This Week in Startups - E1150: Creating a better presentation software, competing with PowerPoint, Keynote & Google Slides & achieving great design with Pitch CEO Christian Reber | Rising Stars of SaaS 9

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

Check out Pitch: https://pitch.com FOLLOW Christian: https://twitter.com/christianreber FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

Rising Stars of SaaS is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-R-C-O-WD.com slash twist. O-D is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of software that lets you build and scale your stack as you. build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever, and right now, O-DU is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at O-do.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. And Pipe. SASS companies, this is for you. Pipe helps you unlock your recurring revenue as upfront capital. No debt, no loans, no dilution. Sign up in minutes and start trading on Pipe free for 12 months at pipe.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of this week in startups.

It is our stars of SaaS. This is a series we do. We like to do series so we can dive deeper over 10 episodes, let's say, into a specific topic that we think is critically important for founders and investors. That's the bulk of the audience here. We do have people who are fans of technology, fans of entrepreneurship. We also have a contention of haters, communists, socialists who watch this show and they hate watch it. They just hate watching people become successful, becoming rich and affluent and changing the world

and using and creating products and services that are not created by the communist and socialist governments. So welcome socialists and communists to this weekend startups. You can hate watch now. We respect your ability to create no value in the world. and only take and redistribute things that you didn't make. Anyway, a little mini rant there. Rising Stars of SAS is a 10-part series. We just had a great guest.

Jason Lemkin, the godfather of SAS was on. We had a rambling talk. You should check that one out, episode 11, 47. Before that, I had Darius from Maritas. Oh, yum, yum, talking about ICE's income-sharing agreements and how these put the onus on the school to get their students' jobs. And if they don't get a job, they don't get paid. Not the student, the school.

And that is tweaking a lot of teachers' unions and a lot of just totally incompetent universities that are giving people $200,000 degrees. Love that disruption from Darius at Maritas. We had dish crash, dish craft robotics, which is going to get rid of the job of dishwashing. I am sorry that we are eliminating the job of dishwashing from humanity. but it is a really bad job.

It's the worst job you could ever have. So let's get rid of dishwashers and give those people something better to do with their lives. That was a really interesting one. Chris Webb from Chow Now was on. They are breaking the false notion that, my goodness, Uber eats and Postmates and DoorDash are taking advantage of these poor restaurants because they're providing them delivery service and customers. Such a stupid framing. What Chow now does, Chow now does, and Chris explained this, is he tells the restaurants, if you don't want to use Uber Eats, you don't want to use Postmates, competition in the free market

exists. I will give you software so you can run your own version of DoorDash. And many restaurants are choosing to do that. And they're telling their customers don't order on those other delivery services. We want you to order direct from us. We want to capture that 30% or 20% that those companies are taking. and Viva de France. That puts more pressure on everybody in the system

to make better products and services. So it's been just, I'll be totally honest, a great series. I thought it was going to be a little boring, the future of SaaS. But man, great job, producer Nick, and to this week in Startups audience for coming up with really interesting companies, and I'm very excited about today's guest.

His name is Christian Reber. Reber. Reber, yeah? Reber, got it. And Christian Reber doesn't know this, but I was a fan of his first set, or his previous SaaS product, I don't know if it was his first,

called WonderList. WonderList was wonderful. It was a really elegant to-do list and task manager that I used at all my companies, and I loved using, and everybody in the team loved using it. They just loved when J-Cal came in and put bullet points and items for them to do

and stacked up all that work for them. You can ask any team member, there's nothing better than having, J-Cal come in and just put eight things on your list for you to do this weekend when you had plans to go skiing or something. I'm joking. But he created a Wunderlist, which was, it was a, you know, to do task management, but just done so well.

We'll talk about that. He sold it to Microsoft, which was heartbreaking to me. He sold it in 2015. He had, I think, 13 million users for that. But lo and behold, yum, yum. somebody sent me a pitch from a website pitch.com. And I looked at it, Christian, and I said, this is elegant and beautiful, and I'm already addicted.

I don't have any presentations because we're taping this in the year of Corona and all of my high-paid speaking gigs that pay down all my gambling debts. All of those got canceled. So I'm completely fucked. But when we get on the other side of this goddamn pandemic, which is making me lose my mind, I am going to use pitch.com. Welcome to the program, Christian Reber. I'm pronouncing correct.

It's R-E-B-E-R, and it's Reber. Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much, Jason. You're a German, aren't you? I am, yes. That explains the precision of your software. I hate to be, I hate to be stereotypical, but you're in Berlin. No, no, no, no.

It's correct. I think we, like, I think Germany produced multiple task management apps, like one of the, most popular ones was Wanderlist. Also, things came from Germany. So we love to produce task management software, it seems like. You like to stay on task and get things done. Exactly.

And you're specifically in Berlin, correct? Exactly. Now, Berlin has become a center of excellence for rave and dance music, art. I'm told some really good clothes. Yeah, it's correct. Yeah, I was in some club. was in a burnt-out building and there was a giant hole in the floor and everybody was dancing on this hole in the floor and I was like you maniacs if somebody falls down this hole it's a 15-foot

drop they're going to die and you had all these crazy Germans and leather and outfits and masks and high out of their minds dancing around a pit have you been to this club in Berlin anyway putting that aside design and startups are also big in Berlin why tell us about the Berlin scene and then we'll get into pitch.com. Sure. Yeah, so I'm a part of the Berlin scene since 2006 or so. That's when I moved here. I'm from a small town near Berlin, actually,

just a few kilometers away from here. And it really evolved. I think in the early days, you saw a lot of communities, like Facebook, like our local versions of Facebook and e-commerce companies. then around 2010-ish you saw a lot of software companies and you still do slowly you see a little bit more crazy stuff like blockchain deep tech and all sorts of stuff but it really evolved it's a fascinating fascinating industry and like I think the largest companies here provide a

tens of thousands of jobs for a city like Berlin. So similar to San Francisco and New York, it's a very important industry these days. So are there a lot of designers there? Is that in some design school that makes Berlin so good at design? Or when you went to school in Germany, was there just a focus on design? I'm curious how that sort of became a thing in Germany, like were design? is important or celebrated because it does relate to the two products you made. I think Wonderlist was a very basic take on to-do,

and I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean it in an efficiency way, but it was also gorgeous, stunning. And did you build that in, and I will get to pitch as well as also stunningly beautiful, did you build that design in-house? Do you hire a design firm? How do you achieve what I would call the 9.510 out of 10 on design? Well, I'm humbled. Thank you so much. It's a great question. I honestly have no idea why design became such an important thing in my career. But I always felt like I'm a design-driven founder. And we have designed everything in-house, both at Wonderlist and at Pitch. That said, we've recently actually partnered with a great firm called Meta-Lab, from Vancouver to help us a little bit.

