Stanford Students Pitch Us Their Startups For $3500 In Prize Money

24:31By the way, I was going to shout this product out next podcast anyways. I saw you on Twitter. And I saw Admit Yogi on Twitter. And I was like, oh, it's a great idea. They're getting college students. Once you don't need your essay anymore, they're paying you a little bit for it. You already did all the hard work. So, yeah, whatever. Who cares? Put it in the database. And now they have this database of college admissions essays and the stats and the resumes and all that good stuff. so I thought that was really smart I was going to bring this up anyhow um that's it's funny that you're that you're here I got to give you props on two things number one you did two things really good in your pitch I want to call out the first is you said at the beginning you go you know before I tell you know I'm the founder of Admit Yogi here's what we do then you go before I tell you about the business I gotta tell you a personal story as to like you know why I came up with this idea in the first place and that's a great way to do a pitch once you have somebody's attention like if you're in the meeting and they can't really leave, that's a great way to start a pitch because it shows your founder fit with the problem.

25:31But also people just want to hear a story. So you get them from going into kind of this transactional like analysis mode to storytelling mode. And so I think that was really, really well done. And then the fact that you actually have traction is the second good part of your pitch. This is not a theory. This is something that you actually have in motion. Now, Sam, give me your take of, would you invest in this? Why or why not? Would I invest? If I were to learn, like if you're taking this as a serious company, I mean, you're only, what are you, 19 or 20 years old? Like you're a freshman. You've only been working on it for a year or less than a year.

26:06You've got great traction, I think. The fact that you're only charging$5, that's like a, meh, I don't love that. I think it's really hard to build a big business on$5. So I would want to know about what your average revenue per user is. But I think that you are a very investable person. So I definitely am interested. I probably, yeah. Can I question on that a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. So our average customer spend right now is$130. So people pay to unlock these profiles in bulk, anywhere from one to 50 profiles at once. And people on average want to unlock 26 profiles of someone at the Dream School.

26:41And all three of us are really committed to this. So we're actually considering taking a leave of absence to drop out, work on this full-time instead. How many students are applying? How big is the customer base for this? How many students are applying to college or let's say, you know, in like kind of the serious college where they'd be willing to pay, you know, for something like this? How many students is that per year? Yeah. So in America, there's 2.2 million students who are applying to college every single year. But if you just narrow that to maybe the most elite colleges, then you have around 400 ,000 to 500 ,000 students every single year.

27:13that are coming into this market. And so how does this get huge given that what you just said, right? So let's say it's 500 ,000 and let's say even 20 % of that market was to use something like this. So$100 ,000, or sorry, 100 ,000 customers. That would be like, you know, the absolute, like you guys are dominating the market at that point, right? So what's that, 5 million? Absolutely. That's a great question. And that's something we've actually thought about a lot at Admin Yogi. So - Sorry, just to do the math. If 100 ,000 people did it, you said they spent about 100 bucks each, that'd be$10 million.

27:43in revenue, if that was the case. Right. Yeah, and we're going to define big as like 50 million in revenue. We'll say that's like the threshold of like things get really interesting. Sure, yeah. So currently the college admissions market is around$10 billion, but that's just spending coming out of the top 1 % of Americans. We think that by providing more affordable services, we can reach the other 99 % and not only capture that massive initial market, but also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space. I think that sounds good. That sounds good because it's democratizing.

28:17But in reality, what's going to happen is you're actually just going to try to take that same 1 % because the 1 % care the most, have the most money, are the most obsessed. And maybe you expand that to like, you know, the one to 9 % of the most competitive, you know, willing to pay type of customers. And it's actually never the other 99 % that you get to be your customer because the other 99 % just don't have the problem in the same way or don't have the budget in the same way. And so, you know, it's very hard to capture that customer versus the person that's taking test prep, that's hiring a college consultant, that's, you know, really, really stressing about what colleges they're going to go to.

28:54They're the ones who are willing to pay for a new solution too. That's really interesting. And that's actually the initial hypothesis that we had as well, that we're going to target these one percenters who are traditionally paying for college consulting services in the first place. But actually with this most recent round of early decision or regular decision applications that came out just two weeks ago, received floods, like hundreds of emails in our inbox from these students who were traditionally underserved. Like we're talking an Annie from rural Mississippi, first generation college applicant, never knew about traditional consultants.

29:24I mean, they were too expensive for her, but Ahmed Yogi wasn't. So we initially thought that hypothesis too, but as we started serving our customers, really collecting the data on this, we realized that that actually wasn't the case. What happens when Harvard's like, you're like, oh man, we're getting all these robots. You're, you know, and then the universal college application, I forget what it's called. Like, can they ban you? Like, can they pull API access? Can it work that way? So we integrate with the common application, which is agnostic to university. So let's say the Harvard University Admissions Department doesn't like us for whatever reason.

30:00We're not sourcing any kind of data from them. We're sourcing it from this national standard. Right. I think what Sam's saying is, could the common app shut off your access? Yes, that's what I'm asking. Okay. If the common application wanted to, they could theoretically turn off API access. But again, college students can still upload their applications manually. So it might take five extra minutes to onboard a new application on our service. But fundamentally, college students own this data. So they have permission to upload it to whatever platforms they want, including Admin Yogi. And we own the data.

