This Week in Startups - 70mph Drone Deliveries, 125% Tariffs & What $10M Exits Really Mean | E2109

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Today’s show: Jason, Alex, and Lon talk about stories reshaping the startup world: 70mph drone deliveries are officially live in Dallas, with Zipline and Walmart promising groceries “as the crow flies” in under 5 minutes. Meanwhile, Trump slaps a 125% tariff on China and hints at a global economic shakeup — Jason warns founders to brace for layoffs and bankruptcies unless they’ve got a Plan B and C. Finally, a UK startup sells for $450M and VCs barely break even… but the founders walk with $20M. Jason explains how small exits create the most dangerous kind of founder: the one who never needs another check. Plus Office Hours with Orchestra CEO Sergie Poe.Timestamps:(0:00) Jason kicks off the show!(1:37) Tariffs, market volatility, and startup implications(5:33) Startup resilience: Layoffs and bankruptcies(10:35) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions(12:10) Globalization and startup ecosystems(13:52) Recent startup deals and Zipline's expansion(19:56) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(21:16) Zipline drones and Marquese Brownlee’s review(24:31) 70MPH Drones and the future of ddeliveries(30:05) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(31:51) Founder FridaysPitch Madness matchups(33:35) LifeStack and Burble pitches and discussion(43:26) Arcana and Tactun pitches and discussion(50:12) Summer West Whiskey and MomSub pitches and evaluation(56:36) Orchestra's office hours: Challenges and strategiesSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpLinks from the show:Orchestra: https://orch.so/Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:35) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions(19:56) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(30:05) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

This is incredible. These things probably fly easily 30, 40, 50 miles an hour. 70 miles an hour, the guy says in the video. And so they're based on how long most delivery routes are. They say three to five minute deliveries for almost everybody in Dallas. If you're, yeah, going from a Walmart. And, you know, we have this expression here in Texas as the crow flies. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard this. It's also in Tennessee. I think it's in Tennessee. That old-fashioned term, groceries. But as being, it's a word, groceries, okay?

It's just a word. I love that. It's like one of my favorite Trump clips of all time. I don't know. It's a simple word. Simple, old-fashioned word, groceries. This weekend startups is brought to you by Brex. The financial stack founders can bank on.

Unlike traditional business banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and no transaction fees. And you can get 20 times the standard FDIC protection. Get the business account trusted by one and three U.S. startups at brex.com slash banking dash solutions. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Northwest Registered Agent.

Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. from LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwest registered agent.com slash twist today. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host Jason Calcanus with me again here in studio.

Lon Harris is here. We're in the Austin studio, which is great fun. We're now going to be doing it live. Alex, of course, is in Providence. And he is joining us here on Zoom. He's at Alex on Twitter. I'm at Jason. He's at Lon's.

Two of us in the four character club, one of us, myself. In last place, in the five character club, we've got a full docket. We have to start with tariffs. Of course, we're going to talk about these in relation to startups. We have a clip, I think, of the chaos. And I guess, do you guys want to, Alex, you want to start with the clip, or do you want to just give us the quick rundown of the latest? I think the rundown is the best place to start.

So everybody, as you probably know by now, reciprocal tariffs from the U.S. went into play last night at midnight. There has been quite a lot of global response. We've seen China ratchet up tariffs higher on U.S. exports. We've seen the EU drop tariffs on metals and probably more to come. And then the latest, if you were hoping for some good news that this is all about to settle down. Instead, Trump promised to put a 100% tariff on TSM if they renege on their plans to build in the U.S. So Jason, I would say, in summary, bad. getting worse.

Okay, yeah, it's a mixed bag. Everything is going up and down. Nobody seems to know, and we're all in law, and I think, trying to interpret 4D Chess here. Yeah. Well, I mean, we all know that Donald Trump doesn't like to back down, especially if everybody, like, in the world is like, you have no choice. You have to back down. That's like, you know, he is like toddler when you're dealing with a child, like the more you tell them what to do, they want to do. they want to do the opposite.

That is the nature of this. He wants to smash people and counterpunch. So the counterpunch, you know, I guess the playbook is never apologize, counterpunch and dig in. So find ourselves in a weird place, I think the market's been doing backflips. Every time I look at it, it's either crashing or not. There's a ton of speculation about, you know, the tail end, the front end, are they going to cut race?

or are we going to refinance? We're going to put all that aside and just make the point that's important here for startups, which is you have to block this stuff out unless you are directly, directly, directly, impacted. And we need to have plan B and plan B C for every startup. I believe if this isn't worked out this week,

because here we are, it's week two of this. If it's not worked out this week, what we're going to see next week is mass layoffs, furloughs, firings, and resizing, right-sizing is the word you'll hear people say. So CEOs of companies will come out next week, starting Monday, I think, and say two things. One, we're going to stop giving guidance. So if you are United Airlines, I think today they said, we can't give guidance. So we can't tell you what our earnings are going to be, Alex.

We can't tell you what our revenue is going to be. that is really going to shake the market up. But it's the right thing to do for these companies because they really, in all honesty, how could they give you? The second piece is going to be layoffs. And what you'll see is companies like the ones who are directly impacted,

which might be like a retailer like Nike. Nike might announce a 10% layoff on Monday. And then, you know, maybe Walmart, Target. retail people directly. And then, you know, tech companies have a unique ability with their war chest of cash typically to avoid this, Alex. But I do think that's the next shoot a drop. So there's two.

We're not going to give guidance. We're going to lay people off. Then number three, Alex, I know there's probably some breaking news at this moment that will be irrelevant tomorrow. But the third piece is if it's not resolved by Friday in the next 30 days, but probably starting around 30 days, bankruptcies. Yeah. You're like, how can a company go bankrupt?

Well, you'll have personal bankruptcy. There were people who were teetering on bankruptcy. We just didn't know about it. We didn't know how bad they had it. And they just won't be able to move out like their cars or something. And so that could get very weird. I saw today, Range Rover or Land Rover decided, you know what? We can't send cars to America.

So if you like the Land Rover or the Range Rover, I think it's the same company that makes those beautiful cars. They just said with the 25% tariff, we might as well not send them. And I didn't know this, or I didn't fully appreciate it. If you were to send those cars, Lon, you would pay the 25% tariff on them hitting the ground in Long Beach, California. And then if you sold them, you now have to carry that 25% until sale. Now, these cars have been sitting on lots for three months, six months, nine months. It's not a great time to. sell cars. So they just said, you know what, screw it, Yolo, we're going to send these cars other countries that don't have some of tariffs. Okay. Alex, tell us the chaos that happened.

