This Week in Startups - TWiST500 Spotlight: The must-know startups from AI to robotics! | E2024

Starting point is 00:00:00 Whether you're an investor, a founder, just an enthusiast, it doesn't matter. We have a show that is packed with takeaways and insights for you today. So sit back, enjoy, and let's talk about the Twist 500. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by Open Phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. NetSuite. The number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform, giving you one source of truth.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netseweed.com slash twist. And Sprig, the product experience platform that generates AI-powered opportunities to continuously improve your product at scale. Visit sprig.com slash twist to book a demo and get a $75 gift card. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. My name is Alex. I'm your host today. Today, we have something a little bit special for you. We are doing a deep dive into the first 100 companies on the Twist 500 list. Now, Twist, of course, is a startup show. So talking about startups is what we do. But what is the Twist 500? If you haven't heard us talking about it on news or other recordings, it is our list of the top 500 private market companies. Essentially, we wanted to go out

Starting point is 00:01:27 there and find the top 1% of venture back startups. There's just over about 50,000 of them, so about 500 is about 1%. Now, how do we determine which companies should go on? This is not just a list of our favorite companies, though there is an element of that to it. I won't lie. Mostly, we're trying to figure out which companies are going to have the greatest financial impact. Essentially, which startups are going to become enormously successful, make lots of money for their founders, their employees, and their backers. Sure, that's not business. success per se, but is what we care about here on the show. So the Twist 500, the companies that we think are going to brush the private and public markets. Now, today we're going to take a look at a

Starting point is 00:02:06 couple of different categories, talk about some companies from each one that we think really highlight the innovation out there in the market today. And then at the end, we do have a special note from Jason Calcanus, so stay tuned for that. But to start, let's go through the Twist 500 categories that have the most companies. We are just over the 100 marks. We've done about 20% of the list, and thus far, 45 of those companies have landed in one of our various AI categories. We have data for AI, consumer AI, AI hardware, AI robotics, and as you'll see shortly, AI for developers. 19 end up in robotics, so there is some overlap between AI and robotics, given the use of

Starting point is 00:02:45 LLMs in modern humanoid robots. There's 12 in FinTech, 7 in cybersecurity, 5 in crypto, 4 HR Tech, 4, consumer media, for Enterprise SaaS, three in energy, two in space, and then the list goes on down from there. Of course, all those numbers and the ratios will change as we add the next 400 companies, but that's where we are with, I think, 104 today. With all that said, let's stick into our first category. It is AI for devs. If I'm being totally honest with you, it probably should have been the very first one that we did,

Starting point is 00:03:15 but we're filling in companies as we learn more about the market and why these companies matter. Now, the market here is developers, which are an enormously large labor class, that are also very expensive, and historically, they have been in short supply. So, applying AI technology to help developers do more, faster, and be more efficient is simply a good place to put this technology to work today. And we're seeing quite a lot of very cool companies bubble up, one of which is Kodo, Kodo, founded back in 2002, raised about $50 million, and it's backed by Sousa Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Vine Ventures, and others. Now, previously, this company was known as Codium AI, all one word.

Starting point is 00:03:57 So if you're confused, that's who Cotto is today. It's also a SaaS business. It's about $19 per user per month for the regular team package. So it's just SaaS, if you will. Why did they make the list, though? Why do we think that they stand out? Well, one, as I said earlier, help writing code is a huge product category. It's already monetized.

