This Week in Startups - Jason’s ultimate dream mega-purchase + Founder Q’s | E2228

Starting point is 00:00:00 Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you, even Jason Colleenus, will not break out the checkbook for. It's definitely private aviation. I've been trying to hold off on doing this for a long time. The great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere, or $100,000 on a round trip, that seemed absurd to spend that. The other one, I would say that I sometimes sweat. is buying a really expensive sports car. I love corvettes, and I really want to buy a barn dominium,

Starting point is 00:00:36 which is like a big, open, fancy barn that's kind of like a man cave, but Texas style. Do I buy this ZRX1 for $250,000, or do I buy $5,000 corvettes and have a little collection? A lot of these things become cognitive load. This Week in Startups is brought to you by lemon.io. Building a great team is essential to any business. Lemon is a marketplace of vetted, experienced engineers ready to take your company to the next level. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a dealbreaker for startups to win new business.

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Starting point is 00:01:41 Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist today. Today's founder question, Jason, comes from our dear friends over at the R slash startups subreddit, and I found a question that I had absolutely never seen before. So I thought it was the perfect thing to bring to us today. From our dear friend entire chest, quote, I signed a, $20,000 paid pilot, but it's a shark bite problem. Interesting framing. Shark bites are big crises because you're bleeding versus mosquito bite, just kind of an irritation. They found a big problem to solve. What they did was they found that there's trucking companies that transport fluids,

Starting point is 00:02:13 and often they get the wrong fluid and the wrong truck or the wrong truck goes to the wrong destination, and so they made a product to fix this. And they signed a $20,000 pilot. They found a problem in the market. They made a solution for it. And then they went out and did more market research and discovered that other people in the fluid trucking industry don't have this problem. They seem to have found a uniquely messed up first customer. And so I was just really curious, how common is it to accidentally index on the wrong customer and drive in the wrong way? This is why you want to get two or three customers and validated across them. If one person says like, yeah, you know, we have milk containers and if somebody puts gasoline in them, it costs $100,000. It's not worth

Starting point is 00:02:54 cleaning them and puts them out of service for two weeks. So we got to make sure nobody accidentally puts gasoline in here and it's a shark bite. It's like, you know how rare shark bites are? That's why when people are wondering, like, why don't we have shark nets everywhere? Why don't we have shark repellent? Why don't we have more shark? It's because it doesn't happen that often. Now, in places where it has increased, and I love the shark bite versus a mosquito bite. Mosquito bite, let me tell you something. Out here in Texas, it gets pretty gnarly in the summer. You're going to sell a lot more of those candles, and I have four, four electric mosquito by killers in that house. In the summer, just the act of going inside and outside of your house lets mosquitoes in.

Starting point is 00:03:37 I have these electric things. Man, I hear the zap when we murder mosquitoes in the house. I leave them on. And in the summer, it's like every hour you hear one of them get fried. Now, you don't see them. They don't bite you, but it's because they probably just got in somehow. there's more money spent on mosquito bites than there are in shark bites. But shark bites, man, my feed on TikTok and Instagram is all shark bites,

Starting point is 00:04:03 bulldogs, and Japanese food. Why? Because I always watch a good shark bite. As far as I'm concerned, people are getting bit by sharks 10 times a day. And that's not what's happening. It's happening three times a month. It's happening 50 times a year, 100 times a year. Maybe it's 100 times.

Starting point is 00:04:21 I think there's two or three fatalities a year, and I think there's like 100 or 200 bites a year. Somebody check as producer cloud. The reason is it becomes top news. Now, in a bunch of places now, I think, Indonesia, where there are a lot of bull sharks in Australia, where there's bull sharks, great white sharks, tiger sharks, every shark loves Australia. They are putting shark nets in. And there's even shark circles, which are places to swim in the ocean.

Starting point is 00:04:51 that have a net around them, and you can jump into. This is like I'm super fascinated by this technology. It's two different technologies. One is, so six fatal unprovoked shark attacks per year. Which is not many. So one every two months. Every 60 days, somebody gets taken out. I don't know how many 60, 70 bytes a year from sharks.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Yeah. So I think the shark bites are more. But, okay, sure. U.S., Australia, South Africa, Brazil, that's where it's happening. U.S. because of Florida and the number of people going in. in Florida is the main reason. Florida is a lot of coastline, and people are in the water constantly there.