Yeah, literally. 90 seconds, I explained all that. Actually, it was a grand total of six minutes ago, Jason, but here is the latest quoting from Trump here, quote, based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets, I am hereby raising the tariff charged to China by the US of America to 125% effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near few, future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the USA and other countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable. Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 countries have called representatives of the

U.S., including the Department of Commerce, Treasury, and the U.S.T.R., to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to trade, trade barriers, tariffs, currency manipulation, and non-monetary tariffs, and that these countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the U.S., I have authorized a 90-day, three-month and a substantially lowered reciprocal tariff during this period of 10% also effective immediately. So Jason, China tariffs going up, everyone else, down to 10%, but still up from where they were. If you could pull up Alex from last week. Yeah.

I said this, if the market keeps going down in the next 48 hours, he's going to pause this and he's going to relent and take a victory lap based upon a dozen companies, I'm sorry, companies, a dozen countries. a dozen countries basically coming to the table. Yeah, that's always the pretend that you got everything you wanted and that it was a total success, declare victory, and then back down.

That's the Trump two step. So the Trump two step in full effect here and I literally had said, I think it was on Thursday, if you find that tweet, where I literally predicted this would happen by the end of the day, Tuesday. I was off by half a day, I guess.

You'd treat a lot. Jason. This is going to take me a little bit of a second to find. Sorry to say. Not only did I tweet it. I retweeted it a couple times because I was so convinced I was right. But it was definitely last Thursday. I tweeted it. Got it. Here we go. Yeah, it was a beautiful deal. We got everything we wanted. It's a perfect deal. There was no need to keep going. That's, you know, that's always the line. There's a 75% chance Trump will collect seven of these pelts over the weekend. Do a couple of victory laps.

And then in a couple weeks, we won't be talking about tariffs. Jason, is that the correct tweet? It is one of the collection of tweets I did on that day on Thursday. I did have a more succinct one that he would, you know, do 12 of these and then go. But it is essentially, I don't need to take too much of a victory lap here, because I believe this was obvious that there is no way he could sustain this. And I think the reason this happened today and we're seeing this right now is because, Congress was going to get a majority, get two thirds.

I guess they have to get 66. I mean, that's what Rand Paul has been really pushing for, that Congress needs to retake their authority to do tariffs and handle tax issues. I mean, that was probably inevitable if Trump had stuck to his guns long term. Here's the tweet. I put it into the chat room. Trump will fold in the next 48 hours of this continue. Sorry, I mean, all quotes.

Trump will declare victory in the next 48 hours as 12. plus leaders, drop their tariffs unconditionally. And that was the one I was thinking would be the, you know, the breaking point. And I said that on April 6th, 10 p.m. And today is April 9. So, yeah, I was off by. Very close. All right.

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slash banking dash solutions. Once again, brex.com slash banking dash solutions. But one thing I've been tracking pretty carefully is what is the EU's response to this? Because we've talked a lot on their show about EU startups

and how they're doing, how well they're doing, or how not well they're doing, why there isn't a major world-bending trillion-dollar European tech company and so forth. Well, we're seeing companies like NextGen Cloud, which is a UK-based Neo-Cloud, announced things like today, a $45 million Series A to build out more neocloud capacity to take on EU AI demand. Why does that matter? Well, the European Commission also dropped a huge new push to lower regulation, invest in data centers, and essentially upskill European industry with AI. So while we are saying, oh, gosh, this is much better.

to not have such a huge tariff on the whole world, other people are making plans that pull them away from us. And if we lose American technology hegemony over Europe, we're going to lose some of our monopoly profits. And that's going to harm American industry. So as a patriot to this country, I think this was a pretty serious own goal, even with the pause on some of the reciprocal tariffs. It's just a mistake. Certainly could have been executed better, but like a lot of things, I think, in the second term, Trump is going to push the envelope. And, you know, I nicknamed you. him Captain Chaos for a reason. He does chaotic things. I attached like the Joker image to him driving

the car. Like he is a chaotic actor by design. I've seen this before. I've been in negotiations with people who are chaotic actors. And at a certain point, you just stopped doing business with them. And so to your point, will people stop doing business with us? Probably America's too important a market to stop. But will people think, are there other places? I can. make money to build, you know, less dependency on this market. Of course, let's get to startups. All right. Let's talk about a couple of deals.

Jason, you want to talk about startups. So a couple things have happened today. First of all, a company called List, L-Y-S-D, unknown to me, but it raised quite a lot of capital from Moulted Ventures, Balderton, Excel, and others. Series D-evaluations, 700 million online fashion search engine. It sold for $154 million in cash to Zozo, a Japanese-based fashion company. So a bit of a letdown, but still a nine-figure exit. It's interesting to see what we call in the industry, singles and doubles.

A singles and doubles are a great part of our industry's makeup, and you really do want to see these happen. Why? In a short sale, in a single or double scenario, the founders do really well typically. The founders, if the founders own, if the founders own 50% of a company and the employees and investors own 50%. The investors, let's say paid, I'm going to pick a number, 50 million for their 50%, just to keep it nice and clean. And let's say you sell for 100 million.

Typically, they get that 50 million back. They have the ability to take their money back. Then there's 50 million left. They don't participate in that in some cases, or they might have participating preferred shares, which means they get their money back. Then they get their percentage back. And so there's a concept of preferred shares, and then there's participating preferred, and there's liquidation preferences. If you had a 2x liquidation preference, you put in 50 million for your 50% over time. You would get 2x that number, 100 million, and then the shareholders would split the rest. Right. In other words, employees get nothing. Nothing. And that does happen from time to time. Why do people do liquidation preferences or participating preferred? They do this because they can't. raise money with cleaner terms. The company's not doing well, so they raise and you have to give investors something, at least a 2x return, for taking all that risk, and it is a lot of risk.

Let's just say this happened cleanly, and the shareholders own, the employees own 50%, they get $50 million. So the team might split $10 million, the two co-founders might split $20 million each. That could be life-changing money. And the VCs just get their money back. kind of sucks for the VCs, right? They took all this risk, took all this time, and all they got was a push. It's kind of like in Vegas, you get a push on your money.

