This Week in Startups - Silicon Valley Bank collapse recap + Wist CEO on capturing XR memories | E1697

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Jason kicks off Monday by recapping this weekend’s chaos caused by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (1:45). Then, he advises founders on preventing a scare like this from happening again before interviewing Andrew R McHugh of Wist Labs, who is building a platform to capture and relive memories in AR and VR (13:40). (0:00) Jason kicks off the show (1:45) The past weekend’s chaos and triaging startups (12:18) Pilot - Get 20% off the first 6 months at https://pilot.com/twist (13:40) The government’s response and advice for founders (24:12) LinkedIn Marketing - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at https://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (25:39) Andrew R McHugh of Wist Labs (37:28) Brilliant.org - Get 20% off an annual subscription at http://brilliant.org/twist (38:56) Reliving past experiences and Generative AI applications (57:00) Raising capital in the weeks to come FOLLOW Andrew: https://twitter.com/armthethinker FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Check out Founder University the podcast at https://www.founder.university/podcast

Three, two, hey everybody, hey everybody. Welcome back to this week and startups. We have a jam-packed episode for you today. First, we're going to chop it up. We're going to do a post-mortem on the weekend that was. The bank failure weekend, Silicon Valley Bank, going out of business and the Fed backstopping everything on Sunday. This all happened in 48 hours.

I'm going to explain some of my tweets for those of you who are wondering why I was in Caps mode. And then we have a great interview with Andrew R. McHugh. He is the co-founder and CEO of Whist Labs, which is creating a VR technology that lets you record and then relive in 3D your memories. Record on your phone and then relive your memories in VR. It's an amazing conversation and we're going to talking about not just reliving your memories and all the ethical, interesting concerns that can come up from that, but the why now,

all the camera upgrades in the new iPhone that enabled WISS technologies and some startup advice on how to raise money and the ideal customers and some WIS Labs use cases. features. It's going to be a great show, so stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Pilot, Grow your business sustainably and operate more effectively. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting CFO and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com slash twist and get 20% off the first six months. LinkedIn marketing to redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. And brilliant.org. Brilliant is the best way to learn math, science, and computer science interactively.

Try everything Brilliant has to offer for a full 30 days and get 20% off an annual subscription at Brilliant.org slash twist. Hey, everybody, it's March 13th, 2020, 3. And it has been a long weekend. For those of you looking back on this episode as a historical document, this is the weekend, the Monday after the weekend, where Silicon Valley Bank went out of business, was taken over by the FDIC, and we had complete chaos for startups, investors, and that chaos started to tip over into the civilian community. And when I jokingly say civilians, I'm kind of talking about the military,

talking about everybody who's not in the military. I'm talking about everybody who is not in tech and capital allocator venture capitalists, angel investors, seed investors, etc. And if you follow me on Twitter.com slash Jason, I was tweeting up a storm with my caps lock on, because it was a crazy weekend. Venture capitalists all over the Bay Area this weekend to give you the inside baseball witnessed on Thursday the bank run of Silicon Valley Bank. This bank run did not occur on Twitter because the Wall Street Journal reporter contacted me and said, I want to talk about the impact of Twitter on the bank run.

And I was like, well, the bank run happened in private, on email and on group chats, and Slack channels, those kind of things. the reaction to Silicon Valley going up, going belly under on Friday was what happened on Twitter over the weekend. On Thursday, we witnessed everybody talking about Silicon Valley Bank, potentially going out of business, obviously on Wednesday, and we've been over this a couple of times on the Friday emergency pod for this weekend startups and all in episode 119 this weekend.

It was chaos, Wednesday night into Thursday and then into Friday. And what we witnessed was an absolute run for the doors at Silicon Valley Bank. And then that went to other regional banks. And I don't want to single out specific banks, but obviously you saw a lot of press around First Republic, which is a fantastic bank. Silicon Valley Bank is a fantastic bank. I have worked with them, both of those firms for maybe decades now. And they have serviced all of our startups.

I love both of those firms. Both of them have been advertisers on this and supported different events I've done. I have accounts at both of them. I do not have exposure to either one. I do not have a position. I haven't j-traded at either firm, although I literally was involved in a discussion is now at the time with First Republic Bank being down 60% today on Monday, March 13th, to buy First Republic. Anyway, long story short, we watched as people fled Silicon Valley Bank for First Republic. Then we saw people saying, hey, you know what?

I don't want to be in any of the regional banks. I want to be in one of the top four banks. So if this is a bank run and it hits contagion, then we can at least be in the top four banks and there will be like safety in those larger banks. This was terrifying to witness up close and personal because it was the prisoner's dilemma where like either you leave or you stay in jail forever and your money's locked up. So the logical thing for any founder to do was to get their money out. And the logical thing for any investor or board member to do was to tell them to get their money out. And this is the definition of a bank run. It's why we have this term.

It's why it's so terrifying because it has to do with the psychology of individuals more than it has to do with logic. If everybody acted logically like it's a wonderful life and they just took out the money they needed, you wouldn't have a bank run, right? And this precludes any post-mortem on Silicon Valley Bank. But on Saturday, we had no reaction from the president of the United States, Janet Yellen, just the Fed. Everybody seemed to be asleep at the wheel. And what we were doing in Silicon Valley to give you the inside baseball, we were looking at the companies impacted,

and we were trying to figure out which companies raising money in our portfolio had money at Silicon Valley Bank and who was going to make payroll on Monday. And we had identified six or seven companies in our portfolio, that had what I would call significant exposure. In other words, they might have had all their eggs in one basket. There were people who had exposure, but it wasn't life-threatening. It wasn't in the next week or two, we're not hitting payroll. So we had to do this crazy triage.

This is a very intense thing. So Friday night, I'm in board, meaning Saturday, board calls, threads, documents flying around. How do we get $200,000? How do we get $2 million? How do we get $750,000? And so I'm saying, holy cow. And I just told my founders, if anybody can, can't get their money out, we'll do personal loans to those companies, not investments in the

company for equity, because then you have to decide, well, what is the valuation of the company? And this could be particularly challenging because then you have to get a group of people who are on the board. You might have five major investors. A major investor is somebody with, say, over $250K or a million dollars in a startup. So let's say you have five of them. Okay, we're going to put a million dollars to this company. Okay, what is the company worth? Well, oh, it raised money in the peak valuation market last year, it's not worth that much. Okay, now you have to have a negotiation and the clock is ticking and what if everybody doesn't agree? So somebody came up with a really good idea. It was one of our founders, in fact, and I think other folks were also coming to

the same conclusion. We'll just give you a loan. When the money is released from Silicon Valley Bank, which we all think it will be at some point, and maybe it's 80 cents on the dollar or 90 cents or 50 cents, whatever it warrants up being, you just pay this back. We don't have to convert it into equity. And so we started that process. Some people wanted to do uncapped notes, which is very convenient for the founder and, you know, just throw the money into the company. But in some cases, venture firms then have to make a decision. Do they want to own more equity? So this is the chaos of putting a gun to people's head and saying, invest in this company now or it goes away.

