This Week in Startups - Viral fundraising tactics with Rewind AI’s Dan Siroker + How to build a strong brand | E1745

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

This Week in Startups is presented by: Merge. Let your developers get back to their core product. Merge is a single API to add hundreds of integrations to your app. Integrate up to 3 customers for free today at http://merge.dev/twist. Embroker. The Embroker 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 at http://embroker.com/twist. While you’re there, get an extra 10% off using offer code TWIST. Hyperice. Warm up and recover faster with the Hypervolt 2 massage gun and Normatec compression therapy boots. Save $50 off your order of $150 or more with code TWIST50 at checkout on http://hyperice.com Today’s show: Rewind AI CEO and Co-Founder Dan Siroker joins Jason to break down his viral fundraising strategy before diving into a demo of Rewind’s AI software (1:27). Then, Scott Bair of Lunour gives a talk on how to build a strong brand, where he dives into topics like branding, creating a logo and more! (34:49) Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/dsiroker Check out Rewind: https://www.rewind.ai Time stamps: (0:00) Dan Siroker joins Jason  (1:27) Dan discusses his method of raising capital publicly and the valuation they settled on (9:08) Merge - Integrate up to 3 customers for free today at ⁠https://merge.dev/twist (10:38) Advice for founders taking a high valuation, choosing the right firm, and differentiating Rewind AI from file search (19:03) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at ⁠https://Embroker.com/twist (20:35) Dan demos Rewind AI (25:04) Privacy concerns, dealing with legal issues, and Rewind’s enterprise use cases  (33:21) Hyperice - Get $50 off your order of $150 or more with code TWIST50 at ⁠http://hyperice.com/ (34:49) How to build a strong brand with Scott Bair Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo & Apply for Funding Buy ANGEL Great recent interviews: Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

My first advice would be not to fixate too much on valuation. I know you've asked a lot of questions on that. It was actually not really the critical thing I was focused on here. It was really around the firm and partnership. Sure. You've also focused on the next one or two years. I'm thinking much longer time horizon, and that's one of the reasons I chose NEA. Their fund structure is very unique.

They have a 15-year fund, not a 10-year fund. They're very often buying at the IPO, not selling. So that horizon is kind of what I was really looking for, as somebody who wants to be doing this with me for a while. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Merge. Let your developers get back to their core product. Merge is a single API to add hundreds of integrations to your app. Integrate up to three customers for free today at merge.dev slash twist.

In Broker's startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today. Adambroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And Hyperice, warm up and recover faster with the Hypervolt 2 massage gun and NormaTech compression therapy boots. Save $50 off your order of $150 or more with code Twist 50 at checkout at hyperice.com.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the program. We've got an interesting interview lined up for you today. I'm joined by, Dan. Seroca. He is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind AI. It's been viral for a tweet about how he raised his last round of capital. Dan, welcome to the program. Explain how you raised money for your startup. This is the most innovative thing I've seen in a long time, and I've been around a long time. Thank you. Well, thanks for having to meet Jason. We did something a little unconventional, which is we put our investor presentation out publicly. And the reason to do that was inspired by a couple of factors. One was that, you know, AI is hot right now.

I don't know if you got the memo. And we've been getting inundated by investors who want to meet. And I realized that instead of just meeting with folks and repeating myself, it'd be much more efficient to share what we've been doing. The biggest reason we thought that would make sense was because it would really build a lot of trust with customers. as we'll talk about my product really requires customers to trust us. We take a very privacy-first approach to how we solve the problem. And by sharing our metrics, our deck publicly, we thought at minimum it would build some customer trust. Turns out it also got us a great outcome in terms of the fundraise as well.

Got it. So you raised a couple hundred million dollars in your career. You're not a first-time founder. And you put the pitch out publicly. it got viewed 1.7 million times on Twitter. You received over a thousand preliminary offers to invest and that led to 170 committed offers.

What's the definition of a committed offer? Basically, you know, I told them, this is binding. So I may make sure. Oh, okay. Yeah, a handshake protocol. Yeah, exactly. Or a term sheet, one or the other.

Yeah. Got it. And you did spend back to Mac meetings, getting to know the investors, finding the right fit. That's what you should do. You did reference checks. That's what you should do. You did diligence. Well, that's great stuff. You did your homework.

And now, you turned down offers from 61 investors who offered valuations over $350 million for your startup. Your startup has how many employees and how much revenue? I think you disclosed this. Yeah, we have 15 employees and about $700,000 in annual

recurring revenue. Okay. So, if we rounded that up to a million. This was like a or so. It would be a 400x, which is absurd. valuation. You got offered 400 times, not bottom line, but top line revenue. The public markets are trading at two, three, four, five times top line and maybe at 12 multiple on PE. So how do you justify such an outrage as valuation? Yeah, I mean, part of it is just the growth rate. I mean, we launched November of last year, publicly, end of December. So we got to about a million in just a few months. Our market is massive, too.

