LIVE @ YC Demo Day | Nate Bosshard, Joshua Reeves, Joshua Browder, Burkay Gur, Theo Browne & MORE

25:58Everything is native, native checkout. The attribution is really dialed in in terms of everything happens on the platform. And it's the first real attempt at getting anybody like you, me, regular creators that don't have millions of followers to make content. And with the algorithm, the way it works is you can go viral. Right. So I think that's one big aspect of it. And the other part is AI. And I'll let you speak to that. So you guys just just one second. So you guys are focused on TikTok shop initially as a category? Currently, yes. Yeah, you said agents going around finding creators. Is there pushback from scraping TikTok?

26:32Like what's the actual interaction like there? No pushback because we're number one on the TikTok shop app store. So we're in the back end. We help TikTok make money so they don't want to push back. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. We have some lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur, what you got? You can say anybody. Yeah, I know. I was going to say Elon, but I think it's Jensen. Jensen! There we go. The first Jensen, let's start counting them up. Yeah. Also, we've been asking everyone, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet? Oh, first dollar on the internet. We're just dollar in business.

27:07Dollar in business. I was fixing people's iPhone crack screens. No way. That's a great story. Fantastic. Awesome, guys. Traction, traction. What kind of numbers do you report? on for demo day. Alumni demo day was great. Our traction is$137 ,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Whoa! Okay. Thank you. Series B, Terry. I've seen enough. Give him a hundred million. We heard series A and B investors don't like outfits, so we're going to see about that. Okay. Well, we love the aesthetics. Thank you so much for coming on. Awesome, guys. Tremendous progress. Have a good rest of yours. Cheers. Thank you. And we have a surprise guest.

27:46We have the CEO of Gusto, I believe, Josh is here. We're going to bring in Josh. There we go. How are you doing? It's been too long. Good to see you. It's been so long. I'm so glad to see you. Good to catch up. It's good to be here. Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly. Hello, I'm Josh. I'm the CEO co-founder of Gusto, and we are right across the street. No way. Literally, my team walked up and was like, they're across the street. Do you want to go say hi? I'm like, sure. Let's go. Incredible. I have zero prep. Good placement, too. Did you guys do that on purpose? Well, we were an early adopter of Dogpatch.

28:21We came here in 2017. Okay. And we were surrounded by Juul. Oh yeah. It used to be this building. Crazy. That's crazy lore. Uber Autonomous Cars was the other tenant. Now it's Astronus NYC. Okay. Awesome. What batch were you in? It was 2020? Winter 2012. 2012. Yeah, 2012. That must have been just after summer 2012 when I went through. Now, because I remember we used Gessa. Yeah. What, how did, how did Demo Day go for you? Yeah. So first off, it was smaller. Yep. It was down in Mountain View. But it was still like 70 teams back then? There was about 50, 60 in the batch. Yeah. And it was twice a year.

28:57Now it's four times a year. And yeah, I mean, the shift was just starting to San Francisco. So we were actually still based in Palo Alto up until four employees. And then we moved up to the city, and then a lot of companies are now here. Were you, did you guys start with the payroll? Was that the thing you were planning to build, or did you kind of pivot into it? We were before YC definitely iterating and experimenting once YC officially started we were like heads down Okay, so were you running payroll prior to demo day or did you need more time? So we because we're not dog food the product so we we decided we weren't gonna pair ourselves Okay, until you do it product.

29:35There we go. That's great. There we go

29:40I like it Yeah, this onboard's going hard. But yeah, no, we didn't pay ourselves until we could use our own product. And then we onboarded like 10 other companies. Okay, but that was during YC. During YC. That was during the batch. Well, for demo day, we had to be able to say to everyone, Yeah, yeah, we're using our own product. We can process payroll. Otherwise, you'd have to put a clown mat, you know, outfit on. We were three electrical engineering PhD dropouts. What credibility do we have building payroll software? What's the craziest MVP version of running payroll? Like legally, can you just hand someone cash and fill out a form?

30:11aren't there aren't there stores how do you how do you ramp up you can do it on a spreadsheet obviously you should use gusto but like don't do it legally legally can you just do it when we started the company 40 of businesses in the us were doing it by hand wow right and you can you there's like physical businesses out there in the world that still like run they do payroll as a service bureau and you can like go into that a tech business yeah exactly and it looks more like retail. Yeah, about a third of companies are still using that type of system. It's error prone. Mistakes get made. You get penalized.

30:45Yada, yada. That's wild. Insane. That's crazy. How was, how was, how was raised? Did you guys have any trouble raising or people by that point were pretty bullish? I'm guessing. I think we stood out. There was luck. There was hard work. A lot of stuff has to line up because you're raising at the same time with a bunch of other founders. Instagram had just gotten bought in the last year or two I think before that and so a lot of the companies in the batch were in the social mobile local I remember this kind of craze so low best time to build sass is when everyone is like we're building a business that has like very concrete need very very established market yep so we ended up doing really well in the batch in terms of the fundraising process we raised a six million dollar seed Wow no way back then was a large amount.

31:31And then it wasn't about spending it. Like when we did our Series A, we still had two-thirds of that in the bank. But yeah, we had some great investors get involved and we're really grateful. We have a lightning round. We have two questions we've been asking everyone. Favorite entrepreneur? Doesn't have to be greatest. It can just be anyone. But who's your favorite entrepreneur? Can I be snarky in my answer? Please. Tomer and Eddie are my co-founders. They're amazing. I think really highly of them. That's a fair answer. I can go with a classic. Any biographies that you have on your nightstand?

32:01Here's a personal story. Graduated 2005, Stanford, and the commencement speaker that year was Steve Jobs. Wow. That speech was live. It's like a viral video. That was a formative moment. And I really admire that customer centricity, that imagine the future aspect of Steve Jobs. Wow. Yeah, that's great. And then what's the first dollar that you made online? Was it Gusto or were you doing anything before that? I mean back in the 90s I was building websites. I built a website for a coffee shop. For a coffee shop. So I mean that was, I got paid for that. Do you remember how much you got paid? I think I did it for like 500 bucks.

32:39500 bucks? That's pretty good. In the 90s with inflation that's like$25 ,000 today. I mean, yeah if you just waited some time, bought Bitcoin, you'd be a trillioner. Yeah put it all into crypto and you'd be good to go. Well, you put it all in a payroll and I think it worked out. Maybe I'm Satoshi. Fantastic. Do we have more guests just ready to go? Okay, perfect. I got a lot more questions. Good to see you. Yeah, yeah. Thanks so much. Congrats on all the progress with what you guys are doing. Good luck out there if you're moving founders. What percentage of the batch is already using Gusto, do you think?

33:12We tend to do pretty well with YC batches. It's fantastic. And we also do a Boba get together. There you go. Boba. Yeah, it's a little bit gusto. Make payroll easy. So it's easy. We're here to serve. Well, thank you so much for hopping. Incredible. We'll see you soon. And we will bring in our next guest. We'll also tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com. What's happening? Welcome to the show. Hey, I'll give you a salute. There you go. I'm a big fan of the show. Thanks very much. Yes, I'll introduce yourself for the stream. What are you building? What are you pitching here today?

33:46So I'm Bruno. We're building Gauss, a personal AI investment analyst for retail investors. Oh, interesting. So, you know, B2C, if you invest in stocks, you're welcome to join our platform. Yeah, I mean, there's been a ton of moves in the retail world, tons of meme stocks going on. Is this going to help me find the next great meme stock or avoid getting caught up in the meme stock stuff? Is it more for the retail investor who doesn't want to get burned or the retail investor has to go risk on? Can I tell the app to not make mistakes? Exactly. That's actually our number one use case. we want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes.

34:17Emotional mistakes. Right now we're focusing on thesis driven investors, so not the meme stock buyers. Sure, sure. So you have a clear thesis, you want to monitor the market, but you're a busy professional, you don't have time to keep track of everything that's happening. We can find opportunities, you connect your portfolio to us, and we can start giving tailored advice that fits your financial profile. Talk to me about the puzzle pieces that you're putting together. I imagine Plaid's important, There's probably some broker dealer at some point. There's probably a frontier model that you're partnering with.

