This Week in Startups - Why J-Cal Invested to 200K in a former Employee | E2249

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by:NetSuite - https://www.netsuite.com/twistLuma AI - https://lumalabs.ai/twistSquarespace - https://squarespace.com/twistToday’s show: On today’s epsiode of TWiST, Jason gets pitched by two top founders, Presh Dineshkumar and Peter Cetale! Presh used to work for Jason at Launch! When he left, Jason invested $200K into Presh’s new startup The Wellness Company. Presh pitches Jason on what he has been building, and Jason gives Presh advice for improving the product!Peter went through Andreesen Horowitz’s Speedrun accelerator program as CEO and co-founder of Sourcerer. Sourcerer uses AI agents to help US firms and distributors find the best prices for mass produced goods. Check out how Jason digs in with these founders!Timestamps:(0:00) Presh was originally a TWiST fan who emailed Jason!(1:59) Why Jason invested in Presh’s startup(3:19) Checking out the Wellness Company’s hot new app, Tempo(4:03) How Tempo monitors your health and offers proactive advice with consistency(9:10) Why Jason recommends adding a group or family feature to make it stickier(9:51) Netsuite - Get the free business guide Demystifying AI at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(11:28) The end goal: bringing app advice and guidance into the real world(13:34) Presh shares where his apps are finding the most engagement(14:13) The key importance of Product Velocity and World-Class Design(17:27) Luma AI - Stop guessing and start directing with Ray3 Modify from Luma AI, the AI-powered post-production tool. Explore it at: https://lumalabs.ai/twist(18:38) Introducing Peter Cetale and Sourcerer!(19:32) How Sourcerer uses AI to help distributors and manufacturers automate their sourcing(22:48) How Sourcerer manages to actually bring costs down(25:02) Lining up REAL customers, not Letters of Intent (aka Letters of Nothing)(26:04) Peter’s experiences in a16z’s Speedrun accelerator(28:08) Working with agents on BOTH the supply and demand side(29:16) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://squarespace.com/twist(30:32) How has Tariff Mania impacted Peter’s business?(35:35) Why Peter thinks startups will keep getting leaner and compute will keep getting cheaper*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/*Thank you to our partners:(9:51) Netsuite - Get the free business guide Demystifying AI at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(17:27) Luma AI - Stop guessing and start directing with Ray3 Modify from Luma AI, the AI-powered post-production tool. Explore it at: https://lumalabs.ai/twist(29:16) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://squarespace.com/twistCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

And we met, started to work for me, crushed it for me for five, six years. Then he said, I want to do my own company boss. I said, okay, get the hell out of here. And I gave him $200,000 to leave. This is what it is. I can't fire people. I give him $200K to leave to start a company. And, you know, for background, why did I invest?

Well, we thought, precious smart. He's going to figure it out. He's great at building product. He can, you know, build products on the cheap. He's not going to spend a lot of money, but he's going to get product velocity. So we have a founder we trust who has product velocity, who has great product chops, who has world-class design. That was enough for us to make the bet, frankly.

And we also had seen tone bass, a musical app, steasy, a dance app, a musician, another music app, but not classical, like tone base. And of course, Calm and FitBod. We had seen five different health apps do really well. We thought, hey, this could work. This week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial.

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Get the free business guide demystifying AI at NetSuite.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Presh, Dinesh Kumar worked for me for many years. How did I meet Presh? Pressh was a fan of this very podcast, and he emailed me when he was in college. I think he was 18 years old. And he said, hey, I want to come work for you. I said, okay, that's nice.

And then he said, oh, no, no, serious. I'm serious. I'm serious. And he wouldn't stop emailing me. So I said, what are your skills? And then I looked. And he was great at doing social media. I said, okay, kid, come to California.

You work for me now. Come to the Blade Runner 2049 screening. And we met, started to work for me, crushed it for me for five, six years. Then he said, I want to do my own company boss. I said, okay, get the hell out of here. And I gave him, I don't know. What did I give you? 250?

200. I gave him $200,000 to leave. This is what it is. I can't fire people. I give them 200K to leave to start a company. Presh, I want you to tell everybody all about the company and the amazing progress you've made. There's a lot of lessons here for founders. So either show me or tell me a little bit about your company.