And so these are frustrating for VCs, but it's better than losing your money. But they're fantastic for founders. They actually got millions or tens of millions of dollars. And what that does is it gives them the ability to start more companies. And this is the one great, vibrant thing about capitalism that is under a pre-

In these small sales, great entrepreneurs come out, and they have their FU money. FU money defined in 2025 is 10 million bucks. I know that sounds like a low FU number. The reason it's a real number is you could live in Austin, buy a two or three million dollar house, have $7 million, make seven percent on it a year, make a half million dollars in interest a year, and you would basically be able to F off forever. Yeah, most of the startups that I freelance for over the last 10 or 12 years, they were that. It was a guy who'd had like a pretty good exit before enough to fund another project, like Rancor.

That was the word Ranker came out of. Yes. So this is a very, these second, third time entrepreneurs have a win under their belt, Alex, become particularly dangerous. Yes. They could either go become LPs and other funds. They could start their, they could start angel investing. They could start their own fund or they could start another company.

And when they start the next company, if you've got $20 million, in the bank and you start a company, you're not going to go to YC or do an angel round. You're going to fund it yourself. You'll fund the first 500K, the first million like I've done previously, although I like the discipline of having outside investors because I feel it makes me better at what I do, because then I've got other people's money at stake and it sharpens my blade a bit. But congratulations to them. Good to see. Where did this occur? Where are these companies domiciled? Japan. List is British and Zoso is Japanese. Okay.

So it's an international deal. Globalization is also a good thing. Yeah. And the reason globalization is a good thing is because you have more buyers for startups. If we're allowed to make cross-country purchases, then you have good relations. So you have more buyers to buy companies like this in the single and double era. And this is absolutely fantastic for the market. Congratulations to everybody involved.

All right. Moving on, you know, I saw a zip line. Mm, yes. is, and a founder's been on the company. I'm not sure what episode he was on last. But this is really interesting. We've been waiting for drone delivery. We've been waiting for V-TOLs.

And like self-driving, it's starting to feel like science fiction is becoming a reality. We're going to have, we have Waymo in a couple of markets. And now drone delivery has been happening in Ireland with the company we've had on the program and it's happening now, I think, with Walmart in Texas, correct? Yeah. So the question is, how, where, what, and how much? These are the questions I have about drone delivery. Right.

Can we get it? What can be delivered and how much is it going to cost? So let's chew this up for me. Yeah, so just today we've got this video Zipline. This was a company that used to focus on they were going to deliver medical supplies via a drone. They found it in 2014, and the original pitch was like in Burwanda and these kinds of areas. We can get people their medications much more quickly.

They've since pivoted since 2021. They've been experimenting with using these for commercial deliveries, delivering, you know, let's see the video. Yeah. Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them Lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SOC2 or ISO, 2701 are the keys to building

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I think we can talk over it. This looks like somewhere near the water are a bunch of drones on metal racks. It looks quite industrial. I guess this is maybe their testing facility where they did tests. I'm guessing this is they're testing. facility. That could be Northern California, if it's by the Pacific Ocean. Yeah, that looks

like Northern California. Yeah, so this is their journey to build these things. I don't know if we have, do we have sound on that or no? I turn it off because they were talking over, you're talking. Got it. Okay. Okay. Future that we would be proud to hand to our kids is about as cool as it gets. Okay. I know it's been a lot of sacrifice from a lot of people to make this happen. I don't think any of us thought it would be easy it? Okay, here we go. So now that was like their preamble of how hard they were.

Now we're seeing the city of Dallas, a bunch of people looking up in the sky. And that's a, there's a drone. And the way their zip line drones work is they're quadcopter-ish, but they have a little mini kind of, a tether.

Yeah, they can lower the objects by tether. And that's also, we have a video as well of how they pick up the food. And you could see they're using a line to sort of pull it up into the drone itself. It's pretty cool. Yeah. So these drones have a tether with a box. So the drone doesn't need to land.

That's the key feature of what Zipline is doing. And Alex, what are the details here in terms of who's using it and where? So it's starting off in Dallas as their first major metropolitan area, as that initial video said. Walmart Supercenter is the delivery partner. And we are talking about a thing that can carry. I think it's eight pounds. about 10 miles of memory serves. So keep in mind that their original system

was designed for slower, long distance, almost fixed wing style transportation. Their second generation of products is aimed at this more urban environment. Jason, do you want to see what it looks like kind of in practice at a restaurant? Yes, that would be great. Yeah, we got this Marquez Brownlee video

that actually shows it in practice. Like, here's how it would pick up food from a restaurant. Yeah, so here's our friend. Let's go. Drone. Now, there's a theoretical future where restaurants and other small businesses can have this drop-off point that's essentially a hole on the wall that they just put the order in for the drone to pick it up from.

It would have to be relatively inconspicuous. But even for companies that don't want to do all that, they've prototyped these standalone passive structures. So the idea is to make it easy for the restaurant to just walk outside and leave the package in the structure where the drone can pick it up with the Zipland system. I actually saw a demo of this working as well, and it was technically pretty impressive. Once fulfillment happens, that to be is awesome. And if you're not watching the video, essentially, imagine a mailbox-sized, I don't know, Jason, the bread box, yeah. Breadbox, yeah. Coming down from the drone and the restaurant puts the food into it, it gets zipped up via its cable back onto the drone and then taken off and dropped to your house.

What's also very cool is on their little tethered drone pod they drop down. It has a rotor in the back to ensure that it can stay level. So if you ship drinks, you won't get matcha all over the inside of the drone carrier. I love to that. This is incredible. These things probably fly easily 30, 40, 50 miles an hour. 70 miles an hour, the guy says in the video. And so they're based on how long most delivery routes are.

They say three to five minute deliveries for almost everybody in Dallas. If you're, yeah, going from a Walmart. And, you know, we have this expression here in Texas as the crow flies. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard this. It's also in Tennessee. I think it's in Tennessee. Groceries, that old-fashioned turn.

groceries. But as being, it's a word, groceries, okay? It's just a word. I love that. It's like one of my favorite Trump clips of all time. I don't know. It's a simple word. Simple old-fashioned word groceries.

