This Week in Startups - From PM to GP: Roach Capital's Fahd Ananta | Angel S6 E6 + OK Boomer: Dive Chat | E1390

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

00:00 Jason intros the show, Roach Captial's first fund, and Producer Rachel's interview with the Dive Chat founder01:33 Angel Season 6 - First Time Funds 04:07 Fahd Ananta of Roach Capital's path from founder to PM to VC 06:08 Fahd's Angel investing beginnings in at Shopify 10:20 How Fahd made the transition from Angel investing to raising a fund 13:03 Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist 14:11 Using geography (Canada) as a competitive advantage to raise capital as a VC 18:34 How Fahd has differentiates himself to founders 22:15 Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist 23:19 Fahd's investing thesis 26:05 Early winners in Fahd's portfolio 32:33 LinkedIn Marketing - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/AngelPod 34:09 Ok Boomer, Producer Rachel talks to John Herrick, the CTO of Dive Chat a new messaging and event app Check out Roach Cap: https://roachcap.com FOLLOW Fahd: https://twitter.com/fahdananta Check out Dive Chat: https://dive.chat/ FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Okay, we have an amazing show for you today. First up, I interview Fad Ananta for Angel Season 6. He runs Roach Ventures. Get it, Cockroach Ventures, founders with grit who will never give up. And he shares some really honest insights about raising your first venture fund. He did 25 Angel investments. And then he raised, you know, somewhere around a $5 million fund. And he's in the midst of deploying it. Lots of lessons there. And it's Friday. So producer Rachel, Rachel reporting is back with another edition of that. of OK Boomer and she understood the assignment. Stick with us. It's going to be a great show. Season 6 of Angel 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, CRO, WD.com slash Angel. And Broker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today atmbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And LinkedIn marketing. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash AngelPod.

Hey everybody, welcome to episode six of Angel Season 6. This is the series we do as an extension of this week in startups where we talk to capital allocators. A fancy word for angel investors, seed funds, and venture funds, even syndicates and accelerators could be considered part of capital allocation. What do capital allocators do? They pull together some pool of capital. and they look for opportunities to invest it in high growth companies. In the venture space, private company space,

we're looking for very high growth companies because most startups fail. You can look at them as experiments. That doesn't mean the founders or failures. It just means that experiment failed. And they move on to the next experiment. Typically, we see founders on their second, third, fourth one. They can get on base or even hit a home run.

And so it's very exciting to be a capital allocator. and one of the most exciting things over the past decade, and I'm in my 11th year now of investing, is that investing in startups and creating funds has been massively democratized. We're seeing many, many, many more people start their own funds, start their own syndicates where groups of people get together and invest,

and we're seeing a ton of diversity, people from different backgrounds, different regions, genders, ethnicities. It's absolutely fantastic to see this kind of massive change. And it's been great in doing this series. The five interviews we've recorded already, McConwell, Mac the VC from Rare Breed, David Rosenthal from kindergarten,

Paki McCormick from Not Boring, Paige Van Dardy from Behind Genius Ventures, and she's like 23 years old. Minique Woodard, a good friend of mine, who was at 500 startups, which is now called 500 Global and Incubator here in Silicon Valley, and she has cake ventures. So we've been having this incredible parade

of capital allocators. Some of them are on their first fund and did venture before. Other ones, it's their first time adventure and their first fund. Really amazing when I came into the industry 20, 30 years ago. If you wanted to join a venture fund, man, you had to be out of Harvard and get your MBA

out of HBS, Harvard Business School, or Stanford, GBS, graduate business school, maybe Wharton. And it was kind of an insider's game, you know? Your fraternity brother basically got you the job or your dad or a cousin or something. Now, completely democratized and everybody's figuring it out. Today will be no different in my little pre-interview

with today's guest. He said, I'm figuring it out. And I said, you know what? Me too and decade too. It's not an easy job. So Fad Ananta, please tell me I got your name. Perfect. Thank the Lord. You know, it's very weird. Sometimes there'll be a name that's incredibly challenging to pronounce and I nail it and other times it's incredibly simple and my producers are just beside themselves. And Fad is, and it's spelled F-A-H-D, if you're wondering, is a general partner at Roach Capital. You heard that correct, as in Cockeridge.

And I'm guessing you named your fund after the phenomenon of the Cockerotech entrepreneur, which is the entrepreneur who will never be killed and never give up, correct? Yeah, I think there's some hidden alpha in, you know, resilient, integrity founders. Yeah. And so you were a former founder yourself. You did a SaaS company, you sold it to HubSpot. When did you first become aware of angel investing and start doing some angel investing, and then we'll get on to when you decided to move from an angel investor to a fund?

We sold the company to HubSpot, I think, in 2012 or so. And then since then I've kind of been a product manager. I worked at Shopify and so forth. And one of the cavigaries, and I'm based in Canada, I'm based in Toronto, Canada. I started to notice, as I saw more and more founders here, there weren't a ton of great accessible angel investors or venture capitalists. I think a lot of the VCs here typically come from different industries, not necessarily from tech.

And so as I started to see it, and I had a bit of liquidity myself. You mean strategic investors? Like it's part of some big company has a little venture arm on the side and they're investing. That or it might be like an old. oil and gas family or like a real estate family that sees the asset class. But they're not, you know, I don't think they're as like sophisticated as like understanding, you know, how to build a software company. And so as I started to kind of see that type of archetype more and more,

I saw really compelling companies. And I just decided to write small checks. And I'd saved up a little bit. I was working at Shopify. And so I started to, I think the first time I wrote a check, I didn't know how to write a check. I didn't know like what like do you just like ask them like hey like can I invest your company or do they ask you or what that looks like and so I just kind of just said like hey you know I'd really like invest in the company and how much can I write etc and then wrote a few checks that way that started in 2016 and then over the last four years before I raised the fund invest in 25 companies myself and then went on to raise the fund. And when you make those angel investments, you're doing 10, 25, 50K of your own capital, something in that. Yeah. So initially, I started with 25K, USD, which as a Canadian, it's a lot of money.

Yeah. And I started to size it down a bit more so I could have a bigger basket of companies. And as I start to learn a bit more, I learned about my investing type, what things I like in certain companies, what things I don't. And at some point, I start to learn about like the asset class. and think of a disaster class. To be very honest, I think when I started, I thought it was cool. I thought it was a good way to pay it forward, and I thought it was effectively, you know,

tuition in a different industry with a call option at that. So, like, it, you know, it might work out and you might be rewarded, but either way, I get to learn a bunch about a specific domain that I'm interested in. Yeah, I mean, if you think about getting an MBA, cost a quarter million dollars to go to those schools that I mentioned. And if you were to Angel Invest 10K and 20, 25 companies, I think arguably you'd learn as much or more than getting your MBA, just hanging out with those 25 founders.

