This Week in Startups - Best of This Week in Startups: Week of October 12th, 2020

Episode Date: October 17, 2020

E1122 featuring Running Tide's Marty Odlin: https://rb.gy/fgg88x E1123 Jason reacts to the iPhone 12: https://rb.gy/t8ztxz E1124 featuring RapidDeploy CEO Steven Raucher: https://rb.gy/7ynjqn E1125 featuring LAUNCH Accelerator 18's top 3 vote getting founders: https://rb.gy/ccglvt Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I am super pleased to talk to the founder of Running Tide today because I care about climate change like I'm sure all of you do. I believe in climate change and solving that problem as best we can in that there must be solutions to it. But I'll be honest. I feel like a neophyte. I feel like I don't have the education I need. I trust the scientists. But as an investor and a technologist, I would really love to be able to invest in some companies and some visions and see people take some big swings and some risks and build companies around this. And my friend Chris Saka, who's a big fan or big friend of the pod, I should say, I assume he's fan of it, but I know he's a friend of the pod, tweeted out from his At Saka account

recently that Running Tide was the kind of company we're hoping we would find when we started lower carbon. Everybody knows Chris Saka retired from. Angel investing. He did well enough with Instagram and Uber and decided, hey, I'm going to just cash in my chips and be done. But then he said, you know what? I want to do a carbon-based venture fund, investment fund. And he says here, bonkers scale, unreasonable ambition, massive impact on the planet during insane times. It's entrepreneurs like Marty Odlin. That fire us up. And he linked to a story about Running Tide. And I thought, even though it's early days, I would have the founder, Marty Audlin on the program to talk to us about what he's doing with Running Tide. Welcome to the pod,

Marty. Thank you very much. How many of these stocks would I as an American, average American, need to put in the ocean to just be carbon neutral? Would I need to put 100 stocks, one stock? Okay, great question. Let me work it out really quick. This is actually my nightmare when I was talking about coming on this. I'm coming on the pod is actually doing like real time. I really shouldn't ask it this way. It was kind of a jerk way to say it. But another way to say is how many stocks would it take for the entire planet to be carbon neutral?

Yeah, I'll tell you that. I already have that figured out. That one. Tell me that one. Okay. Well, this is interesting. The average carbon footprint for someone in the U.S. is 16 tons. 16 tons.

Wow. Yeah. And the global average is four tons. So we're four X worse than the average. Okay. So if we went to eight tons as a global, you know, if we, or whatever. Well, like that, I mean, we know, I know exactly how many buoys it would take to get to 40 gigatons. Okay.

So that's 400 billion. Okay. So that's a lot. That's a lot. That's a huge amount of effort. But it's possible, but it's possible. The possible and the ocean can absorb it. This is the most important thing, right?

We have, there are only so many places that you can take this carbon that's in the atmosphere and put it out of the carbon cycle. So you can plant it into trees. You can put it into soil. Those are like somewhat temporary. solutions because, you know, they're still in the carbon cycle where people could go cut down the trees or burn down the forest or like over till the land and release the carbon. So those are great. We need to do those as fast as possible. We need to plant trees. Yeah, we do, we need to do

all of that. But then there's also this other type of carbon sequestration, which you call like permanent removal from the carbon cycle. And that's critical because that's what we have to do to get back into balance. And so we need permanent removal. So, you know, you can divide up the climate work into like three parts. You have behavioral change so we release less carbon. Right. Like eat oysters.

They're really good for you. Low carbon footprint. Fantastic thing to do. It offsets potentially, you know, more carbon-intensive protein sources that you could be eating, right? So those things are important to do. And you said scallops too? And scallops as well. Yeah, absolutely.

Those are all super important things to do. And we need to do those. Then the other bucket is like pulling climate down or pulling carbon down out of the atmosphere. And then you put it in and you want to do it into permanent places. So permanent places would be turning into rock or like calcium carbonate, where it's going to be super stable and it's not like, it'd take a ton of energy to get it out. So it's unlikely people would do that in the future. Then you have, you could turn it back into oil or like a gas and inject it deep underground. So there's some really interesting companies like charm industrial that's that are doing that.