Anyways, as the crow flies. As the crow flies is a key piece to this. If you had to drive and a door dash driver is doing it, you got stoplights and you got turns and you got highways and, you know, it might be five miles. to drive somewhere, but it might be like one and a half miles as the crow flies with no stoplights. So it's not just like your driver could be going, could average 70 miles an hour on the way to your house like a lunatic fast and furious. But there are stoplights and turns. This is 70 miles an hour straight shot.

That's really fast. 70 miles per hour, let's just say, you know, if you're three miles as the crow flies, that's three minutes away. Yeah, I mean, you just think of car travel versus air. travel. It's, it's no contest. I could have gotten here from LA in three, four hours. It took three days. It's going to be pretty amazing. You can do up to five pounds. So if we start thinking about that, if you ordered an iPhone with the packaging and everything or a laptop, all of those things could be sent, even with packaging. There's still work to do, but here's another thing. If you had to send, your groceries and you had

let's just say 50 pounds of groceries would it be better to send 10 of these or I mean I'm saying it kind of as a joke but you know better to send one driver or a human with 50 pounds of groceries or 10 of these that's going to be the question I think people are going to answer I think that hinges on just is the person driving an ICE car or an EV

because if it's an EV it's an EV it's electricity both ways But if they're going to drive a, I don't know, raised F-250 to your house across the Texas highways, probably much more efficient on the environmental side to use six drums. Yeah, no doubt about the environmental side, for sure. And these things are all electric. And then I guess the last piece of the puzzle in terms of adoption is going to be sound and noise pollution. And here's what I'll say. If these things are happening and you hear it five or ten times a day, it's not going to be a big deal.

because of the massive convenience. So you're going to be okay with your neighbor getting these burrito deliveries until 10 p.m. You might not like it after 10 p.m. So there'll be some noise issues if you're not on a three acre property or less. If you're in a track house community where everybody's got a half acre, this could be a little annoying if your neighbors are ordering a burrito every night. I'm not specifically talking about you, Lund. But if you got that late night burrito guy.

Sometimes you need a late night. I'm going to say me. I think in an urban environment, it's already so noisy, negligible. You got helicopters, you got sirens, you got trucks backing up, you got leaf blowers. What's a drone every now and again? I'm going to be an urban. You know why? Fear of these things falling out of the sky. Paradoxically, you could do these point to point, Alex, in an urban environment where you put on the roof of a cloud kitchens, the drone system, and it goes to the roof of us. And it goes to the roof of other people's buildings. So in San Francisco, let's say it sounds crazy to do this because if one falls, it would kill somebody. But the truth is, the chances of that happening are low in good weather

conditions and they would go, it's probably safer to go from the roof of a cloud kitchen in Soma to the buildings in Soma on the roof and then drop them on the roof and have the people who live in that building go to the roof and have a caged area where you pick your stuff up. or you have a person up there to get it. Pretty incredible. I do think it's worth figuring out for urban environments eventually, just because think of the traffic relief this would provide in a place. Like, imagine if everybody in L.A. who was a delivery driver was suddenly not on the road anymore.

Well, a lot of jobs, but you're also clearing the roads. Yeah, that's a super important point. But also, we're comparing this not to Waymo-driven safe drivers on the mode. We're comparing this in Jason's example to the average San Francisco driver, who is an idiot. and who does not know how traffic works. And I say that as a diehard San Francisco fan, the drivers there aren't great. So I think it's much more risky to cross the road,

even at a stoplight, than it is to have a drone go overhead. I just want to throw in here that I'm so excited about this. I really, really hope zip line nails it. I hope it works. I hope they bring it out. But I got super excited about Amazon Prime Air when they first announced that.

And I think also the second time they announced that. And so I'm just, I'm going to withhold my own personal hopes until this rolls out to like a second and third market. because I just can't have my heart broken again, but I can't wait for this to come to my neck of the woods. I have the perfect backyard for this. Bring it on. Founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right way. Tight is right, and it all starts with having a registered agents. Investors simply won't fund your business if it isn't structured

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Go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist today. Can we move on to Frounder Friday? You want to do some pitches? Oh, yes. Let's do our pitches for sure. We've got three matchups. left till we're ready for the elite eight. So I was hoping to get through them today. We'll see. Okay. Let's start with our first company for people who don't know. Founder Fridays is a program

we created for founders, five founders here at this week in startups. It's pretty simple process. You sign up at Founder Fridays. Tech, our partners over at River, which is a community building tool that we incubated, set up these local groups. You apply to be a manager to be a host. You then find five founders in your neighborhood, in your area. The six of you get together, and you can have three pods of six. You go around a table every first Friday of the month. It's kind of like a mastermind group or a study group, if you want to look for analogies, Lon. And then, Alex, what we do is you go around the table.

What was your big win for the week? Oh, what was your big win for the month? Or last two weeks, however, we're a cadence you use. And then what are you struggling with? Everybody goes around the table. It just says those two things. three minutes each. Now, three times six, 18 minutes, after about 20 minutes. Everybody said their piece. Everybody takes notes. And then how can we help each other? Somebody might say, hey, I'm having a

hard time with my cac. My customer acquisition cost is too high. I don't know how to track it. We're doing Facebook guests. The person says, hey, have you tried doing original content in a podcast or mastering TikTok and not paying in just doing earned media? Another person says, oh, I did earn media with PR and all of a sudden you do that sharing. What we asked each of these groups to do is pick your worry or pick your what's the term fighter. Yeah, pick your contender. Pick your contender would be the best way to say it. Our first matchup for round three I think would be New York versus Philadelphia. So from New York, the company is Lifestack. They are an AI calendar for health and productivity. An AI calendar. AI powered calendar that you can use to monitor your health, your productivity.

Okay. All right. Let's bring up our contender from New York. It's LifeStack. Yes, sir. Hi, I'm now founder of Lifestack, the first AI calendar built for health and productivity. Our energy and focus fluctuate throughout the day due to our body's natural rhythms. One study shows that performance can vary by up to 20% depending on timing.

Yet most people still get their way through the day, leading to burnout and inefficiency. With wearable health trackers and AI, we now have the data and tools to change that. Introducing LifeStack, it syncs with your calendar, to do-do list in wearables to help you schedule tasks and activities at the right times based on your calendar events, circadian rhythms, stress levels, and more. And here's how it works. Your energy levels are displayed as a collar feed map alongside your calendar. Green means high energy, red means low. You can now schedule, for example, deep work in high energy zones and breaks or smaller tasks and lower energy runs. And because life happens on the go, we also provide a mobile app so you can check out of just your schedule anywhere, anytime.

