The Startup Ideas Podcast - How to Sell Picks and Shovels in an AI World

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Emma Lawler, the founder of Velvet, an infrastructure provider for cross-platform app authentication and monetization. In this episode, Greg and Emma talk about what trends are worth attention in an post-web3 world and why the Pick-and-Shovel Play could be the most exciting opportunity right now. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comEmma Lawler:https://www.velvet.cash/https://twitter.com/emmaryanlawlerhttps://www.emmalawler.com/SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro7:53 - Takeaways from working at The Skimm18:45 - Business trends to pay attention to33:56 - Why your should build a "boring" business

All right, all right. Emma, Emma Lawler. Welcome, welcome, welcome. So you're a friend of the editor of the pod. We've actually never spoken. But she said, Ari was like, you got to meet Emma. She's like a dynamo. So I wanted to meet you. Yeah, tell me a little bit about who Emma is and what makes Emma really, really dynamo. Yeah, so I started my career as a product designer and was in San Francisco in what I would say was the peak of Web 2. So got to learn from really awesome engineers, product managers, designers at that time, spent a lot of my early career at Fitbit. And so I was working on both physical and digital products there on iOS, Android, and web. And then stayed through the IPO. so really saw this upward trajectory of what it looks like to be an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley at that time. And then started my first company called Moonlight. And that was when people were leaving the Bay Area and New York to go live in, like, Mexico City or wherever,

and still have access to really high-quality work. So that first company was enabling remote work for software engineers who still wanted to work with companies in the Bay Area and get paid to do that. after that we sold Moonlight actually to a company called Pull Request in Austin and then was in New York at that time and went and worked at the SCIM leading product and so they were trying to apply the New York Times model of content monetization to their podcasts and newsletters and things like that and then decided I wanted to go back to business school so that that's not the normal trajectory for entrepreneurs But went to Chicago Booth for the past two years and got a ton of more formal traditional business training on the finance side of things. And then also got to work in B.C. So I worked at a VC firm called Chicago Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence and got to help invest in a bunch of companies and started my company that I'm working on now called Velvet. And then they funded that company. So now I'm moving back to New York. We'll be working on Velvet full time with my co-founder

and, yeah, very winding path, but have learned a ton about cross-platform consumer apps through all of those experiences. So you sold the business, you sold Moonlight to pull request. Can you talk a little bit about the M&A process and what you learned around how to sell a company? Yeah, I had no idea what I was doing. So we just went to our investors and they introduced us to a variety of people who might be interesting. And then we also went back to like our first enterprise customers and things like that and pretty much ran a sales process, very similar to fundraising. So just having as many calls as possible and then narrowing down a few prospects. And then the deal process was pretty quick. I mean, we were an early stage company at that point. So it was kind of like, do you want to do this

or not like, do we want to keep running this business or raise more funding or do this deal? And so it was the peak of the pandemic when we did that. And it was just the right outcome for us at that time. And then that company bought Moonlight, kept it running in the way that we had originally designed it and actually bought the platform. It wasn't an aquihire situation. So that was really attractive as well because we had just built this really strong community of software developers around the world. And they were, you know, living off of the platform. You're lucky that it was like the deal process went so smoothly.

I, you know, one of our portfolio companies, I was just speaking to the founder today. And he, he had signed an LOI with a really well-known company to buy their company. And they had been talking for months, like the, you know, had spent 50, to $100,000 in legal fees. And one day, this acquirer woke up and was like, you know what? Like, I don't love this team. I thought after like interviewing them and stuff like that and said like, hey, we'll continue to do this deal, but it's going to be at like a, you know, 50% haircut to what

the deal was. And the founder had to sit there and be like, I don't know if I want to do this. because if if I take a 50% haircut, that really means the investors are taking 50% haircut. And at that point, I'm kind of just like, I'll just close this and start something else. Yep. And you hear that time and time again where, you know, most deals flop, they don't end up happening. And you just got to assume that like the transaction is going to fail. But it sounded like for you, you kind of just, you had this deal, you signed the deal, you did the paperwork.

and all of a sudden, it was done. Yeah, it was pretty fluid. But I will say it's mostly just the tenacity of following through. Like, I think at any point we could have decided, it would have been easier to not do it. But have you ever shut down a company? Yeah, I'm constantly shutting down companies. Yeah, it's like a really horrible process. Like shutting down a company is way worse than like going through the motions to get acquired.

or raise more money. It's just a horrible process. Do you know Nikita Beer, the founder of Gas and TBH? So he sold TBH to Facebook, now Meta, and he sold, and then basically the same app. It was literally the same. Like he basically sold it to Facebook. It was this anonymous polling app. A lot of people know the story. Like work there for four years. The four-year vest over, he leaves. He launched something called gas. same app sells it to Discord.