Starting point is 00:04:15 One thing we know, for example, is that GitHub's developer co-pilot hit the 100, million ARR mark last year, and GitHub's co-pilot accounted for 40% of GitHub's growth more recently over at Microsoft. So people really want this. Also, what it does here, it tries to apply AI to more than just writing code. Coda will actually help you write, test, and then integrate the code that it kicks out, so we're not just talking about yet another way to have something else write your syntax for you. Essentially, I think this company is taking code gen to the next level, recently raised capital, very cool, and one to watch. Next up, a startup in the AI for Devs category that has a name that I think is evocative of what it wants

Starting point is 00:04:54 you to be able to be when you use it, and that is Hoolside. This is a relatively new company founded in 2003, aka last year, and it has already raised over $600 million. That's capital from Rudpoint and Felizis and Bane Capital Ventures, and it recently put together a $500 million Series B, which is an enormous sum of money even for 2021, and it's not. Other things to keep in mind with this company, it does have a pedigree on the founder's side that did make it stand out for us. One of PoolSize founders is Jason Warner, worked at Redpoint for a couple of years, but also was the CTO at GitHub for four. So one of the founders here has a little bit of a pedigree when it comes to building developer tooling. PoolSight also wants to do a lot.

Starting point is 00:05:41 It's building its own models. It's offering AI fine-tuning and also using its technology on customers' own stacks so that way they can run the stack. the Poolside built on their own hardware. That solves some data privacy concerns, I think. And also, one last thing. That massive Series B is, sure, it's a lot of capital, but it's not just operating capital. To me, that amount of money at this stage kind of smells like they might do some acquisitions. Roll up some smaller players, get some good talent, some customers. You can see the AI for Dev's category going through some consolidation, and you'll want to have a checkbook when it does, and that's by Poolside is one of our TwistfulFunders companies to watch.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Let's turn the page on AI for developers and instead focus our attention down to AI infrastructure, or AI infrastructure, if you want to say the whole thing. Now, when we think about this, we often think about Google Cloud Compute. We often think about Azure. We think about AWS. The major platform as-a-service cloud providers out there that also offer some AI-related tooling. Well, there's an entire new category of companies out there called the Neo-Clouds that are focused on, in some cases, lots of GPUs or other AI training, related chipsets, they offer up to companies that want that more specialized cloud approach. The fact that many major cloud providers are occasionally having some supply constraints also does impact these companies. But let's talk about Cor Weef, a company that I think embodies the

Starting point is 00:07:02 Neo-Cloud approach and also has raised more money than God. All right. So Corweave, founded back in 2017, capital raised to date, it's a little bit hard to nail down because there's equity and there's debt and there's secondaries, but let's say $12, $12 or $13 billion. And of that, at least a billion dollars is equity and there's at least $10 billion worth of debt. So this is a company that is incredibly well funded. And that makes sense because if you're going to build a GPU cloud, you're going to have to buy a lot of GPUs and a lot of racks and a lot of cables and a lot of switches and a lot

Starting point is 00:07:36 of load balancers. It's a lot of work to build data centers, even if you're just focused on one particular use case. So lots of capital. really cool company. It's not alone, there are Landlabs and Crusoe in the larger NeoCloud list according to semi-analysis, but this is a company that is growing quickly. So recently, Cisco tried to buy in via a secondary. I'm not sure if that closed, but the company's valuation ticked higher in that round that was at least being planned to $23 billion. That tells you this thing is growing.

Starting point is 00:08:05 You don't get that price today with a lot of revenue growth behind you. Having Cisco on board could actually really help Corweave in more ways than just providing some funds, perhaps. Cisco makes a lot of networking hardware, and I presume that the company is going to need a lot of it. Elsewhere, a Corweave backer, Magnitar Capital, has put together a new AI fund that is tied to Corweave's offerings, that's super cool, and should help Corweave have access to the next generation, at least in part, of Gen. AI startups that want to use its compute power. So to summarize, huge market, tons of capital, cool corporate backing, and even has an end with a venture capital group. This is Corleave. I love it. All right, everybody, I'm on the road. I mean, all the time, right? And that means

