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

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

(00:00) - Nate Bosshard, founder of Offline Ventures and co-founder of Tonal, has a background in marketing leadership at companies like GoPro and The North Face. In the conversation, he reflects on his early entrepreneurial ventures, such as selling used records on eBay, and discusses the evolution of Y Combinator's Demo Day to a quarterly event. He also highlights Andrew Dudum of Hims & Hers as an underrated entrepreneur, noting the company's rapid growth and successful public offering. (24:17) - Jerry Qian, co-founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing workflows for brands, discusses how Reacher helps brands find the right creators, personalize outreach, manage payments, and generate scripts to create viral content. He highlights the emergence of TikTok Shop as a significant social commerce platform and emphasizes the role of AI in enhancing creator marketing. Jerry also shares that Reacher has achieved $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue. (27:52) - Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto, a company reimagining payroll and HR services for small businesses, discusses his journey from Stanford electrical engineering graduate to entrepreneur, highlighting his experience with Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch and the early days of Gusto. He shares insights into the company's initial focus on payroll, the importance of using their own product before paying themselves, and the challenges of raising funds during a time when many startups were centered on social and mobile platforms. Reeves also reflects on the significance of customer-centricity, drawing inspiration from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech, and emphasizes the value of understanding and serving customers to build a successful business. (33:28) - Bruno Koba, co-founder of Gauss, introduces their AI-driven investment analyst designed to assist retail investors in making informed decisions by monitoring markets, filtering noise, and delivering personalized insights. He emphasizes the platform's focus on reducing emotional investment mistakes and catering to thesis-driven investors who lack time for extensive market research. Bruno also shares his background, including roles at Nubank and Monashees, and mentions Gauss's subscription model, charging $19 per month, with plans to transition to a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) model. (39:24) - Jason Cornelius, co-founder and CEO of Perseus Defense, discusses the development of affordable 16-inch guided missiles designed to counter drone threats. He highlights the limitations of existing counter-UAS solutions, such as electronic warfare and high-cost interceptors, and introduces Perseus Defense's cost-effective alternative, aiming to produce missiles for under $10,000 per unit. Cornelius also shares the company's rapid prototyping progress, including multiple missile iterations and live-fire tests, and mentions engagements with the Department of Defense to advance the technology's deployment. (44:53) - Farhan Khan, co-founder of Meteor and former University of Washington computer science student, discusses their AI-native browser designed to automate repetitive online tasks, positioning it as a superior alternative to Google Chrome. He explains that Meteor employs AI agents to handle activities like scheduling meetings and data entry, aiming to save users significant time. Farhan also shares his entrepreneurial journey, including previous projects and his decision to drop out of college to focus on building Meteor. (48:31) - Wyatt Lansford is the co-founder and CTO of Pally, a platform that consolidates contacts and conversations from various platforms into one place, utilizing on-device AI to maintain user privacy. In the conversation, Haz Hubble, Pally's founder, discusses the platform's functionality, emphasizing its local data processing to ensure privacy, and shares the company's growth metrics, including reaching over 3,500 users and achieving $125,000 in annual recurring revenue within two months of launch. He also recounts his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his admiration for Richard Branson and an early venture selling FIFA Ultimate Team coins at age 12. (52:10) - Luigi Pederzani is the co-founder and CTO of mcp-use, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to build and deploy AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). In the conversation, he discusses mcp-use's open-source strategy, its growing GitHub repository with over 7,000 stars, and the company's bottom-up approach to enterprise adoption, similar to Supabase. He also mentions raising $6 million in funding and his previous experience in Zurich working on virtual try-on technology for e-commerce. (56:18) - Dhruv Roongta is a 20-year-old entrepreneur and co-founder of Slashy, an AI agent that integrates with various applications to automate repetitive tasks. In the conversation, he discusses how Slashy connects to tools like calendars, Gmail, and Notion to streamline workflows, reducing the need for manual input. He also shares that 40% of their batch uses Slashy, with a 30% week-over-week growth, and mentions that 30% of the VCs at Demo Day are utilizing the product for meeting preparation. (01:01:21) - Anmol Tukrel, CEO of Closera, a Y Combinator-backed startup, discusses how his company leverages AI to automate time-consuming tasks for commercial real estate brokers, such as creating sales materials—a process that traditionally takes four weeks and costs $5,000, but with Closera, can be completed in about five minutes. He also shares his background as a former Google product manager who monetized projects like Gemini and NotebookLM, and as the creator of iDentifi, an app aiding the visually impaired, which was featured in a Google commercial alongside notable figures. (01:05:23) - Joshua Browder, founder and CEO of DoNotPay, discusses the emergence of AI-driven solutions in niche sectors, highlighting a startup utilizing AI for waste collection. He emphasizes the potential for building substantial businesses in specialized areas that large AI models may overlook. Browder also reflects on his early entrepreneurial ventures, including selling jailbroken phone themes at age 13, and expresses admiration for Larry Ellison's pricing strategies and business acumen. (01:12:06) - Anson Yu is the founder of Normal, a company that automates hardware testing and compliance processes, focusing on robotics, drones, and other electrical components with radio features. He discusses how Normal streamlines testing infrastructure, which is often cumbersome or located overseas, to support teams in efficiently validating their hardware products. Since launching three weeks ago, Normal has achieved $35,000 in revenue and completed its funding round. (01:15:47) - Aden Clemente, CTO of Effigove, is developing an AI operating system for local governments, starting with a 24/7 311 call center service. He discusses the limited availability of 311 lines in cities and how Effigove's AI-driven solution aims to provide consistent information services to all municipalities, regardless of size. Clemente also shares that Effigove is live in one city with an $80,000 ARR and has two additional contracts pending. (01:22:10) - Zane Hengsperger, founder of Nox Metals, is revolutionizing the U.S. metal supply chain by integrating software and automation to deliver raw materials more efficiently to manufacturers. In the conversation, he discusses how his company purchases large metal billets, cuts them using advanced band saws, and supplies precisely sized blocks to clients like Hadrian for CNC machining. Hengsperger emphasizes the importance of reindustrializing America by enhancing factory efficiency through technology, aiming to provide next-day delivery of custom-cut metal blocks to factories n...

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 Valsard, friend of the pod. You yet the first time you came on was at the first time we did YC Demode day 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, was the ARB, 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, what do they call it? Crate digging.

Crate digging, finding stuff that wasn't available in, you know, in Ohio. And then you ship it there. So I'm from New York, in L.A. 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 gonna go up the last decade the last five years and 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 spak trading at 11 billion dollars yeah they went yeah they went out as a spack but then they actually held the price he is an absolute killer and he's got a retail Army. Exactly. Not every boardroom general can lead a retail army. And I would just, I think Andrew is incredibly underrated. I'm not going to say all time,

but in the last cycle. But we're going favor. There was some recent news that they 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. Yeah, like a regulatory royal flush has been. kind of drawn and there's been a lot of uncertainty about which way the chips would fall and they got lucky and i want to give one of their charges for founder 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 fantastic um well i have to put you in the true zone this is uh why combinator demo day summer 2020. This is summer. This is summer. This is the end of summer. We're starting fall.

We're starting fall batch. We met some founders who had F who were I think going into the fall batch but they've been accepted. They'll be joining the next batch. I believe so summer. Yes. Oh great. My first my first wife. C was summer. Wow. I was summer 12. S12. So just a mere 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 boy. What else is at the top of your timeline today? Have, did you watch the Apple event? Were you shaking?

Were you crying? Were you gasping? Were you clapping? Standing ovation from you for the iPhone. I was looking for more innovation on the wired headphones. Oh, you're speaking in his language. That's my boy. As a vinyl.

Yeah. You know, I like analog. Okay. 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, 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 and transatlantic 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 breakout. 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, you know, as someone who travels when I've got Google Translate open and I'm trying to have live conversation, it still doesn't exist.

So I'm really excited to try that. Yeah. 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 is called Bitrig. Okay.

And they've built essentially an on-device, you know, prompt to app live in the app store. Sure. Test flight. Yep. 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. Okay. 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 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. Yeah. 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 there's going to be, like, a ton of opportunity. We saw this with the initial rollout of the app. 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 maseoshi sound 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 up. We're back up. 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, 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 yeah than the supply of developers that can actually like build these things and then especially too like most app ideas are not worth investing a hundred thousand dollars 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 that it is sort of a gauntlet being thrown down for the ideas guys because it's like John Fio

but like seriously it's like it's like now you're in you're 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 in front of millions of people let's see how good your idea really is I think apps figure it out I think the concept of social app marketplace all at 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. Like 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 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 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 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 it would the John app have. It would just be everything you're into. Okay. Right. And I 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 a lot of, this new dynamic piece of software there's like a portal through you yeah yeah yeah that's something that's super interesting and I I'm just riffing here but like I think that where you think where this goes yeah yeah becomes really trippy and you know the the language like it's like Uber for John basically it's Uber for John it's DoorDash for John it's Trip Advisor for John it's is it more like or or is it more like a return to like the old like Tumblr 2000s web yeah exactly

or something like like we we have we've all been forced into expressing 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 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 think about every time someone asked you for advice sure oh yeah that or pings you yeah it's just like you just like here's my here's my app like it's like you're just a proxy And you can permission things out. John and I are investors in Delphi. Yeah, which is kind of a similar thesis of, you know, making yourself available 24-7. Let's switch gears a little bit. Are you going to be buying the, you're going to be signing up for Elon's SpaceX telecom, Starlink, direct-a-phone? Are you excited 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. Have what's your do you do you travel with a starlink set up much when you're going on escapades? No, but I would say like when I'm situated in place for sure. Yeah, my my partner Dave who is a sprinter van guy is fully mobile mobile Starlink on his van. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on 996? Deep Fates on X says yeah I work 996 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 I would totally agree with you, but we had R. Krasian 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 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. of course there's always truth in every meme yeah it's like it's like maybe there's a 20% uptick in 996 thing and then that's been like five-axed by the the volume of like Atlas Atlas 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 some new some new press today said Naval Ravikon expects employees to work 24-7 at his new startup that's the next level after 9-96 is Just don't sleep. Just stay at your desk. Just 12, 12, 7. 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 sleep deprivation tag. Remember back in the day, people used to take pro vigil. Yeah. There was always that lore about like the Air Force pilots, the most elite combat units. I've never done that. But you know, that was always Obama's hack as he would, you know. What? Yeah. You would. You came on. We're not going to talk about politics and here you are. What you're doing? That's about performance. That's 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 track it, there's, there's one that Pantera 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 TradFi 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 assume that they're 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, let's just be honest. 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 8.5 billion of cash. eight and a half 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 eight and a half 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 business, of course. I mean, that stock from purchase is highly strategic and makes me very, very bullish. I think people also should be looking at, if they want a public market comp, 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, Zikeguise, that stock, which one? Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab, okay.

