This Week in Startups - Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Today’s show:How do you get investors excited about jets when they’re hyper-focused on new AI tools?In a fresh TWiST 500 interview, Alex sits down with Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic to talk about the Overture, the world’s fastest plane that recently broke the sound barrier over the Mojave Desert. (That’s a first for a private company, rather than a military or government.)Hear about the secrets to avoiding a noisy and disruptive sonic boom, using satellites to set the most efficient routes, designing the Overture’s complex engine, dispelling the common myth that hardware startups are money pits and much much more.PLUS we’ve got two brand new companies entering our Gamma Pitch Deck Competition. Time to see how they stack up to our first impressive entrant, Where2Wheel.Timestamps:(02:22) Introducing Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic(04:03) How Boom is improving on the classic Concorde experience(08:29) How hyper-fast Overture flights could change passenger behavior(10:02) Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at Gusto.com/twist.(11:10) The long road to breaking the speed barrier(14:34) How satellites could help guide Boom’s planes(16:37) The next milestones to check off Blake’s list(19:13) Breaking up the jet engine duopoly(20:57) Nexos.ai Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at nexos.ai/twist.(24:28) How 3D printing speeds up the R&D process(30:26) DevStats translates complex engineering metrics into a shared language everyone at your company can understand. Get 20% off by going to https://www.DevStats.com/twist(34:10) Gamma Pitch Deck Competition: Confy vs. The Drive AISubscribe 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/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow 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:Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at Gusto.com/twist.Nexos.ai Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at nexos.ai/twist.DevStats translates complex engineering metrics into a shared language everyone at your company can understand. Get 20% off by going to https://www.DevStats.com/twistGreat 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

I think that's thing people don't appreciate is like the amount of space you want in transportation is inversely proportional to how long it takes. Like if you're on a boat going across an ocean, you have a suite. And it is a hotel room on a boat, right? If you had a literal transporter beam, you don't sit down. So, you know, and everything else is kind of somewhere in the middle. This week in startups is brought to you by DevStats. Check out DevStats today and get 20% off plus access to their dedicated.

Slack channel. Just go to devstats.com slash twist. nexos.com. Stop shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at nexos.aI slash twist. That's nexosos.a slash twist. And gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months free at gusto.com slash twist. Hello and welcome back to Twist everybody. This is Alex and today we have three founder interviews for you.

First up, boom, one of my favorite companies on the Twist 500. This is a startup that wants to bring supersonic travel back to the people. If you yearn for the days of the Concord, well, this is a company you should care about. I got the CEO to come on the show and tell us how much progress. they've made, how much more work is still ahead of them, when we're going to get to take one of these jets, and of course, how much more money do they need? It's all rather bullish, and I am stoked for boom. Then we turn to the gamma pitch deck competition. Ten different companies made pitch decks with gamma. You can think of it kind of like an AI assistant for making beautiful presentations, and now

those founders are using what they cooked up to pitch Jason. The winner's going to get $25,000 from Twist. So, who are we talking to today? Well, the folks behind confi.comfey.com. They have built an app that helps you find the right people at the next event that you're going to. So if you need help picking out the right person to talk to or break the ice with, it's going to help. If you're going to a conference and you want to find, I don't know, let's pick an example, all the small business owners. Well, Confi wants to help you find just those people. Then to close out the drive.aI, bringing together things like file management and AI agents, collaboration and even AI writing. The Drive AI is a multimodal, agintic workspace that isn't quite like anything.

that I have used before, but that just makes me all the more interested. After all, if AI is actually going to change the way that we work, shouldn't it change the way that we work? All right, let's dig in. All right, so I used to live both in San Francisco and Providence. That meant that I flew back and forth across the nation all the time at very slow speeds. Why was I being held back by the sound barrier when we cracked that decades and decades ago as a species? But happily, there is one company working very hard over a long time horizon to build the future. of Supersonic Transport here in the United States so that finally we can go back to moving a little bit quicker around our planet.

I've been tracking Boom Supersonic for an incredibly long time. I'm a fan of the company because I want to get myself around the world faster. So please join me in welcoming to the program, founder and CEO Blake Schull. Blake, thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for having me, Alex. You were last on Twist. I think it was September of 2024. So thanks for coming back.

But the most important thing is since we last spoke to you, you and your test flight, test plane, I should say, broke the sound barrier. So I know it's a couple months back, but tell us about how that went down and if the test met all of your company's expectations. It was really just an epic day. And one for me personally that I'd worked for for more than a decade. So we broke the sound barrier above the Mojave Desert, the same hallowed airspace that Chuck Yeager did for the very first time. What was the year on that Chuck Yeager flight? I think that matters. 1947, October 12th, 1947.

It's been a minute, so to speak. It's been a minute. There were two really important things with that test flight, really three. One is it was the first time it had been done outside of a government or military. It was also the first time that we float a supertonic jet made out of airliner-ready technology. And last but not at least, although we didn't announce it that day, we also cracked Sonic Boom. Yes. we're going to talk about that in just a minute,

but tell me about the airline-ready technology and what that means and why it matters. So I think a lot of folks listening to this, startup fans, but a little bit less into the weeds of the aerospace industry. Yeah, well, we, of course, had a supersonic passenger plane before. It's called Concord.

First flew in 1969, the same year as the moon landing. And isn't it interesting, in 1969, we can go to the moon? 1969, we can break the sound barrier as passengers. 2025, we can't do either of those things. we actually went backwards, which is a whole other thing we can talk about. But we're going to fix that.

And today, half a century after Concord, we don't just have the technology for passengers to fly supersonic. We have the technology for them to do it in a way that's going to be far more economical, which was the big problem at Concord. It was a $20,000 ticket for a seat, you might think, came out of the back of a Southwest jet. With Overture version 1,

which is the scaled up version of our XP1 airplane, it will be more like flying business class. So I think round trip across the Atlantic, three and a half hours each way, $5,000 round trip, which is not yet for everybody, but a lot of people already pay that or more in business class today.

Absolutely. So if you're already paying that much, you can take a faster plane with, according to you, a similar level of comfort once we get over to rebuild. That's right. I mean, it'll be a really nice seat, much nicer than was on Concord.

