This Week in Startups - Startup pitch competition: Jason invests $25K live! | E1709

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Jason hosts another pitch competition featuring three startups from our Founder University program! Apply for Founder University: https://course.founder.university (0:00) Jason kicks off the show  (1:58) Kelly and Presh discuss reactions from the Founder University community (6:47) Presentation 1: Kevin O'Connell, Founder and CEO of Kapsule (12:08) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at ⁠https://Squarespace.com/TWIST⁠  (13:38) Presentation 2: Julien Hoachuck, Founder of ArkiTask  (19:48) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at ⁠https://Embroker.com/twist ⁠  (21:10) Presentation 3: David Axelrod, Founder of Open Insure (32:07) CacheFly - Get 10 terabytes free by signing up at ⁠https://twist.cachefly.com ⁠ (33:28) Deliberations  (37:36) Jason's thoughts on the three companies (41:13) Key takeaways from Founder University (46:22) How to learn more about Founder University FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Presh: https://twitter.com/preshdkumar FOLLOW Kelly: https://twitter.com/KSchricks Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1 FOUNDERS! Subscribe to the Founder University podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/founder-university/id1648407190

Hey, everybody, it's another awesome show for you today. We're going to do founder pitches for $25,000. I got such an amazing response from y'all. The YouTube comments were on fire. You loved episode 1703, where we had four founders from the Founder University program. Pitch me for two or three minutes and take some questions about their startups. And then I made a decision to invest $25,000 in one of those companies today. Three more founders, three totally different ideas. And I will give $25,000 at the end of this program. to one of those three founders. I will invest it. It's not a prize. It's an investment. We want to see these companies become unicorns. And leave us a great review on YouTube. You can go to

YouTube.com slash this week in to see all this great comments. That's one of the things I have been absolutely delighted with. I'm spending so much time in the comments, as are my producers, that we're actually starting to see a very positive community on YouTube. And I want you to be part of that community. YouTube.com slash this week in. This is going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch,

use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Embroker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today Adambroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And Cashfly is a pure play CVN provider that makes CDN simple, effective, and secure. Deliver content faster than your competitors and get 10 terabytes free forever if you sign up at twist.

com. That's twist.c-c-h-e-f-l-y-com. So we have a couple of hundred people go through the Founder University program, and with me are the two individuals who are running Founder. That's the URL. Presh and Kelly, how are we doing? Great. Doing well today.

Okay. And so more importantly, what was the reaction after last week's episode, where we had four different founders pitch me for a 25K prize? We won't tell us. people what happened in that episode, but it was last Friday's episode, and it was episode 1703. So if you're ever looking for this week in Startups episode, you can type in This Week and Startups episode 1703. What was the reaction from the founding university community? So the folks in the community were really jazzed about it, loved seeing their peers up on

the podcast, and we also got an influx of applications for folks that want to attend our next cohort. Awesome. Presh, tell everybody how they can apply to come to Founder University when it's starting and what we're looking for in terms of people to come to the 12-week program. Yeah. So our next workshop or next course starts April 24th, so that's our kickoff. We're actually doing a live kickoff in SF. So that'll be super fun.

Yeah. You go to fund it. It's optional to come, by the way. Some people will do remote. Some people prefer to do in person. So one of the weeks, the first kickoff week will be in person. Yep. Go to founder, u.

University slash apply and fill out our form. Kelly and I go through applications on a rolling basis and are accepting founders as we go. So what we're looking for, builder founders primarily. So what does that mean? You've built a product, your technical, even as far as like a designer or a growth person, you can build something, put it out there and get users for it.

That's really the point of the program. and the program is designed to help you launch your MVP. You could already have an idea, you could already have a launch product. The program will just connect you with a bunch of founders and you can launch or you can relaunch, but that's the point of the program. At the end of it,

we'll potentially invest in some of the best performing companies or products. So, Kelly, if I'm just an idea person and I'm a solo founder, I don't know how to build anything, So it's the right program for me? It might be later on. I would suggest find a co-founder who is technical or go learn some skills on the internet. You can learn anything these days.

And those skills, just to recap what Press said, things that we would look for in terms of titles or skills. And those obviously match what equal startup success. So what are the skills of that and the typical job titles, one more time, Kelly, as you see them? Yeah. So the builders that we specifically look for. are folks that can either code or no code to get the actual product out to the world and get that first MVP. If you can do sales or operations, that's another good sign. Any marketing is another good one for us. Again, anything that's going to help you go from an idea to something

real in the world that people can use. Yeah, I would say UX design, designers are right below developers and people who can build no code. And then I would say far below that salespeople, operations, people. If you're just a sales or ops person, you need to have two people who could actually build something. So if you had one sales or ops person on the team, that'd be okay, but you still need to have builders on the team. So we're looking for builders primarily, I would say. And we are still accepting sometimes solo founders to the program, but we'd really want them to be developers or designers so they can actually make some progress on a product. If you can't make product progress, you're not going to be a very good entrepreneur.

