This Week in Startups - E1037: LAUNCH Accelerator Class 16 Founders of BasicBlock (payment solution for truckers), DaoCloud (lead-gen for health & wellness practitioners) & Lately (AI-powered social media writing software) reflect on their journeys through the program

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

0:38 Jason explains the LAUNCH Accelerator 5:39 BasicBlock CEO Taylor Monks details his journey through the LAUNCH Accelerator 14:58 BasicBlock CEO Taylor Monks' biggest takeaways from the Accelerator 27:35 DaoCloud CEO Max Coleman describes his journey into the LAUNCH Accelerator 37:34 How did Max grow throughout the Accelerator? 48:36 Lately CEO Kate Bradley-Chernis describes her experience at the l LAUNCH Accelerator 55:08 What were Kate's biggest takeaways from the Accelerator?

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Start your 14-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. We got a special treat for you today. As you know, we are investors in startup companies. As part of that, we have something called the launch accelerated. What is it? It's kind of like Y Combinator or TechStars back in the old days when they only had seven companies in each cohort.

So maybe 10 times a year, we will have seven companies come, and they'll be part of the launch accelerator. And we did six in 2019. We did four classes in 2018 and two classes when we started the program in the second half of 2017. And those companies have gone on to raise tens of millions of dollars. And it's a very simple deal here in Silicon Valley or in other places. Techstarsts is around the world.

In fact, we put a small amount of money, $100,000 into these companies. We run a program for 12 weeks. We put them in front of 150 investors. and we try to help them learn how to pitch their company, learn how to answer questions about their companies, do planning, do growth, and all around just try to help them navigate raising money. And we do this for companies that are in what we call our Goldilocks zone.

Not too hot, not too cold. Too cold? Well, you've got an idea like everybody else. Too hot, you've got a Series A with six term sheets and you're picking between them. You probably don't need to go to an accelerator. You just need to pick which term sheet you're going to go with. In between those two are 10,000 companies here in America that have gotten their products to market, have two, three, four customers, but they're nowhere near getting their Series A.

They've got another year or two of work to do. That's where we like to engage founders. That's when they need us. That's when we can be the most helpful. And we run a scoring system in the accelerator, largely so that founders can find out which investors like their companies best. So every week we started in the 12-week program, in the first class we'd have one investor come, and that investor would mentor the seven companies and give feedback. And we'd ask them what their three favorite were.

Then we started having three or four investors, and the last couple of weeks we started to have 10, maybe even 15 investors show up every week. This adds up over 12 weeks, obviously. And we track the scoring now across all of those investors. So we have a little spreadsheet, and we ask investors, which are your three-fifest, start-ups through the lens of your own investing thesis. So if we have a bunch of enterprise investors that week and there's two or three enterprise companies and two or three consumer, obviously the enterprise companies are going to get the votes that week because they're in the

wheelhouse of those investors. We give people a half point in the scoring system if they're third place. We give them a point if they're second place. And then we give them two points if they come in first place. We then add all those points up. Those points do not necessarily correlate with the eventual success of the companies. It's too soon to tell if it does, but it does correlate modestly with funding. And sometimes when something's very new, it scores a lot of points.

There's a little bit of a recency effect. Whoever goes last, that week in the accelerator tends to get more points. So we started making it rotate, who got to go first and who got to go last in presenting. But the scoring system allows us to see really which companies are breaking out in the minds of the investors we're inviting.

That also allows, the people who maybe aren't scoring points to ask themselves, is it my pitch? Is it my business model? Is it how much I'm charging people? Is it me and my ability to present? My ability to answer questions? Is it my brand name? Just to be a little bit introspective. Ultimately, by the end, when you have these seven companies presenting two dozen or so investors, you start to see the points get spread out and you start to see different people rise and fall. Sometimes somebody has a bad week, somebody tweaks their presentation, and we record all of these presentations so that the founders can look at them. That's the value proposition of the launch accelerator. If you want to come to the launch

accelerator, you can go to launch.co and apply there, or you can email me anytime, jason at calicannis.com. But again, it's not for ideas. It's not an incubator. It's an accelerator. And so this last class, I thought we take the top three in terms of scoring. It's just a way to pick three companies. You don't have to read into it too much. But, But we'll have these three companies talk a little bit about what they do and what they learned, and you get an idea of what I'm investing in. We will then, of course, invest further in these companies as they go on through their life. So we have a four-bet strategy at launch.

We'll make a bet on the accelerator. When they graduate, they typically are doing a seed round. We'll put a little money into that. Maybe they'll do another seed round and then eventually a Series A, or they may go to Series A and then Series B. And we'll place a bet each time if the company is, growing. So we like to keep continuing that bet and maybe get to 10 to 20% ownership in a company. That's what we do here. That's the model. First up is Taylor Monks. Taylor, you are the CEO and co-founder

of Basic Block. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. This is your first startup. This is, yeah, this is my first startup. Tell everybody what does Basic Block do? So we help digitize trucking workflows. They're often using tons and tons of paperwork and organizing that paperwork to get paid. So think of like starting an origin and then ended up kind of at your destination and picking up bill of ladings or fuel receipts or toll receipts along the way. We then built like a little mobile application for them to scan those documents in and then we bundle them up and kind of put them back to the back office ready to be invoiced. So like Expensify or one of those expense software companies, you just take out your phone,

you take a picture of your receipt and it normalizes that OCRs it, optical character recognition, and takes what is paperwork and makes it digital. Exactly. That's exactly what it is like. And so people pay you for that? Yeah, so they pay us a SaaS fee of $50 per truck per year for that product that we have that we launched. So it's absurdly cheap. Yeah, it's super cheap. $4 a month per truck. Yeah, and it's kind of designed that way. So we built the scanning solution as kind of like a Trojan horse because under that there's this whole financial product called invoice factoring or asset-based lending or asset-based lending or I guess just kind of payday loans, these trucking companies. They often don't get paid for 30 to 90 days. So all that data we capture from those invoices, our plan is to actually start funding those and leveraging kind of the data we get and the capital we have to actually get them paid quicker.

So you make a tool that's incredibly affordable. It helps trucking companies, which are typically small mom-and-pop shops with two to ten trucks. Yeah, 93% of the market is trucking companies that are less than eight trucks. So we service that percentage of the market. And so you find one of those trucking companies. They use the tool. They get great value from it. It gets rid of paperwork.

And then you know how much that haul was worth. Exactly. So we are gathering the rate con and all the receipts and expenses that go. Raycon? Yeah, the rate confirmation. So they negotiate a rate that they're going to pull that load for prior. It's actually pulling it. So we gather that information along with all the expenses they had a long.

the trip and journey, and then we kind of bundle that up and then we ship it back to them. Right now, we're currently not doing the invoice factoring, but we're experimenting with it. All right. So this was your first company. How did you find out that we had an accelerator and how did the application process go for you? Because one of the things I'm hoping by doing this is I inspire other founders to apply. And you're from Nebraska, right? Yeah, Lincoln, Nebraska.