Starting point is 00:05:28 But I don't think those are the fatalities. I think fatalities, Australia wins hands down. Some lunatic jumped into Sydney Harbor. This is dumb for three reasons. One, tiger sharks are known to feed in there. Two, it's polluted. Three, there are ferries and boats everywhere. If you want to die,

Starting point is 00:05:48 one of three ways, like a bacterial infection, a shark bite or getting hit by a ferry, by all means, jump into Sydney Bay. How much money to get you to swim across Sydney Bay? A billion dollars, I wouldn't do it. Oh, wow, really? I might do it for a billion because you didn't put any conditions on there. I would do it under a billion and I would create a net that goes underneath me and around me

Starting point is 00:06:11 in reasonable conditions. I might, let me think about that. For a billion dollars tax-free cash. I'd do it for 10 million. I wrote actually a science. fiction story. I was thinking I would do screenplays at some point. And I had this scene, it was kind of like a running man kind of take up or a dystopian future. And one of the scenes was, in order to pay back their debts to society and to their victims, hard and criminals who were

Starting point is 00:06:38 on death row could swim across the channel in South Africa where those air jaws were from one pontoon to the other in chummed water. And if they made it across, they would be released from death row. And at the same time, all the pay-per-view ratings, because they would have a GoPro on their head, they would be underwater cameras. It's just gladiators. It's basically gladiators. But modern day, they would be forgiven and all the money would go to the victims. So if it made $100 million and there were 10 swimmers, or they're 10, 10 victims and one swimmer,

Starting point is 00:07:11 you get 10 million each. And the swimmer gets a million bucks and gets let out of there. We could call it Shark Tank. Shark Tank, there it is. To our founder. Yeah, you learned a mistake. And then I think what you have to do is just the honorable thing to do would be to tell the person, listen, we're happy to finish this for you.

Starting point is 00:07:28 We'll give you the source code. We can give you an employee to work for you. We can train one of your employees for $100,000. We'll make this bespoke software for you for the next two years or $250K. We'll do this bespoke thing for you, this solution, raise the price to the point at which either it becomes super profitable. Maybe one of your employees goes and takes it and does this bespoke software. Bespoke software is going to be the future, by the way. The fact that you can build software so quickly because of AI now, where you can build hardware so

Starting point is 00:07:55 quickly because of Shenzhen and all this commodification of batteries and chipsets and Arduino and acceleromers and the iPhone, all of that means you can build bespoke businesses that make but a million dollars a year and you have a 50% margin. You know what? For two people, it's good money. It's good money. And when you can't get a job at Met or Google, that's the future. That's why you come to Founder.com University. Now occurring on three continents, the U.S. F12 starting in March, Saudi currently underway and our new ones coming, go to mina.launch.com, and our Japanese version, everything available through links at founder. Dot University. Man, this thing's growing.

Starting point is 00:08:33 Yes, it is. Yes, it is. You're a busy, busy boy. Being a founder is a lot of work. You have to focus on your fundraising. Then you've got to hire the perfect team. Gosh, product market fit, finding your first customers. But all of this means nothing if you're not actually a real business that's structured properly, giving your investors and clients the confidence to partner with you at launch. We're constantly recommending Northwest registered agent to our founders because for just $39 plus state fees, they will act as your registered agent. That means they take care of all the paperwork, making sure your business remains compliant,

Starting point is 00:09:07 protecting your privacy, and more. And as a founder, hey man, there are so many organizational odds and ends that you have to worry about, so why not have a partner who can focus on all those little details? then you can obsess about your customers and Northwest Registered Agent is even going to help you set up a phone line, a professional email account, and find you a great domain name. So here's your call to action. Go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist to get your company set up the right way. So Jason, one of the best questions I've seen asked around founder communities in recent weeks is what to do when VCs reach out to you. We often spend our time talking about how people should reach out to VCs,

Starting point is 00:09:46 but sometimes the tables are turned. Now, in this case, Mr. Cheetah, over on the Venture Capital subreddit, had built a really cool open source application, hit 1.8,000 GitHub stars, and suddenly people are reaching out to him. He doesn't know what to do with this, not quite sure what he should prepare, what they're going to expect of him,

Starting point is 00:10:03 or really just even the kind of peas and cues of dealing with cold, inbound venture interests. So hit me with your top tips for founders who are dealing with VCs knocking on their door. So VCs will hire associates, researchers, analysts, and they'll charge them with, go find me some interesting companies. Now, some people have a lot of inbound. I happen to be in that group, Ycombinator, tech stars, Sequoia, you're going to have a lot of inbound. Later in your career, when you're established as an investor, you get a lot of

Starting point is 00:10:32 inbound. But when you're starting out, you need to get something going. And you want to have proprietary deal flow. As an investor, you need to master three Ds. you need deal flow, you need to make good decisions, and you need to know when to double down. So deal flow, how did you meet Uber? How did you get Robin Hood? How did you get calm? Where did Grin come from? Then did you make a good decision to place the bet? And then finally, did you double down on that bet when you had a chance? And then my fourth D is distributions. DPI, pick which one you want. So those are the four Ds. And to be great at venture capital, you need to source a company like Grin. You can go look at grin.com.