We serve basically all knowledge workers. And the way we've priced our product, we feel like we can have ultimately a $32 billion error market. So in the grand scheme of things, yeah, you're right, the multiple is pretty high today. But the rate of growth we have, the huge opportunity to. It's absurd. It's unprecedented. And just to be clear, we're not, we didn't take the highest offer either.

I mean, we definitely had... Oh, who's the highest offer? We had over 20 offers over a billion. Oh, my God. So a thousand X revenue. Right, yeah. And so... Was this for like legitimate firms?

Well, I mean, yeah, these are all legitimate folks. You know, part of it. They just wanted to be, you know, they believed. And the thing that encouraged me most is most of the higher prices came from active users of the product. Oh, okay. So I think that really reflected well, I hope, on the value. they see we're creating. And what we're doing is very new.

You know, it's not something people are familiar with. It's not a known category. And you went with Eddie A, great firm, new enterprise associates. They are a legendary firm that's been around for probably three or four decades, I think. They're a legit, legit firm. So how long did this whole fundraising process take? Yeah, it took about three weeks between the first public pitch. and signing a term sheet.

So that was pretty fast. In my experience, even when things are going, well, it usually doesn't go that fast. That's another major benefit of doing it all in public is you can sequence it all.

I even tweeted out on my calendar for a week there was pretty crazy. And the good news about also doing in public is that most of those meetings are actually really productive. They're not just me repeating myself.

They're really getting to know the investor. I want to be doing what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. So the relationship I build in this round will be one I have for decades. How much is your is? 12 million is what NIA is investing.

Oh, right. Are you going to, with all these other folks, are you going to selectively include people you think would be accretive to the cap table of the company? Yeah, yeah, we are doing that. We're doing using an angelist roll-up vehicle, so it makes that very easy to do. Sure. Yeah, we are going to have some, well, you know, several of folks obviously feel really good that, you know, they offered evaluation much higher and we're going to let them in at 350. We think that's the fair thing to do. Fantastic.

And, you know, I hope is to make them all look really good. And while today that may be a high valuation, I hope in the grand scheme of things, this will be the best time to get in on the deal. You're going to need to grow into that valuation. What do you think your revenue needs to be to justify that valuation? Well, it's a combination of revenue and growth rate. I think if we sustain the growth rate we have, you know, frankly, if we keep growing the way we've been growing, we'll be bigger than Apple soon.

So at some point, I mean, that's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, I know. Insane and deranged. but if you expect to 10x year over year, your revenue? I think so. I think that's reasonable. You know, we have two major launches. I just take 10X randomly.

Is that the actual expectation in the target? What do you plan to do year over year? Yeah. So today we've only launched on Apple Silicon, so Max, that are the newest version that you can buy. Sure. Later this year, we're launching on iPhone and Windows and much rumored Apple glasses. And so those will be platforms that I think will dramatically increase the market size.

Today, we're kind of a niche product for tech enthusiasts. We've got the latest and greatest. Once you move to those. Do you actually have a number you want to hit in 2024 that you share it in the deck? We don't. No, we have not. Given the uncertainty on how those platforms, you know, Windows, for example, today, we got more people trying to download our product on Windows than on Mac.

We don't even have a Windows product. So we know that we'll at least double our, you know, incoming growth. So 10 times would be $7,000, $3.50. You're still at 50 times revenue rent. So 50 times top line. And so if you did, if then you tripled, which, you know, when you get bigger numbers, it's harder. So then if you tripled and you hit 21 or, you know, even if you, let's give you a 5x, you get to 35 and now you'd be 10 times revenue in 2025. So they'd be giving you credit for two extraordinary years of growth in my mind.

I think 10 times revenue is the reasonable number in the startup. That's what I see doing this for a living. 10 times is what I'm seeing. So normally your startup valuation would be 7 to 15 in a logical world without an AI bump like this or incredible speed. So this is, you've got to thread the needle here. You better 10x that or else you're going to have

the most traumatic downround in history. And now you've set yourself up for complete and utter scrutiny. Closing big enterprise deals is never easy. The last thing you want to do is slow down your sales team. because of a lack of integrations in your product. And you know, B2B buyers, they expect integrations. You're a startup founder. You're building B2B software.

They expect people management tools to work seamlessly with the payroll provider, to work with your CRM, to work with the accounting software. All this stuff has to be integrated in 2023 and going forward. And if it doesn't, it's a huge problem. You're probably going to lose the customer, right? But integrations, as you know, they're brutal to implement and they take a long time and you have to maintain them. What if there was a better solution?