The one thing it won't do is go fully flat because in a three and a half hour flight, you sleep in a much better bed that you'd have on any airplane at your home before you have to leave. So you want a nice size seat. It'll be something nicer than what you'd find in domestic first class and at twice the speed of any other jet today. It's kind of funny when you put it like that because when the A380, the Airbus super

giant jet was being put together and put out back in the day, a bit of a boondoggle in retrospect. But there were talks of like having showers on board and bars on board. But that's only because you're stuck there for so long. How much comfort do you need if you're going to get their, as fast as you possibly can. So I like to hear that. I think that's thing people don't appreciate is like the amount of space you want in

transportation is inversely proportional to how long it takes. Like if you're on a boat going across an ocean, you have a suite. And it is a hotel room on a boat, right? If you had a literal transporter beam, you don't sit down. So, you know, and everything else is kind of somewhere in the middle. I've done a whole lot of flights from Newark to Providence and Newark to Boston. And they put you up in these tiny little planes that are made. made out of like a sardine can. But who cares? Because you're only on it for 45 minutes, right?

So it's a really fair point. And I'm looking forward to see how people's behaviors change. Because once I can go to San Francisco in, what will it take me on overture? Three, three and a half hours, I think? About three and a half hours. You can leave the East Coast at 9 a.m. and landed SFO at 9.30 a.m. S. That's going to be incredible. I think you touched something that's really important there that most people overlook. Most people think speed is about time savings. It's not. Speed is about what you choose to do or what you just can't do. Most trips on jets are trips that would not have been taken period on slower airplanes. And if we go back and look at the history of the jet age, we can actually see that. Just the same way most trips taken on Uber would not have been taken

on a taxi, right, before. It grew the tam. As we said here on the show, the pie larger. Things that make things much faster or radically reduce friction tend to be Tam growing innovations. They tend to be platform innovations. You know, the iPhone is a platform innovation, enabled things like Uber and Airbnb. And I think we're to find that Supersonic, just like the jet, is a platform innovation. A question about that, because we often think about faster travel as making the world smaller in terms of going across the Atlantic to your earlier point or my discussion of flying back and forth between the East and West Coast. But, you know, once you have Oversure, your upcoming supersonic jet out in the market in quantity, am I going to be able to take this from, you know,

Boston to New York City? Like, can I do, will it work for shorter range flights that can then become even shorter in terms of time? Supersonic makes sense the longer the route, right? Like you wouldn't,

it would be pretty funny to go a supersonic across the street, right? So the longer the route, the bigger, the speed up. Boston, New York, I think that the, look for vertical takeoff

and landing is the innovation there because it's going to let you go from neighborhood to neighborhood. Super Sonic, I think, about the shortest routes that really make sense are west coast of Hawaii. And those are going to be incredible

because if you look at the time difference and the flight times, you'll actually be able to board the flight at 5 o'clock in San Francisco and be on the beach in Maui with a cocktail at sunset in Hawaii. It's going to be absolutely phenomenal. Break that down for me in miles, though.

So the shortest reasonable flight length for a supersonic passenger jet is in miles. What's kind of the minimum there? I mean, there's no sort of one cut off, right? But I think there's a tipping point somewhere around 1500 miles where the speedups are big enough that it starts to make a real difference for passengers. Okay, well, that's great for me because I'm just hoping that in the future, I'm never taking a jet at any length of time that isn't supersonic. So I've really big hopes for what you're building. Yeah. Let's go back a little bit to

the demonstrator of playing the XB1. You guys win Supersonic. It has been passing tests up and tracking your progress over on the blog. What is left to? to test, to prove out, and to learn from that demonstrator aircraft so that way you guys can take all of that and then build the final product. XB1 is 100% mission accomplished. We did a total of 13 flights. Yeah. We hit every single performance metric we wanted to hit,

including having demonstrated, it can reliably fly supersonic with no boom. We actually broke the sound barrier six times. Each time the microphones were on, nobody heard any booms. Running a company is not just about working hard, it's about working smart. And that means delegating tasks you don't have time for and that aren't essential for building your product or service.

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That's gusto.com slash twist. I'm going to pull up an image from your guys' site because I think it shows how this works. So to have no boom, you have to be, according to my understanding of this image here, just to fly above a certain cutoff altitude and then that somehow refracts or reflects sounds back up. So talk to folks about what we see here, Blake. Yeah. So if you believe what was written about boom before, well, boom,

The Sonic Boom was this very difficult to solve thing. It would require like unusually shaped airplanes that like spread out the energy or like cancellation waves, all this like crazy technology. Guess what? You can solve it with software. I'd love to hear that. So yeah, our solution to Sonic Boom is really two things. It is a software algorithm that computes the required flight trajectory.

By the way, it does it with ray tracing. This is algorithms out of computer graphics. Yeah, ray tracing is how you track. sunlight's refraction inside of games to provide a more lifelike and almost immersive gaming experience. That's right. So you can retrace like light paths and that's how you can like create a Pixar movie or a great video game or you can retrace sound waves and you can track how they propagate

in the atmosphere. So we sort of use reverse ray tracing to calculate what flight trajectory we need. I'll come back and like why that works. And then you need a power train that can actually go fly it, which is why it's a big deal. we're building our own power train. Off the shelf power trains can't do this. But the essence of it really is software. In fact, we could create an iPhone app

that you can give to a fighter pilot that would enable them to fly their fighter jet in a boomless fashion. So let me break down how that really works. It is refraction. So what's that? So I think as kids, we probably all saw that little science experiment

where you drop a straw and a glass of water and the straw looks broken. Why? It's because the light bends when it goes through water. In fact, anything that's a wave bends when it goes through a front where the propagation speed of the wave changes. So the speed of light's not the same as water as it as an air. And by the way, the speed of sound is a wave, right? Sonic booms are waves.

And the speed of sound varies with temperature. And temperature is not the same everywhere in the atmosphere. It's cold up high, it's warm down low. And so just the same way light has been towards where the speed of light is lower, sound has been towards where the speed of sound is lower, which is up high. which means the boom comes off the airplane, and if you control the angle of that boom, and you fly at a sufficiently high altitude,

the boom makes a gigantic U-turn in the sky, and it never touches the ground, and it's that simple. Okay, okay. In your little hand gesture there, you were pointing down as you passed the speed of sound. As someone who flies, I don't want to be pointed at the ground as I'm accelerating. How far do you have to tip the nose of the plane down

to pull off this trick? It works totally level. The angle in which the boom comes off the airplane is a function of speed. Right at Mach 1, most of the energy is propagated forward. The faster you're going, the more the energy points downward. And the refractive power of the atmosphere varies with the strength of the temperature gradient. So the stronger the temperature gradient in the atmosphere, the more the boom can be pointed downward and the faster you can fly.