Oh my gosh. Incredible. And why I'm bringing him up is I remember chatting with him and, you know, it was probably like summer 2017 maybe where he was going to shut down TBAH, his company. And I remember chatting with him and being like, hey, Nikita, like, I thought you mentioned you had this other app, this anonymous polling app that you're going to launch. And he's like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to launch it. and he was like calling me about how do you shut down a company or chatting with me about how to

shut down a company and he ended up as like a Hail Mary launching TBH. It ends up going viral and like tens of millions of people download it and ends up selling to Facebook like for tens of millions of dollars like a couple months later. To your point, it's like the tenacity of like sometimes you're at this point where you can either quit or double down. And as founders, it's like so lonely. Yeah, especially as like a solo entrepreneur. That's why I love having a co-founder because making those decisions on your own,

it's just a lonely place to be in. And all you're doing is like continuing to work on it until you let it die. And I think entrepreneurs hate that advice of like it only exists for as long as you make it exist. and then once you stop trying, it goes away. But in early stages, that's really what it is. Nobody else is going to make it happen for you. I mean, business is fragile, period. No matter how small you are or if you're Google size, it's fragile.

So, for example, like three months ago with this whole AI wave, Google was like on Red Alert, Code Red. Like our business is at, you know, could go to zero because of chat GPT in OpenAI. And their stock was getting like pounded. It was like down like 40% or 45% you know in 12 months. And the narrative was just going against them. And it's kind of like one of those moments where it's like, okay, like do we do we embrace this? Do we brace AI or do we just like ignore it?

And the point is even a trillion dollar company is fragile, let alone a seat stage startup or pre-seed startup with like two, four, six months of runway. So it's very, we're playing fragile games. And that's just the nature of it. So like, you do need to have pretty tough skin if you want to like be in the game in the arena. So you sold the company. Then you went to the skim to do product design. Why did you do that?

And what did you learn about newsletter businesses in that process? Yeah, mostly I had just been like a longtime reader of the skim. I was in New York. I wanted to be in person because I had spent three years remote and was feeling very ungrounded. I had never really worked with women either. So the skim is like, I would guess, 90% women and then two female co-founders. So that was mostly why I was attracted.

to it. And then I actually came on as a product manager and got to hire a team of designers and engineers to relaunch their mobile app subscription. So that was just a cool opportunity to take their content business. Like it was a lot of journalists and media people working there and then bring in the first tech team and apply more of those mechanisms that I'd learned at other tech companies. It was interesting being at a company with mostly women. because I'd never even worked with women before. And then also a company with a lot of media and journalism people who think very differently than the tech world does.

So all good lessons. I think I'm not meant to be in that role. I like working in a really technical organization with a little more balance. But it was a good learning experience again. And how did you know you weren't meant for that role? Because I think a lot of people are working jobs that they're kind of like, yeah, I think I like it. I might like it.

Some days are good. Some days are bad. How do you know if something is the right fit or not? I think I just wasn't feeling activated there. I like being in a company where I can be super ambitious and pursue things that are hard and where I feel like an entrepreneur. And it just didn't feel like that for me. I think media in general, and this is definitely a stereotype, but it's more of like you go to work,

you do your job and then you go home unless you're like an investigative journalist or something like that. And so I was just looking for like a little more ambition. And I wanted to be working really hard in my 20s and making things happen. And I just didn't feel that there. I actually met the two co-founders of the skim in 2012. And they pitched me on investing. So this was their seed round, I believe. I passed. Unfortunately, I remember why I passed. I was like, this is a really good idea. Makes total sense.

But they were just like, yeah, we're going to get Oprah Winfrey. And we're going to get all these people on board. And I was like, you just graduated, like, how you, like, you're thinking so big. And at the time, I had never met people who thought that big, honestly. At the time, I was like, what do you mean you're going to get Oprah Winfrey? You're just going to, like, call up Oprah Winfrey. and she's just going to like, and then I remember seeing a New York Times article that says, like, Oprah Winfrey is now involved with the skin in 2013. Yeah, they were so good at getting influencers and, like, really impressive people involved from the very beginning.