30:33so here's why here's why you kind of make me all hot and bothered number one well typically people are usually really good at getting traffic to their website so marketing or getting like hype and things like that and a lot of times the people who are great at that aren't amazing at creating products and a lot of times the people who are amazing at creating products suck at marketing and like getting eyeballs i'm at i've been toying around your website right now it looks cool it It looks appealing. It looks well done. And you're saying that you've got all these customers early on. I think that that is very, very, very attractive from a founder's perspective.

31:11So I think you're really fascinating. I'm not convinced that it could be a huge thing. But I am convinced that you could find upsells that could potentially make it big. I think if I'm in your position, I wouldn't raise money. And I think that by the time you're 30 years old, you can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars because you own a business that makes 30 or 40 million bucks that potentially you could sell for a hundred million dollars or something by the age of 28 or something like that. But like just the fact that you've pulled off the, the, cause it's a marketplace a bit because you've already kind of cracked that code.

31:42I find that to be incredibly impressive. Thank you so much. Yeah. I, uh, I really like this. The one thing I would do is I kind of feel like you're using the last business model instead of the next business model. So I think what, like if somebody came to me today with this, trying to solve this problem of how can I help people apply to colleges in a way that helps them be more successful, I would say, oh, fantastic. This should feel like ChatGPT. So basically, I should basically be able to go to some bot that's going to basically help me with my application, with my essay, write my essay or edit my essay with my application, the information I put on my application, how to structure it better or present it better.

32:31And it should learn off of the successful applications. So it should take a data set of successful and unsuccessful applications. And then it should just do it for me versus a marketplace where I need to go pick and choose. Okay, Jasmine got into Stanford. Should I pay$10 to unlock her essay. Okay, then I unlock it. Now I need to look at her essay and I need to compare in my mind how to make her essay, how to make my essay more like her essay. No, no, no, no, no. I'll pay you 99 bucks. Just help me get into college, right? Like give me a 2X shot at getting into my dream school because you have a chat GPT that's trained on successful college applications and it will write your essay and structure your application and even do the application and just let you click submit and go to all these schools.

33:16That's what I think, like if I think about how somebody is going to do this in the next three years, that's what the solution looks like. Sean, it's really funny that you mentioned that because actually that's the exact vision that we had for AdMitYogi. We actually tweeted an MVP of this chat GPT like chatbot that can answer any question about college admissions. And it's like fine tuned on with this proprietary data set. We built this massive data set of college applications. And we actually tweeted an MVP about it a couple months ago. But we really think that with big data and artificial intelligence, especially with generative AI, We can provide students with these hyper-personalized specific recommendations for literally, like you said, a hundred bucks.

33:53Yeah. Because, you know, the college application process, first you got to figure out what school should I even apply to? Where do I want to go? And the chat back and forth about like, well, where do you want to go? It's like, well, what do you care about? Do you care about weather? Do you care about being near home? What do you care about? Oh, cool. Then we recommend these schools and okay, can you help me get in? And then you're comparing to like, how much does the college consultant cost? college consultants charge $6 ,000 on average cool so you say instead of$6 ,000 pay$99 once and get into your dream school and like that's the pitch that now that I think is really really compelling so if you were doing that I would invest because I think that is a very very big idea we should go to the next one but dude this is wildly impressive I saw Sean but what you're saying reminds me I saw this tweet this lady was like Like, it just warmed my heart today that people were doing things in the old school way.

34:47I was on a train and I saw two kids copying each other's homework in their notebooks. And it just brought me back to better times before kids were using chat GPT-3 to plagiarize one another. And so, like, I don't know if that would. I don't. Yeah, I think that that's like weird to hear how kids are going to be doing that in the future. But brother, you're impressive. Congratulations. Don't raise money, by the way. Just own the whole thing. Before you go, can you remind everyone just how old are you? There are some speculations. I'm 19 years old. Wow. You're ahead of the game. You are ahead of the game.

35:19You should take your leave of absence, but you should just stay right next to the campus and just recruit smart kids to come work for you for free, basically, while you're building a company, while they go to class every day. You should 100 % bail, by the way. You should 100 % bail. Yeah. Yeah. If you need help talking to your mom, I'll call her and help you out. Appreciate that, Sean. Thank you. cool all right see ya all right who's next so next up we got zane and matthew electric column two twin towers they're absolute menaces the bone out candid um they're you'll love them so i'll let him take it away there's a bunch of beauties american gladiator or shark tank blazer and blazer what a bunch of beauts let's get them up here oh the twin towers look at him he wasn't lying uh okay cool and we got to go a little bit faster because i think we're taking a little too long on each one of these so let's try to hit the points just here's what you got to do say what you're doing say why you're doing it tell us if you have any traction on it and then tell us if you want money or where you're at with the business sounds good sounds good let's do it i'm zane and i'm matthew so we're building candid at candid we apply generative ai to blog-based social videos with the goal of helping users getting touched with their mental health all All right, but pause there.