And if you're just an idea person, the world doesn't need any more ideas. I hate to break it to you. There's too many ideas. You can ask chat GPT for ideas and will spied ideas all day long. Okay. So founder. dot university, if you want to apply, a couple hundred people each time. So today we'll have three pitches.

We'll do this really quick. They're going to do a two-minute pitch. A two-minute pitch is designed to be the trailer of a startup. It's not meant to be like a movie trailer. not meant to be the full pitch that they would give to VCs. It doesn't cover everything, but it should give you enough information to make a decision of if you wanted to put in a tiny, tiny bet

or maybe take another meeting. We know these founders, so we have a lot more deep research. We've spent 12 weeks with them watching them build, and so none of these founders are not worthy of investment, but we can only make so many investments as a fund, and it is a competition. So what we'd like to do in these Founder University showcases here is to show you how we make decisions,

hard decisions to say yes to one founder, and then maybe not yet, or no, even, to another founder. So let's get started who we have first. Kelly? All right. First up, we have Kevin at Capsule. Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin O'Connell. I'm the founder of Capsule.

At Capsule, we're on a mission to connect the world past, present, and future with video time capsules. Me, Kelly. Kelly is attending Rhodes College and wants to capture moments and share them with their sister Stephanie who will be attending in the fall. Kelly uses social media, but none of the apps she uses allow it to preserve memories in an authentic way to be shared in the future without monetizing her data. Then Kelly discovered capsule, a social app that allows you to capture memories and share them months or years into the future like on a sister Stephanie's first day of class. Let me show you how it works. Kelly creates a capsule

by tapping on the plus icon, recording a video that's meaningful for her sister Stephanie on her first day of school, scheduling it on the first day of class, and that's it. Kelly's video is encrypted and uploaded to the cloud. Fast forward to August it's Stephanie's first day of class. She's nervous, unsure where she needs to be, kind of feels out of place. All of a sudden, her phone phone It's a time capsule from Kelly. Stephanie opens it up, plays the video, and immediately feels a sense of connection with their sister during a time when she needs somebody the most.

Capsules currently pre-revenue with a premium offering, but will be releasing a paid subscription with premium features later this year. Since the launch at the end of September, capsules acquired over 200 users with $0 spent in marketing. Competition can be broken out into two groups, social media apps that allow users to create videos, ensure but monetize user data, and niche players offer a free service to send emails to people in the future,

but no video option yet. To capture the market, Capsule will be focusing on highly targeted launch parties on Instagram to university students by creating highly targeted accounts using the school's colors and slogans and driving them to a custom app store landing page to download Capsule and encapsulate their moments. The whole process can be measured, refined, repeated for schools across the country. The vision is to move away from dates in the future and towards life moments, such as delivering capsules after loss of a loved one,

to provide closure during a difficult time in places, the ability to pin capsules on a map and unlock them in recipients and nearby in the future. The team is currently just me, on the former head of marketing of three different SaaS startups and went from C to Series A or acquisition with some amazing investors. Thank you for your time.

Okay, well done. And so this would fall into a social media type product, but it's not going to be monetized through advertising and using people's data. It's going to be a paid service. We are a paid social product. I think we understood that perfectly well. It looks well designed.

These are the things that first come off of an investor's mind. And Kelly and Presh, the way investors look at consumer products is they're basically lightning in a bottle. Either they capture the attention of an audience or they don't. And so that's what we have to determine here with this startup is can they run enough experiments over time? this capture some group of people's desire to send messages to people in the future and do time capsules. Now, we do have some history here, not our firm necessarily, but there have been many products that are for archivists, like what is the one that families use all the time? There's a one for families. Ancestry.com?

Perfect. You got it. So when you compare this to Ancestry.com, how would you compare it? I think it's completely two different things. Ancestry.com is a great way for lineage. But capsules really out connecting with friends and family and loved ones and be able to unlock those memories at certain moments in time, like at a wedding or sadly after someone passes away, completely different, but, you know, good comparison. So this would be if I wanted to send a note to the person on their first day of school, I could do it ahead of time, kind of like I can schedule a tweet or a buffer can schedule

tweets and Instagram. That's the magic here. That's correct. Got it. Okay. And so how many users have used this so far? Over 200 right now and just released a new update and reengaged some new users. So a monthly, hundred and 30 right now.

Got it. And how many months has it been in beta? It launched at the end of September, but the new version just launched last month. So got it. Both four months. And are you a developer, a designer, an idea person, a manager? Who are you? My background's actually in marketing.

And I was inspired to code and built this in less than 100 days, version one. Oh, wow. And continue to iterate every 100 days with new releases. It's actually, it's a beautiful thing to learn to take a marketing skill set, you know, understanding databases and CRMs and apply that to, you know, app databases and be able to host it in the cloud. It's actually very satisfying. It's amazing. You know, we talk about this a lot.