And you make these, you know, approximately 25 angel investments. At some point, you know, two or three years in, did you have any winners or start to become confident in this? Or were you feeling like some people do in the J curve? People can look that up. But basically in years two or three, your investments, it's unclear how you're going to do because some of your early investments will shut down. And so you're in the negative zone. So tell me what was it like in years two, three, and four for you after making these bets. I think I actually got incredibly lucky that some of the first few companies you invested in performed really, really well.

And maybe because I wasn't trying to be an angel investor, I tried to meet good founders that are local in Toronto. And some of them I even tried to hire at Shopify and they're like, no, I'm working on this thing. Get to learn about their business and say, can I write 10K? Can I write 25K? So I think the first like two or three companies have you know effective like return by return and more my entire capital Some of them are some of them like there's at least one unicorn like I think of top my head They raised the series C last year So they've performed well and then I think once I started to feel too comfortable

That's when I started thinking about like You know a little bit more formal a little bit more hey I should get like access to this type of investment because it's cool And then I think those Most of those investments are still TBD and figuring itself out. You know, that is a lot of the journey of being an investor is, I think if you get lucky on the first couple of investments, you all of a sudden conflate like, oh, maybe I'm good at this, and then it gives you motivation to do it more. And if you get more focused on it and you're super positive, well, you can get this

very positive feedback mechanism going where you meet more founders and you work harder at your job and your luck increases. And I think that's possibly what could have happened to you, huh? Yeah, I think a lot of it was probably just thinking that exact same direction. You know, one thing I tried to do was try to add this like view of like at the same time, you know, I'm working as a product manager. So I tried to help out these founders with a bit more product strategy. Once I learned that, you know, maybe I'm, yeah, getting a bit too excited about my own luck.

I wanted to learn a bit deeper about these companies. So I work closer with them by helping them with their product strategy, get to like know how the founders work, etc. And that gives you a bit more conviction when I make the investment. Okay, so you get the angel investor resume dialed in, and you got some wins under your belt. Perfect setup to start a fund. So when did you decide, hey, instead of just taking my own capital and recycling it and, you know, hey, one of these unicorns pays off 50 to 1 or 100 to 1, you can now make another 50 or 100 investments

and keep that, you know, momentum going, when did you make the decision? I want to invest some other people's money and start a fund. Yes, I would say just the caveat all this, but there's a lot of like serendipity and luck involved. Sure. You know, I happen to work at Shopify during a time. The company was in hypergrowth. A lot of my friends ended up becoming people who would be LPs and funds because they themselves got, you know, fairly rich and had liquidity. And so I happen to be, I guess, one of the first PMs that left and, you know, I guess started taking angel investing a bit more seriously.

And as I started to do that, I start to kind of think about how do I build a brand here in Canada? How do I kind of think of myself as I kind of like doing this full time? And a lot of my other peers would come to me as like, how do I do this? How do I learn about angel investing and so forth? And I've learned from other mentors at Shopify as well, other mentors in the community. And, you know, once that started to happen, someone are like, hey, do you want to manage my capital for me? Do you want to take a little bit of capital here and there? That started to kind of put it in my head.

I was always, you know, I was always pretty hesitant because I had, I had a view on these, like, you know, early stage funds where, you know, I thought, I guess, like, in the long run, you know, there's a lot of responsibility involved in, like, running these funds. And from what I saw from a few funds that, you know, I've seen personally, I think a lot of capital gets deployed early on into, I guess, like, caught trending companies and then a lot of times like the, you know, GPs will go on and go with a job at a larger fund. And then LPs are kind of like in this like limbo state. So I didn't want to do that at all.

So I wanted to kind of think about it myself like, do I want to do this long term? You know, will I do fund one, fund two, fund three if I have the right track record? And once I knew that myself and started to learn more and more, I spent about a year actually learning closely with a bunch of other funds. from early stage to late stage to crossover funds, some hedge funds, and some real estate fines. And I started bringing some of the lessons back to like early stage investing. And then I started kind of like, I guess exercising the relationships I've built with some of those larger fines, with some of the people at Metas Shopify and I started to kind of formalize this idea of like, hey, maybe I want to start a very, very small fine and, you know, set the initial

target around $3 million and they're raising around $5 to kind of take that theory. is still next time. It's time for another R Crowd deal of the week. Right now you can join our crowd's investment in future family. According to the deal memo, Future Family provides millions of families with access to affordable treatment through by now pay later financing, or BNPL if you're in the industry, and they power 15% of the fertility clinics in the U.S. And last year they grew patients served by 300% according to the deal memo. And you can invest right now in future family at our crowd.com slash angel. All around the world, companies like future family are innovating and driving returns for investors.

Our crowd analyzes many of these companies. Then they select the ones with the greatest growth potential and they bring them to you. From personalized medicine to health tech, which is tackling the $60 billion global IVF in fertility treatment market. In state-of-the-art labs, startup garages, and anywhere in between. Our crowd identifies innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest, and that's early. So here's your call to action. If you're an accredited investor, you can join Our Crowd for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com and review the current deals.

That's our crowd.com slash angel to sign up for free. So when we look at your journey, you build product, you sell it to a big company, you become a product manager, a surging company, and everybody around you starts to do well. And you have access to companies, and maybe there's not that many people investing in Toronto. So you've got this, you know, great, wide, open space to operate in. You make 25 bets. Hey, you hit a couple. And now the momentum's building.

And the people around you are saying, hey, you know what? I would love for you to manage some of my money. So you decide you're going to pop up this, you know, three, four, five million dollar fund. And tell me about the moment when you closed your first check. Do you remember where you were? Do you remember who it was? The first commitment is always like special for your fund. It was actually, you know, funny enough, I got this email one day.

So, you know, I think there was a feature on like Shopify Angels. So again, this is what I mean by the same thing. Serendipity part. There's a feature on the people that were leaving Shopify, what the Shopify mafia looks like and what they're doing. And they happen to feature me. And so this one of the partners that Tiger Global happened to read. And so then a few days later, I get this email in my inbox, like Tiger Global Intro.

And I thought it was spam. Click on it. It's one of the partners there. And we started going back and forth, started building a relationship, shared some notes about a few companies they were looking at. And from there, I think over the course, probably about two months, you know, we both figured out that we probably want to figure out a way to work together. And then I kind of went on them and said, like, hey, I want to raise a fine. This is kind of where I'm at.