So we found you on somebody, a mentor of mine, I think you tweeted something and they tagged us on Twitter. And then the process was really weird. You know, like on our side, we are way earlier than most. And you talk about the Goldilocks zone. We were ridiculously early. And I think that you asked us to come present. And candidly, we didn't have the money to get here at the time.

So we wanted to do it over Zoom. But you guys said no. So and I knew obviously listening to the podcast and reading a lot of your stuff, you wanted product and market. So I kept saying no for probably like two months in a row. And then I think the day. I pitched you, we like went live with our first truck driver. So when we got here, we really didn't. Yeah, it was just kind of a wild experience. We didn't really have the money to get here. We only bought like a one way

ticket to get here. So we didn't even have money to like get back. And the way that we actually afforded that ticket was doing like those clinical research trials. So like we were like, whatever. We'll just like get on the plane and like see if we can pitch Jason and see what happens. Wait a second. You mean you submitted yourself to a clinical research trial? Yeah, yeah. You personally. took a clinical research trial to get here. Yeah. Like multiple, we were funding that, we funded our company for a couple months on those clinical research trials.

So basically you took some drug of questionable efficacy and or danger. Oh, very much danger. You, like, signed over your life to do this. Like, it was like... So similar to what they do in prison, you were elected... Well, my mentors always told me that, like, when you start a startup, you'll, like, you'll put your body through stuff that you'll never, like,

expect to. And I guess maybe they meant that. Maybe they did. So you were all in. Yeah, we literally didn't have a, like, I'm not kidding you. When I say, like, we bought a one way ticket here. Like, we didn't have a way to get back. And it was like, we were running out of money. And my co-founder of Brett Biman, like, I don't want to say the ship was sinking, but like, things were on fire, if you will. And it's like, we need this money to survive. We get here. And then it's like, holy crap, you write this check. And it's like, you know, in Nebraska, like, companies, they don't often leave to come to the valley as early as we did. Like it's just like almost when we left, it was like, we're going to like find Bigfoot is like kind of whatever. The community was like, yeah, good luck. Right.

I mean, then when we came back, people were like, oh shit. Yeah. Like they did it. And we were like, you know, kind of like, yeah, like welcome to the show type of thing. And then it was like, yeah, it was like that kick started us into like this crazy like, you know, investors emailing us and like, you know, and you invest in us and then we're like, see you later. We, typically, I'm pretty sure you guys invest in companies, then you come directly to launch a couple weeks later. It's typically, I would say, on average, three or four weeks between when we make the decision to invest in the program starts. So I think that you guys invest in us in May and then we didn't come to October because we were so early. So sometimes we'll invest early and then say to the founder,

hey, you know, maybe you should have five customers before you come to the Accelerate because we want you to succeed. And we know, we can predict that. Investors might say, you know what, you only have one customer, you know, it could be your cousin or your uncle or your you know, a sister-in-law who did this for you, we'll wait till you have five customers. Yeah, so for us, it was like, we had companies prepaying us. So we had companies sending us checks in the mail before we ever had a product. And then by the time I think we got to you, we had like an ugly product, like really bad. And, you know, it was whatever, it was fine. We had one user at the time when I was like sitting in this chair pitching you. And then, yeah, like, then

you wrote us that check. And I don't know if you remember this, but I do like very clearly when we got in this like massive you know I think when Jason Calcanus investing you in Lincoln Nebraska is like you know I think everybody got a little bit greedy if that makes sense. Huh. And we got like this terrible lawsuit basically. Huh. And I remember like we were literally, we took that 100K and we basically just like lit it on fire. Right.

And it was like gone. And I remember having to call like you or somebody on the launch team basically be like, yeah, you invested in us when we had that product and we were like just about there. We were just about to like keep going live. We went through this lawsuit and I was like, I have to get on the phone with Jason Calcanus and just basically tell him that, like, I have to fire every single person on our tech team. It's going to go back to me and my co-founder who are not technical. And we just lit his 100K on fire. And I remember, like, calling you or whoever it was and, like, you guys being like, hey, we invested in you, not anyone else or not anything else. It was like you to figure it out. And we trust whatever you're going to do to figure it out. And I think that gave us, like, superpowers. And like, that moment for us was super pivotal because it allows us to like double down, like go through it all. like still raise the money, find an awesome CTO.

Like we recruited him. His name's Corey Collins. And it was like that like just kick started our company into like this rocket ship that we then came to launch, one launch. And then we're lucky enough to like sign term sheets after that, which is, which is incredible. When we get back, I want to know what you learned from the program, what your takeaways were. How do you think grew as a founder, if at all? And then what you have to do to make the company successful from this point forward when we get back on this thing. start us. Listen, time and place is everything. You know this, and especially in marketing, right?

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Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We're rounding up the top three vote getters in Launch Accelerator's 16th class. We refer to that as LA 16 internally. First up was Taylor Monks. You were the high point getter with 70. three points. You had 20 investors vote you in first place out of, you know, 100 or in change that came during the semester. What did you learn when you look back on it now and you've been out of the accelerator for a little bit? I don't know, a couple of weeks or months. What did

you learn? What were the big takeaways for you as a company, then also as a founder, as an entrepreneur? Yeah, so I think the biggest thing was we leaned in really heavily to who we were, like, as a company. you know, being from the Midwest and, you know, I always joke and I have that line, I know you hate it, but when we used to say like in Nebraska, we have. Oh, my God, the jokes. It worked. It worked. It was a good opening line. It worked for you. It was like our corn, college football and trucks. Like, that's what Nebraska has. And we really leaned into that heavily of like, you know, we understand this market. We have good founder market fit. And we just kind of, we watched, we studied the film that we got. And every, like, Sunday,

our team would sit together and we'd make the adjustments and watch the, like, just like you would on a football game or anything else, watch the film and watch how investors. The film of you presenting at the previous week because we film it and we give you the film so you can get better. Yeah. And it was like, not only I think it's important to understand that, not only do you like film us presenting and the deck, but then you're also filming the investors. Yeah.

Which is arguably the most important part of it. So I'm like looking at these cues of what they're writing down, what they're nodding. And then we're making just small changes. And then the end of the day, like we got to the point where, you know, we could, I don't want to say this is a pitch accelerator because there's so much more to it than that with like the workshops and the other things that go on. but as the CEO like coming in here and this being my first startup I could walk into any room and we could pitch our business and every single firm we pitched at the accelerator and then

went and had that meeting with them we went into diligence with like it was like it felt almost like other we're on another planet by the end of the accelerator like nobody could touch us and I think that's what we learned the most is like how to pitch our business how to be confident in it and how to give those really short concise answers that we practice all the time I mean that's like what I feel like was my bread and butter in the accelerator was the answers. And I gave you a lot of feedback early on. You were a little resistance, if I remember. You had some slides in the deck that were overly complex, in my opinion. And you didn't have video on the deck. What were some of the things that we joke about the joke? You had a joke at the opening line where you said, I'm from