Starting point is 00:11:16 This is one of our accelerator companies. That became worth a billion dollars. We made the decision to invest in them because we believed in influencer as a marketing strategy 10 years ago when they came to the accelerator. Here's grin.com. Companies doing phenomenal.

Starting point is 00:11:30 It's been a great, great company investment for us. We doubled down. We invested in like three or four rounds of this company, not just from our fund, but when our fund was done investing and we'd hit our targets as a seed fund, we gave it to the syndicate. then so we had great deal flow they came to us they had applied we made a great decision to invest we made a

Starting point is 00:11:51 great decision to double down then when it hit a billion dollars there were people who wanted to buy some of our shares we made a great decision to sell i think 17 or 18 million dollars in our share our shares during peak zirr now let's go back to the original question somebody's trying to get deal flow you need to know who that somebody is in all likelihood it's not sequoia or indreason harrowitz or combinator reaching out to you, which means it's an up-and-coming VC. Does that mean you shouldn't listen to them? No. It means you should get curious. You should research to them. You should put it into a database. You should have a CRM tracker of every VC that reaches out to you and you should figure out what companies they've invested in. Now, it is important that you're not be distracted when you're building

Starting point is 00:12:33 your company, so you don't want to be taking meetings with VCs in my estimation unless you're raising. and a great way to handle this is to say we're not currently raising. We don't have time to meet because we're busy building, but we plan on raising in Q4 of next year. A good time for us to talk would be Q3. Then if, you know, if you neg them like that, they're going to be 10 times more interested. I will give a caveat here.

Starting point is 00:12:59 There are nefarious people who are doing this in an automated fashion and they're just spamming anybody with a crunch base profile, an angel list profile, you know, on some list. And so you will get spam and you will get people who look like investors who are maybe trying to sell you something. Real estate, maybe they're a broker. If you can't figure out who this firm is and who the person is, they don't have a LinkedIn page, they don't have a profile page, just throw it away. Don't even respond. If it's a legitimate firm and you can say, hey, they have these other investments that are interesting, great, but do not give any information. And you can say, I'm too busy to meet. But this is a good

Starting point is 00:13:37 time for me to meet. Now you have ball control. And, you know, that is like super important. You have pot control in, you know, a poker game, in a poker hand. You have ball control in a football or basketball game. You're kind of controlling this conversation. And you're the founder. You have to understand you are the precious resource in this, not the investor. The investors are a commodity in, I'd say, 70% of investors do not add any value. And in some cases, they detract value. argument, yeah. Vinod Koso has said this many times. And so the top 10% of investors, they can be very helpful. I can be very helpful. You know, Sequoia can be very helpful. Chumath, Sacks, can be very helpful. There are specific people, Steve Jervison, very helpful. Brad Gersner, Altimeter,

Starting point is 00:14:27 when he dips into privates. These people can be very helpful for obvious reasons. They have incredible networks. And they, if you can get through their filter, become a, you know, real validation for your startup that they would take the time with one of their bullets or one of their bets to place it on you. Fantastic. But these are going to generally be unknown firms, unknown quantities. So therefore you stack them. And then what I would do back when I was an entrepreneur, I'd say, well, we're based in Santa Monica. I'm not meeting with people, but I will have time, you know, two months from now in this week. If you want to stop by for coffee to have a quick coffee, you know, for 30 minutes, I can do it in February. And it was December now. I'd say, yeah,

Starting point is 00:15:07 week in February, boom. And I would just, again, back to getting ball control. And I'd say, you know, thanks for your interest. We're not raising right now. But this is when I can meet. And I would make them come to my office. They'd say, oh, can we jump on a Zoom and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I don't have time for that. And how popular was that? You know, I was able to raise the series B before I launched the company famously and was able to raise $20 million in a time when that was a lot of money and significant to raise. I had a really good idea, really good execution. So this is the best advice I have for this person. Next question comes from the entrepreneurship subreddit.

Starting point is 00:15:38 I found a really interesting question that I'd never seen actually asked before, Jason. And I want to get your take on this because we have talked about a number of European companies. We also heard about a lot of people coming over from Europe to build in the United States. So here it's a unique situation. This founder, they're from Europe. They're building in the United States. Their target market is for young professionals in U.S. urban cities. But they're getting a lot of traction and interest from European VCs.

