was, my guess was 97. 97, okay. No, funneries going well. We like had an initial goal. We got there and now seeing some more interest, so thinking about raising some more. just to have a bit more runway and move faster count me in chad i'm riding with you

i'm right with you thank you so much for coming i know i should have brought my physical check that's such a missed opportunity great to see you you're a legend good luck with that what a terrible prop anyway okay oh that was fun i think i broke a sweat this is not the right move yeah i was trying to warn you so much for coming on the stream how Well, it's happening. Great to see you. I brought my time. You brought your own metal. Okay.

How are you doing? Okay. Okay. So we both lifted the metal cubes today. We did. We did. Are you in knock? You did not, right? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Introduce yourself for the stream. Hello, everyone. My name is Paige Fendorty. I'm the founding partner behind genius ventures. We invest in technical storytellers at their earliest chapters. And you wrote a children's book on venture capital.

You're introducing, introducing venture capital to the children. Are you getting paid out by Anthropic in the lawsuit? Did you see this? Oh, no, I haven't checked. You gotta go check on it. I gotta check my mailbox. You might have a few thousand bucks waiting for you. You can roll that into the fund.

Wait, that would be, I gotta check my email. What, yeah, what's your reaction to Demode? Oh my gosh, it's electric. The prices are too low, right? That's what it most people have been saying, I don't feel comfortable investing. The prices are just too low. It's suspiciously low.

It's suspiciously low. It's discounted. It's discounted. It's discounted. 12 dollar couch and you're like how can a couch be 12 dollars you're like how can this how can this clearly billion dollar company be worth 60 million dollars let me tell you the energy is electric today um it's been so fun bumping into friends uh my friend shout out casey caruso she brought me bone broth to pregame the day no way yeah i drove over in the waymo this is the sf

lock in right here i remember when i explained uh uh bone broth to you for the first time uh no I think I said something like protein tea or something like that oh yeah that really is yeah it's like yeah it's like yeah it's like yeah it's like yeah yeah because you warm it up yeah yeah we we drank half a gallon on the stream one day it's fantastic you guys going to do a muck bang of all the bone the bone broths well we are we are completely aligned with kettle and fire yeah we're aligned with kettle and fire yeah buddies with Justin mares so that's we so we cannot be we we we cannot be impartial when So what's the strategy going into demo day for you, you had already invested, deployed? Yeah, so we looked at a bunch of companies, but actually the story on Knox was pretty unique.

Zane and I met probably four years ago when I was fundraising for my first fund. And at the time, he was working at a firm and they were buying and selling machine shops. And then we just stayed in touch over that time. And I would send him like some of our manufacturing and like we have a company in Meneva and I would send that to him for his thoughts on manufacturing and then I saw on LinkedIn he was posting he got into I C and I was like dude like this is amazing and then we hopped on a call I was really excited by what they're building really fits into the re-industrialization of America the whole American dynamism and I actually was on my friend's roof last night we were talking

and she was just like you know if you just like love company you just like got to go in and I remember being like, okay, I got to call Zane and be like, yo, like, please, like, I really want to be a part of this journey. And he was like, yeah, we would love to have you be a part of it. So I, um, sent the wire this morning. There you go. There you go. You didn't know, don't want to wait until the end of the day, you know? We've been doing a lightning round with everyone. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Who is the genius behind genius ventures? Oh, but that's so hard. The first name that popped into my head was Jerry Lopez, who's a surfer, Zen master, philosopher. I feel like very much not in like the tech world.

Yeah, but founder of his movement. Yeah. And what I love about him is he just has this incredible sense of grace riding super aggressive waves. And then took that same sense of- Yeah, it took that same sense of grace into building companies. He gets barreled? He gets barreled. I know all about getting barreled.

I've learned on this, shore break? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. John, I teach John about surfing. Every time we see the ocean, I explain, this is a beach break. That would be a point break. That's great.

Second question of our lighting round. Okay. How did you make your first dollar online or in business? Did you do anything crazy as a kid or early on? Yeah, I tutored. Okay. Well, okay. I'm trying to, I'm trying to, I'm trying to like the first dollar.

Oh, you know what it is? Okay, so my mom is an impressionist artist, Kim Doordiart. My brothers and I, when we were camping, we would go and sell her art cards in the campground when we were like five. Captive audience. Yeah. It was like seven, five and a three-year-old going around being like, can you buy our art cards? And like, I became an amazing salesperson through that experience. Yeah.

Now you're selling money. Yeah. Where are you on fund two now? What's the update on the fund? Mm-hmm. Yep, we're wrapping up our last couple investments in Fund 2. So two more to go. Very exciting.

More to come soon. Big announcements. Big announcements on the way. Yeah. Incredible. We'll ring the gong. We'll ring the gong. We don't have our gong with us, but we'll save it.

Do we have a gong sound effect today or no? I don't. We don't. Fortunately, no. Okay. Well, the claps are okay. The gong we will save for a proper announcement. Oh, here we go.

I like that. There we go. There we go. Make sure to send us any founders you like and have fun out there. Thank you so much. We are open for business. Thank you. It was a pleasure seeing both of you.

It was a pleasure. Great to have you soon. If you're watching live, we are at YC Demoday and we have our next guest on the stream. Welcome to the stream. Orange Slice. That's a fantastic jacket. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you building? Yeah, so hi, my name is Vihar and we're building Orange Slice. We're basically AI Search Infra to help you find customers that already want your product. Okay, I'm so distracted by the, it's oranger than the YC orange. I know. You're scared. You went orange for orange and you want. It's actually crazy. Okay,

so, uh, give me, give me the, give me the pitch for the company at the customer level. Yeah. Who's buying and why? Yeah. So we take all the data in the internet and we figure out, okay, out of your customers, who actually needs your product today. And we just tell you, hey, these are the people I need it today. Okay. And that's the people you reach out to. So many products. So is this for, uh, other B2B sales teams yeah okay okay yeah so we can track your total adjustable market whatever is in your CRM whoever you're talking to we

figure out okay who needs your product today what have they been posting what are they even filing what is maybe a new blog is out that indicates they need something from you guys smart but it's always on it's always on let's like see who actually wants you instead of when when how old were you when you realized you wanted to build agents for the enterprise that's a great question you know I think that that's a fantastic question really started really really young, but no. Five years old, I woke up. I sponded into the world and I said, I must sell. What were you doing before this? I was basically hacking in college, but I was an investor

banker at J.P. Morgan. Oh, let's go. Let's go. So complete, complete 180. And then did you, was that like summer internship? Summer internship. Did you, did you, did you drop out? And then I, I, no, graduated thankfully. Contrarian. Contrarian. I'm super bullish. I like college. It was fun, right? No, I know. It's a good. It's a good time. That's great. We've been doing a lightning round asking two questions. Wait, no, no, no. Before the lightning round. Please. How much money are you making right now? Oh, that's true. Oh, so we're at like 53K MRR. So let's go a bit more than what is that, 600,000 a year.

Yeah, that's great. Raman profitable? Yeah, of course. Fantastic. That's great. Printing. That's great. Printing. Let's go. But let's go. But let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. It's just the start, though. The rounds close? Yeah, the round is closed, unfortunately. But if you always... Let us in, let us in. I think for you guys, we can make room.

For you guys, you can make room. They're going to keep booing unless you let the sharks in. When you say us, you mean we can do it. Maybe it's super strategic, you know. 25 mil from the QIA and Jiangyan. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. This makes a ton of sense and I can see why I can see why it's ripping.

Lightning around. Yeah, well, I have one more question. So, so I'm selling a business of business product and I get some sort of alert from you saying, hey, there's a new customer. And are you focused on a person or a company? We're focused on the company level. We do both. So we'll track all the executives at the company. Yeah. That could be the one. But you say this is the company. And then this is my job. This is the person that owns. might be the internal champion exactly got it okay all of that stock cool a crazy idea for you so you guys sell to a company you detect a customer for that company you partner with tesla optimist to actually

deploy a robot to go have a steak dinner oh there we go customer and close the loop and then pick up the commission on that deal i think you got to go full stack yeah full stack no totally and that's one of the biggest reasons we haven't done the end of the stack yet like people sell in so many different ways and a lot of people are just like fighting and competing over the end of the staff with a bunch of slop yeah I don't want any more emails in my inbox yeah exactly and so all you need to do is serve the person you know serve the lead up at the right time and then let a stake expert take it all yes yeah yeah I mean it's it's beautifully anti-slop because the like the humans

just in the loop at the right point I don't really care if you if you misidentify someone and I click on a website I'm like actually they're out of like the core value prop right now. Or maybe I'll deal with that one later. Like that's fine. Fantastic. So lighting around. Two questions.

Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Oh, that's a good one. I'm not actually know that many entrepreneurs in general. Someone that you read a biography of or look up to or maybe just saw a recent interview with and thought was, yeah, I could learn something from them. He's Lisan al-Gaibe of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need his blank slate.

He doesn't need any influence. Well, honestly, I don't think, um, I don't draw that much inspiration just because I think the biggest motivating factor in this might be contrarian. It's not actually inspiration, but like the fear of mediocrity of it not working out has been way bigger for us. That's the biggest reason I don't have that much inspiration. But Eric from the rant from my co-founder used to work at ramp. So I mean, they are absolutely killing it. You picked a legend from the modern era. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you can't not like what he's doing. Future Hall of Famer.

Yeah, 100%. Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Oh man, first dollar would have to be in like elementary school. I used to like do origami of like folding up like ninja stars for like other people. Nice. And then I used to sell it on like the school bus. I had half an hour in the morning and half an hour at the end to do all my sales.

And then you go home and you just keep folding the rest of the day. I remember having so many paper cuts when I started. Just fingers bleeding just one more ninja star. Prospecting. I see the kid in the second row. They're ready for a dark place for this ninja star. Yeah, exactly. They're ready for a ninja star.

Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Congrats on all the attraction. Are you going to go, are you going to hang out for the rest today? You're going to go hit. Always like to chat with sort of cool founders. Awesome. Thanks for doing this guys. This is so cool.