And, you know, they kind of like did their own reference checks. They ran their own little process. And they came back to me as like, you know, myself and a few other partners want to be the largest LPs in your fund. So that was my first check. I was, you know, I was at home. You know, they gave me a call. They did a few reference checks. And they're like, cool. We're in for. this amount will be the anchorism of the fund. And then from there, I got a lot of confidence, you know, kind of being this like no name, effectively no name Angel in Canada.

So having one of the largest, you know, institutional funds in the world, you're kind of finding that confidence to me. You were anointed. You know, it's interesting. Your story, similar thing happened to me. Sequoia said, hey, you know, you've introduced us to so many great founders. Would you like to be a scout for us?

And that was the first scout program ever created. you know, just over 10 years ago. And so you call it luck. I call it action. I call it energy. I call it, you know, some people might say hustle. I just think it's like when you're of action, when you're in the mix,

when you're doing things in the world, people get attracted to you. And that opportunities come to you that you might not have ever anticipated. So one interpretation could be luck. My interpretation of what's happening to you is you're doing so much good action in the world that it's attracting people who do good things in the world to you.

Tiger's not looking to give you a handout or a donation. They're looking at you saying, he's going to find something that becomes a unicorn again in Canada. And if we're LPs, we got some early signal. That's their intent, right, when a big fund like that backs a tiny fund. Yeah, of course. And just to kind of comment on that, you know,

I think a lot of it's like planting these seeds. So I spent, you know, 2019, I left Shopify, and I spent, I was pretty lonely because I had no co-workers, so I spent a lot of time on Twitter. And so every time I had like a thought of my mind, whether it's around like product strategy or investing, I'd share it and start to build this audience there. And then from there, I start to meet with a lot of different funds

and planting these seeds of like, how do you think about investing, how do you think about building conviction? And then, you know, once you develop these relationships, then I think, then I can go back to them when I'm thinking about raising a fund myself. And a lot of them ended up becoming all pieces. my fine down the road. And, you know, this is another theme that keeps coming up.

Mac as well and other folks. Hey, if you're good at Twitter, all the VCs and investors and founders are hanging out there. You following me, me following you, us talking to another, talking to Paki, talking to Mac, talking to Monique. Everybody's kind of at the same cocktail party. It's called Twitter. And if you get good at Twitter, you're going to make friends. And if you can write intelligent observations, maybe even a tweet store or, you know, heck, even do a podcast,

you might build your brand up a bit. So how are you thinking about brand building today and building up your brand? So instead of you chasing deals, hey, maybe some deals start chasing you. Yeah. So for me, you know, but I think I saw this like Justin Con video a while back. And he basically, I think it was Justin Conn. And he basically said like three things. So like, you know, as an angel, there's like, as a fund,

there's three things you can offer, which is, capital. I don't have a ton of capital. Any other large one will have more brand. You know, I'm one guy running Roach Capital. I'm not addressing Roach Capital. I'm not in recent or benchmark. And then, you know, the other thing is time. And that's probably the one area where I could probably compete. And so for me, it's like if I can start offering, you know, good product strategy sessions with a lot of these founders I've made for just goodwill, that starts to build a reputation of a lot of these founders. They might be like,

and then a bunch of deals that I've invested in now have been like, hey, like let's talk to thought about how we want to build a product team, how we want to hire our first PM, how we want to think about product strategy or growth.

And so that's been like one angle of alpha. And the other area is like I've been trying to play up until like, up until this fine, into an area where I have less competition. And so in Canada, you know, I find that there's not a ton of people, or at least when I started,

there wasn't a ton of people. people at like the early stage doing angel investing, building a brand, working at, you know, like one of the biggest companies in the country. I think that goes a long way. And then the last thing is I never wanted to, you know, pretend to be a VC. I want to be myself. And I think that goes a long way. I've seen the same in your work.

I've been a big fan of your work, Jason. So I've seen a lot of that. And I think that comes across much more natural. It's just like, hey, I'm just a dude. I've done some work. I have some money. and maybe we can get along both cool stuff to go.

I mean, authenticity and keeping it simple, essentialism, right? Like is a key part of, I think, being successful in life, you know, venture capital aside and capital allocation aside. But in capital allocation, you don't have to overthink this,

and I think a lot of people do. You have to meet a lot of companies. You have to place a bet on some of them, and then you've got to be as helpful as possible to those companies. And if you just do that consistently, you don't need to hit a ton of wind In fact, you need hit only one.

And maybe one per fund, or maybe one, every couple of funds, you know, that's a super outlier to build a career. And it seems like you're well on your way. So you raised this $5 million or so, just over $3 million or somewhere between $3 and $5. It's about $5 billion. About $5 million. Congrats. Perfect size. Solo GP.

There's not a lot of fees off of that, but it looks like you did okay and you sold your company. I think what I wanted to do, just to kind of comment on that bit, I want to. to align myself with LPs as well because I think a lot of these LPs are taking a bet on me, and I want to build for the long term. And I have like a little bit of cushion myself to like kind of make it work and better myself. So I said it at a 0% manager fee and only carry because I think if I build a successful fund here, management fee will not matter. And if I don't, then also won't matter. Yeah, I didn't do one on my first fund. I kind of regretted it only because I could have had a couple of support staff, like maybe one or two.

And that would have helped me service founders, NLP's better. So my best advice to you on the next one is they want you to take those fees because you're going to pay them back anyway. And it may help you build a little more infrastructure. And when they call, you can respond quicker or if you need to do reports, the reports can be better. Yeah, totally. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need. Just one. Oh, insurance. This covers errors and omissions, and it helps you scale your business because

any major customer that you have is going to ask you, do you have E&O, show it to me, let's close this deal. And listen, if you don't have business insurance, you failed one of the first steps of being a founder. And startups should look no further than in broker when they're looking to get their insurance dialed in. Inbroker's technology saves a time and money. Prices are up 20% lower, better coverage than incumbents. You can go from signup to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. It's easy, breezy. And when you work with Inbroker instead of the incumbents, you're not dealing with large, slow corporations up. Nope, sign-up takes days, not weeks, and the process is completely transparent. There's no opaque pricing. Here's a really easy call

to action. To instantly buy custom-built insurance for startups, just go to imbroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, you can get an extra 10% off by using the promo code twist, TWIST. Thanks in Broker for sponsoring everything we do here at this week in startups. And provide insurance to many on my start. I really appreciate it. So take me through. Do you have a specific thesis on verticals, stage, or type of founders?