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customers use. So they're going to give you three linked accounts for free today at merge.dev slash twist. Again, you get three linked accounts for free already at merge.dev slash twist. Check it out. It is a game changer. For founders who are listening, what is your caution? for them in terms of, because you must have people saying like, oh, I should do this too. Do you have any, as a seasoned founder, cautions or guardrails here in terms of, because you didn't take the billion dollar valuation, so you left two thirds on the table. You diluted yourself two thirds more than you could have. So you're trying to be reasonably thoughtful about this as extraordinary and insane as this

valuation is. So what's your advice to startup founders who want to copy? Yeah. Well, the first thing is, you know, I do think I have a pretty clear sense of the market, given the data points. So oftentimes you do these private fundraisers, you meet with a handful of folks. You really don't get a sense of where the market is. So in that sense, I do think today, as I mentioned, a lot of folks are willing to invest at a higher

price. Will they want to do that in a year or two years when we've got more data that we have to prove? I don't know. But at least I know today what the market looks like. You know, my first advice would be not to fixate too much on valuation. I know you've asked a lot of question on that. It was actually not really the critical thing I was focused on here. It was really around the firm and partnership.

Sure. You've also focused on the next one or two years. I'm thinking much longer time horizon, and that's one of the reasons I chose NIA. Their fund structure is very unique. They have a 15-year fund, not a 10-year fund. They're very often buying at the IPO, not selling. So that horizon is kind of what I was really looking for, as somebody who wants to be doing this with me for a while.

While I hope we achieve all our aspirations of the next few years, I also know, I've done this before. My last company grew to about $120 million in ARR. And, you know, there's a lot of bumps along the way. I guarantee you that between now and when people look at our valuation and say, okay, that makes sense mathematically, there will be bumps along the way. And so that's why I also chose a partner. That would be my advice is choose a partner firm that's going to be there in thick and thin. And they're also, they've done their diligence. They know the risks. They know the chance,

you know, what are odds are success are. And they'll still jump in willingly. So I think that's very thoughtful, Dan. I think you always want to pick the right partner because you're going into a marriage. And here you're saying, hey, you're thinking in decades. They're thinking a decade and a half for their venture fund. Typically a venture fund is a 10-year, you know, when people expect it to dribble on, you know, 11, 12, 13 while you clean up maybe some stragglers, good and bad, where you can have struggles in either direction, zombie companies or just extraordinary companies like Uber or Airbnb that took their time going public.

And you do have to fill in that valuation. You have enough money to run for 18 months, 24 months. How long will the capital last you in your projections? Well, so that's another factor, too. And we actually, prior to raising, we had about three years of runway. This will extend that pretty significantly. So this is not about adding runway to the company. This is really about, you know, building a war chest to go out and win and build, you know, this market, we think is huge.

So because you have only 15 employees you said before, 20 or something? Yeah, right. Yeah. So you are experiencing what AI is providing in the world, which is massive, massive gains in efficiency with your own team. Is that correct? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

It blows my mind every day to see the ways that our team is using AI to build a better product and just shows you why things are moving so quickly. It's this exponential math of everything we're doing today is better because of the past. We're building an AI for the future and that people who use our product will be better and more productive. And we're right in that sweet spot. And of course, I would be completely hypocritical if I didn't mention that I'm doing the exact same thing that you did with my venture fund. So if you go to watch.com slash memo, they'll throw it up on the screen here for a second. and I literally took our deal memo, and I was like, you know what?

I'm going to raise 506C, which is a SEC designation for racing publicly. I mentioned it on the All In podcast. I mentioned here on the speaking service, and I tweeted it. Over a thousand people showed interest and came to webinars with me. I did webinars.

And then I was like, well, screw it. I'll just share the deal memo. Here's our strategy for a fun for. If you do have a reputation, if you do have a track record like you and I have, and why not cast a wide net? And then this also acts as marketing for your product, your company,

which will then, Dan, in your case, get you better employees, more employees, more press, mission accomplished. And employees and press,

that all leads to better product and that all leads to more customers. Absolutely. That is your, uh, absolutely. And even the customers alone, that part has been totally worth it. You know,

you could argue the downside is more scrutiny and what, we potentially invite some competitors, but we felt so good about where we've been and the product we've built. And I don't think the risks are definitely nearly as bad as people worry. And one analogy here, and I wonder if you agree with this, is this may be the future of what once was considered weird, online dating. You think about online dating, you know, why wouldn't you just go meet somebody down at a bar? I mean, that's how people have been raising money before. You go to the five or ten firms that everyone tells you to go to. And yeah, if it works, it doesn't. You know, cast a wide net.