36:34I didn't understand any of that. So what? It's generative AI to help me get in touch with my mental health through vlogs. What does that mean? Give me an example. What does that look like? So essentially, we ask users to record daily highs, daily lows, and then respond to a thoughtful question, which we source from psychologists and therapists. Then they can choose which of any of these videos they want to share with friends. And from these videos, we do topic detection and sentiment analysis to present patterns to users to help them get in touch with their mental health. So more specifically...

37:01So you vlog and we give you insights into what's going on in your life and help you make sense. Okay. So like almost like an AI therapist. Exactly. It's like soft therapy. Like to call it. Soft therapy. Okay. Love it. None of that hard therapy Sam's been doing for the last few years. Yeah. All right. Carry on. Yeah. And before we jump in, we'd like to tell you a little bit about the problem and what we were facing. So both of us grew up seriously struggling with mental health. I grew up in Thailand and Uzbekistan and didn't have access to traditional therapy and traditional resources. And Matthew grew up in San Diego and did proactively seek out those resources.

37:38Now, I found a couple of things. And the thing that worked best for me was journaling. But the problem with journaling was that it took three or four times to start. It's a hell of a hard habit to get the stick. So when we started IDing around Tandit, it was with the idea of making journaling more accessible and more engaging to users. The problem's a lot bigger than us, though. Last year, 40 % of students were in college experienced depression, and most of them didn't go actively seeking out health. Our vision for the future of consumer mental health is that there are products that don't seem and come off as mental health products, but have a back-end component that's strong mental health focus.

38:13Yeah, so like I was mentioning at the beginning, what does that actually look like at Candid? Users record videos like they would maybe on another type of social media, specifically highs, lows, and reflective questions. They can share these videos with friends. And then we use simple AI techniques to present patterns to users. So we do three things for them, right? We transcribe the videos, we extract emotions, we extract topics, and we do three things. The first is we identify patterns in people's lives. So let's say you're stressed about the college internship search, right? And we play that back for you and help you observe and help you come to your own conclusions about that.

38:47The second thing we do is we allow you to smart search through your memories. So you can search for emotions and topics associated with the event that you're trying to look at, right? And then the last thing we do is we build this aura for you every week, which is a generative AI visual for what your week looked like emotionally. And it's a specific color scheme built and tailored to you. And so is this an idea? Do you have customers? Do you have users? Where are you guys at with this? Right, so right now we're in TestFlight. We have about 50 users. We just closed our pre-seed. We're in dev and in development mode right now.

39:19We'll be launching on the App Store in two to three weeks and we'll be focusing specifically on Stanford to really get that product market. How are you going to get customers? Right. So we're going to launch at Stanford in the next month. And that's going to be a hard launch and we're going to use all sorts of distribution strategies. And how much did you raise? You said you raised the seed round or something like that? Yeah, we raised a pre-seed of half a million dollars. Wow. From who? A variety of these seeds in the Silicon Valley area. Reach. Yeah, who? Ovo. Z Fellows. Stordex. Yeah. Okay.

39:52And GSR. And GSR. And so you're going to launch that at Stanford. Cool. And you can kind of brute force that because you're there. You got friends, you're on campus, that sort of thing. What happens after that? How do you get this to like 10 ,000 users or 100 ,000 users? Yeah, absolutely. So we really do at first want to take a very controlled approach. So we're going to go campus to campus. We're starting at Stanford. Like Zane said, we're going to really lock in the method that works the best. And then we're going to take a few similar universities like Harvard, Caltech, maybe some universities in Los Angeles and take that same approach and then grow from there.

40:25So we're looking at high stress environments and we really don't want like massive rapid growth. We don't want half a million users tomorrow because we really want to test especially the ethics behind this. And in trade, this is something that's scalable and like we're not doing any active harm to users. All right. So Sam, let's pause the pitch here and I want to get your reaction to ideas, to an idea like this. How do you think about this, either as an entrepreneur or an investor? What do you think? As an investor, I don't understand how, it's the same thing as before. Like when you just do the math, getting to venture-sized scale companies, which I don't know what that is, 50 or 100 million in revenue, something like that, or a nine-figure exit.

41:07It's very, very, very, very, very hard when you're only making$100 or something like that a year per customer. It's just a math problem. It's very challenging to do that, particularly when it's a social-ish app. So as an investor, I don't think it's awesome. As someone working on it, I think you guys are in the best case scenario because you have $500 ,000. And if this dies next, next year, then it's like no big deal. You're young, you did something amazing, and you're going to have another swing. So from your perspective, I think this is the greatest thing ever. From an investor's perspective, I'm not, it doesn't, it doesn't tickle my fancy, maybe because I don't see the math on how it becomes huge.

41:47Do you agree, Sean? We have a friend who has an app, she called Rooted, and it's basically around panic attacks, similar space here. And what she found was, she didn't raise any money because she's not saying this is going to be a billion dollar company, but it was a problem she had and she wanted a solution for it and she knew that other people have this problem around panic attacks and it was too niche for a huge outcome but because she built the company in a way that suited how big that market is, she's going to be really, really successful with it. She's got seven figures of revenue. She's the only employee.

42:21She's the only employee. It's profitable and And it serves that niche. And she acquires most of her users. She has 2 million users, by the way. And it could be a$10 million a year business with four or five people. Right. And she's getting the growth through basically being the top-ranked search for if you search for panic attacks, like in the app store. So she had a strategy around ASO, right? Like SEO, like ASO, app store optimization to be the top-ranked term here. And so when I hear this idea, I think these guys, you know, First, good for you for even doing entrepreneurship at this age. That's the first thing.