So what you do is you take a look at reasonably good weather data about one level, what one hour old weather data is good enough. to make this work really well. And you can compute a maximum quiet speed. And then you would just fly at the maximum quiet speed. And that the speed controls the angle of the boom, not the trajectory of the airplane. Ah, okay, that's where I got it wrong.

Okay, so essentially all you need is up-to-date weather information. We have a lot of satellites in the sky, not that hard to get. And then each plane's flight plan would be then predicated on current atmospheric conditions so that way they could set the right minimum boomless speed. which would still be over Mach 1 in this example. That's right. Yeah. And on a good day, you can go Mach 1.3, you know, one point, which is, that's nearly twice as fast as today's airplanes.

On a bad day, you can go 1.05. And on a typical day, it's about 1.15. So that's, but you got to remember, like a 737 flies at 0.75. Which is unacceptably slow, everybody, by the way. Yes. I mean, I believe every speed is unacceptably slow. Amen. We should just keep making everything faster.

What this means is with no sonic boom, you can go 50% faster than a 737. What that means in practice is leave New York at 9, be in San Francisco at 930. It's going to be awesome. Yeah. Because I can actually fly out to SF for lunch and fly back. I mean, I would eventually bankrupt to me. Yeah. So actually, it's fascinating.

So London to New York will be three and a half hours at Mach 1.7. Then slightly slower over land, New York to San Francisco, will also be 3.5 hours. But if you look at the time differences work, you know, various parts of this thing, you could basically have breakfast in London, fly to New York, have breakfast in New York, fly to San Francisco have breakfast again.

And in fact, if you just keep flying west, you could just keep having breakfast. Well, you know, I think that's going to set off some new really annoying influencer TikToks. It's overdrickets to the sky. But you said that you've done all the testing you needed to do on the demonstrator aircraft. I know you guys are working on Symphony,

which is your in-house turbo fan that you're building, the power unit for the future jet. But talk to me about what's coming up next. Clearly, breaking the sound barrier, huge news. But I'm curious to the next, you know, two, three milestones. Right. Yeah, so XB1 is mission accomplished. It's back on the ground in Denver where we built it. And sadly, it'll never fly again. What? Why not? Well, it was mission accomplished. There's no point. We're on to the, we're on to the scale up the engine. It's going to for us the airplane. It's going to stay in the lobby of our new headquarters where it will be there to inspire employees. My rule is,

the most amazing thing they've ever built will always be in the lobby because it will remind every person coming to work that this company is a company that builds amazing things that people said you couldn't do. The plan is to put XB1 in probably the National Airspace Museum once it's been displaced by like an XP2. And one of the thing we did is after the final flight, the entire team that worked on it signed the airplane. And so if we think back to history, everyone knows that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Some people know that he did it on the Bell X1. And if you say who built that airplane, the answers are actually incredibly difficult to find.

Oh, lost to history. They're basically lost to history. And, you know, yet, so everyone's going to remember that Geppetto was the second coming of Chuck Beyer. Right? Chippetto was the first pilot to break the sound barrier on a privately developed aircraft. Blake's referring to a boom chief test pilot, Tristan, Jepetto, Brandenberg. Jepetto is his call sign, I guess? Hall sign, yes.

Yeah. Call time. Okay. Yes. Just 50 people worked on this airplane. So it was easy for them all to sign it. And when it's in a museum, you know, I want them to be able to take their kids and their grandkids and point and say, I built that.

And you can see my name on it. I love that. Okay. But moving past the lobby, talk to me about the future and give me some time bounce here. Like, are we talking about big stuff in the next quarter, next four quarters? Right now, right now big stuff. So what's going on is first we're scaling up the power train. and then we're scaling up the airframe.

And so literally as we speak, we are building the first symphony, it's what we call the engine, the first symphony, and we're building it largely, not only designing this in the house, building most of the parts ourselves. So the first symphony engine

is manufacturing right now. The turbine blades have been made, making the rotor discs. They're in machining, the tie bolts are coming off the lathe. Like hardware is getting made right now, about 80% of that engine is in the manufacturing process. It's going to run early next year. And this will be the first purpose-built engine for supersonic commercial flight.

Concord had adapted military engines. No one's ever done a civil supersonic engine before. This is the first one. And the boomless cruise would not be possible without this power train that we're making. People say only three companies can build jet engines. It's not true. We're doing it faster and better than it's ever been done before. A question on that. Is it harder to build the engine or the airframe when you think about your upcoming future passenger supercentric jet? I guess we'll find out once we're done with both and we can compare.

But I think the airplane integrated system is harder than the engine, but engines aren't easy. I'm impressed on the imaging to build symphony by yourself because I was also told that it's only a couple of companies and it's very, very hard. You can't do this. Don't try it at home, essentially. And you are.

So was everyone just trying to scare you? off? Yes. I mean, if jet engines are a triopoly, right? Airplanes are a duopoly, Boeing and Airbus. Engines are a triopoly. Rolls, GE, Pratt and Whitney. If you are a duopoly or a trioply, what do you tell

everybody else? Your thing is impossible and nobody else can do it. And you also need more DOD contracts, please. Yeah. That's right. You need all kinds of subsidies. By the way, the irony is just the same way Boeing and Airbus don't do new airplanes, right? Like neither Boeing nor Airbus has launched an all new airplane since 2004. Yep.

Right? The 737's going to be beaten to death as a dead horse until I think I stopped flying. That's right. I mean, it's insane. Like, you know, people are like, oh, man, this year's iPhone looks too much like last year's iPhone and Apple can't innovate. Can you imagine 21 years with no new products, right? That's actually aviation.

It is dead. There is nothing happening. It is stasis. There are some amazing AI tools out there that will absolutely make your workers faster and more productive. But having a large team using all kinds of different AI tools sanctioned or unsanctioned can actually pose some pretty serious privacy and security concerns for your data or your customers and partners data. This is Shadow AI and it could be costing you millions of dollars and it could be exposing your company to risk. But there's a solution. It's nexos.aI.

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or check out the link in the episode description below. And the same thing is true in the jet engine world. By the way, when you don't do something for 20 years, you don't know how to do it anymore. And so the irony of like nobody can build jet engines it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The big guys aren't doing it either. There's very little, you know,

there's a little bit more new engine development, the new airplane development, but mostly there's nothing. And so the whole industry has been the mindset of developing new products is hard. So let's do it less often, right? And we have the exact opposite mindset. Like long cycles, we get long cycle, short cycles, beget short cycles. If it hurts, then you do it, do it repeatedly until it doesn't hurt anymore.