It's really, really stressful. So we offered all of our founders impacted a loan. this would have equaled for our small seed fund half a million to a millie. And that would have covered a couple of weeks. And then we would have been back at the half million to a million train, I think, within a couple of weeks if this stuff didn't get released. To say this is stressful is an understatement because you would have had people losing their, they would have had to furlough their staffs.

They would have to say, hey, we don't have money to pay you. In addition to that, there are regulations. If you have over a certain number of employees in your company, you then could be responsible. The board could be responsible. Management could be responsible if you didn't lay them off properly. If you have over 100 or 200 employees, you can look it up. Depends on the state, there are plant shutdown laws where you have to give enough warning, typically 60 days, sometimes as long as 90 days, I think, here in America.

Okay, so we start trying to alert the public. And so I went all caps and I said, listen, you should be terrified right now. And you can go back and look at my tweets. I did delete one tweet. I'll talk about that in a second. But I just really tried to make it clear to people that this was going to be a full contagion. Why did I think this was going to be a full contagion? Well, because I saw Silicon Valley Bank, and I saw First Republic Bank.

And then I saw other banks. And all of a sudden, people were like, you know what? Just go to the top four. And when I saw that happen within 36 hours, the money moving around, it became clear that this was not going to be one or two banks. And then I'm at a dinner party on Saturday night. And some people are in the industry, some people are not here in the Bay Area. And the people who are not, we're starting to know about the headlines. And then we start seeing pictures of banks where people are lining up at banks. And I said, oh, my Lord, this is tipping over into retail or small businesses. And of course,

Silicon Valley Bank has a lot of small businesses. They're just called startups. And then it has, you know, there are people who are using Silicon Valley Bank who have wineries or restaurants or other small businesses. So it became clear this was a fallon contagion. I believe we were already in a contagion over the weekend. If you define contagion by this is going to other banks. People told me I was being crazy. People told me I'm trying to cause a bank run. No, I witnessed a bank run and I witnessed other bank runs underway. And I told folks, listen, please don't blame the person who sees a fire and then sees another fire and then pulls the fire alarm. all of this fud started coming out.

People are saying Silicon Valley is trying to force the government to do this because they have exposure. I don't have any personal exposure. Most VCs are fine. They have a couple of portfolio companies, but again, it's a portfolio. By definition, we are diversified as VCs. Who's not diversified? The employees and the owners of these businesses are largely not diversified.

They don't have 10 companies. They don't have 10 jobs. There might be some people who work two or three jobs. there might be some people who are independently wealthy and are resilient, but there's not built-in diversification. So I didn't have a short position or a long position. I was not talking my book. I was literally trying to make sure everybody in the public, people in Washington, people in our industry, people adjacent to our industry understood that this was going to result in, I believe, thousands and thousands of thousands of companies going out of business and tens of thousands,

if not hundreds of thousand people losing their jobs, and that on Monday, you could see 100,000 people lined up at banks. Now, if that seems alarmist, that was the intent. I was literally pulling the alarm. Because when you see two or three banks starting to have these runs on them,

it doesn't take a genius to realize when the public finds out that smart people have taken their money out, they should do the same. And then the worst thing happened. people started to hear that there were predatory hedge funds offering Silicon Valley Bank customers 60 or 70 cents on the dollar. That was even worse than is there a bank run or is there not. Because if you're saying there is a bank run or there isn't, some people will believe there's a bank run

and some people will say, no, these are too big to fail. Once you say people have valued the holdings there at 60 or 70 cents on the dollar, I believe 100% of people rush to the bank and say, well, at least I'll get my 60 cents. It's better than nothing. This literally is the plot of its wonderful life. The villain in it starts offering people 50 cents on the dollar. My memory serves me correct. It's been a decade maybe since I've seen it.

Hey, everybody. I'm here with Basim Dahar. He is the CEO and the founder of Pilot. You know, they provide accounting, CFO and tax services for startups. You work with a ton of founders. how do you think founders should think about paying themselves? This is something where I see founders get themselves in trouble. Yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff here.

One is we actually have a bunch of really good data on this. We did a founder salary survey to kind of give you the aggregate stats. I think the real take home, though, is you don't want to pay yourself too much, but importantly, you also don't want to pay yourself too little. Like if you're agonizing about should I take the Uber or the bus home, that's energy that you should be spending on making your company successful. And so I think the classic trap, and it's a little bit reinforced by some investors, is you've got to make sure you're paying yourself enough to cover your expenses. And if you're not, it's not going to lead to good outcomes for the company.

Yeah, you don't want the founder worrying about how to make their rent every month, nor do you want the founder paying themselves nothing and then some balloon payment. You want to just be on a nice, steady, reasonable salary that everybody agrees with. And having the data to make that discussion, just easy, breezy is critically important. Totally. Everybody hears your call to action. Twist listeners can get 20% off their first six months at pilot.com slash twist. That's pilot.com slash twist for 20% off your first six months. Thank the Lord.

At 315 or so on Sunday, my time in Pacific, I guess 615 in New York and, you know, early in the morning before the Asian markets were about to open, Janet Yellen comes out. And she had been on the morning press shows like Face the Nation saying, hey, we are concerned about the depositors, but not the shareholders of Silicon Valley Bank. Fair enough. We all agree with that. And they said, but that was also not convincing. She said, we're aware of it, but she didn't give the exact statement. Of course, then we had the Fed and everybody do a joint statement that they would backstop this. Thank the Lord. If they had not bank stopped it, I think we would have. have seen a half dozen, a dozen or more banks go out of business this week. And finally, the president this morning on Monday came out and took a victory lap and tried to calm everybody down. This should have happened. This should not have come down to the water. This should have been done on Saturday. Like if everything was done a day earlier, or if on Friday, they said, we're going to backstop this. I do am reasonable enough to think that the Fed or our government might need a day

to process stuff, but they need to act much faster in the future when this happens because apparently signature bank, a company, none of us, another bank that none of us had known was going to go under. They also got taken over on Sunday in this announcement. So you had the other, you had the banks that people were buzzing about, maybe they're going to go out, maybe they're not going to go out of business or have a run. And then this other one comes out of nowhere. So we had two bank failures, one known, one unknown. in two days. Let it sink in, folks. This is a crazy turn of events. Thankfully, I think First Republic seems pretty secure. And if there's a $25 billion facility, I think we are good.