42:59Second, good for you for chasing a problem that matters with cool new tech. So you're going to learn a bunch about this problem. You're going to learn a bunch about this tech. Good for you, like Sam said, for raising some money. You're going to have the ability to take a shot at this. If it doesn't work, no harm done. You just got your first lessons under your belt and you'll go on to have your second company, third company, fourth company, and one of those will succeed. the thing i don't like about this is that it's a lot of work and what you know i think a lot of these solutions look really good in powerpoint but when they go when they go into the real world people will simply not do the work to help themselves it's like the guy who's you know the very first pitch he's like people get hearing aids and then they get annoyed with them or the battery dies and they don't plug it back in right and then it sits on the shelf like adherence is a really big problem they'd rather get dementia than charge their their battery out and and that's and so you know customers go for for typically like the the low friction solutions and so i think what's the the challenge here is that you have built something that doesn't really tap into human behavior the right way meaning you're saying do the right thing it'll help you and unfortunately people just don't do the right thing and help themselves and so i would love to see you guys slim the product down into something that is simple easier a little more addictive to do and has some variable reward that's like, you know, worth the work that you put in.

44:24If you've ever read this book, go read Hooked by Nir Eyal. Have you guys ever heard of that book? Yeah, I've read it actually. It's a great book. It's about habit formation. It's a great book. And I would basically say, how can we make this a more habit forming product? Because right now I would suspect that the work that you're asking them to do, which is basically proactively go on video and share what's on their mind, is going to be way too much friction for the average person. Like, you know, so I think you got to find something that's simpler if you want people to actually use it. I think simplicity is at the crux of what we're trying to do.

44:58I definitely think, you know, we need to distill it even more. But really what we're trying to get at here is tapping into people's existing habit cycles of log. I think the inflection point here is that our generation is the first generation that's like super comfortable just getting in front of the souls and just like, you know, spewing their shit, talking their truth, right? And that's what we're really trying to do. You should make it detect off of what they're posting on social media then. So there's no extra work. If they're already vlogging or if they're already posting stories about stuff, I wonder if you could read that and give them some insights.

45:29And then that would hook them to pour out more maybe after that. Because then you'd have a zero work solution potentially. I don't know the exact solution. I just know that I have made this mistake. The reason I'm saying this is I have made this mistake. I put in a PowerPoint deck. What would be an awesome product? and I didn't let reality into the room. And when I let reality in the room, it was, yeah, users aren't going to do all that work at the beginning. So they're never going to get the benefits. And so that's a challenge I've had in the past. And I suspect this reminds me of mistakes I've made in the past.

46:00Are you guys dropping out? What are you going to do once you get your 500K? Yeah, so we're actually taking a leave of absence right now. We're having full time on product. Smart. This is amazing, man. Look, my belief is that this is not going to work as you guys have it set up. I think that that's still a massive win for you. And my big takeaway is we say this a bunch, how there's levels to this game of building stuff that makes money and products that people like. You guys are just this conversation. You're very clearly at the top of the top. Luck's still going to play a role and you can still fuck all this up.

46:38but just the fact that you are where you are now even though sean said he's not a fan and i said it the same thing we're fans of you and you're gonna win it's just a matter of is it gonna be this one or the next one or the next one but this is really amazing what you feel so far thing of like i can't wait to see your second company or your third company um because you know i had my sushi restaurant as my first thing sam had his thing as his first thing like i had a hot dog stand guys you guys are doing like you guys are way way better yes generative generative hot dogs. Sam would generate them.

47:12Yeah. I put them in the bun on my hand and I handed them. They were very generous. You had to be artificially intelligent to eat them. The other thing I would say is you should stop calling it a leave of absence and just start calling it a leave of excellence. People like that shit. It sounds more provocative. If anybody wants to take a leave of excellence and come work with me for a year, come do that. You can email me, Sean at SeanFoury.com. How old are you guys? We're both 21. Wow. Well, congratulations on your success and thanks for doing this. Thank you, guys. Good to meet you. Awesome, guys.

47:47Next up, what do we got? Simplify. How many more do we have by the way? Last one. Last one. We got Michael, Mikey Mike, Michael the Mikester. So many different names for this guy. He's a great dude. And yeah, he'll close us out strong. Dude, that's what I miss about college. I used to have so many nicknames. Like what? They used to call me the blender because somebody thought my last name was Puree. And so one guy was like, yeah, his last name is Puree, right? And they're like the blender setting. And so they called me Blender for like a year. That's pretty good. I'll start calling you that. Michael, what do you got?

48:24Hey, Sam. Hey, Sean. I'm Michael. I'm one of the co-founders of Simplify. We're building a career platform for Gen Z. What's the URL? Simplify.jobs. because I know you aren't sitting on that.com. That'd be a big deal. MasterCard's got his beat right now. We're going to get it here soon. I promise. Yeah, I bet you will. If you were to apply to a job today, you'd quickly realize how frustrating and broken the process is. It's super disorganized. Jobs are scattered across dozens of different job sites. So when you're applying, you're going on 15 different sites. It's super repetitive. Today, career counselors recommend that candidates submit around 100 job applications to just get one offer.

