Interviews with the Onstage Hacknight judges: Episode 1, Chapter One, Antler and the Winners!

0:00Hello, welcome here at their On Stage Hack Night. And can you talk a bit about what we're doing here tonight and why we're here? Yeah, we're hacking. We're hacking. We are hacking. Yes, we're hacking. No, I'm pumped. So this is the onstage hackathon. And a one-night hackathon, the goal is to build a company that will be worth, is it$1 million or$3 million? $1 million. $1 million. Okay, so$1 million in three hours. So I'm excited to see what the results are. I feel like the challenge is getting bigger and bigger. There's more hackathons. Build something worth$1 million in three hours. There's no easy thing to do.

0:45What do you think you would build? I have absolutely no idea. I don't know whether you would go consumer or B2B. I don't know. Yeah, it would have to be something, you'd have to do a stunt as well. Like there was like, has to be a stunt to like get in revenue probably. You've got to go viral. Yeah, you have to build something and go viral in three hours. Yeah, you have to build a really structured pipeline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Front end and then like a flashy front end, structured back end but then also somehow a viral video yeah in three hours in three hours but no it's good um yeah it's i feel like with hackathons you know there's so much planning that goes into it and there's always this anticipation beforehand and then when people show up and you like everyone's actually building and coding it's really exciting there's always a great atmosphere always it's like when people it's like as soon as the the hacking starts it's like okay this is yeah i want to i to build like bring my like like real work here and like just like because you just feel focused yeah it's an amazing environment right it was super switched on um i wanted to ask about you're a vc yep you probably value businesses all the time i do what would a business need to get to to be valued at a million dollars in three hours oh gosh um gosh well it's really i guess it's i mean it's tricky nowadays like now of course you can you can raise a million with uh without any revenue or anything but i think um it's it's a hard question because it's you know the being valued at a million versus like a million revenue is obviously very very very very different but i think right now i guess what we're seeing in the pre-seed and seed market at early stage is it's all about uh building velocity and so you know i think the teams that are the most successful right now are the fastest builders and it's it's absolutely incredible what people can get up so quickly so um so yeah i think that it's it's it like comes down to velocity yeah okay so it's something that they that they've been able to show that they've built something outpacing everybody else right something more substantial meaningful even if it's not revenue right right something that is yeah solid big yeah something that's big and a big idea too i think um i mean that's the uh

3:05I think now it's funny because there was this iterate or die type of era. It felt like, like, you know, years ago when you have all the big companies like Airbnb or whatever, and you have all these like dream stories of, oh, they're iterating. And then they finally and like the best idea. And then it almost felt like this period before AI when it was really hard to iterate because there was like, you know, a lot of established players in the market. like b2b sass and then now with ai when this like whole new generation where it really it's iterator diagon like the teams are able to find their way or we've seen so many teams that are able to find their way into like unbelievable markets by just really moving quickly shipping code and then also like you know really like having like quick and successful go-to-market strategies yeah and it's it's linked to this customer obsession yes it's like if you're close to your customer you understand their pain points you just build for them every single time it's about building for them um can i ask how long have you been building how long have you been investing for so i've been at the fund for four years now um and and i was a engineer data scientist before that okay that's an interesting transition yeah was that was that something that you always wanted to do was how did you get into it yeah so um so jeff morris is uh the guy who started chapter one and he his background so he was at um he grew up on sand hill road and then was at tinder from um he led tinder's revenue team from 20 million to 1.2 billion and then he became kind of the product person in san francisco in la and then from that ended up building his own venture fund and when he thought about people that he was or how he was trying to build his venture fund.

4:48He really wanted to bring in almost like a product org. So he wanted people with engineering skills, with data science skills, with design skills. And that's essentially how I got hired. You know, we connected through a friend and he was really looking for someone with an engineering data science background. And so I joined the fund and actually when I first joined it, initially I was just building out data systems in order to source founders and then switched over to the investing side. Amazing. And was that off the back of the success of your sourcing systems? I imagine it gave you like an amazing insight.