Awesome. Yeah, we'll find you after. Cheers. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Let's bring in our next guys. guest we have the co-founder of fall do we have here he is same how you doing good to see your first welcome to the show introduce yourself for the stream really quickly

welcome to YCWRae great shirt by the way thank you this we just talked to a founder that made their first money flipping flipping Supreme box logo t-shirts there you go there you go yeah I'm decked out and follow false swag yeah but GPU poor you guys GPU poor anymore well I have a GP reach hats too okay I got to give you guys some yeah yeah so I'm I'm one of the co-founders oh fall yeah yeah fantastic also our latest sponsors yes it makes this possible so thank corporate media give us your reaction to YC demo day how what's the mood like what you just rolled in here from but give us the vibe

literally I just rolled in from our office oh fantastic I'm gonna try away. I mean, it's amazing energy. I love it. Yeah. I mean, being in the Silicon Valley for, I don't know, 15 years close to 15. I actually never been to a demo day. There you go. This is my first time. And yeah, love the energy. That's great. Give us, yeah, so, so I guess what's been, how much, how much of you guys from a, from a customer acquisition standpoint, it feels like there's like incredible pull from the market. that you guys have crazy logos from, you know, deck of corns, public companies all the way down.

I imagine a bunch of just companies are getting off the ground and signing up for you guys. But like, what does that customer acquisition kind of motion look like? Are you guys, do you pay much attention to kind of the super early stage or do you just like let people find you? Yeah, we pay a lot of attention to early stage.

A lot of our customers are early stage. And it is, I think it's one of the best times to build, like on top of Fall and other other LLMs as well. But like if you want to build anything in consumer AI specifically, I think fall is probably like the best way to accelerate, you know, building something out there. There's incredible demand. I think I was doing some math on the way here.

Like, I think in our startup segment, I think the revenue of like all of our startups combined. And what I define startups is let's, let's call it like 200 people or less. Yeah, raise less than a billion dollars. Yeah, sure. I think the total combined revenue of our customers is in the billions. Wow. So it's kind of ridiculous, like how much demand there is in the consumer AI market

or even like prosumer, but you can build amazing applications that leverage the gen media technology. Yeah, that prosumer thing is fascinating. We saw this with the images in chat GPT, the Dolly moment, where, you know, it's not, like it's not an enterprise tool but it's something that went so viral that everyone has to wake up even if you're just a marketing manager in a fortune 500 company yes you're gonna see it you're gonna think about it and be like okay I actually need a strategy here we recently saw this with nano banana again we saw a little spike in the Google Trends chart what is yeah what have you guys

seen on yeah what have you seen like the nano banana era how are things changing yeah just kind of give me your read it's incredible I mean the demand the way the way I look at it is like every time we have new capabilities, there is a jump in demand. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like these things are eating into each other. It seems like we're really seeing like the building blocks coming together. Yep. So for example, with Nano Banana and like all the editing models in general,

they actually are a key ingredient to really good video models. Yeah. Meaning when you want to stretch together, like stick together a few clips. Start with a few of those. Yeah, you actually want to, you can keep like the consistency. between using these edit models, right? So, like, it actually solves the consistency problem in video. Yeah. So that enabled video to go even further.

Yeah. Because now you can just generate, like, you know, 10 different starting frames and ending frames and then combine them together. Yeah. So these things are really like building blocks, and they're kind of compounding on top of each other. Yeah.

So the way we see it in traffic and revenue is that anytime there's like a new model, new capabilities specifically, we see a huge jump. It was pretty wild. There was a site that spun up. I don't know if you saw this, the day of nanobananas launch. It was just called nanobanana.ai. It had full, like it was a full look like a Google product.

Someone else just vending in nanobanana under the hood. But I'm sure they got their API access. This happens all the time. Like, if you actually search Nando Banana on App Store, like just go to App Store, there will be literally 20 results. Yeah, this is so crazy. It's still nanobanana. It's the number one result for Nana banana.

Yes. And it says AI image editor, edit photos and tech. I mean, the App Store was like that for so long where you searched ChatGBT and it'd be like chat with GPT and it has like 5,000, five star reviews and you're like, I know that's not from Open AI because I can clock it as like clearly this is not an open AI branding, it's slightly off. And all of these things are, believe it or not, they're getting traction. Yeah, yeah. So. And I think, yeah, like Apple, I don't know, like they're not really doing much to stop this. Maybe they're trying, but like not really.

a whack-a-mole. Yeah, it's a game of macamol. And I think they're benefiting from this. And I think, you know, obviously, like, long-term, what matters is, like, how these products differentiate. But I think it just shows you, like, how insane the demand is. Yeah. What keeps you up at night between the inference cost kind of stack? So are you worried about GPU poor? Like, are we going to run out of line time at TSM? Are we going to see a chip shortage versus just large-scale data center capacity versus energy. Like if we play this out a few years, like what what do you want to get right that might be out of your control even, but like you'd like to make it make sure that it goes

right. Yes, I think we're very capacity constraint. But at what level that's what I'm interested in so so yeah it's so it fluctuates even this even this this nebius deal yesterday right like like shocked to everyone right especially we were hanging with a friend who's a multi-stage, you know, as multi-runs, you know, helps run a multi-billion dollar fund. And he was just like, like a year ago, this company like couldn't, you know, this company was not taken super seriously as a player.

And all of a sudden they have a $20 billion deal with Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft. So anyways, like that just shows like the fact that, the fact that, you know, Microsoft is going, I, you know, if you kind of like, stack rank where Nebius sits in the neocloud space it certainly wouldn't have been somebody's top choice but i think that just shows like how capacity constrained um everyone is it's incredible

yeah i think i mean currently we're going through another crunch right now uh specifically for h 100s yeah uh so like we experienced this and and and you can you can kind of feel it's coming and and you know like what does it feel like that it it feels pretty bad right you're trying to you're trying to scale so like most of our workloads are inference workloads right we don't do any training yeah so our needs are like we don't just like buy you know 10,000 GPUs and just sit there for another for a whole year right that's not how we operate we're more dynamic we go and like expand our our fleet over time so we and we're multi-clouds so we talked to like all the you know new clouds and we

have really great relationships with all of them we test them we benchmark them if if they work for us, if they're reliable, support is good, we use them. So, and you know, when you need new capacity, you literally like, hit them up. You call all of them up in order. Old-fashioned, right? And literally, I'm not even kidding, like, you just call them up and, you know, sometimes it's like you start hearing more nose, right? Like, do you have 512 GPUs? Do you have 1,000 GPUs?

And it's just like, no, no, you're like, oh, crap. So you kind of want to like stuck up a little bit. sure that's how we operate we like buy buy a little bit in bulk you know but but really prices hit hit a little bit of a bottom yeah which like hasn't happened with a 100s i mean if you look at it like they just kept going down with h100s they kept going down and they kind of hit the bottom they're like now now like kind of kicking back up again how uh what can you tell me about how inference moves around the globe as a function of time i heard this story about mid-journey potentially doing inference in Asia where they're sleeping they're not using

they're not running Netflix in Malaysia or Singapore and so when I generated an image or something you know it's influenced over there yeah yeah yeah is that something you're doing is that something that you're planning to do is that common yeah have naturally so so our traffic patterns are basically maxed out when US and Europe is up up simultaneously sure so that's that's kind of like the peak time right and then we don't have like as much users like we still have customers in Asia but like it's it's much less yeah so you know we do see a deep dip across you know when US and EU is asleep yeah there's a slight dip sure we do we do a few things yeah we use like we basically like have a pool of GPUs that we like

you know return and and and bring back sure simultaneously but what's really important for us is uptime. So even if it means like we're going to have some idle GPUs, we'd like to take that cost. Because if you can't take those GPUs back, like if you let them go, you get to come back, you know, then you have a very bad time with your customers. So for us, like, reliability is more important at this time, you know, and over long term, I think if you might be able to move the liquidity across the globe more over time. What, any key lessons, you're at Oracle for four years back in the any key lessons from that era that you've kind of brought in obviously

Oracle's been on its hair and really leaning in yeah so Oracle was my first job out of college so you know that's 2012 2016 back then they did not believe in cloud they were like the anti-cloud yeah yeah yeah so so like Larry Elson would go on stage literally be like guys like we don't believe you know he has like a famous quote you know it's someone's computer or something you know the cloud doesn't exist But they've come a really long way since then, and obviously, like, they're on a rip right now, I think with AI. What we hear from the field is, like, there's really good, you know, Nebius, including,

Nebius is a very good, like, data center operator. Yeah. And Oracle is a very good data center operator. Because they had to do that because of running Yandex, right? Yes. Yeah. Like, they actually had to, I get more worried about neocloud products that are, we're doing, you know, like there's one. I think it's like Irene or something like that,

that's coming online that, you know, just last year I think was doing like Bitcoin mining. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like fast pivot, maybe a later pivot. Some of those guys are also good. But after Oracle, I was at Coinbase. So the crypto, like some of the companies, I mean, including Corrieu and Crusoe,

like they had a lot of experience, but like what's special about Oracle is that they've got a lot of experience, they know how to operate these machines at, you know, really good costs. So and up time is very, very important. So, you know, all of these things, you know, the economics and, and like operating the data center play a huge role into this. I think they, you know, I'm glad they chose

going in this direction. You know, I think there's only a few opportunities, right? And this is, this is one of them and they like, they just went ahead and like capitalize on it, which is great. Lightning around? Yeah, let's do it. We've been asking everyone, who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to throughout history? Oof. It can be anyone. be Larry um I really like okay uh maybe anyone let's see I like Brian Brian Armstrong there we go it's pretty good that's a great pick I love it yeah yeah legend second question how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business oof okay I had um do you know these toys carrette a fighter no no okay

it's like is that too old how big is it's like it's like two fighters okay you just like make them fight with each other So when I was like six or seven, this is not on the internet. Yeah, like almost a rock and sockham robot. Yeah, yeah, rock him and each other. Same thing, same thing. I rented those out. You rented those.

Rented. Wow. Flip the Capx to OPEX. You don't need to buy this thing. You go to him. You rent them today. He's renting. That's actually kids don't do renting enough.