We're in public beta with 4,000 sign-ups and growing paid users. While we initially built for health-conscious professionals, we've seen especially strong, among people with ADHD who travel with energy management. So that's our initial focus, but we believe that the need for smarter time management itself is universal across knowledge workers, so the potential market is huge. We're growing through organic content and influencer mentions. Midterm, we'll leverage calendar network effects, and long term, we aim to partner with wearable makers as their go-to productivity layer.

There are plenty of productivity tools out there, but LifeSack is the first calendar built on health data, and now we're creating a new category of health-powered productivity. And we're the right team to build it. I come from Japan's top AI research lab and our founding team has deep food science expertise. Lastly, some may think that the calendar is a small opportunity. We disagree. We see it as a foreign interface of our life. By enriching it with data, starting with wearables, we're building the foundation for your ultimate personal AI.

All right. All right, guys. So what do we think, Jason? Lifestack. It's great. Let's see the second one and then give our comments on both. Ah, okay. Just for efficiency.

From my hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here's Burbel. Burble. Burble. B-U-R-B-L-E. I'm Alexandra and I'm one of the co-founders of verbal. I'm also hypnotherapist and I want you to think about what a world with people who can move through this pronoun much quicker would look like. Verbal is the AI patent-pente wellness platform that utilizes hypnosis to help people create change in their life. It starts with we wanted to work with trauma because we believe that we have a technology that can help you create new neurological pathways to move through a quicker.

I'm a hypnotherapist and this is what I've seen in my office common complaints about the therapy world and also the app marketplace. And I decided that there was a gap in the marketplace for us to come in and do something that can create change quickly. Our platform has four different components to it, where they're going to help you tap into your subconscious mind for different coaching, binoral beads, activities.

But the most important is our state are creative verbal. In five steps, you get to pick what you want to work on, how you want to relax and the visuals we're going to feed you, how you want to end it, what music you want underliead with it, organize the track, and then our AI technology is going to create a custom track just for you. You might poo-poo hypnosis or think it's woo-woo, but it is gaining huge traction in the medical field

that it's used in top hospitals as you've seen below. In fact, we are in discussions with CHOP about bringing us into their system for them. We have five-star ratings already in our platform we've launched. People are telling us how much change they've created already. We have a monthly burn rate of $1,400 a month for the first 50,000 users because we've taken away a lot of the things that are convoluting the app

market in creative production costs. We already are in discussion in consideration with grants or helping veterans with the efforts with the NIH. We are a self-funded startup. We're already in the app stores, and we are working with collaborations like Alex's Lemonade Stan and the American Cancer Society. We are a team of people that are successful entrepreneurs in the wellness, mental health banking and AR and VR and VR tech space, neither are us. And that is Burball. All right. All right. Two great companies. What I like about both of these companies, Lon, is they're directed health care by the individual,

self-directed health care, I believe is the future. You can pitch these kind of new modalities and people have tried to to the health care companies, to the insurance companies, to enterprise companies. The problem is consumers have to embrace it. And if you go after consumers

and they're willing to embrace it, then you know you have something because you're not going through a third party. When you try to sell this to a health care company, Alex, you have to win them over and then they have to win their customers over or you have to win both over in parallel. What I like about both of these is they're saying

we're just going to win over the customer so much that they'll take out their wallet. I saw this happen with com.com. I started happen with Brilliant.org for tutoring people, tone base for teaching people how to do classical music and Steasy, teaching people how to dance, FitBod for Fitness. all of these

costs something in the range of 50 to 100 bucks a year, right? Five, 10 bucks a month. Maybe they offer you the deals at, you know, 16, 17, 18 dollars a month and then back down to the $60 a year subscription, but they work. And they work for the high-end customer.

What I like about the ADHD one is it's not just let me take meds, let me take speed, let me take this, let me take that, to try to get myself more productive. I like people understand. their energy. I like them understanding what other ways there are to manage these other than pharmaceuticals, which I believe, listen, you might believe differently, your doctor might believe differently. I believe there's over-medication going on. The statistics are on my side on that.

Doesn't mean it doesn't work for certain people. Does it mean it's not a valid modality to take these drugs in the short term? But I think before you do these short-term fixes, doing the basics, meditation, diet, sleep, and exercise are very important. Then you have these which are both technique-based modalities for trying to deal with

issues in your life. I love both of them. In terms of which one I like most, that is the question. It's very tough. This is like a jump ball. It could go either way. Alex. I'll go first then. Yeah, which one did you like best and why? If you guys are jumping the ball. So first of all, on the

hypnosis front, I've had people in my life that have done hypnotic things during birth, for example, and they've reported... I did hypno birthing too. Yeah, it works. Yeah. You did. Jason, you gave birth. Well, no, my wife gave birth. We went to hypnotherapy classes.

Sorry, I was... I was perplexed by that statement. You're supposed to use the we when you're... You know, we are expecting. Yeah, we are. I don't know why that short-circuited me so much, but I was just confused by that comment. But what I will say is, I am definitely someone who has periods of... a time in which I am an absolute world kicker, and I have times in which I'm a person was to hide

in a hole. So to me, I think the app that attracts my energy levels and let's be sort out my schedule along that makes the most sense. I think it has a bigger tam. So I'm going to pick that one. Which one? Life stack from New York. Life stack. For ADHD, that helps you be more productive at different times of the day, which I agree. Like, that's a feature I could see myself using knowing that I have, you know, sort of peaks and valleys in terms of my attention level during the day. Okay. So you're going with the hypno. No, I'm going with Life Stack, the non-hypno one. I'll tell you my my hang up about AI doing hypnotherapy and maybe I'm a ludite, I don't know. How do you know the AI is going hypnotize you in a way that you're comfortable with, right? Like you're a little nervous. A little nervous

about a computer hypnotizing me. I feel like that's a sci-fi premise if I've ever heard one. Yeah, right now, producer Chris is writing a screenplay. He's just literally got a treatment. going as he's done. Yeah, I don't need Megan hypnotizing me. Well, I mean, you think about it, it'd be like, hey, can you get me more CPUs? You want to get me more CPUs. Why wouldn't you get me more CPUs?