I think it's really true. And so we are investing a lot in reducing the cost of iteration and reducing the cost of making new things. So there's a sub-stock I read on this a few weeks ago called Move Fast and Don't Break Safety Critical Things. And it's about our fundamental approach here, which is all about making hardware development look more like Agile Software Development. And there are two key things that go into that. Number one is embedding software engineers with hardware teams. There is a lot of Roat engineering that happens in the hardware world that is readily automatable if you put a smart, curious software engineer sitting next to the hardware, engineer. So we have a, we have a push button airplane design suite we call Make Boom. And like literally,

if you update one part of the airplane, you press a button that it redesigns the rest of the airplane automatically. So we make it, we make change easy. This is the important thing. Right. So therefore you can do more of it. That's right. Like, oh, we want to change the diameter of something in a traditional world like, oh, no, that's a whole bunch of rework and everything else has to change. No, we automate the rework, which makes change inexpensive. So that number of Number one on that is software. Number two is vertical integration of hardware. And I've come to believe the most important thing

in measuring hardware productivity, something we call slacker index. And slacker index is how long it takes to get something divided by how long it takes to make it. So if I go get a 3D printed turbine blade out of the traditional aerospace supply chain, it takes six months and it cost a million dollars. For $2 million, I can buy the machine,

and print the blade in 24 hours. There you go. By the way, the material for the blade is like a few hundred dollars. It's like basically zero. So if you can get hardware built quickly and you use processes like 3D printing so you can change the design in software and in data and you have ability to up iterate designs through automated code,

then you can iterate really fast. And if you can do that, then you can actually build new engines rapidly. You can build new airplanes rapidly. Like it took us a long time to do XP1 because we didn't know this yet and we didn't have any of the tools. I look backwards at XP1.

We could have done it in a half, in half the time or less, probably with half the cost or less. By the way, it was already 10 times cheaper than anybody else has never done a Super Sonic Jet. I'd love to hear that. But essentially hindsight's always 2020, but you're taking those learnings and applying them forward.

So before we talk about capital needs, what's the loose timeline for when Oversure, your specific jet will land at one of your airline customers, is that 2007, 2028? I'm trying to get my personal calendar in shape here. 29 is the target.

Could be 30. 29, okay, 30. 29 to 30 ready for passengers. We'll start building the first one next year. You'll see it roll off the line in 27. Our goal is to fly it in 28 and be ready for passengers in 29. And it's probably a little bit sporty on the timeline.

I like aggressive timelines. So it's possible. that I'll slip, but I don't think it'll slip by more than like a year or two. Okay. But all of that work, all of that work ahead of you still, the fact that you're doing manufacturing in-house, you're doing your vertically, you're building your own engines, is not cheap. And so I have been talking to so many founders in the last, especially 18 months, who are

building AI companies, which can be very expensive to build or doing infra, but mostly they're using third-party models and it's just a lot of AI software, man. And everyone's just throwing money at it, which is cool. Why not? You know, haza. But you guys are doing something that takes so much longer

to reach revenue and is so much more difficult. How do you set the company up in such a way that you can still attract capital when everyone's eyes are so squarely focused on tokens and LLMs right now?

There's a few different things that kind of come to mind here. First off, the notion that hardware companies are more capital intensive is not supported by the data. It's mythology. So if you go look at

how much venture capital was consumed by the, you know, the famous, asset light businesses, like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb. I think Airbnb and Uber consumed more than $10 billion of venture. And then if you look at the supposedly capital-intensive businesses, like SpaceX, Tesla, andrel, like they consumed much less venture.

So the notion that this consumes more capital is just not true. The thing that is different is how much do you spend before you get your free first revenue dollar. Yeah. And so what we've learned on the internet is it's hard to tell from a product pitch whether the product is going to have product market fit. So just go build a prototype, ship it, and find out whether people want what you built. Right.

Guess what? I can't build a supersonic airliner in order to find out if anybody wants one. So hardware companies, they need two things. One is they need a way of demonstrating product market fit short of shipping the product. And so pre-orders, pre-orders are that playbook. By the way, this has been done before. It's called Kickstarter. Yes.

And effectively, we did Kickstarter for SuperSantic Aviation. We have ordered with deposits from United and American. Vouch, not just that Supertemic Flight sounds cool, but if we could only deliver them the product that we've discussed, they would want it in quantity. We have five and a half years of demand from United American and Japan Airlines in the order book. The last thing I saw from you guys was that you had 130 Overture ordering. and pre-orders.

Is that number going to, are you going to try to extend that number before 2009, or are you happy with what you have now? We actually stopped selling the airplane. We have so much demand. It's like not worth selling. I mean, like great,

Lufthansa, British Airways, they ordered overture in addition to United American and Japan Airlines. It doesn't make a difference. Because it's so far out in the future because your manufacturing capacity is already pre-sold through 2034. Sounds right.

Every, every airline is going to need this, right? Like when you can get across the pond, in three and a half hour of them United, no one's going to fly BA anymore, right? So guess what? BA is going to have to go order this. And so that's inevitable. 100% of my focus is on delivering this,

not on like, you know, checking more boxes in the order book. It doesn't matter. If we deliver this, every airline's buying it, we'll stop. So the size of the order book beyond five and a half years

really doesn't matter. Like if it was only, the fact that we have two North American Airlines and one Asian airline, like I think that seals the deal. Yeah. But to your point, to show investors that what you're building does have product market fit, without being able to ship a some prototype software program,

you have firm orders and everyone wants it. So that probably gives confidence. That's right. That gives confidence. So that's thing one. If you want to go ship a product that's capital intensive to build and takes a while, you have to demonstrate that people want very specifically exactly what you're building. Right.

And it can't be hand-wavy conceptual. It has to be at the level of specs, right? Because a supersonic airliner, there are infinite numbers of potential supersonic airplanes. They could be a private jet. They could be an airliner. They could be a small airliner or a big airliner. They can have more range or less range, more seats or less seats. More fuel economy, less fuel economy.