We obviously know on a geo basis. You're it in Toronto and people are looking for that early stage check. It's a great place to go. But putting geography aside, how do you think about your zone of excellence? Yeah, so I tend to be a bit more broad. At least I thought my thesis is fairly broad. It's like early stage companies for the most part and building internet businesses that are high growth

and pretty open to geo. Like Toronto, yes, I think I have like a great, you know, center of gravity here, but kind of across North America and anywhere else really. And then the other thing I look at is, yeah, the namesick of the fund. I want to find people that are really, really gritty and these like Roach founders.

And, you know, that term I kind of picked up a bunch from like the Paul Graham essay is like, hearing about the Airbnb founders. And I think that actually goes a very, very long way. And there's a lot of founders that are actually like super greedy and can build a business in the long term that are maybe discounted today. And I think that's where I kind of want to find a lot of that value. Yeah, I think that's a great thesis to have.

If you're looking for, I always talk about resiliency and grit and, you know, most startups fail, not because they run out of money or they didn't get to product market fit, it's because the founders give up. That's the number one reason. sometimes will work for a year with no salary and they pull a rabbit out of a hat and, you know, optimizing around grit is a really brilliant thesis. I've refined mine over the years to be focusing on people who build. So we back builders is my new credo because all of the success we've had has been around that, right? But I think it's important also for you to figure out who do you

like to work with. I get the sense that you are the cockroach rounder. You are in fact the gritty one and I think you probably might be annoyed to work with somebody who's incredibly entitled, am I correct? Yeah, I think it's actually a fascinating essay that Honom, the founder of Allos Ventures, hero is called Foxes and Hedgehogs. And I think the TLDR of it is that there's a lot of people that are foxes that are actually really, really good at fundraising. And there's people that are hedgehogs who are actually like not that good at fundraising.

they're not that presentable, but they're just like kind of in the corner, tucked away, like, doing their work. Yeah. And I think that's the type of people that I want to try and work closer with. That's the type of people I want to continue to invest in it and build with. Yeah, they don't have the big fluffy tail and they're not peacocking out there, but they're getting stuff done. Hey, when you look at your portfolio and I have it up here, maybe tell me about which company out of all of these has had the most markups valuation increase for you. years since you invested in them. Yeah.

So actually it's one of the first investments I made in this fund. This is a company called VIN. They're based on Victoria, BC. They're based on building a online car marketplace. They work directly with the dealerships. And then over time, you know, they become one of the largest sources of referrals to these dealerships. They kind of have a concert experience for the car buyers.

And then, you know, there's kind of repeat their playbook for city over city. And they're, you know, looking at expanding. more into some of the services beyond just buying the car. So things like warranty, insurance, delivery. Vin Auto. Vin Auto, yeah. So I met the founder through another friend pretty much on that exact same premise, which is like I think they were thinking about some product strategy,

like how to skill the product team, how to think about their product in a more concise way and how to position their business. So I met the founder. I spent more time with their co-founder. who was the head of product. And over time, you know, we built a relationship. I actually ended up really more conviction in the business because we got to see how they work, how they think.

And, you know, I discovered that they are indeed roaches. And we built a good relationship together. So when they're raising capital, it just happened to line up with when I have just started raising the fund. And so they ended up being the first investment on the fund. You know, I invested $200,000 in that company out of the fund, which is one of the largest checks. and then, you know, Caleb was the CEO.

He came to dinner and Toronto. You know, we kind of got to meet with a bunch of other investors. You know, they've had some workup since that point. Congratulations on that. And then when you look at all these ideas, which one you think was the not, which one is the non-consensus? In other words, other investors didn't get it. But you thought, hmm, this has a long chance.

long odds for this one. It's going to be a challenging company and challenging product to build a challenging vision. But if it does succeed, oh, my, could change the world. Do you have one of those in the portfolio? Yeah. That comes to mind? I don't know if they change the world specifically, but I think it changed the industry. So this is, so there's this company called Base Station.

And it says founder that I met, again, like he used to work for this company called GFL. They're like waste management of a company. I think they're basing Handa. and he left, he was like working at their corp deaf team, and he basically started seeing all these like SMB haulers, like these recycling and like garbage haulers. And he realized a lot of their operations are run on Excel and paper. And so he wanted to build this like back office management software

for these like like SMB like garbage and recycling haulers. And he set out to build that. He learned how to code. He built the first version of himself. He did direct sales and grew the company to 50K ARR. and then we're not to raise with the capital. And I think that's a type of business where I think it's like tremendously undervalued. It could be kind of like positioned across from like one industry, like not just, you know,

kind of recycling and waste management, maybe to like pest control and some of these like other businesses. And I don't think they have a ton of competition in that market. So I think one of the non-consensus things there is I think a lot of investors will kind of see that market as like really small or like kind of price sensitive. But there's a lot of adjacent markets where they exist. exact same product can map onto. Fantastic. And so looking at this deployment, when do you think you'll be finished

deploying the capital and, you know, raising the next fund? What's the next challenge and adventure for you? I think for me, the most important thing is to build a Hall of Fame find out of this first one. I want to build like a 3 to 20x here. I mean, I think everyone does. So hopefully we get there. I don't want to rush any deployment. I mean, I've all I also learned a bunch, like, you know, reading stuff from people like you on Twitter. Thank you. Just around, like, you know, vintages, you know, investing like, you know, let's say you deploy your entire capital in a certain type of market. That may not work out really well for a fine.

And so for me, I want to kind of find good businesses. Ideally, if we kind of continue on the same pace, probably by the end of this year or early next year, so about a year from now, I think we'll be in a position to deploy the fund. So two years to deploy the fund? Basically? Yeah, about two, two and a half years. Got it. So 30 months for $3 million, $100K a month, and you're going to do 30 companies, 40 companies, as you thought? Yeah, about 30, 30, 40 companies. Great. So 100K a company, you just got to find one company a month. Yes.

To find one great investment. How many do you need to meet with on average? I think sometimes a bit like sporadic, especially for someone who's like building their brand. I think sometimes like I won't get a ton of deal flow and sometimes I'll get a lot of like in-mount deal flow. I think on average, I'll probably talk to about, like, I want to say, like, 30, 35 companies a month. You know, some months it's more. It's about, like, maybe 50. It's actually going through some of these numbers last night. And then I think one month, I only got like 10 companies.