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Starting point is 00:09:32 You want to have everything tight. An open phone will make it tight and tight is right in this regard. shared phone numbers are also awesome for things like customer support or when we run events we like to have a field phone number so hey if you're a VIP and you're at the liquidity conference just call that number open phone is super affordable it's just $13 a month twist listeners get an extra 20% off because they got you covered openphone.com slash twist and what if you got an existing phone number no problem open phone's going to pour them over at no extra cost head over to openphone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20% off. If you want to hear more from Cor Weave, we actually had Brandon McBee join Jason on the show. That was episode 1925. There will be a hyperlink in the show notes below. Hit that for more. Next up, we're talking about data for AI. Now, if you've listened to the show in the last couple of months, you heard us talk about

Starting point is 00:10:23 the copyright wars, data labeling. There's a lot going on here. It's a big and burgeoning sector, also for startups and incumbents, yes. But here are two companies that we think really do stand out. The first one is Tollbet. This is a company that was founded back in 2003. To my knowledge, it's only raised $7 million to date

Starting point is 00:10:42 from Lair HiPou, AIX, Finchers, Sunflower Capital Partners in there as well. Not a lot of money. This is an early-stage company, but we think Tolbitt's model is fantastic. So, Tolbit wants to be an aggregator between individual content owners online and AI model companies that want to have access to their data.

Starting point is 00:11:01 If you're Bob and you have a website, You don't have enough scale, probably, to actually cut a deal with Open AI the way that, I don't know, Axel Springer can. But with Tollbit, you could opt into a larger pool, perhaps, and then earn some money for your content instead of just having it scraped away from you. It's a cool model. We absolutely love it. There's another company called Human Native that's doing a similar thing. So both companies are companies to watch. So why does this data matter?

Starting point is 00:11:27 Well, if you're going to build an AI model that knows what's going on, it has to be aware of what has been written recently. news, analysis, all that sort of thing. The issue is if you go out there and just take it, often that information ends up used in models that could be replacements for the original websites, and then you end up kind of cutting off your own tail, if you will. So there needs to be a circular flow of value here. And the idea is that quite a lot of the value from AI, a fraction of it, will accrue to the people who provide the data that keep the models running. So a toll bit sits in the middle of there, kind of like a toll booth, if you will. But the idea here is more equitable value exchange to ensure a rich field of data for future AI models, so that way they don't

Starting point is 00:12:08 get stupider over time with more synthetic data and less human data. If you want even more on all things Tolbit, we did have both Olivia and Toshit, two of the founders, on the show. That's episode 1989, also the year of my birth, also a great Taylor Swift album, so go check that out if you want more on Tullbit. Now, if Toulbit is a very small company, an early stage startup, single-digit millions raised, scale AI is on the other side of the spectrum. This is a very late stage company. It has raised $1.6 billion to date that we know of. And it most recently raised a $1 billion series F that was led by Excel. That put a $13.8 billion valuation on the company. Why is it worth so much? Well, on one hand, fast revenue growth. The company generated $400 million for the revenue in the

Starting point is 00:12:55 first half of this year, according to the information. And that's up Forex from the same period of That's the type of revenue growth that investors want to see at a series A company, let alone one that recently raised a series F. Now, why is it able to grow so quickly? Well, it's because scale got to start helping with data labeling. Essentially having the data that goes into AI models be properly tagged. This means smarter models, I presume, and perhaps faster inference. There's a lot that goes on in there that I'm not going to pretend to be able to explain to you succinctly. But since that beginning, Scale AI has expanded its rennet.

Starting point is 00:13:29 So it still does data labeling work, but also offers RLHF, data curation services, and pre-built apps for enterprise companies to use along with their own data. So scale's gotten quite big. It's doing a lot of that, I think, picks and shovels work inside of the AI world, the unsexy stuff that doesn't get quite as many headlines, but is very important to enterprise adoption. So here's a company, late stage I know, but we do think for its early investors, it's going to absolutely crush. The question is, how well will it do for its series F investors?

