Tech Brew Ride Home - Portfolio Profile - Rownd.io

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

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On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus portfolio profile episode of the TechMeme ride home. I couldn't be more excited to tell you about this company because I love them. I've actually met them in person, which in these days of investing is not necessarily something that happens all the time.

We're going to talk to Round today. They were an investment that we made, I believe, in the first two weeks. of the fund being live. So I'm going to real quick have the round folks introduce themselves, and then we'll tell you what round does and get right into it. First of all, Rob, say hello. Hello. Matt, please say hello.

Hey, great to be here. And Rachel, hello. Hello. All right. I'm going to kick this to Rob first. Rob and I have actually met in person on the streets of of New York City. Rob, on a high level,

sort of, you know, elevator pitch sort of level, tell me what Round does. Sure. Round helps companies register more users through a code snippets that adds instant user authentication to any websites or app. So a quick example would be,

let's say you have a blog and you have a landing page and you have a web app. What originally happens is that people go to that that landing page and they kind of fall in love with you a little bit. And it might learn some more about you in the blog. And then a lot of them will fall off and never make it to you the cool thing that you actually built, your app, your content, your, your cool e-commerce checkout page. They never get there because there's this, there's this friction in the way in a logging page

or registration page or you make them go through and try to remember their password from two years ago, and that friction causes people to leave. And we found it ourselves, and we found out talking to hundreds of people, and we decided this is a problem. We are uniquely positioned to solve. So, any page, any type of website, any type of app, our authentication works through and between them instantly. And we've been finding some success with that. Well, not to be devil's advocate here, but I can hear people listening saying, well, but I just log in every we're using my Facebook and Google logins. So what is round doing that is different other than, and this might be important,

not being Facebook and Google? Well, that's the first thing, right, is we're not Facebook or Google. The number of people, the websites that have had Facebook login went from $6 million down to $3 million in just last year. You know, starting to move away from that type of authentication. And same thing with Google is there's more and more websites than moving away from. from just having that sign with Google. But what's more important is where that signing exists.

So that's not going to still between the marketing pages and the actual application. And it's still just authentication. So you press the button and then the website owner and the app still have to store all this data, so to do all this work. We take care of all that. So when someone logs in and any piece of information

entered into an app or website, we bring it in around and make it available to the browser to actually customize, personalized, any site. So your blog can be customized with information that you added into an app. Your website can be customized based on a role or profile that you found out, you know, after maybe meeting someone and putting into your CRM system. We bring all information together into one spots. We might even use Google and Facebook, probably not Facebook. We might actually add Google to our platform because a lot of people have Google, but all it is is it ties you to an email address.

We do all the rest and we make it easy to be able to move between these different worlds. We have a WordPress blog, our landing site is on Webflow, we have a React-based app. Our docs are in a jam stack. Like this type of very diverse and very diverse type of platform is normal. Like we all use exactly what we should be using for our different environments. But the problem is, is when I go to my dock sites before rounds, I was there alone. I was like a new user. And we use like intercom and stuff like that to like, you know, see people have questions. And I couldn't tell if they were a, you know, a pain customer or a first time founder, you know, a first time person or someone trying to just sell me something. They would ask a question and we get into a conversation.

Now it's complete context. But we had a twist as well where people have complete control over the information as well. So they can go in, see the information they have and say, I don't want you to, you know, have my last name anymore. That was somebody that gave you a while back for our email list and I don't want to have it. Just turn it off. And now all the websites that are within your constellation no longer have it. But sorry. Yeah. So there's two sides of this. If I am a company, a site, what have you, essentially I'm able to offload sort of the user data, the storage and management of that two round. Is that what you're saying? Yep. And the validation of the email address and phone number. So not only are you getting some of sign up for email list, but you also get to

make sure that they actually have that email address and you can use it for authentication. So essentially, I'm offloading the risks and liability of, you know, secreting customer data and things like that. But also, in theory, I'm guessing that I'm also offloading to you guys, the management of things that has become really important in modern times, which is, you know, the regulations around user data that are different all around the world, correct? Yes, yeah. We have a background in data prophecy. We were very good at data privacy. That's where we actually were when we met you, was a data privacy company, right? Like, we were very good at that. But the problem we found was when we talked to 100 companies, 99 didn't bring up data prophecy. It's the top three things that were taking up their time and the things were keeping them up at night. And that really made us, we look at the problem through a different

lens. But then the flip side of it is that this does offer something that hasn't really been available before, which is on the user side of it, companies and sites and apps and whatever that use Round, round will allow me like one sort of dashboard or point where I can manage the information that I'm sharing with companies. Yes. So on other side of things, you as an end user can come around and look at, can claim your data from any company that uses rounds. So you can go in and see all the companies that use around. You can see what information has been held on them and you can very quickly go in and manage that data. You can also do that now through our snippets. So through our snippets, so through our snippet on a website, all it is is a snippet. Like any developer can add this to their app or their app or website. It takes like 20 seconds and now they have authentication. When a user authenticates using this, this Brown comes up in the corner and you can actually see the profile information that's been collected. All we did is change the word data to profile, right? It's not user data anymore.