And from there, again, I think the deployments are also sometimes, like, sometimes there's a month that I'll make, like, you know, one, two, three investments. And sometimes it's like, you know, a month or two where I don't make a single investment. Well, listen, continued success here. Congratulations on going from an angel and getting your first fund up and running. And we wish you luck if you find a great company. And they're looking to do a little syndicate, you know, another 500K check to 3 million. Email your new bestie. You got my email.

You got my more following each other, slide into my DMs, and then let's do a deal. Let's go. Let's do it, Jason. Thanks for having me here. It's great to have you and really continue. success. You're off to a great start. I looked through all the companies and all of them were very interesting to me. And most of them are in Canada. I'd say maybe about 30%. Oh, only 30%. Okay, great. So, yeah, just looking at them, I was like, hmm, there's a Dow one? Huh? That's interesting.

Oh, yeah. Backend for Dow. Is that like that too? Really good stuff. Hey, Tom Eshbacher is here with us again. He's a senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. and we're talking about their amazing report today in startup marketing, as well as how to use LinkedIn to grow your startup as an angel investor. I like to see revenue early and often from startups. How can LinkedIn help with that? Yeah, the short answer is LinkedIn forums. 89% of our startup advertisers utilize them, and I'll tell you why.

Think about all the effort that goes into creating interest within a prospect. You have to nail the value proposition, create compelling content, find them, and then message them with enough frequency so that they engage. all that, you get them to your signup page and you know how many of them are going to convert, just 2%. That's so much value that marketers are failing to capture and it's a big reason why LinkedIn marketing and specifically LinkedIn LinkedIn forms are so popular with startups. So people know a lead gen form lives on LinkedIn. They click one time and boom, the email is sent to the company. By using LinkedIn forms, you're ensuring they're coming from an audience that you care about.

And then we're pulling the information right from the member's profile. So it's great. Your SDRs are going to be thrilled with that info. They're going to want to follow up. That's the improved lead quality. And as you say, Jason, it all takes place in just two taps in the LinkedIn news feed. So get $100 off your first ad campaign and get access to that LinkedIn report today in startup marketing. And I want you to get that right now at LinkedIn.com slash angel pod, A-N-G-E-L-P-O-D.

slash AngelPod. Okay, Rachel, it's time for you to shine in your weekly segment where you talk to the next generation, Gen Z, Millennials, about the future. Who's on OK Boomer this week? So this week, I got to talk to John Herrick. He is the founder and CTO of DiveChat. I actually met John when I was at Miami Hackwick a few weeks ago because he made a funny tweet about him. We were at a social gathering and he had his laptop out at a party and I thought it was really funny. So I videotaped him. And that is how we met. Live chat is a group messaging app for organizations that allows the users to also see events happening within the app. And during hackathon, that app is what we use to converse. And it was really cool just being able to see the events and not having to switch over between like a calendar app or a Facebook invite and group me. I used group me in college. And invites always got lost, especially if you were in club or in Greek life or you have a

bunch of events happening all the time. It's also really cool. my favorite feature is you get to react to like these messages as many times as you want with emojis. So you know how you can like hard a message in I message.

You can react as many times you want with whatever emoji you want and dive chat. Yeah. So I think that's a big way to get Gen Z's really into your app is to just take the throttle off the emojis. But what you're saying is, hey, this chat app, instead of you having to invite everybody,

it's for that geolocation or it's for that specific event? For that specific organization? I believe they are targeting Greek life organizations within colleges. But at Hackwick, it was a great use. I've been seeing a lot of apps coming up at trying to basically annihilate the use of the Facebook invite, which I personally hate because I don't use Facebook anymore. I don't know if that's ever happened to you,

but you get a Facebook invite, and you end up missing the event or not knowing about it to like the day of because you don't check Facebook. Yeah, that's a problem. Right? And another app that I saw killing it in this space is Partyful. I know producer Justin has also checked out Partyful before. their whole tagline is Facebook events for hot people

and I think that's really funny So that's pretty hilarious Yeah Well I mean this is the problem with Facebook I think if you think about it on a product design basis Rachel is they flooded us with notifications To get us to engage and then we're like This is too much I got to turn off notification

So if you play your notification hand too strong People turn them off And then for things that they would have actually responded to Like a wedding invite or a Greek invite or something, they basically ruin it because who wants to go into Facebook and just get annihilated with notifications? I mean, the notification anxiety I get when I open up that app is just like, oh, it's too much. I totally agree with you.

I actually don't have any notifications on for any social media at all because I find them all to be really annoying. Partyful definitely also goes against this. We were talking to the dive chat, co-founder, but I'm plugging Partyful a lot here. But they use SMS, which is really. smart because I never turn my text notifications off or my calls because what happens if your mom calls you, you know? Yeah, exactly.

So that's a really cool way. And dive child has the event feature and the messaging feature for groups. So I feel like a little bit more incentive because there's not any other noise in there. All right. Shout out Rachel's mom. She's doing a great job. All right. Clip this, send it to your mom.

She's doing good. What is this? I don't know what month you're in now, Rachel, but. Started in July and it's February. I'm not as good mental math as you. So, well, whatever. You're out your six months. and Rachel's mom,

dear Rachel's mom, she's a hard worker. You raised a good kid, and she's got great potential. Nothing to worry about with this one. I don't know if you got any siblings. I can vouch for them, but I can vouch for this one.

She's got a bright future in podcasting and reporting. Okay, let's go to OK Boomer. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you, everybody, for listening to another segment of OK Boomer. This is Rachel reporting, and today I have on John Herrick from Dive Chat.

He is the founder, CTO and has his undergrad and master's degree in CS from UT Austin. Not to be confused with the alma mater of previous guest Ben Awad, who went to the University of Texas at Dallas. He made it very clear. He was like, I do not go to UT Austin. I go to Dallas. And previously, before dive chat, you entered out some pretty cool places, including Microsoft

and the company that made Pokemon Go. Is that correct? Yes, that is correct. And also, it's so funny you mentioned Ben because literally right before this, I was on GitHub in one of his repositories working with one of his packages. So that's so funny. No way. Wait, that's so insane.

That's so cool. So obviously being a technical founder must have habits pros, do you think that there are a ton of technical founders in the Gen Z community? There's definitely a lot, especially as I'm going to a lot of these in-person networking events, I'm finding a lot of people who have very similar

experience to me, who are also Gen Z, really ambitious builders, and it's just really cool to see. That's so awesome. So I guess I'll give everybody else some context. I met John at Miami Hack Week. So that's how I know who was a technical founder. And I made a really funny tweet about him when we were at a social event and he had his laptop out. And it was really funny.