Starting point is 00:13:56 We'll see. but scale AI, when it does go public, is going to make a splash. Now, the entire world of startups is not just software. There's an entire cohort of companies out there that are building with gears and sensors. Yes, they're building robots. Now, when we talk about robotics today, we are talking about AI to some degree because there's an entire class of startups out there that want to build general purpose humanoid robotics.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Essentially robots that look roughly like a human. They've got legs, they've got arms, they've got things that grab, you know, they look like us. But to be a general purpose robot, you can't really have a very set of things that you can do. Instead, you need to take voice commands and be a little bit more flexible and adaptable. Well, as it turns out, LLMs fit pretty neatly into there, and we're just starting to see what the fusion of humanoid robotics advancements and modern AI techniques together look like. That brings us to the first company I want to highlight from robotics for the Twist 500, and that is figure. Now, they are working, as you might have guessed, in humanoid robotics for

Starting point is 00:14:56 general applications. They've been at this since 2022. They have raised, by my understanding, about $854 million for this project. And the backer, as you'll note, coming kind of two different varieties. Hear me out. Parkway venture capital, Intel Capital, Manhattan Venture Partners, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Samsung. So there's a mix of industry, corporate, strategic money in there, and some traditional venture capital as well. But the reason why I think figure stands out from the other companies that we've looked at here is, sure, it's raised a lot of money, sure, it has a lot of great backers, but its technology appears to be advancing quickly. The figure O2, its second generation robot, was announced in August, and it's already done

Starting point is 00:15:37 some testing inside of a B&W factory, so it actually has some on-the-job experience. We're still a long ways, I think, from these robots showing up in my house, for example, at a price point that makes sense, but you can see industrial applications coming quite a lot sooner. And figure is probably going to be one of those companies that gets there first. Big market opportunity, big backing, big dreams. The question now is just one of execution, but figure could be enormous. But if on one hand we have general-purpose humanoid robots, on the other hand, we have very specific application, non-humanoid robots. And these are often rather cute, it turns out. This brings us to one of my favorite companies in the market today. It's dusty robotics.

Starting point is 00:16:19 Founded back in 2018, to my knowledge, $69 million raised from Baseline Ventures, next-gen-venture partners, Canadian partners, and scale venture partners. So a pretty good VC pedigree there, what does it do? Dusty has made a small wheeled robot that goes around job sites and marks out plans. Yep, that's what it does. Turns out this is a simply enormous market and is one that has seen a lot of demand for what Dusty can do, because it doesn't just lay out factories or warehouses, it turns out as Dusty's robots have some experience also helping set up data centers.

Starting point is 00:16:54 And if you listen to the show, you know, we're building a lot of those as a species, so having technology to help them get set up sooner is going to be huge. And we even have a little bit of a hint that Dusty is seeing some pretty large contracts. On a blog post on the Dusty Robotics corporate blog, the company said that it had landed a seven-figure deal after some back and forth about if its technology actually work. Turns out the tech did work and then it led to a huge contract. The point is, if it's ever landing seven-feederate contracts, Dusty is really onto something.

Starting point is 00:17:23 So I think this company could do very, very well. No, it won't have a splash like Open AI when it does go public. But the industrial world and the application world for robots, quite large. I think Dusty's a big one, and I think it could go all the way. We actually talked about Dusty on our show all about construction tech startups. So now you can see why. there's some overlap between our different categories, but it's dusty robotics. They make a robot. So we're putting them today in the robotic section. But 1979, if you want more.

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Starting point is 00:18:57 Now let's talk about a group of companies that were the hottest back in 2021, or at least close to it, and have since seen their hype die down faster than a rug pull at a crypto meme coin. Yeah, talking about fintech. Sure, today, the sector is, out of favor, you might say, but there are some companies that are still working on fintech

Starting point is 00:19:16 issues that we think are absolutely awesome, and in one case at least, they're pretty close to going in public, which means we're about to learn quite a lot more about them. Let's talk about fintech. I have two companies for you. First up is Circle. This is the company that is behind the USDC Stablecoin. You actually might recall we had the CEO, Jeremy Aller, on the show not too long ago. That was episode 2004, if you're curious. Circle has raised over a billion dollars. It nearly went out twice with the SPAC, ended up not doing that, raising more capital, and now it is looking to go out in a traditional IPO. Why do we care about a crypto company in 2024? Well, as it turns out, stable coins are today the killer crypto use case. They frankly are. People love them