Like, if you look at their reel, they've been on, like, every morning talk show possible. So they were amazing at that. What about them made them so good at that? Because that's such a key skill to know as an entrepreneur. If you're able to make the impossible happen and bring celebrities, creators, press around you all the time, like that just makes, that turns building a startup from building a startup in hard mode to easy mode. Why do you think the founders of the skim were able to make that happen? I mean, I think part of it, and I wasn't on the team at this time, but part of it, they were just super young. Like you said, I think they had worked at NBC for a couple of years as producers, built up a really good network.

had already had more of a community there. And then they were young enough to just be like, yeah, we can get Oprah. Like, we're just going to go do that. And then I think once you get a few of those really big personalities on board, it's kind of a flywheel effect. And I remember being a user closer to 2012. And they were just the only ones talking in a very colloquial, conversational voice to women, but talking about serious news. So I loved their newsletter just because there was no, the only other way to get that kind of content was watching cable news at that time. And so they had that background of cable news, but then applied it to this new network. And I think they would just stay up. They were like best friends. They would just stay up until three in the morning and write content every night. So they were just passionate about it and then had a way to attract a bunch of people to that same type of model. And then now I think they have to figure out how to be. a tech company, which is a different skill set for them, I think. Totally.

I mean, I saw that firsthand. You know, I sold my last business to WeWork. And WeWork was always trying to be a tech company. What is a real estate company? So I always saw how did Adam Newman and team really try to bring people together to make it more of a tech company? And it's not easy. The short answer is it's not easy.

So that being said, like, You know, you're seeing companies like, you know, Morning Brew and companies like, you know, content businesses get great valuations. The problem I think what the skim has is that I'm just checking right now, but they've raised a bunch of money. Yeah. I think that was that was because I believe Morning Brew didn't raise money, right? Or they raised like 500,000. A very, yeah, a small, very small amount of money. And the scam I just checked has raised 28.4 million. Yeah. So, So they have to like really perform beyond that to find an acquisition. I think that's a business that should have been bootstrapped, to be honest.

Yeah. Because they're the way they make money is through ads. Like they could just hire an entire ads team and become very wealthy off of that. And like even give employees equity and dividends and stuff like that. If I'm the skim, what I'm doing now is like I stopped selling advertising basically. And I just go, I'm going to go build. products and partner with products. Yeah.

And then we're going to own equity in these products. Where we're going to see venture size returns is going to be in these next generation products for women. And we're just going to use the skim for distribution. Acquisition. Acquisition. And that's like what I, that's what they should be doing. Yeah.

But it's really hard to run both a media business that's based on ads and eyeballs and a product company. And you have to have people who understand how to do both. And I think that's what I was trying to get out before is that the type of person who builds product is a very different organization than writing content and monetizing with ads. So I think maybe New York Times is a good example. Yeah. But it took them a long time.

And I don't know how it's structured, but I would imagine like the people who make the New York Times games and stuff like that. Like those products, like it's probably a separate division of the business. business. So it's almost like the skim should create the skim studios and find a CEO for skim studios. Or the other idea is like you create the skim studios or you create studios and then you go to the skim and you say, hey, I'm going to give you $20 million for your business. But you're going to own 50% of, you know, skim studios and it's got, it's funded and stuff like that. So it's probably an interesting acquisition target for some people listening.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because it's a valuable audience, right? Yeah, it's a very unique audience. I think that's what advertisers love about it. And I'm curious to see what happens with that kind of business with AI as well, because it's just so easy to create content. Like the content they grew off of, you can almost automate that with AI now. So it'll be very interesting to see how you,

like take ownership and authorship for content moving forward in that kind of business. Yeah, the other interesting thing is I just checked BuzzFeed's revenue, but 2022, they had $437 million of revenue. And their business is worth $85 million today. It's publicly traded on the NASDAQ. So it's like, okay, BuzzFeed is bringing in that kind of revenue. Like, what's the skim worth? That's why I think that if you're starting immediately,

business, bootstrap it. Bootstrap it as long as you can. There's literally no excuse to start a media business in 2023 with venture capital, unless you're using venture capital to like scale something like a skim studios. Yes. If there's like a unique differentiated technology behind it, it's kind of like raising money for an e-commerce startup now and you're like the physical product.

I think it's very hard to justify because you're building on top of everybody. else's technology. And then that's the part that scales is the technology side of things. So before we get into what you're currently doing now with Velvet, you're in New York City. You seem to have your pulse on like the vibes and what things are going on in technology. What's keeping you up at night besides your own business around trends and ideas? Obviously, everyone is talking about AI and how it's going to disrupt things. And I think it's pretty hard to know both from like an investment perspective and a technology perspective what matters there.