They're always transactional. Yeah, I'm stretching to draw a full circle analogy here. You rents like you, you buy the servers. You rent out the to rents out. What's your allowance? Okay, 20 bucks a week?

That's what that's the price. 20 bucks a week. There you go. Value-based prices. Yeah, exactly. That's fantastic. Amazing. All right, well, come back on the show.

Yeah, awesome. Guys, good to see you. Yeah, I gotta give you some hats. There we love some. Give them out to your favorites. Fantastic. Okay, we will. Some rich hats.

Ooh. These are good hats. We'll have to pick. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, this is great. Amazing. We got four.

Great senior. We'll quiz, we'll quiz folks on whether they own GPUs or they merely sit on top of hyperskillers. We got Jack from slow. How you doing, Jack? What's up? Good to see you. Oh, the suit. You didn't have to.

What's up? I did. I can't believe. You look fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. How is demo day? It's been fantastic.

It's been great. Tons of cool companies. Yeah. Everybody's kind of ripping. We kind of came in thinking like, let's try and find out. try and find the theme because like other than AI cursor for yeah there's like a little bit of an AI theme but we had metal we had a zane yeah I metal cutting we had a missile company already there's been a few different companies and I feel like the narrative shifting now to just like

AI is just a tool like cloud computing yeah it's just like are you using like a pie like a python or you know it's like do you have a mobile strategy or are you pulling mobile off the show it's like like it's like at this point you're not going to use like oh yeah I know we're building in the cloud. Exactly. Exactly. What do you actually do? It's like, okay, yeah, you're a software company, but like, what are you actually doing? So it very much feels like we're in this era of like vertical software for AI. So it's like vertical AI. This is vertical SaaS all over again. But the traction's really good. The businesses are super niche and super interesting. So you're learning a lot about like a guy who set up a 3-1-1 line in Florida and he's getting a lot of calls

about alligators. And like, that's interesting to me. Anyway, what's new with you? Well, so it's funny. Like everybody, most of the investors are here to like invest capital and companies. for the story now. I'm Jack Reigns. I'm on the investment team over at slow ventures early stage venture fund we run about a billion dollars now invest generalist a little bit of everything one to three million dollar checks but unlike every other venture fund here we actually are launching the uh the slow ventures etiquette finishing school so I don't think we can see this okay let me see you guys are dressed sharp obviously I remember this photo this is a fantastic photo We got to Photoshop you on there. I know once I make once I make Gp maybe I can be on there

But you know there's there's a lot of capital floating around now that's like like financial capital to invest in founders But they don't know how to dress Wait, but if people don't know how to dress why is it? You're just expecting them to go to a black tie event Well, you know they can we say that it's when it's selects Okay, okay, okay, you show up in a sloppy time you want a high bar and then you want to take you want to get from good to great I don't know if you guys were in like fraternities in college but there's this whole like you kind of get hazed if you're totally I mean this is just like pitching a startup you come to you the the pitch is a

little sloppy you go around by the time you come back and pitch the second third time the business is polished yeah literally and it's like there's you know there's business upside of this like fixing your etiquette makes you like you can command a boardroom better like also boardroom generals we love and like we also want to help founders like get girlfriends or boyfriends like there's especially in SF like everybody's complaining you know the 996 is great except you know what your rates collapsing has uh has slow flipped bullish on a oh yeah that's a good question are you guys still bearish speak for the entire firm right now please speak for the entire

firm and especially a friend of the program sam was of course my boss who's my paychecks is ideally watching this right now um we're bullish on AI I wouldn't say good company that uses AI okay the whole like our take the whole time has been that like the models are going to eat pretty much everything yeah Microsoft's going to eat everything I mean that's what we're seeing it today a demo day it's like a lot of the companies is gonna eat nebius a lot of the companies I feel like are in that Sam lesson idea of like AI cherry on top I think was his phrase I like I like that framing I thought he did well there it's the more the more vertically integrated and the thing is like if the founders actually have like real

domain expertise and the thing versus like somebody new AI well and then they're trying to like oh this is an obvious problem yeah yeah yeah maybe but you're seeing interesting like one co-founder is incredibly sharp in AI I've been doing machine learning forever and then the other co-founder actually is that dude in their space for 20 years that dude is he him so when you have a i wizard plus co-founder who is him or her or her yeah that's that's the magic so i would not say that we're bullish on AI any more than we have been but like you know we respect AI used well it's like a i's table stakes if your only things AI get a slow respects AI yeah you heard it here first breaking news cool okay we've been

asking everyone lightning round who is your favorite entrepreneur in history of all time in history um probably outside of jesus christ or lord and savior this is like ESPN so you're supposed to say that yeah um now johndie rockefeller rockefeller yeah that's right what about you guys uh i don't think we've uh i don't think we've answered the question ourselves mine is always steve it's just the obvious answer but growing up yeah you just it is just it is It's, it's, uh, my favorite products ever have consistently been Apple products. Yeah. And I, I just would listen to so much founders podcast. I say Jay Gould, of course, but yeah, can we, can we flip around as your least favorite,

least favorite entrepreneurs ever? Uh, they had to be good enough to be famous, but you just don't like. Yeah. Probably SBF or something. Yeah. One of those, like, that's a good pick. Although, although maybe he's underrated because he got that anthropic bags and he's ripping now. Okay. SBF is underrated venture investor. Overrated entrepreneur. Perhaps, perhaps. Overrated gamer. Do you think the Elizabeth Holmes' Twitter account is real?

I believe it is run by her husband. Okay. And I do not believe that she's right. I actually disagree. I don't think it screams like ghost writer coded. Because for it to be run by her husband, her husband would have had to be like hyper online on X. And like it just feels like very good. Like you can tell when an account is ghostwriter. Sure.

sure sure yeah and it's ghost written i believe that he probably has the keys okay sure hired a ghost writer yes yes yes but we agree that she does not have the prison phone the the everything app installed on a phone that is connected to some sort of 5g network within the prison we agree on that okay could she because sbf is tweeting for prison it is it is possible but it's very much looked down upon it and of course like as soon as the tweet goes out like the warden should be able to get the news like someone calls the warden because like someone sees the post calls the the governor and then the governor calls the warden and says like one of your prisoners is breaking the rules like can you do something about this like it

should flow through I don't know if she if she I don't know what her prison terms are but like if and when she gets out like how quickly do you think she could raise like 50 million hundred million I don't think it's like I see John's take is if you really want to she she can rebuild her her personal brand but that's and and people people are like people are just it just marketing works right so she's just like marketing to the timeline right now people are deciding like oh maybe i like her like oh she's making me laugh so people naturally start to like her i don't think it's going to repair her brand in the in the capital markets uh i think if she wanted

to truly repair the brand would be like deep threads and long posts on like biotech that was my take was was was martin screlly uh he has posted about biotech about trading he's gotten to of picks right he talks about capital markets he talks about yes he he did get in legal trouble right uh but he has but he has said the thing that i was doing before i went to prison i i'm still doing it and i'm an expert and you can kind of judge me by my opinions and my takes and i'll go on live streams and you can judge me by my words and i haven't seen enough posts from her on the state of mrna or the state of of glp ones or the state of of gene editing technology like if she really is an incredible biologist who's been like wrongly convicted like show me some incredible biology

takes right don't just be okay yeah you're just a mean post the the martin schrelli like short selling reports or like it's like friday at lunchtime he just tweets this company's a fraud their test are going to fail stock drops 70% on monday yeah yeah and it shows that he's like he's like at least a student of the game in in the world in the financial world now he has a kid yeah yeah congrats drop his kid on the internet anyway uh we have a lightning round uh we did the we did the favorite entrepreneur the second one is how did you make your first dollar online or in business oh that's uh first dollar online or in business um i was trading spaks in my r a which is yeah so like most people lost money on these i one of my buddies i made you're the guy you're

the one it's my son i'm aware to god this is why sam this is why sam hired me because he really appreciated my spack story but basically like i graduated december 2019 was bored covid hits like the first week i job corporate finance very boring and one of my buddies text me he's like Draft Kings is going public through a SPAC if you buy this thing you'll own draft king stock I was I didn't get it I was like why don't they just IPO I read the structure and it's like oh if you buy these warrants it's like a call option that it doesn't expire for five years and then spacks turned into a bubble I built some web scrapers that would like ping me whenever

whenever like a new SPAC got listed or like a merger was announced so this was like fairly autistic but I saw that Apollo of SPAC. And I noticed that they had changed their website header from oil rigs to windmills in like June 2020. And my hypothesis was everybody's chasing the next Tesla. They're going to announce like an EV deal. And the warrants are going to go from 50 cents to like whatever. And I just put all my money in Apollo warrants. And then they announced to deal with Fisker automotive like a month later, made a lot of money. And I just basically part out because that company did not do well. I just parlayed that like 20 times. So my first online money was trading spacks

in my retirement. That's a fantastic story. So shout out Chamath. A lot. of people lost money on his SPACs. I would like to thank him for bankrolling a trip to Argentina. Oh, let's go. Hopefully you have a nice steak, you bottle of wine, maybe some tequila. And SPACs are backs. Maybe it's time to do it again. Maybe, maybe. Maybe this time is different. Couple IPOs coming. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cheers. Cheers to see you. Bye guys. See ya. And we will bring in our next guest to our YC Demo Day stream. We are live. How you doing? Of course. How you doing? Very Gen Z coded. I love it.

I love it. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? My name is Arlen. I am building Nazomeo, which is an API that gives more context to agents. Okay. So if you're a cursor user, you can pretty much just go to cursor, index any documentation or codebase, and give it as a context to an agent.

What exactly is happening? I know cursor does kind of roll-ups of what's happening. There's some rag infrastructure that's popular. What else is going on in the actual product to unlock? product to unlock value. Yeah, so the two reasons I build this is because I was so fucking pissed, where I would like go to Google,

copy paste all the docs and paste them right in the cursor. So yeah, the memory is not persistent. So they will fucking forget that in like two seconds. And second one is that you also pollute context window, which like causes context fraud. It's actually a study done by chroma, which is like a company. Oh yeah, we know Jeff.