People say, oh, I'm not technical and not yet. Not yet. You're not. And here you are a marketer who learned how to build a product. And it's a fascinating, intriguing product already. And you've also learned about product velocity. So I heard you say, hey, a hundred day sprints and you're trying different things. So I love the pace at which you're building and it looks beautiful and you're really

thinking about ideas and testing them. And that's really what, especially in the social space, is about little experiments, seeing if they click and then iterating on them. So well done, a great first company, Ellie and Prush. Okay, we're about to announce the winner of our second show-as-your-space competition. Elise runs a digital sports nutrition business built on Squarespace called Whoa, Sports Nutrition. You can go check it out at W-O-H-E Sports Nutrition.com. W-O-H-E sportsnutrition.com.

Congrats, Elise. You're going to enjoy $1,000 in Squarespace credits. And if you want to be an amazing entrepreneur like Elise, or start your size. project or anything in between Squarespace is how you do it, from personal projects to giant tech startups, anything can now be built on Squarespace. We love it so much. We use it for remote demo day and many other projects. Here are some amazing Squarespace features that founders love. You're going to get unlimited, e-commerce, templates, analytics, inventory management, all of that stuff built in, SEO, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week customer support. Everything just works

inside of Squarespace. And of course, it's optimized for mobile. You know about the Gorge templates, but you can also sell content there, courses, et cetera, appointments, and save the 15% tax that other platforms are taking from you. That's your money. Don't give it to a platform. Use Squarespace instead, squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We love you, Squarespace. And they hold the belt here at this weekend startups for our longest running partner. Thank you so much for supporting this week in startup. and our mission to support founders and inspire innovation.

Okay, who do we have next? Press and Kelly, who's next? All right. Next up, we have Julian with Archytask. Hi, my name is Julian, and I am a founder at Architask. At Architask, we are redefining the project planning process. This is Alice. She's a software engineer.

She is constantly running out of time. Why, her tasks are poorly written, underestimated, and some are even missing. The number one solution to our problem is to use her organization's historical data. Unfortunately, none of the task management systems make it easy to do this. And people are willing to pay for a solution. That's where Arctatask comes in. With ArchieTas, the project planning process is designed with a data-first approach. Alice can unlock the value from her organization's planning data,

as well as reduce the time to compose projects. When composing projects within Arctatask, Arki is steps ahead and suggesting what the title should be. On the right-hand side, Arki has surfaced similar projects to what Alice wants to create. Now let's create some tasks for the project. With Arkey's help, we reduce task creation to task selection. She shops shops shopped through the generated and historical tasks serviced by Arkey. Arkey even provides estimates for those tasks. Now it's time to check out.

Alice reviews the project her and Arki created together and exports it to Jira. With Arky tasks, Alice has cut the time it takes to plant projects in half, while helping her team meet their commitments. Arky is powered by a proprietary combination of generative AI and semantic search models to enable this experience. Employees from the following companies have signed up on our waitlist and expressed interest in the product. After launching our new landing page during Founder University, our waitlist doubled within a short time frame. We're also seeing a high level of excitement as we come closer to our launch date.

Arctusk's competitors don't use AI to ease the pain of project planning. Customers want these features, and we offer them. We will launch our private beta next month to our most connected waitlisters. My co-founder and I have over a decade of experience in shipping AI products and publications in the field. We met while collaborating with a lab at Stanford to leverage AI to increase the productivity of clinical researchers. resulted in a tool and corresponding publication that continues to be cited today, and even more importantly, an everlasting friendship. We are architectasks and redefining the project planning process. Please join our journey by signing up. Happy planning. Okay. So the question that comes to mind with

all of these is you believe Monday and Asana will not have these features? And then how will you deal with it when they do launch these features if you're doing something similar to what they're doing. Sure. Yeah. So to answer your first question, what makes us different from those particular products is that we provide a data-driven approach to the project planning process, number one, which What does that mean in plain English?

Yeah. In plain English, that means we are enabling you to make decisions about which tasks you should have within a project or how long those tasks will take based off of historical data. Got it. Or data leveraged from generative AI, should it be actually useful. Which they would have access to as well, just to be clear. Sure.

But they wouldn't have access to your proprietary data projects you've done before. Exactly. Got it. Or the general models that we build based off of historical data from the company itself. Yeah. Got it. And is this for building, doing projects that are like corporate projects or more like construction projects?