49:00It's also super noisy. So existing platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed make it super hard to actually find relevant positions among the millions of different openings out there. And, you know, as a student at Stanford, we've experienced this pain firsthand. So during my time in college, I applied to actually more than 200 jobs across 15 different job sites. When I came to school, I grew up in a small town in West Virginia. Parents didn't work in tech. I actually had no idea how to find my first job. And, you know, after trying all these platforms, we realized that the existing solutions out there really didn't work.

49:31So, actually, I actually met my co-founders when we were applying to job together. So that is actually kind of nerdy, even for Stanford standards. But I think that's why we decided to build Simplify. So when we designed this platform, we really wanted to put the candidate experience first. So you can kind of think of us like the common... By the way, I got to stop you. I'm looking at your thing. You have 100 ,000 plus users that are using your Chrome extension and 3 million applications. and you haven't said any of that yet. It's actually on the squad right here. But yes. I got to give you credit, but I got to say also, you buried the lead.

50:12Dude, you're killing it. Don't bury that lead, bro. You're killing it. And congratulations for killing it. Pull up their site and put it in similar web while he's talking. Yeah, I'm there. All right, go ahead. Sorry. No, for sure. We've definitely got some super exciting traction. So I think you can think of us like the common application for jobs. So I think Admit Yogi talked about applying to college. Same process. You come to our website, fill out this five-minute application that you can apply to basically any job on the internet in one click. We've got a browser extension that helps us do that.

50:42So in the last roughly year and a half when we launched, we've gotten more than 5 million applications submitted through our extension, which has saved like users over 70 ,000 hours of time. We've also got a centralized dashboard instead of like 20 different platforms. So no matter what site you're applying on, we'll keep track of your applications on Simplify in a kind of CRM type of thing. So you can stay organized throughout the process. And finally, with all of this information, we built this machine learning model that is able to recommend you jobs based on where you're applying and also based on the profile that you filled out with us.

51:12So instead of scrolling endlessly on sites like LinkedIn, we'll actually deliver you jobs in like a Tinder-like interface where you can swipe yes or no and apply to those jobs in one click. And you apply to them when you swipe, right? So no, we redirect you to their career page and our browser extension will autofill the information. So it's effectively two clicks. Okay, that's awesome. But yeah, so in the last, since launching in October of 2021, we've grown to over 150 ,000 users. And I think the most exciting part of all of this is we actually spent$0 in paid marketing. So more than 4 million applications submitted in 2022.

51:48We've hit a million already in the first four months of 2023. Most of our growth has actually been organic. I think we've built a pretty exciting product that really puts candidates first. So we see a lot of mentions on Reddit, Discord, GitHub. We've also been able to build a community around supporting people who may be first-time job seekers. So we write a newsletter that goes out to 90 ,000 subscribers, giving general advice on how to find your first job. I've also been able to find quite an audience on LinkedIn by posting just free career resources, resume templates, list of opportunities.

52:18I've garnered around 60 ,000 followers in the last year or so. Are you a student or are you like 28 years old and just snuck into this bitch contest? I actually turned 23 a couple of weeks ago. So I think I might be the oldest in the room, but second oldest. I'm a senior right now. But yeah. And how do you make money? Right. So we monetize in a traditional B2B sense where we charge companies the ability to source through candidates and post jobs. I think what's super exciting about us is through this common application, we've actually generated the super in-depth profile on candidates. So basically more information that you get on a traditional job application or on a site like LinkedIn.

52:56So that way, as a company, if I want to say, hey, I want specifically people at Stanford that were in their society of, you know, women engineers club that applied, you know, that studied CS for two years and have two years of Python experience. This is all information that we have in a structured format and you can target your job listings to. And, you know, alongside that, you can source through these candidates on our platform. So wait a second. So companies pay you to post the job that you will show to the audience. Where do they post that? Where does that happen? Because you're saying it's a Chrome extension.

53:29And when you're just using Chrome, you're browsing the internet or you want to apply to a career page, you just click submit. So where are they seeing the job? Where's that other side? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So it's twofold. So actually within our extension, when you click submit, we'll actually pop up relevant jobs. So basically we're able to kind of have a medium to forward jobs to candidates, no matter what site they're on. So even if you're on LinkedIn, you apply to a job, that post submission little modal pops up and it'll recommend you similar jobs and companies have a chance to advertise there.

54:01In addition to that, our matching algorithm is kind of like the core part of the business as well, where through the matches, like candidates are specifying exactly what companies that they're looking for. startups, Series A companies, you know, companies that are founded by women, companies that are in specific spaces. So that gives us a very targeted audience to show jobs to. I think in the last month or so, I think we've had over 800 ,000 jobs shown just within the matches on Simplify. So check this out. If you go to their site, you go to simplify.job, scroll all the way to the bottom. They have this thing that says, check out some of our popular job lists.