Starting point is 00:19:58 around the world because it gives them access to dollars digitally in their home market where they might not be able to access the greenback in more traditional ways. So essentially, the argument that crypto is going to be used to democratize finance has partially come true. And USC, the stablecoin in question, has seen a lot of growth recently. So there's more of them out there now, which implies demand. What matters to us is we're still today in a much higher interest rate environment than we were a couple years ago. And that means that all the cash, that circle is sitting on thanks to its USDC back reserves, is now quite a lot more lucrative. So not only are we seen stablecoins do well in the market, stablecoins are probably also doing

Starting point is 00:20:37 well for the companies behind them. And that's why Circle is a standout. Look to see more from it, including Eurostable coins and that sort of thing, but today, USDC, it's a big darn deal. Sticking to Fintech, there's one more company that I wanted to highlight for you today, and it's Altruist, was founded back in 2008, it's raised about $450 million, and capital came from Inside Partners, Vinrock Acconic Growth, and others. What does it do? Now, you've promised, no falling asleep will I explain this to you, okay? All right, fair enough. Alturist builds software tools for RIAs or registered investment advisors. Why did that make the list? It's not just the fact that it raised a lot of money, though that always is an interesting signal. No, we like

Starting point is 00:21:17 altruist because it grew 550% in 2003 and also tripled its AUM or assets under management, 3x two years in a row. That is the exact type of growth you want to see from a startup that has found a part of the market that was underserved and is bringing something to it. In the case of Altruists, clearly it's supporting RAs that want to go independent, take their book of business with them, and take better care of their clients. There's a lot of money sloshing around the individual wealth space, so they have a lot of room to grow. It's just cool to see a kind of traditional, I don't know, SaaS company doing this well in this era because SaaS is a little bit out of favor too. So a fintech SaaS company doing well, that's a shocker. Altruist is probably going to go public.

Starting point is 00:22:00 How about that? Now, going public in normal times isn't that big of a deal. It's traditional. It's what companies did. They were founded. They raised venture capital. They grew. They were in public at the end.

Starting point is 00:22:10 That's broken down in recent years. So when I say, hey, here's a unicorn that might go public. It actually matters for quite a lot. We've seen such little liquidity through the IPO market, that exit window in recent years, that venture capitalists are screaming. So if altruists can go out, well, all those venture firms that I mentioned above will be very happy to see it. Capital recycling, y'all, it's a big deal.

Starting point is 00:22:33 Let's put Fintech aside because I know. you're like, oh my gosh, Alex, let's move on. How about cybersecurity? One thing that I have noticed in the last couple of years is that it seems that the frequency we talk about major breaches has gone up and down, up in frequency and down market. It seems that more and more companies are discovering that they are actually a cyber risk. It's not just the government.

Starting point is 00:22:56 It's not just Microsoft. It's probably also your bakery, your water treatment plan, your utility, etc. In other words, cybersecurity is something that everyone needs. not just the largest companies. And that's why Huntress is on the Twist 500. Huntress is a company, we actually did have them on the show. So if you want to hear from CEO Kyle Hensloven, he was on episode 1989 as well. That was a banger of an episode, if I do say so myself. But Huntress is cybersecurity for SMBs. And that work has seen it raised $310 million from Blue Venture investors, Forge Point Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and

Starting point is 00:23:30 the inimitable Kleiner Herkins. Great investors and a lot of capital raised is not enough to make it armed to the Twist 500. Why does Huntress matter to us? Well, we care about Huntress because it showed 70% revenue growth in each of the last two years, and it has crossed the $100 million ARR threshold. That means it's IPO scale and growing more than quickly enough to go public. Also, cybersecurity companies have very strong public market multiples right now. That means that when Huntress does decide to exit via an acquisition or an IPO, it's actually got a pretty good set of public comps to be weighed against. That's another thing in the company's favor. Now, finally, this is a slightly counter-narrative business because startups tend to start.