Is there a specific type of project this is for? Is it for all projects? Yeah, great question. So our Beachhead market are software engineers. Got it. Where, by definition, more corporate projects. But we plan, we can expand into other verticals, right? Still being corporate projects, but, you know, maybe further down the line,

construction projects should we feel the need to move into that space. And so it's two co-founders, both of your developers? Yes. And so you will have customers who will either choose Asana Monday. We'll assume that they'll launch their feature shortly. You'll have people have to choose between Asana Monday or your product. So not exactly. So our strategy is that we feel like it's better to actually provide this as an integration initially with a very hyper-focused, you know, a lot of concentration on software engineer.

in that Beechhead market, because we think in order for actually these larger companies to be rather effective across all the verticals and all the industries that they provide task management for, the amount of work and engineering effort would be actually really high. So we want to be super focused on one vertical as an integration, so we're not asking them to convert initially. And as we build those datasets, right, the learnings from those customers, etc., we will pivot to a larger, you know, competing product, or we thought about exposing APIs that they could leverage. That's another route. Yeah. And so you've had people sign up to check it out. I see some competitors signing up to check it out. That's always interesting. When do you think you'll have a

paying customer on the platform? How close are to having a paying customer. Yeah. So people are super excited about it, you know, wanting to get their hands on the product already. And I think that After we go through that, you know, May to July, which is our pre, you know, our beta testing, I assume we'll have a paying customer the first day in July. I don't doubt that. How are you going to charge $15 per customer per month. Okay. Or per user, sorry.

Yeah, preceding pricing. Okay, perfect. Awesome. Kelly, or Presh, any questions? Nope. How did Julian do during the program? Really, well. Well, I had talked to him previously about if this was going to be a tool that would ask customers to replace tools because that's a really hard sell, especially at the enterprise level.

But if it's layered on top, I think that's a winning strategy. And we had talked about that a few times in the program and how he was handling that problem. Great. So it could work as a little sidecar to one of those existing project management tools. Awesome. Hey, everybody. You know, I work all the time with early stage companies at launch. talking pre-series a right thousands of dollars in MRR very little capital raise you're just early in that product market fit phase and listen sometimes they don't have their insurance just this month we had a great startup they didn't have d and oh insurance that basically protects all the directors and officers so what do we do we sent them right to in broker that got them their business insurance and they did it really quick and at a great price with a broker you do a single application startups will get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes

they connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy and listen. Broker is such an amazing product that we use it here. We love it at launch. It's the insurance I use. So that should tell you everything you need to know. When you're in that seed stage, you need to get your insurance correct. You've got to grow up as a company, and it's a lot more affordable than you think it is.

And you want to look like your properly run startup. So try and brokerage day with the code twisting at 10% off their startup package. And try and brokerage day with the code twist and get 10% off their startup package. percent off their startup package at inbroker.com slash twist. That's E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash twist for 10% off. Thanks to the team at a broker. Amazing products, amazing team, great service, and we appreciate you providing us with our insurance.

Okay, let's get back to the episode. All right. Next up, we have David with Open Insure. All right. Hi, my name's David Axelrod, and I'm the founder of Open Insurance, a self-insurance platform that is meant to help people save money. So I was paying $1399 a month to Verizon to insure my cell phone. You know, I have new phone.

I wanted to, in case the screen cracked or I needed a replacement battery, I was paying for the privilege of having that peace of mind. But, you know, I had it for over 18 months. I paid almost $200 to insure my phone. I never had an incident and all that money was basically thrown down the drain. So did a bunch of research, listened to a lot of lectures, read a couple actual science textbooks, even listened to insurance podcasts, And the main thing about insurance is that is as follows, I guess.

So take $1,000 in premiums that comes in. About 60% of those dollars go towards paying actual claims. This is, you know, replacing screens, getting replacements, etc. But the other 40% are used on less things that maybe you don't want your money going towards. Commissions to the T-Mobile employee who sold you the policy, salaries and overhead and all that kind of stuff. So what Open Insure is, is it's a platform that enables you to self-organize with either friends or family and short-circuit and still maintain the same amount of coverage, but completely circumnavigates all the commission salaries and overhead. And ultimately, premium dollars are only used for one of two things. They're rather used to pay out claims that happen against your policy or they get returned to you at the end of a period similar to an insurance mutual.

So people have been pretty interested in this. So the last time at Pitch Jason, I posted to Reddit that same night. That post got over 14,000 views with a pretty good reception. Also in that same pitch, it's hard to stand out in 20 companies, but there was a couple of people who were clamoring to check it out. And I actually have followed up with everyone who expressed interest. So the net result is since that last pitch, it's been 300 new visits. 300 new visitors and 12 new users.

So happy to answer any questions. And by users, you mean people who signed up for your mailing list and are interested? Users who went to the actual platform and, like, created accounts. Got it. Okay. And does it actually work right now? Are there people actually paying 15 bucks a month to themselves to self-insure? Yep.

And then... So I'm eating my own dog food. I organized... I started out with just... I can even share the site here. I organized five of my close friends to originally do this. We originally started on a Google spreadsheet while I was read in the React. And I then,

you know, appetized it and made it into a fully featured product that, you know, keeps track of members, the premiums, etc. And it's now, the policy is now grown to 10 people from the five that originally started with it.