54:33And they have things that say top summer internships, internships at unicorns, best remote internships, software roles at top YC companies. They have this really cool thing that says moonshots. And you go to moonshots and it says leading web three crypto and blockchain startups, the moonshot list of 2022. And so you can apply to some of these moonshots. Dude, this is fascinating. Congratulations. And so what's the revenue like so far? Yeah. So we're actually still pre-revenue right now, really focused on building out the consumer side of things. I think when we set out to this, we just really wanted to focus and make sure that the consumer side was fleshed out before we turned on the jets on the monetization side.

55:09I will say the kind of the way the product works now is we've built these scrapers that pick up jobs. And like Sam mentioned, of all these different opportunities on the internet, we put them into kind of like playlists almost so you can browse them almost like Spotify. So if you know you want to work with a unicorn, here's an example of jobs at these specific companies. And basically through that, we've actually been able to funnel a lot of candidates into their existing jobs. So in the last couple of months, more than 50 companies have reached out to us by email We recently put up a form that is now allowing us to collect inbound from companies where they say they've actually hired somebody that discovered their company on Simplify.

55:44So very soon, I think we're fleshing out the recruiter side of things, allowing you to have a self-serve model where you can post jobs for a month and garner inbound. And I think that's how many, you said 150 ,000 people use it. How many people have gotten a job from it? Right. So that's something that we're in the process of figuring out. So through our CRM, we can see how many people are like in the interview process because people generally use that to track where they are just to keep organized for themselves. So how many interviews? I think we, I don't have the number off the top of my head, but that's something I can definitely pull up for you.

56:14But what I want to say about. Give me an ish. I think around like 30 % have reported like movement in their job search process. So whether that's an interview, whether that's they've gotten rejected. I think that's something. So like 50 ,000 people have gotten a job interview because of you. ish. I would say around that. Yeah, because I think we don't really contribute to helping you get an interview. We just help you apply faster. I think that's the thing. A lot of people ask, like, am I going to get a job if I use Simplify? I think the goal is just to make it easy to apply. Whether or not you get an interview is still up to you.

56:47That's kind of why we're investing in the newsletter to help people kind of actually learn the career aspect. So kind of want to see ourselves like credit karma for jobs. So we can give you like, hey, learn these skills if you're applying to like 20 jobs, you still haven't gotten an interview. I think that's kind of what we're looking for. Explain how, give me the kind of like two-line explanation. How does this get huge? So how does this become a massive company? What would be your best pitch for that? Yeah, great question. I think the vision that we have is just to like be in every single person's browser.

57:19Be in every single person's browser. So we have a 90 % retention rate on our extension, which is basically generally the case for most browser extensions. People install them, kind of forget about them. and they only really pop up when they're relevant. So I think the goal is to be able to make this universal. Everybody that's applying to jobs wants the same time. Let's live in everybody's browser extension. So we have oversight on where people are applying. And through that, I think this gives us like a huge wedge in the recruiting space. The future of recruiting, I think, is going to be all data-driven.

57:46As an employer, you want to know like, hey, I want to target people that are applying to my competitors. I want to target people that are interested in software. And current platforms have very minimal visibility on where people are actually applying, what jobs they're actually interested in. I think on LinkedIn, I've been recommended many jobs as like an electrician or a plumber. So I don't really think that they know what I'm interested in. I think through kind of our browser extension, we're able to collect the data and make the process of finding a job much more like personalized. And I think through that, companies are going to be signing up to recruit on our platform and to post jobs when they find out that their dollar on Simplify goes a lot farther in making.

58:21Did you, have you raised money? Yeah, so we actually just closed a seed round. It's the first time we're announcing it. a couple of weeks ago. It was a$2 million round led by Kraft. Wow. Okay. Well, I don't know what the hell you're doing here, but that sounds awesome. Dude, it says you're... So listen to the... Where was my email? Yeah. How did I not see this? This is... Now I'm upset. You left me upset, Michael. Let me read the team bio. So there's Michael here. He's a designer and LinkedIn creator with 30 million views and 60 ,000 followers. Rasheel is the CTO. He's an engineer and product architect who scaled products to over a million users.

58:59And then there's Ethan, the CPO, who I guess he runs a career newsletter with 90 ,000 subscribers. Are those all accurate? Because that's a very impressive trio. Are they all students too? Yeah, well, so actually we, interestingly, we've all dropped out, but recently Ethan and I came back to live on campus because we both are on near full scholarships at Stanford. So we basically get free housing here. Take a couple of classes, get free housing. it's a great it's a great gig uh but we've been full-time on this for the last year and a half um and she lives in by the way in san francisco i like that you said dropped out versus leave of absence leave of absence is is uh you know one foot in one foot out dropped out is committed right it's the uh the old pig versus chicken uh breakfast breakfast analogy the the chicken is involved but the pig is committed you're the pig you guys are committed i like that and uh you raised this$2 million round.

59:54Can you say the valuation? Yeah, so we raised it at 20 post. Oh, fuck. Really? Yeah. Good job. Their YC. It's definitely a tough market. I think it's also an inflection point for us where when the markets are rougher. Wait, wait, wait. You said tough market as in you think that's too low? No, in terms of in general, I think raising today is pretty difficult. I think we had a little bit of a harder time, but I think we definitely benefited in the sense that we've gotten a lot of growth of really tough to find a job these days. So I think job seekers are more willing to give like new startups the chance.