5:20Yeah, I mean, the sourcing systems are so cool and we still use them to this day. And yeah, they're really successful. And I think like, especially as an early stage fund, it's a really fun edge to have. But it was more that I think Jeff and I just have really complimentary skills. So, you know, he's like the product guy. And then hopefully I bring some sort of, you know, technical spin to things. And how's the way that you are either assessing or sourcing founders change since the kind of birth of AI we're also seeing a lot more AI tools like people like harmonic or spectre who are like you know meant to some people's quite like democratizing access to founders because you've got these amazing tools you've got these AI agents who can help find new founders has that diminished that sort of advantage or alpha that you might have had through your building or yeah or how has it impacted you sourcing founders totally i mean to give you a concrete example here i was um i had lunch with a deep mine engineer the other day and he said within five minutes of switching his LinkedIn profile, he didn't even say starting something new.

6:17He just switched it to end date at DeepMind. He had 20, within five minutes, 20 inbox DMs of people trying to get on a call with him. That's crazy. And he wasn't, it wasn't even like I'm building a company or I started something new. It's like, just people have these data triggers where if someone from one of these big companies leaves, you know, they're on it. yeah wow that's amazing yeah and so i think um so yeah there's so many of these data tools and like i think you know and it is great for you know if you put yourself in stealth you'll probably get inbound from vc and um start those conversations yeah i think for us it's just been um like kind of using like trying to build bespoke data systems and also um ones that have like that are a bit different and are getting at like different profiles than those ones because yeah it is like you don't want to be on the same alpha that everyone else is on yeah of course right and I was thinking does that mean does that push people earlier and earlier like do you start building relationships before they've even left high school yeah yeah yeah I think that that's a lot of like and then I guess that's that's part of venture that's that's like network and ecosystem building and everything like that yeah because you know you're like if like you want it would be great if you get the introduction if someone's leaving uh stripe as a staff engineer and to start a company and you just get the direct intro yeah yeah and has that played a role at all and you know you're setting up the engine room can you talk a bit about that and and i guess why you decided to do that yeah i'm super excited so the engine room is a new program that um that chapter one and ai engine launched this week and it is it'll be a one-week sprint and we're giving eight teams, 5 ,000 pounds, taking no equity.

8:04So like really no strings attached and to just build for the week. And what we're really excited about is that I think like there's a lot of accelerators and hackathons these days. And I mean, I love hackathons, run a bunch of them. They're always so exciting, but it just always feels like, you know, like if you build something cool on a weekend, like what's the next step? And then with accelerators, they're taking eight, 8%. And a lot of times if you're applying maybe you don't even know if you want to be a founder yeah um and so we really want to give this like opportunity in the space so if people have um you know are excited about idea or have done a side project or even their phd and they want to you know commercialize some of the work that they've done to give an environment so that you know they can have a real shot at that um so it'll be put on november 10th through 14th and um applications are open and starting to roll in now and yeah we're really excited no one's done anything like this in europe and uh it will i i think it'll also create like this really cool tight-knit community of engineers and builders i know because i think i looked i think it's in the evenings right so yeah they do their job and then they come in the evening for five days that week and they just spend the evenings hacking yeah from five to ten amazing so have you started to you said the applications start coming in yeah have you got any you know are you looking at these people thinking okay these are already really interesting builders hackers like are you are you seeing that talent come through already yeah and i think that that's been what's really exciting the past 24 hours because um like same with like hack nights you know you you like try so hard to like organize it and you really want to get cool sponsors in and like great builds or some other stuff but like you really don't actually know what people are building until the projects are submitted and you're like oh this is actually sick and what's nice about reviewing the applications is some of the profiles are absolutely exceptional and I think it really speaks to the talent that's in Europe the talent that's coming out of top universities the town that's coming out of like you know some of the fastest growing companies right now so yeah it'll be it'll be good amazing well I can't wait to see it thank you so much for joining me it's been great chatting amazing thank you so much my pleasure yay all right I'm back we're here on stage hack night I'm here David David can you just give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you're doing here as well I guess thanks very much said hi everyone I'm David I work in the investment team at Antler and we're one of the partners tonight who responds supporting the onstage hackathon and how exactly you support it because it's quite interesting we are so we are driving basically talent here tonight so Antler is a very very early stage investor in the UK we back founders at day zero often means we back founders who are pre-starting company or even a team and a lot of our individuals are high potential engineers who are looking to meet co-founders and are out in the ecosystem at hackathons attending events such as this and we drove a lot of our community here tonight how do you build that community of people who are not actively being founders yet right how do you find them we you have to look under rocks and here they're everywhere basically so um our community initiatives are focused on finding outliers from any walks of life so we look um as many visas do that uh high growth venture-backed tech companies so a lot of our individuals that join the antler cohorts will have seen the zero to one in some form or another themselves as either a former founder or an early employee at a venture backed tech company i think that's really important is having at least seen how high growth tech companies scale in in the manner that they do um but we have an open door policy right like you have to work we're all about backing outliers and outliers can come from anywhere We don't subscribe to the fact that founders need to have concrete founder market fit or domain expertise.