It's your profile and it's your accounts. It's words that that when we talk to businesses and I'm sure everyone on this call, sorry, on the podcast listening right now, these are things that we know. Like, we know that every place I go has an account. We just make that account available everywhere. And we just let you turn off data, just like you could go. to your account and delete your name and put xxxx up there and it will overwrite everything that's in there just make it more transparent to make it easy and fast but the snippet is like the cool key here is even competitors like all zero still take a while to to to install our own personal story here

is we used all zero we used it's you know for our own platform here like six months ago when we when we built the platform, and we outsourced the front end to a team. And they spent about two weeks installing all zero and making it work with our brand, making it, you know, tying everything, doing all the security stuff we wanted it to do. Two weeks of dev time spent installing that. We ripped out all zero and add around into our app the first time we installed in about two hours. And that was the first time. That was before we had SDK and before we had all this other cool stuff.

And there was no solution for websites. Like if you have a WordPress website, what do you use for all? What do you use to create profiles? Their CRM system? It's awful. And it just doesn't work well. It's just not good. There's nothing else.

We can actually be installed into Cloudflare or into Netlify, like as a code snippet. And all the websites that are underneath you now have authentication. All of the form fields can be turned into validation or into ways to create profiles. It's not just going to the hub spot anymore. where marketing team has it, but for some reason, it's disconnected from the actual app, the place you want people to actually go. We put it all together into one cohesive story. We want people to be people again.

Like, when you go to a website, we want them to treat you like a human being. You go somewhere and you learn something. So, so well before rounds, back when I was 12 years old, I worked for my parents, you know, store. Like, they were entrepreneurs. They had a little sporting store in a small little town. And starting at 12, I would greet people up the front door. And when someone came to the front door of the store, like, you could see if they're a burdened with something.

You know, they're carrying this big, big box or something. So you open the door for them. See if they have kids. You know, there's all these visual things. We'd also, you know, ask nice questions. Like, what brings you in today? And here's the crazy thing is oftentimes there were repeat customers. And you got a lot of extra credit.

If the third time they came back, you're like, hey, I know what you're looking for. Let me show you. But I don't ask in the first time, where do you live? That's a weird question. I don't ask the first time, do you have children? Like, I don't ask that right off the bat. But after the 10th time, it's okay to ask that type of question. After they've invested in us and we've invested in them,

we have a relationship. And that's how the internet should be. You know, a website and you just look around in it, you know, a proper question might be, what brings you in today? Or like, what is your role at your company? It's not fill out this form and we get back to you. That's not how the world works. We feel like this disconnect.

We just want it to be more of a conversation. You go up between these different sites. You give a little bit more insight about you and the experience is personalized. And then here's the big thing. If you have an app, an actual app or a web app or a thing you want them to see, let them see it as fast as as simply possible.

If it's cool, if you actually built something cool, if it's something that you are actually proud of, you're actually no barriers for them to try it. And yet we put up this all-seer login page and say, log in and create it email address and we're like, don't go in this back room, even though it's the coolest thing ever, let them try it. And when they are so close to doing something amazing, you know, pressing out publish button at that point, say, what's your email address? You don't need it before then. Get it when you need it. And that is a big

insight. That's something that we want to do radically difference. The world is moving from from advertising to subscription. We're all going to have to move in that direction. You know, you might be to have ads on your podcast where you like have someone like that, the funds, you know, ads on your page, that kind of stuff is going away. You know, with cookies going away and with app tracking being limited by Apple and with Google coming out with similar types of restrictions, it's going to change.

And a lot of companies are going to move to this new subscription model. And the only way to do that is to treat people like people and to give them a little experience that makes sense. Not using the same web 1.0 technology, a password, email address, that's a a a email address, and password that we've had for the last 25 years, it's not going to work. And the people are going to survive this transformation?

Are we people that take advantage of just human nature? And honestly, we want to make it just super simple to move between apps and websites. And that's what we're building. So let me just give you the summary of what I've been really excited about, round, which is, you know, as you said, that it's sort of like if straped, you cut and paste some code and all of a sudden you can take payments. This is cut and paste some code and you can do off. But it's also modern off.