I do believe that the Fed coming out and the president coming out saying we're going to backstop the depositors and the money in these banks, not the banks themselves, the management teams of the banks, equity holders of the banks, they take some amount of risk and have some amount of responsibility for running these companies. So they should not get a bail out is the consensus in Silicon Valley, Main Street and Wall Street. I think we all agree with that. We shouldn't be bailing people out if they didn't do a great job. And I don't want to say Silicon Valley Bank did a terrible job or a great job. I'll let a couple of weeks go by for people to assess that. Obviously, they didn't do an optimal job. But I hear people talking about fraud or malfeasance. There's no evidence of that yet. So I think

people should really pause. And listen, I was on social media speculating all weekend, but this was intelligent, informed speculation based on what I was seeing. So some of it was speculation, hey, I think there's going to be a bank run on Monday. But it was based on, I just witnessed two or three bank runs. And I'm witnessing a contagion as we speak. Here is the president of the United last week when we learned of the problems of the banks and the impact they could have on jobs of small businesses and banking system overall, I instructed my team to act quickly to protect these interests. All customers who had deposits in these banks can rest assured. I want to rest assured they'll be protected and they'll have access to their money as of today.

That includes small businesses across the country that banked there and need to make payroll, pay their bills, stay open for business. No losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the deposit insurance fund. Second, the management of these banks will be fired. If the bank is taken over by FDIC, the people running the bank should not work there anymore. Third, investors in the banks will not be protected. They knowingly took a risk, and when the risk didn't pay off, investors lose their money. That's how capitalism works. And fourth, there are important questions of how these banks got into the circumstance in the first place. We must get the full accounting of what happened and why those responsible can be held accountable. And finally,

we must reduce the risk of this happening again. During the Obama-Biden administration, we put in place tough requirements on banks like Silicon Valley Bank and signature bank. Unfortunately, the last administration rolled back some of these requirements. I'm going to ask Congress and the banking regulators to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely this kind of bank failure would happen again. The thing we haven't heard about right now is if Silicon Valley Bank has a buyer. There was supposed to be an auction. All the bids were supposed to be in Sunday, according to Bloomberg.

We haven't seen a buyer yet, but I'm taping this at about noon Pacific time. we'll see on Monday. We'll see if somebody is going to buy it. I think the European portion of Silicon Valley Bank has found a buyer already. That's what I heard on CNBC late last night. So that seems to have been handled. First Republic sent out a notice that they had raised a bunch more money. And they had 70 billion in unutilized liquidity to fund operations.

So it feels like everybody's shoring things up. And I believe we are majority out of the woods here. There are unknowns. I did see some reports of people lining up at banks. Who knows what's true right now. But it doesn't seem like it's chaotic. So what should founders do at this point? What should we take away from all of this?

Well, the obvious one is you can't have all your money in one bank. And you can't have one bank doing. this load balancing across other money market accounts because if that bank goes out of business, in this test, it turns out you can't log in and get access to those. So you have to have access via at least two, probably three or four banks and you should be load balancing your money across a couple of them. It doesn't mean it has to be equal amounts, but let's just say the best practice is probably going to be you have one main bank and then maybe have three others. Those three others have one pay cycle each. In other words, two months worth.

of payroll. And you're just sitting there with a bullet in each bank. So you have three pay cycles, six weeks, you know, safely tucked away. I know this is a pain in the neck.

I know this creates extra work. But I think this is what the new standard will be. This is what I'm going to advise people this week when they ask me, and I'm doing it right now here on the show for everybody. I think, let's say,

your payroll was 100,000. You're putting 110,000 in three different bank accounts that you don't touch. that you don't have fees on. And hey, listen, now you've got three great banking relationships. And then you've got, let's say, you had $4 million in total funds, then you've got the other $3.x million in your main account.

Some people might say put $500, $500, $500, and have $2.5. We'll come to some reasonable conclusion of what makes sense. What that also does is now if you have four of these bank accounts, at least you have the FDIC limit of $250K. What should our government do? I think that $250K needs to be a million or a half-mead. million or two million and maybe there could be a way of paying for more. In other words, you have FDIC insurance provided by the government, but maybe there's an FDIC pro and, you

know, certain banks could offer that to certain customers and there could either be a fee for it that's paid for by the bank or shared by the bank and individuals, but maybe it's time to think about raising that limit or having some way to engage in a higher limit. I'm sure there's going to be third-party services that offer these kind of insurance products. Maybe they exist already. I've just never heard of them. Somebody let me know if there's an insurance product that, you know, will give you your million dollars, whatever's not covered, the $750 of a million that's not covered instantly in the case of a bank run. If that does exist, I'd like to know about it and how much it costs. And it probably will depend on which bank you're in order. And, you know,

that can happen very simply. One partner at a firm can just suggest at the Monday morning meeting, you know what? This seems like a dicey environment. Let's circle the wagons. Let's focus on our portfolio companies and shoring them up. And let's just do that for six, 12 weeks. Now, when a lot of people start doing that, then founders who are trying to raise money, the competition for those dollars went from, okay, we've got, let's just say, a thousand firms actively investing. It's more than that, but I'm just going to say a thousand. Okay, half of them went into Circle the Wagons mode. Now it's down to 500. Okay, now the 500, half of those,

they got 250 funds that are active seed funds that are looking for deals. Okay, if there were also a thousand startups looking for funding, or let's say 2000, it was two startups for every one firm. Now it's eight startups for every one firm, right? And so your chances just dramatically, dramatically got lowered. I hope this is helpful. We're going to be covering this all week long. If you would like to send the producers any questions or ideas you have for segments

this week as we work through this. It's producers at This Weekend Startups.com. And next up, a great interview with a founder. I'm looking to have more seed stage startups on the company. We really do a great job of getting Snowflake and public companies and legendary founders on the pod because I'm old. I got a lot of friends who've been doing this for decades. What I'd like to do is get the early stage founders back on this weekend startups.