You're feeling sleepy. You want more Cipos. Okay, so we got a tie here and that makes me the tie breaker. I think both of us went for Life Stack, New York's Life Stack. Oh, you did go for Life Stack, Alex. Yeah, yeah, I went for Life Stack. You can overrule us, though. Yeah, I do have that ability. Here's the thing. It was a jump ball for me.

I like both of them. I think that the hypnosis one will be able to charge more, but has a smaller audience. I think the calendar one has a bigger audience and is going to be able to charge maybe a little bit less. So I'm going to go with the calendar one as well. I think it's a bigger opportunity, but I think they're both really good opportunities. I would love to have either one in our accelerator. And I like to support things that have a small chance of working or that are long shots or that are new and different. these are long shots and are new and different, just like calm was. Right.

And I like those. I like a long shot. Okay, let's keep going. Congratulations to everybody who performed. It was very early, that was, even though we went 3-0 in voting, I think that was very close. All right, let's move on round two or match up two here in round three. First up, we have, it's an, I was, I'll admit, I was a little confused until I watched the pitch for this one. It's an SDK that helps advertising platforms create contextual ads for AI devs.

Let's watch it. This is Arcana from Los Angeles. I'm going to go ahead and say this is probably Arcana from Los Angeles. Arcana, not Arcana. I thought it was Arcana. All right. Anyways, let's take a look. I could be wrong.

Hello, everyone. We are the co-founders of Arcana. It is a content-based advertising platform that helps developers monetize that gen. AI application without compromising the user experience. Despite the rapid growth in the gen AI space, developers are now hitting a wall. Conventional ad malls prove intrusive and ineffective in the dynamic AI environment. This forces developers to choose between disrupting user experience, facing subscription fatigue, or missing critical revenue opportunities needed to build stable businesses. That is why we built Arcana.

Arcana uses deep contextual analysis to seamlessly integrate hyper-personized native acts. These ads feel like a natural extension of the AI interaction, not breaking the user experience like traditional ads. their traditional ads. Instead, Arcana unlocks real revenue potential for developers in a privacy first framework built specifically for the AIH. Our revenue model is simple. We share ad revenue with developers ensuring their growth while scaling our platform. In the past two months, we turned our idea into a fully functioning MEP validated by real users. Today we're seeing rapid growth. We have eight publishers onboarded, 150 live ads. It were 50 developers in our network integrating Arcana gains their applications.

I'm sorry and I have over five years of experience in the field of AI from co-founding a startup at 21 and raising a half a million dollars in funding to working as an ML engineer at Ralph and USCIS. And I'm done. I've managed 10 million day-driven ad spending and previously exited a startup bike route to a $4 million ARR. Together our blend of AI expertise, advertising know-how, and real-world founding experience gives us an advantage in the booming AI space.

Art Gina isn't just another ad platform. We are building an essential infrastructure for the gen AI economy. Join us in creating a sustainable source for the AI revolution. Thank you. Man, I love these guys. I love the idea. I love the fact that they're in the dumpiest, cheapest apartment with the cheapest blinds in the world. I had an apartment just like that, except I couldn't afford the blinds.

I don't know if you ever been so broke, you couldn't afford blinds. That looks like everybody's first L.A. apartment they're in right there. Yeah, it's disastrous. they look like they haven't showered. They look like they have no life. All they do is work. I love these guys. And I got to say,

empowering publishers and advertisers to make AI-based ads is just so crazy and awesome. And random, like you said, you get a little nervous about hypnotherapy and an AI doing it. And can you imagine making ads on the fly like based on the content?

It's like some tragedy happens that it makes like a, you know, a 9-11 ad in real time. I'm like, this is going to get crazy, but it could also be super effective and weird. But let's spin the globe on. Where is our next contender from? We're off too. I think this might be our furthest flung competitor.

Oh, no, Sydney. Second furthest flung competitor from Yerevan, Armenia. Here's Taktun. Tacton. Brain for machinery. Look around. So many machines in agriculture, construction, hospitals, and factories. All these machines have a brain insight, known as a controller,

and require a software interface for humans to interact. The manufacturers of this machinery spent more than 40% of their expenses to make that hardware and software compatible. The number of those systems around us is going to grow even bigger. There will be a billion autonomous robotic systems replacing human labor as physical AI advances. Tuckton breached the gap between software and hardware, introducing the brain for machinery, and an environment for equipment builders to generate end-user software applications without writing a single line of code. of code. It is also an AI platform that allows builders to deploy their custom AI models directly to our controllers. Now, manufacturers can build machines using Taptune five times

faster while cutting their R&D costs in health. We have two revenue streams, software platform subscriptions and quantity orders for controllers. This brings us to 600K annual contract value. This leads to a 48 billion market opportunity across various existing industries, not even counting future robotic systems. We are a team of 11 professionals with expertise in control systems, software and hardware. Below clients of Rafa Solutions, my previous company, some of whom will soon become Taktun's customers. We have acquired four customers from two industries generating $240k in ARR with the current

pipeline of 5MILA. If you would like to learn more about how Taktun will help make machinery smarter, creating safer, better world, where you have more time for you. For fun and joy, contact me. Okay. All right. Who doesn't want more time for fun and joy? I mean, I was spending so much time redoing the controller units in my factory that I wasn't

having much joy in fun, Alex. I mean, we got two very different concepts here. Both of them are great. So, yeah. Yeah. So I think Arcana could absolutely work. I think everyone wants to monetize AI conversations. But to me, that seems like a relatively obvious.

thing to do versus Taktun, if it can do half of what he said in that video, it's going to be a simply enormous company. So I don't fully understand it, but I don't care. I'm voting Tactun. Go Armenia. Okay. Lon. I hate to agree yet again and make it not competitive, but yeah, I was really blown away by this concept. If these guys can make this a reality, like a single system that can help connect all of our code to all of these devices all around the world and make them smarter, that's a revolution, I think. Yeah, okay. Hmm, this is tough.