Yeah, it's also publicly traded. Another successful deep tech SPAC of the era. 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-Lon trade. Like there's this satellite company that's ASTS. Yep.

And they've been like mooting 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. Rocket Labs for sure. It's like $15 billion 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 Schmoth was part of it.

Same thing. No, no, no. That's wrong. Is that right? He did SOFi and SOFi'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 evenly spread 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? That, That's doing that 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 Went pretty got almost two million views since yesterday some people were pushing back and saying like you actually have to like mouth 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 I ever launching by the way. Future is here. I think that would totally make sense.

And I think that's a good call. The question is just like, yeah, how quickly can like Airpods 4 fast follow that technology? But if it's doing something else with like the electrical signals or like the man, this is a 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 OpenAI,

all for OpenAI to burn $100 billion between now and 2029, so I can ask Digital God for company primers and get answers in paragraph format pulled from seeking Alpha Talks. Wow. Absolutely brutal. The Nebius deal that got announced yesterday, total, total retail. Yesterday was an insane day in the market, right? Yeah, Nevis is up another 40, it's 40,

percent in the last five days, $22 billion company right now. Retail, they had a retail army behind them. And then that WorldCorn 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 folks, but Dan Ives is Wedbush Securities. So he is now leading a crypto treasury strategy focused on WorldCoin, 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 fart coin 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 company that has a treasury that's just pure scratch-off lottery tickets so you have like ten million dollars 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 maybe the investors will just will just not do the book value then you securitize it exactly get derivatives against the the right to scratch

off something there I do want to cover a bit more nebious there 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 Neo-Cloud. 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 Yandex, but in the wake of Russia's invasion of Yandex, Ukraine in early 2022, everything changed. 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. But what remained under Yandex's ownership was a random assortment of infrastructure and business units that just so happened to be located outside of Russia.

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. finished. So we saw a billboard for Nebius on the drive-in today. Yeah, so the new business was to be spearheaded by Arcady,

the Russian Yen-X 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 probably, I don't need to continue that. So anyways, crazy, crazy stories. here.

Highway 101 Billboard? Yeah. Maybe not. Not 101, but we saw it rolling in today. Yeah. Where did 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 uh subscribe uh we i believe we have our first guest so much for coming on great to see you you titans enjoy the rest of your demo day get out there your founder gets 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 okay all apple play now we need a ping sound effect ching anyway if you're just tuning in we are live from ycdemeo day summer 2025 and we will bring

in our first team look at this how you do it's good you guys welcome your stream What's going on? How you do you? Do you want to bring you over another chair for them? Here you can grab this chair. We'll bring in one for you. We'll put this here. Last, last, last.

Are we going to space? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the outfits, because our logo is a rocket. Okay. And we help, I need to talk to 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 and make viral content to help them reach more people. How do you do that? 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, like, 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. 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 shop exists and social commerce is like the first real social commerce platform. Everything is native, native checkout. 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 as a category? Currently, currently, yes. Cool. Yeah, you said AI 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 know. 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 around questions. Favorite entrepreneur, what you got?

Oh, you go? You can say anybody. Yeah, I know. I know. I was going to say, Elon, but I think it's Jensen. Jensen, there we go. Yeah, the first Jensen, let's start counting them up. Yeah, also we've been asking everyone,

how'd you make your first dollar on the internet? Oh, just dollar on the internet. We're just dollar in business. Dollar in business. I was fixing people's iPhone crack screens. No way. Oh, there we go. Awesome, guys. Traction, traction, what, what kind of numbers

how's Demo day going for you? Demo day was great. Alameda Demo day was great. Our traction is $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Whoa. Okay. Okay. Series B tears are you.

Wow. Okay. I've seen enough to get my 100 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 for coming on. Awesome, guys.

We'll talk to you some, have the good guest here. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you. 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. Oh, 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. And we were surrounded by Jewel Oh yeah no way.

No way. Crazy. That's crazy lore. Uber autonomous cars. Okay. Yeah. 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.

Because I remember we used Kustna. What? 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. 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. payroll prior to demo day or did you need more time to build?

So we never not dog food the product. So we decided we weren't going to pair ourselves until we can use our own product. There we go. That's great. And then we had two mouse steps. 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 why. During YC. That was during the best. For demo day, we had to be able to say to everyone. Yeah, yeah. We can process payroll. Otherwise you have to be 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, what's the craziest MVP version of running payroll? Like, legally, can you just hand someone cash and fill out a form? Yeah, aren't there? How do you ramp up? You can do it on a spreadsheet, right? Obviously you should use gusto, but like, don't do it by hand.

Legally, can you just do it on a spay? When we started the company, 40% of businesses in the company, the US we're doing it by hand. Wow. And you can you 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. 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. It's error prone. Mistakes get made. You get penalized. That's wild. Insane. That's crazy. How was how was how was raised? Did you guys have any trouble raising or so in the 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. 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 six million dollar seed round no way that's great back then was a large amount and 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 Tomer and Eddie are

my co-founder there are I think really highly of that. That's a fair, that's a fair, Andrew. I can go with a classic. Any biographies that you are on your nightstand? Here's a personal story. Please. 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 I can imagine the future aspect of Steve Jobs. Wow, yeah, that's great.

What's the first dollar that you made online? Was it Gusto or were you doing anything before that? I mean, back in the 90s, I was building websites. There you go. I built a website 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. It was good. Yeah, if you just waited some time, bought Bitcoin, you'd be a trillion. Yeah, put it all in crypto. 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. Good to see them. Yeah, yeah. 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. And we also do a Boba get together. There you go. Okay. Boba. Yeah.

So go to go. Bobo, Gusto, make payroll easy. Set of healthcare really easy. We're here to sign up. Well, thank you so much for hopping. We'll see you soon. And we will bring in our next guest. We'll also tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com.

What's happening? Welcome to the show. Hello. Hey, welcome to the show. I'll give you a salute. I'm a big fan of the show. Thanks so much. Introduce yourself for the stream.

What are you building? What are you pitching here today? So I'm Bruno. We're building Gauss, a personal AI investment analyst for retail investors. Oh, interesting. There we go. B2C, if you invest in stocks, you're a lot. Welcome to join our platform.

Okay. 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? Yeah. Is it more for the retail investor who doesn't want to get burned or the retail investor has to go risk on?

Can I tell the app to not make mistakes? Exactly, that's actually our number one use case. We want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes. Emotional mistakes. So right now we're focusing on thesis-driven investors, so not the meme stock buyers. So you have a clear thesis. You want to 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 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. We recommend.

So we're an advisor, basically. We want to tackle the advisory market and replace RIAs with agents. So what's the compliance framework, if you're giving people investment advice as an app? So you just say not investment advice, and then you're fine, right? And then you can just give as much advantage of it.

Yeah, yeah. Right now, that's what we do. But we're in the process of getting the RIA registration. Hopefully, by the end of the month, we will be an RA. That's cool. You come into, 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 V2V. But it's been exciting. We've got like 1.7,000 users using our platform, generating revenue. Yeah. And is your KPI like assets that are linked on Plaid? Is that what you shared today?

Yeah, that's one of the KPIs, but right now we're focusing on signups and retain 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? It's a free mean. You can just like sign up the platform. the free features and you can pay and X more features. 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 you can also underwrite this as almost like an edutainment product.

Like even if I'm not always making the trade that 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 reading before this? I was, so I started my career at NewBank, big Brazilian fintech.

I was doing data science there. Then I moved to VC. I did three years of fintech investing in Latin America. Thank you for, I like BCs. I was in the industry. You know, and then I switched to the other side of the table. Now I wanted to start something on my own, did two years of business school at Stanford.

Just graduated two months ago, did YC, and now we're here. Non-traditional background. So how's how's the fundraise going? We close around, alright. Whoa, let's go. Okay. Still undisclosed, but we have a small location for smaller angelo checks. Oh, okay.

Hopefully, that's good, good runway for us. He's like, call me, but not financial advice. But also it's going, it's going to be a thousand bagger, but also not financially advice. Dude, congrats. A couple lighting around questions. Yeah, righty round question. Favorite entrepreneur. We've been asking everyone who comes to mind throughout history.

I have to say Davy Villis 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 this small e-commerce shop

to sell material. for, you know, school materials. Yeah. It was just like a very simple website in Brazil. I wasn't in Sao Paulo, and you know, kids were always, like, they asked their moms 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, you know, they could select a material, and they pay you cash. And that's cool. But you use the internet as kind of, order management system.

Order management system. Wow. That's amazing. That's a great story. Thank you so much for hopping on the screen. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the round. That was not general solicitation by the way. He was not saying to reach out to him if you want to invest in the company. But I love to see it.

I love to see a non-traditional background into Stanford representation. Stanford MBA, worked as a venture capitalist, worked at a at a hyper-scaler. We love to, not a hyper-scaler, but just like one of the things. 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, like weapons.

It should be Perseus 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 Perseus defense. And we're building 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. Okay. What, what, yeah, what, like, do we not have 16 men? 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 the bullet? How much do they cost 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? Yep. We see. Walk through it. Well, yeah, walk through the solutions.

For sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare. Sure. So GPS jamming, there's an unreliable, right? There's easy ways to defeat them. You know, you can 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. So, like, there's a million solutions. And we were. Who's your buddy that does that?