Starting point is 00:24:12 They sell to small or mid-sized customers, and then they work their way up the enterprise stack, trying to get ever larger contracts, longer contracts, and just bigger customers. It's called going up market. In this case, though, Huntress is talking about smaller customers, the SMBs that are famous for churning all the time. And yet, as we just saw, it's growing like a wheat and has reached real scale. So clearly Huntress has cracked the S&B market in a very material way for a key market. That's going to make a great business. And also, it could lead to better cybersecurity at SMBs.

Starting point is 00:24:42 So your credit card information might finally be safe. Sticking to cybersecurity, one of the companies that we talked about the absolute most this year as an industry is whiz. They do cloud security, essentially security for all things that your company does in the cloud, which, given the long progress of the digital transformation movement, means why, a lot of the overall economy. And WIS has grown very quickly, both in terms of capital raised and revenue. Let's talk about capital in first. WIS has raised about $2 billion as far as I can tell, including money from Salesforce ventures, Green Oaks, Insight, Index, Lightspeat, and Dreson,

Starting point is 00:25:19 and Thrive. That's kind of a murderer's row of venture capital firms, but you have to add up a whole lot of checks to get to $2 billion. Now, they made the list, though, not just because of their backers once again, or the money they've raised, but because WIS has one of the fastest revenue growth histories I've ever seen in any business ever. So they reached $100 million in ARR in August of 2022. Then they reached $350 million worth of ARR at the end of 2023, and they hit $500 million in the middle of this year. To get to that first $100 million of ARR, 18 months, 18 months. That's it. I actually don't know how to explain that in simpler terms, but it's just, It's such a crazy, small amount of time to reach such scale.

Starting point is 00:26:00 That's why Wiz was poached by Google. Google wanted to offer them $23 billion. Wiz said maybe, and then instead, eh, we're going to go public. This is why it's my favorite company. They had disclosed financial numbers. They turned down an acquisition deal. They say they want to go public soon. They want to hit a billion in error first.

Starting point is 00:26:17 I love it. Do I know a lot about cloud security? Friends? No, not going to lie. I cannot fix your AWS instance. Don't call me. But in this case, I can see a business that has insane product market it and is going to crush when it does go out. So whiz, cybersecurity, yet another winner. Look, we can't

Starting point is 00:26:32 not talk about crypto companies because there are a few on the TOS 500 list. And let's be clear, I'm not a hater. I'm just a skeptical person by niche. But there are a couple companies that we have said, okay, there's enough going on here that we think they have a pretty viable shot at an ounce-sized outcome, so they go on the list. I'm going to give you one name, and it's forecaster. So this is a company. It's a crypto-based social network. It's raised $180 million total. raised 30 million and then 150 million more in a mess of round that was led by paradigm. And that actually, if I recall correctly, made Farcaster a unicorn. So this is a big company.

Starting point is 00:27:07 So there's a lot of money. It should be doing quite well. Earlier, I said that stable coins have proven themselves as the kind of winning use case for crypto today. There isn't quite yet a non-financial winning use case for crypto. NFTs kind of filled in that niche, but didn't actually quite pan out the way people hoped. And as it turned out, that was mostly speculation anyway. But what Farcaster has built? Is a crypto social network that is doing reasonably well?

Starting point is 00:27:32 I check its charts all the time. It has nearly 700,000 total users. And if I recall the charts from Dune correctly, yeah, 60, 70,000 daily active users. Is it huge? No. But crypto does have quite a lot of fans. There's a big ecosystem built up around it.