And then finally you could sink it to the bottom of the of the deep sea, which we're doing. Yeah. And it doesn't harm the ocean to put that carbon down there. No, I mean, it's a natural process. And no, like once the carbon gets down there, it's down. And when you talk about harm, like one of the things we have to be like super disciplined about is like we have to we have to acknowledge that like no matter what level of effort we do into reversing climate change, there will be externalities. But what's the option? What's the option?

We let the ocean acidify and die? Like, that's insane. No, that's completely not an option. Yeah, right? So, 400 billion to sequester, everything in there or just to be neutral for the year? That's neutral for the year. So you have to do that, plus you have to decarbonize. And if we decarbonize and do that, then it would take us 20 years to get it all down. I mean, it's like, conservatively, it's going to be, you know, and this is like a huge number, but it's like people, talk about like $40 trillion to get the carbon out of the atmosphere down. And doesn't actually seem like an impossible number. I'll be totally honest.

It's possible. It's possible. It is possible. The technologies are not fully baked. No one has this fully baked. Nobody has this dial. Nobody's like, hey, you give me $40 trillion. This is done.

You know what I mean? Like we're not there yet, but we need to get there really, really fast. So what would it take? what is the cost of today to drop a stock? Is it $100? Is it $1,000? Yeah, I mean, it's on the order of, I mean, it's on the order of like $150 to $200.

Oh, per stock. I'm sorry. Yeah. I was talking per ton. But per ton is interesting, too, to look at it. Yeah, I mean, let's do per ton because then it's Apple to apples when you have other people on board, right? So, yeah, we're looking like 150 to $200 a ton.

We think, like, as we scale, you get some economies of scale. We get better at this. We're better at our selection of species, et cetera. We get better at our deployment locations. We refine our models. And, you know, I think it's totally reasonable for us to get under $50 a ton. I think $50 a ton is about. But how many tons did an average American use?

Did you say before? 16. Okay. So it's not a crazy amount. I mean, that's a lot of money. If I gave you $2,000, I could be carbon neutral with this. I don't know your lifestyle, but yeah. actually probably got to give you 4K.

I'm not flying on private jets, but my house is big. Yeah, totally. I do drive Teslas, but, you know. Yeah, that helps. That helps. I'm not making any judgments. But yeah, I mean, you have to be careful. No, I think we do need to make judgments.

I think everybody needs to be judged on this. Yeah. I mean, you know, it depends on what you eat. You should, uh, yeah, that's a bit of a challenge for me. Eat a lot of shellfish and, uh, um, yeah, you know, in robots and, you know, automation, I would think, if we really took this seriously, building or taking an old oil rig or a whole platform that's already in the ocean and having robots build and do this work and just throw it over board. I wonder if that would work too. Or barges doing this on bar. Could you take an old

oil tanker and make that into a greenhouse to build this stuff? So it's just permanently out there? Oh, okay. Is that the roadmap? Yeah, there's a, I mean, there's a lot of ways to scale this type of effort. I mean, what we're doing, I don't want to like, it's, there's a lot of sophisticated modeling that's going into this in terms of deploying in certain locations that are able to like have the correct nutrients and the biogeochemistry of the ocean bottom where you deploy is very important. So there's a lot of like, you know, there's a lot of like ocean knowledge and ocean data that

gets crunched in order to make something like this viable. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of ways that we can scale this up. And I think that it's, we have to. And, you know, one way, 400 billion is not an insane number. It isn't because like, think how many coffee cups get made or think how many, yeah, trivial things that get made that don't, like, aren't necessarily going to, like, you know, for lack of a, to not be too over dramatic, but like, you could potentially, like, have a huge impact on the future of civilization. Like, I mean, Elon Musk says all the time, right? Doesn't he say, like, climate change is one of the filters?

It's like one of the great filters. If you're, if a civilization can't get control over its atmosphere and the concentration of gases in its atmosphere, then it doesn't pass the great filter. Yeah. And what we mean by great filter in the sense is the filter of does your species make it to the next level? One of them is like, can you not kill each other with war? There's one filter.

Can you build a society where warring factions don't destroy each other? Nuclear weapons? That's one. Fusion, nuclear weapons, whatever. I guess, you know, being able to contain pandemics like we're in the middle of right now is another one. It's an emergency podcast. Apple has released a new iPhone 12. And for the first time, I'm not buying the new iPhone.