ACS. ACS. A gun on in the truck, yeah. And so there's some really good solutions out there for different use cases. And we need more. Yeah. 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, you know, right on top of us. So what's the range? It's a 16 inch missile. 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 that go into? 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 costs $1,000. Yeah, yeah.

So it's not a great scale. So we're building these things for a sub $10,000 a shot, trying to drive that cost down. And then you have a missile block. How does it do targeting and like actual fire? Yeah, so there's a thermal seeker on board the missile. All the computes on board the missile, it's fire and forget. So it just seeks out the drones. Oh, 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. Cool. 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 to air 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 cyber small business invasion project I mean we've so we've done some of those applications where 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? Oh, it's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot of your batchmates here can go and just ship a product 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. Yeah. But every two weeks we do 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 missile iterations, launched over 30 missiles. And it's, it's pretty 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.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Lightning round. Favorite entrepreneur? Who do you look to for advice or as a role model? We're looking at Dino at Seronic 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. He's awesome. 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? First dollar.

I used to wash horse trailers. Wash horse trailers. There we go. Yeah. 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. We will talk to you soon. If you're tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We are gonna have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tann stop by. The team's gonna bring in Gary Tann as soon as you available. But up next, we have Meteor.

What's happening? How you doing? Nice meet you. Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? Yeah, I'm Pernav. We're building Meteor and this is for Han. The AI native browser that's gonna kill Google Chrome.

Oh, okay, we got that browser wars going. Let's go. Yeah. That's fire. Yes, this one. Brownaw are you guys going after Chrome? comment too. Yeah, absolutely.

Everyone, yeah. Okay, 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 to spawn AI agents 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 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. Okay. But worst thing is we're going to be 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 automations. We're saying we want to create virtual employees. Sure. That run on your browser. Yeah. Right.

And that's media. 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, if you want, you know, some kind of like data entry, just hand out like Tel Media

and we'll handle it for you, right? How is the AI agent interfacing with 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 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. Yep. So we screenshots. Sure. Also helps a little bit with like some of the prompt injection So definitely, we're primarily using vision, but you know, we've been playing around with a bunch of things. Yeah, I think what's the best frontier model right now for what you do? Right now it's probably clogs on it.

But you know, we use a mixture of models, right? We use GPD, we use a lot, 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 cards.

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. Dropouts, yeah. Unfortunately, you can only do that once. Yeah, this is all. No, you could go back and get an MBA. I just go to med school at 35, drop out. What was your last company?

So he built Maxima, which is an FBGA 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. He almost got kicked out twice. Yeah, I did. What was the worst thing you did to get?

Okay, so the thing that went most viral was I figured out there was a data leak that allowed students to get it. that allowed students to get access to their professors before you'd have 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, I appreciate it.

Good luck out there, good luck. Thank you so much. Cheers. If you see Sundarpa-Shai, just run the other direction. Just run the other direction. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for coming on. We have our next day.

We've been trying not to do handshakes. People are insisted on handshakes. We're going to do handshakes. We're going to do handshakes. We're going to do handshakes. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? How are you doing?

Cheers. Congratulations. Fantastic Demodei. Why don't you introduce yourself? Yes, it 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. Cool. I'm Has Hubble. I'm the founder of Pali. 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 need that. I need that. Modern, modern work. I got eye messages. There's LinkedIn, there's email, there's personal email. Tell me about it.

And there's been a few people that have tried to crack this. I think like text.com, maybe highest profile solution. There was Eric Gifkowski, 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 of my data? Well, one, you don't give us all your data. We do it fully locally on your device. With on device LLMs, on device vector databases,

your data remains local, which is amazing for you guys and for us because we don't wanna 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 gonna 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. You could do. 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, so I don't- anyone- Everyone always says one secret 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, reached products of the week on product time and since going to Ava, thank you. Fantastic. We since going to over three and a half thousand users, 125K of ARR. Oh, wow.

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 of 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, 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.

10 years later, I was invited to spend a week on his island with him. No way, Nekker. And I spent actually time with him on Nekker 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. Second 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 you do? What do coins mean in that context? 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 than the 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.

Well, how's the raise going? How's the, how's the other than it? I mean, we're oversubs and we're still deciding on who to partner with, so reach out if you want to chat. 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. I'm Joe. 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 Pietro. I'm the CEO of MCPU. Okay. We help people use MCP, of course.

It would be an open source that tools and infrastructure. I was going to say, what's the open source strategy? Yeah, open source, I mean, is a new brain. The strategy is to open source. Yeah. D license, everything is free. Okay, everything's free and then there's probably a GitHub repo that's growing in 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 like? Superbase. Superbase, okay.

Break down. How will their business model look like yours? Yeah, because they have a bottom up approach. They 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-term?

Yes. Like the cloud, you know. Great. 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. 20% of Fortune 500.

Is there any, is there any 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 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, have you noticed any trends and who your customers are? Yeah, I think what you said makes a lot of sense. Like tech forward enterprise are doubling down. Okay. Like a 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. We raised six already. What? Six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars. How many times did you have to apply to YC to get in?

Oh, three. Three of three. Let's go. Never give up. Never give up. What were you doing? What was in Zurich? You know,

So fire there and we got me virtual trial for e-commerce. Okay, cool. Oh, virtual trial. Did you just say miserable? Yeah, it's very hard to sell to fashion. Don't do it, the founders. Yeah, it's crazy how many companies have taken that crack. Yeah, it's just...

But now it's getting better, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you always wonder if it's gonna... Is that functionality gonna live like at Shopify or at an independent independent enterprise. What's the AI scene like in Zurich? There's a team over at META.

There's a poaching all the time, apparently. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is great. Zurich is a great place for time, like deep research. That's great. Yeah, I think last year you had another Zerig guy. Yeah. There we go. So we're also getting it.

But you're staying in the bay. Yeah, yeah, we're seeing it. Okay. Oh, yeah. We got a good one. We got a good one. We got a good. We have a lightning round.

We like to ask two questions. First, who, who, who is a good one? 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 with with MCPUs I thought it was like an epithetical question no no no literally like a lot of people they 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. Who's been a job? I don't know. I think it was an op where people could create picture of their kids. I made it with a girlfriend at the time. No way. Okay. Cool.

And you got your first dollar. Yeah. And you got your first dollar. Well, congratulations. Have a great rest of your demo. Thanks, me, you. We will talk to you soon and we will bring in our next guest at YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream.

How you doing? Thank you for hopping on the stream. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Please introduce you. What do you do? What are you building? Yeah, I'm Prongeli. I'm building Slashy. What is Slashy?

Slashy is a general agent that connects to your apps. Okay. Your calendar, Gmail, 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 wars?

Are you going up against Chrome directly? We're not in the browser wars. We're actually built on APIs. Yeah. No MCP, no browser. Wow. You're doing it the old-fashioned way. So does that mean I have to go through like 25 different OAuths to actually log into 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. There's ways to get around. Oh, you know, Google. It sounds like some sift 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, of course.

Well, speaking of power, how powerful is the business now? What is the value, like what is the value that you're telling users they'll get out of the product? Is it more B2B? focus more consumer where where's the focus the focus 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 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 things of the edge cases for you as well and well one thing you should try on 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. I like 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. Yeah. It's really hard to get people to use browsers and switch from like what they've already been using. Yep. Yeah. So better to integrate a deeper level. That's exactly it. You need to, you really need to, you really need to.

just be 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. Yeah, like, I'll ask you to do one thing and it'll be like, do you want me to set this up

for you every single day? Fantastic. 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- And you guys dropped out? Sorry? Dropped out? Dropped out. There we go.

Freshman dropout. Freshman drop out. How did your parents feel about the dropout? They're both PhDs. It's a, you know, it's a little bit of an uphill. battle but you know they're supportive so what what metrics did you share during your pitch what metrics I share well 40% of the batch uses us what yeah yeah that's great yeah growing 30% week over week 3% of the BCs in Demode are using us for meeting prop way yeah crazy

really good yeah you came in with a pretty broad pitch but you narrowed down really well I like this amazing how's the fundraise gone fund raise going Fundraise going well, we're almost almost done with closing. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. That should make your parents be 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? Who's someone you look up to? Elon Musk, Lucy Guo. Wait, somebody's asking you a question. Oh, okay.

Wait, somebody's asking your question, freshman dropout on September 9th. He's wild. Did you go for a week? Were you a freshman last year? Did you a full year at JazeK or not? I did a year. Oh, yeah.

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 to entrepreneurship? Was it this company or did you make money in some other ways?

Some people did some stuff on eBay or built an app or built a website or something. I started a company when I was 14 that Lucy Grove funded actually. No way. went to age of zero. Very cool. Yeah. What did you actually do? How did you make a money?

Like what did someone pay you for? Summarizing research papers. No way, there we go. Crazy. All right, well, legend. 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 day. 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, yes. Good to me.

and introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do? What are you doing? Hey, everyone. I'm on the CEO of Closera, and we build AI agents for commercial real estate. Ooh, okay. Nice. Big industry.

What part of the commercial real estate stack? The actual transaction, do you sit on the buyer side, the seller side? Yeah, it's a great question. Administration, there's so much in commercial real estate. Exactly. It's a huge industry. So yeah, my co-founder and I, our families actually grew up in the commercial real estate space. Both our families are developers. Cool.

Thank you. It's here for the developer. Developers, developers. It's time to build. Developers. Usually say that in a different context. Exactly, yeah. But yeah, we kind of did a survey of the whole market

and we realized actually the most insane amount of manual TDS 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 sound. Yeah, exactly. So 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 we're talking AI agents, are you trying to build an RL environment for some of the other platforms 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 N10 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.

Traction. How's the race going? How's the day? Yeah, raise has been great. We were done in 48 hours. What? Always. Let's go.

It was fun. Yeah, I think with raising, it kind of either goes one of two ways. It's either like, you know, you're hot and- Total productivity. Exactly, yeah. What were you doing right before this? So I was at Google, so I was a PM working on monetizing Gemini, notebook LM, and V. Yeah, that helps with the fun.