That's my commitment for this year. So I'm looking for those seed stage, really interesting products that are just coming to market, have a couple of customers. If you have ideas for really compelling, interesting, innovative, not, you know, copycat products, let's say, just innovative stuff, things that are unique in the world. I'm looking for the unique new things that need support. Producers at This Week in Startups.com,

you can pitch your own company or you can pitch a company you find out there in the wild. So more founders doing interesting things in the pod, including our next one, which has a science fiction-like product that lets you relive memories in VR. Stick with us. Let's talk about marketing to senior level executives. You know, the people that make purchasing decisions when you're selling business to business solutions or services, software, whatever your jam is, you want to reach the decision makers, right? It's great to reach the end users. That's part of the game. But the decision makers who approve the purchase,

it's so hard to find those people. But there is a solution, and I think you know about it. And that platform is LinkedIn. Now, you know, LinkedIn has almost a billion members. But did you know they have 180 million senior level executives? And the 1% those 10 million C level executives, they're on the platform as well. And they have a ton of purchasing power and they use LinkedIn. Why? That level of executive is obsessed with doing competitive intelligence on LinkedIn, looking for new talent.

They're there. They have to be there. LinkedIn ads is specifically built for B2B marketers. That's you. No other platform in the world can offer you these kind of eyeballs. And it's just so easy to do. LinkedIn equals business, business equals LinkedIn, and you can slice and dice the audience by their title, by what vertical they're in, what geo they're in, and listen, they can back it up.

Audience exposed to brand messages on LinkedIn are six times more likely to convert above average. Make B2B marketing everything it can be and get a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups. Terms and conditions do apply. Next up on the show. show. Andrew R. McHugh is with us. He is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Wist Labs. It's formerly known as Vivid. Tough name for a video startup. Yeah. You know, don't Google it. He first founded Wist in 2021. Previously, he was a senior

VR and AR design lead at Samsung. And when I saw this go buy my feed on the socials, I said, um, find out who built this and get him on the pod. And here he is. Andrew R. McHugh, welcome to this week in startups. Yeah, thank you, Jason. Yeah. All right. Let's just get right to it. Let's tell the audience what you built.

And for those people watching the video on YouTube or Spotify, they can see it. So we'll roll the tape and you can sportscast it. Yeah, definitely. So vivid is a great way to step back inside your memories just by capturing a video. As this video starts playing, you'll see my wife, she's pregnant at the time. She has her phone out. She's capturing our cat there. There's a little bit of processing.

And then she can walk back through that same memory in mobile AR or here in VR. So she's putting on a Quest headset. She's in this virtual world and that memory video is like reprojected back into space again. Yeah, it's like a really powerful experience. In some of these captures, you'll see like my wife had an ultrasound at a certain point in time. And so I was able to like capture that in 3D. And then my mother who's back in Missouri, she could like step back in that memory again with me as though as though she were there. Okay. This feels like science fiction. In fact, there's a couple of movies,

Strange Days, and a minority report, which I think use a very similar format. Or either of these, I'm asking genuinely, if you're a fan of these films, or if either of these were in some way inspirational or two. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's like a large amount of like reference in popular media. So also including like Black Mirror, there's a video game called cyberpunk that has like a similar idea. Harry Potter, there's this idea of like a pen sieve where you can like

pull a memory out and save it somewhere. So yeah, I think that's kind of just like in the background. Yeah. Okay. So people are clear. What we just saw looks like a dream. It's kind of fuzzy on the edges,

a little bit of blur here and there. But the magic here is what we're seeing is the VR experiment, experience wearing a VR headset. And to be clear, you're capturing on your, iPhone or Android phone I assume. iPhone right now, which has a fantastic phone and I believe some

sensors for depth and whatnot. So we'll talk about how this is done. But you walk around a scene, you use your proprietary app. So I'm not taking an old video and uploading it. Am I? Not yet. That's on the roadmap. But yeah, right now it's just capturing that feels just like a regular video.

Yeah. So you take what feels like a regular video. When you're taking that capture video, is it coaching you to hey, go to the left, go to the right? Or is it giving you some instruction or it's just no, no, not right now. And I think that's something that we'll be like, observing how people are using it. I think there's this desire for us to make something that feels as close as

possible to what people are already doing. And I think that's in part how we'll be successful. So then your software does something to the video and perhaps other data captured on the sensors on the phone. So why don't you explain technically what happens between taking a video of your wife, you know, getting the ultra- seeing the baby's heartbeat for the first time, and then grandma or your grandchild someday. Yeah, absolutely.

Watching their mother, their grandmother with their mother, getting an ultrasound with their mom. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it gets like a little weird. Yeah. Yeah, so basically like... I mean, you did see strange days, yeah? So I've not seen strange days. Oh, my God.

See, this is really crazy. People have not seen the film, the Capra Bigelow film, Strange Days. This is your homework assignment. Yeah, absolutely. It's like the original black mirror. The premises you could put on a headset that connects to your brain, and it would not only make the video of what you're seeing, it would have the actual feelings.

Oh, yeah, wow. So if you were a boxer and somebody had, you had done a boxing match, I could put on the headset and relive the boxing match. So people who were thrill seekers would use these. And of course, then it goes into dark areas of what else could you record horrible things happening to people? like murders and other horrible things and then relive them. Vincent Dinoffreo, Tom Seismore.

Just, I mean, the cast is ridiculous. Ralph Bines, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis. I mean, I think it came out in 95, 96, somewhere in that time frame. It was like really early. I was 24 years when it came out. You weren't born yet, I don't think. I was born in 90s, so, yeah, it was. Yeah, you're five years.

I went to came out. Yeah. So let's talk about the, why this is, What technology makes this possible today? To go from an iPhone to a VR headset, as my understanding, normally you would be doing something like this. You would be stitching it together. Yeah, so there's some like...

With very unique cameras or using, what's the unity or something to stitch it all together? Right. Yeah, so there's like a technology called photogrammetry that allows you to capture a lot of static images and stick it together. And that gives you a static model back, a static 3D models. So, like, I could scan my house and walk around it,

but it's not alive, like, our memories are alive. And so, yeah, what we're using right now is something called depth video. And so we're capturing the video feed as well as a stream of depth data. And so that allows us to reproject that video feed back into, back into 3D. We do a couple other things to kind of like clean up some of the data and package it in a format that allows us to play it back more easily. And then, yeah, longer term, like, yeah, looking at, yeah, how can you upload existing captures and use some of the

modern ML techniques to kind of synthesize some of the depth data that wasn't captured originally. And so that's something like, yeah, we're very much looking at for this year's roadmap. And the depth data that the iPhone can do, this is a relatively new set of sensors. It's only the most recent ones. Yeah. So these allow that blurry background to be so perfectly done. Am I correct? When people do the portrait mode, is that part of what, absolutely, why this technology was so important for

them, I think, because people love that blurry background portrait mode that makes sure the person pop, right? Yeah, right. Tell us about those sensors and that technology and the API that Apple has to do that and then maybe some other uses for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, right now it kind of feels a little bit like Apple is, you know, maybe preparing for a larger project, maybe glasses that, yeah, right now a lot of the use is around, you know, mobile air, you're on your phone. you're maybe in your living room and trying to place furniture again. Maybe you're trying to test out different paint swatches on your wall. Maybe you're trying to like try on shoes

or something like a virtual tryon or like Warby Parker uses the front facing depth camera to mock classes on your face. So yeah, those are some of the current uses around mobile AR as well as some of the scanning and 3D scanning stuff like in our relation.