But generally, I think the Germans are just really good at crafting premium products. Oh, so you heard Meta Lab. They're the ones who did Slack, right, famously? Exactly. That was one of their most famous projects they've worked on. They did Uber as well. Maybe it was Uber Eats, I think. Uber, Coinbase, I think.

Yeah. It's a great firm. and I, the founder, became friends during Wanderless Days, actually. We had, he had a competitor product. I forgot what is, Flow, I think it was called.

GetFlow.com. Pretty cool task management app. And we became competitors. Let me just ask you, what does it cost? Ballpark, not specifically for that company, Andrews company, but for a company of that design level, what are they charged to design an app,

like a SaaS app? Is that like a half million dollars, quarter million dollars? What do you think that cost for a year? Yeah, I think quarter million dollars is nearly where you land on. It really depends on the complexity. And like what kind of product you want to build? Is it multi-platform, just a mobile app?

Is it like 10 screens you need or 100 screens you need? I think we didn't even outsource our design. Like we had a pretty good design team, but what I kind of tried to accomplish there was to challenge our own, product design with one of the best product design firms out there to increase the quality. So like a hybrid system. So you would say to your team, make your best effort. Then you go to Andrew Wilkinson, who seems to be a really brilliant guy and say, hey, punch this up, tell us how to make it better and tell us why you did that. And then you bring your team back. And instead of

them feeling admonished, they feel like they just got coached or somebody just gave them notes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, honestly, like, I'm such an instig-driven person that I rarely, like, research the kind of products that I want to build. For me, the opportunity, which was crissue clear, like, build the next generation web-based presentation platform that works a little bit like Figma and all these modern design tools, but purely made for presentation creators.

And I thought, like, okay, now we raise some venture funding, and it might be a good idea to validate your ideas. And MetaLab has really built a very good process around that. And they interviewed hundreds of presentation creators, like Google Slides users, PowerPoint users, keynote users, and try to figure out, like, are they actually looking for a better solution or not? And if so, which features are they missing? And that was a really good learning process for me. And yeah, it's a great company to partner with. That's great to hear. When we get back from this quick break, I want to ask you,

what is the core differentiator that you learn from talking to all those presentation users? And then, what did you come up with for a pitch as the reason why somebody would give up a decade, or two that they invested in understanding PowerPoint, a decade that they've invested in understanding Google slides, a decade in trying to be like Steve Jobs and create very precious keynotes. These are big competitors, and I want to know what ideas you found out in order to basepitch.com on when we get back on this week's startup. Do you wish you were in on some of these amazing yum yum IPOs in 2019 and 2020? I bet you do.

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with no payment involved until you decide to invest. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this weekend startups. We've got Christian Reber from Pitch.com. What a great domain. He doesn't do a lot of podcasts. He doesn't talk about what he does, but he sold one. This is your first one, really. I mean, you don't really do them. And so thanks for doing it. I DMG.

I reached out. I told you I was a fan. You were like, all right, fuck it, I'll do it. So Wonderless was great. You sold that for Microsoft. That was like, what, like $50 million sale? Something in that way? 150 million dollar sale was that. Wow.

Congratulations. And that was like a five. year journey you worked on it? Five year journey. Crazy roller coaster ride. Like we've always followed the success. Fascinating journey in the end. Yeah, really thankful for it.

They sunsetted it, but did they move all of those features into some other to-do task manager? Exactly. The idea was to rebuild Wonderlist for the office suite. so they turned it into Microsoft to do I wasn't really up for the task because I felt like I'm a founder

I love to build new stuff I'm not really in like a manager who integrates something and rebuilds it with existing Microsoft tech so they've rebuilt the product I think it's a good app but yeah

I've actually started SuperList very recently as well like the inofficial successor product oh really so I guess your non-compete is way over it's way over yeah way over so and yeah didn't you try to buy a back i heard and they were just like yeah no we're not doing that exactly that well yeah i was interested in buying it back because i always felt like i haven't finished what i started um and i i thought like wonder this is a great product people love

it teams love it i have a clear idea of how i can make it better and turn it into a profitable software company and I thought I could help Microsoft by getting rid of it fast because I knew they were struggling internally to integrate it somehow and shut it down because people were loving it. So I thought that's a good idea. Well, Microsoft didn't agree, obviously. So they shut it down in the end and that's the story. And you made a public tweet.

where you ask them, please let me have it back. And what happened? I saw the tweet that you said. You were like, I'm serious, Satya, please let me buy it back. Keep the team and focus on Microsoft to do it. No one will be angry for not shutting out of this. And you got thousands of hearts on that one,

but I'm guessing nobody called you back. Exactly. Definitely tried to get in contact with the right people there, but I think I got blacklisted quite quickly. You know what the problem is, I think, when I look at those kind of transactions. They know that you're going to bring it back and that you're going to be successful.

So then it becomes this thing where it's like, ah, you want this kind of make us look stupid. Like we bought his house, we shut it down, he came back, you reopened it, and then it goes to sell it to Google. and it's just too much emotion and it really just makes them look stupid. I tried to buy Cosmo.com in the web 1.0 days

and I went to JPMorgan, which owned the assets after they shut it down and I was like, I can raise a million dollars, I'll give you 10% of the company. What do you want? And they were like, we want this nightmare with Cosmo to end

because it was going to work. We had it working in three cities. We blew through hundreds of millions or dollars or whatever it was. And we know you're going to make it work and we don't want to look stupid. I was like, but you'll own 10%.

And they're like, well, still look stupid. We just don't want people to talk about this painful. You try to buy it back as well. Funny. So we tried the same thing. It failed. Well, I hadn't, and I wasn't the person who started Cosmo.com.