12:03The winners are often just for individuals who execute better and hustle harder. I was going to say, I think it's really interesting because this idea of the founder model that VCs are looking for, you always see a lot of it about whether it's repeat founders or X so-and-so, X Revolute, X whoever. But it often seems that VC is such a game of outliers that actually, even when you're looking for the outliers, there are outliers of those outliers. And there's no one one size fits all. No, exactly. I think the way the VC industry is going is that everyone is using these data driven VC tools that are looking for all the same markers on LinkedIn.

12:48and as soon as a founder goes into stealth, if they have worked in a company or have the right educational background, they're getting 100 outbound messages from every VC around the UK, US and Europe. And it's no longer an advantage anymore because everyone's playing the same game. So you have to look in different places. This is exactly what I just spoke to Jameson about. And she was saying that she went for lunch with an engineer at DeepMind and all that they did was update one of their work biographies biographies to say that their date had ended and they hadn't announced the stealth and a new thing and he's within five minutes he'd got 20 messages.

13:24It's insane. There's a VC from Peak VC in Berlin, you might know her, but she tried it herself and wrote a big article about it. She updated her LinkedIn profile for stealth and I think it was like 250 messages in the first weekend since she did that. No way. Wow, and I've used some of those tools yourself and they give you almost like a ranking or a rating based on certain attributes and characteristics it does feel and i think i saw a post go viral of somebody who had just gamified it and they put in their experience you know engineer at tesla engineer amazon product manager or whatever and then they just went into self and they got outbounded by like 300 people and they used it for their own business because it was a great story they went viral with um it's a problem right because i guess another thing that i i work on i'm gonna get the plug in there is a an organization called Social Mobility Ventures which focuses on backing founders from state schools in the UK with a view to supporting those from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and a lot of the markers that Data Driven VC is tracking is correlated with with privilege basically so elite education elite career and job prospects and and we all know that that skews towards those who come from immense privilege and have access to the networks but most people don't so i'm concerned about how that will impact social mobility in the uk entrepreneurship scene and how are you with social mobility ventures trying to counteract that we are creating an ecosystem and community of investors who are willing and open to support founders with an open door policy and give them honest feedback on what they're building as to whether it's venture scale or not i think that's what the ecosystem especially in the dei world in tech and vc has lacked in the last few years is giving people honest feedback and what they're building like don't string people along if what they're building is never going to reach the scale or is solving a problem that a vc is going to get excited about so we're all about candid feedback to help people get on that journey should they want to and what's the reception been like from the VCs that you've been reaching out to or partnering with?

15:40It's been great. We have hundreds of investors who are now part of our community. Amazing. Those from state school and those who aren't. We're supported by Atomico and Local Globe. And we are creating hundreds of investor introductions on a monthly basis between our founder community and the investors who we work with. And the reception has been fantastic. That's amazing. Have there been any success stories, anything that you're really proud of, where maybe there was a founder that you made a really crucial introduction to or something like that? Of course, yeah. Well, many of the introductions have gone on to be leading funding rounds.