It is skating to where things are going, where you guys are going to manage the change in the laws around user data, the expectation around user data and things like that, offboarding it from startups having to mess with that stuff so that they can concentrate on what's important, which is serving their customers. But also, I think, haven't you guys seen, it sort of reminds me of all of the companies right now that are making checkout faster and thus increasing sales. The same thing as you guys have seen increases in onboarding rates that are super impressive through around, correct?

Yeah, yeah. And that's the most important thing is checkout is great if they get there. For some of the e-commerce sites, that makes sense, you know, to really off-front checkout. out, but for a lot of subscription companies, it's about just getting people onboarded. And that's really where we're focusing. And the direction we're kind of going is like a band-in-cart for registration.

So like someone starts a registration process, would be nice to say, hey, you were trying to book a vacation to beautiful Bali. You stopped in the middle. Do you still want to get some mehitos? And click here to restart. And we provide that click here button that puts them back into the context of that registration so they can continue.

And that's the kind of experience that we've expected from Amazon and from Shopify, but still doesn't really exist in this new world of subscription and websites and apps. And it's still very clugey. Like you oftentimes have to restart if you leave or they're using cookies or somebody to kind of pull the session for you, but it's not really your account yet. So we just want to make that account right off the bat. Let's get in. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

I'll be honest. You know, I go to websites these days. You know, maybe I want to try out a new app or a new site, you know, some new startup. And as soon as they ask me for my name and my email address and my password, a lot of times it's just, you know, I'll walk away at that point because yet another password I've got to, you know, remember or put in my password manager. And I think, I think Brown can go a long way to kind of solving some of those hesitations of people's. actually signing up and getting into trying something new. Let's get into the story of round, because we've sort of hinted at this that things have evolved even

since I first started talking to you guys in October. How long have you been working on this idea generally? The new idea or the one that we pitched you? Well, let's do this. The original idea, when did you start working on the original idea? 2021. We kind of came together during the height of the pandemic and we're like, let's try to solve a big problem that the world needs. And data privacy was this big problem that we really wanted to solve for for men and nice children and for like next generation, make the world a better place. Did the team know each other? You guys are based in North Carolina, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. We all worked at IBM together. We men and I have known each other at IBM for five years. part around. We worked on the same projects in the API, Connect space, and built some really cool stuff at IBM.

And I met Rachel. We're kind of in the same floor and the same like design studio space over there. So Rachel was working on a blockchain for identity and some really cool stuff. It's kind of like B2B, B2C kind of world. And yeah, we just became friends sort of working on projects together. We actually started like a small little like startup. Rachel Lide before round. So that was all about connected cars but we're just crazy entrepreneurs just try a lot of stuff and i'm sure a lot of people you know can kind of you know uh uh has empathy for that where it's like i see a problem i want to solve it and and yeah we we've known each other for for at least five years yeah and like rob said during the pandemic we're all working from home and fairly underutilized in our jobs and had plenty

of time in the lockdown to add a little time and hours into this new project so So I think it got as excited ramped us up faster than we ever would have if that hadn't been happening at that time. We've hinted at a pivot in terms of the idea. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, I mean, this is even like admitting things that maybe you were naive about or things that you thought were going to get traction that didn't, but then something you didn't expect to get traction did. Tell me a little bit about how Round has evolved. Yeah. So we probably did the most classic

entrepreneur's mistake. And that was we built something assuming people would come, right? And anyone says not to do that, right? Don't do that. But like the world just seemed like such a place that needed something to make data promise easier. All these beaches were happening. Like in 2019 and 2020,

You heard about these Facebook breaches and all those LinkedIn breaches. And this is giant, one person data was being lost. And it just seemed like there's this huge opportunity to really change the way that people manage personal data. And we really wanted to build this, you know, this new layer of the internet. And we started to build it. And we built it. And we found some traction with some customers. But we got in the YC in October.

And we're really, really throwed again in a lot. YC and and during that first call, there was like an introduction call to like the group, a group intro call. Our group partners really said like, you know, these next three months before YC are critical. Like go out and talk to as many potential customers as possible. Like like really talk to them about what they really, really, really need. Because when you're in YC, you're building and moving as fast as you can, you still be doing that of course.

But like if you have some insights before that you can kind of make some moves on, that's even better. So, so we sat down. we started to talk to customers. Like in November and December, I talked to close 80 customers. Potential customers, customers in this space. When Rachel came on board, she started to talk to dozens and dozens of customers.

And we just asked two questions, two very simple questions. What keeps you up in nights? And after that question, we would kind of brainstorm a little bit with them. Like, what if we get to all this? And then at the end, we asked, we'd pay $200 a month for that. And if they didn't, I would say, what would you pay $200 a month for me to solve right now?