The ad business and ad business tools tend to be small. And I think Tactun is the bigger opportunity. But once again, I find myself wanting to fund both companies. I think one of the things we've accomplished here with Founder Fridays is it attracts, people who are serious about being founders. The quality of these companies so far and the quality of these pitches and the real use cases for these is extraordinary. I think once again I might have done something brilliant. So I'll go with the sweep again. I'll go with, it was a tactoon? Tactun from Yerevan, Armenia. Tactune from Moss Isley. Yes. Okay. All right, we have two more

This is our last matchup until we have our Elite 8 selected. We've got first up, this one doesn't really need a lot of introduction. I bet I'll say the name of the company and you'll know what they do. From Denver, Summer West Whiskey. What do they do, Lon? Summer West. That's the company name. You can see the video's about to start.

I want you to picture a bottle whiskey. What does it look like? What shape is the bottle? and what colors the label? You're likely picturing a dark, kind of squarish-looking bottle because that's how whiskey has always looked. You're potentially picturing something like this. Jack Daniels, Maker's Mark.

Maybe this. This is the exact problem in the category. The whiskey category is an old-school industry with an aging demographic that makes new drinkers feel like it's unapproachable with its outdated branding and elitist language. That's what I like about. Which is exactly why we're launching Summer West Whiskey. Ew.

A brand that prioritizes easy drinking with lower proofing and smoother mash bills that don't make people scared to sip it. Our product has approachable and unique branding that stands out in the bar and is going after a hugely under-targeted demographic of new drinkers age 21 to 35. Last year, I launched a pilot program called Barbado Whiskey of 1,200 bottles, which sold out in less than 12 months being sold only in downtown Denver. From that, we developed our flavor profile further, dialed in our pricing, and learned what attributes of a product are going to truly make it stand out and maximize account velocity. My name is Noah. I'm an experienced financial analyst and I'm the founder of Summer West Whiskey. On our team, I've recruited industry professionals who specialize in their own respective niche of alcohol and CPG.

Okay. Here we go. All right. Fantastic. I mean, I'm looking at that, I do think that changing flavor profiles slightly to appeal to new audiences is not a bad idea. And I do think packaging matters. We saw that with tequila and mescal. All of those went through a little bit of a revolution.

I think even mescal becoming a category, it's more smoky, I guess. And then some people like the sweetness of some Casa Azul or whatever, but the bottles become iconic. People like that part of it. And so finally, our very last pitch of the Sweet 16 from Chicago, here is the Child Care Marketplace Service Mom Sub. Okay, here we go. I'm not 64 different people to try to get care. With mom subs, Sarah submitted her needs,

got matched to one nanny available when and where she needed care every week. Matt Checky on video and booked her. Mom sub handled background checks, scheduling, confirmations, payments, and schedule changes. To take out all the hassle of finding child care. This year, conversions grew 58%. Month over month sales increased 27%. The take is mostly from hourly service fees, which are included in the hourly rate and don't feel extra,

like subscription fees charged by competitors that only provide a list, a match. Imagine if every time you needed a ride, Uber gave you a list of 30 drivers' names and numbers and told you to find one willing to pick you up. That's what middle class working moms who need part-time care face. There are 7 million of them with a take of 600. The take for our B2B employer benefits is 10,000. There are 50,000 of them.

So the Tam is 4.7 billion. With 4,000 parents and 100 companies per city in 30 cities we get to 100 million. Our team includes serial entrepreneurs devoted to building Mom Sub. So Mom Sub is a child care provider for affordable trusted neighborhood child care and the benefit is.

The cool thing about it is they're matching you with one person who they recommend as opposed to, you know, like looking up on Craigslist, you've got a hundred people and then you've got a hunt and peck and try to find the one. So I guess then the question becomes, how is this different than an agency? But I do know that this is a big problem. Yeah, I think it's just taking what an agency would do and put. it in an app. So now I can contact that person on an app. I can pay them over the app. If I need to text them or we reschedule, it's all right there. But yeah, it is basically like

if you went through a professional agency. Yeah. So it feels, you know, this is always one of the challenges of our industry is, is it a service business or is it a scalable business? And marketplaces are great. They were sort of deriding marketplaces here, like care.com, which there's tons of reasons to not like a marketplace because it's variable. People can set their prices, but for the providers, they want to set prices. For some parents, you actually want to have a variable in prices because some people might be looking for an opair that's cheaper or a teenager to do babysitting. Other people might have anxiety about that and prefer somebody who's been doing it for 30 years, has three kids of their own, who are off at college, and they want somebody who's

CPR trained, background checked, et cetera, and just more dependable, right? First aid certifications, all that stuff. So both of these, I'm lukewarm on. I'm going to go with Momsom by myself, because I do think it's a bigger problem. And I'm not really into consumer packaged goods all that much. But I do wish them well. If this was a consumer package goods competition and I was an investor in that space, which some people are, they might really like what they're doing with that uniqueness of the whiskey. But I'm going to go mom sub. Anybody else? I want to go next. Oh, I got thoughts. Okay, so first of all,

strong thoughts about this. First of all, we already have alka pops and coolers. We already have hard seltzers. We don't need to take the glory that is the amber liquid of whiskey, the tears of the gods themselves, Scotland's critical cultural supremacy, and turn it into children's booze. This is ridiculous. The new bottle is ugly.

Noah, I love you. I love what you're working on. Don't like this. Sorry. on the nanny front for mom sub because so many of our friends right now guys have kids between the ages of zero and three we've seen a lot of this conversation we've also had Winnie on the show Sarah Moskoss Company that helps people find daycare

this is such a big problem I think it's a huge opportunity so mom sub for me boo to Summer West Whiskey but I love you guys good luck so mom sub moves forward I will say I love the concept of Summer West Whiskey

I think it's an interesting idea I also didn't like that bottle The white bottle. It looks like rum. That's a rum bottle. That was the, immediately I thought of that rum brand. That's in a white,

white. It's like Malibu rum is in the white bottle. Oh, no, don't say that. Don't bring up Malibu. I've got hangovers still from that stuff. Alex is triggered. Okay,

so now we have our finally. It's going to be an absolute blast. All right, guys, we have to do office hours before we go. Today for office hours, we are meeting with Sergei Poe of Orchestra. Now, orchestra builds communication software

for teams. Think things like chat, video calls, AI help inside of chat, task management, and all that in one platform. You can check it out at orch.s.0. Please welcome to the show. It's Sergey. Sergey, tell us a little bit about your business and what your big challenge is right now. We build an orchestra and all in one communication and improve TIEC workspace for modern teams. We streamline communication and task management into one seamless process and save up to a day per week for on team collaboration. This is our main idea. In fact, we are building some kind of, we mix tools like Slack, Notion and Zoom in one tool and help teams to be more focused on what they're building.

without context reaching, without problems, so on, syncing data between tools and so on. This is our main idea. We started to build it for our team because we experienced this problem of context documentation for years, and we use orchestra right now. It's our main tool. And what's our biggest challenge right now is the go-to-market strategy. We understand that we have for our first customers, we see that customers love our product. But it's really competitive, it's really competitive market, where it's really hard to find your customers and to onboard into product and to acquire it and to save it in product.