Yeah, yeah. 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 limit? 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, I can

I'm not. I'm not going to hold you accountable. We have two lightning around questions we like to ask. One, favorite entrepreneur, somebody 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, do YC, C. The Walter Isaacson. Exactly. Yeah. 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, um, yeah, anything as a kid? So people like sold eBay or like, you know, did like websites as a kid. Any, any, any, yeah. So in high school, I made an 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 to 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. Legend. Well, congratulations. Thank you.

Congratulations on the day. Yeah, good luck out there. Awesome. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Nice to know to 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, Jordi, anything we should run through before we're bringing in the next guest. I think we have our next guest right here. Hey, Chuck Browder, how are you doing, man? There we go. Good to see you. How you doing? I wasn't expecting you.

How many? Did you back all the winners already? No, I'm here mainly for social. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Just hanging out. Just hanging out.

There are some amazing companies here. There are. There are. Yeah. What trends do you like? We heard that last batch was cursor for everything. this batch is lovable for everything. Have you noticed any trends?

I'm seeing a lot of boring software AI. Just with an amazing founder working on waste collection AI software. And you're using boring. 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. Yes. 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 and yeah I mean you've obviously been working in like the application layer of AI for what a decade or something like that now yeah I'm getting old you're still tealfellow right yes young at heart but but does the does this idea of like going after

bore boring kind of vertical SaaS vertical AI Does that fit with a worldview that maybe like we're not just going to get 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 that are beneath the foundation models. 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. 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, some shopping stuff, talent, yeah. Yeah.

But then waste management's not on that list. And so I think you're safe 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 vendor. 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 Chatchip T to generate a template. So we're trying to go deeper, try and go more in the background. Yep.

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 median valuation is for this round 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 a high end, what were you saying? 40, 60. I mean, sometimes even 100. 100 already. Yeah. I'm trying, I'm here to meet 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. You got to get all four badges. You gotta keep some of the time. This is my first YC demo day. It's amazing. You can just meet everyone. It'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. Nazo me, I think that's the name of his company. His name's Arlen. He's just such a hustler.

I'm not 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. No, 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. An 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 and 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 a lot of things are going right. There's a headline from the LA Times in the year the year in June 29, 2000, called Oracle Defends

it spying on Microsoft as public service. I love it, I love it. They also called it their civic duty. That's great, that's great. 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 CDIA. 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. How old were you at the time? Maybe like 13 13 and there's different waves so Disney's worst nightmare so I was in the jail breaking wave and then there was the Minecraft way then there was the sneak about way people making money on Minecraft a Minecraft server businesses okay so that's server so that was Adam

Guild's generation with owner that's The Wanda founder, the amazing TBPN sponsor. They were making money with servers. Then there were sneaker bots, and that's the WAP founders. And now... What's next? Fortnite? Anything in Fortnite?

I think it's right, Roblox. Roblox. Yeah, yeah. Roblocks. 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 song. I subscribe to his product to be nice. I don't even mess around the video games. I just went straight to enterprise sales at age 12. My first dollar? A business deal between me and Oracle. Yeah, me and Larry. To build out a new data center.

Anyway, thank you so much for coming on this too. Have a great day. Enjoy demo day. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Nice to meet you. 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. Do I look at you or 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, rockets, spaceships, cars? Yeah, we're starting with like 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 just the motor work when 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 tested and then they need to put that into some sort of database to manage and and you kind of provide the software suite that they interact with on the day-to-day basis awesome when you pitch it back to me it's

very similar to that so basically as people are trying to build more hardware yeah and try to build more harder 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 they build this like wonderful robot or wonderful like drone like sub-assembly 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 yeah who are you selling to right now do you want to start with like go figure out

how to work with big manufacturing the 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 company 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 a RF component. Okay, great. How's Demodeo 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, oh, let's go. It's a celebratory stream. We don't need to be. Oh, yeah. So this is my

co-founder. You couldn't be he's outside. So we're just gonna put him on the street. His name is Hudson. Yeah. I've seen him on X. He had some wild post just yesterday I was watching. He was wrong about something. I didn't put him in the truth zone. 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, three weeks. Congratulations. Yeah. It's fantastic. Thanks. And then the race wrapped up.

We do have a last. lightning 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? Can I say sir sir John A. McDonald? Who's that? First prime minister of Canada. Okay. Oh wow. Started a company. Did he started Canada? Did he started Canada? Okay. We don't have any buttons for Canada. Yeah, I 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. Uh, the second

question is how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business I guess a kid oh man anything interesting some people set up websites some people I taught kids how to argue okay wait what no you less arguing arts are debate okay okay and and so they'd 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 Congrats on getting the round done and thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, if your 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. He said something wild. Nice.

What was 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 questions. We will talk to you soon. Have the great rest of your day.

We are live. 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 meet John. What's happening?

Dorney. Pleasure. Uh, will you be picking up the $2,000 iPhone? Just dropped minutes ago. This is breaking news. I'm, I'm probably sticking with my... You're good. He's sticking with his old...

Oh, short the stock. I feel like the incremental improvements. It's a disaster. It's a small. Yeah, we look to YC Founders is the future, the tastemakers. The tastemakers. If they're not adopting the latest and greatest, what's gonna happen?

Introduce yourself, what do you do? 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, yeah. 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 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. So you 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 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 comes?

Stuff like that. Stuff like that. It 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, yeah. 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 like the, you're the meme of like when a clangor 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, specific APIs that just sounds so good. Yeah. Who are you using? How do you piece things together to make it great? Yeah, we're using a voice from VAPI.

That's just, we've tried a bunch of different voices. BAPI. VAPI. Yeah, another Y-C company. Oh, cool. Is that in this batch? No, they're, I think, winter 24. Okay.

We'll have to check them out. But yeah, you just trial all these different voices. And this one has a bunch of stutters that makes it sound super natural. Okay, so it just feels completely natural. Got it. Very cool. Traction. Yeah.

You've been lining up cities. Yeah, we're driving around all over. What did you share? Do you share like an ARR or just like number of cities? Like what's the headline number that you shared today? We shared live in one city and 80K ARR. So two contracts that have yet to go live. But yeah, yeah.

But in the pipeline. Let's go. We have, so you're charging is it is 40k per city effectively? 60k and then 20K. Yeah. No way. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine this replaces, 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 helpline, which I'm sure these cities don't offer. But even if you're offering like a workday, 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 gonna 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 311 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're gonna sell to? Oh, the perfect client doesn't know, I don't even know that they're in the market. It's like you know who's in the market. They're doing how the state by state go to market motion. Sure, sure, sure. Because a lot of the first question they'll ask us is, okay, what other cities in Florida are you are using?

Because they can also do this thing called piggybacking where they literally just copy and paste the contract from a number city. No way. No way. So that's kind of, you know, little hacks like this, I think will help us conquer the GovTech market where historically it's been hard to break in. But now you have this AI. Land and expand. Yeah. How does the, how does the fundraise gone?

It's good, we're around three quarters done. Oh, there you go. On a right. We have a lightning round that we've been doing. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Someone you look to for advice. Um, Peter Thiel. Oh, that's good.

First person, let's go. 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. Yeah. Okay. Into the bot game. Okay. Yeah. When 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 for coming. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. 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 I here we go we got waiting for you all have waiting will they bring it massive block oh boy metal onto the stream that thing great to see you got a little workout on the way in there 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 just there this is there they wanted to help the cause yeah it's illustrated It's not right.

So yeah, 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 factor 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, 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, Yeah, it's great to finally. I've been printed a few times. Oh, you're a print era. That was fun. I remember one time I was watching TVPN and I was like, for some reason,

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. There's other people that are doing additive stuff.

We've talked to 3D printing guys who build the metal structures up. 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 Hagrin. Okay. What we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an F150. Okay. Put it on our saw, which is about the size of four F150s. Wow. And then we ban saw cut it. Yep. And then we sell like washing this.

And then it can go into a CNC machine. Yeah. So if you want to make an F18 part, a component for your washing machine, you name it. This is incredibly deep in the stack. I love it. Yeah. 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 it's a challenge. It's not, 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. Yeah. Because even if you make this block, then how do you get it? How do you store it? How do you transfer? You know. So like the metal service industries is like $300 billion.

These guys do a year. Like if you're a metal service center, that's the total of the market. Yeah. We strongly believe that they are... Yeah, John, lift them... Actually, he's going to destroy it. No, it's going to 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. 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, but like everyone I talked to, they're like, okay, how do we get stuff in from China?

So like we want to re- PE shop, like private equity? Yeah. Okay. We want to like re-industrialize the metal service later. Yeah, so how much of the value is just, there's going to be a bigger buy 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 that 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 lightning round that we've been doing. First question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?

Alex Carp. 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. Family business. Let's go.

80,000 square foot facility. One man in the mob. Incredible. Wait, how's the fundraise going? Oh, fun. I'm going to try to lift this. 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. I would put that over on your butts. Yeah, and it's such an awkward size.

My guess was 97. 97, okay. No, funer is 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 mean, I'm riding with you.

I'm riding with you. I know, thank you so much for coming. I know, I should have brought my physical checkbook. That's such a missed opportunity. Great to see you. You're a legend. Good luck with that. What a terrible prop.

Anyway, okay. That was fun. I think it broke a sweat. This is not the right move. Yeah, I was trying to warn you. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. How's happened? Great to see you.

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, are you a knock? You did not, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. We did. Yes. We did not. Cool. And you're doing, are you in Northropic. In the lawsuit. Did you see this? Oh, no, I haven't checked. You got to go check. You got to check my mailbox. You might have a few thousand bucks waiting for you. You can you can roll that into the fund. Wait, that would be. I got to check my email. What, yeah, what's your reaction to Demodeh. Oh my gosh. It's electric. The prices are too low, right?

That's what it mostly. Most people have been saying I don't feel comfortable investing. The prices are just too low. It's suspiciously low. When you go on T-moon, when you go on T-moon, when you go on T- when there's like $12-dollar. And you're like, how can a couch be $12? You're like, how can this, how can this clearly billion dollar company be worth $60 million? Let me tell you. The energy is electric today. It's been so fun bumping into friends.

My friend, shout out Casey Caruso. She brought me bone broth to pregame the day. No way. I drove over in the Waymo. This is the SF locking right here. Do you remember when I explained bone broth to you for the first time? No. I think I said something like pro.

protein tea or something like that. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's like a bone broth. Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah, because you warm it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we warmed it up and we drank half a gallon on the stream one day. It's fantastic.