And the truth is this, we love data privacy. And when we pitch to accompany our data privacy solution, they would always say the same thing. They'd always say, this is so important for the world. You guys are, you know, this is so important, and it's so important that you guys are working on this. And then I ask, cool, when can we install it? And they're like, next quarter, next quarter, how much you want to pay for it?

Well, nothing right now. We don't budget for it. So if you hear this once or twice, so I'd be like, all right, but when you hear it a hundred times, you start to think that you should think that maybe you might be too early in the space or solve a different problem. There's a billion problems in the world. And what we come to in hearing from the starts we were talking to was the thing that we can see up at night, well, sometimes they say something crazy like a dog across streetbarks,

and we talked about the dog and I had a stuff, and it was a good conversation. But when we redirected them back to the business, we're getting to them all the night, these overall trends started come up. It was like, we have a thousand visitors to the website a month, and we get two trials in our app. We have 70,000 people in our email lists,

and we have an 80% open rate for our subscription email, and only 1,000 people inside of our app. So we started to dig into this and be like, the problem here is conversion. We are uniquely set up to work on authentication. And we sort of look at where the conversion was falling off. And the funnel, you usually go take this on that login page. Like making them do that call to action is where it falls apart.

And what really kind of got us excited was when someone said that they had a wait list of like a thousand people. And the call to action was sign up now. Then we got two people to get through that page. That to me was a huge insight where it's like someone came to your website. and said, I want to be a part of this wait list. I want to be a part of the wait list. And then they wait two months and part of the wait list. They get an email.

They open the email. They click on the thing and then they leave. To anyone that sees that, they should say, like, we should change this. But all the tools I have right now is a big page. And we just use our experience. Like, Matt has worked in this space for 11 years. He's a JWT ninja. He knows how to do really cool stuff in this space.

But man, do we make some mistakes. I regret to no end, eight months prior, just asking those two questions. Like, why did I ask that question? When someone said no to me, they don't need data privacy right now, why don't I just ask what do you need? Like, that is frustrating. Like, that was the first piece of advice that we got from YC that was like this giant's piece of advice that was so simple.

And I know people told me that. Like, I know that like back in school and people said, like, solve problems people need. But like, we were solving a problem that society needed without anyone to actually want to pay for it. And I have no doubt that the world will catch up to where we want to go. But how do we actually grow a business and grow and be sustainable? So we were there at the moment, the data products becomes the thing. Will that be in a year or five years? I don't know. But I do know that with our current strategy, this current thing that we just put it to do eight weeks ago, by the way, and we both this entire thing in eight weeks that we actually have paying

customers for in production, that that thing can make us into a sustainable, large company, so we can be here when data privacy comes the thing that people need. So let me sum up if I can and correct me if I get the characterization wrong, but your heart is in data security and data privacy for the general public as a good for the world. But the thing that, but no one was willing to say, oh, I'll pay for that tomorrow. The thing that they were willing to pay for tomorrow was increase my onboarding rates by 25% because that's instantly tangible. Like, take my money for that because I need that tomorrow, right?

So essentially, your product can still have evolved into the things that got you into this. But the tangible thing, sort of the onboarding for you guys, is solving that onboarding problem. Does that sound like what you've discovered? Yeah, that's exactly right. And the cool thing is, is like, we didn't throw away anything that we built previously. In fact, we built this new authentication on the privacy protection technology that we already put together. So that just gives us, you know, a huge opportunity to kind of eat our own dog food and to be ready for that, you know, world that is, you know, ready for data privacy. Yeah.

So the analogy that I like to use is a kale analogy. So data privacy is like kale. It's something that's very good for you. And everyone should eat kale. But very few people will go to a restaurant and say, like, I just want kale. There's some people that do. And we found those people. We found the kale eaters.

And we sold them kale and they were happy. But the entire dressable market of people that love kale is very, very small. So what we did is we took the kale, we shredded it up. We put into a delicious fruit smoothie. And a lot of people like smoothies. A lot of people said that they really want a smoothie at 2 in the morning. Like, that is what they want. That's a thing that, like, they crave.

So they get this delicious smoothie. It does something that they really, really like. They're only to pay extra for it because it's so delicious. But guess what's in there? A little bit of kale. And we still have these principles. We sell these values of data privacy underneath the covers here. And all data privacy is, it's not like this checkmark thing.

Data privacy is a very Web 3 type of construct. It is that you have a profile. And you should take that profile where you want. You carry your wallet with you and you carry it with you. And that's what we're building. Like that's what data privacy used to us is that your data is like, it's yours. And when you go to a new website, went to be cool that just said, hey, Brian, do you want to continue with this data, you know, with this information or no?