But for me, the biggest problem is like proof of personhood. Like who posted this online? Is it a real human? Can you trust it? And something interesting that came from the Web 3 world was this idea of transacting everywhere, everywhere with wallets. And so I think there's something in between AI and Web3 wallets that allow you to like put a stamp on every single thing that goes on the internet, whether it's content or a transaction or a photo of you or whatever it is. But I can't imagine

we can move forward in a safe way without something like that, which just allows you to be like this fully online digital native representative of yourself. So you think there's going to be some blockchain-based validator that basically checks if what someone is saying, posting, is human verified, basically? Yeah, I don't think it has to be blockchain, though. Like, I think it's just there was a lot of invention that came out of the Web 3 world. And I would go to these hackathons last summer quite a bit. And it was super cool to see how much invention was happening.

And everyone was just like forgetting all the rules from Web2 and creating new things, which was super cool. But I think what a lot of them have realized in the past six months, maybe just because funding has dried up and people are very anti-crypto. But you can do a lot of those things without blockchain. So I expect that some of the innovations that came from there, like wallets, like identity, like verified credentials, will just make its way into normal databases and already are.

What other startups that you're seeing New York or could be anywhere? Are you like, wow, those people, they've got a really good business or they're doing something right? Yeah, I would say, I don't know how early they are, but like Vercel and SuperBase, I think they're super impressive companies that saw something in the future. and just created this entirely new tech stack and reality. Explain what those products are. Lecheco pays for both of them and uses those products religiously.

So I like both of those products. What are they and why are they interesting businesses? Yeah. So I'm probably going to botch these a little bit. But Vercel is basically helping you spin up servers anywhere. So you shouldn't have to like go to AWS and spin all of those up yourself and deal with all the infrastructure. So it helps you deal with a serverless infrastructure reality. And then super base is like what we're building our entire backend on.

And so it replaces a lot of the services that we would otherwise have to have a team of maybe five engineers to spin up. And like if you want to add on things like wallets, like authentication, anything like that, it's kind of just an integration that you turn on through Superbase. So I think in the same way that cloud computing allowed solo entrepreneurs to pop up, the Versal, Superbase, different things like that, are allowing one engineer to run an entire very complicated system. It's the classic picks and shovels strategy. There's all these developers.

It's a gold rush in a lot of ways. People are building digital products all the time. How do you make it easier for them to do their jobs? Yeah. And something I do is whenever I see like a new trend, I just, I stop and think. I'm like, okay, what is the picks and shovels opportunity here? I think it's a question that a lot of us should ask ourselves. So for example, like with all that's happening with AI and automation, you know, a lot of people's minds are going to be like, oh, how do I create a legal, you know, chat GPT or for lawyers or for doctors or thinking about consumer use cases or these use cases that are really, really big ideas that you're either going big or going home.

But I think sometimes the products with the least amount of risk are these picks and shovel businesses because you know that if you're mining for gold, if you're a miner and you're mining for gold, like what tool do you need to help mine that gold efficiently? And that's your goal. Yeah. And I think it's a stamina game as well because like I don't think anyone probably saw or sell and was like, oh, this is a super exciting. maybe like really niche engineers. But most people were not like, this is a super exciting thing that I want to exist. Whereas with consumer companies, I think it's easier to have that motivation because it's like everyone you talk to, your mom, your dad, your best friend. They like understand what you're building and can explain it to their friends. But with infrastructure businesses, you just have to know that it's the right thing and keep working on it. And like he's been working

on it for like almost a decade, but it looks like it's been a three-year success story. So I think that's really important to remember, too, is like you just have to keep going and eventually it's going to become something really valuable. It honestly sucks to build those infrastructure businesses in some ways because you feel like an idiot for so long. Yeah. Then one day, like you start really hitting escape velocity and you're like, wow, I have these thousands of people who use this in their everyday life.

and it's so valuable. Like they literally cannot mine gold without it. This is awesome. But it takes so much time to get there with these infrastructure businesses sometimes. And it's not fun to like meet someone or go out of the first date and be like, yeah, I like run a, you know, server company. It's way cooler to be like, I'm the co-founder of the skin. Yes, totally.