Nebraska. We only have three things in Nebraska. It's football. And corn college football and trucks. Right. And I was like, take these jokes out. But it actually made everybody. laugh. So I was wrong on that one. But what did we change in the deck? And then what did you change about your answers? If you could think about one or two things to share with the audience that you got wrong. And then over time, you realized, gosh, this is what great presenting is about. And this is what great answers to questions are about. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing is we kind of painted this like workflow where it kind of go step one through because trucking is complicated. If you don't understand how it works, it's it can be like a marathon to learn it all in this like three minutes

that we have. So we created this kind of workflow. And to your point, it was not about the workflow, it was about like story and the details matter and screens like to move and all these like one-liners that you had that made a huge difference for us. So instead of doing this workflow, it's telling the story of like Janus and Jared, the Janus, the back office, you know, man or woman that's processing the paperwork. And Jared, the truck driver who's, you know, actually moving the load and how that process is working. So telling the story and also showing the product. Because we did at that point, then we did build a beautiful product. And it was, it worked and it was simple and it was slick and showing how the OCR and all the things worked made a difference. And investors started

to like pick up on that. So for us, it was, you know, showing the product and showing the screens and also telling the story from a person perspective. You gave an actual example. Yeah, not for an hypothetical with a bunch of graphics and icons. Nobody wants to look at a PowerPoint deck, but they do like to look at a picture of your customer. And you actually put pictures. of your customers in that. Yeah, we went out there and got these photos of like the actual people. And, you know, we took time. We put, we put a lot of effort into the deck. And my co-founder put, I mean, hours and hours and hours into the deck. He's really good at design. And then when it came to the questions, you know, we always talked about like, you know, dunking on people,

if you will. Like, they set you up to like try and burn you on these questions. And you can really, like, lean into like, yeah, you're completely wrong. And answering that in so, such a, uh, specific way that was kind of like dunking on them. That was like, hey, like, you're wrong and this is exactly why and like on to the next question. And I think that two minute time frame that we have to answer all those questions in the accelerator, like it made it so we had to do that. You have a certain amount of efficiency for people who don't know. We give only three minutes to present your startup. And then you have two minutes to answer questions after the in between that, obviously the investors ask probably two or three minutes of questions. You were answering

very crisply, but what I like about what you learned here is, if the investor's wrong, you tell them they're wrong. Yeah. And it's very simple to do. Investors like to be educated, I think. For sure.

And if they ask a question, they're probing. They don't want to see what's going on with you. So if they ask you, like, shouldn't truck drivers just do X or isn't self-driving truck's going to just win? You could say, yeah, that's completely wrong. Yeah.

Here's why. I think it's kind of like a tennis match, like a volley. So like investors like to volley, Like quickly, they'll ask a question like as quick as you can you want to answer back in the shortest amount of time because it leads like the next question and the next question. And secondly, and then this thing is like beautiful thing happens where you're just bouncing questions back and forth between each other. And it's like very natural. I think once you get into that state of like volleying, that investors like are really into it. If you answer concisely and in the few words as few words as possible, the chances of you getting a great follow of question go up. And then you get into that volleying. So they say how do how much? you charge, the answer is $50 per truck per year. Done. Now let's get on to the next question. How do you acquire

customers? Boom. It's like intoxicating really. I think that that's like what investors are looking for like that intoxicating feeling like with a founder like this FOMO and that creates it, I think. Yeah. Well, the credibility certainly goes up when you can answer questions crisply and in a short fashion. People who fill a bus or answer in a long way, they start to sound like politicians who aren't even listening to the questions. And that's what I'm always frustrated with myself when I ask questions to founders and I'm trying to invest in their company.

They just can't give me an answer. Yeah, but I think I learned that really quickly, like the first time I ever sat here, I was interesting because I didn't know how it went. I always had this good read on how it went and how it didn't win. When I left here, I was like unsure. But you asked me a question and then you said,

like, you're like, that's not the question I asked. Like, let's try again. And you asked me again. And I was like, I think that was an eye-opening moment of like a coaching moment for you to me where I was like, okay, wow, if Jason does invest in my company, I can expect this like candid on the spot right away feedback and we can move past that really quickly. And I think that I appreciated that all. I say it all the time, which is that's not the question I asked. Thanks for the answer, but that's not the, what about the question I asked?

Do you even remember it? Yeah, it's like, let's try again. And I think that that's really cool. I like, I'm a really big proponent. I love like just fixing the mistakes. right when they happen and then moving on. Yeah, well, there's really a little time when you have a startup, as you know, the clock is ticking. So let's assume you are in the process of raising money or maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure what we're allowed to say theoretically when this episode will come out. But assuming that you're able to raise money, which we think is a very good chance,

what do you have to do over the next year and a half to make it to the next level? What is the next 18 months like for basic block? And if you want to go visit the website, it's basicblock.io. Obviously, you're going to be hiring. And if you're in the trucking business, go check out basicblock. If you know anybody in trucking, go ahead and email them that URL. Yeah, that'd be great. So over the next 12 months, it's really about building a repeatable sales engine for us.

It's about standing up a sales team and really like honing in on what that messaging in, what those scripts are, what the email marketing looks like, A, B testing those types of things. We get incredible open rates in the industry, but people just don't respond. So for us, it's really honing in on the messaging and then building out the engine that takes us into kind of like, okay, this is a SaaS business. They can sell this software all day long. They know what they're doing. And, oh, by the way, they're sitting on a goldmine of these invoices that they're just not monetizing yet. So for us, that's the real focus in the next 12 months.

That's the go-to market. You have a plan to go-to market and hit a certain number of. Sales executives, SDR, sales development reps, and you're going to try to close. So you learned a lot about that, I assume, during the accelerator as well. Yeah, the growth workshops with like Prash and you and like and Jackie and everybody else like diving into what that would be like. And actually it was really valuable when it came to the actual process of raising money. Because, you know, I'm not, I'm not phenomenal with the numbers.

Like, I think that's no secret. I think you used to just grill me on that all time. But I think that my co-founder is. when we put together these plans and we got to the point at the end of the process where investors would ask you like, what about these hiring plans? What are you going to pay them? How many are you going to hire? What is the percentage commission going to look like? And we had built a lot of that in these workshops that like on the fly, I could be able to pull up all these documents that we had and be like, yeah, we've thought about this and here's what it looks

like. Right. And investors. Now you've separated yourself from people who are just pulling numbers out of the air to somebody who actually has a plan they're executing against. Yeah. And like we're on a Zoom and like I'm casting me live going and like grabbing that document that I know the name of. Oh, let me pull that document up right. Yeah. Your credibility goes to the roof. You look like a baller and you're like, they're like every question they're asking, you're like pulling up another document. How do you find a customer? Oh, we use this website. This is the scraping tools you use and I'm like building a list in front of them. Wow. And then, you know, it got to the point where and I think that's and then, you know, on top of that, it's like understanding and your customer is like

understanding where you are as a company and then, you know, them help educating your investors, too. We have some phenomenal customers across the country that would get on the phone with our investors and talk about the product and where we're going and everything else, which is really nice as well. Fantastic. Well, listen, continue success on it. Congratulations. You did great. It's great to be in business with you. And we're looking forward to the next 10 years and when you and I go to the NASDAQ and I'm right over your right hand shoulder while you press that button. That would be cool. It's going to be fun. We're going to do it. I hope so. Let's do it. All right. We'll be right back with more founders from the launch accelerator.