This really jumps the shark when they went to their version. virtue signaling, we're going to save the planet, schick, which is, you know, in fairness to them, they do talk the talk and walk the walk. They are going to be carbon neutral. They do care about the environment. They will take your products back to recycling. That's all fine and well. But when they went to this shot of the roof of the mothership headquarters, and I couldn't

believe what they were telling me here, but listen to this. We've also been transitioning our iPhone manufacturing partners to renewable energy. Okay, that's great. Renewable energy is perfect. We looked for ways to cut waste and use less material. Okay, I'm with you. Cut waste is a great idea. Customers already have over 700 million lightning headphones.

Okay, we got headphones, yes. And many customers have moved to a wireless experience. Yep, I bought three pairs of AirPods. Sure. With AirPyce or other wireless headphones. Definitely. And there are also over two billion Apple Power adapters out of the world. I bought all these adapters from you.

And that's not counting. the billions of third party adapters. Yeah, I buy the anchor once. They're better than yours. And cheaper. It reduces carbon emissions and avoids the mining and use of precious materials.

Removing these items also means a smaller, lighter iPhone box. And this is where my head is like, they're charging you $1,200 for a phone, but they took out the charger because there's already $2 billion on the planet. And they took out the headphones because they want you to buy the $300

ones. I mean, and then they're explaining to us that it's a smaller footprint and the box is smaller because they took stuff out. But this is in your best interest and better for the planet. Okay, I get you Apple. I see what you did there. You're basically took everything out except for. And this is where, you know, everybody went crazy on the Twitter. Not only to have the audacity to tell you, you don't need a charger with your new $1,200 phone. And you don't need headphones with your new $1,200 phone. It's not like they lowered the price on this thing. It's still expensive. But then the audacity is they still use a lightning connection. So if they actually did care about chargers and they do care about the

environment, why not go with the standard USBC? Then we don't need as many of these. You make us buy a USBC for our iPad pros. You make us buy it for our MacBooks and our MacBooks and our MacBook errors in MacBook Pros, and every other devices move to USBC, except for this one device, which still makes us buy redundant lightning cables. So forgive me, but I find this ridiculous. Let's watch the rest of this video shot on the solar panel roofed of the mothership. We can fit up to 70% more products on a shipping power. Great.

Reducing carbon emissions in our global logistics chain. That's why I'm buying an iPhone. I want to get that global logistics. changes we've made for iPhone 12 cut over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually. Great. It's like removing 450,000 cars from the road per year. This is huge, and we're really proud that Apple is taking the lead. We hope others will follow, making this impact even bigger for our planet.

All right, so I thought that was like ridiculous and disingenuous. They should have said, hey, we took the $50 off the price of it because we're saving so much money for you. But they didn't say that. But, you know, there's a lot of human components to this. I know people who are in the service of saving lives. It is always very personal. My grandfather, a firefighter, my brother a firefighter, my uncle, a cop, cousin a cop, two other cousins in, let's just say, federal law enforcement. I'll leave it at that. So, we got a Irish family filled with service in firefighting and police in law enforcement, which informs a little bit of my thinking about the world, I'll be honest.

But you have a personal connection to this, Steve. You were a banker, I believe, for 20 years. You left South Africa to go to London and make some bank in banking, as one does. But you had some personal tragedy, and I know that you've talked about it before. Yeah. Not the personal tragedy of working in banking for 20 years to be clear. Well, my karma restoration project is still ongoing. So we know about that, right?

And I laugh because you're so self-aware of this. And I've heard you on some other podcasts or other videos that your company has produced in my research. And I've watched your kind of lament your 20 years in banking. But this is personal for you. Let's get into it. Yeah. I mean, like, I would also argue that the 20 years in banking kind of prepared me for this journey as well.

Awesome. Well, you know, actually in interesting ways, there were, there was parts of my journey in banking when I built my own systems and realized I could disrupt my competitors by building my own options pricing models and suddenly knowing that, you know, number one is not always number one forever. If you have better technology, it's actually, it's a huge game changer. And, you know, when I met, when I went Brett, I'd realize that and Brett's the original founder who built the initial system.