You know, certainly there's a lot of people out there that are great value-out investors believe in your mission. And even if you don't have a, you know, great reputation, you know, people find love every day on online dating. I think you can do the same with raising money for your company or for your fund. People say it's in numbers again, in dating, in sales, and in raising money for your startup. You got a, I think the other phrase is kiss a lot of frogs to find your Prince Charming. Don't know if we should be using that phrase anymore. cancel for it, but there was this phrase that existed for a long time to get to kiss a lot of frogs. So tell us about your company. What is it that you do? Yeah. So the name of the company is

rewind. It is a co-pilot for your mind. It was inspired by my experience going deaf in my 20s. I tried a hearing aid at the age of 30 and it was magical. To lose a sense and gain it back again feels like gaining a superpower. And ever since that moment, I have been on a hunt for ways that technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers. That led me to memory. Memory just like hearing gradually gets worse as we get older. Typically, people forget about 90% of what happens after just one week. And so the question that started this company was really, if there's a hearing aid for

hearing, which I wear and I can hear great, and glasses for vision, what's the equivalent for memory? So our vision is to give humans perfect memory. And the product we're building does that. It is a MacOS app today. soon will be on Windows and iPhone that captures everything you see, say, in here. It makes it searchable. It stores it all locally.

So for your privacy, it's all stored on your Mac. We don't have access to it. Your employer doesn't have access to it. And recently, we've integrated with GPT4. So you can actually ask questions of anything you've seen said or heard. You can ask, rewind, write me an email, investor update, write me an email to somebody I know. And it uses all of the context of your past to actually achieve that goal. So that's why we call it a co-pilot for your mind.

it's a great idea and a great vision. Obviously, it's super creepy when you first come up with it. Oh my God. It's in the system tray. It's recording everything. If I were to look at a website

about pop culture and I'm on TMZ, maybe I don't want people thinking I'm clicking on certain celebrities or worse, if you had an incognito window, film blank, see it yada. So it's recording everything you do

on your desktop and it's in a system tray so it's not a Chrome. and it's pretty interesting. There was a company that Idealab did, and I think you're of the age that you might know this, there was a company called X, which it came out of Idealab, and it was X1, I think,

and it was called Desktop Search. What it did was, it indexed your entire hard drive and the pitch was it's Google for your desktop. So what you were doing is essentially a search index, but then you can put a logic layer on it with a language model to actually do productive stuff, not just find stuff, correct? Exactly.

Yeah, and it's not files. That's a distinction I want to make, which is it's really memories. It's things you've seen, things you've heard, things you've said. And just that distinction alone dramatically improved search.

A good example is Twitter search. You know, Twitter search sucks. And a big reason it sucks is that when you search, it searches every tweet in the history of Twitter, when really most of the time,

what you want is actually a tweet you've recently seen. And so just that lens alone of restricting the things to the things you've seen said or heard, can make the experience of the product much better. Listen, we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm launch. You know, pre-Series A, maybe you got a couple of thousand dollars a month in revenue.

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That's the D, directors, people on the board, officers, the people who work at the company, right? Directors and officers insurance is super important. So what do we do? You sent them right to and broker, our friends over it in broker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups. You just fill out a simple application, right? And then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Four quotes, four lines of coverage. coverage, 15 minutes. Easy, breezy, lemon, squeezy. That's right. They connect you with one of their

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I'm happy to give you a demo if you want to see it. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Great. So let me actually share my screen and I'll show you my memories. The way you open This can get dangerous quick. I mean... You can. You can see. I was very busy waiting for you to join the meeting here. Yeah.

So you can, you open, rewind, you just hit, you know, command shift scroll, and now you're scrolling through time. So this is our conversation. This is everything, you know, you're there's a transcript of this, everything we're seeing, saying hearing. I can scroll back in time, you know, at the beginning of this meeting, you can see I was looking up on your Twitter, looking you up on Wikipedia. So you can see that very easy to go back and forth in time.

You've got this timeline at the bottom. So this is a movie of your desktop you've created. Exactly. And not only is it a still image movie, but it's something you can select text from. You can take any piece of text you've previously seen. You can copy and paste it. So it's this amazing repository where you can go back and turn anything you seen said or heard basically into action.

Makes sense so far? Totally. So let me show you the integration of GPT4. So here is using my rewind data. I'm asking it to write an email to Sam Altman, one of our first investors, asking him to catch up. It uses all the context of our past our first introduction by Paul Graham in 2010, this new feature that I'm showing you, this GPT4 integration and this thing I saw about AGI on Reddit.

It combines all of those moments of my past in a very privacy sensitive way. It just takes the text of those moments. sends it to GPD4. GPD4 produces this email, and it uses sources to actually verify that this data is, or this email is accurate. This prevents you from having hallucinations because you can go directly to these moments in your past. I'll just click on this first one here. This is an introduction to Sam Altman back in 2010 by Paul Graham,

and we were doing that for my last company. And so you have this amazing ability to sort of combine these moments, these emails in the past, but things you've read on Reddit and synthesize that into an email. That's just exactly what we mean by co-pilot for your mind. It's taking work that you would otherwise have to do and doing it for you. Make sense so far? Yep. So I'll show you another quick example. Here's one where it takes things I've done in the past. I asked what did I do last week. It says I participate in a company-wide Slack conversation, received notifications on linear, checked some data analysis. And to my point earlier on Twitter, the last thing, this the summary of

my week says, hey, I posted a tweet, discussing how recent advances in AI could eliminate jobs and Here are some examples. So let's click on that source and I go directly to that tweet. So again, really quickly, and I'm certainly for, I'm sure you're context switching all the time going from meeting to meeting. If you ever want to just pull up, what was that thing? What was that thing?