34:47You're not training your own models, but what are the puzzle pieces that you're putting together to build a platform? Yeah, exactly. So Plaid is part of our platform. We have read only access to your accounts. We don't do trades right now. You just recommend right now. We recommend it. So we're an advisor base. We want to tackle the advisory market and replace RIAs with agents. So what kind of, what's the compliance framework if you're giving people investment advice as an app. Everyone always says, so you just say not investment advice, and then you're fine, right? And then you can just give as much as investment advice as well.

35:16Yeah, yeah. Right now, that's what we do, but we're in the process of getting the RIA registration. And hopefully by the end of the month, we will be an RIA and we can give advice. Did you come into YC with this idea or did you pivot into it? We did, yeah, actually. We've been, Michael Farah and I have been working on this for the past like three, four months. We apply with this idea. We're one of the few B2C companies in this batch. because most companies have been B2B. But it's been exciting. We got like 1.7 thousand users using our platform, generating revenue. And is your KPI like assets that are linked on Plaid?

35:48Is that what you shared today? Yeah, that's one of the KPIs. But right now we're focusing on signups and retention. Yeah, we want to get users coming to our platform and staying with us. And we want to eventually be the best in giving tailored investment advice for people. That's great. Lightning round? Yeah, I was going to say, how are you monetizing today? It's a subscription model. So we're charging$19 a month for customers. And you know, we'll plan to continue with this for a while. And then eventually we're going to switch the more RIA like model. Free plan or everyone paid? Free plan. It's a freemium.

36:21You can just like sign up the platform, use the free features and you can pay an X more. I like businesses like this because people run the calculus of like, if I pay$19 a month, but I can make a slightly better investment. Totally. Also, I mean, you can definitely, I don't want to, you know, degrade the business anyway, but you can also underwrite this as almost like an edutainment product. Even if I'm not always making the trade that it recommends, if I'm just saying, okay, here's my thesis, walk me through the stocks, that's almost like a deep research type product. That's something that somebody can read like an investment newsletter.

36:54Exactly. What were you doing before this? I started my career at Nubank, big Brazilian fintech. I was doing data science there. Then I moved to VC. I did three years of fintech investing in Latin America. Thank you for working. I like BCs. I was in the industry. Thank you. And then I switched to the other side of the table. Now I wanted to start something on my own. Did two years of business school at Stanford. Oh, cool. Just graduated two months ago. Did YC and now we're here. Non-traditional background.

37:26So how's the fundraiser going? We close a round already. Oh, let's go. Let's go. Okay. Still undisclosed, but we have a small location for smaller angel checks. Hopefully, that's a good runway for us. He's like, call me, but not financial advice. But also, it's going to be a thousand bagger, but also not financial advice. Dude, congrats. A couple lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur? We've been asking everyone who comes to mind throughout history. I have to say David Veles from Nubank. He's an inspiration for me. He challenged the most traditional industry in Brazil, big banks, and he managed to create a generational company.

38:06I really liked it. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet? Oof. So when I was a kid, I started kind of like this small e-commerce shop to sell materials for, school materials. It was just like a very simple website in Brazil. I was in Sao Paulo, and kids were always like, they asked their moms to buy school materials. And I was like, I think there's a way to just like sell directly to kids. And they were like starting to go to these websites. And I was just like, and it was like, there was no payment system or anything. It was just like a storefront and they could sell the material. And they paid me cash at school.

38:47So I just started selling them. But you use the internet as kind of - Yeah, it was like an order management system. Order management system. Wow, that's amazing. That's a great story. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. Awesome, thank you so much. Great to meet you. Thank you so much. Cheers. Congratulations on the round. That was not general solicitation, by the way. He was not saying to reach out to him if you want to invest in the company, but I'd love to see it. I'd love to see a non-traditional background into Stanford representation. Stanford MBA, worked as a venture capitalist, worked at a hyperscaler.

39:18We'd love to. Not a hyperscaler, but a gigascaler. Welcome to the stream, Perseus Defense. I saw your stuff on X. I saw the image of this massive weapons truck or something. Oh, yeah. Wow. Got to update the shirts. Welcome to the show, guys. Welcome to the show. It won't be some honor off. No, you're good. Yeah, you're good. Cool. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks for hopping on. We're going to kind of have you pass back the mic and back and forth. Just get it as close as you can. Sure. But introduce yourselves. Who are you? What are you building? Cool. So my name is Jason Cornelius. This is Steve.

39:49Hey, what's up, guys? Steve with Perseus Defense. What's up? and we're building 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. Okay. What do we not have 16 inch missiles in the arsenal currently? Is this something that's like, like we're familiar with like the Patriot and the bullet. How much do they cost and how do you fire them? Yeah, it's a good question. So there are some existing solutions for like the counter UAS problem, right? We walk through it. Yeah, walk through the solutions for sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare. Yeah. so gps jamming which is unreliable right there's there's easy ways to defeat them you know you can make a more advanced drone and this is what we see and then you have the fiber optic cables there's fiber optics oh yeah like already defeating some of those solutions that we have yeah and then there's like the death star laser beam which is very expensive immobile very heavy requires a lot of power there's ai machine guns yeah so like there's a million solutions and we were who's your buddy that does that uh uh acs acs got on the truck yeah and so there's some really good solutions out there for different use cases and we need more yeah we need more and they all have pros and cons and they have like a layered so some of them like acs is very short range some of them like a patriot is very long range and so we looked at it who's going to fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend a 10 million dollar missile to shoot it at 10 miles away but we also don't want it to get so close to us that it's you know right on top so what's the range it's a 16 inch missile half mile half mile okay and is the benefit of that the payload like you you can blow up a bigger drone or you can just fly farther.

41:17Like what are the trade-offs that go, or what are the benefits that go into having - Yeah, really the cost. The cost. Yeah, so if you look at like the best solutions today, you know, Raytheon has something called Coyote. That's still$250 ,000 per drone that we take out. The drone that we take out cost$1 ,000. Yeah, yeah. So it's not a great scale, right? So we're building these things for a sub$10 ,000 a shot, trying to drive that cost down. And then you have a missile. How does it do targeting and like actual firing? I just wanna tell you about it. Yeah, so there's a thermal seeker on board the missile.

41:45All the computes on board the missile, it's fire and forget. So it just seeks out the drones. Oh, so you can just shoot these out. Yeah, and so we have the display out back with, like, the missile pod mounted on some unmanned vehicles. And we got some Navy SEALs to send us. Cool. But you can see, like, these things could, they're cheap. They can pop off. You can have, like, they're only a pound each. So you can have, like, 25 missiles in one pod that's only, like, 30 pounds or so. So a guy can carry around, like, a mini surface-to-air missile site, basically. That's crazy. Crazy. What's the progress of the business?

42:13Are you going straight to program record? Are you doing some different grants? What's the business model? Sure, it's a good question. So, you know, a typical way to do this is you apply for a CIBIR, Small Business Innovation Project. So we've done some of those applications, but we're kind of trying to attack it from all different possible angles. So I was in the Pentagon three weeks ago. I carried missiles inside the Pentagon to show two offices there. We're working with Fort Hood, so 1st Cavalry Division down there. They've been super helpful giving us feedback on our solution trying to help us accelerate it into the DoD So we're talking to the soldiers at the ground level We're talking to the Pentagon We're talking to the science and technology communities inside the DoD and really have a list of supporters They're just waiting for us to get a technology ready so that they can bring us out We can demo it get it ready to rock.

42:56What's it like? Testing a product like this Yeah, yeah, yeah, but but but you know a lot of your batch mates here can go and just ship a product to make an edit, ship it to prod, and then the stakes are a little bit lower. So where are you guys even testing and all that stuff? Can't say on here where we test at, but every two weeks we do a long drive very far outside of San Francisco, and we load the truck up. We take a bunch of missiles out into a very faraway land, and we test. So that's been the entire YC batch. Every two weeks we've done it, so four or five cycles. And then in between those two weeks, we have the entire team doing major iterations to the design, improving it.

43:36So in the 10 weeks of YC, we've done five major missile iterations, launched over 30 missiles, and it's progressing quite fast. I will say the first thing that we bought with the YC company, or with the YC money, was a forward expedition. And so we just packed that thing full of all the things you guys got. And then we blew it up. Yeah, exactly. Lightning round. Favorite entrepreneur? Who do you look to for advice or as a role model? We're looking at Dino at Saronic right now and trying to match that growth trajectory that they're having a lot. Makes sense. And I'll say Steve Blank. We're kind of friends with him down at Stanford.