But how I got on this journey, in 06, I lost my brother to a drowning accident in Cape Town, just very near where I have my holiday house in Cape Town near where I grew up. And in 2015, I took time out after capping a 20-year career in investment banking. I was like, I've got to go back to my roots, take my kids, get the feel of Africa under their feet. And as soon as I arrived, I realized I now have time on my hands and I wanted to do something to honor the men and women who had been volunteering on the National Sea Rescue Institute, which is a completely volunteer-based organization that helps offshore rescue in South Africa. So it's the equivalent to the Royal Lifeboats in the UK. I don't think there's quite an American equipment.

We don't have that. I mean, we have lifeguards, of course. And we have the Coast Guard. Yeah. But we don't have a volunteer service like this. There might be on some lakes or something like that, but growing up in Cape Town, you grow up on the water and you grow up kind of like the water is a big part of your life, correct? Is my understanding? 100%. Yeah, I mean, I grew up. I remember the first time I went to London and I couldn't see the sea and I couldn't work out who would have a major city without an ocean. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute. But also, as beautiful as the oceans are there, there is a respect you have to have. for those oceans. Those oceans are particularly, I mean, historically known as the most dangerous

oceans in the world coming around that Cape. Is it called Cape Horn? The Cape of Storms. So it's called Cape of Storms, right? So the Cape of Good Hope was notorious for wrecking many merchant ships over the centuries. And your brother went out for a swim and he just took a... There's also notorious wind in Cape Town. The sea is also frighteningly cold. It looks great in photos. It's Instagram friendly, but like Super cold. And anyway, he got into some difficulty swimming offshore. And it took a while to, I mean, for that to all trickle down and get the response going. And I realized.

He went out alone for one day for a swim. Yeah. It's where I'm in a bay nobody swims at. And, you know, they might dip their feet in. But no one tries to swim across this particular bay unless you really know what you're doing. Right. But the point of that was, you know, I landed up back in Cape Town and I know that these men and women who are volunteers that they have to go, you know, if it's an unsuccessful rescue like it was for my brother, you can imagine just normal people have normal jobs in 9 to 5 and suddenly they have to go, you know, pull a body from the bottom of the ocean and do all that and the kind of trauma associated with that is nothing can prepare you for, right? It is, yeah, it's, it's one of the life-changing experiences you can have as emergency service person the first time you get called to a call that, you know, ends in a death.

And, you know, every single person you've talked to who works on an ambulance or in any volunteer or firefighter, they can tell you in detail about that first time. And I could tell you mine as well. And, you know, it's, I wouldn't say it haunts me to this day, but it is something I've carried with me for 30 years of my life since I've, watch somebody, you know, pass or, you know, wasn't able to, in this case, resuscitate somebody who, you know, was having a heart attack and who was very old, but, you know, did CPR on them. And it is a, it is a traumatic experience for sure. And you just think about that job, think about that work that people do, to go and try to help somebody in that moment. It's just, it really is. It takes a tremendous fortitude as an individual. And we could expand on that and say,

you know, it's unbelievable. You think about your 911, the first person you speak to when they, you know, you a 911 call. Yeah. I mean, they've had literally thousands of those. And only recently, just in California and now in the last few weeks, they could recognize as first responders

before they were classified as Clarks or admin. And you can imagine this. Yeah, yeah. Which is ridiculous. I mean, the dispatchers are such a critical role in this. The dispatchers are negotiating,

you know, the who to send, and then where to send them to and then communicating all these services in the back end. It's, there are, there are the conductor of this orchestra of services, whether to deploy a helicopter or a boat or firefighters.

I mean, it is, man, the intensity. I mean, like, it gets really hand on. Hands on. I mean, there's, anyway, like, we're going down another rabbit hole, which I can talk about. It's kind of the point of the show. But, I mean, just to put a note in it, I'm very sorry about your brother. And then to do something this meaningful with the rest of your life as opposed to trading options, which you, you know, are pretty self-aware of is, you know, like a video game, right?