Like I just did with X1. Yeah. I'm like, ah, what is that a search engine? I know it was IDELAB and I was trying to create a query on Google. X1. I typed in X desktop search IDLAB. I found it. Yeah, exactly.

Is that? Here it would search a movie recording of my desktop for the last 30 years. Ideally, yeah, if you have it run that long, that's, that's the hope is that you're able to, anytime you've had this desire to go back and synthesize information, we can, we can do it for you and make it much easier. Last example I'll show you, it sort of shows the power of GPT4 is I can ask it, you know, what's our founding story and vision? And it knows what our means. It means rewind the company I founded. It talks about, when I mentioned earlier, losing my hearing, my 20s, our vision to give humans a perfect memory. And it synthesizes that all down into a simple paragraph. We didn't have to tell GPT4 what is our, what is founding. It knew from the context of my past. You know, it's heard me say this now a couple of times in meetings,

which by the way, we transcribe meetings. So that's another source of data. So it makes it super easy to take data of anything you've seen, said or heard, and turn it into action. In Iduru, a William Gibson novel, he had a little Zeppelin. And I think it was called God's Machine or something. It was a little balloon that floated above everybody's head. recorded everything in their life.

Not a quadcopter. He needed a balloon for some reason with a little propellers on it. Anyway, he recorded everything. And so everybody had a little thing following them around, like a little drone. And it recorded everything. And you could then, with your, you know, glasses, AR, whatever, rewind your entire life.

So if we had met in person, he would be like, oh, you've been in person, and let me replay this for you real quick, a summary of that time. And it would have a DVR of your life. And what you've created is a DVR of your desktop, that analysis on top of it. So you keep this video recording locally of everything I've ever done over my desktop.

That's right. And a key technical breakthrough that we had to achieve was storing this in a way that doesn't hog your drive or your storage. So we compress the data about 3,000 times smaller to be able to basically indefinitely store data for many, many years on your local hard drive. That enables it to be all private. It's locally encrypted. You don't have to worry about what happens if this is up in the class. and that doing that imperceptibly was another huge technical feat. Like how do you do that in the background?

Another reason we started with Apple Silicon, you know, how do you do that without it feeling heavy, without it feeling like the, it's hogging resources? Oh, that breaking the law too, because if you were to record a conversation in California with this one, Zoom and the other party was not known, you'd be breaking law. And then if you were searching for stuff and then it got subpoenaed in a lawsuit and you had the software running, it would all be. something that could be subpoenaed, as we've seen with people's conversations on email and

text being subpoenaed over time. So how do you deal with these two legal issues? Yeah, so consent is super important. So we have a few things that we make really easy. One is at any point, you know, in this being assumed, you assumed we'd be recording it, you're recording it. Well, it's the public, yes. But the conversation we had at the beginning wasn't.

I didn't know you were recording it. And depending on if you're in a two-party consent stand, you would be breaking the law or not. Yeah, one thing is we recommend folks doing this, a little banner on the screen. saying, hey, recording with rewind. That's one way to sort of disclose it publicly. It's a little less ominous than the big, loud, red dot.

But this is from a legal perspective, all it really takes is reducing this presumption of privacy. We also tell folks to add to their calendar invite ahead of time a little phrase that says, hey, I'm going to record this meeting with rewinds. It's going to help me be more present. It stores all the data locally on my Mac. Let me know if you have any issues. So that's another sort of more subtle, more comfortable social dynamic where people can do this, without making it awkward at the beginning of a meeting.

So those are just two things that we recommend. At the end of the day, it is, you know, it's great power comes great responsibility. This is, you know, we ask our users to do this and this tool makes it easier for them to record. But most of the folks who use this, you know, they tell the folks they meet with, especially if they're meeting with a lot of people. What about being subpoenaed? And like, you see all the research.

So if you were researching competitors and then a competitor sues you for stealing features that they believe you did, or you had a conversation with somebody who was an employee of that company who you were interviewing and they, They disclose some information. You didn't ask for it to be disclosed. And they told you something that was proprietary data. And now you go to court that you're using Rewind, man, they just pull everything up. And they're like, here's your conversation with this person, this employee of X1 or Google, you know, spilled the beans.

And now you've got an actual recording of your desktop with you looking stuff up. And you've basically given a, you know, at a opposing counsel, a buffet of stuff to misinterpret. Yeah. So a couple points on that. One is we don't have access to it as a company. So we could never be subpoenaed and handed it over. Not you, but the person could be subpoenaed. Yeah, exactly.