I just loved it. It was like the early Uber Eats or postmates. It was really like postmates mostly because you could hot, you could just order anything you wanted. And within one hour, they brought it to you, sometimes too. So you'd be like, I want a pint of Hogendaz and a DVD to watch dances with wolves tonight

and some bagels for tomorrow morning. And like literally in nine. 90 minutes, a bike messenger would come. But then they had a problem. The bike messengers were also selling weed. And when weed was illegal. So reportedly, I can't confirm any of this. Literally, I can't. I'm not joking.

I can't confirm it. But then they were like, there were people who were, you know, bike mess. Everybody knew in New York bike messengers could drop off packages. Let's just leave it at that. And you could get a little Girl Scout cookies or sour diesel to pair with your hog and das and your dances. but wolves. I don't know if you want to smoke weed

and watch dances, but wolves. Tell me about pitch.com. What did you learn and what is the, you know, what is the core differentiator

from the three juggernauts? Because those three are the juggernauts, right? Yeah, it's PowerPoint. It's keynote and Google slides. I think the key differentiator and pitch is that you can really build beautiful professional

presentations within minutes. That's really, what we're trying to enable our users to accomplish. So we have a huge library of handcrafted templates for like sales reports, pitch decks and status updates. What have we learned? We kind of understood, like I give you the backstory. Like we were a design driven software team.

We were looking for an interesting opportunity to build a good product. and we saw these design companies like InVision Canva, Figma, and what else was there? And we thought, okay, design software is cool, but what about building a software for non-designers? So non-designers can build beautiful stuff. And that's really how pitch got started. So we have a range of very unique features like blazingly fast, desktop apps, dead simple, editing experience, powerful workflow features like the ability to assign slides to your coworkers,

set slide statuses, integrate real-time data from services like Google analytics and Google spreadsheets, and collaborate with live video right within the app. So I think what I've what I've kind of learned the most is that people have a really hard time to create great decks and decks got a very bad rep I think Amazon was very popular with this like no PowerPoint decks anymore at like executive meetings and stuff and I think when I looked at this industry I felt like presentations as they are today are like really outdated and and just not modern anymore and that's kind of what I want I wanted to fix. And so you're going completely multi-platform. It's not just web-based because you can build on the web. You have a web interface. Yeah. But you also have Windows and I think you're coming out with iOS and Android and some other stuff soon. Exactly. So it's truly cross-platform. We use a very similar

tech stack to companies like superhuman, Notion, Slack. So like, it's completely web-based. Like, when you use the Mac app and Windows app, you're essentially using a web app, and that's the same app you're using in the browser. And therefore, we can develop the product like 100 times faster than like our competitors can do. Like you said, we need years to catch up with the existing products to reach feature

parity. But once we're there, we can. fly. So, yeah, I think we chose the right stack there. What is the point of wrapping webpages into an app on Windows or Mac? Like, is there some big, huge win other than when I hit Alt tab or Control tab, I can switch between them? And if I accidentally close my browser, I don't lose it. I've always wondered, like, isn't the whole point of writing an app that you get something extra speed or something, right? I think it's mostly comfort, to be honest.

Like I, for example, I was never a Gmail user because I didn't like the experience of like opening your browser, opening a tab, entering Gmail.com. I just wanted an email app. I think users don't care if it's a native app or a kind of like web wrapper as long as the experience is the same. So, yeah, I think one thing I've learned with Wanderlis is if you have a cross-platform product, so you build Windows apps, Mac apps, iPhone, iPad, tablet, Android, and you have like a Java, you have a Java app, you have an Objective C app, you have a Swift app, you have a whatever app, it's just insane to maintain all this stuff after some time. and I think that's why

kind of most of these next-gen knowledge worker apps like superhuman notion, etc. are being rewritten like or these office products are being rewritten from scratch. It's an interesting opportunity

right now definitely for productivity founders, let's say. All right. When we get back from this quick break, you've raised $50 million already for this. I want to understand why so much money to build this and how much runway does that actually give you? And then what's the business model here? Because most people are getting a presentation software for free.

And there's this whole concept of SaaS burnout happening. So I want to understand how do you get people to go to their boss and say, let me use pitch and pay extra for that when I've already got PowerPoint, keynote or Google slides available as part of our already paid for office. suite when we get back on the suite of startups. As someone who's invested in over 200 amazing startups and advised countless others, I want to talk to you about a serious pain point I see all the time. People are spending a ton of money. They have massive burn and they don't have a lot of revenue. And what that leads to is a short runway. What one of the

big costs that people have, it's all of the time and money that they spend on SaaS software that they've got to integrate together and they take all this time that should go towards their customers, right? Well, Odu is here to change that. Odu is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of software

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All right. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week and stars my guest, Christian Reber. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pitch, which has raised $52 million. Last round was the $30 million series B with Thrive Capital, who led it. My pal, Kevin Sistram, from Instagram, shout-out episode. I don't know. Maybe 40 when he had.

two people at the company. My boy, Raul, from Superhuman and previously, he was in Superhuman and previously reportive, and I'm in a little micro-LP in his micro-fund. And they've got a little fund where they're investing. And then, I guess before that, index ventures, our friends, Danny Reimer and the team over there, plus Eric from Zoom, Slack's fund, great list of investors, $52 million raised, is that a lot of money for building a company like this, or is that the appropriate amount of money?

I mean, that seems like a ton of cash. Is that the appropriate amount of money? Well, good question. I mean, what do you need? I mean, to build something that's that cross-platform, I would think you need to have 50 engineers or something? Yeah. Yeah.

So I think my idea is to build an all-in-one presentation platform. So I think when I looked at presentation tools, I just found it ridiculous that you build a deck and then you convert it into a PDF, then you upload it to Doxend, then you send it around to people. And I felt like this is crazy. Like it should be an all in one kind of solution.

You create a deck, then you share it on pitch.com. It's a link and people can interact. You should, I don't know, have a platform built in like slide share. So is 50 billion the right amount? the true story there is we never actually raised money. We always got offers from investors like index and thrive.

And I've like partnered with Thrive on Wanderlis before. And these guys were just so interested that they made us an offer that I couldn't resist. So I think building that kind of product just takes a few years. And until you can turn your business into a profitable company. takes another few years and yeah i try to raise the exact amount to accomplish all those things and so far i've raised the capital to build version one and then spend like one or two or three more years on on improving it and then i will probably raise another round uh at some time um to turn it into a really fast-growing profitable SaaS company.