But I actually knew about dive chat previous to coming because dive chat was what we were using a few days before going to Miami to where everybody was conversing and RSVP to the different events. Can you talk about what is dive chat and why do you decide to dive right into this? Yeah. So dive chat is the platform for in-person communities. So the kind of idea is right now in college, if you have a fraternity, if you have any sort of student org, almost all of them are using GroupMe. And GroupMe has been around 10 years. It is kind of dated at this point and everyone really hates it,

but people keep using it anyway. So kind of the goal with dive is build something that's like GroupMe, that's very simple, easy to use, low friction, but also extremely fun and tailored towards Gensie. That's awesome. I think my favorite part about dive chat actually is being able to see the event aspect of it. I love going to a bunch of different social events in college because I went to Penn State. It's in the middle of nowhere. So the university had a lot of sanctioned

events, which was incredible. And it would have been really helpful to have these all in one place rather than just on a bulletin board in the dining hall. So I definitely see a use case here of this. I think it was really cool when we were at the hackathon. Can students currently use this right now? Like, are you guys on the app store? Yes, we're currently on the app store. We're partnering with different student organization leaders. There is currently a waitless code to get on. But if you're interested in getting our organization on board, contact us and we'll be happy to let you on. That's awesome. So how do you guys make money? Was my big question, I guess, too. So that's one funny thing about consumer that I didn't realize until recently is most business

models who actually need to make money, you need revenue. But for consumer, you actually don't want that, at least at the beginning. Everything matters about users. And anything that slows down user growth is basically the death of the startup. So you want to focus all resources on getting as many users as quickly as possible. So any sort of attempts to monetize there end up slowing down user growth, slowing down retention, engagement, everything there. So basically we actually want to hold off from monetizing for at least a few years down the line. And then it's so funny. It's so counterintuitive. And then once you reach scale, once you have a larger amount of users, then there's a lot of different ways to monetize. One example is with premium groups. So like the Patreon approach,

having Discord communities where you have to pay to enter, just building that premium community model. And then as well, because we have the event side of things, there's a lot of ways to monetize that. I definitely know a lot about that because I have used Slack groups that don't have like the premium Slack. If you don't have the premium Slack, then a bunch of your messages from a certain time period, I believe, get deleted. So that is super interesting. How did dive chat come to be? Because when I was doing some in-depth stalking of you on the internet, I noticed that you pretty much went to school undergrad grad. I mean, you had your internships here and there, but it looks like you you went straight into dive chat. What was that process like? Yeah. So there's a really funny story of how

what started actually. I was in university and I met my co-founder in an intro to Buddhism class. And it's so funny, we both just took it as kind of a one-off elective just because we had to do a social science. We met each other through the class. We were studying for an exam. And we started talking entrepreneurship. I mentioned I was doing a hackathon next weekend. He talked about how he had some previous experience at startups. And he said, hey, we should grab a coffee tomorrow or something like that. Now, most people, when they say that, they never follow through. And then you never end up meeting. But he actually did follow through. He was like, hey, let's go to Einstein's coffee tomorrow. knew and how's that sound. We went there. He pitched me the idea was very different back then.

But overall, I could sense his incredible enthusiasm as drive ambition and I wanted to work with them and that's our dive started. I know we've talked a lot off of the show about pivoting, especially looking back on life like one year later and just seeing how in the past, like, how could have I even thought that? Like looking back, hitting that one year mark, especially maybe as a grad student coming out of school completely, just seeing how far you've gone and how wrong you were going to be. Can you talk about how you guys have been able to pivot and maybe even some advice you have for people that are scared to pivot?

Yeah, I didn't realize until I did it, but pivoting is absolutely so important and that any successful startup is going to need to be able to pivot many, many, many times, if not minorly, then majorly. So originally, Dive was a ticketing platform for college parties. And in retrospect, looking back on that, that's a really bad idea. College students are some of the stingiest market anywhere.

And so trying to monetize college parties in particular won't really work. And then we pivoted towards kind of an event discovery app, which every single college student has tried. But event discovery apps don't really work either just because people aren't checking them. So then we thought, what has really good retention, one app to people check all the time, which is messaging. But then messaging is also an incredibly crowded space. So then how do we innovate on messaging where there's so many other messaging apps, when there's so many other startups that have tried in this space and failed?

So now we have kind of this hybrid approach. of the whole in the market, it's kind of like Slack and Discord, but for parties, for social, for Gen Z and consumer that hasn't really been filled before. And that's kind of a unique take on it. And then leading into that, just having really good design and making it really fun for Gen Z in particular. I've decided that the one app, if I could just have somebody come in and redo the whole thing, it's fidelity. It's like a finance app, like I just do my retirement account in it. And the usability of it is so bad that it makes me not ever want to use the app. Your Guys' app is incredible. It's really pretty to use.

hasn't crashed on me yet or anything. And it's funny that you mentioned ticketing apps and things like that because I actually, there's only one app that I know that's ever really worked with ticketing and it's line leap. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I think, again, it was one of those startups that might have like coming to inception off of college students. But I don't know if that's like Penn State specific or not.

It's just such a hard area to break into. Another one that's really difficult is to see, that I've seen students like try to iterate a lot on is like how crowded restaurants or bars are in the area so you know when to come. So dive chat, obviously being able to integrate two crucial parts, I feel like has made you guys really fun to have, especially at places like hackweeks. Definitely would have been very, very helpful for me in college. Have you guys ever used this at any other events outside of hack week? We have one really large group for kind of just Gin Z tech Twitter as a whole.

Oh, cool. That group has around 400 people. And that's a really fun group for us, just because it's a lot of our friends, a lot of people, in the tech community, as well as a lot of other founders. So when we're looking for feedback on the app and being critical on UI, UX and everything there, people who have been doing that for years and years and years, all being located in that one group is just really fun for us. That's awesome.

So I did not realize that, although it feels like a very large community when you first enter, I've noticed that as we continue to go to different social functions, to different events, I see you at all of them. And it's kind of like the same group of people. Like, I'm sure that everybody in that dive chat, It's kind of like just a subset of that group of people that continues to like come up on my radar as like Gen Z kids in the tech and VC community. A lot of people have different thoughts on what the community of founders is like. What are your thoughts?

I've been consistently blown away with how nice and how giving the Gen Z founder community has been. Honestly, it just seems like everyone wants to help everyone out. Everyone wants everyone to succeed. anytime I'm going to these events and meeting people, almost always they'll say, hey, how can I help? Can I introduce you to this person? They have expertise.