I think is this part of the true depth stuff that's also on the face camera that lets it do the face. It's two separate sensors. So there's like, yeah, there's like one depth sensor on the front for your face.

And then there's on the pro model iPhones. There's a depth sensor on the back. Right. My understanding of this technology also is, hey, when you're doing the face recognition, one of the key things here is the depth. So it knows the depth of, you know,

how your eyeballs and your nose and all this stuff, it can really start to build that model. So if we put this all together, there was breaking news just yesterday that Tim Cook was saying, you know what, we're going to get our Apple goggles out. I'm not saying you said any of this. This was breaking in the news. I don't want to screw up your relationship with Apple.

This is me talking, not you. But that he had said, hey, we're releasing it. It's been seven years, according to these reports, that Apple's been working on it. And a lot of these technologies that have been dripping out are the precursor to, hey, you might be able to use a tool like yours, make this, somebody has the Apple glasses, and then all of a sudden this gets built. So you start working on something like this,

and what is the business model today for the product? And then how do you think about it, you know, in a bigger picture of building a sustainable business in the face of, well, is this something that's going to be built into an Apple or an Oculus product? Is this already built into the Facebook Oculus product? And how do you think about being in an emerging vertical as a founder? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A few questions there. So, like, in the middle one, around risk, I mean, I think that's something that everyone faces. Sure, that like, yeah, almost anything we're building could become of interest. I think a advantage we have is that we are independent from any of those companies right now. And so if you capture with us, our goal is to release apps on all of them. So you can view across. You're not locked into a particular ecosystem. Yeah, which is incredibly important for your most intimate moments.

Yeah, for like building in an emerging market, I think it's very exciting. Like it's something where, yeah, we can see things take off extremely quickly. If you think about like the first iPhone launch and getting in early then, getting familiar with how to, to build for these kinds of devices. Because, yeah, it's not, it's not like a mobile app. It's, yeah, it's a spatial computer. It's the stuff is back in your world and that's just a very different experience. And yeah, I think I missed part of your question.

Oh, business model. Like, you know, short term, long term, you have to be thinking about that because when we think about funding of companies, you have deep tech. This isn't, this is deeper tech, right? Certainly. But let's say you're not in a laboratory at Berkeley doing this. Right. You need to figure out a way to get a little bit of oxygen to keep the vision going here.

So I guess, you know, product roadmap-wise, what do you ultimately see this as going forward? Yeah, definitely. So, like, very short term as in what we're shipping today is free to use. In medium term, as in sometime this year, we are expecting a freemium model. So we're still figuring out, still talking to customers and stuff. But, yeah, our expectation is a freemium model. kind of thinking about like Dropbox or Google Drive or ICloud, something that allows you to use a service for a while,

especially as an emerging technology, and especially because we're trying to capture your most important moments. We think it's important for users to get familiar with it, really understand the value, and then those who are capturing a lot are probably those who want to be subscribed and either additional features or storage. Consumer subscription, storage, additional features. they all seem like the big ones.

When you have a great idea like this and you build a mockup that's so compelling, and I really do encourage people to go visit the product and download the app. Where can they do that? They can sign up for the waitlist at Wistlabs.com. WIST, Wist. Yeah, got it.

So we're not officially launched yet, but you can go see all this. So you want to get in there and be part of the private beta if you're listening to this podcast at all cases. If you're listening to this podcast, you clearly have an interest in startups and technology, but do you have the skills and knowledge and need for a career in tech?

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and this is in that category of inspiring demo is everybody gets 10 ideas and says well you know what you should do yeah you know so it's like when you open a restaurant you got a hit restaurant and you're like you make burgers and fries and people like you know what you should do hot dogs you're like yeah but it's called Jason's burger join like it was quite up to burgers okay sure thanks for the recommendation

oh add on your rings okay got it wow you're a genius so I'll add myself to the people telling you you should add on your rings to the menu yeah go for it um I always just think thinking if I had my child when she was six year old, six years old, and you're a dad, congratulations. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Yeah. I would love to take my 13 year old, make her a six year old again, and then make a video of my six, seven year old twins, play with my six, seven year old, now 13 year old. Yeah. Or take me as a child and have me, and I know I'm sounding like a lunatic right now, but have six, seven year old Jason, you know, playing or having hamburgers and french fries with my kids, or skiing with my kids. It would be mind-blowing to see that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, I think, um, yeah, definitely. And possible, possible today. Like, my wife has talked about, um, so I've, uh, I think my oldest capture right now is like February 2022. Um, and yeah, like, she's been kept all throughout that. So, um, like throughout the pregnancy and after pregnancy and stuff. And yeah, she's talked about, yeah, it's just like a really powerful and moving experience to see her own body again and see how it's changed and see, like, see herself become a mother, like, from an outside perspective. And yeah, it's wild that like, yeah, our son will grow up and he can go back

to all these moments, like he can see his mom before she was pregnant. And, wow. Yeah, it's like, mind-blood, yeah, wild. Mind-blowing. Well, I mean, there is something about reliving stuff. In fact, there is a, in trauma work or in therapy, uh, I was a psychology major. I was actually going to go for clinical at one point or industrial. And I remember there was a technique where they would ask people to bring photos of themselves as children and to talk about themselves. And inevitably, you know, some percentage of people would burst out crying because they would see themselves as a child and it would pull them into a memory. Or if you took somebody to a location like their high school or their elementary school with a therapist or if they were trying to work through trauma, they could, actually go to the location and they would feel that sense and then the memories would come back

could be quite cathartic. Right. Well, here we are reliving the moment. And then you add AI to this and there is generative AI. So you could take these videos and then say, you know what? Let's, we have a small video of this child, you know, eating a hamburger. Let's have them playing with the dog that we see in the background. And you could actually make memory.