16:22Amazing. Yeah, we've had a pre-seed round right now, which is not announced yet, but they've just raised£2 million on the back of introductions we made. we're really going hell for leather with it and making 50 plus introductions to investors where we really believe in in the companies themselves and and that in future we'd love to be able to back them through the syndicate we're building around this community and that's the vision is it build a syndicate to to co-invest or lead rounds into somebody's founders co-invest co-invest and then maybe one day raise the fund who knows as well if it goes well i mean there's an opportunity here right all right so you've you've backed found you've introduced founders that have gone on to raise real money we have yeah we've backed many founders have gone on to raise real money and is the syndicate up and running are you have you started to invest alongside or not yet we're we're looking for our first deal right now from a syndicate no way that's exciting we have we have about 50 angels lined up um we're looking to do checks of 50k plus into pre-seed rounds and then bring on our investor community to leave that funding round alongside us so would you would you wait for a successful introduction and then invest alongside them or you saying look we want to invest in this founder and we're gonna do everything that we can to we're gonna write that ticket and then we're gonna do everything that we can to like fill out the round with our investor community exactly yeah we back first right like this is a problem is that individuals who come from this background don't have the access to networks and they need for the social proof and the social capital of people who want to back so we back found us first then we use our network to get them from as many VCs as possible.

18:00That's amazing and I want to take it back to the hack night before we finish up. The winner of this is joining Antler for a residency is that right? That's correct. So what is that, it's ten weeks? Yeah we're live right now so the Antler residency kicked off last week, it's our biggest yet, we have a hundred more than a hundred families who are currently in the office so it's pretty crazy right now and whoever wins this hackathon we want them to join the grant a residency with you to invest up to 500 ,000 pounds by the end of the year. That's amazing. And of that 100 founders that you've got in, 100 builders, how many would Antler typically back?

18:38We have no upper or lower limits. In the last cohort, we backed about 37 founders out of 90. That's amazing. So we're looking to do upwards of 15 investments for this cohort right now. Maybe more, who knows? amazing well David thank you so much for joining me and thanks for your support I guess and helping to put on this amazing event thanks so much cheers cool I'm here with Hector Mason co-founder of Onstage partner at episode one what are we doing here today we're at the Onstage Hack Night yes we are what's going on we've got how many people are here do you know how many people are here I imagine 50 people feels like 50 or 60 people are like dotted around cracked engineers who are looking to build the next deck of corn and they have three hours to build something notable and if they win, they're going to get to pitch at Demo Day.

19:32Yeah, let's go. The on-stage Demo Day. And what have they been asked to build? I don't know. Something worth a million pounds. Something worth a million pounds in three hours. As a VC, what would a business need to look like to be valued at a million pounds? to be worth a million pounds as a VC. I mean, it's practically non-existent. I mean, we're getting people with ideas that are worth even more than that. But what does it take? Someone needs to have a good early product, some product vision, a lot of ambition. And yeah, they need to be tackling a problem that's fairly unique. So we've got to believe that there are real people facing a pain that they're solving.

20:21and that there are enough of those people. To make it work. Yeah. And you're judging tonight. Yeah. Is that what you're going to be looking for? Some sort of validation of a real problem? Yeah. I mean, a huge part of it is the speed of development. So, you know, if we can see that people have built something really, really quickly that should have taken much longer to build, then that's a super strong signal for us. Interesting. So it's about the ability of a team to have built something in a really short space of time. Even if they haven't got revenue or traction, but have built something that, built a real product.

20:56Built a real product and have just proven that they are outlier, that they're outpacing everyone else. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And so you co-founded On Stage five years ago. Next week is the demo day. First one in person. Yeah. How are you feeling? Great. The location is going to be amazing. we've been filtering through the companies they look incredible we're going to have a room full of the best VCs globally, people flying in, founders and VCs to watch the pitches and yeah we're really really excited to see some of those pitches I think at every demo day so far there have been some breakout companies that have gone on to raise tens or hundreds of millions of pounds um and so the excitement is always in thinking which is going to be that or those companies this time and do you have do you think you've got a good indication or like how much you back yourself to i know exactly which company is going to be worth 10 billion it's exciting some of them have been amazing companies that have come through on stage yeah um and like what about this cohort has been different or interesting compared to other ones um it's a good question i mean every year we see the quality increase as our brand improves we're able to attract better founders um and so um the notable change is just how difficult it is filtering down to the top 20 because really there are 30 40 maybe even more companies that are really credible and and the painful thing for us is that we know we're going to miss some amazing companies just as YC miss amazing companies just as every VC misses some amazing companies we've all got our anti-portfolio but that's painful to know and to accept that truth yeah yeah interesting you mentioned YC every company that goes through YC is a YC company and it's like YC X25 whatever it is would you like that to be on stage?