Okay. So here's a tough question. Have you thought about governance here? I am part of these 10 folks and I'm like, you know, I, yeah, I dropped my phone and it's ruined. I want a new iPhone 13. Everybody give me the money. Great question. So originally I would start. Do you all vote on it? Did they have to take a picture on it? Is it trust based? How does that work? Exactly. So when I first started, it was a direct democracy. Basically, if there's 10 people, you need six of them to approve it. When you break your phone, you, you know, write up a report. There's a whole claim section where you say, this is, these are the pictures. Somebody can attest to this. And everybody votes in a blind democracy. felt. But actually that turns a lot of people off. And so I was talking with a gentleman this morning who suggested something really interesting. And basically he suggested a hosted adjudication service.

So neutral third party for maybe $5 per claim would review all the evidence and propose a recommendation to the group, which the group could decide whether to choose or not. And that's another monetization angle as well. But there are many different, I want to leave it flexible. So if groups want to choose direct democracy, they can, or representative democracy or a hosted adjudication service. All right. Prash Kelly, any questions for our founder? And then maybe if no questions, what impressed you about the founder specifically, detailed wise, not generic in the program? Yeah, got a quick question, David. Can this work for other products like insuring, I don't know, any other products that you come to mind you could potentially use the service for?

Right. So I think of insurance. policy types on a spectrum. On the very low end, on one end, you have super low-stakes stuff, like cell phone insurance is one, where, you know, it's property, it sucks if you break it, and it's, but and the dollar amounts are small, but it, people are willing to try something new in order for these lower-stakes stuff. On the other end is, you know, health insurance. And so, but you can draw concentric circles around cell phone insurance to other minor property and casualty. You know, you could do small, like people insure their Rolexes, like a Samariner for, 600 bucks a year. You could start to draw concentric circles around cell phone insurance,

but I think it's a decent B-Shead market for now. Has anybody ever tried this before? Like a cooperative insurance program online, would seem that cooperative insurance, if I'm just making up a term here, did that ever exist in the world? Is it, or I'm thinking that's how insurance, since you dive down this rabbit hole started, was everybody said like, hey, let's do a barn raising. Lowe's of London. the Amish were picking the subject Correct

There are companies that do self-insurance platforms for other It's like a B-to-B thing for health insurance Actually a couple years ago JPMorgan, Amazon and I think Buffett Or I don't know

somebody else They were trying to form a collective To self-insure you know To stop paying so much to Aetna And whatever That fell through But I have yet to see something For the consumer

And I think You know hopefully Open and Share can help people save money and sidestep the, you know. What's your background? What did you do before this, David? Sure. So I'm a software engineer. I work days at a company called Bold Voice, which is a YC-backed startup that I was the first employee. I can't say too too much publicly, but when I joined, we had about 100 ratings on the iOS App Store. Now we have over 13,000 and I've been responsible for, it's basically been me and the CTO. writing all the code.

So with this 25K investment, you'd be ready to move on full-time to this? Not necessarily. I would definitely like, you know, I've, I like coding. That's what I like to do. So I do it. I do this on like nights and weekends,

but I like to dedicate my daytime to that. I would continue grinding. So another important thing is the platform is entirely open source. I might change that, but it's available on GitHub, and I can show the look later. But I would just keep working on it and making it better and trying to get more users. When do you think you'd make that jump to being a full-time, what will take for you to do that?

To be honest with you, I'm unsure. That would be a hard decision. Great answer. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, and that becomes, for people who are listening, Kelly, and Prash, this is the pull and push that founders go through, right? You can, especially developer founders. hey, I can get a really good job, have great upside in a growing company, or I can take the jump myself. And programs like Founder University or Ycombinator, Techstars, launch accelerator or accelerator, all of these things are trying to push the babies out of the nest and get them to fly.

And so I think it's important at some point for the founder to say, you know what, this is going to be risky, but I'm going to jump out of the nest. Great job. Any other questions there, Kelly, or thoughts? Yeah, I had a question for you. So if I understand it correctly, you are going to be making money off of the interest. And so I'm wondering, how long would it take to hit that $10 million in revenue or $100 million in revenue mark? That's a great question. So to bring everyone else to speed, there's two ways to make money.

The primary way that I was thinking is similar to how Venmo makes money, which is the floats on deposits that people have. So people deposit their premiums. You invest in short-dated treasury bills and collect, what's it now, 3.5%, 4%, of which Open Insurance made on the $700, we've made about $13, give or take. But the other option is the hosted adjudication where you could charge on a per claim basis. I kind of think that's interesting. but so I and to try to estimate I don't I don't know if I'd be able to have a 10 million dollar number tough to say my goal is to continue adding one new policy one real world policy a month for the next however long yeah you don't have an answer now you don't need to have an answer

now for it but I think it is something for you to be thinking about is can the business model to Kelly's point, that's what venture capitalists anything about. So that's why she's asking that is, you know, hey, well, can this be venture scale? And, you know, if people were paying, you know, $10 per person per year, or, you know, so $100 total,

that equals 1% of the total amount. If there's $10,000 and then let's say it's 10 people, 10 iPhone 14s or 13s or whatever, $1,000 phones, you know, is it that much to pay $10 each? Probably not. And it feels like a pretty good business to pay 1% to do it. they could just have me a flat rate. It's a really clever idea.