Starting point is 00:16:02 and they say, we keep hearing the same thing. Do not judge the VC's money, but judge their ability to help you succeed. So what are people's thoughts? Is it a bad idea to take money from the EurovCs when their target market is America? And I haven't thought about this, but I was just kind of curious, what would your advice be here to this founder? You know, they're a great venture capitalists all over the world. And they do want to have, you know, they're just looking for great companies. So sometimes you'll have a European VC that only invest in Europe.

Starting point is 00:16:29 And they'll be very clear about that on their website. they're marketing. And they have other ones who are, you know, Australian VCs or European VCs or Singapore VCs or Mubodala, you know, in the UAE. And they're just looking for great companies. So there's no downside. And if they've got a great reputation and you vet their reputation by doing backdoor references from their CEOs, that's the best reference. So if you wanted to know if I was good, you would ask somebody at Uber, Robin Hood, Com, Grin, etc. Hey, what was it like having Jason as an investor. Did he show up for you? Did he introduce you to people? Did he add value? And so when I train my team, I'm like, these backdoor references are happening. And we never

Starting point is 00:17:12 hear about them or we rarely hear about them. And sometimes we do. Sometimes somebody will say, hey, this person called me to ask you. And I'm like, wow, that's a sophisticated investor. Before they took our money, they asked another founder. Other times, VCs will say, hey, here are three founder references. You can call these three people and ask them about us. So that's basically what you want to do. you should be doing as much or more diligence on your investors as they are doing on you. And that's something that founders forget because they get a little enamored when you're early in your career by VCs, then later experience founders become cynical about investors. Oh, they're just a commodity.

Starting point is 00:17:46 It's just money. Who cares? Just take it at the highest price. The truth is somewhere in between. Don't be enamored by them. Don't be intimidated by them. But also, you know, don't devalue them because they could be the person who, gives you that one piece of advice, one connection, or accelerates the business in some way,

Starting point is 00:18:06 and that's what the great investors do. But you had a take on it. What's your take? I'm curious. Oh, my take is that, you know, if you have great traction from European VCs who are going to have an extra amount of interest in you because of your European heritage, take advantage of that. Like, this is a thing to capitalize on not to be worried about. If they can't offer reasonable terms or they offer a lower valuation, they do what, then cut them loose. But I would say, if you have an edge, ride it because right now the market's very competitive, then it seems that it's kind of feaster famine in the startup scene. The other thing is you might be the best deal that they're going to get into, whereas, you know, for Sequoia in the heart of Silicon Valley, you might not rise above

Starting point is 00:18:44 with Sequoia's deal flow, but you might be the top of this firm's deal flow. And that's not a dig to Europe in any way, but they may just have missed, you know, I don't know, anthropic or X-AI because they're not in the mix and they're not here and they didn't know about the Palantir round and just got closed and Founders Fund grabbed it. So they might covet you in a way that, hey, maybe Founders Fund is too busy for you. Sequoia is too busy. They've got too high of a bar and you didn't hit the standard that YouTube and Instagram hit for Sequoia. So, you know, now you're number one with them. So great question. And all money's green at the end of the day. I mean, Loveable just raised from Minlo and Capital G. It's still based, I think,

Starting point is 00:19:26 think in Europe. So if American investors come back to Europe, to me, it's all about quality, right? I think what you're saying here is lovable as a quality company. They happen to be in Europe. Got investors from America. There could be investors over there who are quality investors who want access to American companies. Yeah. Great, great deals and great investors are not constrained by geography. Startups move fast. And in the age of artificial intelligence, they're moving faster than ever. But moving quickly doesn't mean you can fall behind when it's. comes to security and compliance. Hey, move fast. Let's break things. Good advice at times, but not exactly what huge enterprise customers want to hear. So that's why I recommend Vanta to my

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Starting point is 00:20:39 So it's time to get secured with Vanta. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off by going to vanta.com slash twist. That's v-a-n-tta.com slash twist for $1,000 off. All right, Jason, pulling from our dear friends in the notie gang, Royal Yon 31. I think that's how you pronounce that, wants to know that now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? And if you say the jet, I'm going to say no repeating yourself. So answer this honestly.

Starting point is 00:21:10 Tell the people what you, even Jason Collegendis, will not break out the checkbook for. Oh, gosh, it's definitely private aviation. You know, I've been trying to hold off on doing this for a long time. but as my time gets constrained and I become more successful, the great unjustifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000 going somewhere or $100,000 on a round trip, that seemed absurd to spend that. It can also at some point seem absurd if you have a certain amount of income and a certain amount of net worth to not buy $500,000 a year in a jet card, which would be 50 hours. And it doesn't make logical sense.