Number two is, you know, Ray Dalio has been recording meetings at Bridgewater Associates for decades now. And he gets this question all the time. And he says, more often than not, the recordings help the company, not hurt the company. You can actually use the data, you know, for example, wrongful termination lawsuit. As soon as the party that might be trying to sue them knows that the meetings have been recorded, they immediately drop their charges because they know, hey, there's substantive to actually defend ourselves. So that's Ray Dalio's been public about the legal benefits. You know, there's this perceived, you know, concern.

The third thing I'll say is we give you a lot of control over what gets captured, what doesn't. I'll just quickly show you in the app. You can actually choose, you know, which apps get recorded. You can exclude specific apps. You mentioned earlier incognito windows. By default, we do not record any incognito browsers. Yep. So that's just checked by default.

And similarly with audio, you know, you can choose what gets recorded, what doesn't. And you can delete anything. So it's, it's, you know, really designed to give you control. It's not meant to be all or nothing. You can selectively choose, hey, exclude all my Zoom meetings. You know, I don't want those there. Hey, you know, we had a Zoom meeting. I didn't, you know, probably shouldn't have a record of that.

We can do that. Last thing is, this is a big one for data retention. You can just control how long stuff sticks around. You know, my point earlier is most people forget 90% of things after a week. So usually what you're looking for and rewind is on the order of a few weeks ago. So you can just say, hey, I only want to have data for the last week store, month, three months, et cetera. So those are all features that we've enabled to make it easier for folks, you know,

to control what gets captured and what doesn't. You are the most fascinating guest I've had on in a long time. This is absolutely extraordinary, both your execution of your fundraising and product. I am terrified and intrigued, which, like most great technology innovations, is sometimes, you know, what you're looking for here. I'm totally comfortable using self-driving for powers and end. I am totally uncomfortable using your technology right now, but I might be absolutely converted.

So I'm going to definitely try it at some point. And I really appreciate you coming on the pod and being super transparent about it. What do you do? You charge 50 bucks a month for this or something? It is a very generous of 50 rewind free trial. So it's a usage-based free trial. Our hope is, you know, because by the way, what you're describing is, not atypical. A lot of people look at this and they're like,

this is weird. Would I use this? It's beyond weird. I mean, it's challenging. But in some ways, actually, it's weird in a very similar analogy to, would you have imagined 15 years ago getting into the car of a random stranger you're matched with on the internet? Yeah, no, Airbnb, all the stuff. Yeah. So it's weird in that same class of things. I hope

we will be as successful as those companies. Where, you know, at first blush, you're like, how would I use this? Why would I use this? You know, and then the reason we give this 50-day or 50 rewind free trials, what we find is people try it, they install it, and then all of a sudden

they'll have a magical moment. It will be likely, initially it'll be like a tab crashes or they hit discard on an email instead of send and they'll have this pit in the stomach. Oh my gosh, I just lost everything. 50 days to me feels like what I would try

or 30 days. What does it cost? Well, it's, so it's the free trial's 50 rewind, so it's usage base as much as you want. Then it's $10 per month for the basic plan and $30 a month for the pro plan. And you have an enterprise here,

so you could record everybody desktop in your organization, and if everybody uses their business laptop, for compliance reasons, anybody who's in finance or healthcare already has everything recorded. So there's a multiplayer version here that would be extraordinary for people in finance where I could search all of my employees' desktops. That's crazy that is. And look at all of them. By the way, in customer support and in finance, this already exists. So for people who are like, whoa, that's creepy, if you're doing finance, every phone call on the desk is recorded, every desktop action is recorded. Every desktop action is record every message, every email.

So there's going to be a compliance, big brother version of this for those companies. I take it. Well, not really. We don't view ourselves as a surveillance tool. We don't, and today, we actually don't have those enterprise capabilities. Right now, it's really a individual. Are you going to make an enterprise version? We will eventually, but it will be much, it won't be surveillance.

It won't be letting your boss see what you've recorded. It will be giving them control over what's got shared, maybe some data retention controls. Like I showed you earlier, maybe a company, if they're buying, software for you. They can say everything after six months automatically gets deleted, but we'll never let your employer see the recordings. We really believe this is a power tool for individuals. People use it just as much for personal life as for business life. So it will never be a surveillance tool. That's the farthest thing from what we want. That's part of the why we started with a sort of prosumer model initially, because we really want to have the folks

who would just have this problem? Would you imagine, you know, if you wear glasses or context, would you imagine going a single day without them? Probably not. And that's the experience people have with our product. Once they have that first magical moment, they're like, Why would I go a day without being able to capture my memories? You know, that seems silly. All right, everybody. They have it, Rewind Pro, 30 bucks a month. Coming soon to Windows, your phone, and everything.

God's little DVR, record your entire life and never forget anything. Dan, extraordinary job. I think I can understand why people wanted to invest at 350. It's an incredible vision and good luck and I'm going to play with it. And we'll see you all next time on this week's startups. Bye-bye. Okay, everybody, are you sore and tired? It's hard to keep this peak performance up, but I have an answer for you.