Yeah, do a quick explainer. And then I have a demo, our newest product that would love to show you as a product guy yourself. So, yeah, I run the wellness company. We build health and wellness apps, iPhone apps, all on. iOS in the Apple ecosystem right now. And they all do niche things. So we have three apps, three, four apps that we built and launched last year. One of them is called GoPolar.

It's an app to track your cold plunge and your sauna sessions, very niche, but a niche passionate community. And then we have a sun app called Sunseek that tracks your vitamin D and also your morning light exposure for mood and circadian help. And then we have a posture app, which uses your iPhone camera. and uses some AI to process what your posture is and gives you a report and gives you some workouts that are chirophysio-backed to help correct any imbalances you have. Those are the three main apps that we launched. And then now we're working on a new product called Tempo. And that's

where I think the bigger vision of the wellness company happens. And, you know, for background, why did I invest? Well, we thought precious smart. He's going to figure it out. He's great at building product. He can, you know, build products on the cheap. He's not going to spend a lot of money. but he's going to get product velocity. So we have a founder we trust who has product velocity, who has great product chops, who has world-class design. That was enough for us to make the bet, frankly. And we also had seen ToneBase, a musical app, Steezy, a dance app, a musician, another music app,

but not classical, like ToneBase. And, of course, Calm and FitBod. We had seen five different health apps do really well or education apps and Brilliant.org. six. So we had had six winners in this space or six really high quality companies. You know, remains to be seen how big of the wins they are. Com, obviously a huge one, brilliant, a huge one, a fit bot, a huge one. You know, it's a really tough space to be in education and apps, but we thought, hey, this could work. So, Prash, show us your latest product, please. And remember, most people in the audience are listening, not watching, but for the audience members who

are just listening, this is one of the chances you have to go to YouTube. YouTube.com and visit this week in startups and click subscribe and put the alert bell on. For anybody who's watching this, you can take a picture of these QR codes and go directly to YouTube to sign up. What you're seeing here is the Tempo dashboard. And so Tempo as a product brings in all your wearable and health data and your labs and puts it into one place as a centralized location. That's level one.

So those products would be Woop, ORA, on one side, HLE, and on the other side would be superpower, function health, or function, I think it's called, or even if you just got your blood work done from a doctor. Yeah, show you exactly what that looks like. But you basically ingest all this data and you can get it very easily through Apple Health, for example. So Apple Health or you do a upload lab test, et cetera. But we give you a score. And so you have this, let's say, we call it the health span score. And the health span score is derived of these four pillars that we classified. So Cardiorespiratory, metabolic, recovery,

sleep, and lifestyle behavior. And this is all reference to your age and sex. And so everyone's score is going to be different based on who they are. And we know that because they go through the onboarding. But you can see the metrics that matter is what we call it. So metrics that matter for cardio respiratory that we can get from wearable devices ends up being your zone two minutes, your VO2, your resting HR. And then from there, we give it a score,

all kind of reference to the latest science. and science-backed research, right? And so that's the kind of health span score concept, pull from your wearable data. But really, we want that app to be useful, not just the dashboard and not just information, right? And so that's where protocols come in. And protocols is the main core of the app.

So protocols are designed to help you achieve your goal. And so what does that look like in the app? So right now we have this protocol section. You can select a generalized protocol. These are templated, but they still use AI. So I see one of them is general health span. Health span is, hey, when you get older, how healthy are you in your 60, 70s, and 80s? I was skiing this morning with a 76-year-old woman and two 74-year-old men.

I shouldn't say I was skiing. I was on the lift with them. I didn't ski with them. But health span is really what it's all about. We don't know that we're going to get people to live to 150, but we know that if they live to 80, what if you could ski to 80 years old today? in the year of our Lord 2026, I'm seeing people skiing in their 70s. My goal, ski in my 80s.

Keep going, pressure. Love it. Yes, my goal, like, run in my 80s. So same idea. Quality of life, right? So general health span, if I were to click this protocol, it's going to go through, and it knows my health data,

and it knows my labs. It didn't even knows what I eat, which we'll get into. But through that, it's going to give me a list of protocols that is going to just tell me what I want, or what to do based on the outcome that I want. And so the app knows right now I want to live and I want to run until I'm 80. So naturally it's going to tend to having good cardiorespiratory, having good muscles to be to be able to support the activities that I want to do.