Yeah. And it really depends on how you look at it, right? If you are able to create, I don't know, two, three, four billion in market cap by building a software company and you raise 50 or 150 or 200 million dollars, is that an appropriate amount? Yeah, it seems appropriate. Yeah. How many people does it take to run a company like this when you're building for so many

platforms? Is that 50 engineers, 100 engineers ultimately? Oh, that's extremely difficult to say, I would say to get it off the ground. Probably takes 20, 25, 30 engineers. So actually not that many. But if you want to accelerate it, so like I think my personal benchmarks for getting this product to the market were companies like Zoom, for example, or Notion or Figma, which were founded in 2012, I believe. I'm not exactly sure when Zoom was founded, but Figma, I think and Notion were founded in 2012.

And it took them a long time until 2020 to get to where they are today. And I think you can't definitely accelerate the development. And since, like you said, we're in a very competitive space. you essentially compete with free products. So, yeah, this additional funding gives you a lot more firepower to build more stuff faster. So you mentioned Doxend. Doxend's killer feature is the ability to track what slides users look at for how many seconds so that somebody who is pitching an investor can see they spent 60 seconds on this line,

10 seconds on this one, and they skipped these three. Do you support those features? That is exactly what we're building. That is exactly what we're launching in Q1 next year, presentation analytics. That will be part of our premium version. How do you think about that on a privacy basis? I have stopped clicking on Doc Sign links, because I find it creepy.

Not everybody thinks the way I do. Yeah. And there's a website that's called like doc to doxend to PDF or something. And you can just put in a doxend link and we'll make a PDF for you. Because I just don't want people have my IP address, security issues, and then also knowing what slides I'm looking at, etc. But I understand founders want to have some reasonable control over their information. and I don't know why it doesn't give you explicit warning. You are being tracked.

And Superhuman tracks opens, but they put it in the bottom right. But when Hay came out, Jason Freed was on my podcast, and I'm an investor in Superhuman, I'm not an investor in Hay. And he was just railing on Superhuman and Raul for people's privacy

and not being upfront about it. How do you think about being upfront about it, or do you think it's okay to bury it in the terms of service like Doxend does? Well, on specifically Doxend, I think it's okay. So I open Doxend links because I know like I'm being tracked. That's kind of the purpose of that product. I think with like built in analytics for tools or read receipts specifically, like Superhuman has, for example,

as long as the other side knows what's happening, it's okay. And if you can opt out of it, if you just don't want to be tracked. And I think I was very skeptical in the early days of like GDPR stuff when it came out like as a founder because I thought like, oh my God, this is creating so much extra work for startups.

But yeah, I think I've learned that privacy really matters. and is extremely important to people and myself. I also don't want to be tracked when I don't know it. In terms of being in control as someone who shares a deck with external folks, it's perfectly fine because, let's be honest, most investors I know, angel investors, like take screenshots of decks, send them around, forward PDFs. So like, I think creators would like to be in control of,

of docs they send around. So I think actually in a weird way, it helps privacy a little bit, knowing that you just can't send these things around so easily anymore without the other person knowing. So that's an interesting approach to it because you do bring up a very valid point, which is on the other side, people might be taking screenshots. I think DocuSent, does DocuSend tell you if somebody takes a screenshot? Can they actually know?

I don't think so. Maybe. I don't think. Or doxs. See, what I think should happen is when you log in, it should say, it should say, in order to look at this document, we are tracking how many seconds and, you know, which slides you look at, click here to approve. I think that's what you should do on yours.

And I think my suggestion to Raoul and superhuman, and I was public about this with Jason Vridis, you know, when you have on your I message, Apple does a really good job of you can set read receipts, I think by person. So I could say with my wife, and I have this, she can see if I've read the message. But I don't do that with everybody else because I got a bunch of randos, you know, I'm messaging me. I don't want them to see that I saw it. And they're like, you saw my thing, you know, well, you didn't respond. And I'm like, I could 500 emails a day. So you don't think GDPR isn't even probably up to this yet. But I like that idea that people commit to being tracked if it's open, right?

And I think that should be the way it should work is I should be able to say, everybody at inside.com or at launch.com, my two companies, they should be able to see if I've opened it. You know, but I don't want anybody else to know I've opened it. So I was using something called like Ugly Mail or Bad Mal. there was a Chrome extension that showed you which links were being tracked and would put like a little toxic icon

and what I would do is if somebody sends me an email I hover over the links and they have those trackers I just don't click on the links I just go type their domain in so I don't want them to know that I clicked on the link because then they just created this whole like oh you clicked on the link you know can we set up a phone call now and it's like this stuff is annoying

creepy yeah I think there's a there's a extremely fine line between the value it brings to business customers, enterprise customers specifically. Like the bigger your company gets, the more you care about privacy and being in control of your files, especially in like services like Notion, like pitch, maybe Dropbox. You want to know is someone sharing files outside of our business and where do they go? I think in some capacity that's kind of covered by GDPR, but it's true. It's definitely a little bit complex to figure that out in detail. Yeah.

So how do you think about pricing for the product? Is it just the standard, you know, $100 a year per seat kind of thing? Exactly. So it's $10 a month for folder permissions, video uploads, yeah, and presentation analytics like I mentioned,

and workspace roles, so that kind of stuff. If you go enterprise, does that mean you pay more or less? So if I wanted to put a hundred people on it at the company, do I pay $200 per person to have all that management? Or do I pay $50 a person because I'm buying more? How do you think about that?

Well, we are one month after launch. We don't have an enterprise version yet. That's something we definitely will focus on over the next years. But, yeah, right now we don't really give discounts. So it's a pay-per-seat model. Got it. That said, like it's if you want to, use it, you can use it for free to create unlimited amount of decks with unlimited people.

Lots of stuff is actually free. Cool. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk to you about the killer feature I found in it, which is the video collaboration feature. I haven't used it yet, but this seems to be a really interesting one when we get back on this week in Starbucks. Okay, you know if you're running a SaaS company, Software as a Service, a monthly subscription, you've got all this value sitting there, right?

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Welcome back to this week in startups. Christian Reber is here. He is the founder of pitch.com which is absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Tons of beautiful templates. We'll get into that. But the feature I thought that was really interesting, which I haven't used yet because it's behind the paywall, I believe.