And you can say no or you can say yes. And now the website can be customized to you and do all that. That's all we're building. That's all we were ever building. But now we have a actual wedge into a company and say, we can be increasing conversion by 50%. We increase your revenue and increase your profits. Isn't that cool?

Here's some kale. Here's a little kale. You don't even have to know about the kale. We also listed on there because we're not bad people, but like, like that's not the first thing we talk about. That's even the top 10 things you talk about when we talk to a customer. It's at the bottom. We're like, oh, by the way, GDPR and CCP are really easy for us.

But leading with it, even though. it's important to us. Like, if it's not important to our customer, it's not something that we lead with. Why would we? Why would we try to sell you kale if I know you don't like kale? Well, and as you said, like, I think the very important lesson here is you're not, you don't have to throw away anything that you learned or anything that your heart was in at the beginning, because you can still, if you get sort of the wedge, if you find the product

market fit that gets people to sign on with your product. What they'll discover down the road is once they've used round to increase their onboarding rates, and they're very thankful for this, you know, it increases their sales and things, like you said. They'll discover what down the road working with you that the product has other benefits that will include customers being thankful that they have more control over their data. So while that was not a good, you know, that was not the thing to lead with to land your first customer is that, oh, look, this is going to be beneficial to you because customers will trust you more. The thing to lead with was more sales. Down the road, they will discover the value of the product of all of the kale that they have

been eating from you for six months that has also lost them weight and et cetera, et cetera, etc. So I think that that's very interesting in terms of, you know, it's, even the best idea in the world needs a wedge or needs the spoonful of sugar that people want to eat immediately. But that doesn't mean that that's the only part of the product that will ever work for them. And that's sort of what you guys have discovered through this pivot, it sounds like. Exactly. How's YC? Where are you guys right now? Oh, boy, we are, what's it, 26 days of demo day?

Yeah. So about two-thirds way through the batch. It is everything that you hear about. It is intense. It is humbling. It is incredibly motivating to be a part of a batch where people are doing stuff like boom. in the last batch that's trying to like make a super sonic jet along with like you know

alumni like Airbnb and Stripe that just totally made new new spaces like it's really really huge but the coolest thing I think is the one-on-one and a small group environments to get with these partners that with our group partners that really challenge challenge us like there's there there's no extra words that are used you know it's not like hey use what you're doing well like it is this is what you're doing wrong. You're going to fail and die unless you change these things. And that to us has been the most transformative part of this is having someone literally looking at you and say, like, stop being afraid and get out there and do something about it.

It's like if you're going to do this, do it. Don't, don't half ask it. Do it. And that was, that has been the most amazing part for me. Yeah, it feels so obvious to everything they tell you. Every mentorship call and group session, you leave it. And you're thinking, like, right, talk to your users, duh. But then you go do it.

And it gives you so much benefit and value in what you should be doing next because you're listening and you're doing all the right things. So I think it's been great. I don't think we would be where we are at this point without the speed and intensity of IC. To what degree are you also getting sort of feedback and guidance and suggestions from others in the co-heaval? court. Like, because I mean, like you said, there's a rocket startup over here or whatever, but at the same time for a product like yours, are you getting feedback from your fellow YC folks that are like, well, we could use this if you did this tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably the most power. I'm probably say like 10 things that are really,

really cool about YC, but like one of the coolest parts is being able to, we shout to Kirkcour members and then reach out to previous batch members and and like when we launched on bookface there's like internal launch like other people see it from previous cohorts they reach on be like let's chat about this or can i do this and that and those interactions like that easy getting on slack and talking to another founder and then having a meeting with them and just asking them those same questions like what keeps you up on night like here's what we're working on would you pay 200 for that what would you pay 200 a month for like 200 dollars a month for off is 200 $200 more than is being offered through all the competitors.

Like most competitors are free for like a year and they start to pay. So we need to make something that's truly crazy. But yeah, being around people that want to grow and grow quickly and do something that is totally out of the ordinary and do something new and effective is incredibly motivating. But it also just has allowed us to really build our product around user input. Like we'd ask the question, we pay $200 for it. And then I'd say, here's a strike link, pay me $200 for it.

We'll get to it in a week or two and we do that. Or if we don't, we return the money. And if we do, then they're extremely excited. But yeah, that's really cool. But like, I probably have four calls today with YC Founders. Like it's just such a cool, hard charging, very, very smart.

Like, you know, there's geniuses in different parts of the world, you know, in different parts of e-commerce and in other words, you just bounce ideas off of them. And it's just amazing. Do you have any advice to other startups that are looking to get into YC? Because, you know, listen, I've written 11 checks now. You guys are the only people that have gotten into YC thus far. That doesn't mean the other 10 companies are, you know, great and amazing, but it's hard.