And so it's going to give me this list of items to basically checklist. And so that's what you see on screen here. So I have spent 15 minutes outdoors. So I can tap into that and I can see why, you know, why this matters to me and for my protocol essentially. But I can go and add different protocols. So the interesting thing here is like do physiomobility stretches that you see here. So I had a shoulder injury. I went to my physiotherapist.

He gave me and how it works is they just tell you what to do and assume that you do it. And most people forget after a week and go back with very little progress. Right. So where this gets interesting is like, okay, yes, I can go and enter this in and add it to my protocol. And it's going to go and keep track of that over time. And this says compliance is such an important issue. when it comes to health. Can you consistently do this work?

Can you consistently sleep well? Can you consistently get to the same bedtime? Can you consistently stop drinking caffeine after 12 p.m., whatever it happens to be, that you're focused on? Yeah, this is great. Exactly. And to that point, there was just a research study that went out, and it was like essentially talking about spending a couple minutes

doing the more intentional eating, more intentional, like five minutes of extra sleep, going outside in the morning, very small things, but doing that consistently over time, that ends up adding years to your life and quality years, right? So very simple things, but just doing them tends to be like. And this is kind of gamified. So if I went out and I did my five minutes of sun exposure in the morning, I don't know if 10 or 5 is the goal, but I do that every morning. I try to go out with the dogs on the ranch, you know, just take my coffee outside.

instead of having it inside. Very simple. I'll sit on the porch or I'll go walk up, take a walk around the ranch, you know, get a thousand, two thousand steps in, have my coffee, and walk the dogs and get my sun exposure.

And then I just take my shirt off to increase my sun exposure because, you know, it's not a pleasant sight at this point, but it's better than it was two years ago. I'll tell you that. Getting there, getting there. So how much does this cost?

And what's the business here? Yeah. So right now it's consumer subscription. That's how we do all of wraps. There's another angle that we're, we will explore over time, which ends up being like, okay, if we facilitate a lab test, for example, you see here, I've got my labs. And this is a couple years old, but, you know, I can import that in here. We, we don't have this feature yet, but, you know, take a test. So that's

like an interesting angle where maybe we partner with, you know, a function, a superpower, etc., and just direct, get a test order to them. Yeah, I think they all have affiliate programs. So if you just put in there, these are our approved partners and or our preferred partners. And, and, you You just have to be clear, you know, that you're getting a commission in some cases. And just list your preferred ones and say, hey, these are the ones that we think are pretty good. That's a great way to be in there. Any family dynamics or group dynamics here to make it more motivating, I'm in a group on whoop with a team of friends. We were back in a day.

We were in FitBod groups. Those all made the app more sticky. So what do you think? Groups, I think, are huge for accountability and just consistency, right? And so we will add groups as well. And more so like intimate, so groups of four to five. In our other app, for example, like go polar, just throw it up here since I have it. We added a small community piece, right?

And that really ended up being groups of like two to five people, which were just families. Hey, here at my firm, we are AI first, of course. And we're looking for any way to use these new incredible tools to take away the tedious, busy work, all those chores we have to do. But just taking random chances when a new technology can lead to real. risks. Now with NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work for your company safely and with confidence. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud enterprise resource planning software or ERP, and it's already trusted by over 43,000 businesses. NetSuite is a unified workspace that brings together every piece of your data into one single easy-to-use interface. And it's the connecting of all this data

that makes your AI so much smarter, so much crisper, so much more accurate, so much more valuable. Now you can automate routine tasks and get actionable insights from an AI system that's more like a trusted partner than some isolated chat bot or a bolt-on tool that keeps hallucinating. And if your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, demystifying AI at netsuite. At netsuite.com slash twist. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash twist. What about meeting people? You know, if one of the things with dating and friends, is it's hard for people. But if you find people who are also into health, people who are into this health thing are going to have a much better relationship because, you know, if one person wants to go out drinking and smoking cigs and, you know, smoking weed and, you know, staying out

all night. And then with somebody like me or you who wants to go to bed by 10, get up at 6, hit the coal plunge, you know, do the sauna, man, that's just going to be, it's not going to work. it would be great for people to meet people who also like to cold plunge and are focused on their health spend. Have you thought about that dynamic? Hey, these are the people in your area. Expose yourself to those folks. It's a great question, great insight. And that's, I think, where the product actually evolves into. Right now, there's many people working on like the dashboard of the information. That ends up being commoditized. I think where the interesting piece is when you can bring that URL to IRL connection. And so that's that's exactly the plan for the roadmap is we know your