No, no, it's free for 10 people. Oh, it's free for 10 people. Okay. So there's a live collaboration, live video collaboration. Explain what that is. Yeah, so the idea is really simple. If you collaborate on anything, you usually need to open up Zoom and invite your collaborators, then open and open and,

another app, screen share, and that it's like really complicated. And one of my brilliant engineers, I think a month before we launched Pitch, pitched me this idea of like, hey, why don't we have like live video collaboration in Pitch? Because then you can just send someone a link and collaborate on the deck. And I was like, this is brilliant. This is like really next level multiplayer, if you want to think about it. And it really helps you to not need another tool for like audio and video communication.

And that really, for us, it's the very first version. So we also want to soon launch like audio and video recordings on decks. So we want to support like the synchronous kind of presenting and the asynchronous kind of way of presenting. I think there are so many cool ways to deal with audio and. video features in Pitch and also other web products. It reminds me a bit of Lume, where Lume will let you walk people through, you know, a presentation or a website, like a docksend or a website. And they just put a little round video of you and somehow the camera uses AI to just do

your face. So you have to worry about your background if you're in a cafe or whatever. And so when you're doing collaboration in Pitch.com, it's pretty cool. you pick where you want to put your little circle of your face. So if we had five people, instead of having like a bunch of video over here, the video is just little circles. I wish Slack had that feature

where you could have just turn on your little video and just throw it into a Slack room. So when you're chatting, people could see it. We have the Loom CEO, by the way, on the podcast episode 1113. Great guest. So are people using that product or not, the video collars?

What has the early feedback been on it? And do you think it's the killer feature? It's not the killer feature. It's, I think, like, lots and lots of users love it and use it every day. I think what it solves a bunch of really interesting problems. Like, if you share a deck through any video kind of product, so loom or Zoom or whatever there is, you always have, like, video compression on it, right? and sharing a video through a video tool

is not a great experience because you don't really see the video, you don't really hear the audio. You don't have control. You don't have control. You have video compression. Or all participants don't have control, right? I mean, that's the problem.

Yeah. So you have like this video compression, which can be really bad. And the idea we had with live video is anyone just sees the slides. Those slides are on the, devices the viewer has. And just the video is the only thing that it gets like compressed, but it doesn't really matter.

I think initially we knew it's an exciting feature for people. We really loved it when we, when we've used it ourselves and we gave it to beta users. They loved it. But we feel like it's just the very first, it's our way into audio and video features of any kind. as a like SaaS angel investor, I actually believe lots of productivity apps will have live video collaboration at some point in their products

because it's just a really cool way to collaborate. Tell me about templates. That seems to be a killer feature for Notion and other folks like, what's the other one that everybody, Airtable seems to have built a business off of having great templates. It seems like the people at Keynote or, you know, Google slides or, you know, keynote, they just don't give a shit about the templates anymore.

And they just like, they PowerPoint put out some templates, you know, whenever. And then maybe the audience puts them out. But they don't seem to renew that. Do you have a team that just thinks about and makes crisp gorgeous? Like, Squarespace actually is the great notion or great examples of that. They're constantly coming up with beautiful designs that you can draft off of. Like literally, you can start with like a world-class design at Squarespace. Use a code twist for 10% off when you check out.

And the same with Notion. Yeah. Yeah. So we have a, I think we have a very similar approach like slide chair there. So we have a team that thinks about templates all day and ships one new, exciting, beautiful template after another. I think, I mean, it's fairly simple, right? If you are a founder, you host a board meeting for the very first time. You have to most often create a deck for it, and you have no idea how to do that.

So you start Googling, board meeting template, then you find some crap on the internet, and you're not really excited about it. It's not really helpful. So in Pitch, you just have a really professional board meeting template. You click it. You create your deck in like five minutes, and then you're done. So I think it really, it's not just about creating beautiful stuff, it's also about creating professional stuff.

I think when I like to tell my team all the time, I think we have to invest into creating the fastest, most delightful experience for our customers. If you are an employee in a big company and you create a sales report for the very first time or a marketing report and you have no idea how to do it, templates can, can, like save days of work for you and really help you to to win at work. So yeah, very similar approach, I think like Slideshare. Sorry, what was it? Not Slideshare. Not Slideshare. What's the other one? I think Google slides. Squarespace, you just said, right? Oh, square. No, yeah. People, Notion and Squarespace and Airtable, I think are the three best examples of companies that relentlessly

release these templates and these templates engage you and re-engage you. So I think that they probably have a department that's just responsible for putting out some number of collections and then marketing them so consumers understand them. And that was like one of the beautiful things. I have to say like it's so clear the details. I don't know if you've ever heard like big, there's a website like big little things or little big things. Is it little big big things or big little things? And they just think about UX,

little big details. Little big details, yeah. Have you seen this website? Yeah, it was great. Oh, it's great. It's just like if you're into product, little big details.com, I don't know who the hell came up with this idea.

There's just some wonky person who studies UX and comes up with little tiny observations about what people are doing in Google forms or something on Stack Overflow where somebody thought of a little detail that nobody's going to notice, but it's just super brilliant. And the one I really loved inside of pitch was when I started working on my first deck, I noticed that with, you know, the templates and the slides in each template, right? So I picked the template.

I picked the one called light or something. It's a beautiful light kind of thing. And then it has a little tiny, tiny taskbar at the bottom with the templates and the background color and images. And then you can pop it up a little bit and see, you know, like a little strip of all the different possible slides. Because, you know, when you're building a deck, you want to quickly look at what template does this piece of knowledge I'm trying to transfer, you know, which one should I use?

Should I use bullet point? Should I do a big hero image with a little bit of text under it? And then you can see there are 29 slides in the light collection, template collection, and you can just make it a little bit bigger. And then there's also a maximize. And then all of a sudden you see like a 3 by 5 or a 4 by 4, whatever your screen's at. And it's absolutely like one of those beautiful. And then you can compact it down.

It reminds me of you drive a Tesla, right, Christian? Exactly. You're on a Model X or did you just go to? the model why well i'm terrible i actually have both very good very good two tass the family i like it yeah we have the tesla we have the tesla battery in the in the basement uh to power our house with solo on the roof like i'm a tesla fan boy no my wife is is driving the the ex because we have two young kids it's the perfect family car and then what do you have the pushing the y daddy drives an s oh you're old school you got the old school ass you got the old school ass

Yeah, we have no Y in Germany yet, so it's pre-ordered. Oh, man, if you're an S driver and you drive the Y, it's sort of like going from like, you know, like a big Cadillac, a big wide seven series BMW or something. And then getting into a tighter like a Porsche or a, you know, a tighter driving experience with a shorter, I guess a narrower wheelbase or whatever. And man, yeah, all dads. Model S is a dad car for sure. but the model Y is like if the model S and the model X had a baby and then that baby was like even smarter than their parents, that's the Model Y experience.