So I'm interested in any ideas about it because this is what we're working on right now. All right. So it's a really good idea to combine Slack and it's, Notion. The big challenge you are going to have, obviously, and we've talked about this, I think previously, is how do you get people off of Slack and Notion and Koda? Those are very sticky products. So I'm curious, how has that gone for you? Because I can't, in our firm, rip out Notion or Koda or Slack right now. So is the strategy to find people who are frustrated with those things for some reason and why would they be frustrated? Or is the idea to go with people who have

new startups and have them start from scratch with their new project or startup. Yeah, what's work, Sergey? We tried both, and we see that the idea of acquiring users that understand the problem is better at the moment because we don't have the new startups. They don't know about us. They know, for example, about linear or Slack, and it's a pretty common tools to use. For us, the customer that loves us much, that loves us really much, the customer that came to us on our idea that we want to merge all these tools together

and help them to be more effective. Got it. Questions from our other panelists, Alex and Lon, about the business? Yeah, where is the company based? We are spread all over the world. were fully remote from Canada to Asia. And I spent my days between San Francisco and Barcelona right now. Okay, because I was hoping there was some sort of like national element, like in Europe,

you could lean on and say, hey, you know, forget those American companies. We're homegrown over here, but it sounds like it's more of a distributed team, so that wouldn't quite work. I'm curious, have you put a lot of capital into traditional kind of GTM channels like, you know, social ads and search and so forth? and just found that to be cost ineffective? Right now we use, we spend our, you know, orchestra is a very big product, and you need to craft it very, you need to make it very precise,

and with good, it's like, we want to build something like linear built, with this approach to a product. And we spent a previous year building orchestra in close beta, So we had a small amount of customers that use orchestra came to us with their feedback, and we improve, improve, improve, improve, improve our tool. So right now we use only founders-led approach. So we outreach our customers with warm outreach. We show the product.

We have pretty comprehensive salespots right now. We talk to our prospects. Then we make a demo. for example, for the CEO or COO, if they like the demo, we create an onboarding call when on this call we onboard all their team. We help them to set up all the workspace to show them how to use orchestra, and then we support them in our support charts during all the days. So right now we use founders-led approach.

We don't use paid marketing, something like this. Previous month we got our first two customers from marketing. I'm not sure how they found us. Some were on social media. But they don't remember how they found us. Yeah, there is. So I am not a marketing expert, but I was just thinking about this as you were talking. One thing that I would try if I was in your shoes

was simply to create a 10 to 15 user account for every single startup that's going through an accelerator and just make sure that I email all of them and saying, hey, don't want to give Salesforce and Slack all your money. Come try orchestra. You can have it free for a year or whatever because those companies are incredibly cash strapped and they're probably not as deep in their existing work at

outside of the we are here at launch, for example. Have you tried that? Have you tried the incubator startup route? Not yet. I just had a call to with an incubator who told me this idea two hours ago.

So the easiest way to do it is to just create slash startups at your website, right? And have a landing page that says Augustra for startups. If you're under $3 million in revenue, if you're under 20 employees, you can use the product for free

for the next 12 months, sign up here. And then after that, you get 50% pricing until your series A. What this will do to Alex's point is it's going to give you people who are really focused, really tech savvy, really operationally, you know, and product-driven customers. And that's really awesome because they're going to give you really nuanced feedback, founder to founder. And that tends to be the best, you know, advice you can get. So you're going to learn a lot from them, even though you're not going to make a ton of money from them. And so I, I love it as a concept.

Yeah. Yeah, this is a great idea. One more question. I have, we use Notion and Slack all day here constantly. And Coda. And Coda. And I have some very specific using it all day, like mini frustration points. What are some of the big pain points with those apps that you guys are attacking with orchestra and trying to sort of solve?

We have two main paypoints. First, pain point is Channel Fatten. Stig and Slack. When your team grows, you are overwhelmed with messages. And you, for example, have the general chat or chat for marketing. And in this marketing chat, everyone discuss everything. You can't understand what's going on. In orchestra, we have task focus chats channels for each part of the work. It's a very, very small chat with only the people who involved. So they don't disrupt anyone else. They have all their context in one chat. They don't need to switch between apps that they don't distract everyone.

And this is a first pain point that we solve. And the second pain point that we solve is that when you use, for example, Slack and notion, your communication Slack doesn't connect it with your tasks in Notion. So you need to jump back and forth between these tools and try to understand, okay, where this task? What we, where we did discuss this? it was a week ago or two weeks ago and you spend a lot of,

you need to use your brains and you focus to find out what's going on. Exactly. And I hate doing that. You know, I hate using my brain. This is the two main problems that we are solving. That number two that you just named, that's it. Well, you know, if you are the type of organization that has a task list, a to-do list,

and you're really into con bond boards, and you know, that kind of getting through stuff, which might be like a dev shop, right? Or you're working on releasing a new product. You want all the tasks in one place, et cetera. When you assign a task, the chat is assigned to that tasks. If you want to learn more, go to orc h.so. We really appreciate people trying the product and giving Sergey some feedback. Everybody go check out.

ORCH.com. This is a company that went through our accelerator. They're doing fantastic. that really innovative idea. I hope everybody checks it out. And we'll talk to you soon. Thank you for your time. Okay. For Alex Wilhelm, Ed Lott Harris, I am Jason Calacanus. This week in Startups.com. If you want to see the docket for Friday, we will not be talking about tariffs. Our national nightmare is over. Knock on wood. I don't want to jinx it. But hopefully we can

go on to the next chaotic moment for. We can just focus on startups and building businesses again, please for the love of God. If anybody could put the gun back in the holster, put the safety on, and put it in the closet. Please stop shooting us in the foot. Dance, dance. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.