health intimately or Tempo knows your health intimately and can bring you into the real real world with like facilitating or or even booking for you like a cold plunge sauna session at the end of the week knowing your recovery metrics. There's a franchise company that is doing this cold plunge. I know there's one near us. Well, there's a couple of them in Austin. You just pay 25 bucks to go use the coal pludge, the sauna, the shower, whatever, and there's all these health clubs. So I think, you know, respectfully, as, you know, hopefully I've been a good mentor to you, you've got this incredible foundation. You've got a great, great roadmap. And I want to just give you permission to even think bigger. I wonder if there's a way to, you know, even get this

real-world component going. You know, I wonder if, you know, I opened the app one day and said, hey, you know the density, right? So you know where people are. And if Austin is like, maybe if you got really focused on Austin and you said, hey, on Sunday, we're doing run club and we're going to jump after the run club in the, you know, Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, whatever it is, whatever cold plunge, meet us at this point for the walk around the lake, run, jog, and then we're going to go here. It could be kind of a movement and being, paying 50 bucks or $100 a year or $10 a month to be part of a community, And that value is unbelievable, right?

So I'm giving you permission to kind of explore that or just think about that. Connecting it to the real world. Connecting the real world. I think that ends up being like the real moat of the health and wellness business. Think about the cities where the most healthy people are. Like what cities do, does Go Polar and everything have the most users? Right now, Austin is definitely one. Salt Lake as well, New York.

A lot of like European countries actually for Goal Polar. specifically just because obviously hot and cold activities. Got it. Okay. So I think Austin's the winner there. All right. Listen, great job. You're off to a great start.

Things I love about founders for people who are listening, you know, after doing 600 investments, you start to get some signaling. Number one, are they competent? And how is competent if you were an angel investor? How do you determine competence? The quickest way to determine competence is look at product velocity to look at. to look at the quality of the product, to look at the reviews of the product. So is the product improving on a consistent basis? That's called product velocity inside of our venture firm launch

and our syndicate, the syndicate.com. So we love to see product velocity. One of the other 14 categories we have is world class design. World class design is an accident. When you look at Prash, he's got product velocity, he's got world class design. Then you want somebody who is a serial founder has had an exit before. Prech isn't that, but he has worked for me, so he's got a good pedigree. Then you also want a founder who has got a particular obsession with the product, the service, et cetera. So if you were to look at somebody like Elon Musk, he's obviously been obsessed with space since he was a kid and electric cars. He talked about them a lot in college, so there was a mission there. If you find a missionary founder who is also a product founder,

founder who can ship product with velocity and win a design award, that is a lethal combination in my mind. They just have to, you know, keep grinding and then they figure something out. So all these different apps you've created, fantastic. They're interesting funnels. But tempo is obviously the winner, and you're probably going to need to say, hey, let's get super focused on tempo and let's put 90% and have that relentless focus and get a flywheel going there. What's the flywheel? You also need to have founders who have that quality of knowing how to acquire customers, knowing how to do marketing. I feel you know how to acquire customers really well. I think your marketing is strong. So there's room for improvement in both of those, but you're very solid in both of those. I would give you like a rating of a seven or eight, not a nine or ten. So there's like a really good opportunity for you to add to your skill set, the ability to get press and the ability to do marketing and go to market. Is my assessment of you correct? Yeah, I agree with the assessment. It's good.

Just no sevens. I think you got to make this into a movement, right? Make it into a movement. I think if you look at function health or whoop, ORA, ate sleep. They all became kind of movements. Those people have a very evangelistic, won't shut up about it,

kind of like vegans or vegetarians, Brian Johnson. You've got to get a little bit missionary here. And I think that comes through building communities. I don't think you have to be as out there as Brian Johnson. but I do think building up groups of people who really are passionate about tempo. And I think the social aspects of tempo are will the big win will be. A lot of people going after a long tell of niches here from cold plunges to, you know,

heartbeats, HRV. This can be just be tons of competition, sleep data, whatever. But being the place that pulls together the community and the advice and compliance and those dynamics could be really, really interesting, great job. Presh, where can people learn more? Thewellness.compan has all of our apps, so thewellness.compan. Or just search up Tempo HealthSpan and will appear on Google. All right.