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That's H-Y-P-E-R-I-C-E dot com and use the code Twist-W-I-S-T-V-O. Twist-F-O for 50 bucks off your purchase of $150 or more. Sincerely, my wife got me into this and then all of a sudden they showed up to be partners on this program. I was like, I use that product. What? So it's amazing. You're going to love it. Hey there, I'm Scott.

I'm going to talk through the founder's crash course on building a strong brand. So a little background about me. I'm a family man with three kids. I'm a designer with 15 years of experience. I'm a founder of Time Well and I'm also a certified brand specialist at a branding studio called Lunar. So let me dive right in. My first question is, out of all of these options of water bottles, which one would you buy?

You'll find that most of the time people don't make a decision of what's inside the water bottle, but actually on the outside and everything else that it means. So, if we look at something like Arrowhead, you might think that that's the one that you get at your soccer games. Or Voss, that's somebody that, you know, you could assume what kind of car they drive with that. Or liquid death, the fact that they valued at $700 million. And it had very little to do with what was inside and, again, more on the outside.

Taking a look at this design, which one of these do you think works better? without knowing anything about it, most people, if not 100% say it's the right one, because it's simply designed better. So the question is, what is branding? And to still admit, branding is not your logo. And to describe that a little further, I'd love for you to think about how you would describe why someone should buy from Apple. And most of the time, it's something like, it's really simple, it's easy to use,

it's fun, it just works. and I can almost guarantee that those are not words that Apple has told you to say, but it's something that you've felt over time through a lot of different experiences. So we could argue that more branding is someone's gut feeling about your company or service. In reality, it's what they say it is. It's not what you say it is. So again, in a nutshell, branding isn't your logo, but it is somebody else's feeling and how that they describe it.

So the goal at the end for branding is to align what you say it is and what they say it is. And that's what we're going to talk about. Again, we'll start at the top of this mountain here, which, again, running a branding studio, people come to us often and say, hey, we need a new brand. And typically what that means is we need a new flag planted on the top of a mountain, being our logo, or we need new styles. And so we go into the conversation more and they say, well, maybe it's more of our website or we need a new product, it doesn't quite feel right.

And so as we go in a little further, as you can see from this visual, is that we need to go under the water to what isn't seen. And that's brand strategy. And this is where we can talk about their purpose, mission, vision, values, what their cultures like, what's their goals as a company, and also how do they position themselves in a way that's so unique that people will come to them? and illustrate that a little further is that brand strategy leads to deliberate differentiation. And this is what I do all in a nutshell.

As we look at how we want to position your brand, it's that in a sea of competitors, we want you to be the only one that customers will go with because you are so different. And your job as a leader is to give clarity about that. So as you see that you want to lead your team in a specific direction, you need to cast a vision to say, here's where we're going. And in the days where you can't be the one leading, and I would argue you shouldn't be the one who is telling everybody all the time, every single task what they need to do,

you need to be able to cast a vision for them to be able to run on their own. In reality, that's what brand strategy should lead to, is for your team to be able to answer this question on their own, which is, what's the right decision here? That could come to how do we, respond to this customer in a consistent way? How should we design this billboard? What should we do for this screen? And that should be all around that you have a clear vision for your company of where we need to go. There is a structure for that. It's what I like to use, which is a brand strategy pyramid.

And this is what we use with clients, but we're going to go through a couple of these today. So there's purpose, mission, vision, values, look and feel, goals, and tactics. And just for us right now, we're going to cover purpose, vision, values, and look and feel. First of all, purpose. This is your why and deeper cause that would be written about in the history books when you succeed. And here is a template for how to do it. We won't go through that now, but you can take a look at it for later, which is two and then fill in the blank, some positive improving verb,

and then aimed at a specific group of people, two, and then the end goal is for them to reach a specific state. And again, this has nothing to do with money. It won't change with the market, and it should almost feel impossible. An example of this is Tesla's, which is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. And you can see if and I'd argue when they accomplish this, it will be written about in the history books. And you can take this a next step further, is their mission would be in line with the how that they do that is they build Tesla's, Tesla cars, to be able to accomplish this purpose. Next is the vision, which is a clear scene that can be able to be in line with the how that they do that they do that, they build Tesla's, Tesla cars, to be able to accomplish this purpose.

Next is the vision, which is a clear scene that can be easily understood and visualized. And this is where we see a world where, and then fill in the blank. Microsoft, for example, which is exciting to see that they've accomplished this, used their vision statement used to be a computer on every desktop and every home. And what's really helpful about a vision statement is it will help your team have a clear picture of what they need to do to accomplish it. So back when this was written, a computer couldn't fit on a desktop at all.