Because you're higher up, you got a lot more room, but it drives a little, I find it's tighter. I know Elon doesn't like when I say this, but I kind of feel like the Model Y is the masterpiece in the entire line. I know the X is really the most advanced of all of them ever made and the new S with the crazy ludicrous is bonkers. but I am just Model Y all day.

Like if I have all four, I come outside, the one I want to drive is the Model Y. And now my wife, who has the X, now she wants to drive the Model Y. So I lost my Model Y. I'm like, why did I get this? We basically have a sexy driveway. That's awesome. X and Y. That's awesome.

Well, I got the cyber truck coming, so I need to get like, I'm literally like this, I'm turning into that guy who's got a garage for cars. So I'm literally, when I moved to Austin, I'm not moving to. Boston. Maybe I moved to Austin. If I moved to Austin, I'm just going to buy a garage to have like a poker garage warehouse somewhere with all my cars in it. But I just love that detail you put into it with that little template stuff. These are like some of the best products ever made, right? If you sit in it and drive it, it's the best experience you can possibly have. I'm a big fanboy. I love the company. I love the founder, obviously. So yeah. And now Germany, oh my lord,

It was very interesting. The beamers and the volvos and Mercedes were laughing at Elon 10 years ago, dismissing him. Oh, that's cute. Maybe Mercedes will invest $50 million and give him the drive train for the. The steering wheel for the original S, I think, was the Mercedes one. I know it was the Mercedes. There are a lot of Mercedes components, I think, still in some Tesla's, right?

Yeah, and the S. I think the diesel. Now they love him. Oh, he goes over there. And they love Elon now, Germany. Yeah. But I think I think Mercedes has a few interesting cars coming up, EQS and EQC and all that kind of stuff.

So I think Tesla will have a harder time in like two or three years. They keep saying that, but here's the thing. I think that all those companies are going to spend, you know, billions of dollars to catch up to him to have, you know, what might wind up being like very sexy BMW, gorgeous Mercedes interiors, right? But they're not going to have the self-driving. And they're not going to have the software upgrades like he has. And that's going to take him another five years. Do you use self-driving at all? No, not really, no. But I mean, like, I think that's the beauty of a free market, right? Even if Tesla has their own self-driving solution

maybe all the other companies team up to build their version. I think that's what's going to happen. Yeah, Waymo. And then I think Tesla, I think Uber is selling their self-driving unit. What do you think? All those people are going to get there at the same time. What do you think? Like, I think all self-driving arrives like in the same two or three-year period.

Yeah, probably. I think so too, yeah. I think it will probably take much longer than expected. I don't know. I think even as like a tech fanboy, I don't really trust self-driving cars yet. But honestly, I haven't been to San Francisco. Like maybe those things are these days totally noble

and everyone can experience it. I would say I trust the self-driving 99.99% on the 280-101 freeways when I drive down the five. In fact, they've made it super sensitive now because all these idiots are going on YouTube and leaving the front seat. like as a joke they're morons

or they were putting an orange or a grapefruit in the steering wheel because the steering wheel knows if you're holding it so they were trying to trick it so people were taking like clamps and clamping them

to the steering wheel to create a little bit of weight but not too much weight and I'm like idiots just pay attention but when you're on like a 280 or a you know in Germany the Autobahn

you could you could set that car it's sort of like those Sessna planes where like even if the pilot falls asleep or God forbid the pilot had a heart attack and died, those planes, they could just fly forever until they run out of fuel. And that's actually

happened. Like, people have had heart attacks in Cesson or there was that famous golfer where they ran out of oxygen and he was in a jet and it was on autopilot. And it just kept flying. And they had planes, you know, military planes on either side of it talking to them for like an hour. And it turned out they lost cabin pressure and lost oxygen. So everybody just died or got knocked out on the plane. It was really tragic. So when you launch a product like this. what's the go-to-market strategy and how do you try to chip off people from those existing products or do you not bother and just say, you know what, I'm going straight for startups because startups are open-minded and they're five people and they like to invest in new technology.

In other words, the notion and Slack, Yamr approach of just screw it. We're not going to go after the big enterprise. Let's get all the startup people. Again, like very similar approach, I think, to most other SaaS companies. We focused on, initially on, like, teams with less than 200 members or companies with less than 200 employees because we felt like they're the desire to get better software or best in class products is really, really high and the barriers are low. Like throughout the beta phase, and we had a pretty extensive beta phase of almost a year. we've had all sorts of companies companies with 10 employees

50 employees but also thousands of employees but yeah go-to-market strategy really is focus on small teams first and then grow with by building more features I think really the moment we will be able to provide the best possible product to

enterprise customers will, it will still take two or three years until we're there. So there's no point in a sales team. I was having this discussion with Chimoth and Friedberg and Sacks on the All-In podcast, the other podcast I do. We're talking about the Slack acquisition on episode 14 of the All-In podcast. And they said the thing that Slack did too late, if there was any Monday morning quarterbacking you could do because it's obviously the greatest success in SaaS ever, I think. Or maybe Zoom would be.

and they would be like a close second in the modern day SaaS world. Yeah. So nobody did it better than Stewart and Eric. Everybody knows that. But they said the one criticism they had was that they didn't hire a sales team and embrace like a sales culture early enough. Are you one of these SaaS people who's like just buy it if you want to go to the website or do you think you need to have, you know, a serious enterprise sales team now to do those

200, 400 seat sales? Like is, is 50 million the appropriate amount to build a product like this? We have a sales leader at Pitch, even during the beta. Not cheap either, but it's, it's a great, you just need, you need many months to understand, like, how can you sell your product? Where do people, like, how fast can you close deals? What can you actually build for enterprise and larger teams, enterprise customers and larger teams that is valuable? So yeah, we definitely, I had conversations with Stuart about this as well. And he said also to me, like we invested in sales way too late.