44:11I love him. He's awesome. I love him. Yeah, I interviewed him a while back. He's great. Second lightning round question. How do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? I used to wash horse trailers. Wash horse trailers. There we go. Quest re-encoding. There you go. Let's give it up for people who get their money. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, guys. Good luck. Cheers. We will talk to you soon. If you're tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We are going to have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tan stop by. The team's going to bring in Gary Tan as soon as he's available.

44:50But next we have Meteor. Welcome to the stream. Nice to meet you. Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? Yeah, I'm Pranav. We're building Meteor and this is Farhan. The AI native browser that's going to kill Google Chrome. Oh, okay. We got the browser wars going. Let's go. Okay, okay. Meteor, are you guys going after Comet too? Yeah, absolutely. Everyone. Yeah. Okay. What's the plan? I mean, everyone has installed Chrome at this point. Everyone runs it. It's so hard to rip it out. How do you create a solution that's 10x better? Yeah. Well, I mean, we all spend seven or eight hours every day on our browser.

45:27We do most of our work on the browser. Most of it is redundant work. We're saying we can automate all of that away. We're saying we want to spawn AI agents that work with you as your co-pilot to the web that can do your work for you so you don't have to waste your seven, eight hours. Okay, but what does that look like as I use the product? How do you pitch it to somebody who says, Chrome works well enough for me? Right, Chrome does work well enough for you if you're okay wasting many hours a day. But we're saying is we're giving you time savings. It's sort of like people pay thousands of dollars for personal assistants.

45:58Right? People pay thousands of dollars for employees to hire, like to create automations. We're saying, we want to create virtual employees. Sure. That run on your browser. Yeah. Right? And that's Meteor. So like, let's say you want to handle your calendar. Sure. Right? Just automate all like meeting creation, you know, based on your emails. Like if you want, if you want, you know, some kind of like data entry, just hand out, like tell Meteor and we'll handle it for you. Right? How is the AI agent interfacing with the actual data? Are you screen scraping, taking screenshots, trying to interpret it that way?

46:26Are you doing computer use or interacting with the HTML API underneath? Yeah, so we're in alpha right now, so we're trying out a bunch of things. Right now, we're primarily using vision, so we use screenshots. Also helps a little bit with some of the prompt injection stuff, so definitely. We're primarily using vision, but we've been playing around with a bunch of things. What's the best frontier model right now for what you do? Right now, it's probably Claude Sonnet, but we use a mixture of models. We use GPT, we use all of them, and we are state of the art. What were you guys doing before YC?

47:02We were at the UW. We were both doing computer science. We left to build Meteor. There you go. We have a lightning round. Who's your favorite entrepreneur? It's got to be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, okay. And how did you make your first money online, your first dollar in business or online? Selling Pokemon cards. Selling Pokemon cards. There we go. There we go. Congratulations on Demo Day. How's the race going? First year college dropouts, you're here, you're going through YC. Oh, it's been going great. Yeah. We're both second time entrepreneurs. We've been to a bunch of cool shit in the past. First time dropout, second time.

47:36First time dropouts. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can only do that once. No, you could go back and get an MBA and jump out. You could go to med school at 35, drop out. What was your last company? So he built Maxima, which is an FPGA IDE. That was 10 times faster than the industry standard. Okay, serious. Yeah, yeah, a lot of code optimization. I've built a bunch of projects at UW that went viral. Awesome. He almost got kicked out twice. No way. Tell us the story. What was the worst thing you did to get kicked out? Okay, so the thing that went most viral was I figured out there was a data leak that allowed students to get access to their professors before UW published it.

48:11And I published it. Within eight days, it got taken down. I got called in. But, you know, everything's okay now. Okay, everything's okay now. Congrats guys. Good luck out there. If you see Sundar Pichai, just run the other direction. Just run the other direction. Cheers guys. Thanks for coming on. We have our next guest. We've been trying not to do handshakes. People are insisting on the handshakes. We're going to do handshakes all day. We're going to do handshakes. Okay. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? How's it going? How's it going? Cheers. Congratulations on a fantastic demo day. Why don't you introduce yourself?

48:48Yes, he just literally came directly from the stage. Fantastic. We love to see you. I think it was really good. You look calm and collected. Okay, that's good. Introduce yourself in the company. Cool. I'm Haz Hobble. I'm the founder of Pali. We're bringing every contact and every conversation from every platform into one place. Okay. And using AI to help you keep track. I knew that. How do you get my iMessages? Modern work. I got iMessages. There's Signal. There's Action. There's LinkedIn. There's email. There's personal email. Tell me about it. And there's been a few people that have tried to crack this.

49:16I think like text.com. Yeah. highest, maybe highest profile solution. There was a, but what's the, what's the, the YC founder working on something like this deeper? Yeah, so what's the, what's the unique insight and what kind of value do I get from connecting all these services and giving you all my data? Well, one, you don't give us all your data. We do it fully locally on your device. Okay, cool. With on-device LLMs, on-device vector databases, your data remains local, which is amazing for you guys and for us, because we don't want to see your data either. So I have to run it on a computer that's always on basically?

49:47No, so it's on your MacBook and then it syncs to your iPhone as well. Okay, but if my MacBook's closed right now, it's not going to sync to my phone? If it's switched off fully, it won't sync. But if it's chilling like that, it's okay. So never turn off.

50:04But realistically, if I really cared about this, I could get a Mac Mini and throw it over and then it's just running. Okay, got it. How are you actually scraping? Can you share how you're scraping out of iMessage? It's very clever. Okay, so I don't really want to share. Everyone always has one trick that Tim Cook hates. And good luck to you holding on to that. What's the traction been like? What kind of metrics? Yeah, I mean, so we launched two months ago, reached product of the week on Product Hunt, and it's since growing to over - Thank you. We've since grown to over three and a half thousand users, 125k of ARR.

50:37People are really paying a lot. Yeah, yeah. Wow, okay. Growing at 22 % week over week. That's fantastic. We have some lightning round questions for you. Who's your favorite entrepreneur? Who are you learning a lot from? My favorite entrepreneur of all time? Actually would be Richard Branson. And here's a fun story. So when I was, I dropped out of high school. And I remember when I was like 14, 15, speaking to my mom about this, I pointed to him as someone who was successful who dropped out. Did he drop out of high school though? Yeah. Oh, wow. And then 10 years later, I was invited to spend a week on his island with him.

51:08No way. And I spent actually time with him on Necker Island. And so it was like a very cool full circle moment. Totally. He's been a great, great like mentor over the years. That's amazing. That's amazing. Second lightning round question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? I was 12 years old and I sold FIFA ultimate team coins. What do coins mean? Basically, it's like you can buy and sell players and create a team. Sure. And I would. Virtual currency inside the game. But how I do it is I'd find a player and buy up every single version of that player and then price fix three times higher classic price and so it made so much money definitely illegal in the real world but on this game it was fair game

51:51how's the raise going yeah I mean we're oversubscribed and we're still deciding on who to partner with so reach out if you want to chat financial advice but super bullish on you. Guys, thanks so much. Great to meet you. Can't wait to test the product out. We will bring in our next guest, and we are live here from YCDemoDay. Welcome to the stream. I'm Joe. Nice to meet you, man. Nice to meet you. What a direct name, let me guess. Model, Context, Protocol, AI, something like that. What's going on? Introduce yourself, what do you do? Yeah, my name is Pietro. I'm the CEO of MCPUs. We help people use MCPU, of course.

52:26We have open source, they have tools and infrastructure. I was gonna say, what's the open source strategy? Yeah, open source I mean is a no-brainer. The strategy is to open source. Yeah, everything is free. Okay, everything's free and then there's probably a GitHub repo that's growing and some measured by stars or something like that. Yeah, 7k stars. So there we go. I know it's here for 7k stars. Congrats. And then at some point, do you want to be more like Red Hat Linux? Like who are you looking to in terms of well-run, is it GitLab? Superbase. Superbase, okay. Breakdown. How will their business model look like yours?

52:56Yeah, because they have a bottom-up approach. they get developers and then those developers introduce inside the company the tool and I love it. And is the goal there to sell a non-self hosted version long term? Yes, like a cloud. What else is driving adoption right now? Who are the key businesses or customers that are really going all in on MCP? Enterprise. Enterprise. 20 % of the portion 500 users. Is there any specific subset of enterprise that's particularly all in on AI or MCB? Like we saw this data point yesterday that when the census polls people, maybe enterprises are less likely to adopt AI.