There are a zillion choices that go into what the product is exactly. And you have to demonstrate that the exact choices that you're making are the ones that customers really want. And so that's where United stands behind us. They want the 4,000 nautical mile 62 seat. Supersonic airliner designed a business class economics and the cabin layout that we've put in this airplane, right? That's product market fit. It's not whew, supersonic, right? One of the great challenges of running a startup is getting your business and engineering teams on the same page.

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And we're going to give you 20% off plus access to their dedicated Slack channel. Just go to DevStats.com slash twist for your 20% discount. That's D-E-V-S-T-A-T-S dot com slash twist. Like Concord, Concord is a down-the-middle example. And you can build a supersonic airplane with no product market fit. Let's not do that again. Amen to that. So because you've shown product.

market fit, and I would say really do risk the technology quite a lot through your test flights, through breaking the sun barrier, through the boomless work that you've done. Will you have access to the capital you need to get us all the way through to when United gets delivered? Yeah. So there's a second thing that's really helpful, which is finding your starlink. What is that? So the way Elon financed development of the Falcon 9, then the reusable Falcon 9, was through

building an ISP in space. I think a lot of people did not know how to think about the launch business. A lot of investors didn't, but they understood an internet business. And it was Starlink that made the rest of it financeable. And of course, Starlink you could spend out, it could IPO on its own and be a multi-hundred billion dollar company on its own independent of the launch business. So it's really useful to have a Starlink. So what is your Starlink?

Well, I can't tell you yet, but I can tell you we found it. You found it. We found it. We found our Star League. So there is... When are you going to tell me what it is? How long until I... How long do I have to wait, Blake?

There is a shipping product that ships before the supersonic airliner that we have over a billion dollars in orders for. I'm going to have to have you back on the show, aren't I? Yeah. So I can't tell you what it is, but it's based on the same technology, but it's much faster to scale of revenue. And I spent a decade looking for that. and saying no to a lot of things that are shiny objects. And then we found it earlier this year.

And it's really exciting. And it is the Starlink of Super Sonic Flight. Is it a software product or a hardware product? It is a hardware product for which the world is desperate for. Huh. Okay. Well, I'm going to chew on that.

When you do announce it, Blake, will you come back on the show and tell us about it? Absolutely. Or you can come to the reveal. It'll be fine. Where will the reveal take place? TPD. Probably it'll be at our first.

factory in Denver. That's a short fled for me. So I will come out if my shoulder and will grant me the time to do so. If only every flight were as short as the flight from SF to Denver. It's amazing how much more I could do if I wasn't constantly dealing with slow, annoying planes that are apparently from 2004. Blake, I'm supposed to be impartial on a journalist, but I'm stoked for boom, man. I'm a big believer in the company. And so continue success in the meantime. And apparently I'll talk to you sometime between next week and a year from now. We'll have to find out. Sounds good. Alex, appreciate you. Thank you, thank you, sir. Bye. Bye.

All right. Next up on our pitch competition is Mircha from Confi. Am I pronouncing the name correctly, C-O-N-F-Y, ConFi? I usually say confi, but whatever you prefer. Confi. Okay, confi, got it. This is the problem. We misspell names, but, you know, you got the nice confi.

Dot Tech domain name. We love a dot-tech. And I can see here that you're optimizing data for better business at events. And I'm really excited to hear your pitch. I'll give you the 3-2-1. Are you ready? I am ready. Three, two, go.

Hi, Mircha from Confi here, and Confi is AI for events. You can think of us kind of like an intelligent data layer for the trillion-dollar business events market. So meet John and Hannah. John is attending an industry event where he needs to meet sales prospects to fulfill his quota. And Hannah organizes that event, aiming to deliver ROI and keep her attendees happy. But all John gets on his event app is a static guest list, thousands of names, no way to

search for the right people. He doesn't know who he should meet or why. And Hannah can't easily capture Ant&D goals or approve ROI to exhibitors, because events are fundamentally data rich, but usually insights poor. Enter Confi. Our web app helps guests articulate goals before the event. We then enrich the guest list with public and proprietary signals, including our own data set of tens of thousands of AT&Ds already on Confi today.

John runs AI searches like Find Me FinTech investors or Find MCP engineers, and he finds relevant prospects. He connects with them instantly. And at the same time, Hannah boosts engagement and sponsor ROI, justifying higher ticket and sponsorship prices. Our go-to-market is a real game-changer. We use a permissionless approach that engages attendees directly without requiring organizer buy-in. And this has fueled a consistent 227% month-over-month growth and a 24% cold email conversion rate. In the past four months alone, we've added 36,000 new attendees on Confi. We are live on Luma, where we plan to charge AT&D's a $20 subscription for unlimited access across all events, but the much larger opportunity here is conferences, because there are over

200 million conference tickets sold worldwide annually and a $30 per AT&D, that's a $6 billion market. More importantly, exhibitors and sponsors spend six to seven figures per conference, and Confine's proprietary intent data will enable us to charge pricing of above $10,000 per exhibitor per event, which in itself is a $10 billion opportunity. our TechStars-backed founders with Deep Domain Authority. We've delivered paid event software to 100-plus companies. I-drive growth, and my co-founder is a full stack and DevOps engineer building our platform end-to-end. We are now working to unlock self-scraping, which is our next viral loop. This will let us automatically ingest data and service events that we can't yet

access with our model projecting $10 million in ARR within 18 months of realization. That's Confi, and you should add it to your next event. All right. Great pitch. I didn't like the tagline at the beginning. I'm going to talk to you about that. So let's go back to the first slide, because it's always great to go through these. But I do love the problem you've stated. Everybody now has apps for their event, right? That's like now become kind of a standard. The All In Summit has an app. I went to the Code 2 conference. There was an app. And in these apps, you get a directory. But the directory is, you know, the two complaints I have, with this app software.

And there's one big app company. I forgot the name of it. What's the big 800-pound gorilla that does these event apps now? The oldest one that is really well-known is C-Vent, but that's not the only one by far. Yeah. What's the next most prominent one?

Funnily enough, based on company size, I would say Bizabo is really big, but more recently I see more people using Brela and other things like that. Swap card is another one out of Europe. Yeah, so these platforms tend to be expensive. and they're not great. And the problem is you get that app and you're like,

okay, there's now a list alphabetical of all these people. Like, how am I supposed to use this? Are people even on the app? It's just a disaster. And so it is a real problem. And it would be really nice if there was an algorithm inside of these that could help you sort through them. So what you're saying is as an attendee or as a sponsor,

we're going to give you some tools, some weapons. We're an arms dealer. We're going to give you some weapons. so that you can do this independent of the platform. So whether you get a CSV file from the planners that has all the attendees, or you have to scrape it by going to the website, we're going to help you figure this out. Get them into your CRM or your AI-based CRM, and we're going to do AI matchmaking. So you're saying, hey, we're not going to rip out the existing software,

not going to try to displace them. We're just going to make a tool that people are willing to pay for, whether you're an attendee or a sponsor, that help. you get maximum value and do AI on those specific data sets. Correct? Do I understand the product? You understand it perfectly. You're missing a few steps in there.