Like, and I'm sure it was hard for you guys. Do you have advice for people that want to try to get in on the next batch or a year from now or whatever? Yeah. So just apply. We applied in April, got to interview stage, and then got the email. So if you get an email, you don't get in. If you get a phone call, you get in.

Like, that's cool. The thing I ended in this interview process. And like back in April, we got email. And they laid out three things that we should work on. And we're working on those things. And then we applied again. And we got in. But I don't think there's like a special trick or anything.

It's solve a problem that people need. That's interesting. that has a big market and do something that makes sense for your team like you know our portrait of privacy made sense so like Matt is really really good at uh at at the back end tech around what we're working on and rachel is an amazing designer that uh you know can design just the range experiences and you know five years of product project management experience or product management experience so like the team made sense but man it's just just do it like don't wait like don't wait until the ideas

like fully formed just do it. These number of companies inside this cohorts were idea only. Like they started in October before YC with just an idea and then they quit their jobs and started full-time YC when Batch started. But like in January, but just just apply. Team really matters, I think. And the actual interviews 10 minutes, right? It's 10 minutes.

That's all it is. So you have 10 minutes to talk about what you're working on. on the website, so you know, give you a little tips. But the first thing they ask everyone is, what are you working on? Just practice that a few times. And if it doesn't sound interesting and passionate to you, change it. And that's the most important thing. Don't feel like that you're attached to what you pitch OIC or attach to anything you're working on right now.

That's something that's probably delayed us like three or four months, is that we were like, the world is wrong, we're right. I was going to say, are you seeing, are you seeing, seeing other companies have a similar experience to you? Because you just said that there's been a few of the companies that came in here with fully formed ideas, but are you seeing that that is not necessarily the usual experience that people are pivoting sort of like you're pivoting because they've learned so much from the YC process?

Yeah. I would say almost every company pivots in some way, like a minor pivot or a major pivot, but most companies pivot a little bit. And I don't know, like in our little section, which is like seven or eight companies, we want to, probably three pivots inside of that's, you know, bigger pivots. It's a small group. So, yeah, there's a decent number of people that just want to try something else. And why see really encourages that?

Like, all they're going to ask you over and over again is what do your customers say? Like, are they going to pay for it? Like, the question to ask are so simple. But how they say it and the conviction and how they look at the world and how they interpret signs and signals is just it's genius. And it's really nice to have that. Yeah, I think there's something to be said and you're asking about advice in terms of just releasing something like early and often. As a designer, that's hard for me because I want it to be beautiful and I want it to be perfect. But you're not going to get any feedback if you're not putting anything into the world.

So like put something out there, make people use it so that you can actually. start to go in the right direction and you can figure out what that is faster. So I think why I see would look for that sort of actions beforehand. It's far better to have a product out there that looks awful and makes no sense, you know, and sucks where you have like three users that love you, then then just have, you know, trying to make it perfect. I know that's like one-on-one advice, like, you know, all entrepreneurs say that, you know, you know, release early, at least often, but actually when you're doing it, it's a lot harder.

It's a lot harder to be like, no one's going to want this or like prep for a big launch and just put it out there or do the exact opposite and go to a potential customer and just ask them, ask them, what do you need that you want to pay me for? That's like you start a company. It doesn't have to be like, I got this grand idea. Just talk to people, but you really have to be willing to talk and get a lot of rejection. That's the other part of it is they're going to ask you about your customers. Like we had customers.

We had privacy customers. We are very happy with what we're doing. We actually helped with a large Afghan EVEC with our prophecy stuff. Like people, you know, we're excited about it. It's like there's a small set of people that love Cato. And we talk about these people that love CIO. And we convinced them that Cail is a bigger market. And we got to YC and we heard all these stories about what the product market feels like.

And we're like, we're not there. We should do something else. And we did. Are they giving you how much guidance? I almost want to ask the question, how much importance do they put on the demo? day. But like, are you being coached heavily for that? Or is that, or is that sort of just like, well, this is all part of it? You know what I'm saying? Like, is the demo day something that

you're all working for right now? Or is that just sort of like the icing, like the graduation day sort of thing? Yeah. It's like demo day is like a unmovable milestone. And everything before that is about building a company and getting customers to love you. That's it. it. Like demo day is like your, your final report, like your final essay about what you did over the last three months. And they really emphasize to a crazy degree, like get back to work, talk to your customers, get more customers, get more feedback, how much you're willing to pay, try to charge them more, like really try to understand are you solving actual pain points? How many people have that pain points? That's the markets. And that is really what they want us to do over the first

two and a half months. Like, I'm no doubt that as we close to demo day, it's going to come all about demo day. But like, right now, advice is still, what's your MRR? Get it out, you know, talk to 200 more customers. Like, get out there and build your product better because really, that's all it is. It's like there's one graph, right? And the graph is when you start YC and demo day. And the graph doesn't have to be like a hockey stick, right? It doesn't have to like do that. But you have to like be able to tell a story with that graph. Like if two months in, you did a big pivot, and it does something, but that's what that's what's all about. So overall, the advice is very, very tactical.