Starting point is 00:21:53 if it does make your life easier or your family's life easier, yeah, that's the number one one. The other one, I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car. So I really covet this. I love Corvettes and I really want to buy a barn dominium, which is like a big open, fancy barn that's kind of like a man cave, but Texas style. And I love Corvettes. And I've been on this Bring a Trailer website or Cars and Bids website watching. Corvette C-2s and C-3s going by and C-6s is my three favorite gens.

Starting point is 00:22:29 And I'm like, do I buy this ZRX-1 for $250,000? Or do I buy five, $50,000 Corvettes and have a little collection? And so those would be high net worth problems. But, you know, a lot of these things become cognitive load. And so I like to stay humble. I like to not have cognitive load. and what I find is every time you own another home or you own another asset, it just becomes like a little bit of load on your processor.

Starting point is 00:23:00 And so I had two properties in California that I rented. And so they now become income properties. I wanted to sell them, but they were coveted properties. So I rented them instead. But now I have to worry about those. So I like the stay focused on the thing. And the thing is really just. two things for me, being on podcasts and talking, and then two, investing in companies and hanging

Starting point is 00:23:27 out with those founders. Everything I do that's not that becomes cognitive load. And does it actually add value to my life? That's what you really have to, that's what you really have to, you know, ring your hands about. So it's obnoxious to even talk about this kind of level of stuff. And I'll be honest, putting, buying a $50,000, $1970, Corvette Stingray would give me some joy, but putting two 25K first checks and Founder University would give me more. I'll be totally honest. So that's what I try to, you know, stay humble and stay focused. I'm 55. I'd like to put another 10, 20 years into this. And yeah, if I'm going to put 10 or 20 years into it, it's important to not get distracted by earthly possessions.

Starting point is 00:24:13 Jason, over in the notice, our dear friend Pilgs wants to know, what is a common industry belief that you currently disagree with? Or what is the biggest risk that you're taking right now? I would say the application level of AI is something I believe is going to provide massive value. And SaaS enterprise software will continue to provide massive value. I do think the industry is down on these things because they think that, you know, the large language models will wipe those things out. I kind of think the opposite. There's always a way to create a more refined product that solves a singular problem for a small group of people and you add features and community and design that speaks to that group.

Starting point is 00:24:54 So as an example, when we made the investment in calm.com, the meditation app, people are like, why would you invest in that? You could just get meditation videos for free on YouTube, which is true. You could talk about tone base or musician or steasy or brilliant.org. All of those are educational types. vertical apps that have had massive success, FitBod as well. But again, people said, well, you can just learn how to play an instrument on YouTube or for free or you can buy a book or this or that. Why would I need a verticalized one? Well, if you look at those verticalized ones,

Starting point is 00:25:34 tonebase and FitBod as just too and Brilliant.org, they're so dedicated to those verticals of, so here's tone base. They know who the best classical violinists are, you know, clarinet players, trumpet players. And if, you know, this is something that Open AI is not going to get to. There's something YouTube's not going to get to. Could you find on Instagram or TikTok how to play, you know, a Louis Armstrong trumpet solo? Yes, you're going to be able to find that. But if you want to go deep and you want this trumpet player and you want to take it to the highest level, tone bass is a place to go. If you pull up Brilliant.org as an example, you know, could you learn how to do some math problems from Khan Academy or other places on YouTube for free? Of course. Could you have chat

Starting point is 00:26:22 ChpT explaining? Yes. But Brilliant.org is going to verticalize these and they've gamified them. And man, these questions are so well thought out. And the way they've done personalized learning here and adaptive learning, they're just going to have a nuance and a fit, finish and polish that those other platforms aren't going to have. And what happens is people will use the large language models, get to a certain point, and then they're going to want something more. If you're charging below hundreds of dollars, why wouldn't you spend it? You can get calories from any number of food sources. That doesn't mean people are not going to spend, you know, $50 on an amazing, you know, steak from Long Hill Wagu or Miyazaki beef. They're going to want

Starting point is 00:27:10 that as well, even though they can get hamburgers for, you know, from Shechak for nine bucks. Okay. I think I made the point. Maybe I beat the point to death. No, no, I beat the point to death. Building out your team is one of the most crucial things you have to get right in your startup. And finding the right developers is particularly important. But now there's lemon.io. They're going to save you time, money, and headaches by doing all the time consuming legwork for you. They've got an experience lineup of pre-vetted developers working for competitive rates. Just 1% of applicants are accepted into Lemon's elite program, and they're not just out there finding this great talent. They're also working with you to integrate these new members into your team. Plus, if it's not a good fit, hey, and sometimes things don't work out.

Starting point is 00:27:54 Lemon will hook you up with a new developer ASAP. I've seen startups go from just pretty good to amazing after filling out their teams with developers from Lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer, or technical team in 48 hours or less. Plus, twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. That's lemon.io slash twist. L-E-M-O-N-I-O-S-Twist. All right, next up, we have a gamma pitch.