23:07would you like to get to the point where the brand is so established the success has been so huge that companies now would become, we went through on stage. Yeah, what YC have built is absolutely incredible. And I think they have an extraordinary brand. I think what we're trying to build is something a little bit more grassroots. We're sort of crowdsourced deal sourcing through our 350 VC partners. We're crowdsourced decision-making. Those partners vote on the companies they want to see pitch and the top 1 % get to pitch. And so we want to create something very community driven, that's really founder friendly, investing on really commercial terms that don't take advantage of founders at all.

23:53And we think there's a space we've heard from founders over and over that there's a real space for that. So we're leaning into that. And do you see there being a risk with relying on crowdsourcing that you then you risk missing out on the outliers? if it's sort of like, you know, it's the most popular and the most commonly selected companies. Yeah, absolutely. And so there are different layers of voting and filtering. And every cohort, we do add some that we think are particularly special because no one cares more about the companies that get to pitch than the onstage team. So we go through every company individually and always the VC partners miss a handful of companies that we think deserve a spot on demo day.

24:36Amazing. And during this process, right, from the company submitting an application to pitching on Demo Day, what happens in that time? Are you seeing companies that are fundraising and that end up falling out or raising around or what happens in these few weeks? So often companies will use Demo Day as a milestone to kick off their fundraise. Oh, interesting. Okay. and but yeah sometimes there are companies that are raising in the run-up to demo day but what we often find is that those companies are able to pour fuel on their fire at demo day so they've got a number of funds leaning in they might even have a term sheet but they're going to say to those investors hey look hold off we've got demo day coming up and they'll get a bunch of inbound from other vcs yeah fomo from the vcs and they'll be able to get better terms for their round yeah yeah amazing choice so it creates more heat much more heat we're all about creating heat yeah amazing and so you do this twice a year has there been you've ever thought about doing it more frequently you think twice is enough we create a lot of noise on linkedin um so i think doing it more than twice a year um uh is is not the right approach i think twice a year um you know we're able to go out with a real bang um attract the very best companies and founders i think doing it more than that we have thought about it we might create some kind of um always on um type platform a sort of locus where um you know founders can be matched with investors the best founders with the best investors throughout the year it's something we're exploring but it's there's no solid plans yeah interesting when you talked about your anti-portfolio companies that you've missed do you follow them on their journey do you kind of keep an eye on them in cases like future opportunities or or is that kind of has that ship sailed um yeah naturally you know we follow our anti-portfolio um it's it's good to do because you can learn from those mistakes you know um i'm a partner at episode one and we we found that when we look back at the companies we wish we'd invested in we'd often pass because the valuation was too high um we felt it was too high in retrospect we should have invested so it's helped us to be a little bit less valuation sensitive which has actually helped us get into um some great deals that we're really happy we are investors in now um so are prices too high now um well i mean the so there's certainly inflated ai valuations um but i think you know what what we're underwriting as investors at this point is companies eating into the TAM of you know the cash spent on wages and employees because those jobs that were being done by humans now being done by AI so the TAM of you know services and wages is like 70 or 100 times bigger than the software TAM that previously we were underwriting so the opportunity is there yet to see how it plays out but there are certainly going to be many generational companies from this wave.

27:41And as a VC that, you know, you go through the peaks and troughs of bubbles and waves or whatever, does that change the way that you evaluate or look at companies or do you still try and ignore the market dynamics and just focus on the company in front of you? To some extent, you have to ignore the market dynamics in the sense, you know, we need to be thinking from first principles. We need to have an eye on valuations and not getting carried away. We were sensible through crypto. There was a lot of hype around that as well. So these things do, you know, the cycles return. You do try and learn from any mistakes.