53:37Maybe they got over their skis. But you can imagine that it's different if you're a farmer adopting AI or a large agricultural conglomerate or chemical plant or a widgets business versus like your visa or your fintech company. And like AI, it's already a digital business. So have you noticed any trends in who your customers are? Yeah, I think what you said makes a lot of sense. Like tech forward enterprise are doubling down. Like PayPal, these kind of companies, because they have a very software, like they have a very valuable software. MCP allows to expose this software to agents. So they're the ones, you know, doubling down.

54:11How's the raise going? Very good, very good. We raised six already. What? Six dollars! Six thousand dollars. $6 ,000. How many times did you have to apply to YC to get in? Oh, three. Three? Let's go. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up. What were you doing? I was in Zurich, you know. Oh, nice. So fire there and virtual try-on for e-commerce. Okay, cool. Miserable. Oh, virtual try-on. Did you just say miserable? Yeah. It's very hard to sell to fashion. Don't do it, founders. Totally. It's crazy how many companies have taken that crack. Yeah. But now it's getting better, you know. Yeah, Doji.

54:52Yeah, New York is very good. Yeah, I mean, you always wonder if it's going to, is that functionality going to live like at Shopify or at an independent enterprise? What's the AI scene like in Zurich? I mean, Sucks over there poaching all the time. Yeah, yeah, no, guys, it's great. Zurich is a great place for time, like deep research. That's great. Yeah, I think last year you had another Zurich guy. Yeah. There we go. So we're also getting it. But you're staying in the bay. Yeah, we're seeing it. Okay. Yeah, we got to play the America Eagle. We got to get on. Thank you. We have a lightning round.

55:28We like to ask two questions first. Who is your favorite entrepreneur or someone in business that you look up to? Yeah, Brian Chesky, I think. Brian Chesky. There we go. And then our second question, how do you make your first dollar online or in business? Converting an open source user. Really? Yeah. With MCPUs? I thought it was like an hypothetical question. No, no, no. Literally, like a lot of people, they sold records on eBay or they, you know, set up a website for a friend. Everyone has an interesting story of like their first taste of entrepreneurship. Yeah. It's been a job. I don't know.

56:03I think it was an app where people could create a picture of their kids. Oh yeah. I made it with a girlfriend at the time. No way. Okay. Cool. an app programming yeah yeah and you got your first dollar well congratulations have a great rest of your demo day we will talk to you soon and we will bring in our next guest at yc demo day 2025 welcome to the stream how you doing thank you for hopping on the stream i'm john nice to meet you uh please introduce yourself what do you do what are you building yeah um i'm prongeli i'm building slashy what is slashy slashy is a general agent that connects to your apps okay like your calendar, Gmail, Notion, Slack.

56:40Just does stuff for you. On Android, iOS, both? It's on the browser. It's on the browser. Okay. So is this a Chrome plugin or are you engaged in the browser wars? Are you going up against Chrome directly? We're not in the browser wars. We're actually built on APIs. APIs. Yeah, no MCP, no browser. No MCP, no browser. No MCP, no browser. So does that mean I have to go through like 25 different OAuths to actually log into every single app with you once? And then you have the freedom to move around with your agents? There's ways to get around it. There's ways to get around it a lot. Oh, that's secret.

57:12You know, Google. Sounds like some Sith Lord magic. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Right now it's very basic. We just don't want to, you know, unleash our power to the world just yet. Of course, of course. Well, speaking of power, how powerful is the business now? What is the value that you're telling users they'll get out of the product? Is it more B2B focus, more consumer? Where's the focus? The focus is just, you know, you're nine to five, the shit that you don't like doing. And you just like have Slashy do the automating of the repetitive tasks. So specifically, I have a workflow that I'm doing where I'm going from this document to this app, to this calendar, to this email.

57:46And I do that every single day. And so I'm going to use Slashy to automate that. Well, yeah, I mean, that's, of course. Yeah, except Slashy writes the prompt for you and thinks of the edge cases for you as well. And, well, one thing you should try on it is people search. I know you're meeting lots of founders today. But yeah, we made a specific template for you for we season alike to be like, find everything about X founder. Okay. Atlassian just bought the browser company. Do you think they're kind of going after a similar opportunity to what you guys are going after? I think the issue is just it's really hard to build habits around browsers.

58:21It's really hard to get people to use browsers and switch from like what they've already been using. So better to integrate at a deeper level. That's exactly it. You really need to just be useful and be something that people want to use. So once I authenticate and you're hooked into my digital life, are you going to just automatically detect things that could be workflows? You said you're going to write the prompt to yourself. So you're going to notice that every time I get an email from someone saying, hey, I'd like to meet, I open up LinkedIn and I search them and I go over here and I look at their website.

58:52And then you might do that automatically for me in the future? Yeah, I just asked you to do one thing and then it'll be like, do you want me to set this up for you every single day? Fantastic. That's very valuable. How did you meet your co-founders and what were you guys doing before this? We met at college. I'm 18, freshman. My co-founder is sophomore and the other one is junior. Wow. What school? Georgia Tech. Nice. Yeah, before that I had another - And you guys dropped out? Sorry? Dropped out? Dropped out. There we go. There you go. Freshman drop out. I'm a sound effect for that. Freshman drop out.

59:19Make it very far. How do your parents feel about the dropout? They're both PhDs. It's a little bit of an uphill battle, but they're supportive. So thank you mom. What metrics did you share during your pitch? What metrics did I share? Well, 40 % of the batch uses us. What? Yeah. That's great. Growing 30 % week over week. 30 % of the VCs in Demo Day are using us for meeting prop. No way. Crazy. That's really good. Very cool. Yeah, you came in with a pretty broad pitch, but you narrowed down really well. I like this amazing how's the fundraise gone? Fundraise going well we're almost almost done with closing yeah yeah a little bit better it's like okay like she dropped out but you know the bags in the river um we have a lighting round we asked two questions who's your favorite entrepreneur who's my favorite entrepreneur you look up to Elon Musk, Lucy Guo.

1:00:23Wait, somebody's asking a question, freshman dropout on September 9th. Did you go for a week or were you a freshman last year? I did a year. You did one year, okay. It would be funny. And then the last question we ask is, how did you make your first money online? Although normally that's like people much younger, a decade ago. But yeah, what was your first introduction to entrepreneurship? Was it this company or did you make money in some other ways? some people you know did some stuff on ebay or built an app or built a build a website or something you know i started a company when i was 14 that lucy guill funded actually no way yeah we went through h of zero very cool okay what did you actually do how'd you make your money like what what did someone pay you for uh summarizing research papers no way there we go crazy all right well legend one shot by deep research eventually legend in the making well congratulations thank you so much for coming on the show uh we will talk to you soon have a good rest of your demo day.

1:01:18If you are just tuning in, we are live from YCDemoDay 2025 and we are bringing in our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I'm John. Please sit down, talk into that microphone and introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do? What do you do? Hey everyone. I'm Anmol. I'm the CEO of Closera and we build AI agents for commercial real estate. Ooh, okay. Nice. Big industry. Huge industry. What part of the commercial real estate stack, the actual transaction, do you sit on the buyer side, the seller side? Yeah, it's a great question. Administration, there's so much that in commercial real estate.

1:01:48Exactly. It's a huge industry. So yeah, my co-founder and I, our families actually grew up in the commercial real estate space. Both our families are developers. Cool. Thank you. Let's hear it for the developer building. We like to build. Developers, developers, developers. We usually say that in a different context. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, we kind of did a survey of the whole market and we realized actually the most insane amount of manual, tedious, boring work that of course can be automated with AI agents is actually done by brokerages. And so that's where we decided to focus. Mm-hmm. And so where in the brokerage stack do you say, is this somebody who's, they never actually take possession?

1:02:23They're just facilitating the buy and sell? Yeah, exactly. So our customers are commercial real estate brokers. Brokers, okay. So both on the buy side and sell side. Very cool. And that's, yeah, that's where we focus. Then in terms of where we're talking AI agents, are you trying to build an RL environment for some of the other platforms and throw your own agent on top? Or are you just building like SaaS that pulls the different AI tools off the shelf as needed? Yeah, it's a great question. How should I think about the business? Yeah. So you should think of us as kind of like AI employees. We automate entire end to end workflows.