So have you, has the concept of generative AI plugged into these models yet? Right. Yeah. Generative AI side is something that is both incredibly crucial to the success of Wist, but also something we want to be cautious about, right? I think our goal is not to generate new memories that did not exist, but we can do things like fill in holes. So, yeah, if I'm like capturing in my living room, but I only capture one side and not the other,

we could take captures or we can take data from across all of your captures to kind of like fill back in the living room. But yeah, I think we want to be cautious about like generating totally new memories or like bringing someone back from the dead. Like that, I think that's an area that, yeah, we would just want to tread very lightly. Well, I mean, you're now in Blade Runner territory. There's a scene in Blade Runner where Decker goes

and he has a stack of the memories of, you know, the, the replicant that doesn't know she's a replicant. I mean, you sort of get into really crazy territory and they had actually put their memories in there, into people. And these replicants were, so desirable to extend their lifespan and their memories were so important to them that the ability the fact that they were going to lose their memories which they knew were

manufactured was heartbreaking to them and that's where the famous poem at the end all these memories are now gone like tears and rain right right yeah uh so yeah what do you what do you think you could get into some dangerous territory there just people's psychology yeah like it's it's So I lost my grandmother in middle school. And we have some like photos and videos of her, but it just like it doesn't feel the same as being in a room with her again. And so I think like, yeah, I would be interested in like up converting those photos and videos.

It like, it would be interesting to be able to like have a conversation with her. But I think that's that's all of a sudden in a territory where I know like, because she didn't actually answer those questions, then it's not actually her. And so, yeah, I think there's, like, a lot of ethical questions that, yeah, are probably, like, we can, we can engage with ethical questions, but I don't think that's something that we want to build. Yeah, I mean, somebody's going to build it. Or actually, people could do it right now. You could literally just go to chat GPT right now. Right.

Give the data set of everything I've said on my podcast. Yeah. And I think in one of our, in one of our Reddit comments, someone mentioned that they had, like, they had done that with their grandfather. And after a few interactions, they were like, oh, this is. is this is too much. I will not show my grandmother this. I'm just going to like close it and never look at it again. Oh, wow. So they, they literally made a natural language model. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know too much because it was just like a Reddit comment. But yeah, yeah, it's like. No, I mean, it's a lot. Why we think about the trauma you could cause by having this, you know, magic box that is really like a fun toy, then trigger the memories of your life partner. for 50 years coming back.

And people are so desperate, I mean, we're basically writing Black Mirror episodes here you and I. People are so desperate for these memories. They're so desperate for that loss connection. And we're talking about in grieving when we all lose people and that's part of life, um, that people would do anything to bring people back.

In fact, I think there's a Stephen King novel about this. Yeah. And a movie about bringing people back from the dead. And now you're, you're starting to get into some unnatural areas that could be super traumatizing. Right. Yeah. And that's like, that's not our goal. Our goal is to, yeah, help you like honor and cherish all of your memories, happy and sad. Yeah. Yeah. So how is the business going? How is fundraising going for a business like this? You're obviously it's a down market, but this is this week and start. I like to talk candidly about, you know, building this is, this is something you could build with, I would guess, two, three, four people, you know, as a weekend project. But I think you've moved over from weekend project to full time status. This is moving over in that direction. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I've been full time on it since, uh, what was it, May or March of 2021.

I'm sorry, before I was at Samsung, leading a small group of ARVR designers and developers. And yeah, left to kind of build a bunch of prototypes. I knew something about memories and like spatial computing was important, but didn't know exactly what that would be. Yeah, and then in 2022, really like started building out the alpha on iOS and Quest, found my co-founder. Yeah, and then we did this. we did a small angel rage in the fall of last year. Oh, great.

The down market was not great. In 2022, you did an angel round. Wow. Right. Yeah, yeah. And it was kind of like, well done. It was kind of like just as the news was coming out that, you know,

valuations were decreasing. People were less excited to fund stuff. Yeah, it was just about then. That was when we were starting to reach out to people. So, um, bad timing, but, you know, it is what it is. Well, you know, bad timing in some ways. But there are not, I can tell you, there are not as many people. in market, not as many entrepreneurs in market.

And then since investors are taking a little longer to make decisions or some of them are frozen, so then you don't have like a crazy market, just to tell you the experience on the other side table, you can get to know a founder. You can have them on your podcast. You could, you know, meet them and then say, hey, when you get it launched, let me look at the first 100 data. And if anybody subscribes, you know, and if you can convert this via paid or whatever they need to see in terms of traction that gets them off the bench, ensure a lower value

but I think you may have seen there's maybe more people available to work on projects now because people have been laid off and there's a lot more talent available today and they're not going to say to you, this is your first startup? This is my second major startup, yeah. Yeah.

So the whole concept over the last five years was to convince somebody to not go to Google or not go to Samsung. Yeah. And, you know, depending on, you know, Samsung to Google is probably a factor of 2x in terms of realization at this point or at that point. And you're basically competing again,

a person with literally a money printing machine and you have like a bag of shackles and you're trying to make something happen. So now it's like people like, yeah, I'll do it for equity. You know, valuations might be lower, but money goes further. Right. Yeah. This is all, it's really interesting. This is all possible because of the depth cameras and this new sensor set and the progress on VR. Do you think it's ultimately the consumer experience is going to be VR or do you think the entire industry is going to be this mixed reality leaning towards AR experience in terms of mass adoption.

We are going towards AR glasses. Yeah, because that's like, yeah, it's like the holy grail. It's like the device that lets you see and experience and interact with anything. And so, yeah, like, that's where we're going. I think some of the timeline is open and we'll find out what happens. Like, yeah, Apple has been working on something it seems like forever. And yeah, hopefully they talk more about that. Meta, of course, had that leak recently that, yeah,

like they will probably have another headset on the horizon for this year. Oh, they are going to release one. Yeah. I mean, at least there's like a... There's rumors of that. Rumor, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll keep you safe.

Yeah. For people who don't understand why I'm trying to deflect any rumors to myself is because if you are a developer, and I don't know the situation here, you might be under NDA with a company and you might be working on that with their product on their new thing. So we're always very sensitive. if you're on this weekend startups to make sure we don't put a founder in a position where they break their NDAs or, you know, mess up their relationships in any way.

But they released like a $3,000 developer kit this year, correct? Over at Meta, there was some like really high-end one. Right. So there's a, there's a Quest Pro launch. And that was for between 1,000 and 1,500. And basically what's different about that is that, yeah, so it's still like still kind of VR because your eyes are covered. But there are cameras on the outside that kind of like project what those cameras are seeing back into the headset. So the experience ends up being kind of like AR glasses.

And we, in February, we shared a video of our beta working on those. And so it's like, you see my living room, you see my couch. And then the memory of my wife holding our son is like reprojected into that space. And does it sink? Does it know the couch or it just sort of you look that direction and unlocks it? It's manual. Now it's manual, but yeah. Near future will be. So this gets really interesting.