And to be honest, every successful SaaS founder is telling me the same. Invest in sales early. Learn as fast as possible. How do you deal with the pack that the sales people get paid more than you do in a lot of cases and a lot of the other team or does nobody care? They're just like, whatever, they have to do sales and that's brutally hard and boring. So let them get paid. more and we just want them to be rabbit attack dogs because we got the equity.

How do you deal with that? Great question. I think there are just two different kinds of companies, right? Some companies pay sales folks the same like everyone else. And then most companies have like this flexible component bonus system. Really depends. Like I've seen both at Wonderlist. we had three sales folks who didn't get bonuses,

but were really had the same kind of salaries like everyone else. I think both works. It really depends on the company. I think every founder and every team can decide how to do it themselves. Don't really have an opinion on it. What's better and what's worse. How do you keep everybody focused on this one thing for years and years and years? Because, you know, in order to be great at this,

you really do need to have focus and people are going to be like oh we should build a word processor and a Google sheet and we should go after the whole office suite but that's not how you're going to be successful you have to make this one thing perfect so how do you think about that

and keeping people focused or is it just hey listen if you're not into the mission after two three four years of doing this you can leave and we'll get another person fascinating question because I think I've experienced this once before as a founder at Wonderless that people were getting

tired after four or five years of working on a to-do web. So I think it's perfectly normal and healthy for people to just express that and say like somehow I'm just tired to do the same job for years. And I think that was interesting to observe at Microsoft. Like as soon as we've joined such a big company, lots of team members like join the Xbox team, the Windows team, the OneNote team. and they just basically switch teams

inside an organization. And we've learned from that. So we try to keep the competition up internally and enable our product team leads to recruit each other internally and try to create a talent war, basically, inside the company.

And that way you, as an employee, I think you constantly have new challenges you get excited about. And then, yeah, I think it's my job to really really the troops and get everyone excited about the mission we have. But yeah, ask me in like three or four years again, how successful that is. All right, listen, I've taken enough of your time. Continued success with pitch.com.

I think it's a great product. I've been enjoying it. I'm building my launch culture deck, which I'm going to unleash. niche on my team because I'm, I just read the Netflix book about culture of high performance. I don't agree with all. But you read that Netflix new book, Read Hastings's new book yet? I have it on my, uh, Kind of for like four weeks. You got to read it.

It's really good, actually. And Patty McCourt's previous one, uh, because she was the human resources person. Like I had her on the podcast like three years ago when she did her book. They were good reads back to back. The Reed Hastings one with Aaron, I forgot her last name, uh, who's a like a HR specialist, she's going to come on the pod. And then Patty McCord, who was the HR person. So there's like literally two books.

And then the co-founder of Netflix wrote a book. So I'm going to read that one too and have the trifecta of them. So you kind of get the Roshamon, all different versions of what happened at Netflix. But the core thesis of freedom and responsibility really resonates with me, which is like higher adults, half talent, density hired the most talented people. That's kind of obvious. You want to hire the most talented people you can afford. Aaron Meyer is the person who really really really.

the book with Reed. It's basically hard book, though, based on my take on it. Read is kind of like maybe 20% of the book and Aaron's 90%, 80% or 90% maybe, which is fine. I mean, I think they really nailed it, but freedom and responsibility of like, you're responsible for Netflix, Brazil, Netflix, Poland, Netflix, Tokyo, whatever, Netflix, Japan, and you're going to have to make decisions. But it was really interesting as they went around the world. Like, in Germany, like, certain things about freedom and responsibility where like, you know, oh, we don't have a travel policy. Do what's in the best interest. Do what you would do with your money was one, the original travel policy. And then somebody was like flying first class and like going out to like absurd

restaurants and ordering $800 bottles of wines. And they're like, what are you doing? Because like the CFO was in the back and coach and like all these sales executives were in business at first and they had spent thousands of dollars on wine. Like what the fuck are you guys doing? And they're like, you said to do what I do? This is what? how I fly. This is what I spend my money on. And then they said, okay, that's not the rule anymore. The heuristic, we're not going to tell you how much you can spend is do what's in Netflix's best interest. Is it in best interest to spend $8,000 on wine? Maybe if it's Tom Hanks and you're trying to win a deal and he loves wine and that wins you the deal. But if you're just

going out with four other Netflix people, please don't buy $8,000 bottles of wine. So it's really interesting how they like try to take away, because they basically were the basic premise of the look, and I'm curious what you think of this just as a general strategy is talent density, get the most people, best people you can, give them freedom and responsibility and be candid with each other, and then take away rules. So remove rules, but you can't remove rules if you don't have the right people and you don't have this like freedom and responsibility, FNR. What are your thoughts on management?

What did you learn in terms of managing a startup and managing people? Well, I burned out from like micromanaging people doing the, Wanderless days, I was completely obsessed. And I think most founders have this insane challenge of doing most of the works themselves in the early days than to becoming and growing into a CEO that just manages people who manage people. So everyone is going through that weird phase and transition. And I think most of us are probably doing a terrible job the very first time you go through this at pitch, because we have done this before from the beginning, like we knew, okay, have to create autonomous product teams.

We can't really micromanage people. If you want to make everyone, keep everyone excited and mission driven, we have to just provide a lot of freedom internally. And we also hired a lot of senior folks who have been a part of other startups, failed startups, successful startups, venture firms. And I think that really helps. to, like you say, like to create a very mature company culture.

How do you deal with people who are complainers, Eeyors, they're just like, they do good work. So like on the work scale and productivity scale, they're high. But in terms of on the enthusiasm scale, they're annoying and negative.

So, you know, if you had somebody who was super positive and enthusiastic and skill, that's the top right quadrant. You love them, right? But then you have somebody who's a bit of an e-ore. That's from Winnie the Pooh. They're just constantly complaining.

We're bad at what we do. It's never going to get done. Why was there so much chaos in the company? But they're a high performer. How do you deal with those people? Hey, to be honest. And I know it sounds like a lie. Be honest. We don't have these types of folks at pitch yet. And I think the secret there is that we have a brutal hiring process. and I'm not involved in like hiring most of our engineers.