Starting point is 00:27:47 So you can kind of see that if one social network on the blockchain does take off, it could accrete to itself a lot of value over time. That's my guess of why Farcaster is raising this. kind of money, why investors believe in it, and why people want to play with it. I'm still on Twitter, where apparently I'm going to die. But if I was young, maybe I would join Farcaster and hang out with all the cool kids. One to watch, we'll see how it goes. This is a more speculative bet on the Twist 500, but who's afraid of a wager? Before we go, I can't help but throw in just a couple more names. It was so hard to narrow down from over 100 to just a handful to

Starting point is 00:28:21 share with you. So do go check out Twist500.com, and there's a way to suggest names, or you can just email me, AlexW at launch.co. We're always looking to learn more about new companies. But here are a couple more just for you. First up, Harvey AI. We talked about earlier how AI has seen a lot of promise in the developer space. Well, also in the legal space. What does a lot of writing and ingesting the documents?

Starting point is 00:28:44 The legal profession. Ergo, AI is going to be a hot fit. Harvey AI reached 10 million ARR. I think it was last December. Don't know how big it is today, but a lot of investors at least can be very, very excited about what it is building. so I presume it's seen quick growth this year as well. Now, also, we have Kojo in the construction tech space.

Starting point is 00:29:02 I love that company. Give them a look. And then there's Albedo Space, a company that I have tracked since its very first Y Combinator Demo Day appearance. I love this company. They want to have satellites in space that go at a very low orbit to take high-res images of the planet that they didn't serve to you as a service. The space economy is going to be absolutely awesome. If you want more on that, we just talked the CEO of Radiant Aerospace recently, all about

Starting point is 00:29:26 getting things up into orbit, even cheaper, even faster, and that one involves a kind of rocket-powered minivan, so check it out. There's lots more to come. The Twist 500 still needs 400 more names. We are adding companies every single week. We often do it on the news show, so tune in live, we're always on YouTube. And also in the Twist 500 newsletter, previously the ticker. If you don't get that, you really are missing out. And if you want to just take a look at the whole list for yourself, well, twist500.com, we have all the names there and we love to hear from you. All right, I'm Alex. been the Twist 500, October 24 spotlight, and I'm stoked to come back and do with you again as soon as we get to company number 200. I'll see you then. Okay, we all want to build products that

Starting point is 00:30:07 users love, and we all understand in the startup game, it's product market fit. That is the goal. But increasing conversions and boosting engagement, well, you've got to really understand your users in order to do that, right? And that's something you're not going to get just from analytics. Well, let me tell you about Sprigg. It's a product experience platform that generates a powered opportunities to continuously improve your product at scale. Here's how it works. Sprigg captures your product experience in real time, and they do this with heat maps, replay, surveys, and feedback studies.

Starting point is 00:30:40 So you put all that together, right? You're seeing where people are clicking, you're watching how they're using your app or your product. Then Spriggs' industry-leading AI instantly analyzes all of your product experience data to generate real-time insights, providing actionable product recommendations. That's going to allow you to drive revenue, increase retention, whatever your goals are, and most of all, improve user satisfaction with your product. So, CY top product teams at Figma and Notion are already using Spriggs AI to unlock new opportunities at scale.

Starting point is 00:31:11 Visit sprig.com slash twist to book a demo and get a $75 gift card. That's sprig.com slash twist. Okay, I host every six months or so a workshop called Angel University, and this is where I teach. people how to become professional angel investors. And the next time I'm teaching the course is on November 6th. And I teach it with my pal, Mike Savina. He's a partner here at launch, one of my best friends. And it's based on my book, but everything I've learned since then. Obviously, you know, I've invested in over 400 startups. And if you've met me for more than five minutes, you know that Uber, Robin Hoodcom are amongst the ones that I've hit that have gone supernova. In fact, Uber is considered the greatest investment over the last decade or two in Silicon Valley. Robin Hood, you know, doing fantastic as well. And Com, not yet public, but another great company. In this course, I teach you the fundamentals, my personal philosophy, and then I compare and contrast it to what other people say. And the most important thing is how do you source and decide which companies to invest in? And then how to evaluate those companies? I have a criteria. I have 13