I did use those, that Quest VR Pro, whatever is called. The Pro one, yeah, yeah. Pro one over Thanksgiving. And, you know, this is basically my yearly Thanksgiving or Christmas. My brother-in-law, Ryan, always has the latest, greatest, and we put it on. And I was playing a game, like a Star Wars game, was quite compelling. I did for about half an hour. And then I started to feel a little nauseous, which is I have, I get motion sickness.

but it used to be I would get motion sickness after like the five minutes of Beat Sabre I had to take it off. But this is really compelling. When you can press a button and turn it off very quickly and without taking the headset off, which is a little bit of work,

it builds a 3D model of your, or just does the pass-through video and you can see the space. That's really compelling because if you're starting to feel nauseous or you don't know what's happening and I was playing some game where you throw a, it's like a racquetball kind of game,

you throw a ball up against the wall and it breaks stuff. It was kind of like breakout, but in 3D, and it's behind you, too. So you're playing like in an arena. Yeah, yeah. I was getting a little addicted to it,

but again, 20, 30 minutes in, it was enough for me, but really does change the game when you can turn it off. And I could see a bunch of folks having Thanksgiving and saying, you know what, we're going to record some memories of Thanksgiving

specifically to document these, and then if people weren't there, in future thanksgivings, you could pull up that memory and just say, hey, let's have a memory with this person who's not here anymore and we'll play back their toast, right? I mean, how great would it be to have the toast?

My dad would give a toast every Christmas, I don't have any of them. But if I had them from the 80s and 90s and my dad's still with us, so he still gets to give the toast, but I would love to have those toast where you gave a toast at Christmas time and just replay them.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think I run in use case, like we are thinking about it as, you know, anytime I'm hanging out with my son and I would pull out my camera just to record something for, like, my personal use. Basically, what we're seeing is, instead of opening my, like, iPhone camera, I open the Wist app, and then I record in there.

And so it's, yeah, like, all those times that you would capture something for yourself or maybe share with close friends and family, that's kind of where we're targeting. All right. Listen, this is great work. I'm very excited. That Quest headset, also, by the way, you know, as these things do, is now down to $999. Yeah, yeah. Meta Quest Pro.

man, too many names for these products. Drop the meta, just call it the Quest and the Quest Pro. You don't need to have this many names, Facebook. Let me just help you. Quest is enough. Or call it the meta one and the MetaPro. Don't brand things three times. This is the Facebook MetaQuest Pro 2.

No, five names, not good. And how does the login work on those? That was the other thing that I thought was challenging. Is it now a meta login when you log in or your Facebook login or Instagram login, you can log it with anything? That is a good question. I think right now it's the meta login plus maybe Instagram, but yeah, I do not know exactly. This was the other problem I had with it, is just like getting the thing up and running.

Yeah. Finding apps, getting login, who's logging am I in? And all that kind of stuff becomes super complicated with these things. But I think they'll get there eventually. Right. Yeah. I think that's something that like, yeah, we're thinking about too, because our, you know, Yeah, our goal is to kind of bring more people into the space,

but also be easy and accessible so that, yeah, you're not overwhelmed. But, yeah, definitely we need the platforms to be easy to use so that once you get in our app, it continues to be easy to use. You know what would be a great paid feature since I'm going to tell you. I told you about the onion rings. I think now I'm going to tell you about chili fries or something. Yeah, go for it. They could add to the menu is the ability to give prompts.

So I think there's a, you know, I always think about beachhead audiences when I'm working with founders. Yeah. And then there's this group of people who are obsessed with archival stuff, right? Yeah. And they're the people who pay for Ancestry.com and other services like that, genealogists, right? And there's like one person in every family who takes on this role, sometimes two or three people do it and then they bring it to everybody on the holidays. If you had prompts and you said, here are prompts for, you know, a grandma, grandpa, here are prompts for siblings when they're sitting next to each other.

here are prompts about childhood, here are prompts about college for your sorority, for your fraternity, and you just had people tell stories. You know, here's a prompt for work culture

and your startup. Then you could make that, like those little templates, like if you have Notion or Koda, it comes with templates. Those templates and the audience being able to build up and genealogist being able to build up, that could be like your app store.

So, you know, you have an app store where it's like, here's what a genealogist would ask. Here's what a documentarian would ask. Yeah. Here's their top 15 questions. By the way, here's their next 25 questions for $25. And I think the genealogy people, they're used to spending lots of money,

hundreds of dollars a year, getting document requests. So for them, like, some of that costs $25 a month is not going to be crazy. So highly recommend, looking at that, unless you have another beachhead market, I think parents are another good one because they want to document. Some of the early signals around people who feel the passage of time, just feel the passage of time. And so, yeah, like parents with younger kids or families with aging parents, I think is like two categories that kind of have bubbled up.

But yeah, you could also think about maybe I'm younger and I'm like traveling to a place and this is like the first time I'm there and I really want to like capture all of this and remember as I get older or like maybe it's high school. And, you know, this is like the last summer with my friends before we all go off to college. And so, yeah, trying to find those moments and weave our way in. I wish you great success with the startup. Everybody, please. Go ahead and... Oh, did you have questions for me? I saw on my notes that you might have had a question or two for me.

Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, I think... You wanted to reverse the tables, which I always... Just so for founders who are listening to this week in startups, which there are many, if you want to use this time to ask me a question at the end, I mean, I'm here to promote your stuff and learn about what you're doing, but I'm always open for an ask Jason at the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, and closing out, like, some of the interview, yeah, people can reach me at Andrew

at Wistlabs.com. And yeah, happy to field any questions there. Yeah, but then for you, yeah, thinking about some of the stuff with SVB, and yeah, fortunately, it seems like all that's at the high level is taken care of. Yeah, we are kind of like at the very early stages of a raise and thinking about, yeah, I guess just how do you think VCs in the next like two to three weeks are thinking about funding new companies versus still perhaps shoring up their existing portfolio. So it's a great question, Andrew.

And by the way, the Twitter handle is Wist Labs, W-I-S-T-L-A-B-S. So you follow WISL-L-A-B-S as well. That's a great way to follow startups in my experience. It's a great question. Whenever there is a scary cataclysmic event like the one of this weekend, it will distract VCs and angels and seed investors and make them want to focus on their existing portfolio. this is the circle the wagons type moment.