Yeah, saying like post-4,000 tokens, I think, like the performance of any LLMs goes like this. Yep. So that's like the reason I build this. That makes sense. Wait, do you have a take on Jeff, Jeff's take on like context windows and and the need for RAG. Like how do you think about the trade-offs

in where the frontier models are scaling? Like there's one world where you just throw bigger and bigger context windows endlessly. Maybe that doesn't work. Yeah, you know what? There are two different architectures right now. So if you look at cursor and cloud code, cloud code doesn't index your code base.

So they only do agency crack, which like only uses terminal tools, like grip, grab, and cursor, they use both. They use local index and also vector stores, so like crack. Okay. It's really hard to say right now. A lot of people started hating on Rack,

but I think it's still effective if you're combining it with like Graf Rack, which is also a very good approach. Okay, yeah. What's the traction of the business been like? Yeah, so in the past three weeks, I send up 25% of the current batch, and paying, and paying, that's good.

Yeah, thank you. And 5% of the Spring Batch. So yeah, total like more than 90 OSC companies. That's amazing, and yeah, about like 11.5K MRR. There we go. Congratulations. Thank you.

Are you profitable? Yes, sir. Yes, go. Yes, go. Yeah, because like we see deals cover everything, like all the infrastructure costs. Sure. So yeah. That's fantastic.

Oh yeah, yeah, it covers the infrastructure guys. Okay. Incredible. What were you doing? You have a crazy story, right? Yeah. So I was board of high school when I was 17 and I wanted to build. So I dropped out, raised a million in couple days in London.

A couple days. How did that go? Yeah, so usually like people raise, like it takes weeks to race in London. especially in Europe. Because they were so fucking slow, but like, if you find the right approach and like good people. So in my case, it was local globe. They're really, really good and they're really fast.

So I guess I just got lucky. I built from London for a couple months and then applied for OEC. So yeah, so same company. Same company, yeah, yeah. Applied for YC for my third time. Third time, rejected the first? My dad applied three years ago. He got rejected, so I sort of like put a goal from myself

to like fucking apply again and again. That's incredible. That's amazing. How did you make your first doll? How did you make your first dollar on the internet? On the internet, yeah. So when I was 15, I was a student and I wanted to build something. And I needed some domain expertise.

And since I was a student, at tech was like the solution. So I built like an AI scholarship database for high school students from like underrepresented backgrounds to go and apply to summer programs in US. So I did a couple of those myself like at Berkeley and then at UPAN came back, scaled it to 20,000 active users and made like $2,000 or something. Congrats, that's amazing.

Take it to the bank. Last question, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Yeah, who the fuck that most money, bro? Like Elon Musk, yeah, he's the richest man, bro, yeah. But otherwise, yeah, Brian Chesky is my goal. I love Brian Chesky. Founder Mode. There you go.

Fantastic. B.O.G. How's the fundraise gone? I closed it a couple weeks ago, yeah. Couple weeks ago. Okay, incredible. That's great. Crushing it, dude.

Fantastic, well, thanks so much for coming out. Yeah, thank you. Great to meet you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Have a good one. Up next. Next.

We are continuing our coverage live from YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. What's happening? I'm John. Alessia, nice to see you. Great to meet you. How you doing? Would you mind introducing yourself and your company?

Sure. Hi everyone, I'm Alessia. Vibeflow is the only one solution to build production ready apps in no code. Okay. We've seen a lot of news recently that there's now a whole industry of vibe code cleanup specialists. What's your reaction? Can vibe coding ever make it to production? No.

No. Not now at least. All the solutions out there are really broken and they can give you this wow effect in the front end but on the back end side there is so much to do and there is a huge needs. People are like they have hair and fire problems and they need to solve these problems. The market is huge. So how are you plugging in?

How do you deliver value to your customers? So we have a solution which is a hybrid approach between lovable and any tan and a database plugged in. So we have this no code interface that is AI like the AI generate this flow. And then maps deterministically to code. So the code is never going to be hallucinating. And, yeah, that's a robust solution. How has traction been so far?

Traction is amazing. As soon as we launched, as I said, like people have this hair and fire problem. So they just want to throw money at you for you to onboard them on platforms that they can actually continue developing the application on. Did you share any metrics today at Demoday? I will share it. I haven't presented yet. Okay.

Okay. You will. Front run it. Front run it. Front run it for the audience. $8,000 applications in three. weeks. There we go.

Congratulations. What were you doing before this? I worked at a software engineer for four years for a company and I actually built a no-code tool which is very similar to what by Flacidavis today for animation and 3D modeling. Oh, that's interesting. For Disney. Disney. That's amazing.

How do you, how have you reacted to like the way that Disney's approached AI? I know they kind of seemingly, it's like a, they're very careful not to get into hot. hot water around like using like too much AI but clearly want to stay on the edge. I think they use AI everywhere like literally everywhere in rendering 3D modeling everywhere and it's cool like you can just make everything faster and a super high resolution rendering. Yeah makes sense. Let's move into our lightning round. We've been asking two questions first. Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? My favorite entrepreneur is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. I'm a big fan and she is

amazing. That's great. Icon. Definitely. Mogul. resilience and persistence second uh how'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business by selling um stuff that my brothers didn't use at home really yes no way no way it's amazing nice anyway uh incredible thank you so much for coming on this thank you we'll talk to me have a good one we'll bring on oh we forgot to ask about the GPU we got to ask if they uh their GPU open hey how you doing nice to meet you welcome to show i'm john welcome to Josh. Josh, pleasure.

Good to meet you. Introduce yourself for the stream. All right. What are you building? Well, I'm Joshua March. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Veritas agent. We build AI agents for the consumer lending industry. Okay.

So interfacing with borrowers to help doing sales, servicing collections for like fintech, banks, credit unions, services, that kind of thing. Do you see your company is GPU poor or GPU rich? We're rich everything. Rich everything. There you can have this. what how have you like how have you what's go-to-market look like are you are you are you focusing like are you trying to thanks involved yeah I imagine there's like a

couple the NPL players that would you know be the ideal yeah no we're we're currently our first design partner was in the collection space collecting on medical payments that's being super successful we've done thousands of outbound calls but but sort of like a not a name that you know no right no but we're now launching yeah exactly we're now getting live with a who's launching us into their conversion funnel for like for sales. There's a big servicer that's in the solar space. There's collections agencies, so a big handful.

Did you have experience in the space prior to this? Yeah, so I actually, I previously built a contact center software company to like $15 million error before I got acquired. And then immediately prior to launching this company, I was essentially working at like a Web3 credit fund and had invested into some emerging market debt buyers who are doing collections and servicing, which kind of exposed me to the whole world.

And I was like, we should just do this with AI, basically. Did you share any metrics today at demo day? Yeah, the only, we haven't converted any of our, we got our first design customer live like six weeks ago. We're now launching with like five more. And the first customer, the first design partner, we did like 4,000 outbound calls and collected like 50K in the first month, which is like a big success. But like, yeah, so we're still getting going. Are you, how are you thinking about the, are you thinking of selling like the results in some way?

Like over time, would you just charge your percentage? Yeah, depends who we're selling to. Yeah. So when we're selling to like a servicer or collections agency, we'll probably just sell on usage-based kind of pricing. But when we're selling to fintechs and banks, then we'd love to do as much outcome-based pricing as possible. And that's on the sales side, the collection side, everything.

We have been asking everyone two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? So there's this guy, Felix Dennis, who was a British entrepreneur. And he wrote this book called, how to get rich. Yeah. Which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship. Okay. And he's like a crazy guy, he's dead now, but he was like a crazy, crazy guy. Big into magazines. Yeah, you would love this guy. He owned like he was like PC magazine, Maxim, the Wii. He was like a big publisher, did a load of different stuff.

Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis. Great, I'll have to look him up. Second question, how do you make your first dollar online on the internet or in business? Yeah, so I launched an e-commerce website when I was like 19, still at college and was selling selling like a load of homewares online homeware yeah nice John was selling a reselling DJ equipment he's an international businessman from a young age business man age 13 is great 13 nice awesome anyway thank you so much for stuff on the progress on the progress let's move on to our next guest we are live from YC Demo Day 2025 how you doing we're getting some photos taken by Bryce

Johnson welcome to the stream we got our next to bring in, wait, the prompting company? Come on. The prompting company. The prompting company. The prompting company. Yes, sir. Of where?

Where could you possibly be based? Of San Francisco. The prompting company of San Francisco. Don't capitalize the of though. I'm just looking at this. Oh, cool. Yeah, bull market and companies named that start with that. Exactly.

The issue tracking of a company of Australia, right? Yeah, exactly. When did you pick that name and logo and design? We picked it two months ago. Two months ago. Okay, okay. You should be the last one to do it, though. I hope so.

I think he's getting kind of boring. The trade is over. Yeah, the trade is over. So you're prompting. It's pretty self-evident, but tell the stream who you are, what you actually do. Yeah, my name is Kevin.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of the prompting company, and we help product get mentioned in chat GPT. Okay. Okay, okay. Not just another generative engine optimization tool. Yeah, yeah. How do you differentiate? Yeah, for sure.

So we play in the infrastructure layer. just creating articles for you okay um we create shadow sites for our companies to you know influence all is there is there any special design in in in the type of shadow site that you're building like what what exactly does that look like yeah for sure so tvs there's documentation there's yeah for sure so these shadow sites are basically like marked down versions of your site okay markdown yeah we basically iterate on more of those why do the foundation models like markdown so much because it takes like no it's it's just 90% less tokens man oh okay It's just more compressed.

Got it. Then HTML? Yeah. Okay. That's correct. Did you come into the batch with this idea? Yes, we did. We did not pivot.

We came in. Pure play. It's a pure play. What were you doing before this? I was at Beehive. I was working there. Oh, no way. Yeah.

Made your money in newsletters. Newsmaxing. What's traction been like? It's been pretty good, dude. We are at 300K and ARR now. now in videos of being customers no way yeah how did you how did you land in video oh dude it's um it was a crazy bake-off but ultimately a better product one there you go bake-off yeah i love i love bake-offs that's great cool um what uh speaking of

jensen who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history in history i mean anyone alive or dead dude uh steve jobs steve jobs yeah that's a great answer good What about how you made your first dollar on the internet or in business? Oof, on the internet, I actually ran a service back then to jailbreak iPhones. No way. No way. That's come up before. Josh Browder.