Even though the valuation of those two companies is vastly different. Like, I think the things that people get excited about usually are not high value companies because it's like what's relevant now, not what's relevant in the future. What other, I mean, I'm loving this hot take stuff. Like, what other hot takes do you have that most people probably would disagree with you, but, you know, you're on the right track with? Well, this is very unrelated, but I think remote work is a very contentious topic right now. like my last company was evangelizing remote work. And I was like, everybody should work remote. We never

need to go to an office again. But I've spent most of my career as a remote worker at this point. And I feel extremely ungrounded and communityless. Like I have to work really hard to find those things. So I think we're going to have to invent something. Like either we're going back to offices at least a couple days a week, or there's going to have to be a lot of innovation in how we can engage with each other, especially for junior employees. The reason I have a technical background is because I worked in an office with other people and learned from them. And I just, I don't think I would have gotten that virtually, even with like Zoom and everything we have today. But at the same time, I don't really want to go to an office from nine to five every single day. So for me, the

answer is living in a city and finding community that way. But I think we're going to have kind of a crisis if people don't go back to an office at all or build a community outside of their house. And when you say build a community, you don't mean like a community of your team. You're talking about like you're finding community in other places, right? Well, it used to be that that was your community. Like you made friends and met people at work. And so if you don't, don't have that. Or like, what happens when education goes fully online and you don't even make friends in college? Like, I think that would be kind of scary to not have connections that you, like, engage with in person. And maybe I'm just going to be an old person at some

point complaining about this, but I think that would be hard. Okay, here's what I hate about remote work and here's what I hate about online education. It's very transactional. Online education, it's like, okay I'm going to go take this course. I'm just going to go consume these videos and now I'm educated. I'm remote work. I'm just going to log into Slack and log into Trello or whatever and see all my to dos that I have to do and I'm just going to go and complete the tasks. Yep.

And what sucks about that is that the world, if the world is a more transactional place, I think the world becomes a worse place. because that, you know, you go to the barista for your morning coffee and you're just like, give me the coffee. You don't really care. It's not about, or you order it on your phone. You go to a blue bottle and just do it on the app. Yeah. Yeah. So the transactional world is actually quite a scary place, like at its extreme. I think we should be very, very careful of that. I think you're right that we need to be wary of it. I also think that you can build a remote team with some elements of community.

Like we're for example like I run a remote team. We've got tons of team members. We're constantly throwing like in person events where people can come and hang out and just like the goal isn't even to like do any work. The goal is just hang out and meet each other in a cool place. Yep. So for example, like we just did one in in Toronto and we had a bunch of people come. And it was just like, yeah, let's go and have some really great food and drink.

wine. How often do you bring the whole team together like that? And then like, what do you spend the time on when you're in person? So we do two major events per year where it's big team coming together. It might be a three-day thing or four-day thing. We did one, two big ones last year where we did one in Bali, Indonesia, and one in Montreal, Canada. And we just try to do really crazy stuff. So for example, like we, we literally, and I don't say this to be like a flex or anything like that, but like we found this like really crazy chateau outside Montreal, this like literally chateau. And I actually talked about it on my episode on the Where It Happens pod with my co-founder, Theotabba and a few episodes ago. But the idea is basically like, let's just

bring people to places that are going to create memories. And like, I just like saw people like walking around and taking videos and like sharing it with their friends and and it was just it was it was magical in a lot of ways so try to do that a couple times a year and then there's like teams kind of come together on a more regular basis but we are remote and I don't I personally don't want to go into the office like I just I can't I don't I don't want to and I know like Elon Musk will say like you know I'm soft or whatever and I just think that for some people, remote work is the most productive form of work. Yeah, I think I'm definitely more productive remote. Like, I think back to, the last time I was in an office full time was at

Bipit and we had these really fancy downtown San Francisco offices and we would go in there and like, honestly, half the day or more was, I think, social time thinking back compared to what remote work is where I'm like actually doing things for eight hours a day or close to it. Or if I'm not, I'm still being super focused with my time. But I haven't seen remote work. I haven't been at a company that's super productive at scale with remote work. So I'm building a remote company also, to be clear. Like I don't want to go to an office every day either. Shopify, from what I understand, is pretty remote. Like, they're mostly a remote company. they started off in Ottawa, which is pretty random, all things considered.

And then they started having an office in Toronto and Montreal and other places. But then they eventually just went remote. And I think what works from what I understand from them is they have teams. Like, for example, if you're on the payments team, it's remote, but everyone needs to work on EST. Yeah, that helps. be in Charleston, but you could be in New York or Toronto or Montreal or anywhere along that EST because I think the time zone thing also kills people in remote work. Yeah.