Starting point is 00:28:26 It's time to bring Zach Kidd from Ask Humans up on the show. Jason, this is our final gamma pitch. This is number 10 of 10. And don't forget, we'll be backed in the New Year to crown a winner, and that person will receive a $25,000 prize slash investment from both launch and gamma. Zach, welcome to the show, man. Thank you so much. Jason, nice to see you. You look great. Texas is treating you well. I can see the sun shines hitting your face.

Starting point is 00:28:49 Yes, I'm sometimes getting too much sun, but yes, I'm Schfeldt, I'm well-rested, I'm rocking, I'm peptides, I'm GLPs. I got everything going on. Rho.com. Shout out to my friends over there who are providing me with my GLPs. So Ask Humans, I'm really interested in getting the update here. So we'll give you two minutes on the clock for your presentation. If you go a little over, that's okay. Three, two, go. Ask Humans is a platform that helps organizations collect open-ended feedback and act on it at scale.

Starting point is 00:29:18 So this is Jenna. She is the director of membership of the NEDS club, which is in Washington, D.C. The Neds Club is owned by Soho House. Now, these high-end membership private clubs, when they're really trying to understand what members think or what staff thinks, really they have collected information very anecdotally in the past, basically through conversation, what's been heard in the lobby. And the challenge of that is really to sort of speak to ownership and speak to management in terms of how they should run their club better so that members are happy.

Starting point is 00:29:54 So we've worked with them over the past four months, and we've integrated Ask Humans into many points throughout the club. So they have brass stands on every kiosk. They actually have Ask Humans embedded into their iOS app. So when members open up that app, they can give feedback. They also, when you check out and you get a check, our QR codes are integrated into their POS system. They're effectively now able to really understand what people think within their clubs at scale. This is Jenna speaking to that.

Starting point is 00:30:27 Humans is such an incredible tool for us to be able to gather member feedback all in one place and I have a live sentiment analysis of what our members are happy with or what they're disappointed in. We deliver our transcripts by department on a weekly basis to our team so that they understand exactly what our members are saying. And then on a monthly basis, we get together and review everything and develop action items to make sure that we are always listening and responding to what they want. So I really appreciate Jenet, sharing that with us, really showing how they're integrating Ask Humans into their operations. Jason, they're now actually extending Ask Humans into London, New York, and potentially even Dubai. But what we are doing is we're taking this open-ended feedback technology that we're integrating, and we're actually building an entire suite now of applications that could integrate more deeply into any organization.

Starting point is 00:31:22 So we are bringing together a calendar in which you can look at your day and then sort of gather feedback from your colleagues. We are also doing meetings. So we're basically cloned granola so that you can record conversations that integrates into your workflow. One of the big things here, Jason, is that we really believe that feedback, given LLMs, can now more deeply ingrained into an organization's team and workflows. So it's not just external feedback. it's internal stakeholder feedback too. Additionally, we have loops, which are reoccurring check-in questions for your team to give feedback. That runs on cycle.

Starting point is 00:32:02 So let's say it kind of replaces your stand-up where your team members can give feedback and can see what's changed from one week to the next week. And then, of course, studies, which runs with all of our clients. And then also something called presentations. All of this, we're building with the ability for, you to talk to the data and actually to listen to personal podcasts as a summary of all the feedback that's coming along and our clients are loving this so the washington dc economic partnership is using ask humans now where they're integrating it into their workflow so whereas before they

Starting point is 00:32:38 were sending surveys or hiring consultants to understand what the public thought about economic development now every outreach phone call they do to a tenant broker or to a company ask them hey, why would they want to come into Washington, D.C.? They're recording that with Ask Humans. That's being transcribed and integrated in. That's being paired with the studies that they're doing to collect overall feedback. And of course, that's also sort of integrating into the presentations and they're showing alignment around feedback too.

Starting point is 00:33:08 So the last slide here is just, of course, you know, this look at as information that's public becomes zero cost to attain, any information that any organization can gather, which is novel and non-public, is incredibly valuable. We've basically built the suite to allow teams to gather open-ended feedback that's not found anywhere else, and then to act on that. We've done over a million minutes in recording over the past 10 months, and we're just loving the success that our clients are having. And again, just thanks a lot to Gamma for sponsoring this and Jason, Thanks a lot for your time.

Starting point is 00:33:50 Wow. Platform has really come together. There's internal products that do this. We are investors in one for a long time, 15-5. And that's performance management of team members, roll-ups, very sophisticated, you know, based on like Google philosophy, et cetera. And then you have surveys, like famously SurveyMonkey and other ones that people will roll their own.