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Go ahead and go to Squarespace.com and get that free trial. Use the promo code. Twist to save 10% off. All right, welcome back to this week in startups today. We are meeting with the top three scores in the Launch Accelerator's 16th class. If you'd like to come to the accelerator, you can apply at launch.co. And you can email me anytime, Jason at calicanus.com, my first name and last name. And I'll introduce you to the team.

and we'll talk about your startup. Always good to include a link to the product and a chart about your traction. And this just is generally good advice for all founders. Lead with what's strong. If you got a beautiful product, lead with that. If you got a beautiful chart, lead with that. If you got both, here's a link to our product and here's a chart. Here's a video of our product in action.

And here's a chart of our revenue or customers. All right. Next up is Max Coleman. Max, you had a company called, We have a company called Dow Cloud, D-A-O-C-L-O-U-D dot com, Dow Cloud. What does Dow Cloud do? So, Dow Cloud connects people with wellness practitioners, and we help those practitioners grow and manage their businesses.

And just right there, what a crisp explanation. It leaves nothing to chance. We understand exactly what you do. You're Yelp. I have no one to think but you. Well, we worked on it a bit. You really do need to be able to explain in a sentence what you do. Yeah.

And you're able to do that very simply. You help... Six months ago, my answer would have been 45 seconds long. Really? Yeah. Brutal. Getting to the point is super important in this world. Tell me, how did you find out about our program?

I'm always curious as to how we source... Actually, I don't know if I told you is David Fox. Remind me of who David is? He's a syndicate member. Oh, David Fox from the syndicate. Yeah, I met with him. We had a great conversation. Did he get his 10% commission?

Do you know if he got his commission on his referral fee? We give them a referral fee on the character. So make sure that we know about that. So if anybody from our syndicate, the syndicate.com, refers to as a founder. We give them 10% of whatever money we make off of that startup's first investment. So we'd love to give it to him for introducing us. And what did he tell you? Well, first, so we met, I met him at a dinner.

We got lunch. We were talking about the company for a while. He said he was interested in investing. He spoke for like 30, 45 minutes. And then he's like, yeah, I write like, you know, $5,000 checks. I'm like, wait, what am I doing here? Yeah. But you should talk to Jason Callicanis.

I'm like, who's this? Ah. And he points me to your website. Interesting. And like nine days later, you wrote me to check. I mean, it was a very quick process. That is pretty amazing. Well, you know, the way we look at it, those $100,000 checks to come to the accelerator,

we want to take risk more than a million dollar check. And we put those $100,000 checks in so we can really get to know the founder and know if a $250K,000k, or K check, even a million or $2 million check is going to get put to good use. So you came to the accelerator and tell us what it was like in that day zero. We have a day zero. Oh, day zero. You tore me up. Really?

You don't remember that? No. Tell everybody. I do. I was kind of a softball. No, I don't remember. Yeah, no. I pitched and you just like tore it up and it was probably the most valuable 30 minutes that I got.

And I wish I had that years ago. So let's unpack it then. Yeah. Because people know me through the podcast as being candid. What does it feel like when you're in the room with me and six other founders in my team and you present and then I just come in and savage your presentation? Does it feel great or how did you take it? How did you feel in that moment?

I'm always very careful in how I do this. But to be candid, I really don't care how you feel. I care about the results. But let's pretend I care about how you feel. on that moment and share it. Well, there was kind of a point where I was pissed off because I forget, you said something about how is this even, do we need to do our due diligence in this company again? I was like, wait a minute.

What are you talking about? That's super candid. It sounds like something I would say. And then. I think it was because your numbers, you didn't have your numbers crisp. And I couldn't explain it. You couldn't explain your numbers. And I am a math guy and I always tell everybody in presentations, if you're going to do math

with investors, be ready to do math. Yeah. Because you put out, I have a thousand people paying me $300 a year, they're going to be like, okay. But the year hasn't started. And like the way I'd, it just like didn't make sense, the way I was explaining it. So what else about that initial? Because for people don't know, day zero is before we actually put you in front of investors, we have you present to our team.

And we try to really bang on the presentation and ask your questions that we think would represent the hardest questions you would get in the life of your company. Right? so that if we hit you with the hardest questions in day zero, it's sort of like joining, you know, the Navy SEALs. And they're like, yeah, that pool's freezing. And we're going to throw you in there and put a hose in your face. And let's see what it's like to get some water down your lungs.

Because that's going to happen at some point when you're out there in the thick of it. So take us to that moment. Well, I came back. I mean, the next day was our first pitch to the group of investors. I'd completely redone the whole deck and the whole pitch. So how long did that take to really? redo the whole deck knowing you have the investors the next day and I've savaged you. The evening.

It was probably six, seven hours, something like that. So you say, you know what? I got to take this advice and get to work. So you took it in the spirit in which it was intended. That's good. It's also our test, to be honest. I want to see if I can break somebody in that first week. If somebody can't handle some tough feedback, I would like to know that in week zero.

Because then I could just get them out of the program and not embarrass them or myself. Does that happen before? Has it happened before? I'm trying to think that through. Maybe you're not hard enough. No, you know, we're very good at picking, we like to think, but we've had people who once or twice we've had people who put up a pretty embarrassing showing, and that's why we started doing day zero.

That's actually what it was. We had people come to day one, and it was so embarrassing. We said, you know, we need to have day zero here. We need to have a pool day before we put you in the ocean. Thank you for that. Well, tell me about what the first day was like then. After you had done the six or seven hours to fix the deck. Gosh, I honestly don't even remember really, but I do remember people coming up to me and

like, wow, that was so much better than yesterday. Oh, your cohort. Yeah, yeah. So talk about that a little bit, you know, you're in a cohort with six other companies. Did you become friends with them? Did you learn from them? What's the relationship like with them? No, I did. And actually, you know, one thing that was really interesting, I feel like I learned a lot about you through the cohort. I didn't really know much about you. Yeah, that's unique because you found out of about me through one of the syndicate members. You weren't a fan of the podcast or something. And then it was like, yeah, and then I remembered, I think I'd heard of you before.

It's like, yeah, the Uber guy. Yeah. And to be honest, I thought that you were just this like guy that got lucky on Uber. Yeah, it's true. And, you know, and then we just decided to throw your money around and I got lucky and I got some of it. Yeah. And I remember first meeting the other founders in the cohort the first day. And I remember kind of being like, these companies don't even seem that exciting really.

Like, what am I? I was kind of like. Yeah, what's going on here? And it was just like week after week of seeing the founders and seeing that they're making progress. And every time I see them, their company's bigger, better, fast, or stronger. And even though I don't necessarily understand, I didn't maybe understand their business at first, I realized I don't really need to. All I need to know is that this founder is going to solve this problem.