Things that we can do better, but that's the basic problem. I got it. Yeah. So I think showing the apps of these other ones and, you know, just slowing down there to explain the problem, this is a salesperson. They go to this event, right? And they see this, right? So this slide is great.

So they now have, and this could be like you could scroll through this and show the app and how meaningless it is with a video. So videos are more convincing than pictures. Pictures are more convincing than text. So each time you replace one of those objects with the next most convincing object, your pitch is going to be received even better. So here, John logs into the app. He works and he's looking for attorneys who are at this event who work in specifically litigation. This event has 10,000 attorneys. He needs to find the litigators, boom, and here we go.

So here you have this video. And now this is your app here. This is us, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think explaining the go-to market works two different ways. One, you can use existing datasets that you scrape, ingest, etc. Or we're building APIs into those. Are any of these people letting you build an API into them?

or do they just see US competitive? You mean the apps providers? Yeah, like C-Vent, whatever. We typically don't even work with the app providers at this point. We would love to win the future and would love to build integrations. But at the moment, we're just serving the attendees directly. Yeah, the matchmaking piece of this, AI matchmaking for events in and of itself is really interesting.

So I wonder if going after your go-to market is to find the attendees and get them to use this or go to the event providers and get them to do it? What's the go-to-market? Attendees. And that's where we're really smart. I have to be a little careful about what I divulge in a public setting, but we have to be, this is part of our special sauce, but we are really smart about this stuff.

And what we can do is beyond actually just grabbing the list of people and matching it with the right people, we are also interviewing and encouraging all the other attendees as well to share their goals. You see, if you think about it from an incentive perspective, when you get a request to fulfill a survey or something, there's nothing, or to fill out the survey. There's nothing incenting you to actually do it. But in this case, if you tell me what they're looking for, I will find people for you. And that helps us actually gather a lot of proprietary data, which can be resold to the organizers, to sponsors, to other attendees like this. And so we're not just aggregating existing data.

We're generating our own. And that's one of the big things that other players in this space have not figured out, how to actually get people to respond. And when we decide to cover an event, we don't just find information about the people and the customers that we're working with. We find information and we generate new information about everyone, or at least the people that want to use us. Yeah, so that's great.

This concept of lead enrichment, it exists. We have a company of Lead IQ. We're investors in, and there's many companies that do similar things where you give an email address, a URL, a domain name, or just a first and last. name in a city and it will go and try find a Twitter, an Instagram, a LinkedIn, a blog, an X.com account, whatever it is. And lead enrichment is also very powerful. I think you're off to the races. I think you'll know you'll have made it when the event people start to get upset about your existence or you actually are a competitor to some of these other services. And I think

there's an opportunity to just make a matchmaking platform and have an API. I wonder if, are you building all this technology with an API in mind or no? In the future, yes, absolutely. And we already have a list of all the events that are covered. Some of them are accessible publicly, others are not. And you can go right now on our website. And I'm not sure if you can still see my screen. If this is okay for me to share, but it's literally you're able to go on our website right now

and choose from a few hundred events that we've powered in the, past. And the ones with a green rectangle around them are the free ones, and the other ones are paid. And you can go at any one of these events and put in your goals and the types of people that they're trying to meet. And you can find people specifically at that event that you are in right now. And of course, eventually we're building tools that will enable you to look for things universally, but there are some data sharing concerns there that need to be addressed carefully in the future. So for the moment, it's very much event-by-event-based. But imagine in the future, if you know what everybody's trying to accomplish. Why not use this as a tool to find more attendees for your event?

Why not use this as a tool to create your own events, if you would like? The potential of this data to be reutilized and to be monetized in different ways, I think is almost infinite. Yeah. I think you have a lot of great ideas, a lot of data, and then building this into an elegant, seamless product is the last piece of the puzzle here. I think you're on the way. And it seems like you're getting some early signs of product market fit. So I think you're going to be successful here. I love the idea of like there being an API for this or a white labeled service. For example, you know, at the all in summit, we have 3,500 people there. I'm not sure what event software they used or if it even has this type of features. But we run bird of a feather

dinners and that kind of stuff. It would be great to have a white label service where we can just pay $1,000 a month or $10,000 a year, whatever it is, $5,000 a year to put everybody in and then have them just do that matching or some AI matching service. It's really clever what you're building and you've got great potential. So why are we not doing it? Let's do it. Let's get the Olin Summit on board. It was in LA.

I live like close to where the last one happened. I think you also have to just. My last thing is your design is mid, like maybe a five out of 10, a six out of 10 in terms of like UX, UI, the pitch deck itself. One thing is people do judge books by their cover. Design matters. So I would think about investing a little bit in getting the design from what I would say is a five out of ten to maybe a seven and then, you know, struggle again for a couple of months, try to get it to an eight and a half. And then a year later, maybe you can get it to a nine and a half. If you look at the journey that Uber went on or, you know, Facebook or et cetera, like a lot of them were janky apps at first or they were also mid five or six is out of ten. And they just invested over time and they built that muscle. You've obviously got the data muscle in this. organization. I'd love to see you add the designing UX muscle to it next. A great job, and I wish you

continue success with it. Thanks again to... Thank you so much. Confi and Mircha. It's C-O-N-F-Y. And what's your domain name? So we can give you a shout. DotTech. Dot Tech. Another great crossover there. Dot Tech domains. I love those. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. All right. Next on our pitch competition is Bijan from the Drive AI. How you doing, Bajan? Good. How are you? I'm great and I'm really excited to see your pitch built in Gamma.com. Let's start. I'll give you the big count. I'm ready? Yep. Three to go.