They might be able to help you out. Just the amount that they're willing to give in terms of their personal network, their connection, and even their time has been absolutely amazing to see. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I always tell people I squat at the Wii work because I don't have a WeWork pass,

but there's so many people in the tech community that do that everyone's super welcoming and it's very much like, oh, let's co-work together and being able to have that support, especially, like I said before, like especially because the group isn't that small, like the Gen Z founder community, you know, few and far between. They're incredibly supportive, and I think it would be a really sad place if we weren't all connected together. So very happy that I met you. I kind of want to like pivot a little bit here and speaking of pivoting.

I have been doing a lot of research on remote work, acing communication, especially in the workplace. This week and startups, we are all remote. I very much like that. I don't think I would have moved to San Francisco right after college. I'm from the East Coast. My family's here. So I enjoy being a remote worker because I think it provides a lot of opportunity. And I've been seeing a lot of commotion as well about async communication.

What are your thoughts on acin communication? More importantly on that, though, how can we make it easier? Async is so important, especially now. So dive started with me and my co-founder in person at university. But since then, we've basically been living in day. different cities. And all our employees, everyone else working on it has also been in different cities. So basically everything in the company is online. Everything's remote and everything's through Slack. And that is really drilled into me the importance of async communication. Being able to

overcommunicate as opposed to undercommunicate and do so really concisely to the entire team has proven extremely valuable just to make sure there's no miscommunications that everyone's on the same page for everything. And then one other thing I'm really passionate about is cutting down on meetings. Any friend I talk to who works at Microsoft or big tech or any of those companies there always complains about meetings and how they have way too many meetings. All the meetings don't have clear agendas. They don't get stuff done. So one thing that I'm really particular about is having really efficient meetings. If a meeting can be done async, then moving into as much preparation that can be done as well, moving it to async. So oftentimes

we'll have standups in the morning and we'll cover everything so well async that the standup itself is only five minutes. It's a quick check-in and that we're able to get most of it done without using people's time in meetings. I love that. I think big control, as Molly Wood says, like her time is her greatest asset. Molly Wood is our co-host. And it made me think a lot more about my own time now that she's come to the show. And she's been reiterating that to us. And I definitely agree. My favorite memes have been lately, like this could have been an email. But now in 2022, this could have been an email, even emails sometimes on like, all this could have been a Slack, like going one step further. Like I've noticed that like our abbreviation

with communication is going further and further and further to the point where it's almost like in order to create a well-functioning team, how much communication is needed. Obviously, that's based on team to team. Do you ever see yourself as a team, though, going in renting out an office space because I do think that communication and human interaction is important just for humanity, like to not go insane, like working silent in my bedroom alone sometimes gets a little crazy. do you ever think about you guys getting office space? We've definitely thought about it a lot in the past, and there's definitely that extra spark

that happens when doing collaborative work in person. I think especially creative work when brainstorming and bouncing ideas back and forth, that being in person is extremely valuable. And it's oftentimes those little moments, like when you're both grabbing lunch, and then you have an idea, and then you start talking about that idea,

how those little moments kind of spark into really great ideas, that you don't capture through a Zoom meeting that's forced 30 minutes, blocked off at either end. So from that aspect, it's extremely valuable. So if we didn't get a remote office or if we didn't get an office in person, what we could do is have a bunch of retreats. So office space turns out is really expensive, which I didn't really know until I started looking into it. But it's around the same cost of doing some just really cool retreats throughout the year. And those retreats offer a time to basically do the same type of work in the office, except a more

memorable experience there. So those are kind of the two options. And we're thinking about that now. That's so cool. So how often do you see your co-founder? I see my co-founder every few months. We bounce around different cities a lot just because everything is remote and we have full flexibility. We like to travel a lot. So I'm actually going to be seeing him next week in Colorado. He's running a little ski house right now. I'll be dropping in for a week. Then he'll be doing a house in L.A. later this summer, I'll probably drop on by. He'll probably drop on by New York. So we definitely make sure to see each other in person still.

That's good. And I know you're based in New York like myself as of now, although you've, obviously pop around a lot. Do you think that you have to be in a particular city in order to get integrated into the tech world as a Gen Z? Or do you think that we can solely survive off of platforms like dive chat? In-person community, I think, is really, really valuable. And that's one of the main kind of guiding theses of dive chat, is that in-person community is more powerful than digital community. And by building for these orgs that are already in-person that have a really tight in-person aspect, like fraternities and sororities, we double down on that. So I would say for someone wanting to break into the Gen Z-Z tech community, it dramatically helps to be either in SF, L.A., New York,

or Miami, just because of those in the cities where it's really happening. That is slightly mitigated, though, by Twitter, and that the Gen Z Tech Twitter community is absolutely thriving. It is violent. It is crazy. The people, I meet people who aren't in tech, and then I tell them about this phenomenon where everyone in Gen C. Tech is on Twitter, and it is the go-to-fly. platform at networking events. They just don't believe me. It's absolutely crazy. So because of Genzy Tech Twitter, I met so many people online before meeting them in person. Like at Miami Hack Week, I met at least a dozen people. I'm like, oh, I know you from Twitter. And then I would meet other people and they're like, oh, I know you from Twitter, which is so funny. So because of

Twitter, I think it's much more possible now more than ever to be connected to that scene, even without being in one of those big major tech cities. It's so funny. Again, so I went to Miami Hack Week with you as where I met you. I was kind of actually hesitant to tell people like where I worked that I was at this weekend startups just because I wasn't a founder. It wasn't in tech. I was like, you know what? I'm just not going to tell. I'm just going to wait until people ask me.

It comes up in conversation. I was looking to record with people too while I was there. I got the awesome TAP co-founder on Eric Button before he was a great person to speak with. But I wasn't really like telling people like what I did for work or anything like that. I was just kind of like showing up places and talking to people to see who would be interesting to have on the show. I even with that, even with kind of like trying to ride like on the down low, I went to Miami Hack Week with 300 followers and I left with 1,000 because everybody is on Twitter. I was just talking to somebody about how we should pivot the recruiting platforms like and start

going to these different hackathons and events and then pinpointing these people, mostly software engineers on Twitter because I think it is just an incredible place to try to find not only like a co-founder if you're young, but also trying to hire in the tech community. were you guys able to hire at all? Or was that a part of your agenda when you guys were at Hackweek? Definitely currently on our horizon. We're currently looking for some full stack engineers, but I totally agree with that sentiment.