Starting point is 00:32:16 reasons to invest in a company, and about 30 reasons to not invest in them. We call those pink or red flags. Pink flag, and it's something you can clean up. Maybe the cap table is a little messy. you know, red flag could be, you know, a patent lawsuit that you don't think they could ever get out from under. And when we talk about those criteria for when you're picking a company, we'll also go into adding value as an investor in startup and then portfolio construction scenarios. Like how many investments do you need to have a chance at hitting an outlier? If you haven't read the power law, you don't know what the power of law is, the Pareto principle. Go ahead and look it up. We talk about securing pro rata, very important, getting investor updates,

Starting point is 00:32:53 It's what information rights are and just so much more. We had 1,200 individuals join us for this workshop last year. We did four of them, so 300 people at each. Many of these accredited investors have also joined my angel investing syndicate, which is the syndicate.com, and you get to see our deal flow. The workshop is open to all investors, whether you're retail or accredited. And all the proceeds of this go to charity. You can see a full list of the donations we've given at angel.

Starting point is 00:33:19 Dot University slash charity. You can sign up at angel. dot university. So whether you're an accredited investor or non-accredited or you're just interested in learning, visit angel dot university to learn more and register. Again, the next class is November 6th. I'm going to be moving to twice a year for this because my schedule is very busy. So if you don't get in on November 6th, you're going to have to wait six months, clear your schedule unless it's something really important for your family. You can take a couple hours and learn about how I make decisions and our team make decisions on which of these early startups to invest in. It's not like investing in public

Starting point is 00:33:52 companies where you can see how many subscribers Netflix has or how many Uber rides were taken or how many DoorDash deliveries occurred last quarter versus a year ago. No, this is a whole different set of criteria when you're dealing with a company in years one or two or even in year zero. So I hope you come. It's for a good cause. Again, angel.com. University slash charity to see where all the proceeds go. I'm very proud of the work we've done, Mike and I. the team over the last, I don't know, six or seven years of doing this. We've inspired people to find this new career. People say it's changed their lives and they love being an angel investor. A lot of times it's young people who sold their company or it's young people who are professionals

Starting point is 00:34:30 making a little bit of money. They're making 200 grand or 300 grand working at Google or something. And they just want to learn how to do this. And then all of a sudden it becomes a path to becoming a venture capitalist. Because think about that. If you have no venture capital experience and then you go apply to be a venture capitalist and then I apply and I've made 15 angel investments and two of them have done well and the founders speak highly of me. Who's the venture capital is going to hire? The person who took the initiative to make 15 bets or the person who just wants to be given a chance, right? You're to pick the person with more real world experience. And then, you know, a lot of people who are retired in post money, they're 50, 60, 70 years old and they're sitting there at home on a mountain of cash and they want

Starting point is 00:35:10 to do something fun. We know it's a lot of fun to hang out with people who want to change. the world. They're called entrepreneurs. And they're lunatics in the best sense of the word. They have crazy dreams, crazy ideas. And when you're an investor, an angel investor, you get to spend time with them. But you don't have to drag yourself to an office. You don't have to put in 60 hours a week. You can put in five hours a week. You can put in 50 hours a week or anything in between being an angel investor. You make your own schedule. You meet the most interesting people in the world. Sometimes you hit a big winner. Sometimes you lose. And that makes it just so exciting. And so I think it's like a better pursuit than going to Vegas and playing blackjack or betting on sports. I love the idea of betting on

Starting point is 00:35:47 startups because you get all these non-financial rewards that come with it, which is you get to see where the world's headed. You get to see and you get to hang out with inspiring people and see their plans to change the world. It's just an awesome, fun career and pursuit hobby. However you want to look at it. I hope you come, angel.university.

This Week in Startups - TWiST500 Spotlight: The must-know startups from AI to robotics! | E2024

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