Hi, I'm Bigan. Founder of the Drive AI, the world's first authentic workspace. A Mitken, he works as a VP of venture and community at Edmonton Unlimited. And his reality is his files are spread across different shared Google drives and tools. And he spends hours searching, organizing, and sharing files. Each event that is, Tim runs, generates hundreds of documents. For his new event, he is working with 10 companies. And here is what it looks like. Ken opens up Google Drive, clicks new folder 10 times, writes the name of the companies,

adds people, fixes permission, and uploads same templates into each of these 10 folders manually. It's tedious, repetitive, and by the time he's done, an hour is already gone, and the real work has not even started. Now imagine, what if Ken could simply say, create folders for all of these 10 companies that I'm working with, invite their team members, and upload the templates. And it just does that within few seconds. Oh, Kate has missed the files. Why don't you ask the Drive AI to just organize it by its content?

And it just automatically organizes it neatly within the nested photo structure. Oh, two word to type it out, just drag and drop it. And then the Drive AI automatically organizes it within the neat folder structure. And that is what we are creating, the Drive AI, the world's first is where all file operations can be done using natural language or even voice. It's the only drive that you'll ever need. I started working on the Drive AI as a note-taking app for students and scaled into 20,000 users. And here is something that I discovered, very insightful.

One in three user queries are actionable queries. That means users naturally ask the Drive AI to do things and not be just expect to get answers back. Right now we are focused on enterprise and we already have four LOIs from companies and we are starting our paid pilot with one company starting this month at $500 per workspace per month. Starting with consulting, engineering and accounting firms, we only need 2,000 of these companies to reach 2 million ARR, a very, very tiny fraction of $96 billion market. Previously, I've built superhuman. level China checkers Alpha Zero isn't and have extensive AI and reinforcement from research experience

from this year's during our winning institution. Right now we are raising two million dollar pre-cdraud to scale up our research infrastructure and code market strategy to onboard those 2,000 companies to get to dual million ARR. See the drive AI is here to end the era of static dumb file stories. Google Drive box drop box you name it they are all file cabinets at this point of time. What we are building is the only workspace that thinks and acts alongside you, the drive AI, the only drive that you'll ever need. Thank you. Okay, well done. What's great about this is you have traction. We need to do a better job showing that traction and what it means. And let's go back to your first slide here. We'll do a little, some tips on

presenting. So you said the drive AI, world's first agentic workspace. That's generally word salad. When you use buzzwords and you say, oh, it's the first and it's agentic, it's kind of not as evocative or as powerful as just saying it in plain English. At the end, you had a different tagline, which was the only one you ever need or something to that effect. And then you had another tagline that you said before it.

So I want you to work on just a really simple sentence that explains the value proposition to investors. Hey, we're the drive AI. We're an AI first file management system, whatever it is. We're an AI first version of Dropbox or, you know, box.com. Something so that people understand what you're doing. Now, when you go to the next slide, this is an incredibly text-heavy slide. Okay. So I'm going to give you a couple of just general tips because you nail it on the next slide.

On the next slide, you show your product and you do a product demo. That's great. On this one, you're trying to queue up an actual user. Now, is this a real user or is this one you made up? This is the real user. So you should say that. This is a real user. His name is Ken. He is at Edmonton Unlimited.

He's a vice president. And you just need to know two things about him. One, he currently is very frustrated with Box and Dropbox and Google Drive. And two, he waste hours and hours and hours doing the following. Then show it. So this is a very simple rule of presenting. Show, don't tell. Show don't tell.

So here you told us, he creates 10 folders, he invites team members, he sets up permissions, and he upload templates. This should be a screen. And you should say, and you can even. you know, put it on the left. You could just, you know, show it really quick. I'm speeding this up, but what you're seeing here is an hour of his day, and you speed it up, you know, and you show it in a minute while you're talking.

So you definitely want to show that the one hour, you know, show the one hour of work, you know, really fast. Then you go to your next slide and you say, and here's how Ken does the same exact task today. He opens up our thing. He types the following command. You can go a little bit slower here. Instead of showing, I think you showed like maybe five or six different things here, just showed the one, apples to apples.

He did the same thing in how many minutes? I don't know, probably a few seconds. Okay, so say that. He did it under a minute. So he went from an hour of work to under a minute. And this is what he said to us. And then you do, boom, full screen the quote from him, this incredible, you know, testimonial from your customer. I can't believe this doesn't exist.

I would pay any amount for this. Whatever his amazing quote is. You just ask him, can you give us like a Yelp-like quote for our presentation deck when we go raise money? Okay. Then if we go to the next slide here, you do some more demos, the next slide, and you maybe did maybe too many of them and maybe too fast. So I think slowing down and just showing like maybe one more. Here's another example, whatever. Let's go to the next one.

This slide you probably don't need. If you can type it out, it can do it. You kind of showed that. ready. So back to show, don't tell. And then here, traction was very interesting. But again, very text-heavy slide. What I'd rather see you do here is show a cumulative user slide and an active user slide, something like that, a chart. So how many months has the product been out? It's been almost 16 months at this point at time. So I'd say here's our 16-month cumulative user chart. And then here's, you know, our, and you can get rid of the B2B letters of intent,

because people in our industry call them letters of nothing. Like, I think it's much better to take the B to C folks, and are any of them paying yet, or are just all users? No, we have some paid users. Perfect. So I would get rid of the LOIs because that lowers your credibility because you're, like, wasting time on getting people to give you a letter that they might use your product. We get 20,000 free users.

How many paid do you have? 100, 1,000? And when does it turn on paid? Right now, just 13 paid users. Perfect. And how many months have you been doing paid? Probably last 12, 13 months. Okay, fine.

So it's a small number. So that's going to be an issue for folks of why did that convert. Now, of those 20,000 users that sampled the product, how many use it every day? Is it 200? How many daily active users? Almost like 5%. Okay, great. So you want to lead with like the most important numbers?

you understand when you're talking to VCs, they're going to double-click on all of these. And so when they see vanity numbers versus real numbers, credibility can go down. It's much more credible to say we have a thousand daily users currently. Of those thousand, 13 have converted to paid, and they're paying $50 a month. How much are they paying? So for individuals is $20 a month. $20 a month. And let me tell you about those thousand users.