1:00:26And I think we've been able to capitalize that when people install some of them, they generally don't uninstall and people seem to love the product. So I think we're super excited. Well, Michael, this is great. I love the product. I want to invest. Really like your approach here. I do think, you know, when I asked the question of how can this be big and you've had the kind of like the, what I'll call like the vision answer, which is like, what if everybody, what if everybody used this? then it would be big. There's another way to kind of think about that, which is a bottoms up way, which says, you know, we think on every customer we're going to generate this much revenue.

1:00:58So with 100 ,000 people or 200 ,000 people or a million people using this extension, we think we would be generating $100 million a year, right? That would be, you know, so there's usually a formula that says X users times Y value per user equals Z, you know, revenue. And so, you know, you want to have that for you guys. I know you're quote unquote, you know, pre-revenue. so maybe you don't know exactly how much your user is going to be worth, but it'd be good to have a guess. So that's kind of my only constructive feedback. Everything else was music to my ears, so well done. I love these businesses.

1:01:31I think the guy's name is Ian Siegel. I think that's the guy who started ZipRecruiter. If I remember correctly, ZipRecruiter was like, it had the largest Series A at the time, like five years ago ever. It was like a$60 million Series A because they bootstrapped the business to many, many tens of millions in revenue. And then And what's the guy's name, Wilson? What's his first name? Is it the guy who has Union Ventures in New York? I forget his, Fred Wilson. He has this awesome blog post and he's like, we were seed investors of Indeed and it's the greatest business model of all time because it's basically Google AdWords.

1:02:05You know, like people only, it's like a paid performance type of thing. And it's one of the greatest businesses I've ever seen. I love these types of businesses because they're perfectly aligned. like the the what you pay for you the pay for performance is perfectly aligned all everyone's incentives are pretty aligned it would be even better if it was like paid per job placement but that's a little bit more challenging so it's pretty nicely aligned i think this is awesome yeah i know super really appreciate that i think we're still working out the business model right now we're trying a subscription-based thing but definitely open to to try new things so yeah would love to hear feedback here's what fred wilson said he goes um people you know one of the first great investment we made at usv was in the summer of 2005 in for indeed and they talked about the founders were great the team was great blah blah he says they have a product that's used by 80 million people worldwide every month and they have a business model like google is the best on the internet revenues profits customer satisfaction shareholder value they've built a fortress and i'm happy to have a seat in the front row um so that's uh that's that's pretty cool um well listen this is this has been this has been awesome thank you for coming up i think we have to announce the winner so the winner is going to get $3 ,500 for today's pitch competition I'm going to message you Sean who my winner is and then you could yeah go ahead and ask Bobby what you want well I was going to say how did we settle on$3 ,500 it's a very specific number here I mean bar shop you might have an opinion on this that's like one souped up Mac MacBook Pro or something do you have Bobby like so you have a syndicate now like it would be very wise if you just gave$20 ,000 to every single person who's presented on MFA.

1:03:42Yeah, so that's what we're working on. And Sean, you said something interesting, which is like, why did I not hear about this startup? And there's what we've learned is that angel investors are having a damn hard time finding the top college startups. It takes a ton of time to build these communities like we have at Stanford and Michigan. And so right now we're trying to prove the model with a syndicate and helping support startups like you saw today and like the ones you saw on the Michigan show. But the long run is hope to do something just like you mentioned, Sarah. How old are you, Bobby? Are you in college still?

1:04:11Yeah, I'm 22. I'm a junior at University of Michigan. And so what happens in two years when you're out? We're going to change the world of college entrepreneurship forever. We started by building communities for founders, and now we're bringing in angel investors into the mix. We think that the way that college entrepreneurship is fostered by institutes, centers, clubs at schools is bad. And we think that the VC funds that are targeting college entrepreneurs are just looking for poached deal flow. we have a better way of doing it by building the best communities and then intelligently bringing in dope angels like you guys to make them a lot more interesting.

1:04:43Alright, well congratulations, you're on to something. Sean and I have selected the winner and I don't angel invest a ton, not nearly as much as Sean. So the winner on this one, I would love if you guys would accept me, I would put a very small like$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 if you'd allow it. But I don't know about you, Sean. I don't know if you're in that same boat, but we both are aligned on who we think won this one. Yeah, I think, you know, what is the best pitch? Who wins the pitch competition? It's the person who can have a clear pitch that's compelling, that gets you excited and they're committed.

1:05:18I think that's the hardest thing with investing in college entrepreneurs is you don't know if next semester they're back re-enrolled in school. It's like, okay, cool. So now you're super part-time on this? Like, oh, this is now an extracurricular activity. Damn, that's not what I want. Like those fishing guys. Remember the guys who had the – not the fishing, the boating company. We loved it. And they were like, yeah, but we're in college. It's like, well, I don't want to give you money then. By the way, I invested in those guys, and they are going for it. They are pretty committed to it. But I think it is hard to know because it's just one extra risk factor that you don't have with somebody who's out of school is that they'll just get sucked back in by society to the safe path.