You guys gonna 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, but he's with Justin Maher. So we, so we cannot be, we, we cannot be impartial when it comes to about. So what, what's the strategy going in? What's the strategy going in?

to a 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 investments. 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 YC. 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, you 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 sent the wire this morning.

There you go. There you go. You didn'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? 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. Yeah, and what I love about him is he, he just has this incredible sense of grace riding super aggressive waves and then took that same sense of. You're speaking jury's language here. Yeah, it took that same sense of grace into building companies. He gets barreled? He gets barreled?

Oh, he gets barreled. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I know all about getting barreled. I've learned. Shore break? 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. It's great. Second question of our lighting round. How did you make your first dollar online or in business?

Did you anything crazy as a kid or early on? Yeah, I tutored. Okay. Well, okay. I'm trying to, I'm trying to think it's like the first dollar. Oh, you know what it is. Okay, so my mom is an impressionist artist, Kim Doordy Art. 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 too now? What's the update on the fund? Mm-hmm. Yep, we're wrapping up our last couple investments in fund too. have 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 say. Do we have a gong sound effects today or no? Barely. No, we don't. We don't. Fortunately, no. The claps are okay. The gong, we will save for a proper announcement.

Oh, here again. I like that. There we go. Make sure to send us any founders you like. Yeah. 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. We were seeing you soon. If you're watching live, we are at YC Demo Day and we have our next guest on the stream. Welcome to the stream. Orange Slice.

That's a fantastic jacket. Oh, 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 info to help you find customers that already want your product. Okay, I'm so distracted by the, it's orangier than the YC

I know. You want orange for orange and you want. You want. It's actually crazy. Okay, so give me the pitch for the company at the customer level. 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. And that's the people you reach out to. So many products, though, where you started? Is this for other B2B sales teams? Okay, okay. Yeah. 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 so 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 realize you wanted to build agents for the enterprise that's a great question you know I think that's a fantastic question really started really really young yeah yeah yeah no five years old I woke up I respond into the world and I said I must sell.

Zach. What were you doing before this? I was basically hacking in college, but I was an investor banker at JPMorgan. Oh, let's go. So complete, complete 180. And then did you, was that like summer internship? Summer internship. Did you drop out?

And then I, no, graduated, thankfully. Oh, wow. Contrarian. Contraryan, I'm super bullish. Here we go. 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. So we're at like 53K MRR. So we make a bit more than what is that, 600,000 a year?

Yeah, that's great. Romin profitable? Yeah, of course. Yeah, like 90% margins. Printing cash. That's great. Printing. Let's go.

Let's go. It's just the start, though. That's great. The rounds close. Yeah. his club. Oh, yeah. 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 them. They're going to keep booing unless you let the sharks in. When you say us, you mean we can do it. It's super strategic, you know. 25 mil from QIA and Chiang. Yeah.

That's awesome. This makes a ton of sense. And I can see why it's ripping. why it's ripping. Lightning around. Yeah, well, I have one more question. 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. That could be the one. But you say this is the company and then and then this is my job. This is the person that owns.

Who might be the internal champion. Exactly. Got it. All of that stuff. Cool. A crazy idea for you. So you guys, so I'll do a company, you detect a customer for that company, you partner with Tesla Optimus to actually

deploy a robot to go have a steak dinner with the end customer and close the loop and then pick up the commission on that deal. I think you've got to go full stack. 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. Well, and a lot of people are just like fighting and competing over the end of the stack with a bunch of slop. Yeah, I don't want any more emails in my inbox. Yeah. Exactly, 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. I mean 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 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, I don't 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,

I could learn something from them. He's Lissan Al-Gaibe of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need his blank slate. He doesn't need any influence. Well, honestly, I don't think, 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 me

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 rent, 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. Yeah. 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. And then I used to sell it on like the school bus.

I was like at 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. Damn, just fingers bleeding. Just one more ninja star. He was like prospecting.

I see the kid in the second row. They're ready for. Yeah. to go to a dark place for this ninja star. They're ready for a ninja star. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Congrats on all the traction. Of course.

Are you going to go, are you going to hang out for the rest of the day? You're going to go. Yeah, yeah. Always like to chat with sort of cool founders. Awesome. Thanks for doing this, guys. This is so cool. Fantastic.

Yeah, we'll find you after. Cheers. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Let's bring in our next guest. We have the co-founder fall. Do we have?

There is. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Welcome to the stream. What's that's happening? Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly. Welcome to YC. Demandah.

Great shirt, by the way. Thank you. We just talked to a founder that made their first money flipping, flipping Supreme box logo t-shirts. There you go. There you go. I'm decked out and false swag. But the GPU poor, are you guys GPU poor anymore? Well, I have a GPU rich hats too.

I gotta give you guys some. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm one of the co-founders of all fall. Yeah. Fantastic. Also, one of our latest sponsors. Yes. It makes this possible.

So thank you for everything you do. Give us your reaction to YC Demo Day. What's the mood like? I think you just rolled in here from, but give us the vibe. Literally. I just rolled in from our office. Oh, fantastic. Five minute drive 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 of you guys from a customer acquisition standpoint, it feels like there's like incredible pull from the market. You guys have crazy logos from, you know, Decacorn's, public companies all the way down. I imagine a bunch of just companies are getting off the ground 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 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, in a Fortune 500 company. You're going to see it.

You're going to think about it and be like, OK, I actually need a strategy here. We recently saw this with nanobanana. Again, we saw a little spike in the Google Trends chart. What is the- What have you guys seen on that front? Are people- Nanobanana era?

How are things changing? Just kind of give me your read. It's incredible. I mean, the demand, the way I look at it is like every time we have new capabilities, there is a jump in demand. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like these things are eating

into each other. it seems like we're really seeing like the the building blocks coming 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 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. because now you can just generate like, you know, 10 different starting frames and ending frames and then combine them together. 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 Nano Banana's launch. It was just called nanobanana.a.i. I 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 nano banana on App Store, just go to App Store, there will be literally 20 results. Yeah, this is so crazy. It's still Nanobanana.aI is the number one result for Nana banana. Yes, yes. And it just says AI image editor, edit photos and tech. I mean, the App Store was like that for so long where you search ChatGBT and it would be like, chat with GPT. And it has like 5,000 five star reviews and you're like I know that's not from opening I because I can clock it as like clearly this is not an open AI Branding it's slightly off and and all of these things are believe it or not they're getting traction

Yeah, yeah so so and I think insane. Yeah like 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 and I think they're benefiting from this and 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 TSMC? 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 what do you want to get right that might be out of your control even

Yes, but like you'd like to make it make sure that it goes right. Yes, I think We're very capacity constraint and at what level That's what I'm interested in so so yeah, it's so it's well even this even this this nebius deal yesterday right? Right like like shocked to everyone right especially we were hanging with a 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 dollar deal with with Microsoft so anyways like that that that just shows like the fact that the fact that you know Microsoft is going I 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 everyone is it's incredible yeah I think I mean currently we're going through another crunch right now specifically for H100s yeah so like we experienced this 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 workflows are inference workloads, right? We don't do any training. 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 fleet over time. So we're multi-clouds. So we talk 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 they work for us, you know, if they're reliable support is good, we use that.

So and you know when you need when you need new capacity you literally like hit them up. You call all of them up in order old-fashioned way. And I'm not even kidding. You just you just call them up and you know sometimes it's like you start hearing more nose right like do you have do you have 512 GPUs do you have thousand GPUs and it's just like no no you're like oh crap. So you kind of want to like stock up a little bit. Sure. That's how we operate we like buy a little bit in bulk.

But really prices hit a little bit of a bottom, which hasn't happened with A100s. I mean, if you look at it, like they just kept going down. With H-100s, they kept going down and they kind of hit the bottom. They're like now kind of picking back up again. What can you tell me about how inference moves around the globe as a function of time? I heard this story about mid-jurney, 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, yeah. Is that something you're doing? Is that something that you're planning to do? Is that common? Is that having naturally? So our traffic patterns are basically maxed out when US and Europe is up simultaneously. Sure. So that's kind of like the peak, 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 dip. Okay. Across, you know, when US and EU is asleep, there's a slight dip. Sure.

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 bring back. Sure. Simultaneously. But what's really important for us is uptime. Yep.

So even if it means, like, we're going to have some idle GPUs. Sure. 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, that 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 day, any key lessons

from that era that you've kind of brought in, obviously Oracle's been on a tear 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 company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so like Larry Ellison 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, if the cloud doesn't exist. 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 data center operator. And Oracle is a very good data center operator. Because they had to do that because of running Yandex, right? Yes. Yeah, exactly. I got 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, 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. So after Oracle, I was at Coinbase. So the crypto, like some of the companies, I mean, including Correa, Crusoe, of course. 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 uptime is very important. So, you know, all of these things, you know, the economics 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 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. Could be anyone.

Could be Larry. I really like, okay. Could be anyone. Let's see. I like Brian, Brian Armstrong. There we go. It's pretty good. Great pick. I love it.

Legend. Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Oof. Okay. I had, do you know these toys, Carretta Fighter? No. Okay.

Is that too old? How big is the toy? It's like two fighters. You just like make them fight with each other. So when I was like six or seven, it's not on the internet. Yeah, like almost rock'em sock and robots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same thing, same thing.

I rented those out. You rented those. Yeah. Let's go. Flip the CAPEX to OPEX. You don't need to buy these things. You go to him. You rent them today.

He's renting. That's actually kids don't do renting enough. They're always transactional. Am I stretching to draw a full circle analogy here? You rent, you buy the servers, you rent out the tokens. He's going to get, what's your allowance? Okay, 20 bucks a week? That's what, that's the price.

There you go. Value-based prices. Yeah, exactly. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Amazing. All right, well, come back on the show. Yeah, awesome. Guys, good to see you. Yeah, I got to give you some hats.

Please, there we go. I'd love some. Give them out to your favorites. Fantastic. Okay, we will. Perfect. Some rich hats. Ooh. GPU.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll have to pick. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. Okay, this is great. Amazing. We got four. Great senior. Don't, don't give this away.