Thanks for coming on Twist. You've Herbie talked many times about Luma AI. They're the innovators leading the charge toward multimodal AGI. They just picked up $9 million in their Series C funding in November. There are so many texts to video models and platforms out there, and many of them can turn out a nice looking clip, but Luma's Dream Machine product offers something truly unique. It's an all-in-one creative platform helping you to brainstorm your ideas, turn them into images, and then generating eye-popping detail 1080p videos, which you can edit and tweak using natural language, all without

switching platforms. And that's the key. The ability to refine these and make them better, that is what the future is. The future is being able to improve your AI generated images. And today, we're excited to announce the Luma Dream brief. competition. Just create a commercial for a fictional product on Luma, submit it to the Can Festival of Creativity. And if your ad goes on to win the gold, you will get $1 million to enter the competition. Go to LumaDreambrief.com. And to try the dream machine for free, go to LumaLabs.AI-I-S-T. That's Luma-U-M-ABS.A-I-S-T-W-I-S-T. All right, next up, we've got a founder, Alex. We do. Please welcome Peter Satale to the show. He is the co-founder over at Sorcerer. It's a company that

helps source, price, and arrange delivery for material products and inputs, all using the power of AI to ensure that everyone gets the best price. But Jason, what's really interesting here is that they're not just helping you connect to someone else. In fact, they want to become your supplier. Peter, where the hell did you get the idea for this? I love it. Yeah, well, thank you, first off, for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. And I came with the idea when I was actually running an import business back in 2020. And so my co-founder and I both have ran import-export trading firms. And so we saw firsthand how laborious the whole process is.

And so he said there has to be a way to make this more efficient. And so that's how we came up with the idea. So how does it work? Or you could show us. You could do a debo, but show us how it works and why it's important. Yeah. So I'll give you a quick run through. So in terms of a lot of the manual processes within procurement,

there's purchase order aspects and other. manual processes. And so at Sources, what we're doing is we're automating all that processes. And so today, if we look at a lot of the workflow automation tools, all focus on reducing labor costs. But if you look at for larger scale distributors, so a lot of the ones that we work with, they're doing a significant amount of volume, but their procurement team's only about $2.5 to $5 million a year on spend. And so if you're spending $5 to $10 million a year on your procurement team, they're spending tens of billions of dollars on spent. And so at source, what we're focused on is actually reducing the cost of goods sold and be able to do that more

effectively. And so we have a end-to-end process. So let's say, for example, you're interested in importing metal rebar. We'll go in and find every single fact in the world that produces steel rebar. And so our agents do the full back-and-forth negotiation, background checks on the factories, as well as also comparing real time. And these are AI agents, just to be clear, are not human agents? Yes. Yeah. So AI agents.

And so this process, if you're, let's say a construction company, I mean, to do this entire process end to end in real time would just be impossible. And so for us being able to do in real time getting up-to-date pricing and comparing the freight and tariffs, it gives them the most competitive advantage and directly impacting their bottom line. And so it goes all the way until delivery for our end customers. Does the agent sourcing go and do like an 11 lab? call to the person and say I'm an agent from sorcery and, you know, I want to, you know, get this or does

it email, from sorcerer, sorry, how does it actually mechanically do that? Does it, do you already have the rebar or is it like human in the loop for now and then over time it's going to learn? Do these people have websites? Is there a directory of them? Are you building that directory? Take us behind the scenes as to how the magic happens with that, you know, getting the quotes. Sure. So first of all, there's a couple different main marketplace platforms that are available like is Alibaba, made in China, India, and so we're able to pull a lot of information from those and be able to correspond directly on those platforms. But even on top of that, we're going in and finding export records. And so there's expert records that are publicly available from

China or Vietnam. And so we can go ahead and see every single exporter from China, for example. And so what that does is that we're able to aggregate our own proprietary database of all the difference, for example, in this case, steel mills in the world. But in terms of the communication process, the way that we're structuring today is that we're going in on email, we chat, WhatsApp, and be able to do that correspondence all through AI agents. And so the way that I look at it longer term for the business is if we're able to get this in real time, we can consistently get all these factories to bid against each other. And so if you're doing hundreds of millions of dollars, even if you can help them save 5% and 10%

and we have a customer of ours that does about $250 million a year in spend. It would be consistently helping them save about 10% on their cost on aluminum. And so on a grand scale of things, we have a lot of potential to solve what the customers actually care about, which is reduction of their spend.