And I could see people really like, I like the way you're thinking that people could plug in their own. We want to have a democratic process here. You know, and we need 70% of people to agree, or we need eight people to agree, or we need all, you know, nine out of ten people to agree or,

you know, seven out of the nine who are not involved in it. Or we want to have an adjudication process. Or we want to have a process of, if it was a very large thing, what is that called when you go to arbitration? So you have arbitration clauses in there. So many creative ideas here.

And it's one of these non-consensus crazy ideas that I've never heard. And those are all really interesting to us and to investors as well. And then the only Achilles seal you have is you're not ready to make the jump yet. But I appreciate you being honest about that. And that then becomes for us as a firm, Praschen Kelly, do we want to take on that risk that it never becomes, never has a full-time person behind it when other folks have two full-time people behind it, right? So we got to keep an open mind to that. But well done. Okay, everybody, when it comes to the blocking and tackling of running a tech

startup, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. We all know that. CDNs are a place where startups can really overcomplicate things. Content delivery networks. You've heard this before. If you're in the tech business, you need to understand. You don't need custom authentications or custom code. If you're a startup, you just need to check out Cashfly. Cashfly is a PurePlay CDN. and CDNs are literally all they do. And they've been doing it for 20 years. They basically created the category. Cashfly makes CDN simple, effective, and secure.

That's what I want you to take from this. Simple and secure. That's Cashfly. Listen, if you're going to go with a CDN from one of the major providers, you're eventually going to outgrow them. So don't burn your startup credits using a CDN at one of the larger players.

Nope, just let Cashfly handle it for you. They're going to help you deliver your content faster than your competitors, which means user engagement goes up. It doesn't matter. If it's videos, mobile apps, gaming, they're going to help you scale faster because that's all they do. That's all they focus on.

So you want the pure play. Cashfly will save the day. Twist listeners get 10 terabytes free forever if you sign up at twist. Dot cashfly.com. That's T-W-I-T dot C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. To get 10 terabytes for free forever, twist. dot cashfly.com. I think, you know,

this is one of these situations where you have three very different companies. Three very different companies and you can make a case for each. Prasch, which one is your favorite and why? Which one do you think we should put 25K into it today? Yeah. So I think my answer

is slightly changed after the Q&A. Oh, really? That's interesting. Which is interesting. So, walk us through your exact process. Going into this, were you thinking and then during the Q&A, what changed your thinking? Yeah, so going into it,

ArkyTask was my pick for the 25K. And reason being, I like the builder team. I like the traction on the product. They hadn't launched yet, but they had a growing wait list and that seemed to have doubled in the past couple of weeks. So that was my initial thinking there.

And a useful product, of course. Then doing this Q&A in this session, I'm leaning now towards Open-Aure. And reason being, I just had the thought of this can be used for other products other than cell phone insurance. And so that, you know, opens up a huge range of upside, potentially. You can see people. Yeah, and you can see people in a storm area.

I mean, you don't have to, also with insurance, it doesn't have to cover everything. So let's say you wanted to do flooding. and you're in an area where, you know, homes get flooded and you all live on the same cul-de-sac area. So you would all be impacted by flooding kind of equally. You could say, you know what? We want to do, you know, $1,000 each a year, build us up. And then if after three years, the every, if it gets to three years and we each have $3,000 in there, we can take it out and we can leave the pool. The rest of people can stay in the pool for flood insurance.

And if people have a flood claim, we're all in the same community and we would vote on it and it would give up to the amount in the pool. So it's not like going to cover the house getting washed away, but if there was $5,000 in damages, the pool could handle that, right? So you could have a claim, like a top claim. And there could also be on the claim. What do they call that a deductible? So that would keep people from abusing the claim. So if you want to do this flooding insurance, there are some places you can't get it. Okay, yeah, we have a $30,000 pool here after three years and each person putting in $1,000 a year. But you have to pay the first $5,000 and then the pool will pay up to whatever amount for the next amount.

And if there's multiple claims at the same time, we'll have to do with that. But the software doing that kind of reminds me of DAOs, you know, in decentralized organizations, people taking control of their destiny and being more self-reliant, which is a really fascinating thing in society when you think about it. opposed to people going to big corporations to, you know, make them feel more secure in the world. They take on their own security in the world. Kelly, walk me through your thinking, who did you most want to invest 25K in? And we're looking at this, of course, not through how much you love the product, but we service our LPs, launch fund four. We're raising right now. You can publicly go to launch.com slash F OUR for to see some information about the fund and maybe sign up if you're an accredited

or a qualified purchaser to get more information to meet with our team. And we make these investments from that pool. So for launch fund for investors, we want to see them get a return. Which one do you think is going to have the biggest return? Yeah, absolutely. I think Arctask is my choice.