Yeah, he was jailed. I do a lot of that. iPhones. And there was someone else who was fixing broken iPhone screens. So the little low-hanging fruit in the digital economy, very, very popular. Would you consider yourself GPU poor or GPU rich? GPU poor at the moment? GPU poor at the moment.

How's the fundraise going? It's going pretty great, man. We're way over subscribed. Fantastic. Ficking our lead right now. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on.

Great to meet you. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. You're coming on. Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest from YC Demo Day. How are we doing on time, guys? We have to get out of here to catch a flight, correct?

Okay, let Nick know. How are you doing? What's happening? Nice to meet you, Theo. Good to, how you know, I meet you guys. What's happening? How you doing? Fellow streamer, right?

Yeah, fellow content, creator, streamer accidental business guy turned into an influencer somehow. Introduce yourself for the stream. Yeah. For those who don't know me, I'm Theo, I started, I was actually doing a YC company for making stuff like this easier because I worked at Twitch for five years. I wanted to be easier to do live content collaborations. So I built Zoom for streamers, make it easier to bring a guest like you onto a show like

mine and HD. I'm assuming you guys are actually not using OBS, that's cool, but we built everything around OBS so that you can use your professional existing solutions, copy paste somebody straight from your browser into our, or into OBS at 1080 PhD. Oh, so no matter what you're using, if you're using, Hangouts or Zoom in the browser. We're an alternative to hangouts in Zoom. We're like better, but to be clear,

we don't really focus on this product anymore. We built it because it was so needed and nothing else like this existed before and I saw the need when I was at Twitch. We won half the top streamers, a reward was 8K a month so we started exploring more. I was gonna say it's like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers

and have a tiny business stuff. I had a buddy who built this amazing tool for helping make documentaries and I was just like, this is a very small market man. This is coming from any fun. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, this is the best. I was making YouTube videos.

What are you, so did you, you guys tag them all? Kept the product running. Yeah, still running to this day. It's relatively easy to maintain. Thankfully, we, I'm proud of what we built there. But at the same time, I wanted to better understand creators. And I just missed going deep on tech, because when I was at Twitch, my favorite time of day was lunch and dinner where I could just nerd out with these super

experienced engineers. COVID took that away from me. So I built my YouTube channel to better understand what creators needed and to just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest. And it blew up all this. almost immediately. I'm still, I, the last, do you, do you have a head of membership? So you've seen the browser company video. I love that. So, uh, it was a fantastic reaction. Jordi was saying the same thing in the morning. Yeah, I, I mean, I, I think it's fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved. I think, I think, I can see it,

I can see atlasian, like, wanting to take the browser very seriously. And so there's a way that in the fullness of time that it will look like, you know, incredible deal for both sides. But I did see the video, I was like, wait, head of membership? What's going on there? There are just certain things in that scenario that are like hard to not have your eyes catch. So the chaos I've engaged with since my YouTube channel blew up accidentally, just got more into dev tool stuff, built some dev tools as well for the business, got so annoyed with the state of all the AI chat apps.

Deep Seek v3 drops like, oh my God, this model is incredible, but the website was somehow even worse. So I said, time to make a better one. I'm a nerd about like full stack web and application performance and just quality of experience. I helped build a lot of Twitch chat when I was over there. As far as I know, fastest updating text interface on the web. Oh yeah, people love Twitch chat.

It's so much better than YouTube. It's unbelievable to this day. So I wanted to make that something... Wait, wait, we unpack that because I believe that Twitch chat, it's specifically like doesn't just endlessly load. It loads blocks at a time. It's blocks, but they come in really fast. Is that a mistake?

No, that's by design. That's by design. That's absolutely by design. Like, chat readability is like comprehensive, like, your ability to comprehend what's happening in chat is, like, I was listening to Ludwig and he was saying, could I start over if I didn't have any Twitter which followers and he did this experiment.

And he was like, I think I have an edge just because I'm good at reading chat. And I was like, I never would have clock that as like a thing, but it is. Actually, one of the things I do differently is I film all my YouTube videos live on Twitch. So I'll be like, and I have chat open next to my like return feed. Yes, I have a team that like helps me on set.

We've built some custom software to auto chop the individual topic so we can get a video out within an hour of it being recorded, which I'm really proud of. But the goal is really to do it live. So any like mistakes I make, any sources I need help finding, any weird comments or questions, I would get about the thing can happen while I'm filming. Yeah, so then the final thing is much better.

Yeah, it just cuts, like, it takes us an hour and a half to film an hour long video and then like 30 minutes to edit it. It's great. I'm really proud of our workflow there's cool. Super fun. Was that a content creation injury? This got in a fight with a Firefox user. Joking, it was a skateboard injury from a long time ago. Oh wow. Yeah, it's slowly built up.

Yeah, I was a sponsor skater for a little bit. I really into that to this day. But, yeah, 10 years ago had a really bad wrist break. had a really bad wrist break. Also tore the entire ligament for my thumb and it's just slowly been like falling off of my hand. So finally got that reconstructed. Well, you should build an app

that uses computer vision to teach people how to kickflip. I think there's a, there could be a bull market in that. Yeah, it'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools. No, but it's a, it's a public service, right? Teaching the world to kickflip. Yeah, just come out, our mission is to kickflip. So that's been fun for me recently

that I actually really appreciate you guys for too, is it seems like the hunger for people to understand how the startup stuff actually works, has been growing a lot recently. I've always been a nerd about it. Recently, I've been investing in a lot more. I think I've been over 100 YC startups at this point. It's been really fun for me. And love it. And recently it feels like I can actually talk about that stuff more where previously people's eyes would just glaze over. They wouldn't care. But I'm doing like one startup, an e-video a week at least right now. And they're performing incredibly well. The response has been awesome.

It feels like people are ready to talk about this now. It's a really good time. entirely big enough. I mean, you look at the traction on, like, the actual Y Combinator account and, like, on YouTube and it says, like, over a million followers. Still one of the most underrated YouTube channels, too. Like, the old Michael Seibel Dalton podcast, like is, I reference it all of the time. So good. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, they've, but all those stuff that Gary's done, they've done really. Yeah, absolutely. I love all of them. It's like, the Y Combinator, like, program, Y Combinator content, the Ycombinator partners. Everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful. And now YT3 chat is successful, too. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Makes sense. What's your goal over the next five, 10 years? If I had a five to 10 year goal, I would be probably not here.

I'd be working on it. I have no idea. I've always kind of just went with the flow and that works really well. My thing's always been it's better to be late than early. I find that people try way too hard to be early to a thing and it ends up kind of rotting their brain a little bit. Like imagine you saw how powerful smartphones were getting back in the day. You're like, oh my God, this is obviously the future. Everything's going to be on phones.

So I'm going to go all in making Java applets for the Kyocera Echo and Blackberry. Are you better or worse off than somebody who got into app development two years after the app store came out? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's better to be late. Everybody told me I was too late when we made our chat app and we're, as far as I know, the fastest growing third party chat app. Wow. Crazy.

Fantastic. We've been asking everyone two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history. History makes it tough. I would say like, live or dead. Modern history, like a live makes it a lot easier. Modern history, I think Tim Sweeney is my personal favorite. The way he's aligned his business is incredible.

Like to this day, he still owns exactly 51%. so nobody can outvote him. His focus on making everything better for developers, knowing the flywheel will eventually fund him back. It's kind of like Apple strategy, but way more focused on developers, which I care a lot about. Even things that have been a flop like Epic Game Store

were with the goal of getting developers more money because he was tired of Apple getting subsidized with 30% revenue from an indie game dev. Yep, that makes a ton of sense. What did you think of the Apple launches today? Apple launch today was, as a nerdy tech and video guy, I love it. The iPhone 17 Pro is an actual, like, monumental leap in what you can do for video production.

Have you guys paid attention any of that stuff? No, no. I just know 48 megapixel, like, better cameras. That's cool, but the, no, I mean that they added gen lock support. Oh, okay. So, like, full black magic, like integrations. You can do time code with a new USB, like, do I say part with black magic to make. You can do crazy synchronization shots where you get like 20 iPhones at different angles. That's kind of cool. And do like frame by frame, like, like freeze frame 3D shots. stuff with it that was normally you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before now you just get like 20 iPhones and a couple of USB adapters it's insane and that's gonna be even cheaper in like two years yeah oh and pro res raw which is really cool too because i know way too much about

cameras i'm really nerdy about this but uh the red camera company had an exclusive patent on compressed raw video encoding where on camera specifically so the reason that all those like usb or i used to be like external hdddd my recorders got popular Atmos is a business because of Red's bullshit patent. That patent allowed them to just get away with things. They absolutely shouldn't have been shut down every other camera company trying. The patent was, they had succeeded in suing Apple. They succeeded in suing DJI.

They almost got the barred from the U.S. They succeeded in suing Sony, Canon, a bunch of other companies. They were suing Nikon. Nike said, how expensive are you guys? And bought them for like $30 million. So now the patent's not being enforced. So Apple got to put ProRids raw in the new iPhone, which is unbelievable. That's wild.

Actual raw video encoding on a phone is just, I could not have imagined that even two years ago. That's crazy. Other question we've been asking, how do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Minecraft. Minecraft. Yeah, somebody else said this. If I hear from a founder that they started in Minecraft servers, I don't even think twice, I just write the check. Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah, it's so crazy. It's sneaker boughting, Minecraft, iPhone, repairs. Like buying and selling stuff on eBay, it was popular in like the 90s, 2000s. Yeah, there's always one of those every generation. It's been really fun to see. And now I feel like people skip the stuff and just go straight to the business, which is interesting. which is interesting.

Yeah, you're hearing that. Just start in enterprise staff. Just go to the end state. Yeah, just going to like the Founders Inc events and seeing how many like excited young founders there are now. It's just something I never would have imagined before. Like when I was a kid, it was the promise, like the exciting thing is you'll get to work at the Google campus one day. Like that's what you were aspiring for.