I mean, yeah. Comparing contrast, waking up every day and going to work. For the audience who is wondering about what they should do with their life's purpose, you're now in, I guess, the, you know, the third half of your life like me, the importance of finding something that you wake up every day and the passion you have for this versus maybe the level of passion you had for, you know, playing the options video game, as it were. Yeah, so, I mean, the options video game, I just wanted to win, right?

I mean, that was pretty much, and you could only measure your wins and losses by your P&L, by how much money you made. And one, me personally, I always say that I created nothing other than revenue in those first 20 years of my life. Obviously, there's a lot of experience that I've garnered over the years. But certainly, if my kids ask me what I would do for a living, I would have to tell my, you know, dad talks a lot in the telephone and gets paid. I mean, that's like the sum total of my net contribution to society. And when I went to, so I landed up volunteering at that agency in Cape Town, right?

Wow. The same one that had tried to rescue your brother. The same crew and boat that are gone, I try rescue my brother. So I literally went up to their door and I said, what do you need? Do you need money or people? They said, we need people. And I said, I volunteer. And I started the next Saturday.

Yeah. But what was more interesting is about three days after that was their first, well, it was my first monthly meeting every first Wednesday of the month. All the volunteers at that particular station got together. And there were about 20 people who'd been coming there for between 20 and 30 years, like every weekend volunteering. Giving up their weekends. So these are people, to be clear, who are putting in their 40, 50 hours a week.

And then in the small amount of time they have a wake left, they're getting on a boat to go rescue people who are drowning. Yeah. Extraordinary. I mean, as a guy who grew up in like five different Swiss banks between London, New York, to hear people talk about volunteering their time like this was like a total moment for me in realizing that there was so much more to my life than how many toys I could accumulate. And the high score. And basically, you're trying to get a high score in banking. So for young people listening, do something meaningful with your life that also could result in a high score, these are not too disparate things, correct? You can.

There's two opinions I have on this. One is even when I was in banking, I would be sitting in the city of London and I'd have all these Oxford grads with a double major in physics and chemistry coming and trying to get a job on a trading floor. And even then I would say, listen, guys, I don't care what you say to me. It's interview. I'm not hiring you. Go, go fix cancer.

Like, yeah. The brain drain within the financial community is just, it's terrible how that's kind of siphoned off the best of the best. And I think it's maybe redressed now and maybe consumer internet is having its moment taking the best of the best out of there. But I think a mission to build is like that. Yeah. No, if you're Facebook or Google and you're printing money at the velocity they're printing money, you literally have people who have PhDs in computer vision, computer science, who could be literally curing cancer, like doing computer vision models or doing drug discovery models or creating, you know, the next, you know, device used

on an ambulance to save people. And instead of doing that hard work, they're going to optimize the percentage of clicks to an ad for some racist Russian paid for anti-Hillary Clinton ad. Like literally, that's what you're doing with your life, really? You got a graduate degree from Stanford or Harvard or MIT, and you're going to work at Facebook optimizing the ad network. really? I mean, it's pathetic. I mean, this is why, you know, we've been able to grow like this. We moved our company to Austin in Jan 2019.

And I've recruited out of IBM, Apple, like all the big guys in Austin. And that was largely because we have a mission-driven business, right? When your mission is, I want to reduce response signs for all and improve situational awareness for first responders, it's not, I want to make sure that your eyes never leave, you know, the little black mirror in your hand. Welcome to another episode of this week and startups. I'm super excited to share with you. The top three vote getters at the launch accelerators,

18th cohort. We run an accelerator and we used to do that in San Francisco and have everybody come out for 12 weeks, but during the pandemic, well, that ended. And we went completely virtual. The accelerator is just like any other top accelerator you've heard of, like TechStars or Y Combinator. We put it in 100K.

We work with a company over four months. It's now a 16-week program, essentially. And we try to help them raise money. We introduce them to every investor we can imagine. And then when they invest each week, they present to investors. So it's like a demo day each week with 10 to 20 investors present. By the end, they've done this 16 times. So they've presented to likely 500 investors.

If you can't raise money, after you've pitched 500 investors, that should tell you something about the business. Either the business doesn't have product market fit or doesn't have that uptick that would lead investors to want to make a bet. Maybe the investors don't like the space. It could be a space that's been where the well has been poisoned, maybe like a we work kind of situation. But in general, the companies that go through the accelerator, they raise money. and they tend to do it pretty efficiently. That is kind of the point of our accelerator. Other programs are more like incubators.