Okay, we're not an explorer mode. We are in making sure everybody's at camp. We get a head count. Everybody's safe, right? So I think that could take a couple of weeks for people to kind of like the shock grenades went off and people's ears are ringing and there's a little fog of war right now. Yeah. I think if we don't see another two or three banks go under this week or get rescued,

whatever you want to call what's happening now to the two banks that this has happened to already. If we don't see more rescues, I think the ear ringing gets done in two weeks or so. And then we're back to business close to normal. Everybody will go through these two weeks saying, okay, how many bank accounts should you have? How should you manage a treasury of, you know, a million dollars? That's obvious. Two or three bank accounts. How do you manage a $10 million or one? Do I need to have five bank accounts? Do I put money in Bitcoin or, you know, Starbucks gift cards? I mean, people are losing their minds a bit. And so that's that's probably the path forward.

I think most people in your stage, now you've done this before, so you probably don't need to do that and you raise some money during a down market. So you're obviously good at raising money. She did it in 2022. So kudos on that. Well, maybe. Yeah. Maybe we'll find out. We'll find out.

Sure. It's like the degrees get harder sometimes, not easier. So, but I do think it'll get easier in the second half the year. The interesting thing that I think will, I think for most people in. your position, I'd say go to an accelerator if you can get into one because it's 100 or 200K for 5, 6, 7%, and then you get validated, you get introduced to more investors in a cata, you know, as a catalyzer. But if you already know how to do this and you feel like your product is on the cusp of maybe getting 10 paid customers, I think you will separate

yourself with a product like this by being able to show just a trickle of revenue. Just 10 people buying the pro version and knowing who those 10 people, people are and having them in a Slack room or a signal room and being able to talk to them and understand them. Now, why do I say this? A lot of people in your position will get on the feature, the never-ending feature trail. Yeah. And they're like, well, if I get this feature, it's going to blow up.

If I get this feature, it's going to blow up. And then the signaling from seed funds, which is where you're going to kind of live right now, is the 250K seed fund check or so. And then plus angels or syndicates, that 250K seed fund, people are going to want to say, okay, if I can't get to Series A, at least if they're burning 25K a month or 50K a month, can they cut that in half and get 10 or 20K a month in revenue so that the Series A investor or future seed investors can kind of imagine, oh, they got 10 people, they could have a thousand. And that's my best advice.

And sometimes you'll see that. In fact, the thing that the generative AI folks had going for them was some of them had apps in the app store that would make pictures of you and they got 10,000 people to pay for it because it was so compelling. And it's like, well, this person can build something compelling. So that's really going to be the litmus test for you. Is this compelling enough? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think that like, 10 moms pay for it or 10 dads rather. Right. Yeah. And it's like, it's, so it's a little early for us to do the subscription yet, just because we haven't built it. But yeah, I think, I think with that Twitter post, like,

our wait list increased over a thousand percent week over week. And so, yeah, it's like, Yeah, it's clear that we are starting to get that signal that there's this thing that is resonating with people. And yeah, we'll continue to dive into that. People do sell the wait list. I will tell you, like, when you have revenue, you sell revenue. And then you can even talk about the quality of the revenue. When you have earnings, when you have profit, when you have gross margin, top line revenue, whatever. People will sell the revenue.

When you don't have revenue, people will sell the wait list or the user base. They'll sell the user base. And then before that, they'll sell the wait list. and before that they'll sell their pedigree, right? Right. So you're kind of always moving on to reality. And the closer you can get to the actual reality, I would say, you know, if you made it so the product let you do five of these,

and then after that you had to have a pro version, that could be a very easy way to test how it works. You can do five a month and then we ask you to pay. Sure. Or the watermark kind of situation. Or you could do it based on the length of the video. So you can do 10-second videos, but you can't do 20-second. Right.

You know, hey, contribute to the product for this amount, and we can do more than five a month or more than 10 seconds. You have unlocking frequency and you have unlocking time because it's a video. So that's a really nice thing about where you're at. And I think most, and then there's the watermark, which some people care about, some people don't. And then there's also sharing the link. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think sharing in multiplayer is going to be really, really core to us going forward. Oh, multiplayer is just such a great. Multiplier people know. multiplayer means multiple people can work on the same project, like a shared document or a shared folder. So if you said, hey, I'm going to start a family one. And this is a great device for virality, by the way. If you said, hey, this, I want to, if you presented the family tree,

people will fill it out and you say, hey, who's this? And you say, this is my daughter. And then it says, oh, do you have any other kids? And then who's your spouse? Who's the mom? Okay, what's the relation? My partner, my spouse would rather not say, whatever. Is there a grandma?

Is there a grandpa? Is there a cousin? start adding those. And then when you add the cousin says, hey, put their email in and share them. And do you want to invite your first level family tree or your second level family tree? And I would just look at how the genealogy companies have figured this out. Yeah, yeah, I think with the genealogy direction, that's something that we are open to and exploring. But yeah, right now the product is more about like, here's this camera for your memories. And it's like straightforward, easy to use, familiar. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, brother, I am rooting for you. Congratulations. Thank you so much. And we will. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Oh, I mean, here's an easy way to get on this week in startups. Make something that's really effing compelling. If something's really compelling and you see it in people's social feeds, you've now put yourself in the bucket of people talking about ideas and who want to have coffee and chew your ear.

Like literally, I could live in a coffee shop for 10 lifetimes based on the number of people want to have coffee with me. But then once you put something in the world and I saw it go by on my feed, I was like, okay, that's good enough. That's super fascinating. I can ask 20 questions about that. And here we are, 30 or 40 minutes in of what was supposed to be a 20 minute, you know, quick head. So well done, brother.

And everybody go follow Andrew. Is Andrew R... No, he's arm the thinker. If you want to follow his Twitter and Wist Labs, and is the name of the company, Wist Labs on Twitter and Wistlabs. com. Yep, dot com. Oh, why? You get the dot com.

Wistlabs.com. We'll see you all next time in this weekend start us. Bye-bye. Okay, that's it for today, folks. But before we go, make sure you check out the Founder University podcast, Founder. dot university slash podcast. Each episode is a quick hitting tactical talk from entrepreneurs and operators. I created this new podcast because I didn't have room inside this week in startups to basically

do tactical talks, right? These are really tactical. You might need one today. You need a different one tomorrow. So we're going to build a library of these. And there's an amazing talk with Richard Wang from Pilot. He walks us through how to understand your startup budget and optimize it for the current economy. Also, you'll get some tips on how to extend your runway.

That can be found at founder. University slash podcast. Please go search in your podcast player and YouTube for Founder University Podcast and like it, subscribe to it, and give me your feedback. I'm Jason at calicanus.com for life.