Now you're aspiring to be here and that's a really interesting shift. Yeah. That's great. Are you GPU poor or GPU rich? Ooh. I'm GPU middle class. You could pick a hat if you want one. Oh, I want the GPU poor hat for sure.

the GPU poor hat for sure absolutely thank you so much middle class you got to go you got up or down well thank you for joining it's not properly fitted but you can I will fix that for sure yeah thank you guys I appreciate any weird stuff in like yeah yeah chat space or whatever no worries at all I miss even more of them than you guys do let me if you have any help with anything I'll be around happy man cheers have a good rest of your day lightning round let's let's let's oh there's people out there okay okay let's run it let's run it let's run it let's run it come Speed it up.

Who are you? What do you do? Bob. Let's introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Bob. Welcome to the show, Bob.

We build coding agents for firmware. Okay. Coding agents for firmware? Firmware, yeah. What device are you embedded? They said it could be done. So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers. So think about any microchroll you can think of,

STM 32, ESP, TI, NXV, any manufacturing. When did you learn you wanted to do agents for coding agents for firmware? That's good, good question. So I did hardware on my life. started like you know started when I was full doing robots moving to more professional stuff in high school in college I did school let's go in college I yeah in college I built human rights and then went to a startup the med tech stuff and then went to Tesla worked on robot taxi yeah so we kind of saw that I

saw this problem from like you know a risk like a 10% research lab to a trillion-dollar company yeah that firmware done was so inefficient from web dev yeah and traditional coding agents just couldn't do it yep like cloud code or cursor they lack context what we say about contact is two different problems, right? One problem is that has no understanding of the chips. Like, it needs to read the documentation for the chips to understand how to actually write the code.

And once it has written the code, there's no way to test the code on the device, right? So we built this information layer and this hardware interaction layer, where you can actually, you know, read our outputs from your board and run out like a GV debugger to like debug, yeah. How's traction, how's demo day going?

Tracking has been great. We launched three weeks ago now. We have over 100 paying users, 500 lines of code changed working on the first enterprise yeah yeah uh who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time oh Elon has to be there we go are you uh bullish bear humanoids in the next uh five years i'm very bullish very bullish in the next five years in the next five years you think i will have one of my home maybe in all your home factories factories factories factories Why factories?

Factories, because like, it's a straight-old replacement before you're human workers. You're just so much lower cost and you don't have to modify anything in your factory, dropping replacement and free workforce. Okay, we will see. Okay. Well, thank you so much. We'll hold you to it. We'll hold you to it. We'll hold you to it.

Five years. Expect to hear from us with a fact check on that. Thank you so much for coming by. Thanks for you'll see you later. Have a good one. We'll bring in our next guest. We're doing lightning round. We got a lot of folks out there. Let's bring in the next founder.

I'm Weiss in Demoday, 2025. Welcome to the stream. Hi, I'm John. Elena, nice to meet you. Hey, thank you. Nice to meet you. Introduce yourself, who are you? Yeah, Elena Seekash, I'm a partner at Google Ventures.

Oh, fantastic. Amazing. Okay. I was gonna hit this button, but, uh, not. Partner Mo. How, uh, what's your reaction to Demo Day been? What are the common trends that you're seeing? Yeah.

How is this one different from other ones? Or valuations is the highest they've ever been? What are you seeing? I feel like valuations. are always higher. I think the fact that the public markets have come back has just reinstored a lot of faith. IPO windows open. I'm excited to see a lot of that. I run fintech at Google Ventures. There's a lot of fun fintech and crypto companies in the pipeline. And yeah, it's been a really fun demo day. I feel like the energy is always tough. Did you do any of the companies in this batch

yet? Are you still looking? Not in this batch yet, but I think. But you guys are, you guys can, are so multi-stage that you can kind of come in for, it's more about, yeah, building, building relationships. we're investing out of a $2.8 billion fund every two years. Yeah. And our sole LP is Google. That's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Why? Do you introduce it as Google Ventures, but isn't it rebranded fully to GV or have we gone back? It's, you know, it depends on what flavor. Okay. People are looking for, but it's both GV and GV. Okay, got it. What? Give us, give us the state of early stage fintech today. Yeah. Because if this was four years ago, I think we would have seen like half the batch, some, something like that. fintech related and very little of that today from from what we've seen it probably creates

probably means like now is the right time to be starting company but what are you seeing yeah i feel like fintech has always ebbed and float um and at gv we've been investing in fintech since the start uh we were seed investors in robin hood seed investors in plaid seat investors in gusto we recently invested in ramp and so what you can kind of see in fintech right now yeah let's go big day to day What you can see in fintech is a barbell. There are people who are solving things at the earliest stages, parts of the world where fintech still hasn't touched. I'll still say fintech's total market cap is 4% of all of financial services. Financial services is 20% of the S&P 500.

So there's a lot of ways to go. Do you think the fact that there are so many scaled growth stage deca corn plus fintech companies with founders still at the helm, changes the strategy at the early stage. Like, do you need to be more focused or niche? Because you have Zach at Plaid, you have Eric at Ramp, Brian at Coinbase, right at Robin Hood. Like, it's not the same era where it's like the founders died 50 years ago. And so, yeah, it's probably open season on that category.

It's like, no, if you start that company in that space, like that person, that founder that we all know who's already on the podcast circuit is going to be coming for your life. And they go multi-product, right? They run the trust of a consumer, and then they get into everything. And they also are not in manager mode. So, yeah, and I mean, I think that's a lot of why we invested a ramp, even at this last round's price, right?

Like, I've spent a decade looking at Office of the CFO software. And I think that they'll end up winning agents. Let's give it up for the Office of the CFO. Let's do it. And I think the best founders think they're never done. Yeah. And so with FinTech, what I love about it is I look at Amex, it's a $230 billion company. Yeah. There is a lot of room to run if you're a fintech founder. Are you pitching Ruth

Perrot on ramp? Always. Okay, let's make it happen. Yeah. We got to do that. Were you at the last demo day? Yes. Why do you come on upstream? Yeah, yeah. One, that's more important, but I was going to say like vibes-based analysis to me, the, I've been a lot more excited about this batch than last time. Last time it felt like super derivative, everything. It was a lot of like agents for agents and infrastructure for agents this is a lot more of like less infrastructure more like here is a product with like a clear value prop and we have a hundred people yeah we're using AI like we're using cloud or mobile or anything else yeah and I think I think I always think of things as variables

right and when people are building for things that don't yet exist it becomes stacking a bunch of variables on top of each other and I think what I love about this badge is it seems pretty grounded and rooted in things that people need today like the market is there I'm not taking a risk on whether or not the market it's going to come into fruition. Yeah, and a year ago, if you were doing agentic infrastructure, there was a lot of people that I was seeing, like, not even just in YC,

that were, like, building infrastructure for agents, and yet, and they would sign up a lot of customers, but none of the customers were creating any value. So it was like, it was like infrastructure for companies that weren't really working. And I think that's, and I think that the catalyst now is like, now you have a bunch of companies building a gentic software that are delivering

value for customers and so a lot of the infrastructure companies can probably work now yeah uh we're doing a lightning round outside of larry and sergey obviously who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history alive or dead anyone that you think is inspiring maybe read a biography or something oh wow uh there are there's so many this is really difficult um you know what i i think i would say um brian armstrong coinbase created a market that didn't exist before the large just businesses are always market creators in spite of what I said earlier about market yeah that's a great one we love Brian so if you're the next Brian Armstrong you're creating a market right now please please me get in touch yeah um second

question how do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business oh wow trading crypto trading crypto I'm surprised we haven't heard that more I know yes let's get up for she was born in the trenches Born in the trenches. Still in the trenches. Still in the trenches. Last question. Do you consider yourself GPU poor, GPU rich?

You're bolted onto a hyperscaler. I think I know the answer, but I'll hear it from you. Define GP poor, GP rich. GPU poor means that you're struggling to scrap together. Every H-100 you can, GPU-rich, as you press the button on the massive training run if you want. You know, it's a vibe, but it's also a very real thing for foundation model companies now it's just a general vibe do you feel constrained by

technology or liberated by it i feel like liberated by i think you we got it we got a lean in we got to lean in we'll give you this hat it hasn't been properly said oh maybe it fits there you go anyway thank you so much yeah great to me it's fantastic great to be you see you next batch have a rest of your demo day two phones you know she means business there you got that's a corporate that's a corporate athlete corporate athlete right that's a boardroom general how you doing welcome the stream welcome to the stream geordy you yeah introduce yourself what do you do hey uh my name is sion uh we're kalinda that's a great name yeah we're basically a deep research for class action

law firms okay interesting yeah let's give it up for litigation what's the secret sauce is it is it just the the day bad data in bad data out you got to get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall it's not scraped into the the pre-training weights of gpt5 and so you have some cornered resource in the data or is it something in the architecture or something at the ui level like where's the interesting kind of like most startups at ycc like a lot of it sits on the application layer sure um most of it for for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things you know they can have maybe 10 million pages for litigation oh wow so with that kind of scale

you can't obviously just toss them to check yeah it'd be a hassle it just like upload another PDF, upload another PDF, upload another PDF. And then the kind of second thing is like most of the data sort of sits sits in silos and kind of aggregating it all and making it sort of, you know, comprehensive like human would is. Would you ever, would you ever go full stack? Would you ever start suing people yourself? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We just said, that's America. That's the American way. Let's go. Watch out. Yeah, we actually just said this in our, in our pitch. We want to become the world's first class action law firm. Okay. Full stack. A.I. AI law firm. Nice. Fantastic. How's traction? What do you

share a demo day? How's it going? How's the race going? Yeah. So we've about 60,000 in revenue in just the last four months since basically launching. Congrats. We have three of the largest plaintiff law firms in the U.S. as customers. But yeah, it's going really well. Pitch is a little nerve-wracking at first, but got over it. What's it like selling into these firms so far? they seem to be responding well yeah much better than uh most would expect i guess like they uh they probably don't know a lot about me at all so you just kind of say it's magic and then has this been an overlooked category broadly just building software for this type of firm it feels like they just print cash and they're willing to spend um some of the numbers i've heard on like some of these

even firms that like have a website they look like a tiny business and they're just printing like 50 million dollars a year it's crazy most settlements are a billion plus but uh yeah absolutely like you know because of natural language being so a lot easier with art of generative AI um they it makes it a lot easier and so the kind of work they do is has basically been overlooked for practically ever in fact most of them you could never throw software out yeah and most of them aren't even still paperless they still have lots of paperwork so they've just gotten over the the cloud if you want to call it that so um yeah cool uh Lightning round.