Right. And it took me a few months to like figure this out about some of the founders. And then as I'm figuring this out, I'm like, wait a minute. Jason figured this out in two minutes. Like, what's going on here? Right. Yeah. And that, yeah, I'd be really became really impressed with you over that time.

Oh, that's great. Understanding. Yeah. And I think you're going to make some waves as an investor. Yeah. Well, you know, if you pick the right people and you put them in front of the right people and you set the expectation properly, which is we're here to do work. This isn't like a vacation.

We're not goofing off here. We're trying to raise money and take money from the best people in the world to then build enterprises that will return 100 times their money, it's pretty serious, right? And so we're, we are trying to find founders who are going to put the work in. What do you think by the end of the program the big takeaways for you were? What, what did you learn as a founder yourself? And then how did the business evolve? Because you're a Yelp of alternative health care. What do you, what do you call it? Wellness. Wellness, I guess is the better. Yeah. So wellness, which includes what would be under wellness?

Meditation, massage therapy, what? So there's 51 therapies that we recognize. The big ones are chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture. But the list goes on and it's growing. And people pay you to be on your site? The practitioners, yes. The practitioners pay. You give them tools in order to blog and to get customers.

Right. Right now, it's mainly they create a profile and they share everything about their practice. they also earn reviews and endorsements for specific health issues, kind of like LinkedIn. So if you're coming on, you don't know what therapy to look for, but you say, hey, I have this health issue. We say, hey, here are practitioners endorsed for helping with these health issues. So that's one of the ways that we're bridging the education gap, which is one of the problems that we're saying. So you have insomnia. You can come to the site and see, here is somebody who helps with nutrition. Here's somebody who helps with massage therapy, meditation, whatever

it is, chiropractic, that it relates to that specific issue. How does, how do you, how do you did the, how did you, what were some of the things that you advanced as an individual over the 12 weeks? I'm always interested in what, when people look at themselves, you know, it was pretty clear that Taylor got more confident, I think, as he went on and maybe he was in a little bit of awe of the investors and then he's like, wait a second, I can do this. How did you advance, do you think? What did you learn? Probably in some ways the same thing. around confidence, just like, we're ready to raise this round. I don't need to keep, you know, I kind of was in this mindset. We need to keep making everything perfect. Every, the product needs to be

perfect. Everything needs to be perfect. Um, and I think, whether it's just going through the cohort or learning from you, realized, okay, I should just be setting my time fundraising. And, and not, I was kind of like, toe in the water fundraising. Right. And that just doesn't work. Yeah. You got to be all in. Yeah. And so how many investors. have you met with, how many second meetings, what's that pipeline like for you in order to try to close around? Since the accelerator or no forever? You can talk about pre-accelerator too, but just in the accelerator, how many investors

have you reached out to? How many have you met with? What's the scale of the three or four months of the accelerator? Yeah, let's see. Probably have reached out to my guess is, let's say, 100 to 150. Yeah. I've met with probably about half, about six. 60 to 70. Wow. And that's what it takes. Yeah. To start getting people interested in investing.

Yeah. Yeah. And before that, in that you were running the company for two or three years before that. Well, yeah. The company's been around. It's been, we're now five years in. It's been a long journey. I became CEO two years ago. So I've been running the company for two years. Before the accelerator, that year and a half, how many investors had you met with? Oh, gosh. Over the years, probably a hundred. Yeah. And what was the caliber difference between the investors we had and the investors you'd match just would you say night and day i mean it was just i don't know if you would assign a caliber to um the most the investors i was speaking to before yeah it's hard yeah because i wasn't really getting intros you know it's hard to get those intro hard to get that first meeting um did you find the program in some way validated you or open doors for sure yeah yeah and and how did that manifest

itself you would email somebody cold and they would recognize the program or my name or or like Jackie would send an email and the subject line is Jason Calacanis you know by the way

I think you should do I feel like Jackie should have an email that's Jason at launch.com and it's like coming from you for me yeah I'm trying to build a team Jackie's one of our managing

director so I want them to learn who Jackie is learn to trust her judgment as well but I will do that once in a while I'll send an email myself if I have to especially if it's one of my close friends

you know if it's Shemoth or Bill Gurley sometimes I'll step in and be like, yeah, let me do that one. Bill hasn't gotten back to me yet. Yeah, well, you know, I think you have to look at the big investors as something you earn over time. Sure. So I look at those as term papers, not as like quizzes. Okay.

You know, getting into like some new fund that's a $50 million or $150 million fund fund fund and they don't have a unicorn yet, like they're looking for a deal flow. Sure, you're going to get that meeting. Mm-hmm. But to get the Sequoia meeting or the Bill Gurley meeting or the David Sachs meeting or the Founders Fund meeting, like that is something that you earn over like a year. You might send four or five updates, the charts going up and to the right, and then you get one of their associates or directors and then or a principal and then you work your way up, right? And then that's the way I just sort of get there.

What is the next, oh, let's talk a little bit about the answering of questions. We had Tyler talk a little bit about how good he got out. You maybe heard his analogy earlier where he said it was like getting into like a real good tennis match. Did you find you got better over time at answering questions? Definitely got better over time. I think if you look at the recording in my first couple of pitches and then go to the last couple of pitches, I think it's a huge difference in just being able to answer questions very quickly and concisely. I think I still need to, I still have a lot of work to do on that, especially in my one-on-ones. But yeah, definitely.

Well, I mean, if you're a considered person, what I find is considered people who are also very enthusiastic, they, when they had asked a question, they just get so excited. they answer the next three. And they may think of all the four or five questions surrounding that question. And they think, well, what is the person really asking? They asked me what the revenue was for 2019. So I need to tell them what the revenue potential is of the next five product lines. And I never answered the original one because I just, I got to the virtual reality and augmented reality of Dow Cloud.

Yeah, sure. You know, when we're going to be delivering services virtually. Like I didn't even get to the answer of the first question. What's still challenging for you as a founder? What do you feel you still need to work on? Always trying to become a better product person. I think that's just a gene that I don't have, but I'm just constantly trying to get better at being a better product person.

Do you have a deliberate strategy to doing that, or are you just feeling your way through it? For a while, I was kind of feeling my way through. I think something I have gotten good at is being able to test hypothesis, with as little resources in time as possible. The lean startup methodology. Yeah. Make small changes and test them efficiently.

Yeah. And even, you know, before I kind of figured that out, I would, we would, you know, spend nine months building something and then no one wants to use it. Crap. Go back to the genre. That's the worst. Yeah. Yeah.

So how do you do it now versus spending nine months of, and $50,000 in developer resources? Now you do it kind of crappy and ugly. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily work beautifully. But it works enough to answer the question, do people want to use this? Right. And then you answer that question before you start investing more resources. When you have a service like this, I noticed on my Yelp in your whatever it is, 15 of Yelp. Feels like Yelp's been around for a long time.

They just have a wait list now. And I was like, oh, wow, I've been wondering why they don't. Yelp is testing a wait list service. So like Open Table or those other services would have a wait list. Yeah, yeah. Now you go to Tai Shokin, my favorite ramen place in San Mateo, and you can sign up in the app and say, I have two people. Then it tells you your number 47 on the wait list, come to the restaurant at 8.48 p.m. It's crazy. Like, it really works. And it's sending you updates as you go.