1:02:56And so for commercial real estate brokers, there's two workflows in particular that take up the most amount of time and money. And so for example, one of them is creating sales materials for buying and selling buildings. So today on average, teams spend about four weeks making these materials and spend about 5k in design fees. And with us, they can do that entire process in about five minutes. Very cool. There we go. Traction. Traction. How's the raise going? Yeah, the raise has been great. We were done in 48 hours. What? Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. I think with raising, it kind of either goes one of two ways.

1:03:32It's either like, you your heart and productivity exactly yeah what were you doing right before this I'm so I was at Google so I was a PM working on monetizing Gemini notebook LM and that launch was I was super fun it was like we were in chats with like Sergey it was crazy why were you rate limiting us so hard John was paying 500 and I wanted to pay you more I don't feel like you weren't monetizing hard enough come Yeah, you know, I don't work there anymore, but I can, I can, I can hold you accountable. We have two lightning round questions we like to ask one, a favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to.

1:04:10Yeah, I think, you know, classic answer, definitely Steve Jobs, like reading that biography in middle school is like what got me to want to move to the Valley, go to Stanford, DYC. The Walter Isaacson book, fantastic book. Second question, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet? Yeah, how we made our first dollar on the internet was actually we cold called. So brokers are, you know, they always pick up the phone. And so, yeah. Anything as a kid? Some people like sold eBay or like, you know, did like websites as a kid. Yeah, so in high school, I made an app. It was a free app, but it used AI to help the visually impaired.

1:04:43And so basically this is like pre-multimodal models and stuff. And you could take a photo. And if you're blind, like it would tell you, you know, what you're looking at, like say like a can of Coke or a can of Pepsi. Yeah, that had users in about 120 countries. It was named one of TechCrunch's top AI stories of the year and was also in a Google commercial with Jeffrey Hinton and Justin Trudeau. No way. That's amazing. Legend. That's a fantastic story. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Congratulations on the day. And yeah, good luck out there. Awesome. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Good luck saying no to all the VCs that couldn't fit in already.

1:05:13Yeah. RIP. Anyway, we are live from Demo Day YC 2025. We will bring in our next guest whenever they are ready. In the meantime, any breaking news, Jordy? Anything we should run through before we're bringing in the next guest? I think we have our next guest right here. Hey, Josh Browder, how you doing, man? There we go. Good to see you. How you doing? I'm okay. I wasn't expecting you. How many? Did you back all the winners already? No, I'm here mainly for social. Okay. Okay. Just hanging out. Just hanging out. There are some amazing companies here. There are. There are. What trends do you like?

1:05:49We heard that last batch was cursor for everything. This batch is lovable for everything. Have you noticed any trends? I'm seeing a lot of boring software AI. I was just with an amazing founder working on waste collection AI software. And you're using boring as a pejorative or not as a pejorative? No, I think more of these businesses need to be built. Less jargon and more boring stuff. More boring stuff. Just find a specific... Yeah, I've been impressed with the traction so far. There's been a couple founders that have come on that cool ideas expected to not necessarily have a bunch of real traction with businesses.

1:06:30Yeah. I mean, you've obviously been working in the application layer of AI for what, a decade or something like that now? Yeah, I'm getting old. You're still a teal fellow, right? Yes. Young at heart. But does this idea of going after boring, kind of vertical SaaS, vertical AI, does that fit with a worldview that maybe, we're not just gonna get the foundation model labs to one shot every single business opportunity, and in fact it is a great time to build a niche business? I think that there's opportunities that are beneath the foundation models. You're seeing them now get into coding and things like that, but those are huge opportunities.

1:07:13they're not going to go into waste management. I agree. And so you can build a hundred million, 200 million business doing this sort of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I looked at Fiji Simo when she became the CEO of applications at OpenAI. She had five things that she was gonna knock down. And it was like, you know, knowledge retrieval, health, you know, coaching, shopping stuff. They're getting into talent now. Talent, coding, but then waste management's not on that list. And so I think you're safe for a little bit. Anyway. What's happening in your business that's exciting? I imagine every time the models get better, your product gets better?

1:07:51Yeah, I think you constantly have to be innovating. We're always worried about what the big companies are doing to detect our AI robots. There are now SaaS startups that detect our robots. Sure, as a service. Yeah, exactly. Anti-robots as a service. Unfortunately, we're more motivated than the average like Comcast, SaaS, Fender. So we stay ahead. And then on the product side, when Do Not Pay started was just like templates. Now you could just ask ChatGPT to generate a template. So we're trying to go deeper, try and go more in the background and build really exciting things. Have you been talking to founders about where prices are sitting do you have any sense of of what what a you know median valuation is for this round or or you know high end of the batch pricing i remember when i went through uh you know raising it like 12 was great i think any company raising below 20 there's like a problem with it so i think 20 is now the baseline 20 is the base and then high end what were you saying it's 40 60 i mean Sometimes even 100.

1:08:58100 already. Yeah. I'm trying. I'm here to meet 100 people at once, and then I can relax. I'm very introverted. So this is my one social event of the year. One of the year. One of the year. There's four of them. You've got to go to all four. We've got four badges. You've got to keep some in the tank. This is my first YC demo day. It's amazing. You can just meet everyone. It's great. Yeah. We've been doing a lightning round with everyone that comes on the stream today. Favorite entrepreneur? Someone you look up to. Who comes to mind? I guess in this batch, there's an amazing founder from Kazakhstan, Nozomio.

1:09:28I think that's the name of his company. His name's Olin. He's just such a hustler. I'm not an investor in his company, but I wish I was. What about throughout history? History's greatest entrepreneurs, who sticks out to you? I think Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is an inspiration. He's very kind of pricing focused. Did your other guest say that? No one said Larry Ellison yet, but we've been talking about Larry for a long time. as a deeply underrated founder, just fantastic. An absolute animal. An animal. Oracle will sue its customers. They're so focused on money. Also, I mean, the fact that he's just like never really sold and like really just the position that he has in that company is just remarkable.

1:10:08There's just a bunch of things. Also, he just looks great at his age. You can just tell that like a lot of things are going right. There's a headline from the LA Times in the year, in June 29th, 2000, called Oracle Defends Its Spying on Microsoft as public service. I love it. They also called it their civic duty. That's great. That's great. The other lightning round question, this one would be fascinating for you, is how did you make your first dollar ever on the internet? So I was jailbreaking phones and selling themes on Cydia. So this was before the days when the Apple operating system allowed you to change Apple icons.

1:10:46And so I would sell a Disney theme. and this was like a complete copyright violation because I'd take all of Disney's IP and make it, but I guess they weren't detecting it. And it was very lucrative. How old were you at the time? Maybe like 13. 13. And there's different waves. Disney's worst nightmare. So I was in the jailbreaking wave and then there was the Minecraft wave. Okay. Then there was the sneak about wave. How are people making money on Minecraft? Minecraft server businesses. Okay. So you set up a server. So that was Adam Guild's generation with Ona. that's the wonder founder the amazing tbpn sponsor yes yes um they were making money with servers then there were sneaker bots and that's the wop founders and now what's next fortnite anything in fortnite i think it's right roblox roblox yeah yeah fascinating people that are printing on roblox today will be here in five years or maybe just sass startups i mean there's like a 12 year old who's viral on X.

1:11:42I subscribed to his product to be nice. I don't even mess around with the video games. I just went straight to Enterprise. Yeah, there you go. Age 12. My first dollar. A business deal between me and Oracle. Yeah. Me and Larry. To build out a new data center. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. Have a great day. Enjoy Demo Day. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Nice to meet you. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Pleasure. Welcome to the stream. Great to meet you. Please introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? How's that going?

1:12:13Yeah. Hi. Do I look at you or do I look at the camera? Whatever you want. Okay. I'm going to look at you. Fantastic. I'm Anson. We're building normal and we're automating hardware testing and compliance. Hardware testing and compliance. Any specific verticals? Are we talking like semiconductors, rockets, spaceships, cars? Yeah. We're starting with like robotics and drones and other, any electrical components that have like a radio part to it. So that's mostly it. So there's like a test stand where you need to actually see, does the motor work? couldn't pick up the robotic arm. Yeah, basically.