Do it. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Sam Haltman. Sam Holtman. Just because I've met him twice, but he's, yeah, he's a goat. Second question. How did you make your first dollar online in business or on the internet? Oh, cold call.

Cold call. Let's go. It was actually, so the previous space that we were in was personal injury. Still law firms. My brother, he's an expert cold caller. Yeah. Are you, how did, when did you realize you wanted to get into class actions and personal injury law? Yeah.

Well, basically, we live. literally about last summer we started walking into business as cold just like saying hey we do AI we're both previously AI researchers like we can probably solve your business problems yeah law firms were a huge part of it so nice yeah it's based on where you sit in the stack do you do you feel like your GPU poor or GP rich oh GPU rich but here we go GPU poor soon okay okay good luck to you scaling up hopefully you can scale up thanks so much great to be you guys we will talk to you soon have a good rest of your day

Thank you, if you're just tuning in. We are live from YC Demoday, 20205, and we have our next guest coming into the studio. Welcome to the show. You seem fired up. Did you just pitch? We haven't pitched yet. Who are you?

What do you do? Ralph Garcia, founder of Kernel, we're crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your AI agent. The browser wars. The browser wars are on. But this is basically computer use. So it's API to go and interact with the website.

Yeah, so nowadays a lot of AI agents, you want to hook them up to you, the exact same tools that humans use, and the browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day-to-day basis. And so we're powering automations in healthcare, fintech, QA, lots of different use cases that AI is really good at. Walk us through to kind of the history of the market, because I know there was, there used to be this company, I'm blanking on the name, but they were doing like browser, they had a browser use product, and they were venture-backed, but they never really, like, broke out. And it feels

like this market is just like exploded in size. Yeah, so prior to LLMs, the main use case was you run your tests or your QA chromium on a, on a browser, a headless browser in the cloud. But as soon as AI came on the scene, tools got supercharged by this intelligence you could connect to them. Yep. So, you know, I experienced this firsthand. I found out a company called Clever back in 2012.

That was, uh, no way. That's right. I think we might have with Tyler. Yeah, we were technically. the same batch and we our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation that's amazing uh data out of uh student information so there's a killer company by the way you should look it up as massive acquired acquired yeah exactly massive deal size gone size gone what was the number what was the number uh 500 million so yeah both both me and my

co-founder previous yC founders so we are uh experienced at the game uh and yeah i was previously a quant at a high frequency trading firms right so like speed is the name of the game If you want to make your browser infrastructure super fast, I will help you. How are subscribed is the round? It's extremely and it's over. It's over. It's actually over. You're not bad.

I mean, it is a hyper-competitive space. I saw even AWS launch something. It seems like something obviously AWS would have a product. How are you thinking about competition in the long-term market structure? Are you thinking it's even a winner-take-all market or is this oligopoly like what we saw with cloud? what we saw with cloud, where AWS, GCP, Azure, these are all great businesses. Yeah, I think, you know, with DevTools, I think there's an opportunity for companies to come into the space and just be laser focused on the technical quality of the product.

So you see this with like Planet Scale and RDS. Amazon has a competitor that like, you know, has a huge market share, but Planet Scale is like eating their lunch when it comes to MineShare and some bigger cost of customers. Like there's a lot of examples of. So we are like infra nerds, like trying to make browsers. super fast in the cloud. And I don't think they're, the lengths we are going to do that, like AWS is gonna be years behind whatever we're working on.

So how are the bakeoffs going? The bake offs are going well. So we, you know, we did YC and YC is now like five or six thousand companies. So it's a huge early adopter market to kind of launch and sell into. But now we're starting to see deals come on that are, you know, Fortune 500, more enterprise deals. So yeah, size gong is going off in the office and yeah, we're seeing really good revenue growth over, I guess, 1,000 you could call it month over month, 400% usage month over month. We've spun up like 200,000 browsers in the last three months.

So, yeah, things are going well. Fantastic. How big is the team today? We're six full time. So hiring a lot of people I worked with that clever. and uh yeah no i love i love when a founder comes in but runs it back does it like they did it the first time like goes back through yc and then just puts on a master class yeah yeah yeah the mistake and i don't know if you'll agree the mistake is like okay you could have done the next

i'm gonna incubate 25 different things yeah you could i'll be at the beach for the next bar gets so high that i'd like you to build things as hard and they've completely forget how hard it is at the stage yeah or that's the value of going through yc again is like The partners put you in that mindset like, okay, you actually have to do things that don't scale. You have to build a product something wants, right? Yep, yeah. Yeah, just you could have done the whole like raised 50 million,

get the really crazy office out the gates, and then you gotta earn it every time. You gotta earn it every time for sure. Well, speaking of people who earned it, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history? Ooh. Who do you look to you? Favorite entrepreneur, I mean, how far back are we going?

We can go live or dead, literally thousands of you want. You can go, you can go Edison. Somebody has mentioned Jesus Christ. somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at Ramp. So, I mean, I didn't make the comparison, but it was made today. I mean, cliche, I'll have to go Steve Jobs. I mean, I grew up reading. That was George's answer too.

And studying Apple, like, that was my first computer as a kid. So I got a shout out to Steve. I said Edwin Land, Steve Jobs mentor, but it's not. Anyway, second question. How do you make your first dollar online or in business? I mean, do you count trading futures as a equine? Is there a more noble way to make their first dollar? I mean, that is my first job out of college.

That's my Kwan. That's my Kwan. Anyway, congratulations. On the progress. Come back on the show as you have more news. When you're ready to announce a round? Jump on. We're very excited.

Anyway, we will bring it. We have what? 10 minute countdown. 10 minutes. Come in. Where in the lighting round? Who are you? What do you?

Explain yourself. My name's Adi. I'm a co-founder of Asian Mill. It's the first email provider built for for AI agents. The key distinction, there we go. The key distinction is we're not AI for your email, we're email for your AI. Okay.

Whoa. Whoa. Wow. Exactly. I was wondering about this because I go to agent mode and oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like, okay, it should just email the person to actually kick off that process and it can't do it. How much money are you making? How much money are we making?

Yeah. Did you share a KPI at Demoday? Did you share progress? Yeah. What KPI should be focused on? We did not, but we love our customers. But there are customers plural. So I know there's more than one.

Yes. Okay, I'm learning. There we go. Okay. Did you come in with this idea or did you pivot to it? So we were trying to get rich quick. Is that why you're, is somebody vlogging out there? Was that someone else?

Yeah, exactly. We're like that you're doing that YouTube. I know what question I'm asking you guys. Let's go. So we wanted agents to go on the internet, make us money, farm free trials. And then interesting, exactly. And we realized, okay, it's kind of hard to give agents. their own inboxes. But they should have them. Sequoia's talking about them,

land chain's talking about them. Agents need their own email inboxes. Okay, so you did. This brings me to the lightning round question. How do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business like as a kid or maybe took you a while? So I got cut from the basketball team and I was like, damn, I want to be a part of it. What's basketball? I'm kidding. We don't know a lot. We don't know a lot about sports. Yeah, yeah. So I was like, hey I want to be involved man I want to feel like I'm a part of something so I just said hey coach what can I do he's like okay be the scorekeeper that's how I made like my first 300 bucks

that's fantastic and there we go that's an honest that's an honest living yeah uh second question who's your favorite entrepreneur in history of live or dead I like Warren Buffett Warren Buffett yeah interesting I think he's one of those guys who's like actually humble yeah right like it's not like okay hey I'm worth 100 million yeah I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game he does he's so hopefully one day you know I be like that fantastic well thank you so much nice love the guys great to see you have a good one let's bring on our next guest at YCWA 2025 we got eight minutes let's bring them in introduce yourself who are you what do you do what do you do

sit down here shake my hand it's time to meet you're riffing who are you what do you do hey I'm all that building riff which is cursor for music production oh that's fun are you sitting so cursor sits on top of an open source ID are you sitting on top of Ableton Or something? That doesn't exist for music. So we actually built everything from scratch. Okay. Trained our own models.

Sure. We have our own like editor. It kind of looks like garage band, but you can use AI tools to generate sounds and mess around. Interesting. Do you bring your own like samples or do you plug into a sample library? Like where, or is all the samples AI generated? Yeah, we have like a user community of samples. But we also like let you generate your own.

And also like lots of bells and whistles to make it easier. Like for example, you can hum out a melody and we'll play it on an instrument for you. That's very cool. What's your most popular song? You make music, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I, let me see.

I produced a song for this artist named Rio Cragon. He's pretty big. He works with like a lot of EDM artists. Nice. That's awesome. We'll have to play it. So what's like, how do you see the market here? Is there a million people that you think will pay for a product like this?

Or do you want to go more enterprise, work with labels? Like, what's the play? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so like, you know, we're definitely targeting pros. It's a pro tool. Yeah. But pros for us means pro tools. Oh, yeah.

A good one. Like, it doesn't just mean music producers. It's really anyone who releases music on the internet. Like imagine you're just a singer. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for your producer, you can produce your own music. Yeah, that's great. And that's like an 80 million people release music on the internet. Yeah.

How's traction? How's Demodee going? Great. I mean, yeah, we grew to 400 DAUs. People are already dropping songs on Spotify that were made our riff. And getting some listening. already. Fantastic. Yeah, the raise is fantastic. I want to have to like really pick the investors now. Like the round is completely filling up. So great spots. Amazing. Last question,

wrist check. Oh, yeah? Yeah. What do you got? What is this? Yeah, it's a bread like. Nice. Nice. Not enough watches on the wrist here. Why see? Lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur in history, Liberdeadette. Dr. Dre. Dr. Dr. Dre. I knew I knew I'd ask you. Anyway, thank you so much for that. Thanks, nice. Great to meet. Let's bring in the next one. How are you doing? Five minutes left at the YC Demer Day live stream. Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself.