My co-founders are. And I have like four engineering co-founders who like really interview every single engineer. And we really take our time in making hiring decisions and make sure that we don't just hire very talented people, but also very like-minded people and kind people. if it happens like I don't know we we definitely had this once or twice where you hired someone and you knew like that person would prefer to I don't know work on their own project or work on something else then yeah you just have to part ways in a professional respectful way and that's it and we prefer to do that as fast as we possibly can yeah fire fast hire slow that's definitely the model yeah and if somebody's high perform I mean there's high performance I mean there's high performers who are also jerks, you don't want them. And they have high performers who maybe are negative. But you can work with them. You can just say, listen, you're, you're coming across as negative. It's kind of a downer to be on the phone with you. Can you just be more enthusiastic and celebrate the wins a little bit more? And I appreciate the obsession with the things we're doing

wrong. But kind of brings the call down. Maybe talk about three things that are going well and then add the thing? I've had this conversation with many people over the years who are just it's never good enough for them, right? I used to be like that as well. I'll be totally honest. I was a little bit like this is not good enough, we can do better work and you've got to take time to celebrate the wins.

It is extremely important as a founder to be the most critical person in the room. And you should never turn that off. You should never learn not to be so critical anymore. You should actually invest into

coaching your team so they're critical as well, both of their work and of other work, other people's work. I think what you should try to accomplish is some kind of feedback culture. So if you are in a meeting with someone and you don't enjoy it for whatever reason, you need to have a culture where after that meeting, you just talk with each other and say, like, hey, you kind of pissed me off that that wasn't cool what you just did. And that's it. And if you, like you say, if you're a grown-up culture or a team of adults, then you should be able to confront each other in a respectful manner.

And that's it. Yeah, I had this happen recently on a board meeting. I was like, I brought up, I said two questions. The same other board member was like, yeah, we don't need to talk about that right now. And then I asked another question. They did the same thing to me. And I was like, hey, bruh, I was in this company like for two years before you, even got on the board.

And if I ask a question, I would prefer that you don't roll over me. He's like, I'm just trying to keep things moving. I was like, I'm the point guard. You need to show me respect. He's like, I totally respect you. I was like, don't run me over in the board meeting. He's like, I didn't realize I did it. I was like, that's okay.

You know, if you want to be the captain of the board, you can be the captain of the board. But if I ask a question, I expect an answer or at least like, you know, 30 seconds or 60 seconds for at least to be considered before it got shot down. I was in shock. I was like, wow, look at me. I'm a target. Feedback culture again, right? If you, if you, if you know, it was good, because I had to get it off my chest because I was like, I'm not going to go to another board meeting and then have the same person. Like, every time I ask a question, he's just like, he just shoots the question down. I'm like, what? He's like, we talked about that last more. We did that. I'm just like, I'm bringing it up for a reason. It's important to me. I own seven

percent of the company or I represent seven percent of the company. Can I maybe ask a question? It's pretty funny. But board dynamics are weird. You have a, you do all your board meetings remote now. So that's efficient. Yeah. I think it's awesome. I love it. That's the best part of this remote forest world. I used to have to be in person, right? There was this like in person board culture. Did you have the in person board culture for wonder. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, VCs were flying in and their private jets to have board meetings with me in Berlin. So, uh, definitely and then you had to take people out to restaurants in the evenings like that is just not happening anymore the old board dinner it's not happening anymore it's awesome you get back all that time

you have seriously you get back 10 hours absolutely what happens is if these board members fly in then you have to have lunch with them a board meeting then you have a post discussion you go on a hike you bang some drums just sing some songs and kimball yeah you have dinner the next morning you got to drive them to the airport. It wants a ceiling a two-day thing. And I mean, I think I miss it a little bit, but I think one time a year is going to be my thing. One time a year, we all get together in person, do something fun.

And then let's just zoom is so much more efficient. You have a distributed team? Or are you going to go back to your office after a vaccine? It is hybrid. We've been distributed from the beginning, but we also have an headquarter in Berlin. Nice, beautiful. You go to the office now or no? Well, some people are.

they just need a change of scenery once in a while. Like I think if you have two or one kid at home and you don't really have an office, I let those folks work from the office. But like the rules are don't, don't take the bus, don't take the train, come by bike, don't really meet other people. And then you can work in the office. And it's. Yeah.

Seems reasonable. I mean, we're going to have all this testing soon anyway. I mean, we're recording this in December of 2020. Well, this testing equipment, I'm just acquired some more tests. So I have rapid tests that I got from a guy, a fell off a truck kind of thing, or my friend has one. And they're going to be, I don't know if you have those in Germany where you can just take or do a buy like a hundred rapid test for $25 each and then do them yourself.

Or do you have to go to a doctor clinic? I think you can't buy them. But what we have are like little stations where you can go and then you get tested and 20 minutes later you get the result. Is it free or do they charge you? I think it's free with health insurance. And since everyone has health insurance, I think it's technically free. So does that mean you've done it like 10 times or two or three times?

No, there was never in, like I had one COVID test when I flew back to Berlin, like from a flight, I had to get tested and still had to get quarantined five days or so until I got the results. You flew? Really? Wow. Brave. Yeah, I flew once in summer to Spain. and back to just for a family vacation and all of us had to get tested. Well, it's so weird sometimes these rules. Like me and my wife had to get tested, but not the kids. And then the kids could, it's just like, it's a little bit confusing.

I think Germany does a pretty good job on it, but the rules are just sometimes a little bit confusing to people. Yeah, it does seem like there's no rhyme or reason. We just shut down all outdoor eating. in California, which then sends everybody indoors. So people who would have eaten outdoors with another couple

or two other couples or whatever, six is the limit where they're friends. They're not going to invite them to come over their house. And what are they going to do? They're going to shut the doors because it's a cold outside. And now that's why this thing is surging is because we just don't have stupid.

These politicians are so dumb. They can't understand that going to the beach or going for a hike or biking is better than from going shopping inside or inside your house and having dinner. It's so dumb. Anyway, listen, this has been great. Congratulations, Christian, on another amazing SaaS product.

We'll be watching from the sidelines. I'm not an investor, but who knows, maybe a round will open up and I can zip in a quick milly. I don't know. Who knows? You never know. When did the round close? The last one?

I honestly don't know. I think 2019, mid-2019 or so, something else. Well, maybe, you know, something happens. you know, you do a little convertible note, you know, a little discount. I'm going to give you a call. You know, I'm going to slide in a quick five hundred. You know, just a little taste to get my beak way.

Anyway, do the all-in syndicate, yes. Well, you don't need money. But thank you for coming on the pot. I appreciate it. Stay. Thanks. I know you're in Germany, so it's late there. I'll let you get back to the fam,

and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.