1:12:41And it needs to be, and there's someone there testing that robotic motor. Like every day they get a new robotic arm, they test it, and then they need to put that into some sort of database to manage and you kind of provide the software suite they interact with on the day-to-day basis. So awesome when you pitch it back to me. Okay, that is what you're doing? Okay, fantastic. It's very similar to that. So basically, as people are trying to build more hardware and try to build more hardware here, a lot of the testing infrastructure is either overseas or it's not like very nice to deal with. It's kind of like working with the IRS a little bit.

1:13:11So just kind of streamlining the process so that as teams go through and like they build this like wonderful robot or a wonderful like drone, like sub-assembly, they're able to actually get that tested in like a facility and through a process that is like deserving of the thing that they've made. Who are you selling to right now? Do you want to start with like, go figure out how to work with big manufacturing, the big automaker OEMs and primes or startups? like who's the ideal customer to work with at this stage? Yeah, so the people that we're working with now are mostly like early stage startup companies.

1:13:42So if anybody's watching, like we'd love to work with you. So yeah, mostly drone robotics, toys, cameras. Yeah, anything with like a RF component. Okay, great. How's demo day going? Did you share any sort of headline KPI or news on the raise? Yeah, we're wrapped up. So this is kind of like - Oh, let's go. It's a celebratory stream. We don't need to be. We can get back to building. Yeah, yeah. So this is my co-founder. He's outside, so we're just going to put him on the stage. His name is Hudza. Wait, I've seen him on X. He had some wild post just yesterday I was watching. He was wrong about something.

1:14:19I didn't even put him in the truth zone. I got to debate him. Bring him in to him. Come on. I don't remember anything other than that he was wrong. I just remember seeing his post and being like, What about traction, though? What were you guys able to do? Yeah, what did you share? Yeah, so we launched three weeks ago, and we have 35K in revenue. So it's so fast. Three weeks. Congratulations. Yeah, it's fantastic. Thanks. And then the race wrapped up. We do have a lightning round. We've been asking everyone two questions. First is who is your favorite entrepreneur? Someone you look up to? Can be anyone.

1:14:51Favorite founder? Favorite founder. Can I say throughout history? Sir John A. McDonald. Who's that? First Prime Minister of Canada. Okay. Oh, wow. Started a company. Did he start Canada?

1:15:06I don't know if I can fully endorse it, but it's outside the box. I appreciate it for that reason. The second question is how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? I guess a kid, anything interesting? Some people set up websites. Some people I taught kids how to argue. Okay. Wait, what? No way. Are you less arguing? Debate. okay okay okay uh and and and so they they pay you like on an hourly basis yeah that's fantastic there you go that's great well uh watch out don't get an argument with her congrats professional congrats on getting the round done and uh thanks for coming on yeah thanks for coming on yeah if you're if you're like a handshake of course yeah if your co-founder wants to debate john too yes i'll bring him right after i don't remember what he said but i know I'm angry about it.

1:15:53I'm ready to debate. You said something wild. Nice, nice. What was that? Of all time? Oh, favorite entrepreneur of all time is what we're going to be asking. Okay. Thank you. We are clarifying our questions. We will talk to you soon. Have the great rest of your day. Breaking news from the timeline. There is now a$2 ,000 iPhone. It's the iPhone 17 Pro with 2 terabytes of storage. $2 ,000 iPhone dropped. Welcome to the stream. Nice to meet you. I'm John. Jordan, nice to meet you. Pleasure. Will you be picking up the$2 ,000 iPhone? Just dropped minutes ago. This is breaking news. I'm probably sticking with my iPhone.

1:16:28You're good. He's sticking with his old life. Short the stock. I feel like the incremental improvements. What's going on? This is a disaster. It's pretty small. Yeah, we look to YC founders as the future, the tastemakers. If they're not adopting the latest and greatest, what's going to happen? Introduce yourself. What are you building? So I'm Aiden, the CTO of Effigov. We're doing the AI operating system for local governments, starting with the 311 in a box. 311, what do you, is that information hotline? Yeah, it's the informational counterport to 911. Okay, yeah. So interestingly, only around 2 % of cities have a 311 line, even though every city has 911.

1:17:05Yeah, yeah. And what we're doing with our first product is creating a 24 seven call center that's available to anyone from, if you're in San Francisco, or if you're in like a city of 10 ,000 in the middle of Iowa. Like you should have the same level of service. So you call 311, it automatically routes you to your service. And then if I'm in my city, it'll give me information. What are the, what's the, obviously everyone knows textbook 911 call. Someone's breaking into my house. What's the textbook 311 call? Yeah, I think it's, is this road open or when does the trash pick up comes? Stuff like that.

1:17:39Stuff like that. It definitely varies a lot more city to city. So we're live in Florida and we're taking calls about alligators roaming around the city. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's pretty interesting. And it can kind of route, and I'm sure you've set the system up so that you can route to 911 if you need to. Absolutely. Or right to animal control, kind of sit above the rest of the stack of all the different city services. Yeah, and that's kind of why we started with this is because it gives us a really great insight into what are the calls and services that the city's providing. So now we can go down and actually handle these workflows end to end with our agents.

1:18:09What's the secret to actually having like high NPS? I imagine that people are not very happy with robot phone trees. You're literally in the clanker business. You're the meme of when a clanker picks up. Phone trees are terrible. They've been terrible for decades. But this is conversation. This is potentially better. So what's the secret? Most people don't realize they're talking to an AI. They don't? No. Okay. Why is that? Is this the cure for male loneliness? Are you building on top of a particular foundation model or specific APIs that just sound so good? Yeah. Who are you using? How do you piece things together to make it great?

1:18:43Yeah, we're using a voice from Vappy. That's just, we've trialed a bunch of different voices. Vappy. Vappy. Yeah, another YC company. Oh, cool. Is that in this batch? No, they're, I think, Winter 24. Okay. We'll have to check them out. But yeah, we just trialed all these different voices. And this one has a bunch of stutters and makes it sound super natural. Okay, so it just feels completely natural. Got it. Very cool. Traction. Yeah. You've been lining up cities. Yeah, we're driving around all over. What did you share? Do you share like an ARR or just like number of cities? Like what's the headline number that you shared today?

1:19:18We shared live in one city and 80K ARR. So two contracts that have yet to go live, but we signed them. But in the pipeline. Fantastic. Let's go. So you're charging, is this 40K per city effectively? 60K and then 20K. Yeah. No way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can imagine this replaces, you know, potentially replaces a job or make somebody a lot more high leverage. And if you want like round the clock coverage on a helpline, which I'm sure these cities don't offer. But even if you're offering like a workday, that's just somebody who has to sit there. I would flip it around and just be like, if I'm the mayor and I'm charging every single person in my city some sort of property tax and I'm taking in millions and millions of dollars and my citizens can't get information.

1:20:04but for whatever price he's charging, I can offer this service to my population. They're gonna be like, wow, the city feels so much more responsive. Like when that tree fell down on my street, I was able to just dial three on one and send it to the right thing. Instead of like going to this archaic website. It's an interesting execution challenge where you can literally create a database of like every potential buyer for your product. And then just hound that on day one and then hound them. Like, it's not like a mystery of like, Who are we going to sell to? The perfect client doesn't know. I don't even know that they're in the market.

1:20:37No, it's like, you know who's in the market. We're doing kind of a state-by-state go-to-market motion because a lot of the first question they'll ask us is, okay, what other cities in Florida are using it? Because they can also do this thing called piggybacking where they literally just copy and paste the contract from a neighboring city. So that's kind of, you know, little hacks like this, I think will help us conquer the GovTech market where historically it's been hard to break in. but now you have this AI, obviously. Land and expand. Yeah. How has the fundraise gone? It's good. We're around three quarters done.

1:21:10There you go. On our levels. We have a lightning round that we've been doing. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Someone you look to for advice. Peter Thiel. Ooh. Let's go. First person to say PT. Mr. Thiel. Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Flipping Supreme t-shirts. There we go. There we go. How did you acquire, did you have bots that would buy them? Yeah. Oh, okay. Into the bot game. Okay. Yeah. It was like during my lunch in high school. So I would just like monitor the site. The situation. Monitoring the situation. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on.

1:21:54Congrats on all the progress. We'll talk to you soon. Super bullish. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. uh if you are just tuning in we are live from yc demo day 2025. uh we will bring in our next guest when we're ready um just oh we got uh oh here we go you've been waiting for you all have been waiting will they bring a massive block metal onto the stream great to see you you uh got a little workout on the way in Look at this. How many pounds is that? No clue. No clue. A lot. I borrowed it from Astronis. Oh, okay. Yeah. Did you sell it to them and then you borrowed it back or is this just theirs?