It's soul-sucking. Like, thinking about, oh, my God, like, I need to stay. I need to, like, get up for my dinner and, like, call Tokyo because I have a team member in Tokyo. Right. If you can't, I think if you can't have, you know, a schedule and a routine, that's really hard. Some people do really well with it, but my perspective is that people are more productive when they time block and have a specific period that they're focusing on something. And even like EST to PST is really hard. Like the three hours is almost harder than you're up because it feels like you're in the same place.

But like someone's having dinner or going to bed when you're wrapping up your day. So I agree with the time zone thing. Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you're getting any value. You need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens podcast YouTube channel. I promise you the experience is richer, more interesting. So if you're getting any value, just stop what you're doing, open up the YouTube app, go to the website, and press subscribe at where it happens on YouTube. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, what are you doing?

Go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. All right. Switching gears to your new baby. Yes. Tell me about it and tell me about why you think it's going to be big. Yeah.

So every company I've worked at, I've focused on this place between acquisition and engineering. So like how do you get someone into your? your product, activate them, get them to pay or do whatever you want, and then retain them long term. And if you can't do that, you will fail as a company. Like if you just have a leaky bucket that gets people in and then doesn't keep them or you can't identify them, there's just no value there and there's no revenue. And so we're building tools that creates the crossover between those two teams. So no code acquisition on the front end. So giving growth teams, the ability to spin up all of these growth pages and acquire people to apps in about 10 seconds or less,

and then connecting that to the back end for engineering teams. So engineering teams never want to touch onboarding. Like you have to beg engineers to work on it because it's the most important part of your tech stack. It allows people to authenticate into a system and then accept payment. And so we're creating an API to do that authorization and payment on the back end. So it allows growth teams to experiment and do growth, but engineering, to trust the system. How do you come up with an idea like this? Because to me, this feels like, so I felt this pain, by the way, on a lot of projects that we work on. But I'm just curious, like, how do you go from I'm working at the skim to building this?

I spent two years trying to figure out what this company would be. So it's not like it just came to be. I actually started more in the Web 3 space, and I was really excited by wallet authentication. So, like, I adopted a wallet, started going to all these hackathons, and was just amazed that my identity could travel around with me. So it's like one tap to create an account, one tap to pay, one tap to sign for a transaction. And that was just the most seamless, amazing experience, but you couldn't use it anywhere, like, other than buying NFTs, which I was in school, so I didn't have money to do that. So even gas fees would like put me into debt. But that was a really amazing experience.

And it was this new design paradigm that I hadn't seen through all my years of rebuilding onboarding over and over again. But then when I met my co-founder, we realized we could just do it on normal databases. So that's really where the inception came from. Another good framework for thinking about how to build these types of businesses is, and you kind of mention it or allude to it, which is you look at, you pick an industry, so the tech industry, and then you pick, you map out all the teams that they have. And then you look at how do I build a productize infrastructure business that could 50x or basically like bottle up this team in some sort of software solution?

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think one that I don't want to do because I just like don't like this part of the stack, but I think is pretty ripe for disruption, is manual sales teams. Like for media companies, they go out and they sell an ad package to a company. And then it's like this fully manual process to get them integrated with the product. And in my opinion, it should just work like Google ads do. But like you have to have an entire engineering.

or who hates working on ads, building out this entire tech. But I think it's kind of like, it's not a fun problem to solve. Nobody wants to work on ads. Cool. And Velvet, like, how's it going? Did you raise venture for it? Tell us more. So I think this is maybe another hot take.

A lot of early stage companies, I think, raise a million to $5 million, and they hire like 20 people. and then you just run out of money before you get anywhere close to product market fit or creating value. So it's just going to be the two of us until we feel like we have product market fit or some version of it or maybe one more engineer and trying to keep it super lean in the meantime. So our first product will be ready hopefully in the next couple of weeks for adoption. But like we were talking about with infrastructure companies, it's just really high stakes. Like if you mess up someone's user data one time, you never get to have a customer again.

So it's a longer sales process, a longer development process. We're using SuperBas and Bursale, which is pretty cutting edge. So there's just we have to run into all the bugs ourselves before we can offer it to other people. But yeah, going well. Always wish it was moving faster. But I think with infrastructure, it just it takes years to get there. That's the other thing. You only need one to really work.

Yeah, totally. Where could people find out more about you and Velvet? Yeah, Velvet is Velvet.cash. And my website is Emma Lawler.com. And all my socials are there, but happy to connect anytime. This has been wonderful. Thanks for coming.