I was just thinking, they added this in year 15. They must have had this idea in month five. It takes so long. Yeah. The obvious ones for you are scheduling and billing. Dow Cloud right now is like, hey, here. Here's a directory of people. Here's a bunch of content with them talking about stuff. It's great for searching, great for SEO. Wendy, are you thinking about those two specific features? Yeah, so the booking and payments is the first thing we're doing after the round.

Oh, wow. Great. But yeah, and actually that reminds me. That was another thing that was really challenging is, you know, we start out with this massive vision, you know, and we try to build the whole thing. and that doesn't get anywhere. No. And you end up building nothing essentially.

Right. So yeah, starting with the practitioners, starting with this kind of directory listing. And then, yeah, the plan is to build up the stack, eventually become full stack practice management for the practitioners, not just a marketing tool. Yeah, it's people don't remember this, but I was driving in my original Tesla Roadster the other week. And I realized this doesn't have power steering. It doesn't have power mirrors. It doesn't have sensors for a backup, and it doesn't have a backup camera. This is Tesla's first product.

It literally did not even have sensors. And when I got my first Model S, it had a reverse camera, but no sensors. And I was like, Elon, there's no sensors on this. He's like, yeah, that was a huge mistake. We have a camera. We're working on self-driving, but we don't have a backup sensor. So the first model S is you could literally back into, you know, whatever, a wall or your garage. You had to put a tennis ball in your garage on a string to be able to not hit the front of your garage in a Tesla.

Nobody remembers that, of course, because now they drive themselves. Nobody remembers that Yelp didn't have a wait list or a delivery service or any of the other features they now have and they're easy peasy. But, yeah, you get there over time. All right, continued success. Congratulations. you got a lot of first place votes. You got 15 first place votes over those 12 weeks. And you came in second with 56.5 points.

Feels pretty good, doesn't it? Sure. A check is better than points, but... A check is better than points. I think that's important also to realize is that like just the points are a great indicator. Do people care about the points every week? Does it make people sharper, you think?

Well, I think what's just helpful for me is so I'm focusing my time on the people who are interested in the business. So if someone doesn't vote for us, even in the top three, I'm not going to waste my time reaching out to them. Right. Which is why I created it. Yeah. Everybody thinks I created it for like the entertainment value.

Well, that you say every week. I say that as a joke. No, it helps. But really, it's just a way for me to say, hey, listen, if they voted for you for number one, two, or three, how do they not take a meeting? How do they not read your update? Because you can say to them, you voted me number one. You voted me number three. It was really great feedback.

All right. When we get back, one more company from Launch Accelerator 16. Listen, I know you're running a very complicated startup and you've got multiple projects going on concurrently. You've got multiple pokers in the fire. And you're trying to figure out what is the ground truth. What is actually going on in your organization? Well, unlock your team's potential with Monday.com. Monday.com is an intuitive work OS that powers teams to run workflows, processes, and projects in one digital work space.

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to come to the launch accelerator. And he chats with them to see if they're a good fit or not for the accelerators. Sometimes they've made too much progress. Sometimes they have not made enough progress. In both cases, we want to keep in touch with those people and make them feel good about the projects. So he separates them into our Goldilocks zone. He also adds notes in the comments section so the team can easily view what the next recommended steps are. Join over 100,000 companies that use Monday.com to focus on the work that requires their true talents.

Start your 14-day-day free trial by going to Monday.com slash twist. Monday, like the day of the week.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to this week and startups. Next up is third place in the launch accelerator 16 class, but number one in terms of effervescence and enthusiasm. Kate Churness is Cately of Lately.com. Tell everybody, Kate, what is lately? Lately uses artificial intelligence to make writing, social media, effortless, and way more effective.

Way more effective, yes. And you showed this. really crisply in the accelerator by showing a Gary Vaynerchuk blog post. And you would take the URL from the blog post, put it into Lately, which you can go try yourself if you're in social media, try lately.com. And it would take the Gary V post and make, I think we'd make 17 different tweets. And then you can go through the tweets, edit them, christen them up. It would suggest hashtags.

And it was like, oh, my lord, you could probably use, you know, five of these might not be good. five of them might be okay, but the top seven were great, and you could edit them and then schedule them and basically start on second or third base. You are hired. That's it for me. Yeah. And you came to the accelerator. You kind of like a typical accelerator company had 10, 20, 30,000 a month in revenue.

So maybe not enough to close the series A yet, but certainly enough to get tons of meetings and for people to realize there's a real business here. What was it in the accelerator that you learned? And when you look back on your time, if you were talking to another founder who was considering it, what would you tell them is a reason to do it or not do it? Yeah, I mean, you know, so I went to a few accelerators before yours. Okay. So I'm kind of an accelerator because I like free rent. Well, accelerator hopping is a thing.

There we go, yeah. And I can easily say that launch was hands down by far the best. Okay. And I love my accelerator peeps from, you know, before. But but the big reason was the pitch was huge. I mean, we knew when we came here that something wasn't working, right? And so we knew we needed to change. We knew that I needed a fire littered my ass, whatever that was going to be like.

And I needed someone to help me cut through that clutter. So my super power is not being concise. I'm a marketer, right? I spin it. I was a fiction writing major. I tell the long story. And I think that way too, which is why lately works how it does. And so having you help us do that was huge for me, but also understanding the product.

So even from the time we came into lunch and you said it was day zero here, writing social media, making it faster and way more effective, I was like, great, that's so much easier than whatever else it is we're saying. This has been the bane of my existence. But even until now in the last few weeks of the, and through the accelerator that the investors were actually coming up to me and saying, oh, but you're so much more than that. Ah, that's fascinating. So you presented yourself in a very simple fashion. We make writing social media faster and easier. Yeah. They said, no, you don't get it, Kate. There's so much more to this. You could actually do X, Y, and Z. Yeah. Which really is that the definition of a great startup is that it inspires investors, employees,

customers to think of all the other ways that it could evolve. 100%. And I said that, by the way, I said the short version feeling like I was leaving it, leaves something on the table. But like, I just had to be like, I got to take Jason's direction because what I'm doing is them working. Right. Leave them wanting more and explaining it simply.

Job number one, when you're talking to an investor is for them to understand what you do. And to understand what you do, like, if you see a great hamburger, we don't need to know you slaughtered a cow to make it. It's like, it's a beautiful hamburger. That's enough. Like, we don't need to know every step of the process in which that hamburger got put on our plate. Yeah, like that's the, I mean, we talk about this all the time, but the dating metaphor that people use a lot. And finally, one day I said to my co-founder, like, I don't understand this metaphor because people would say, well, in college, just remember like how you'd get her number.