One, just because I love SaaS, and it tends to have really great returns for our LPs. And also, I'm really familiar with this problem. And I've never seen a great solution other than humans finding other ways to talk about it and try to figure this out on their own. So adding some software here, I think, is a no-brainer for companies. The pricing is right.

And so I think they're going to really be able to scale quickly. Okay. So there we have it, folks. My two team members have two different views of who should get the money. I will say a couple of nice things about each company. Working backwards, I've said a bunch of stuff about opening sure. It's the most intriguing product. It's the most non-consensus product.

It's like, I don't want to say a hell Mary, but it's one of those products you haven't seen before. So you're like, huh, what if it does work, right? What if you could actually make this happen? Wow, it's a kind of novel in the world. In the way, same way that Airbnb or Lyft and Uber were novel in the world when they, you know, came out. And now it's kind of like, yeah, of course you take an Uber. Of course, you order DoorDash.

Of course, you get an Airbnb. But in the beginning of Airbnb, people are like, I'm never going to open insure. I'm not going to let people sleep on my couch. But group insurance through a platform sounds like a really great idea. working backwards to architect. I like the answer of, hey, these other platforms are going to do stuff

will be like a sidecar to it, will be a guide on the side like grammarly. And I feel like if you do something really well like that with AI and you're more focused on other folks, people would pay for it. And hey, you know, people pay for grammarly, even though there's a grammar checker in Microsoft Word

as but one example. So you have to be really, really good to carve out a niche. and then, you know, the initial company we saw a capsule, it's really hard to invest in social apps because they're lightning in a bottle. You have to strike gold. It's really like prospecting. You've got to try a couple of different things.

But man, the fact that this has product velocity and he's trying a couple of different things, if it does hit, he would have an outsized return. and so really like the fact that the founder is getting some early feedback and trying creative things. Is this the one? I think you're betting more on the jockey in this case and thinking, hey, maybe Kevin can figure something out here over time, right? So, hmm, this is very, very interesting. Hmm. It's very interesting how sometimes a founder's idea is just so unique that people want to,

back it because it intrigues investors. And then one of the other products is just seems like it's a clear path to making money. And that's really where we're left here. Architectas has a clear path to making money, but with a lot of competition. And I don't know that it has the same outlier impact that the other two companies do. And open insurer seems the most unique in the world. So my choice is open insure for this round. But I trust Kelly's judgment.

and I feel like architectas has made massive progress. I feel like Capsule could make a little more progress. And so Capsule is my not yet, but not a no. Keep grinding. I think it'll be close. And then I'd like to invest in companies two and three, Architectas and Open Insurance. So congratulations to two out of three founders.

I know I'm supposed to only do one here. But these are small checks to help you get off the ground with the goal of us investing more money. So for people wondering, we do this out of $1 million evaluation. You can see these are high-risk companies. I'm guessing some of them aren't even incorporated yet. One of them is pretty much a project.

And so two yeses. One, not yet, but I would like to see capsules progress and how that works in terms of getting traction. So well done, everybody. I'll bring everybody on here for a second. and if all of you could turn on your cameras one more time. And I would just like to get from you maybe if you had one thing,

that was your major takeaway from the founder university experience, what was it? So Kevin, one thing that you got from the program that you might encourage other people to join because you might learn X or Y, or you might attain A, B, or C. Sure. For me, it was the startup flywheel, just focusing on building a team, building a great product, talking to users, getting the feedback,

iterating the product and doing it all over again. It's a beautiful thing. And for me, it's a startup flywheel. Yeah. Product, you know, a team builds a product. That product delights customers. You don't really have to overthink it, folks. Okay.

And Julian, any thoughts about the program and what you got out of it? And if you were going to encourage somebody to go, why they should go. So we're going to tell a friend. Yeah, definitely. I've already advertised a majority of my friends that they should try to get into cohort five and sign up. So I think it's a wonderful program. And, like, really the number one thing for me was the community.

And I think that, like, you kind of mentioned this battleground of startups initially. But, like, on the other hand, it felt like a super inclusive and, like, generous community where people wanted others to succeed. And I think that's hard to find and that's very hard to create in a place that's, you know, like intuitively, like competitive. And so I think like that's something that, you know, I'll always be a part of. I assume I still have access to circle. Yeah. That is, uh, it's very, that's very nice to point out. We are keeping everybody in the community.

So every time you graduate, you get to say, we're using a piece of software called Circle right now, which I think is a great piece of software, um, for our building communities. And we're like, okay, are we supposed to take people out of the circle instance? Like, sort of like Slack, but with like notion built in, it's kind of like a hybrid piece of software. Um, should we take people out of it? it. And it's like, well, why would we do that? Let them hang out and share, you know, their progress. And if they shut down this company and they do another one, that's okay too. So, uh, and I do like that I'm hearing that it's everybody's super supportive. It gets more cutthroat as you go, right? As a company, when you get into an accelerator, you get into Techstar's,

Y Combinator, or even our company, our, um, accelerator, launch accelerator, where we put 100K into companies. You're one of seven in our program. I think it's one of 10 or 20 in tech stars and one of 200 and Y Combinator. Now, you're a lot of 10. you're in a dog in competition because it's a certain, whoa. Did you hear that? I saw it too. I was worried for you. That was just a giant piece of snow and ice that fell off my roof.