Who are you? What are you doing? Yeah, I'm Tunga, and I'm the CEO of Freya. What do you do? We build voice AI for European enterprises. Okay. Especially regulated ones like finance. Okay.

And we're pretty much voice AI for Europe. How's traction? Traction, eight paid pilots converting to 24K MRR. That's great. Within the past four weeks. And the rest of the demo day, the ratings? Are you getting ASML in the round? Are you gonna be this?

Yeah, they're the hot investor. Say goodbye to the tier ones. No, he's didn't get a SML. Not yet. Next round, next round. We're rooting for you. Are you GPU poor by any chance? Do you want a GPU four hat?

I might as well be. Are you, so what's the strategy? Are you going to build a company here? Are you moving back to Europe? Back and forth? So we have office in San Francisco and in Istanbul, as well as Prague. Yeah, they're based in three places.

So I go to market is Europe. especially finance industry, but since we started working with banks and insurance companies there, especially we're working with some of the biggest banks there. In US, we got some interest with some of these neobanks and credit unions, so we're... Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? And I would love a European example if you have one. European example, huh? But you can say anyone.

If they were good European entrepreneurs, they would come to SF, they would come to SF. So. Mogged. Well, just zooming out. Who's your favorite entrepreneur? Entrepreneur. I would say, alive or dead. I'm impressed by what Elon Musk has done.

There we go. That's great one. Fantastic. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? In my own business? Yeah, just, no, in life. Any? You know, like as a kid, did you make any money on the internet?

Yeah, I mean, on internet, pretty much. I didn't make my first money on the internet. I was doing sales. Sales. Yeah, for, I was trying to get some people to a real estate shop. Okay. pretty much what i did there you go that's fantastic yeah nice well congrats on the progress thank you for legends are made we'll talk to you soon all right and have a good one let's bring in

our next guest how much more time do we have four minutes let's keep going we're going we're going bring them in bring them in how you doing welcome to the stream what's happening long time listener first time caller thank you for coming on let's go it's great to have you who are you what are you building i'm john ferrara i'm building which is a GPS alternative that can track anyone on Earth with no hardware. I feel like I've seen this on X. You might have seen our, we had a pretty cool launch video. Very cool, yeah.

Okay, so how does it work? There's some company that spun out of Google that just sold it does something similar. It's like magnetics, but what, what do you, how are you doing it? Yeah, so we basically use simulated technology to basically render any environment using satellite imagery or indoor floor plans into 3D. So you do a geogessor? You could, you could put it that way, yeah. We shouldn't have the company that way. Yeah.

And then we simulate millions of people or object. moving through to space, simulate their sensor measurements with like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and then train models on that, and then basically deploy the software, and then we can leverage the IMUs, which are like sensors that are already into every phone and most other devices today to track you. It's adjacent to that, like, I can see you through your Wi-Fi. Lots of people love this. Yeah, if you've seen that film in like the dark night, there's like a scene where Batman kind of does something, a little, you know, that's how you can envision.

Yep, that's gonna be entertaining on the internet. What? Who's the buyer here? Yeah, we sell a lot to like actually at this point, like warehousing, manufacturing, logistics because 90% of all movement happens in GPS, the areas. Inside a building. Indoors, underground, defense is a big one. I grew up in a military family, so we sell a lot to like, try to sell lots of DOD, stuff like that.

But right now we've made a lot of progress like selling to companies who want to like ship thousands of pallets or containers or move around a warehouse, stuff like that. Do you require any custom hardware or could this be distilled at some point into just an iPhone app? No, it's just software. It's just software. So like actually it was almost, we were this close. If you come next demo day, we're actually gonna be in the demo day app. We were YC1, Gary and Jared wanted to track all the investors and founders to see where

they were going, but we weren't able to work with their app team quite in time. So next demo day it'll be there, but that's already existing. We're building actually small asset tags that are like two inch by two inch that that allow us to basically stack. Yeah, yeah, I was going to take. A lot of stuff is important, but doesn't have soft. Right. And so that's where like we'll get to the point where we can do that sort of thing.

That's super, super, super cool. Lightning round questions. How do you make your first dollar? your first dollar. Like traction and how some fundraise going. Sure. Yeah. We've done about $150,000 in revenue in the last six weeks.

That's pretty good. Congratulations. Thanks. And then we're actually on pace to be at like 500K in the next two months. There's a lot of demand. We have like hundreds of thousands of these tags pre-ordered. Wow. That's fantastic.

And yeah, we raised our round. Five million at 40 was what our... There we go. There we go. I'm honestly giving it away. Sorry. I didn't mean that maybe that was too much. No, no, no.

We try not to drag it out of people. Oh, my bad. No, no, no, but it's helpful. It's very interesting. Come back on the show when you want to announce the actual round. Yeah, I guess you kind of pre-announced. Can I get a gong? Yeah, you can get a gong.

We'll hit the gong for you. Appreciate it. How did you make your first dollar on in life? In life? Or as a kid? As a kid, I would, well, I worked a lot of really weird jobs. I got my first one when I was 13 working at a, working 13 at a hot dog stand in a shack in Phoenix, Arizona.

Let's go. So it was shoveling hot dogs and it was gourmet hot dogs. So like you basically paid $9 for a hot dog that got wrapped in non bread instead of a normal bun. Yep. We charge you nine bucks. Uh, who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? Live or dead? Oh my God.

I would say, I would say, I know the riff guys just said Dr. Dre, but I'll say Drake because he just came out that Amazon store and Drake's my favorite artist. Oh, there we go. What Amazon store? You haven't seen this. He's, this is his actual plot to take over Amazon music as a distribution platform, but he's working with Amazon to sell all of his merch and all of his goods through their storefront and basically facilitated all their distribution through there. So that's my cop-out answer, but I just love Drake. Thank you so much for coming on. Right for six. Great to meet. Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

We have our next guest. Casey, let's bring her in. How you doing? Welcome. Final guest, closing it out. Closing it out. Closing it out. Saving best for last. Good to me, welcome. Introduce yourself for the stream. Tell us who you are. My name is Casey Caruso. I'm the managing partner of a fun called Topology. Fantastic. be here. Reaction to Demo Day. Electric. Electric. Electric. More electric than the last demo day? Particularly electric. What is, what about it is electric? I just think the founder quality is so high. And I think it's just an incredible thing that YC does for the Valley. Yeah. And it's very unique. I mean, there's a lot of things that are like this and still the essence of YC

has been, I think, retained. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Were you at the last demo day? I was. To me, like it seems like the bar is like consistently higher across this batch. I don't know if you feel the same. I feel like the founder. Maybe it's the founder the same, but the quality of the company and the traction. The industry has kind of figured out like how to tell the story that's not just like AI only. And it's actually like putting, going back to the basics of like what's the problem we're solving. So when I talk to a lot of the founders, they come in and they lead, yeah, there's AI being said, but it's almost in the background and they're more focused on the market or the problem or the product. So I've been, I feel like all the stories have been a lot more tractable

than just like AI infrastructure. I agree. I also think the founders are getting younger and younger. I honestly feel that there's a high school dropouts. Yeah, there's like 14 year olds up there and they're like, we just launched 30 seconds ago and we have 10K and ever are. And I'm like, oh my God. Yeah, they're skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker slipping. They're just going straight into enterprise SaaS is absolutely beautiful. Where have you been most excited to invest broadly just outside of YC over the past year? Yeah, I mean, so the fund is a 75 million fund one, and we're backed by people like Mark Andreessen, founder of Open AI, and we really focus on technical founders that are commercially

minded, building cool shit. And that's really important. We only back cool shit. And so we will look everywhere, but that's like the motto where that's the one-liner. We spend a lot of time in neurotech. We spend a lot of time in maybe less popular AI category. Yes. Yeah. Any reaction since you said neurotech? There was a company that went pretty viral yesterday with doing like telepathy. What's going on there? How proprietary do you think that is? Is that something that we're going to see more of as like a form factor? Yeah, absolutely. So actually if you go to topology.bc slash neuro dash map, you can see a really sick visualization of all this. But it's more than a market map. Okay. But I love market maps. We're We're pro-market map here, by the way.

And if they're crowdsores even better, right? Yeah, of course. But that specific technology is called silent speech. Okay. And it's becoming more popular. Very cool. It's actually not. Do you have to actually move your mouth in order for-

That's right. So it's using muscle movement instead of brain signals. And there's some that are trying to do silent speech with brain, but like alter ego is going with the muscle approach. And to actually get it with like the EKG, you don't, or is it, not EKG, whatever. In the EMG maybe? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you need like 60 sensors or something like that, so it's not necessarily.

Yeah, right now the biggest thing in neuro is to become what's called multimodal, kind of like what happened with AI. So people are using things like ultrasound with the EEG, which is one of the most popular, non-invasive technologies with muscle movement and combining them all together. The other cool neurotech company, though, that we're investing in is Sam Altman's new company called Merge. That one's going to become really popular, too. But I thought they killed that demo on Twitter. Yeah, it was very good demo. It was great demo. Lighting round.

Lighting around. We got out of here. So favorite entrepreneur, alive or dead. I can't do that. All my children, I love equally. All my portfolio companies. What about someone who you read a biography of who's like, you know, from a hundred years ago?

You're like, no, my favorite, my favorite entrepreneurs are only the, only the companies I invest in. Yeah, no, not favorite entrepreneur that you've necessarily got. Then you got to just go Einstein. Einstein. Yeah, you just got it. Okay, there we go. That's good.

No one said Einstein yet. And how did you make your first money, first dollar, either on the internet or in business? Yeah, I started coding when I was really young as in an anon because my mom wanted to keep my, like, gender kind of under wraps. So I, you know, I didn't get any like creepy messages. Yeah. And I used to, yeah, do website development as an on. That's a great one. Nice.

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