And I'm like, I was a girl. I didn't get a number, right? You're talking about getting attention from investors and just giving them enough information that they want to do the follow up. Yeah. And that's a huge learning that we got was the concise. The reason to be so concise is just to get to the next step. Right. Right. Whatever that is. The goal of the presentation is to get a meeting. To get a meeting. That's it. And that's what people forget is you're just trying to get a meeting. You're not trying to get the check. When you're meeting somebody at a cafe or that first meeting, you just want to get the next meeting. That was a great learning we got,

by the way, from the previous cohort who was who we met with a couple of times. They said, when you get that vote from whoever is there, afterwards, go up to them and just say, great, thanks for the vote. I'd love to have a meeting with you. Let's, you know, email or whatever and get some coffee. Don't get into a conversation with them right there. Right. You're not going to close them right there. It's not, they're standing up. They want to go to their next meeting. They may have to go home and put their kids to bed. They may have a yoga class and you're keeping them from moving on with their life. But you don't realize that because you're like, oh my God. You know, you get spastic and you're like, oh my God, I have to close right now.

You don't. You have plenty of time. chill. How important is it or how hard was it to make progress with your business while fundraising at the same time? And how do you manage that? Because I hear that from a lot of founders like, oh my God, you know, investing, you know, racing around is a full-time job and running a company is a full-time job. How do you manage those two things? Yeah. I mean, your hair is on fire. I mean, that's just it all the time. So I do it by having an amazing team. I mean, my team is superior. People try to steal them from me. They've been with me through thick and thin, not getting paid a lot of times, and nothing seems to break them, which is incredible. And so I rely on them, and they know that their

job is to run the company when I can't, because I am only human, apparently. And you can only be in one place at a time, and if you're raising fund, if you're trying to raise funding, you've got to do a large number of meetings in a short period of time, try and create that marketplace. And you have to trust them to do, I mean, like, you know, I was just talking about this with someone who we recently brought on and we've had this conversation a couple times now and I've said listen the worst mistake you could possibly make is one I'm cool with which is why I heard you so just go do it I don't stop asking me because the more you ask me the more I'm wasting time not closing this round right right yeah what if what else did you learn in the accelerator were there any other

takeaways for you or moments you remember where you felt like things evolved for you or something clicked for you otherwise yeah so the the big one was was the day that you pitched lately Oh yeah. And it was huge. I forgot about that. Yeah. Your co-founder. No, your co-founder came and had a panic attack on stage, basically, not to throw him under the bus, but he literally froze up. Yeah. He doesn't like pitching. But he's otherwise like an incredibly confident human. So it was really like it was. So I'll tell you why this is so wonderful. And you should say more about what happened. But I'll just preface it. What was beautiful was I was the benefit of some good things. But, but, but. But. two white guys in venture helping, one is helping a woman out, me, and the other was helping me out, but you were also helping Steve out. Right. And so when do you see that? Yeah. Well, I mean, he basically got to like slide two and he froze up. He basically had a panic attack. I don't know if it's a panic attack officially, but or what that means, but he couldn't continue. And he kind of went off script and I was like, let me take over from here for a second because I hadn't really

spend any time with him, but I was like, this is a disaster. So I just ran through your deck. And I was like, let's just do it together. Get some practice in. And that's where I always tell everybody, never worry. Like, even when something bad happens, it's an opportunity to show resilience. Yeah. And it's an opportunity to grow. And so when we went through it, I think actually people really then got excited. It was amazing. Yeah. I mean, so I've watched that video a bunch of times. But me pitching your company. When I feel shitty, I watch this video for two reasons. One, because Steve actually pitches me for three minutes, which is really validating because what happened there

was Steve actually communicated the challenges that we'd done through, but more importantly, he made me understand that not only had I survived them, but I'd led the company. I didn't even realize what I had done. And I was surprised to

hear it in that way, right? And I was like, well, shit, I am awesome. Well, you know what? We'll put it at the end of the episode. I'll have Nick stitched if you're okay with it. We'll stitch it to the end of the episode. episode. Thank you. Well, the last thing I want to say about that real quick is the other thing was the fact that you just stood up and, and as you were pitching lately, I started, I stole your lines. I don't know if you noticed this. Oh, no, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Which lines were the good ones?

Oh, God, all of them. Like, everything from, and the AI gets to work. Oh, the AI gets to work. Yeah. Or like, and now a social media manager can come in, look through, edit schedule, publish, like all of those lines. I just took them. you took your concise superpower and like put your put it on my thing and like I'm a stealer like I'm constantly having any investor any customer the way they describe lately I'm always writing it down and then repeating it out loud absolutely because a customer is going to tell you like a child might exactly you know they say like children sometimes like from the mouths of children come like these great truisms and truth I forgot what the expression is but they can explain something in a very like innocent kind of basic way and your customers can do that as well they're like they ask the customers

of square what it was and they were like it's a device you put on your phone and it lets you take credit cards and they don't charge you and i was like okay yeah that's what it is yeah it's a little device that you put on your phone that lets you charge credit cards and they don't and they give it to you for free yeah that's it's funny like okay like as you're saying that so the thing that we've heard the most in the last 12, well, during the 12 weeks, but in the last couple weeks even since, is you, you don't know what you have. You don't know how big the tiger is that you're holding by the tail. Right. And when, when you stood up and did that, I got it because I could see the effect of everybody in the room. And then since then we, you know, yes, we make writing

social media effortless and way more effective, but the AI actually does writing for you. And so the reason this is powerful, right, is because no matter, it doesn't matter what kind of tool you have to measure or publish or manage any kind of writing. But if the writing itself is crap, you can't polish the turd, right?

Yeah, it doesn't work. Yeah. And so once you understand that, and so what people have communicated to us since is that we actually created a lead gen monster because we're writing sales copy also. Right? So it could be writing emails,

it could be writing marketing on a website, not just a tweet, not just a social media post. All right. Yeah, out of the mouths of babes. That is the proper way to say, Charles. So when people ask you if they should do the accelerator, what it's like, what do you tell them? Yes.

I mean, so one of the things that we always use to judge the quality of the accelerator is the companies around us who are there as well. Yeah. So similar to how, you know, Max was saying like, you know, our actual reaction was like, wow, we were with some really high quality companies and entrepreneurs. And we found that throughout. A lot of the times, frankly, I don't, it's not that I don't, I'm not a nice person. I just like don't have time for people. Like, I'm busy running my company. This is not a social thing for me. I feel like I'm on the bachelorette saying this or something like I'm not here to make friends or whatever. Yeah. But like, I'm not. No, you're here to do business. Yeah. We're here to do business. Yeah. And like, and like, this is the first time where like I literally really like these people. Right. And I want them to win and I want to help them. Yeah, because when you were in other accelerators, maybe it was variable, the cohort. Yeah, like, I'm just definitely the bitch who doesn't go to any stuff.

Like, I don't go to social stuff. And it's not, it's just like, that's my jam, you know. Yeah, you just want to work. Yeah, I just got to get shit done. Yeah, stuff's on fire, man. Right. You know, I get stuff done. Got to get stuff done.

So that, that's for sure. And I think the, I mean, you know, being in front of 10 investors that are high quality every day and pitching to them, I've had 68 meetings in the last 12 weeks. 13 weeks at this point. Wow. Yeah, they're like Max said, they've all been high quality. I've gotten, I can't remember when I, I'm sure I haven't had a second meeting, but I can't really think of that moment at the moment.