1:22:32This is theirs. Okay, but they wanted to help the cause. Yeah, it's illustrated. It's an art. So, yeah, why is this sitting here? What do you do? Introduce yourself. Who are you? Yes, my name is Zane. I'm the founder of Knox Metals and we cut metal. Okay. So, we're trying to build the most efficient metal service centers in America to empower every factory in America to work with better margins and to move faster. Okay, there's a lot of ways to cut metal. He's doing the meme. He's doing the meme, the re-industrializing. Also, to be clear, this is Zane from X. Yes. Probably, if you're on the Everything app, you've seen him before.

1:23:03He's been on the show via his post many times before. So it's great to finally - I've been printed a few times. Oh, that's OG. You're a print era. That was fun. I remember one time I was watching TVPN, and I was like, for some reason, I had to go somewhere, and I was like, I just skipped to the print section. You guys would print the best tweets, and I was like, who do they got today? That's fantastic. Okay, so there's a lot of ways to cut metal. Hadrian's doing a bunch of CNC machines. There's other people that are doing additive stuff. We've talked to 3D printing guys who build the metal structures up.

1:23:33What is your specific, like put it in like Lego terms for me, like how are we actually cutting this metal? Okay, so to be clear, we would sell this to Hadrian. Yeah. To someone like a Hadrian. Okay, okay. What we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an F-150. Okay. Put it on our saw, which is about the size of four F-150s. And then we band saw cut it. Yep. And then we sell like washing this. And then it can go into a CNC machine. If you want to make an F-18 part, a component for your washing machine, you name it. This is incredibly deep in the stack. I love it. So like the operation's really simple.

1:24:04What we're working on is like the complex operations of the factory. Like I'm sure you guys know the cliche. I never want to hear anyone say Y Combinator just does consumer apps anymore. Look at this. This is pure metal. This is insane. Yeah. So many steps away from the mobile central local app. It seems like, obviously, it's not easy to just cut through metal, but it seems like that's relatively solved. What you're trying to solve is the efficiency in the factory, because even if you make this block, then how do you get it? How do you store it? How do you transport? You nailed it. The metal service industry is like$300 billion these guys do a year.

1:24:42If you're a metal service center, that's the total of the market. Yeah. We strongly believe that they are - Yeah, John, lift them. Actually, it's going to destroy it. No, it's going to destroy his suit. We need it for tomorrow. It might destroy his suit. I can pick it up. We basically strongly believe that they have a ton of overhead and lack all the technology in the world that puts a tax on every metal sold in America. Yep. That's why you're seeing more metal bought from the USA or bought from China. Yeah, coming in. I worked in a small PE shop, but everyone I talked to, they're like, okay, how do we get stuff in from China?

1:25:13Yeah. So like we want to re shop like private equity. Yeah. Okay. We want to like re industrialize the metal service. Yeah. So, so how much of the value is just, there's going to be a bigger buy, buy American wave. There might be more regulations, more tariffs. And so it makes more sense now to do this work in America versus you think that you could long-term go toe to toe against a Chinese metal shop and just with better, better workers, better automation, better technology, you will just have a better product even in a completely level economic playing field. Exactly. And like the key thing you said there is product and what is product?

1:25:49The factory, right? So everything that goes into it, procurement, inventory management, like you said, estimating. So how do we get blocks, the cheapest block to any factory in America next day? That's the goal. Got it. We have a lightning round that we've been doing. First question, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Alex Karp. We've had him on the show last week. I think that's a great pick. Second, how did you make your first dollar online or in business? My dad had a machine shop and he made me scrub the floor. I was 14 years old. No way. Family business. 80 ,000 square foot facility.

1:26:22One man in the mob. Incredible. Wait, how's the fundraise going? Oh, it's good. We closed like, Yeah, we had like an initial goal and we closed that but

1:26:39There we go

1:26:49Yeah, and it's such an awkward I guess my guess was 97 97 Okay, so no funnery's going well. We like had an initial goal We got there and now seeing some more interest. So thinking about raising some more just have a bit more runway and move faster. Count me in, Chad. Count me in. I'm riding with you. I'm doing too. Cut the check. Thanks so much for coming. I know. I should have brought my physical checkbook. That's such a missed opportunity. Great to see you. You're a legend. Good luck with that. What a terrible prop. Anyway, okay. That was fun. I think I broke a sweat. This was not the right move.

1:27:27Yeah, I was trying to warn you. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. How you doing? Well, it's happening. Great to see you. Okay. I brought my tiny gold. You brought your own metal. This one's from you. I lifted one. How are you doing? Okay. Okay, I can do it. So we both lifted the metal cubes today. We did. Are you in Knox? You did Knox, right? Yes. Yes, we invested in Knox. Yes, introduce yourself for the stream. Hello, everyone. My name is Paige Fendoherty. I'm the founding partner behind Genius Ventures. We invest in technical storytellers at their earliest chapters. Very cool. And you wrote a children's book on venture capital.

1:27:53Yes, we wrote it. You're introducing venture capital to the children. Are you getting paid out by Anthropic in the lawsuit? Did you see this? You gotta go check on this. I gotta check my mailbox. You might have a few thousand bucks waiting for you. You can roll that into the fund. Wait, that would be... I gotta check my email. What's your reaction to Demo Day? Oh my gosh, it's electric. The prices are too low, right? Most people have been saying, I don't feel comfortable investing. The prices are just too low. It's suspiciously low. When you go on Teemu and there's like a$12 couch, and you're like, how can a couch be$12?

1:28:30You're like, how can this clearly billion-dollar company be worth$60 million? Let me tell you, the energy is electric today. It's been so fun bumping into friends. My friend, shout out Casey Caruso, she brought me bone broth to pregame the day. That way. Bone broth. I drove over in the Waymo. This is the SF lock-in right here. Do you remember when I explained bone broth to you for the first time? No. I think I said something like protein tea or something like that. Oh yeah, that got me. Yeah, it's like a nature's protein shape. Yeah, yeah. It's like a protein tea. Yeah, yeah, because you warm it up.

1:29:08We warmed it up and we drank half a gallon on the stream one day. Fantastic. You guys are going to do a mukbang of all the bone broths? Well, we are completely non-impartial. Aligned with Kettle and Fire. Yeah, we're aligned with Kettle and Fire because we're buddies with Justin Mayer. Okay, that's fair. So we cannot be impartial when it comes to - So what's the strategy going into demo day for you? You had already invested, deployed - Yeah, so we looked at a bunch of companies, but actually the story on Knox was pretty unique. Zane and I met probably four years ago when I was fundraising for my first fund.

1:29:44And at the time he was working at a firm and they were like buying and selling machine shops. And then we just stayed in touch over that time. And I would send him like some of our manufacturing investments. Like we have a company in Maniva and I would send that to him for his thoughts on manufacturing. And then I saw on LinkedIn, he was posting, he got into IC and I was like, dude, like this is amazing. And then we hopped on a call. I was really excited by what they're building, really fits into the re-industrialization of America, the whole American dynamism. And I actually was on my friend's roof last night.

1:30:21we were talking and she was just like, you know, if you just like love company, you just like got to go in. And I remember being like, okay, I got to call Zane and be like, yo, like, like, please, like, I really want to be a part of this journey. And he was like, yeah, we would love to have you be a part of it. So I, um, sent the wire this morning. There you go. There you go. You did not want to wait until the end of the day. You know, we've been doing a lightning round with everyone. Um, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Who is the genius behind genius ventures? oh but that's so hard um the first name that popped into my head was uh jerry lopez who's a surfer zen master philosopher i feel like very much not in like the tech world of his movement yeah and what i love about him is he uh he just has this incredible sense of grace riding super aggressive waves and then took that same sense of jerry's language yeah yeah it took that same sense of grace into building companies.

1:31:19He gets barreled? He gets barreled? Oh, he gets barreled. Oh, yeah. I know all about getting barreled. I've learned shore break. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. John, I teach John about surfing. Point break? Every time we see the ocean, I explain, this is a beach break. That would be a point break. That's great. Second question of our lightning round. Okay. How did you make your first dollar online or in business? Did you do anything crazy as a kid or early on um yeah i tutored okay well okay i'm trying to i'm trying to think it's like the first dollar oh you know it is okay so my mom is an impressionist artist kim doherty art uh my brothers and i when we were camping we would go and sell her art cards in the campground when we were like five captive audience yeah it was like seven five and a three-year-old going around being like can you buy our cards and like I've became an amazing salesperson through that experience yeah yeah where are you on fund two now what what's uh what's the update on the fund yep we're uh wrapping up our last couple investments in fund two so two more to go very exciting more to come soon big announcements big announcements on the way yeah incredible we'll Ring the gong.