The first two months was do things that don't scale. Do things that don't scale. And like Paul Graham talks about this a lot and there's a whole bunch of blogs and articles about it. But like do those things like one-on-one customer onboarding. Don't worry about having a perfect onboarding experience for your customers. Sit down with them. Go into their code.

Onboard them yourself. Do things that don't scale. Because in those conversations, you're going to live. learn things and you're going to actually find real customer love there. And it's so easy just to be like, oh, we're going to spend three months building a back ends to make it so easy for people to scale. Like, we've done that. Like, that's what we used to do at IBM is build these beautiful backends and for developers.

And now we're finding that that approaches this wrong. Like, it's okay to have no back end, whatever, have no, no, like, dev experience. You can just send them a code snippet. That's what we do right now. For everyone more customers, we send them. a code snippet. We just created a nice auto onboarding experience for like developers who want to try us out. So like it's built on Webflow, which is really cool. Like building a dev experience on Webflow is tricky, but because of our authentication is easy. But, but yeah,

it's a it's really, really important to grow and to know who your customers are and to learn from your customers, be able to have real paying customers, not friends. not just YC customers, but finally people that actually like inbound customers are like, we have a problem, you need to solve it and be able to have that at Demo Day. That's your entire goal. And some companies will already have $80,000 or $100,000 in MRRR because they entered YCA at 50 or something like that. And that's awesome.

The graph can go like that. Other people are going to have a steady graph and they're just going to say like, here's what we learned, here's what we did, and we did in four months or, you know, in the last six weeks, imagine what we could do over the next year. And that's kind of the end of the sentence, right? That's the untold part. It's like, look at what we did when we're focused and have this mentorship around us as YC. That mentorship doesn't go away. YC is still a giant community. It's going to be here forever. Imagine what we can do over the next year and a half as we accelerate and try to tackle

this problem in the world. So that's sort of what I had been told by people that have been through YC and know the internal workings of YC. When it started, the demo day was everything because the whole idea was you were, you know, it was sort of like a summer camp. And then the demo day was, we'll introduce you to investors and maybe you'll have a real company. Well, now, you know, real companies are in YC all the time. So why still have the demo day? Because it's still useful to the process to have this sort of discipline mechanism. So, right.

And because the idea is, well, the demo day is not important anymore. What's important is you're going to have a better company that's further down the road. but it's still useful to have that sort of mentality of final exams, if you will. Well, and I also say that Demoday is really important from a fundraising perspective because it really does, like, it creates a environment where like, you know, we will only start fundraising two weeks before Dema Day. That's the only thing that YC really, really strict, not strict on. Like their advice is very, very focused on, which is do not take an investor call while you

are building your company. like that is a distraction you know so so so starting to take them this investor calls you know in two or three weeks before demo day and then there's demo day as it's like you know this is this point in time where you know there's a lot of investors are going to invest and this opportunity to to like really show off what you can do but but there's a decent number of like angel people on their call and NBC's that's that's that will see us and even if they don't invest like being a customers out of that we can get uh get advisors to people that are just interested and just want to give us a vice out of that experience.

So the rest of the day is really important. We are going to put in a lot of efforts. Like there's a lot of effort to make that one minute pitch perfect. But it can only be as perfect as the metrics, right? Like if we don't have good metrics or good stories or an actual product that we can actually show, you know, that we actually have sold and have, like it's just a different scenario. Right. So, so, so, so yeah, for us it is like our final exam. like that's going to be like the you know the conclusion of yc experience here but but what's cool is that

we talked a lot of s 21 companies and you know uh w20 companies and and like this this this this apartment stays around after demo day so so like it doesn't end like we don't just go home like we have to keep up this pace like for the rest of our lives basically there's no kind of of dialing back and it's intimidating but also very energizing. Well, by the way, the whole mutant podcast army is going to be rooting for you at the end of the month on Dema Day. Thank you. Yes, we're fans of this journey now. So, but aside from that, how can the mutant podcast army help you? I assume that if there's any startups out there that are interested in the idea of

cut and paste some code and you've got instant really sophisticated onboarding that can help increase your adoption rates. Go to round.io or is there, yeah. Go ahead. That's it. Go to run that I.O. and we'll direct them to a page to actually try it, like they can try right there or they can have time with us. Like we're just in that transition right now between doing things that don't scale and scaling. So with other grab like 20 minutes of their time and just chat with them about what their needs are. And if you can meet them now or in the future. But yeah, that'd be the biggest thing. Like, give us your feedback. Come and spend 20 minutes with us. Tell us about your pain points. Tell us about your nightmares at 2 in the morning.