And I feel like the questions, you know, I've done this before, right? Like this is not my first time doing this. And it's just been a much, how do I say this? People understand what I do now. Right. They're placing the value on it. Your name, I mean, I throw your name around like a dirty prom dress, sorry, but like it's, valuable. Right. I'm fine with that. Okay, cool. I don't exactly understand the metaphor,

but I'm fine with it. It's definitely, and I told you from the coming into this that she was the most effervescent, I literally had to reprimand you for whooping when you got votes. I was like, you can't whoop when you get votes. It's unsportsman license. I had to give you a technical. I know. I was like, you can't cheer that on. It feels so good, though. It feels good. You can have your inner voice whoop. I knew that when you were whooping. I was like, you know what? That's going to cause more votes and then I'm going to have seven companies all whooping and this is going to turn. Maybe that would be good for the program and make it really exciting if everybody whooped. Well, you do make it competitive.

Like, right? I mean, well, I try to make it friendly and the competitiveness, but was it competitive? Did you feel you were competing against everybody or that you were just part of a team that was running really fast? Well, I mean, I really like the people I'm with. But no, of course it's a competition. It's a competition because those investors have to choose who they're going to get money from. And I'm sorry, I want it to be me.

Right. So like, they're not going to invest in everybody. No. And like that's, you know, one thing, which is really hard is when you really like the cohort members you're with and you want to help people and you also have to save yourself at the same time. So like I'll see questions go by and slack and I might know an answer, but I just don't have a half an hour.

But I'll try to choose, you know, you know, and respond when I can. But sometimes it feels a little devilish because you're like, ah, I'm holding back, helping somebody. Well, there's only so much time you have, right? And if we're investing in the right companies and somebody's asking a really basic question on the secret Slack channel, they should Google it first. Yeah. Or someone else will get to them. Yeah. I mean, the Slack, the super secret slack does not exist to do the work for you. On the margins, you know, you can ask a question, but you're not going in there saying, can somebody explain to me this.

you should be going in there saying, I've researched this, I'm at these two roadblocks. Has anybody had to make a decision between A and B, and how did you get to that decision? You should not be coming into the Super Secret Slack. That's something, by the way, you do really well is to keep that Slack channel valuable. Like, it's the only, I've got a lot of Slack channels that I'm invited to. Well, I had to, I kicked three people out because they were being annoying. I didn't know that. But, I mean, if you're using the Super Secret Slack channel to,

sell other people or, you know, not staying on topic or... Right. I'm not saying harass other people, but harangue other people. Like... Note to self. Well, no, you're not like that. You're all business. Remember, you talked before about being all business?

I think a lot of people get on there and they want to socialize them, you know, fuck around. And, like, it's not the group to do it with. Like, we're... It's like somebody showing up at the Navy Seals. I used that before. And listen, the greatest respect in the world for the Navy Seals is meant as a compliment. Like, if you come in... and you start goofing off with a bunch of Navy SEALs while they're training, they're not going to have it.

I stayed at the Marines Hotel in preparation for this show, by the way. Perfect. But I mean, it's just they don't have time for nonsense. Like, they might have a good time after they go kill Ensemble Bin Laden and have a drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they might goof off then. But if they're on the mission, like, they're on the mission. If they're training, they're training, and post-mission, yeah, maybe we could have crack a couple of cold ones.

But, like, when you're working, like, it's time to work. And when people are distracting, that really annoys me. It's the only select channel that I pay attention to do that's not my. my own. Yeah, I mean, actually, literally for me, it's the same exact thing. I literally have my two companies and that, the super secret sock. And I like it because you see me go on there and ask questions. That's the best part. Well, and a lot of times when I get in there, I see a great question that I want to answer. And then I read the six replies that came in. And I'm like, God, my answer would have been fourth in this race to help the founder. Like, that's also great for me. I don't have to

answer every question. You have this little community building of people who want to get shit done. All right, listen, continue to success, Kate. And if you are in the social media space where you have a Twitter handle or you've written a blog post, and that should be all of you listening if you're in the technology. Or podcast and video. Sorry, plug. Oh, yeah, podcast and video now. Go to try lately, L-A-T-E-L-Y.com.

And she is, Katie of Lately. You can follow her on the Twitter. Outland... Outlandos. I'm a huge police fan. You know the police? Yes. Classic rock.

I love Andy Summers. I love short guitar players. I married one. Really? I stole the name of her. Wait, wait, who was the drummer? Stuart Copeland. Stuart Copeland was a drummer.

He plays everything but the beat. Really? Oh, yeah. Anyway, so Al-Ando's... That was a great band. Media. I stole it. Well, they're great.

Three pieces. Mark Knopfler and Dyer Straits were recording in the south of France. Yes. And they, Mark Knopfler was... You guys always played Nuffler before... You was my favorite, yeah.

And so then he said, like, I really love this song. I just, I need to get, when I get back to London, I need to get Sting to sing on it. And they said, oh, no, no, he's here on vacation right now. And he said, what? He's in like, you know, St. Ramio on vacation or whatever, wherever he was, a niece or something. And they're like, yeah. And then Sting came and sang on, I want my MTV, I'm money for nothing, yeah. You know, so I was a rock and roll DJ in my other life.

Oh, really? I didn't know that. That makes total sense. Yeah. So my last gig was broadcasting to 20,000. and listeners a day for XM. Wow. And I can tell you that you can't play that song in the radio anymore.

I know because it's got the quote about, look at that F word, and they banned it. Well, they changed it. They changed it. They have a new version, which is fine, because Mark Knoppler explained it and he's like, I was recounting a story of somebody who said that. Right, yeah. I didn't say that. It's not meant to be an anthem in that way.

It's like they said this derogatory thing. It would be like making a movie about a serial killer. And they're like, the director actually thinks you should chop people up. And it's like, no, the director does not think that you should kill people, like a serial killer. They're telling the story of a serial killer. It's a shame. The great thing about him, and I know we have to go, is that Mark Knopfler can play a note and everybody knows which guitar player it is. Instantly.

And that's really difficult. Well, finger picking on electric guitar at the level he did is just never been done since, really. I can't find anybody who's even close. He stands alone. Yeah. All right. This has been a great episode. I hope you learn something from it. And the basic idea, what you should take from this is, let me give you $100,000 and come to the accelerator if you've got a company that's in the Goldilog Zone. If you have ideas, watch the program, read the book, get lean startup, watch other people's podcast. But please, for the love of God, put something out in the world and get three or four customers, get three or four people to try it. That's when you will get taken seriously in Silicon Valley and amongst the elite investment class. If you have ideas, that's fine.

Talk to your friends about them, brainstorm. But make that jump. If you hear my voice right now, make the jump from taking your idea and just make an MVP. It's not that hard, people. There's the whole no-code movement. There's designers out there.

Teach yourself to become a developer. Go to Lambda School. Go to free. There's like an open-free developer courseware online. Just go get it done and do the work. We'll see you next time on this week. And start us, bye-bye.