We're not that. We're not incubating ideas than getting a product launch. We're looking for companies that have a product in market that have some base level of traction. That could be 2K a month. It could be 50K a month. Typically it's somewhere in between those two numbers. And we work with them.

We put a stamp in their book, hey, launch, Jason, are involved. That helps a little bit on the margins in terms of getting a meeting. And that selection process where we pick seven companies out of 500 or 1,000 applicants, that really helps other investors know that we ran a process and that we worked deep with these companies and we diligence them. So next up is Sherry. Sherry Atwood is from Support Pay. She was also in the launch, Accelerator's 18th cohort. We do these monthly or so. We're trying to get to monthly. And Sherry, you had a company called Support Pay. Explain to the audience what support pay is. Yeah, support pay helps parents manage child support and share expenses directly with each other.

So it is an app that people pay for. What do they pay for it? Correct. They're starting at $7.99 a month or $79 a year. And that way they can manage their child support, their finances with their ex, ultimately never having to talk to their ex about money again. For the audience, I've been very careful to not savage people. And I taught this in the angel university classes, when you're meeting with founders, before you've invested, do not savage them. In fact, I try to give no feedback in terms of what to fix in the business. I just try to, before I invest, I just try to learn about the business and the founder.

But I'm not prescriptive. I don't give them too many notes or tell them, change this, change this, you should do that. After we invest, then I feel like, well, they've opted in to getting the candidness for me, and they kind of expect it. So I'm going to be full bore candid as brutal as I can be so that they succeed down the road, better to fix your shot or whatever little mistakes you're making in practice than when you're on the court. So what was the experience like when I savaged you? Well, I think that was exactly the point, right?

When we were interviewing with you, you didn't give any feedback. And it's very similar to me fundraising before. People don't give feedback. I think the key areas where you really, really helped me was one, just the way that my pitch deck looked, making it much more simple. And being all virtual and presenting virtual is very different. And that's what I don't think people understand is, yes, we've gone into this virtual investing world, but your slides and how it looks and even how it sort of what I'll call it animates, but doesn't really, all of those things are much more important. we realized, for example, we did this test of how many slides should be moving and how in real world, right, you want less slides, but in virtual, we realized we needed it to, you know, move every three to four seconds else people like lost interest. So things like that. So the way it looked and then the big one was focusing on where we're growing, not trying to go into every go-to-market strategy. And then finally, really nailing the question and answer. Because if people aren't familiar, right, after we pitch, then the investors get to ask questions.

And we have two minutes to answer all of their questions. And so being able to be really concise and clear on your answers was also something that your feedback was, you know, even throughout the weeks was amazing because it really helped narrow it down. Yeah, I mean, just to give people a background on this, you really want to give short, tight answers when you're talking to an investor because the investors tend to be really smart. They've heard everything. They don't need you to explain basic stuff to them. So when they say how many customers do they have, it's great to just give them a number. We have a thousand people subscribed. When they ask you, what's your best marketing channel or what's your go-to marketing strategy? You say, we're doing paid ads on Facebook and Instagram and our CAQ is $72. You answered their question and you gave them one little extra data point, the CAQ, right? But I'll also say what you also helped with was how to answer more difficult questions or maybe questions where things aren't as great or wonderful. So how to reframe the questions that they were asking in order to make sure it promoted the business and put you in the best light from those quick answers. What do investors want to see? What do they need to see?

Investors need to see some growth. The idea of you having zero growth and saying it's coming is not convincing to anyone. And that's what we had the first year. That's where I was, you know, talking to 300 investors and not getting anywhere, was that we were flat growth. And we had reasons for it and stuff like that. But no one really cares about your reasons. If you aren't showing more revenue the next month, the next month after that, like, we don't care. That's fine. Cool. Let us know what you have a good. You're like, I can build a business that doesn't grow. Right. You know, to be harsh. Yeah. But that is like to be super harsh. And like part of this program is to be harsh, right?