All right. There you have folks. But you have that support. That's going to be like a really interesting video. You have that like support. It's absolutely fantastic for, you know, and it goes away over time, as was sort of my point before the snow collapse. So we had an avalanche behind me.

And that's fantastic to have that moment of support when it's very nascent. And that's sort of what we're trying to do. All right, David, we're on in the corner here. Your thoughts on the program itself, but you got out of it. You're in a startup already, so you knew startup culture coming in, no problem. But what did you get out of it? If anything. You don't learn, working data data sort of, you don't learn, like, safe note terms or like

what you could deduct on tax. taxes for like travel and entertainment, things like that. So learning that just in the weekly sessions is just good for like a base level of knowledge. And then like I said, the midweek sessions where you can get in a breakout rooms, pitch your idea, hear others. Actually had spoken with Kevin and Julian before just in those in those rooms. And like early feedback on Open to Sure, it still has a lot to go. I can improve the UI a lot, but it's definitely way better than it used to be. And it's mostly due to feedback from those sessions and from close friends.

And then on top of it, it's really nice to be motivated by the initial tuition. And like that has been an option to explain that and how you took that because we really struggled over how to do this. We don't want to make money our founders. We want to invest in founders and make money long term, right? It's a long term great, not short term. But we noticed when we did things for free, people didn't appreciate them. but when we charge, people appreciated them. And so we're like, huh, if you come to all 12 sessions, pay 500 to secure a spot,

come to all 12 sessions, we'll give you a 500 bucks back. If you want it back. Some people just say, keep it. We just kind and kind, and nice and helps me pay for, you know, Prussian Kelly. But, yeah, maybe explain to me when you first saw what you thought of that. Yeah, like, it almost felt like putting money into escrow. And, like, you have an obligation. This is, you know, the sort of Damocles over your head.

and you have to fill your obligation in order to get your money out of escrow. It's still yours, but you have to do the right things in order to get it back. Basically, you get paid 50 bucks each week, 40, 50 bucks to come to learn about startups. And you just have to come for one and a half hours each week. Monday night session.

Then Thursdays is optional. All right, well, listen, great job. Once again, Kelly or Presh, how can people learn more about Founder University? Tell them about the podcast and tell them about when this class is starting. Can I go for it? All right. So for Founder University, go check out Founder. That is the URL. We do have a cohort starting April 24th. We are reviewing application. So it's not too late. Go ahead and get that in. And we'll get back to you in just a couple weeks here. From there, we also have a Founder University podcast, which is on YouTube under Founder University. There, we publish content from our team as well as some of our partners. And it's all meant to be really tactical help. And so if you're looking for something very specific,

We dive into a lot of different topics there, and a lot of those are some of the topics that we cover in the program as well. That's it. No, everybody apply. Go check out the podcast. If you can rate and subscribe and all that other nonsense on YouTube, that's helpful. But most of all, if you've got a great idea and you've got one or two friends who also are builders, that always helps. If you're a builder and you want to learn how to build and use no code platforms like bubble or other ones out there, you can do this, folks. take the dive.

We need more people to start companies and the reason we created Founder University and the reason we're doing these showcases here is to show people really that zero to one as Peter Thiel talks about, that inception moment, coming up with a great idea, making an MVP,

getting some initial feedback and then even getting some early stage investor to just give you a little bit of money because once you get a little bit of money from somebody like me or, you know, Peter Tio famously with Facebook, things can all of a sudden start

going in the right direction. And listen, people always ask for social proof. I know that people consider me social proof. And if I can splashy cashy make 125K investments a year, it's only 2.5 million of what I think will be a $50 million or $75 million launch fund for than I'm raising right now.

That's a good bet for me to make. Think about it to the founders who are here. What if I did 300 of those for $7.5 million out of a $50 million fund? It would only be 15% of the fund. I need to just get one of you to build a really great company and invest maybe two or three times in that same company. And it will make us world-class investors, top decile, 10, 20% investors, I would think. And we get to support hundreds of founders, both with investment and also with the program.

So really excited that you all came today and shared your vision. All three visions, amazing. And let's keep working together to get these companies and products out there to deliver. like customers. Keep grinding. It is a grind and it is a daily and a weekly grind. I think that's what we all can agree on. So I'm so proud of you also, Kelly and Prash, Charlie, who was with us previously, who created the program, did an amazing job. And now we're, you know, standing on his shoulder. So shout out to my guy Charlie, who I'm an LP in his new fund. And we'll see you all next time in this week and service. Bye bye.