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

Good to see you. I can't believe it. You look fantastic. Well, you're fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. How we doing?

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 the theme.

Because like other than AI cursor for it. Yeah, there's like a little bit of an AI theme. But we had metal. We had, Zain. Yeah. 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 or 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 gonna use like oh yeah I know we're building in the cloud exactly exactly what do actually yeah it's like okay yeah you're a software company but like what are you actually doing so it

it very much feels like we're in this era of like vertical software for AI so It was 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. I'm like, that's interesting to me.

Anyway, what's new with you? Well, so it's funny. Like most of the investors are here to like invest capital in companies. Quickly. Introduce yourself for the street for those you go now. I'm Jack Raines. I'm on the investment team over at Slow Ventures, early stage venture fund.

We run about a billion dollars now, invests, generalist, a little bit of everything, one's a three million dollar checks. But unlike every other venture fund here, we actually are launching the slow ventures etiquette finishing school. So I don't know if we can see this. You guys are dressed sharp. Obviously, our GP's dressed sharp. This is a fantastic photo. We had this. 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 a lot of capital floating around now that's like financial capital to invest in founders. But the real problem in San Francisco is you 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 kind of itself select. Okay, okay. You show up in a sloppy you want a high bar and then you want to take you want to take someone from a good degree. Constructed feedback. Right. 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. But also, boardroom generals. We love boardroom. 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 9-96 is great except, you know, birth rates collapsing. Has, uh, has slow flipped bullish on AI.

Oh yeah. Has a good question. Are you guys still bearish? Speak for the entire firm. I was, yeah, for the entire firm. And especially a friend of the program, Sam, my boss, who's my paychecks, is ideally watching this right now.

We're bullish on AI when it's a good company that uses AI. Okay. It's like the whole like our take the whole time has been that like the models are gonna eat pretty much everything. Microsoft's gonna eat everything. I mean that's what we're seeing today at Demi Day. Microsoft is gonna eat Nebius. A lot of the companies I feel like are in that Sam Lessen idea

of like AI cherry on top I think is his phrase. 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 knew AI well. And then they're trying to like, oh, this is an obvious problem. Yeah, yeah. Maybe.

But you're seeing some 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. That's when it gets interesting. So when you have AI wizard plus co-founder who is him or her or her. Yeah, that's the magic. So I would not say the word bullish.

on AI any more than we have been, but like, you know, we respect AI used well. It's like AI's table stakes. If you're only things AI, get a post out there. Slow respects AI. Slow respects AI. Yep, 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. Can be anybody. Probably outside of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is like ESPN, are you supposed to say that? Yeah. No, Johnny Rockefeller.

Rockefeller. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. What about you guys? I don't think we've, 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'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 flip around? Is your least favorite,

least favorite entrepreneurs? Ever? They had to be good enough to be famous, but you just don't like that other crap. Probably SBF or something. Yeah. One of those. That's a good pick. 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.

I actually disagree. I don't. I don't think it screams like Ghost Rider 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 go. Like you can tell when an account is ghost written. Sure, sure.

And it's ghost written. I believe that he probably has the keys. Okay, sure. Hired a Ghostwriter. Yes, yes. But we agree that she does not have the prison phone. The everything app installed on a phone that is connected to some sort of 5G network within the prison. We agree on that. Okay, great. Could she? Because SBF is tweeting for prison.

It is possible, but it's very much looked down upon it. And of course, like, as soon as it, as soon as the tweet goes out, like the warden should be able to get the news. And 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, 100 million? Do you think it's like,

John's take is, John's take is, if you really want to, she can rebuild her personal brand, but that's, and 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.

in the in the capital markets I think if she wanted to truly repair brand would be like deep threads and long posts on like biotech that was my take was was was was Martin Screlli he has posted about biotech about trading he's gotten a lot of picks right he talks about capital markets he talks about yes he he did get in legal trouble right but he has but he has said the thing that I was doing before I went to prison I I am 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 martin screlly like short selling reports or like it's like Friday at lunchtime, he just tweets, this company's a fraud, like their tests are gonna fail, stock drops 70% on Monday, incredible performance. Yeah, yeah, and it shows that he's like, he's like at least a student of the game

in the world, in the financial world. Now he has a kid, yeah, congrats, drop his kid on the internet. Anyway, we have a lightning round. 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 first dollar online or in business.

I was trading SPACs in my Roth IRA, 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 guy. It's my son, I mean, where to God, this is why Sam, this is why Sam hired me because he really appreciated my SPAC story. Basically, like, I graduated December 2019, was bored. COVID hits, like the first week I start my 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's stock. I didn't get it. I was like, why don't they just IPO? I read through 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 SPACs 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 had a 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 didn't do well. I just parlayed that like 20 times. Wow. So my first online money was trading SPACs in my retirement. That's a fantastic story. Shout out Shemoth.

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 had a nice steak. You bottle of wine, maybe some tequila. Spacks or backs. Maybe it's time to do it again. Maybe, maybe. Maybe this time is different. Couple IPOs coming. Good to see you. Fantastic. We'll see you. Cheers. Cheers. Bye to see you. Bye guys. See ya. And we will bring in our next guest to our YC Demode Day

stream. We are live. How you doing? Of course, how you doing? Great, great. Yeah. Very Gen Z coded. I love it. I love it. Introduce yourself. What do you? What do you do? My name is Arlen. I am building Nazo me, 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 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 into cursor. We've all been there.

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 AI company. Oh, yeah, we know Jeff. Yeah, saying like post-4,000 tokens, I think,

like the performance of annual LLMs goes like this. Yep. So that's like the reason I build this. That makes sense. Do you have a take on Jeff? Jeff's take on like context windows and the need for rag? Like, how do you think about the tradeoffs and where the frontier models are scaling?

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 code code doesn't index your code base. So they only do agency crack, which only uses terminal tools. Like creep, grab, grab, and cursor, they use both.

They use local index and also vector stores. So like crack. 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 graph 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. Wow. And paying, and thank you. And five percent of the spring badge. Oh, wow. Amazing.

So yeah, total like more than 90 OAC companies. That's amazing. And yeah, about like 11.5K MR. There we go. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Are you profitable?

Yes, sir. Yes, go. Yes, go. Yeah. Because like we see deals cover everything, like all the infrastructure costs. And yeah, so yeah, I guess it's profitable. Oh yeah, yeah, it comes to the infrastructure guys, okay.

Incredible. What were you doing? You have a crazy story, right? Yeah, I was board of high school when I was 17 and I wanted to build, so I dropped out, raised a million in a couple days in London. Couple days, how did that go? Yeah, so usually like people race,

like it takes weeks to race in London, especially in Europe. Because they're so fucking slow, but like, yeah, 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 fine.

So I guess I just got lucky. I built from London for a couple months and then applied for OEC. So yeah, 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 for myself to like fucking apply again and again and yeah, yeah. That's incredible. How did you make your first dollar on the internet? Yeah. 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 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 the most money, bro? Like Elon Musk, yeah. Here's the rich man, bro.

But otherwise, yeah, Brian Chesky is my. Yeah, Brian Chesky is my goal. I love Brian Chesky. Brian Chesky. Founder Mode. There you go. Fantastic. E.O.G.

How's the fundraise gone? I closed it a couple weeks ago. Yeah. A couple weeks ago. Okay. Incredible. That's great. That's great.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. We're talking to you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

Have a good one. Up next. We got next. We are continuing our coverage live from YC Demo Day, 2025. Welcome to the stream. What's happening. I'm John. I'm a pleasure.

Great to meet you. Hi, Alessia. How you doing? Would you mind introducing yourself and your company? Sure. So, hi, everyone. I'm Alessia. Vibeflow is the all in 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 need. People are, like, they have hair and fire problems and they need to solve these problems.

So 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 N.E.10 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 these hair and fire problems. 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 Demode Day? 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. Eight thousand applications in three weeks.

Congratulations. Congratulations. What were you doing before this? I worked with a software engineer for four years for a company and actually build a no-code tool which is very similar to what by Pleicity for animation and 3D modeling oh that's interesting for Disney Disney crazy that's amazing how do you how have you reacted to like the way that Disney's approached AI and know they kind of seemingly it's like they're very careful not to get into hot water around like using like too much AI but clearly want to stay on the edge

They use AI everywhere, like literally everywhere in rendering, 3D modeling, everywhere. And it's cool. Like you can just make everything faster and 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. Mogo. Resilience and persistence. Second, how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

By selling stuff that my brother's didn't use at home. Really? Yes. No way. That's amazing. Anyway. Incredible. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. We will talk to you.

Have a good one. We'll bring it. Oh, I forgot to ask about the GPU. We got to ask if they, if they're GPU. How you doing? Nice to meet you. Welcome to the show. I'm John. Welcome to the show.

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

Okay. So interfacing with borrowers to help help doing sales, servicing collections for like fintechs, 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. Rich. You should have to be rich. What have you, like, how have you, what's go to market look like? Are you, are you focusing, like, are you trying to, banks and, Yeah, I imagine there's like a couple of the NPL players that would be the ideal. Yeah, no, 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 sort of like a not a name that you necessarily recognize. No, but we're now launching. Yeah, exactly. We're now getting live with a fintech who's launching us into their conversion funnel for like for sales. There's a big server service that's in the solar space. There's collections agencies, a 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

ARR before I got acquired. Nice. 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? We haven't converted any of us. 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. There 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 you were selling to. Yeah. 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, which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship. And he's like a crazy guy, he's dead now, but he was like a crazy, crazy guy. Big, 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 lot of different stuff. Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis. Great, I'll have to look him out. 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 a load of homewares online. Homewheres, yeah. Nice. Nice. John was selling, where are you selling DJ equipment? He's an international businessman from a young age. I was a international businessman at age 13. It was great.

13. Nice. Awesome. Anyway, thank you so much for stuff. Great to me as well. Yeah, to meet you. On the progress. Congrats on the progress. Let's move on to our next guest. We are live from YC Demo Day 2025.