Are you pooling demand here to make this happen to get these discounts? Because I just, you know, Peter, if I'm a company spending, you know, a quarter billion dollars here on aluminum, I would presume that I'm already getting a pretty darn good price. Yeah, so there's a couple things on that end. The way that we look at it and our focus on the mid-market, $250 million,

that's our largest customers. But for some of the ones that we're working with that are smaller, like $50 to $100 million, a year in spend, they're probably only doing on a quarterly order for, let's say, steel rebar, about $10 million. And so if you can go in and aggregate that demand right away, it does create about just by that alone, about 10% in savings. But for us running this whole bid, process, that's where we get that additional aspect of savings. And so for super, super large,

of course, right, if there's like a $30 billion a year spend, then it doesn't really allow us to have as much opportunity there. But for mid-market, which is what we're focused on, we're able to actually create those savings. All right, cool. Keep going. Thank you. So the way that we operate this business, which is different than the standard AI agents' workflow, is that what we do is we take a cut of the transaction. And so usually how it works is we give our customers two-thirds of the savings, and then we're able to get one-third of the savings. And so we're able to go in and keep that consistent revenue. One of the aspect that we've seen in this business is for those who have tried it in the past, if you reveal

the factory name, then more than likely they'll circumvent and go direct. And so we keep everything done as a blind escrow marketplace. There's other areas that we look into in terms of offering other aspects with insurance and credit terms for our customers. But I think what's very interesting in particular, because our main focus is on metals and commodities, is that if in real time we're going in and talking to every single steel mill in the world, for example, or other types of commodities, this data is very valuable for hedge funds, because we're getting directly up to date to the stores. And so I will understand very quickly what's happening with freight and everything like that. And so I think that's an area that's also very exciting

for us on expansion for the business. got to go through speed run, I see, and you've got some purchase commitments. Tell us a little bit about the status of the startup. So right now we're sitting about 500,000 in GMV, and we hope to bring that up to about 10 mil a month in GMV by end of the year. When you say sitting on, what does that mean? So we have purchase orders for 500,000 in orders. And then we're right now already placed the orders with the factory. And then now they're already starting productions. So those are real customers, real purchase orders, not letters of intent, not, or as we call them here at our firm letters of nothing. This is real GMV. That's going to be executed in the next 30 days, 60 days,

what's your vision here? Well, right now, there's like China New Year right now, so there's going to be a little bit of a waiting period, but it'll be about 60 to 90 days when it's realized. That's how that works. Yeah, I'm always aware of Lunar New Year because when I go skiing in Japan, you want to avoid that week because everybody who's off in China just invades Naseko and it's chaotic. It's like, it's kind of like ski week up here in Tahoe. All right. So you got a great pipeline, got a lot of commitments and you went through speed run. How is speed run? We've had a number of our companies go through speed run that we invested in from founding university and accelerator. What was it like? What did you learn there? Yeah, it was great. I mean,

the resources that Andresen, Holitz provides is just top notch. I mean, They're going in and they have full service on the marketing team that they have. So anything PR-related, they handle. They also go in and they have a full-service talent recruiting team. So they pull from across their entire ecosystem. And so we have a couple engineers that we're setting offers to that we got connected through the A16Z talent network. And then working directly with the partners was a really strong experience.

and working people like Andrew Chan who wrote the book with aspects on marketplaces and things like with Uber and things like that. Awesome. So PR and recruiting talent, two of the great functions over there. I remember Sequoia started with, they were like the first fund, I think, that had a dedicated recruiting team and then doing PR and comms. You can get some good press. So I wonder how they do that with so many startups, though.

They email like 100 startups to TechCrunch a week. Did you experience that, Alex, when you were at, you know, various publications? Did Andreessen's PR team reach out on behalf of a startup or they just coach them? Jason, I'm not going to lie. As the world's worst reader of email, I can't answer that because I didn't read any of it. Yeah, got it. Yeah. Jokes aside, I mean, venture firms often use individual partner relationships to reach out to journalists.