And so they had to think, how could we continue to refine our process to be able to accomplish this? Next is your values. These are the core beliefs that will ultimately guide what you do and how you do it. And understanding these values, something like, we take care of our customers above and beyond, will allow your team to run freely to know if somebody needs help resetting their password for Netflix while they're on a phone call with you, is that that's completely okay. And when asked what he'd do differently if he could start his company all over again, Zappos

CEO, Tony Shea had this to say. If I could go back and do Zappos all over again, I would actually come up with our values from day one. And for someone who sold his company to Amazon for $1.2 billion, I think I'd pay attention. So next, we'll dive into visual identity. And again, this is arguably what people come to most often when they say, hey, I need a new brand, which is I need a new logo. But first, really your brand comes first in people's minds by your name.

And I argue this is more important to get right than your visual. Because you can change that over time, but you think of a company like Coca-Cola. For them to change their name would have huge impacts on their business. And the test that I like to run with is if you're at a loud party and you have to say, I'm the founder of, blank name, and we do blank. If you have to explain every single time how it's spelled and it's a get, name.S.O., then they're just going to forget it over time. So again, it's really hard to do and it's harder than ever,

but it's really important to make sure that it can click in someone's mind. And then on the visual side, what should you do for your logo? I like to keep these four points in mind, which is make it clear, make it scalable, make it memorable, and then make sure that it has some sort of connection to your value that you offer. And as an example, let's look at Time Wells logo. So here, Timewell is a platform that helps families connect with different generations by recording their life stories to photos with their voice. So what we have here is the icon on the side.

It's actually an hourglass flipped on its side to essentially pause time. And then there's these two linking back and forward arrows showing the future and the past, older generation to the younger generation linking together. In this visual here, I wanted to make sure that it's really flexible and scalable. We'll see how that looks. Every brand should be able to be flipped in both white and black as well. So if you have a primary color, make sure that it's flexible there. It should also be scalable on size. So an app icon, browser icon, a Bavicon, or your logo for your website.

Also, it should be able to be scalable to a billboard size. Now let's look at some different logos that maybe are some not to-dos and some recommended to-dos. On the left side, you'll see here, these are something you might find online if you get a logo for a couple bucks. And on the right, you probably will recognize that these companies are doing all right. On the left side, you'll see that these ones do not work well for mobile. And with the majority of browsing now done on phones, it's more critical than ever that your

logo can work with all those scalable methods like I just shared. So the question is, how do you build this? The first thing I would do for anybody looking to build their logo is to start with some sort of personality sliders like this. And for Timewell, I'd probably put mine here. So it's more professional, it's more reserved than it is allowed. It's more clean than experimental and you get the rest. So you kind of want to put a personality to how it looks.

And one thing to keep in mind is that your logo and your icon shouldn't tell the whole story. It's simply a recognizable mark that will connect to people. What about color? So, color improves brand recognition by up to 80%. I often see new founders who mix too many colors together, I would focus on just one. And there's visuals like this that you can find online that get your personality and the feeling to match.

So again, you might find that majority of banks use blue because psychologically it evokes trust. So now we've created a huge brand logo. How does that look like in the wild? First thing you'll probably want to do is launch your website. We'll see a couple examples here that guaranteed most people have seen. And they all have the same structure and that's really important to get the structure right. Because you have seven seconds.

And seven seconds to what? You have seven seconds before they scroll through and they don't find what they're looking for and then somebody will press the most press button on the internet, which is the back button. So our goal is to make sure that that doesn't happen. They click and they convert. There is a structure for that, and we'll dive in. So this is based off an example I'll show at the end. But looking at point one here, if you follow this structure for above the fold,

so on desktop, before you have to scroll, this is showing you, you're in the right place, and you can keep going from here. So step one is we have explained the value you provide in the title. Next, in a subtitle, explain how you'll actually create it. Step three, let the user visual. visualize it. Use the visual with a video or photo or some sort of mock-up. Make a believable with social proof. And five, make taking the next step easy.

So look at that. What is that clear call to action? And here we have something like get started for just $1. Get started, sign up. Maybe you can push out a little further to be more specific. I would highly recommend looking at marketingexamples.com for the full layout of this. They have done an absolutely incredible job on building a landing page. Kind of summarizing, if you wanted to look at what are next steps for branding? These are some books that have completely changed my thought process and shaped how I think about branding. Feel free to steal all these.

I hope you enjoy them. Please let me know if you've read any of them or will read any. Also, some general design resources. Say, well, what do I do about? Are there any pictures I can use? Are there any examples of maybe some good login screens or desktop screens or something like that? I would take a look at all of these options and all these sites and your designs will be much better off. As a quick thank you is that, again, I'm a partner at an awesome branding and design studio,

and we like to say that your competitors want you to neglect your brand. And so we don't want that to happen. If you are at a certain spot where you feel like you're not quite presented in the way that you know you should be or you're looking to raise a new round and you don't quite reflect, your brand doesn't quite reflect the success that you have, I'd love to talk. And then finally, as a founder myself, I would love to get your thoughts on Timewell, so you can check it out at Timewell.io. Again, thank you so much for your time.