1:06:01And by the way, a lot of times they should go out there and get laid and do whatever you want. But if you're going to get after it, I want you to get after it. If I'm giving someone money, it's like, I don't care. This isn't supposed to be cute. I want you to give me more money back. You know what I mean? We have simple investment philosophies. Yeah. When you say, well, you know, but I learned a lot. It's like, yeah, I don't care. I don't care what you learn. I care about me and my money. so uh learning is great but it is second to earning earning is always better than learning it's the fallback right uh anyways the business that we've both selected is simply uh i think you could probably tell from our excitement during the pitch you know it solves a real problem simplify bro oh sorry simplify dot jobs um yes yes there he is michael from simplify uh you are the winner of the pitch competition.

1:06:57You had the best pitch. You have the most traction. You seem the most committed that this is like happening and there's no, there's no way out. Um, so congratulations. You got, you, you, you have done it. Yeah. Thank you guys so much. Huge fan of the podcast. And yeah, simplify. I think it's a, we really got to get that URL for sure. You're never going to get it. You're never going to get it. What are you going to do with this$3 ,500, Michael? It's a great question. I think Like bottle service. Yeah. Hey, if you guys want, we can make that happen. But I think what's most important for us is investing in our social channels.

1:07:33I think, you know, huge fan of the podcast. One of the hardest things for us is getting in the hands of more college students. Our users have been super helpful in kind of organically spreading it. We don't even have referral rewards, so they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. I think we want to invest this in, you know, whether it's our social media, whether it's on the grounds kind of referral programs. I think these are all things that would help us really take us to the next level in terms of user growth? You can either get a little bit of LinkedIn promotion or an eight-sleep mattress.

1:08:00The answer is, it's very obvious to me, frankly. Yeah, this is 291 days of Chipotle. So that's a lot of fuel that we're giving you for you to go forward. Think of us every day at lunch. This lunch was brought to you by My First Million every single day as you build this company for 291 days. And at the end of that, you're on your own. Sean, let's do a wrap up here about like what about these whole things. I mean, we've only done it two or three times. I leave these things energized. I also leave these things intimidated. Every single person we've had on this, even if we've given them a hard time, is incredibly impressive.

1:08:40Would you say so? Yeah. I mean, I just remember where I was at that time. And we're not even in the same room. Like I was, I don't know where I was. So just putting yourself in this position to be doing things like this can make a pretty big impact. I did – this is actually how I became an entrepreneur. I did a pitch competition my senior year, second semester senior year. I had never even thought about business before that. I did a pitch competition. I ended up winning$25 ,000, and it changed the direction of my life. I literally wouldn't have been an entrepreneur had that not happened. And so – and the idea was bad.

1:09:14My pitch was bad. If I go back and look now, it would be so crazy. What was the 25 for? What was it for? It was for the sushi – the Chipotle for sushi idea. Dude, those investors were horrible. How did they? We had two things going for us. One, we had the most swag of anyone at the pitch competition. So we gave the best pitch. I brought the Duke basketball players in as a cameo during the pitch. They threw out T-shirts to the crowd. So we won extra money from the fans and stuff like that. But also one of the judges, he was worth like, I don't know, 20,$50 million, something like that. And he did it because he owned 50 Applebee's.

1:09:47So he was like, oh, restaurant industry, great industry to be in. Whereas 99 % of the population would have said that's a terrible idea. But this guy had made his living off of Applebee's. And so, you know, we had one judge in the bag from that. Oh, man, that competition was really bad if you won. These are so much better. This guy just raised money at a$20 million valuation from like, you know, a top 20 venture capital. I mean, it's like pretty, it's so much better than when you and I were doing this type of stuff. Yeah, totally. By the way, the funny thing is we won the competition and then we also, they also paid for one MBA student to work for us as an intern.

1:10:28So they paid his salary and we were like, we were younger than this guy. This guy had worked like seven years of like real world experience before then. And so he was taking direction of these 21 year old idiots. And we were like, do you know how to roll a sushi roll? We were just like, yeah, can you build us an Excel model? and he just and then he would build it and we'd be like yeah but you know this doesn't look very good can you just make it better and we just had this guy work on an excel model for like five months he must have been like this is the worst experience of my life well congratulations guys you're you're amazing bobby good job organizing these guys and uh i forget your the other guy's name who's the bmc over there but uh good job uh uh yeah you what was your name Anon Anon good job you know that energy that you have it's really actually great for setting these guys up you know trading stuff is really hard and like dude I don't know if you guys have ever like done high school sports but like when you're lifting weights and like trying to bench press a ton of weight and you have your team around you who's like get it get it like on that like when you guys are trying to max your bench or squat or whatever that shit actually helps and you're kind of doing the same thing so kudos to you it does actually help psyching these guys up so congratulations to everyone Thank you guys so much.

1:11:36And Sean, I'll just close with like, you mentioned that going on a pod the second semester of your senior year, like pretty much changed your future. You guys are changing these kids' futures. Like after the Michigan episode, the amount of people that reached out to us and like I'll close with saying, hit these people up, hit me up, be howlswhatumich.edu, hit these kids up. We're going to put them up, put the descriptor, like their website, their emails in the description, but like you guys are changing these kids' lives too. So we're damn, we're damn great. Not necessarily for the better, but we're changing them for sure.

1:12:06Our lives are changing. We don't know which way it's going, though. I think that's the pod.

1:12:15I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:12:35All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you can tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

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