Anytime I'm meeting someone in person and I say, how do you want to connect and they say LinkedIn? I kind of shake my head internally because Twitter really is what's happening right now. I completely agree with that sentiment that the best people you're going to find either on Twitter or in person at these networking events. Yeah. I didn't realize how important in person networking was because when I graduated, way it was 2020, came here to New York, and now it feels like because you say yes to one thing,

you're actually saying yes to three every time you meet someone in person. And when you say yes to a Zoom call, which is virtual, it doesn't open necessarily any other doors except for maybe another Zoom call. Just not that same communication you get. Has dive chat been performing well even since students have been traditionally not attending college as much as they used to? Yes, I think even though college is online, that makes people kind of strive for in-person community now more than ever. So people that are in fraternities that are in-sorities, they're placing even more importance on that. Because now that's even a larger percentage of their in-person interaction from day-to-day, just because they're not seeing other students in-classes.

So there's in-person communities that people are already integrated into are even more of a part of their lives. That totally makes sense. So are people at UT currently using this platform? Yes. We have a few different Greek orgs at UT that we partner with. Awesome. And what has been the best thing that they've liked about dive chat so far? The number one thing I hear over and over again is about our reaction system. So unlike any other messaging app, you can actually react as many times as you want. So like if you have a heart emoji and you really love a message,

you can just keep pressing that hard emoji until it's 10, 20, 30, 40 as high as it goes. And everyone can be doing that. And every time you press it, there's a little explosion. So hearts fly across the screen that other people, if they're in the chat, they can see that. So it's created these really magical moments where you have maybe 10 people in the chat. They're all reacting at the same time. And everyone's screen is just absolutely blowing up with heart emojis, which is so, so fun. I love that.

I love that. It's like the little things, right? So we said Greek life is pretty heavily integrated on your platform. What's your guys is marketing partnership strategy to bring people and, like, groups onto the app? Like you said, you have codes. I believe that's how I got it in. I found like the Miami Hackweek code. And that was introduced into that community.

There was a code also for the tech community, like you said. How are you reaching out to these people and giving these people, though, the access? Right now, it's a lot of warm intros through social chairs of Greek life. So, for example, we'll go to the social chair of a fraternity and say, hey, here's this thing. It's like Grumee, but 10 times better. And the social chair has been used to using GroupMe and they'll throw parties and then people miss the message. And so there's a lot of frustration, especially by the organizers with GroupMe. So if they find kind of this solution that makes everything a lot easier on their part, it makes it easier in the members part.

a lot of times they're willing to try it out. And then once the fraternity's on board, they'll end up loving it. Then we'll have a really good relationship with them and they can enter us to other social chairs of other fraternities. So that's kind of been how our marketing's been progressing. Yeah, the network of social chairs throughout state school creek life. I know this would perform super excited for this to get to Penn State. I know it's going to perform really well there. We have these things called like Thon Orgs, which are student-run philanthropy organizations that always have little, I mean, philanthropy events,

like throughout the year in order to raise you. money for the big one. Like the total, they do with like a dance marathon where they stand for almost 48 hours. And they raise a lot of money then. But all the money that they're kind of collecting throughout the year is like presented at the end of that dance marathon. And they host so many events. Like I know dive chat would absolutely freaking kill it.

Producer Justin, who is another producer on the show, also had a question on kind of the college realm. So we see all these Gen Z founders dropping out. We obviously met a lot of them when we were at Hack Week together. Why did you decide then to make college students your target audience? College students have a very tight sense of community and very similar values. And because we're building for in-person communities, we wanted to start with kind of the best example of really tight in-person communities

that are really, really kind of dedicated to their community. And Greek life is just a really strong example of that. Greek life has been around for so many years at this point. people in fraternities have their brotherhood that goes even as they get to late ages, they'll meet people in their fraternities that are younger. And there's just that kind of link between all sorts of different ages and just a really tight community. So because of that, because we are college students ourselves and we relate very much to them,

we thought it would be a really good kind of target beachhead market. That's awesome. And I guess at Penn State, there's been a lot of talks about like banning Greek life as a whole. Are you guys ever worried that the use case in your target audience might like cease to exist on college campuses in the next few years? I think Greek life is here to stay. Even as much as people want to get rid of it, I think there's definitely a lot of bad in Greek life.

I think there's a lot of good in it as well, especially in the community aspect and lifting each other up there. And even if Greek life were to go away, there's still a bunch of other different opportunities in college. Like student government, for example, is a really tight-knit group, student athlete organizations. And then just broadly,

any sort of student organization as a whole that meets in person is a good use case. Awesome. That's so cool. Do you have any advice on community building because it seems like that is a huge focus of your guys' time? Yes. So at the very beginning, one slight pivot we made is we originally wanted to build an app

to help people build communities. And we realized that that wasn't really a good idea and it has been tried many, many times before and failed. And it all kind of ties into the realm of habit changing. If you try and build an app that changes people's habits, it is very hard to do successfully. And you're going to need a lot of momentum. and it's a lot easier to build an app

that already aligns with what people's habits are and then helping that out. So instead of helping people build their own communities by targeting more established communities and building tooling for them, we found that that's been a lot more successful. Awesome. I think that is super incredible. And thank you so much for being able to come on and talk about dive chat.

I'm super excited to see where you guys go. Again, like I said, cannot wait until you hit more college campuses. I think this is a really awesome tool that's going to benefit a lot of GenZU organizations and maybe older people's general, organizations too. I don't know. I don't know what's out there. Where can people find you? And what is your Twitter handle? Twitter is definitely the best place to find me. It is the John Herrick, H-E-R-R-I-C-K. I do fun little random side projects that I'll occasionally tweet about as well, but definitely shoot me a DM and always happy to hear from anyone. Now you need to say some of the

fun little side projects. My favorite one I made is, you know when you're at a restaurant and you're trying to split the check with three friends, and you have to figure out how much people owe and there's tax and tip, and it's super annoying math, and it takes around two minutes to do. Super annoying. There's a bunch of apps that try and fix it. All of them have really bad U.S. And so I thought, what is the quickest way I could possibly solve that problem? So I made an app where you can do all that math in less than 15 seconds and figure out who it was who what. So I use it absolutely every single time, super, super fun. And just little random ideas I have that I decided to build up. What's the app's name? No hard name. I called it QuickPay.

It's not available anywhere right now, but potentially in the future. That's so sick. Well, thank you so much for being on. That sounds cool. Let's try to get that to the App Store, too. I know I would love that. I've been using split-wise, I think it is. And like you said, not super-upon-to-use.

So, yeah, thank you so much, John. And can we see her with Jason? Thanks about this interview. Thank you so much for having me.