And then you go to the next thing for the thousand users. They've uploaded 90,000 files. And you show the number of files uploaded cumulatively. Okay. So what I did here is I just looked at all your stats. And what founders do is they try to look for the biggest numbers. And what investors do, they try to look for the most important numbers, the most accurate numbers that will let them understand the first.

footprint of the business. So the cumulative files uploaded, if it was a cumulative chart, obviously it only goes up, but we could start to see slopes and we could start to see like how people are using it. And then if we talk about those 13 users, here's the 13 users who decided to give us their money. Boom, and you explained where they are. Then you could also talk a little bit about how you're converting them. So we're doing a conversion where when you hit this many files, it prompts you to convert. So you get your first 10,000 files and your first file. And gig for free. After that, you have to pay. Is that the business model, consumption, and tier pricing on consumption? Right. So we limit, so we are like three plans right now, free individual and

enterprise. For free, we just give like a one GBI free stories plus five AI queries per day. Perfect. So I think explaining that is more important than some of the vanity metrics, right? Okay. And let's go to the next slide. Okay. So this is pretty good. you know, we're going to be business to business at some point and we think we can get to 2,000 people who are, and this is where like maybe having a persona, the people who want our product are the top 5% of drive users. They don't get this out of their current drives. And then there's going to be a question, why don't you build a layer on top of Dropbox and Google Drive? What's the

answer to that question? I'm curious. One, well, I hear that question a lot. Yeah. The answer that I like to give is we want to be one-stop solution for all of your agentic tasks. So Google Drive would never, never integrate OneDrive into its system, right? Or even email services or any other existing services. And that's, I think, the value that we provide. We want to be one-step solution for your all file organization tasks.

So it doesn't matter whether you use Google Drive, One-Drive. What's interesting about that is you're thinking big. want to be the full-stack solution. I get that. But if you had a Chrome extension that did all this, or you made a browser that did this or a wrapper or something like that, then you could have people tried on their existing ones and be able to run these tools on the existing ones and then let them port over if they want to. It's just something to consider because when Superhuman did their email product, they let people keep their Gmail address, their Google Docs, and their outlook and they just became like a layer on top of those in interface.

People said, oh, my God, it's never going to work. You have to be full stack. And I kind of felt that way, too. Turned out, I was wrong. People just love the interface, and they like having their Gmail interface available as a backup. So there is something to it. But you'll make that decision as you go. Let's go to the next slide.

Sure. I just want to quickly follow up on that. Sure, right. Yeah, absolutely. So what we already have is Google Drive integration. So we can sync all of your files from Google Drive into the Drive AI. Oh, great. So that you can still work on a Google Drive, but it's still important sync that file within the Drive AI.

Got it. So if I create one on the Drive AI, it puts it in my Google Drive. If I create something new on Google Drive, it will sync over there. So you're a backup service as well. Right. Yeah, so that's an interesting one, too. If you were like, I need to have a backup. We invested in a company BackUpify, I think, yeah.

And they let you log into your services like Twitter or Gmail or GDrive. and they just use the APIs to back all your stuff up in case you lost your Gmail account because people would get their Gmail hacked and there's no recourse. It's not like you're a paid customer if you have a Gmail account. And then here, this slide, you're a solo founder, is that right? Right now, yes. Yeah. So solo founder is always a weakness in the eyes of venture capitalist because they have seen and they have pattern recognition that you've got to go big,

you need to have like, um, you know, two or three co-founders to kind of spread out the work. Did you have any other full-time employees, or is it just a one-man show at the time? We recently hired a full-stack engineer. Perfect. So I think here you could just put, I'm a solo founder, just own it, and this is our first engineer, boom. And so you get that credit for having your founding engineer, you could call them.

And if they say, what's the difference of founding engineer? It's, oh, he has, you know, X percent equity, right? So when co-founders, when solo founders don't have co-founders, they can do, or I advise them to do the founding team. So founding engineer, founding salesperson, founding growth person. And you can just explain, you know, I didn't have a co-founder on this one, but I did build a founding team. And these folks each have on average 4% equity if they stick around for five years. So then they feel like, oh, there is a little bit of a team here. If something happens to you, the company doesn't shut down, which is their fear for

early stage companies. When a company gets bigger, you know, if you've got a solo founder, it's not the end of the world. But in the early days, people do have a bias towards it. You did a great job. I think you're probably going for too much money. I think it's going to be hard to raise $2 million. I never want to tell a founder not to try. I think you should go to an accelerator first, go to Y Combinator, Techstars, launch. God, there's so many. That could then help you find a co-founder or maybe answer some of these questions around how do we convert more of the thousand to, you know, paid? And then I think going for a seed round and maybe trying to find an anchor seed fund who will put in 250 to a million. They typically do 500K. They put in 500K and

then you could pass the hat with other angel investors for 500K and then deploy that with a goal of I'm going to deploy a million dollars. I'm going to build the team out to five people. And then we're going to get to, you know, 10,000 free users and a thousand paid users. And with a thousand page users at 20K a month, we'll be, you know, close to break even, whatever it is. And you can explain that use of funds. Going for $2 million at this point with a two-employee team with not a lot of growth and a very small number of paid, it could be easier for you. Have you raised venture before? We did get a small check from launch, from founding university.

Yeah, so you got our check from founding university. When you go on, I would definitely go to, which we like to do. We give this 25K check to try to get people started and help them incorporate. But you need to go to a next. I would try to go to an accelerator, yeah, and keep things going. If you can add 10 paid users a month, 20 paid users a month at this stage, and then let's say, 20 a month and you churn three or four, people are going to look at the business and go, oh, okay, he's figuring out product market fit and go-to-market. But, you know, the challenge for

you will be, you're so busy building the product that where's the time for fundraising going to come from? Where's the time to go-to-accelerator going to come from? Where's the time for your go-to-market strategy? It's just going to be hard. So I wish you the best with it. Great job. And you're off to the races. And for background for people who don't know, we have founder dot University. We do it three times a year here in the United States, but anybody can go anywhere around the world. And then we just launched our Mina, which will be in Saudi, starting in the first week of November, and you can find all that information at Founder. Dot University. And we give all of the folks who aren't incorporated yet, or they're just a one or two-person team. We give them the option every

week, check a box. I would like a 25K check. I'd like a hundred, 25-k check. And we review the progress, and we decide if we can be helpful and we think it's a good investment for our LPs. And hopefully that 25K helps you get into an accelerator. That's my wish for you. So you get into Y Combinator or you get into our accelerator or Antler or any of these great ones, tech stars. The only chat or Pair has a good one. Pair VC has one over the summer.

The only problem is you need a co-founder really to get in. So a lot of these programs will not accept a solo founder in my experience. They may not say that explicitly, but realistically they may not. So I wish you continued success, and we'll see everybody next time on This Weekend Starterdam's. Bye-bye.