28:23So, yeah, no, you have to be aware of what's going on. But I think it's sensible to keep investing. There are some great opportunities out there. You don't have to follow the hype. You need to think about how defensible the company is. And you can do that. thinking about network effects you know companies that can have real long-term defensibility winner takes all opportunities deep tech is a great place to be investing in at the moment super technical founders but there's very few people on the planet trying to solve the problems they're going after a few people who can actually do those solve those problems and can we talk on jack and jill so jack and jill i've just announced around yeah but you invested preceded earlier this year yeah did you post on linkedin about it today i think the story was that you you know emailed them at six can you tell the story of that sure so I um I met Matt we we backed Matt with his last company OmniPresent um and uh we stayed in touch uh ever since and um told me he was working on site in news so we met up um he showed me the product I uh went away and played on it that evening spoke to um Jill the um uh company side recruiter and Jack the candidate side recruiter thought it was an incredible experience um my signal for super high conviction is it's keeping me up at night so i in this case i woke up really early um and when that happens i know like this is there's something special here yeah um so i was like right i've just got a draft matt an email 6 30 saturday morning um sent him a heartfelt email um saying right how do we make this work and um yeah very quickly we were um got the episode one team behind the behind the deal and we were in amazing that must have been i think it was four months ago yeah when it closed probably yeah um at what stage of traction were they then i know they've hit 50 000 users now was this pre it was very early they had maybe they had like a few hundred candidates on the play it was very very early um but there was momentum and it was just it's just an amazing opportunity it's an great company well look i think we've got to get to the um the final soon so yeah thank you very much for joining me thanks Ed cheers all right i'm back and i'm here on stage happen with us congratulations how you all feeling great yeah amazing you just do with brand introductions the product manager and we built the hanyo gamers system oh thank you uh and i'm lorik i'm also a I'm a product manager working at Runa and we've got a new working game tonight What is it?

31:06My name's Ben, I head up machine learning and AI for a company called Motorway and we were just trying to see what we were doing really all the way We've had labs and more days so we're a family time So the idea was to build on the new strategy and essentially build on the virus and then during all of us, it was a strategy for a while What about that kind of time? Yeah so we were just thinking about this and we were talking about the fact that games have always needed a screen not a modern game as far as we've known them but actually now with LLMs and with voice agents and things like that for the first time you actually don't need a screen for doing something engaging and playing a game and then we had a one hour conversation now about three hours to actually build the thing just talking about what that might look like and then we landed on a Harry Potter quiz called Atreus and that use case to find a new skill for example when the car you're trying to target one's built and what does that mean with?

32:00so it's probably a mirror to be honest we aren't thinking about like a little bit of personal experience but also what situation can we not use a screen at a more kind of obvious segment of users because it can also actually be like the blind community you know coming out of the user screen and that's the key working yourself and kind of the new play line and it's like to gain the psychopathy or we were thinking one of those outings but yeah So one of the prizes of winning was when you got to do it and it's going to be like three goofy moments here Are you gonna... how do you look like that? We were just checking on Callum and stuff We were just like kids at Winsor You can't tell me if you guys have anything to have You guys did better to it right?

32:44No, damn it You all met tonight We found it together and Nessie's having come up beside you and now you're gonna be getting into hundreds of these things we're gonna be like 20 ,000 you wouldn't know what's up yeah so that's pretty mental um I guess it shows the power of these kinds of things right? I mean we we didn't meet each other before that came up on a new record so I suppose I'm thinking about the idea of it's actually going to be there but Pomo Wana shows like what I've been doing these days so we don't even know how long it's like it's like you know because I would see it around people which is man I don't know.

33:19But yeah so, it's a good interesting experience. I think that's it. Ben you made a good point to have like some massive exciting event. This idea in some way is that like it feels like something you can just build now. Like the audio agents are only smart enough now to do tool calling to call super bass so we can really make like multiplayer and also leadership, sorry the leaderboard for this game so I think it's all sort of looking on 3, 4, and maybe the right thing as it seems like where the tech was just able to be able to So you're playing on as you're saying juxtapable and they talk about eating assets Yeah That's so cool Are you gonna spend time in the next 7 days trying to go up here for better products or I don't know what do you think?

34:06Well we've got a WhatsApp group now It's all there It's all there about the minutes So that's cool Well look guys, congratulations, it's amazing I'll see you all hopefully at the most things of you all, congratulations Thank you! Thanks very much!