So if notable capital does a major deal, then one of their partners might text me, for example. That might be a better way to go about that. So they essentially have the short circuit to the reporter, journalist, writer, content creator, in question. And I think that's the real power. They can jump over the inbox. Yeah. Go directly to the journalist. Genius.

Okay. Keep going on the deck. Yeah. Any more slides? So one of the things that I think is with how AI agents continue to become more and more relevant. And I think there's going to be longer term. And this is why we did the business model like this, a lowering of the margin for a lot of these AI agent companies where they're going and doing, I mean, we've seen there already with stuff like sales development rep agents where

it's just kind of a race to the bottom. And so the way that we look at it on the defensibility side of why would a customer go ahead and purchase from us is that by us doing the work, and so we have AI agents not only doing that supply side, but we're also through export records finding other buyers of the same type of product. And so I agree the demand. And basically, even if they went to the factory directly, we get a better price because of the volume that we're doing. And so that's what I I would say is the main area that I see for us and how we're differentiated versus a lot of the competitors. And yeah, we just raised our C round with a couple of others, very strong investors like Madrona

Pioneer Fund and a couple other funds. And so right now our main focus is just continue to hire up on the engineering side and go full soon ahead on the wait list and expand from there. If you're listening to this podcast, there's a good chance you're thinking about starting a new business. And that means you're going to need a beautiful website. That's going to help you stand out in a very crowded market. That's why I'm so glad to tell you about our longest running partner, Squarespace. It's the fastest, the most effective way to turn your idea into a money-making reality. Squarespace is going to help you find an incredible domain name. It's going to

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Peter, I have a question. When I think about an API, what they do is abstract away complexity from the person who needs the service. And it seems like what you guys have done is built a really great system to get people what they need quickly and hopefully at a discount. Do you guys handle tariffs as well? Because those can be really tricky. And I'm curious if that's also abstracted away inside the product.

So with the whole tariff situation, there's been a huge surplus of demand. In particular, we have one of our customers who does metal imports of, Puejis. So they do, they're a car wash distributor. It's an early, early scale pilot that we were able to help. But for them, the tariffs just went through the roof. And so their business would have completely collapsed if they weren't to get it from China. And so we were able to find them another option that was outside China and be able to do that process very, very quickly. And so being able to on a dime, be able to switch factories and be able to adjust is a huge advantage. And so especially right now with how volatile the whole situation is, having us for a lot of these companies as a resource and be able to consistently buy from us, and we can just do the back end of swapping based on freight, based on tariffs, is a huge advance for our customers. And it's been a huge driver of our growth up to this point. That's a good place to double click on, though. Just how has the tariff, I don't know, chaos, insanity, changes, constant changes. How has that affected your ability to,

sort of build this business, if at all? I think the main thing is that it's no longer China is the main game in town. And so everyone's not looking for outside factors, different locations. And then historical, a lot of people were thinking, okay, India is going to be the next frontier. But then there has been huge tariffs against India. And so I think the main thing that I would stress on this point here is that the whole global ecosystem is completely changing in real time.

And so you need to have clear cuts, very quick systems, place. And so what I've seen on this end is like, so we're going in and every time there's a new tariff that's sitting out, we are able to scrape that directly and be able to instantly see if there's any customers that be impacted by that. The one that we're currently, our largest customer, they have over 7,000 skews of products. So to go in and consistently check the main website and stuff like that. It's just tough. Every single time, there could be something new that comes up and you have to react very, very quickly because the people that react very quicker, they're going to get the better price. So let's say there's a huge new tariff from India.

Now everyone's going to now look for another place nearby. And so speed is the name of the game for this. So more fragmentation pushes people or more regulatory changes, more tariff changes, drives people to look for more resiliency in their supply train, which increases fragmentation or geographic fragmentation, which then makes your software and your platform more valuable. because if they just were like, hey, I've got two or three suppliers, it's rock solid, I don't really need to make changes. It would be less need to have a software platform in some ways, yeah? That's correct, yes.