Starting point is 00:34:12 You're building an AI-first solution here. And so that means you have to discervely. the one that the NED's using, or most customers you go to, they are not using this, and the AI is giving them sort of a reason to engage with it because it's more powerful. Which is it? Are you displacing people typically, or are you coming in and it's like Blue Ocean? This is a totally new capability for some of the organizations that we're working with. Generally speaking, when you think about measurement and management, the practice of management

Starting point is 00:34:45 and the practice of measurement is generally rooted in computers, not understanding language, right? And so with management, you have management by walk around, the CEO actually having to sort of walk around or the Steve Jobs having lunch at the cafeteria to hear from what his employees think. Or if you think of measurement, you're sending out a survey and you're asking people on a scale of 1 to 10, what do they think? Well, of course, all of that occurs because it's rooted in computers,

Starting point is 00:35:11 just tabulating, not understanding language. And so it's a complete blue ocean when you understand operationalizing the fact that computers can now understand language. And so measurement and management is absolutely being rewritten with a platform like Ascuments. All right. Final question. And then I'll give it over to Alex. Do in the case like a private club like the Ned or even in an enterprise, do people prefer to give audio, text or video feedback? What is the modality that people prefer most? Do they like to be anonymous? Do they like to have their name attached to it because, you know, they want to close the loop on it? Or do they just want to send it into the void and just make sure it's heard?

Starting point is 00:35:50 One thing people hate is video. No one wants to do video. And one thing that people love is the audio. One, it's multilingual. Two, it's super easy to multitask. And three, people don't want to think about, you know, how to sort of exactly, you know, phrase what they're saying. They just want to talk.

Starting point is 00:36:10 I'll give you the one tidbit. We work a lot with the Department of Buildings in Washington, D.C. They have gathered 7,000 responses from over 40,000 of permit applicants at Department of Buildings. They basically have a 60% increase in their feedback through Ask Humans than to previous systems. That's really quite. And that's to the general public.

Starting point is 00:36:36 That's not like one specific cohort of people. Does the AI ask a follow-up question, or is that not, is it too early to do that with, you know, fidelity? We released, thank you for that softball question, Jason. I appreciate that. About three months ago, we actually built in AI follow-up. Again, everything is configurable. You asked the question about anonymous or non-anonymous. We really let clients choose. If it's anonymous, maybe because you're asking, you're doing a town hall with all of your employees and you're the World Bank, and that's what they've used. Maybe it's non-anonymous because you want to be a little bit more customer-focused and you want to follow up. So it's really totally configurable. on the client's perspective. Yeah. So they can click a button and have the AI basically predict or make a prediction as to what's the best follow-up question.

Starting point is 00:37:25 So if somebody says, hey, the club is far too crowded and there's not enough staff to get food out in time on the weekends, they could say, okay, have you experienced this at other times or is it just on Friday and Saturday nights? It could, yeah. Or is it specific to the bar or specific to the tables? It could come up with maybe, a good follow-up question. And as long as it doesn't do something embarrassing, I guess,

Starting point is 00:37:50 why not give it a shot? Yeah, it's been really great for, for, I think with, you know, clients really love that personalization at the end user perspective. And end users really like it because they recognize that they've been heard. And at the end of the day, we all want to be heard. Yeah. Zach, so going back to the presentation itself, watching this as someone who's new to ask humans and didn't have a lot of prior context, I would thought we were going one way to start with the presentation. Here's a club. Here's a, you know, a little brass placard with QR code, collect feedback, and then it felt like there was kind of a hard pivot over to the enterprise use case, you know, the granola functionality and that sort of thing. So just thinking

Starting point is 00:38:26 as someone who was de novo to it, that is maybe a place you could bridge a bit more and explain how the club example maybe better fits into the rest of the other features, because it did seem slightly distinct to me. Does that make sense? Oh, it's definitely two chapters of a longer story. Okay. So is the first couple of slides in, is that still core to what the company is doing, or are you now more focused on kind of the internal context of helping companies better understand their own staff? Alex, when we launched studies, we launched studies really to gather external feedback for organizations. And what we found specifically with the World Bank is they used our studies for their own internal staffing to gather feedback from their global

Starting point is 00:39:07 staff around the world. And then we saw that and we said, okay, we know that there is a straight line with using studies for external feedback, but there's an entirely new set of opportunities for collecting internal feedback and really allowing for organizations to collaborate around the best ideas that people have. And so that's why we established loops and presentations and meetings. And when you think about how all of this can interconnect into one platform, imagine if every client call you have plus the studies that you're doing on a monthly basis, plus the presentation you sent potentially, you know, to a prospect, if all of their verbal feedback can come into one platform that you can then interact with, that's a very powerful