How are you doing? We're getting some photos taken by Bryce Johnson. Welcome to the stream. We got our next guest. Wait, the prompting company? Come on. The prompting. The prompting company.

The prompting. We're prompts maxing. Yes, sir. But of where? Where could you possibly be based? Of San Francisco. The prompting company of San Francisco. That's correct.

Don't capitalize the of though. I'm just looking at this. It's funny. 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. It should be the last one to do it though. I hope so. I think you're 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 that mentioned in chat GPT. Okay, okay, okay.

Not just another generative engine optimization tool, but yeah, yeah. How do you differentiate? Yeah, for sure. So we plan the infrastructure layer. We're not just creating articles for you. Okay. We create shadow sites for our companies,

to influence all of them. Is there any special design in the type of shadow site that you're building? Like what exactly does that look like? Yeah, for sure. There's such. There's apps servers, there's documentation. There's a lot of different stuff.

So these shadow sites are basically like marked down versions of your site. Okay, mark down. Yeah. Why do the foundation models like markdown so much? Because it takes like, no. It's just 90% less tokens, man. Oh, okay.

It's just more compressed. Got it, then HTML? Yeah, okay. That's correct. If they scrape the HTML, they're bringing all the CSS and strong okay yeah did you come into the batch with this idea or yes we did we did not pivot okay in pure play it's a pure play what were you doing before this um I was at beehive I was working there oh no way yeah made your money in uh newsletters newsmaxing

what's what's traction been like um it's been pretty good dude uh we are at 300 k and err now and videos of being customers no way yeah there you go how did you how did you land in vida Oh, dude, it was a crazy bake-off, but ultimately the better product one. A bake-off. I love bake-offs. Very cool. Speaking of Jensen, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history? In history.

Anyone, alive or dead. Dude. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. He's down. Good answer. Good answer. What about how you made your first dollar on the internet or in business?

On the internet. I actually ran a service back then to Jill break iPhones. No way. No way. That's come up before. Josh Browder. Yeah, he was Joe Browder. I do a lot of that.

iPhones. And there was someone else who is 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? How's the fundraise going? It's going pretty great, man. We're way over subscribed.

Fantastic. We're picking our lead right now. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming in. Good to meet you. Good to meet you 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 guys? What's happening? How you doing? Fellow streamer, 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 collaboration. 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 OBS at 1080 PhD. Oh, so no matter what you're using, if you're using Hangouts or Zoom. We're an alternative to hangouts in Zoom.

Okay. 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 going to say it's like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers and have a tiny business stuff.

Yeah, I had a buddy who built this amazing tool for helping make documentaries. And I was just like, this is very very important. like this is very small market man. It's coming for many fun. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, this is the best. I was making YouTube videos like video essays. 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 do. just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest. And it blew up almost immediately. I'm still, I, the last-

Do you have a head of membership? So you've seen the browser company video. I love that. So- It was fantastic reaction. Jordy was saying the same thing in the morning. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved.

I think, I think, I can see at last year and 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, had a 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 DevTools 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's incredible, but the website was somehow even worse.

So I said, time to make a better one. So 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. Unpack that because I believe that Twitch chat is 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 absolutely by design. Like chat readability is like comprehensive, like your ability to comprehend what's happening and chat is like really a Ludwig and he was saying like, could I start over if I, didn't have any Twitch 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 an, 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 match that we've built some custom software to auto chop the individual topics. 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, 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, 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. 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 and that's ways. Yeah, it'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, but it's a, it's a public service, right? Teaching the world to kickflip. Yeah, just come out. Our mission is to kick flip. So I think 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. Really big enough. I mean, you look at the traction on like the actual Y Combinator account and like on YouTube 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.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean that they've but there's all those stuff that Gary's done they've done really absolutely love all of them. It's like like the Y Combinator like Combinator content by your partner's everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful and now YT3 chat successful too. I wouldn't trade it for anything makes what what's what's your goal over the next five 10 years if I had a five 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 gonna be on phones.

So I'm gonna 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. Sometimes it's better to be late. Everybody told me I was too late when we made our chat up

and we're as far as I know, the fastest growing third party chat up. 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 a 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. 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. Sure. 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 a actual, like, monumental,

leap in what you can do for video production. Have you guys paid it to 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 Genlock 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 frame like, like freeze frame 3D shots and 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 USB adapters. It's insane. And that's going to be even cheaper in like two years. Yeah.

And ProRas Raw, which is really cool too. I know way too much about cameras. I'm really nerdy about this. But the Red camera company had an exclusive patent on compressed raw video encoding. We're on camera specifically. So the reason that all those like USB or I used to be like external HDMI 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 and 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 US they succeeded in suing Sony Canon a bunch of other companies they were suing Nikon like that said how expensive are you guys and bought them for like 30 million dollars so now the patent's not being enforced so Apple got to put pro rhods raw in the new iPhone which is unbelievable that's

wild actual raw video encoding on a phone is just so that I could all 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 I was listening Minecraft servers yeah somebody else said this I hear from a founder that they started in Minecraft servers, I don't even think twice, I just write the check. That's crazy. Yeah, it's so crazy.

It's sneaker-bodding, Minecraft, iPhone repairs. Like buying and selling stuff on eBay, it was popular in 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 step and just go straight to the business, which is interesting. Yeah, you're hearing that.

Just start in enterprise SaaS. 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. 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 yeah that's great are you GPU poor GPU rich

who I'm GP middle class GPU middle class well you could pick a hat if you want oh I want the GPU poor hat for sure absolutely thank you so much middle class is you got to go you got up or down well thank you for joining it's not properly I will fix that for sure yeah thank you guys appreciate you so much for stop meeting you guys well find you yeah yeah yeah yeah I need to comment on any weird stuff in like AI chat space or whatever no worries at all I miss even more of them than you guys do let me if you ever need help with anything I'll be around have fun here cheers have a good rest of your day lightning round let's let's let's

let's go oh there's people out there okay okay okay let's run it let's run it let's run it come in quickly speed it out what do you do you what do you Bob hi I'm Bob all been better we've been better we've been able to coding agents for firmware. Okay. Coding agents for firmware? What what device are you embedded? They said it couldn't be done. So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers. So think about any microchro you can think of STM 32, ESP, TI, and XP, any, any manufacturer. When did you learn you wanted to do agents for coding agents for firmware? That's good good question. So I did hardware all my life.

You started like you know, started when I was full doing robots, moving to more professional stuff in high school in college. In school, let's go. In college I did. Yeah, yeah. In college, I built humanoids and then went to a startup, the MedTag stuff, and then went to Tesla, worked on Robitaxi. So we kind of saw it. I saw this problem from like, you know, a 10% research lab to a trillion-dollar company. That firmware was so inefficient company, web dev.

And traditional coding agents just couldn't do it. Like, a clock code or cursor, they lack context. What we say about context 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 a read out outputs from the from 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 fantastic 500,000 lines of code changed working on the first enterprise you know Yeah, yeah. Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Oh, Elon. Has to be Elon. There we go.

Are you bullish, bear humanoids in the next five years? I'm very bullish. Very bullish. In the next five years. They'll be walking around. Do you think I will have one of my home? Maybe in all your home, factories. Factories.

Factories, why factories? Factories, because like, it's a straight-up 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 hold you we'll hold you to hold you to five years expect to hear from us with uh with a fact check on that thank you so much for coming back thank you we'll see you later have a good one uh 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 from wising demo day 2025 welcome to the stream hi i'm john elena nice george great to meet you uh introduce yourself who are you what you're going I'm a CECASH. I'm a partner at Google Ventures. Oh, fantastic. Amazing. Okay. I was going to hit this button, but not... Partner mode. Partner mode.

Partner mode. How, what's your reaction to Demodei been? What are the common trends that you're seeing? How is this one different from other ones? Or valuations of the highest they've ever been? What are you saying? 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. And people, 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. Have you done? 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 relationships. Right now 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?

We like work. 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 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.

Because if this was four years ago, I think we would have seen like half the batch, something like that, fintech related and very little of that today 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.

And at GV, we've been investing in fintech since the start. We were seed investors in Robin Hood, seed investors in Plaid, seed 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, big day today. 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, DecaCorn plus fintech companies with founders still at the helm, changes the strategy at the early stage? Do you need to be more focused or niche because you have Zach at Plaid, you have Eric, at Ram, Brian at Coinbase, right at Robin Hood.

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 they get into everything.

And they also are not in manager mode. So yeah, it does not change the market. 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 let's say let's give it up for the office of the CFOs 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 dollar 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 our stream? 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 problem. We have 100 people. Yeah, we're using AI like we're using cloud or mobile or anything else. Yeah. And 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'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 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.

We're doing a lightning round outside of Larry and Sergei, obviously. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history, alive or dead? Anyone that you think is inspiring? Maybe you read a biography or something. Oh, wow. There's so many. This is really difficult. You know what?

I think I would say Brian Armstrong Coinbase created a market that didn't exist before. The largest businesses are always market creators in spite of what I said earlier about a market. Yeah, that's a great one. We love Brian. Second question. So if you're the next Brian Armstrong. if 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 um trading crypto trading crypto

i'm surprised we haven't heard that more i know yes let's see up for you she was born in the trenches born in the trenches still in the trenches still in the trenches uh last question yeah uh do you consider yourself gp u poor GPU rich you're you're bolted on to a hyperscaler. Yeah. I think I know the answer, but I'll hear it from you. Define GP poor, GP-Ritch. GPU-P-Pore 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. Yeah. Now it's just a general vibe. Do you feel constrained by technology or liberated by it?

I feel like liberated by it, right? I think you qualify as GP-Rich. We got to lean in. We got a We'll give you this much. You'll be rich. It hasn't been properly said, oh, maybe it fits. There you go. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Nice to meet.

Great to meet you. See you next batch. Have a great rest of your demo day. Two phones, you know, she means business. There you go. That's a corporate. That's a corporate athlete. Corporate athlete right there.

That's a boardroom general. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Welcome to the stream. Jordy, good to be you. Yeah. Introduce yourself. What do you do? Hey, my name is

This sion. 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 bad data in, bad data out? You've got to get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall. It's not scraped into 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 YC, a lot of it sits on the application layer.