Try to keep them focused more on authentication, but I will be a therapist. If someone has, like, all the things that's going on in their life they want to chat about, that's fine. Well, well, we'll chat. No, that's an interesting thing because how many, how many people out there might have the sort of pain points that you're talking about, where if they got in touch with you, and by the way, say you're from the Mutant Podcast Army, say Brian sent you so that they know that this is where this call to action is coming from, it not only might round be able to solve your problem, but you can help around by being like, oh, here's a problem that we hadn't thought of that we can, yeah, we can incorporate that too. That's fantastic.

Everything that you see in our products right now and everything that we're going to do next week and the week after and probably for the next six months are things that our customers need. Like they say, this is awesome. If you could do this, we would love you more. And here's a bit more money, right? And there are things that keep them up on night. So, yeah, if you have something around authentication, they're like, they're not doing this right now. I'm going to not worry about it. This is the time.

This is the coolest thing about working with YC companies, by the way. Like we work with other YC companies for stuff inside of our platform. And they're all willing to do this. So it is such a cool environment. It's like you can go to a YC company and say, this is a problem I have. And if it's something they can solve, they'll probably help you solve it. They will. Like it's so cool.

Like we're using, you know, a few other companies stuff inside of our, our stack. And like we're like, well, it needs to X, Y, and Z three days later, X, Y, and Z are there. Because, you know, we're all in the same boat. Like, Brown is not special, right? We're not doing like the special thing. Like we are in the majority. Like most people are doing this exact same thing when they're talking to a bunch of customers. We might be their customer.

So, so yeah, come to us. You got something around off. Come to us. You got a weird email problem and no one's clicking on your stuff. Come to us. Like come to us around that kind of stuff. You want to expand to Europe and afraid of GDPR? Let's talk.

Like would love any problem that you have just to talk about in that space. My only caveat will be, and this is really important. It's something that we learned early on from YC is it has to be a problem that you're willing to pay for. And that might sound like self-serving, but it's really important because it's so easy to solve problems people aren't willing to pay for. And it's not really a problem then. Like there's a lot of things in life that I want that I'm not willing to pay for. Like I tried hay.com for a whole year, pay $9.9 for it. And at the end of it, I was like, ah, it's not worth that.

you know, I'm going to go back to Gmail. And as a data privacy person, I should be like more, but, but I just, you know, I just let that happen. Like, I'm not willing to pay for email right now. I'm just not in my life where I am right now. And we need that same kind of like, you know, contract, right? Like this is kind of like, you're going to hold us to a high standard because you're paying for something.

And we're going to hold you to a high standard because you're paying for something. Like, we understand that your pain point is real because you're willing to pay for it. So that's my only comment to that, Brian, is like, please, we just, we just, out, but make sure something that sets that is like such a big pain points that like, I want to pay 50 bucks a month for that or 100 bucks a month for that. If you have a really cool idea, still want to talk to you, but we're definitely, you know, that's just something that we really, that was really, again, a simple statement that was made by a group partner to us, but was so transformative because, yeah, of course,

it makes so much sense, right? Like a lot of companies were using our privacy stuff for free. if we try to charge them $300 a month for it, they say, oh, we can't afford that. We're not solving a real pain point right now. It's not real. It's not something that is actually coming them up at the night. And that's, when we started ask that question at the end of these interviews, $200, that changed everything.

So, so yes, reach out. I'll give you a special calendar link to put in the show notes. So it'll be like for your listeners, you know, a block of a bunch of time, like, after it airs and they can go in there and grab 21 minutes. It's like a perfect amount of time to chat about stuff. And yeah, we can have these conversations and we'd love to talk to as many people as possible. Please, let's check. Well, yes, let's do some of that YC community spirit guys.

And not only can Brown maybe help you with a problem you're having, but you can craft their product into something amazing. Again, we're all going to be rooting for you at the end of the month for demo day. It's round.io, r-o-w-n-d-d-d-i-o. Tell them Brian sent you. Congratulations, everybody, on this amazing journey that you're on, Rob, Matt, Rachel. And thanks for being so open and honest about sharing that journey with us. Thanks, Brian.

Thanks, Brian.