Starting point is 00:39:55 and entrenched solution that really drives collaboration and knowledge forward for that organization. So instead of me thinking this is really two different products that seem to be sitting next to each other, you think they actually are quite connected and you really want to have both the internal and external feedback in one place to learn from it at the same time. That's exactly what's happening. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's such a new concept that you've got feedback coming in, you know, at this private club or at this government agency. Then you've got the feedback coming in from employees interpreting that feedback and just how their jobs are. And it becomes this nonstop, continuous feedback loop. Now, of course, management has to decide when to listen to things and when to ignore things and when to ask follow-up questions. So none of this is like you've going to blindly follow it, but if you start thinking about the job of managing an organization,

Starting point is 00:40:49 feedback is critical. And then what happens in these organizations is feedback becomes politicized. So CEO asks for feedback, and then feedback comes in. It gets massaged, and then it gets massaged again, and then it gets presented in a way, like, as the seventh item. And this is why I always insist in our organization that the feedback for everybody who speaks at the accelerator or or founder university, et cetera, gets ranked by the people who heard the talk. And then that gets put in a database and we just track it over time. And my instructions is, you know, just it's shared by everybody. It just posted into a Slack room.

Starting point is 00:41:26 There's no filtering of it when it gets to me. And we give it to our speakers, even if they get a low rating and we will then tell them, hey, remember we told you in rehearsal or we asked you to do a rehearsal and you skip the rehearsal. We think this 6.5 could really be a 9.5 if he just did one rehearsal with us and we talked about it. So yeah, that's going to be like the key to the software in my mind is can it be available to everybody in the organization and can it not be, and just for founders who are listening, you've got to be really careful that nobody shuts off access to feedback. I've been in organizations where the customer support person has the keys to the

Starting point is 00:42:07 kingdom and they give like a roll up report. And it's like, nope. And I had people, oh, you don't need to get feedback at. And I'm like, no, I want feedback to come for me as the CEO of the venture firm. And I want it to come from my personal email address. So every founder we meet with, we send them a survey. The survey comes from my email address. And it says, this is a form letter. You met with our team. But if you hit reply, it does come to me and I will see it. And I see all the results of our founder performance and we ask founders, how likely are you to recommend our firm scale of one to 10 and we ask them for some color commentary? Whenever it's seven or less, it goes into one chat room. And if it's eight and above, it goes to another one. Founder tomatoes or founder applauds or whatever it is with an

Starting point is 00:42:53 emoji. And then we have a follow-up system for it. So just these tools are great. You just got to make sure that nobody tries to massage the results to protect the guilty. I mean, I would just say, you know, your prior friend Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, you know, in radical transparency. Like he ran his firm with, you know, honest, open-ended, put your ideas ahead of you and let it be judged. So this is the type of culture that we're pushing forward. And in an age of AI where everything is being annihilated in terms of tasks, it's really what's in between people's ears. That is the most viable thing that they could bring into a table. I'll also second, you know, going back to, you know, your hometown of New York City, back in the day, theater Rose,

Starting point is 00:43:34 When he was police commissioner, you probably know this story too. He would actually put a code on at 2 o'clock in the morning and jump into the police cars and talk to the police officers because he wanted that on that ground feedback. So now we're effectively able to sort of bring that feedback into what we say is collective judgment. Zach, can I ask one more tiny thing here? Just how good is AI sentiment analysis? Because in a lot of your slides, you showed the kind of red, yellow, green.

Starting point is 00:43:59 And that to me seems so incredibly useful if it's accurate. So how confident are you in those sentiment analysis? numbers. We've been, you know, we spend a lot of, we have a, we have a PhD at USC working on inference and how we're doing our e-val pipelines. Yes, I am brushing my shoulder. That's not me. I think, you know, Sam Malman talked about this. When you were looking in, probably for any founder out there, when you're looking to be in the space on the application layer, you should assume that the LLM models are going to get 50 times better and make sure that doesn't make your, your product less, less relevant. And at the end of the day, what you think Alex or what Jason thinks or what producer

Starting point is 00:44:33 or Marcus think, if you're able to sort of put that into Ask Humans, regardless of how good, as those models get better, we're just able to do better analysis. And so, you know, we're really, really excited, you know, every time from when we went from 4 to 5.0 in terms of how our data is better and better as a result. All right. It's AskHumns.com.

Starting point is 00:44:54 And if you're feeling inspired, head to gamma.com and start working on an idea of your own. And maybe we'll see you here on a future episode of Twist. All right. Bye, everybody.

This Week in Startups - Jason’s ultimate dream mega-purchase + Founder Q’s | E2228

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