I always tell people like, be sure you want to have this experience because we're going to be, we're going to be brutally honest here. What non-growth founders prove is that they don't deserve capital. And that's a harsh way of saying it, but you actually realize that you've taken it to heart, haven't you, Gabe? I mean, I've certainly seen the difference between trying to come to investors with zero growth month over month and coming to investors with 20% growth month over month. I mean, the responses are very, very different. Tell us. Well, I mean, you have to bat people. away when you're growing 20% month over month. I mean, we are turning away more than a million

dollars now. And we turned away more than a million dollars a few months ago. At that point, we were growing 15% month over a month. At this point, we'd be growing 20% month per month. And it's like the difference in desire from investors and just like, oh, no, please let me in, let me in. It's just night and day. Just from hitting, just from between like low single digits and 20%. It's not that big of a difference in terms of a number, but it is very, very, very, very, different in terms of the reception. And it's very different in terms of running a company. How is running a a company changed for you now that you have a North Star that you want to be a high growth company? I mean, I think the idea of having a bunch of capital and having access to capital and whatever

capital you want, that changes things. I mean, then you have to start making decisions about, well, what do you actually want, what do you actually need, and what is the right path for this company? And so it frees you up to be really, really strategic with this stuff in a way that just trying to get whatever you possibly need because otherwise the company's going to fold. Like that kind of panic space gives you a lot fewer options and a lot less time to make strategic decisions. So at the point where you get to actually start turning down capital and saying, no, what capital do I want and who do I want it from and why? And what are we going to do with it?

Like those being able to have the luxury of time, that's what you get. Yeah, you've earned the ability to take a bigger picture to think more strategically. And, you know, this is what Elon always said about Tesla and their journey is, well, the way capital allocation works is the more success that you have and the more you prove that there's a business there, the more capital allocators will give you tokens to put into the video game. So in the case of Tesla, like when they sold 2,000 roadsters, it was like, well, that's an achievement. Here's some more money, but not all of it. When they got the Model S and it was car of the year, it was like, oh, well, let's take this company public. Here's more money. And then they get the X out.

and then the model three, eventually they're like, okay, this company's unstoppable. Now they can start thinking in a decade long way instead of, you know, in the early days of Tesla, they were looking at, you know, month to month life. They were literally hand to mouth. So how has that changed for you, Jeremy? I'm curious in terms of thinking about life as a growth company versus, you know, the reality of like, hey, maybe the product isn't finished or it's not, you know, like you can't just all of a sudden, you know, put the car at 100 miles per hour if it's only got three wheels on

it. So how do you think about that? Yeah, it's so true. Like, I always think like everything's falling apart internally, right? Like, we're, we're building companies within companies. Like, there's companies built around being a form builder and we have a form builder inside our app builder. So, like, there's always things that are like, like, three wheels and you're trying to like put the best face on you possibly can while you're still trying to grow. The funny thing that has happened since launch is the outbound that I learned in launch that I keep having. It is slowly pivoted to getting the most inbound interest from partners at tier ones, like VCs

that I've ever had in my entire life. So, like, as you start to grow and, like, people are interested in the no-code ecosystem, like building the business does back that thesis that I was talking about earlier, that if you focus on the business and make sure that that's growing and wearing that pressure, people will find you somehow, some way. There are smart people out there watching you and what those investors are sometimes watching is. Oh, you raised a seed round. So as I was training in the Angel University course, somebody asked me a question of like,

well, how could I find companies to invest in? I said, well, that's very easy. go on crunch base, say in your state or just in the United States, let's say if you're in the United States, and that's where you want to invest. Do the United States, take two-month period, January and February of last year, and take any company that raised between $50,000 and $750,000, which your companies might have fell into at some point. And then if they're in there and they've raised that amount of money, that's not enough money to last three years. So if it was last year ago or maybe 15 months ago, they're probably looking now if they're still alive and then go see how many employees they have.

If they've got 12 employees and they only raised 250, well, 12 employees times, you know, 5 or 10K a month each, they're going to, they probably have revenue. Or maybe they raised money and you don't know. So it's just teaching my angel investors how to find companies. But that's, but that's just so you guys know how that's happening. That's how they're finding you. Yeah. And that's why it's important to keep your crunch base and to write a blog post about your fundraising

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