Sure. Most of it for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things. 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 change. Yeah, be a hassle, just 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 in silos and kind of aggregating it all and making it sort of comprehensive, like, in wood is what's true you ever would you ever go full stack would you ever start suing people yourself yeah yeah yeah we we just that's America that's the American way let's go yeah watch out um yeah we actually just said this in our in our pitch we want to become the world's first class action love okay full stack so AI law yeah nice fantastic uh how's traction what you share a demo day how's

you going how's the race going yeah so we've about 60 000 in revenue and just the last four months since basically launching. Congrats. We have three of the largest plaintiff law firms in the US 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 most would expect, I guess. They probably don't know a lot about AI 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 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 a year. It's crazy. Yeah. Most settlements are a billion plus, but yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, because of natural language being so a lot easier with our generative AI, 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 are, you could never throw software at it. Yeah, and most of them aren't even still paperless. They still have lots of paperwork. They've just gotten over the cloud, if you want to call it that. So, yeah. Cool. Lightning Round. Do it. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Sam Holman.

Sam Holman. Just because I've met him twice, but he's a goat. Second question. How did you make your first dollar online in business or on the internet? Cold call. Cold call. Let's go. It was actually, the previous base 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 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. Law firms were a huge part of it. Nice. Based on where you sit in the stack, do you feel like your GPU poor or GPU rich? Oh, GPU rich, but here we go. GPU poor soon. Okay.

Good luck to you. Scaling up. Hopefully you can scale up. Thanks so much. Great to meet. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you if you're just tuning in.

We're live from YC Demoday 2020. And we have our next guest coming into the studio. It's colonel time. It's carl. Welcome to the show. You seem fired up. Did you just pitch? You haven't pitched yet.

Who are you? What do you do? Raf Garcia, founder of Kernel, were crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your AI agent. The browser wars. The browser wars are on. 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 the exact same tools that humans use.

Yep. 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 blank 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.

It feels like this market is just like exploded in size. Yeah, so prior to LOMs, the main use case was you run your tests or your QA on a headless browser in the class. 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. With Tyler. Yeah, we were technically in the same batch. And we, our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation to pull data out of student information. Clever's a killer company, by the way. You should look it up as massive. Acquired. Mass-back position, massive deal.

Size gone. What was the number? What was the number? 500 million. There we go. So yeah, both me and my co-founder of previous YC founders, so we are experienced at the game. And yeah, I was previously a quant at a high-frequency trading ferns.

So like speed is the name of the game. Will you be our quat? If you want to make your browser infrastructure super fast, I will help you. How are subscribed is around? It's extremely and it's over. It's over. It's over. It's actually over.

You're not back. I mean, it is a hyper-competitive space. I saw even AWS launch something. It seems like obviously ABS 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 where AWS, GCP, Azure, these are all great businesses? Yeah, I think, you know, with DebTools, 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, and some bigger customers. Like there's a lot of examples of like... 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 going to be years behind whatever we're working on. How are the bake-offs going? The bake-offs are going well. So 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 percent you could see.

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 things are going well fantastic uh we have how big is the team today uh 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 and 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 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 at the beach for the next bar gets so high that I'd like you to build things is

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 yeah yeah yeah yeah just you you could have done the whole like raise 50 million get the really crazy office out the gates and then and then you wouldn't you you got to earn it every time you got early it every time for sure uh well speaking of people who earned it who is your favorite entrepreneur in history who do you look to favorite entrepreneur how far back are we going we can go live or dead literally thousands of you can go edison somebody has somebody has mentioned jesus christ somebody has

mentioned eric lineman 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 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 quant for 20 20 20s there are more noble way to make your first dollar I mean that is my job out of college yeah that's my that's my quont anyway congratulations

On the progress. Thank you so. Come back on the show as you have more news. When you're ready to announce around, jump on. We're very excited. Anyway, we'll bring in our, we have what? 10 minute countdown. 10 minutes.

Come in. Where in the lighting round? Who are you? What do you do? Explain yourself. My name's Adi. I'm a co-founder of agent mill. It's the first email provider built 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. Oh, interesting. Like browser use for agents. Exactly. about this because I go to agent mode and oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like okay it should just now it should just email the person to actually kick off that

process and it can't do it yeah how much money are you making how much money are we making yeah did you share a kpi at demo day did you share what what kpi should we did not but we love our customers okay but you customers plural so i know there's more than one yes okay i'm learning yeah there we're going 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, hot stories. We're getting that YouTube. You're getting that YouTube ad sense. 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 is talking about them. Langchney's talking about them. Agents need their own email inboxes. Okay, so you did. This brings me to the lightning round question.

How'd 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 can't. I can be like my old B2B sessions. 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 living.

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. I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game. He does. He's in the love of the game. Hopefully one day, you know, I could be like that. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much.

Nice to do you. Cheers. Have a good one. Let's bring on our next guest at YCDW. 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 Riff. Who are you? What do you do? Hey, I'm Alith, building RIF, which is Cursor for Music Production.

Ooh, 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, 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.

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 this are all the samples AI generated? Yeah, we have like a user community of samples. We also like let you generate your own. Cool. 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 Cragan.

He's pretty big. He works with a lot of E-DEM artists. Yeah. That's awesome. We'll have to play it. Off the string. 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. So like, you know, we're definitely targeting pros. It's a pro tool. But pros for us means- Pro tools? Oh yeah.

from that. The 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 80 million people release music on the internet. Yeah. How's traction? How's Demodegoing? Great. I mean, yeah, we grew up 400 DAUs. People are already dropping songs on Spotify that were made our riff and getting some, getting some listens already. Fantastic. Yeah, the raise is fantastic. I want to see like have to like really pick the investors now. Like the round is completely filling up so great spot yeah last question wrist check oh yeah yeah what do you got is this yeah it's

it's a breadling nice one nice not enough watches on the wrist here at ys see lightning round questions favorite entrepreneur in history live or dead dr dr dr dr dr dr i knew i had to ask you anyway thank you so much yeah thanks guys great to me let's bring in the next one how are you doing five minutes left at the yc down the day live stream welcome to the stream welcome to the stream introduce yourself who are you ready to time 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 a voice AI for Europe how's traction traction eight paid pilots converting to 24k MRR that's great

in the past four weeks and the rest of the demo day are you getting ASML in the round are you gonna be the hot investor say goodbye to the tier ones AISML's in the business. Didn't get a SML. Not yet. Next round. We're rooting for you. Are you GPU poor by any chance?

Do you want a GPU poor hat? I might as well be. 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. We're based in three places.

So our 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. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? And I would love a European example if you have one. European example. But you can say anyone.

If they were good European entrepreneurs, they would be doing it? They would come to SF. They would come to SF. Well, just zooming out. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? I would say, alive or dead. impressed by what Elon Musk has done. There we go.

That's a great one. Fantastic. Track record is very impressive. How did you make your first dollar on the internet earn 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. Yeah, for I was trying to get some people to a real estate shop. Okay. Nice. Pretty much what I did. There you go. That's fantastic. Yeah.

Nice. Well, congrats on the progress. Thanks for your time. We'll talk to you soon. All right. 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 screen. 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 Juxda, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere 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 just sold it does something similar, like, magnetics, but what, what, 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 geodeser. You could put it that way, yeah. We should have the company that way, yeah. And then we simulate millions of people or objects moving through to space, simulate their sensor measurements with like accelerometers

gyroscopes and then train models on that and then basically deploy to software. And 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 wife.

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. Oh, yeah. I know the one you're talking about. You know, that's how you can envision it. 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. Indoor's, underground. Defense is a big one. I grew up in a military family,

so we sell a lot to like, try to sell a lot to like DOD, stuff like that. But that's like, but we 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 going to 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, got it. 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 allow us to basically stack. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say

because a lot of stuff is important but doesn't have softening type. 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 cool. Lightning round questions. How do you make your first dollar? Like traction and how some fundraise.

Sure, yeah, we've done about $150,000 in the last six weeks. That's pretty good. And then 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. 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 can 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 like on my first one I was 13 working at a Working 13 at a hot dog stand in a shack in Phoenix Arizona So it was shoveling hot dogs and it was gourmet hot dogs so like basically paid nine dollars 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 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 facilitate all their distribution through there. So that's my cop out answer. But I just love Drake. Thank you so much for trying. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. Casey, let's bring her in. How you doing? Welcome.

Final guest, closing it out. Closing it out. Saving best or last? Good to me, yeah. 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. It's like to be here. Reaction to Demo Day. Electric. Electric. Electric. More electric than the last demo day?

Particularly electric. 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 time of day? I was. To me, like the, 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 maybe it's the founder the same, but the quality of the company and the traction. The industry is 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. 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. Agree I also think the founders are getting younger and

I honestly feel the 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 you never are and I'm like oh my gosh. Yeah, they're skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker slipping. They're just going straight into enterprise SaaS. It's 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 OpenAI. And we really focus on technical founders that are commercially minded, building cool as shit. And that's really important. Commercial. that 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 spent a lot of time in maybe less popular AI categories. 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? Absolutely. So actually if you go to topology.vc slash neuro dash map, you can see a really sick visualization of all this. I love it. But it's more than a market map, okay? I love market maps. We're pro market map here, by the way. And if they're crowdsores are even better, right? Yeah, of course.

But that specific technology is called silent speech. It's becoming more popular. 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 don't or is it EKG?

Not EKG, whatever like. 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 technology. with muscle movement and confining them all together.

The other cool neurotech company, though, that we're investing in is Sam Oltman'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? We got out of here.

We do need to get out of here. 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 100 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. No, all right. And then you got to just go Einstein. Einstein. Yeah, back to base. 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. I love that.

Great start. Fantastic. Awesome. Great having you on. Thank you so much for coming out of the stream. Nice to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Anyway, thank you for watching our show. We will see you tomorrow live from New York City. Live from New York City, maybe live from New York Stock Exchange. You never know. It might very well happen. We could very well be there. Thank you to our incredible sponsors for making TBPN possible. We love you all.

and thank you for watching. We'll see you. We'll see you tomorrow. See tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.