But there's still the aspect there of the group purchasing as well that I would add on, that even if they were buying it from, let's say, there was no tariff from China, we could still go in and help them get a better deal by going in and finding, and it's very difficult to do to find other buyers of the exact same type of spec and be able to aggregate altogether. And so we're able to use AI agents to do that and accumulate all that data. Peter, wouldn't you need a very large customer base, though, to aggregate enough demand to really get the discount? Like, to me, it sounds great. But you would need probably many people that need Steele Rebar at the same time, for example, to make that kind of function?

Let's say, for example, there's other types of products. And so like metal squeegees, for example, where for like our customer, for example, they do about 20 containers a year of metal squeegees. And so if we can go in and find another distributor that does, let's say, 20 themselves, by us just doubling. If you go to a factory and say, I'm going to double your volume, they'll drop the price, 20 to 30 percent, just by doubling it. And so if you could do this process, like if we went and got for that one product category, 100 containers a month, they would probably drop it 50%. And so you don't really need as much along those lines and to be able to do this process. And we're an interesting time where we can actually go ahead and use AI to

to make this whole system, which is fundamentally, I would say, is the most broken industry. It's the most antiquated along those lines. And so we're a very unique situation right now to be able to go ahead and execute on this. Now, you guys are based in the Bay Area right now, yeah? Yes, and San Francisco. And then we went through Speed Run. And Speed Run was in L.A. There was a thing.

But they now brought it back to San Francisco. Well, I think they were the idea for Speed Runs that maybe they started with video games, I think. And then they were like, yeah, maybe do everything. L.O. was a little bit bigger for video games, but it seems like it's a great program. They seem to do a bespoke deal, Alex, like a little bit more money at a much higher, not much higher, but a higher valuation than say Y Combinator, Texars or R accelerator. So it's like you have to be much more far along, which obviously, Peter, you are much further along. And so what impact

is, if at all, these AI agents and these new platforms coming out, open claw, I'm sure you've play with her seeing it. And how is that going to change how you run the startup, you know, this year and next year in terms of developers? You said you got to hire more developers. Like, do you see a world in which, you know, you don't need developers anymore? You need less developers. There is a movement afoot of no humans writing code, no humans verifying code. It sounds crazy. But that is like a goal that some people have. So how do you think about that as a founder? Yeah. So I think there's a couple ways to look at it. I think the main thing is that, well, at least what I think is that the models and everything will continue to get better and better. And so I really think

that for those that are trying to play the game where you charge a $50 monthly fee or something like that, and obviously there's other different ways of pricing it, I think it's going to be a race to the bottom. And so that's why I think we have to look at it almost like all the prices across the board will just continue to collapse. And obviously, if this happens, and I know Jason, you've always talked about it on your podcast about the jobs. I mean, we already seeing huge amount of impact along the lines for people that are new grads trying to go and get new jobs. And on the engineering side, it's completely correct. Right. I mean, for us, we don't need to hire 10, 20 engineers. We can work fine with a team of a smaller team about two to three. And so I think

the main thing is that for what I've seen, at least for the tech startups here in the Bay, is that it's still going to be hiring engineers, but you just don't need as many. And for those that are the top level, the salaries will go up. But what happens to the rest of the, you know, the engineers that maybe are not the super, super top level? And that's where I think it's going to be really severely negatively impacted. And we already seen it where there used to be a huge amount of these software development consulting firms.

And now, I mean, the prices have dropped and I have a person that I know that runs one of those firms. He said the business completely stalled out now. And they can't charge as much. And so when we look at now software no longer being a mode, I mean, we saw public markets with SaaS and things like that. It's just impacting everything. Yeah, very strange world we're moving to where adding developers isn't the goal.

Just making the developers more focused and getting them the tools is the goal. This is counter to, I would say, startups number one problem, Alex, but three or four years ago, which was, we need more developers. That's our blocker. We need more developers. And now it's like, we don't need more developers. So we're focusing on go-to market strategy growth, whatever. PR, et cetera. Peter, great job. And I'm really fascinated by your business and can't wait to get more involved. I'll leave it at that. We have an angel syndicate. If any of you are accredited investors and

want to join it, you can't just join. You have to apply. You have to get approved. It's at the syndicate.com. All right. Nicely done, Peter. And where can people learn more? What's your website? What's your email? Our website, sorcererai.com. And my email is Peter at sorcererai.com. And thank you very much, both of you for having me on. I really appreciate it. for coming, Peter. All right. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.