1:32:32We'll ring the gong. We don't have our gong with us, but we'll save it. Do we have a gong sound effect today or no? Barely. No, we don't. We don't. Unfortunately, no. Ben is saying we do have a gong sound effect. The claps are okay. The gong we will save for a proper announcement. Oh, here we go. I like that. Size gong. There we go. Make sure to send us any founders you like and have fun out there. Please let them know. Thank you so much for having me on. We are open for business. Thank you for coming. It was a pleasure seeing both of you. It was a pleasure. Great to have you. We will see you soon.

1:32:58If you're watching live, we are at YCDemoDay and we have our next guest on the stream. Welcome to the stream. Orange Slice. That's a fantastic jacket. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you building? Yeah. So hi, my name is Vihar and we're building Orange Slice. We're basically AI search infra to help you find customers that already want your product. Okay. I'm so distracted by the, it's oranger than the YC orange. I know. You went orange for orange and you won. It's actually crazy. Okay, so give me the pitch for the company at the customer level. Who's buying and why?

1:33:36Yeah, so we take all the data on the internet and we figure out, okay, out of your customers, who actually needs your product today? And we just tell you, hey, these are the people that need it today, and that's the people you reach out to. There's so many products, though, where are you starting? Is this for other B2B companies? B2B sales teams, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. So we can track your total addressable market, whatever's in your CRM, whoever you're talking to, We figure out, okay, who needs your product today? What have they been posting? What have they been filing? What is, maybe a new blog is out that indicates they need something from you guys.

1:34:04Smart, so it's always on. It's always on. Let's see who actually wants you. It's monitoring the situation. When, how old were you when you realized you wanted to build agents for the enterprise? That's a great question. You know, I think that's a fantastic question. Really started really, really young, but no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five years old, I woke up. I spawned into the world and I said, I must sell. I have to help enterprise go. What were you doing before this? I was basically hacking in college, but I was an investor banker at J.P. Morgan. Oh, let's go. So complete 180. That's a tough thing, guys.

1:34:38This is just fantastic. Thank you for everything you did. And then did you, was that like summer internship? Summer internship. Did you drop out? And then I, no, graduated, thankfully. Oh, wow. Contrarian. Contrarian. I'm super bullish. Here we go. I like college. It was fun, right? No, I know. It's a good time. It's great. We've been doing a lightning round asking two questions. Wait, no, no, no. Before the lightning round. How much money are you making right now? Oh, that's true. So we're at like 53K MRR. Oh, let's go. A bit more than, what is that? 600 ,000 a year? Yeah, that's great. Ramen profitable?

1:35:11Yeah, of course. Fantastic. Like 90 % margins. Printing cash. That's great. Printing. Let's go. Let's go. It's just the start, though. The round's close? Yeah, the round is close, unfortunately. But if you always... Let us in, let us in. I think for you guys, we can make room. For you guys, we can make room. They're going to keep booing unless you let the sharks in. When you say us, you mean we can do an SPV and bring in 25 mil from QIA. That's awesome. This makes a ton of sense. And I can see why it's ripping. Lightning round? Yeah, well, I have one more question. So I'm selling a business-to-business product, and I get some sort of alert from you saying, hey, there's a new customer.

1:36:03And are you focused on a person or a company? We're focused on the company level. We do both. So we'll track all the executives at the company. That could be the one who could - But you say, this is the company, and then - And then this is also the person. This is the person that owns - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who might be the internal champion. Exactly. All of that stuff. Okay, cool. A crazy idea for you. So you guys sell to a company, you detect a customer for that company, you partner with Tesla Optimist to actually deploy a robot to go have a steak dinner with the end customer and close the loop and then pick up the commission on that deal.

1:36:36I think you've got to go full stack. Full stack. No, totally. And that's one of the biggest reasons we haven't done the end of the stack yet. People sell in so many different ways. And a lot of people are just fighting and competing over the end of the stack with a bunch of slop. Yeah, I don't want any more emails in my inbox. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so all you need to do is serve the lead up at the right time and then let a stake expert take it all away. Yeah, I mean, it's beautifully anti-slop because the human's just in the loop at the right point. I don't really care. If you misidentify someone and I click on a website, I'm like, actually, they're out of the core value prop right now, or maybe I'll deal with that one later.

1:37:16That's fine. Fantastic. So, lightning round. Two questions. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Oh, that's a good one. I don't actually know that many entrepreneurs in general. Someone that you read a biography of or look up to or maybe just saw a recent interview with and thought was, I could learn something from them. He's Lisan Al-Ghaib of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need his blank slate. He doesn't need any influence. Well, honestly, I don't think, I don't draw that much inspiration just because I think the biggest motivating factor and this might be contrarian. It's not actually inspiration, but the fear of mediocrity, of it not working out, has been way bigger for us.

1:37:54That's the biggest reason I don't have that much inspiration. But Eric from Ramp, my co-founder used to work at Ramp. So, I mean, they are absolutely killing it. Royal Flush. You picked a legend from the modern era. Yeah, I mean, you can't not like what he's doing. Future Hall of Famer. Yeah, 100%. Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Oh man, first dollar would have to be in like elementary school. I used to like do origami of like folding up like ninja stars for like other people. And then I used to sell it on like the school bus. I'd like at half an hour in the morning and half an hour at the end to do all my sales.

1:38:36And then you go home and you just keep folding the rest of the day. I remember having so many paper cuts when I started. Damn, just fingers bleeding. just one more ninja star. He was like prospecting. I see the kid in the second row. They need a ninja star. They're ready for a ninja star. Yeah, I had to go to a dark place for this ninja star. Yeah, exactly. They're ready for a ninja star. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Congrats on all the traction. Of course. Are you going to hang out for the rest of the day? Yeah, yeah. Always like to chat with sort of cool founders. Awesome. Thanks for doing this, guys.

1:39:05This is so cool. It's awesome. Yeah, we'll find you after. Cheers. Good to meet you. Great seeing you talking to you guys. Let's bring in our next guest. we have the co-founder fall do we have here is what's happening introduce yourself for the stream really quickly welcome to great shirt by the way thank you this we just talked to a founder that made their first money flipping flipping supreme box logo t-shirts there you go there you go yeah I'm decked out and fall fall swag yeah but gpu poor are you guys gpu poor anymore uh well i have a gpu rich hats too okay i gotta give you guys some yeah yeah yeah um so i'm i'm one of the co-founders of fall yeah yeah fantastic also our latest sponsors yes makes this possible uh so thank you corporate media uh give us your reaction to yc demo day how how what's the mood like what are they just rolled in here from uh but give us the vibe literally like i just rolled in from our office we're like five minute drive away um i mean it's amazing energy i love it yeah uh i mean being in the silica valley for i don't know 15 years close to 15 i actually never been to a demo day there you go this is my first time um and yeah love the energy that's great so give us um yeah so so uh i guess what's been how much how much of you guys from a from a customer acquisition standpoint it feels like there's like incredible pull from the market you guys have crazy logos from you know uh decacorns public companies all the way down i imagine a bunch of bunch of just companies are getting off the ground and signing up for you guys but like what does that customer acquisition kind of motion look like are you guys you pay much attention to kind of the super early stage or Or do you just like let people find you?

1:40:59Yeah, we pay a lot of attention to early stage. A lot of our customers are early stage. And it is, I think it's one of the best times to build like on top of FAL and other LLMs as well. But like if you want to build anything in consumer AI specifically, I think FAL is probably like the best way to accelerate, you know, building something out there. There's incredible demand. I think I was doing some math on the way here. Like, I think in our startup segment, I think the revenue of like all of our startups combined, and what I define startups is let's call it like 200 people or less. Yeah, raise less than a billion dollars.

1:41:40Yeah, sure. I think the total combined revenue of our customers is in the billions. Wow. So it's kind of ridiculous, like how much demand there is in the consumer AI market or even like prosumer, but you can build amazing applications that leveraged the gen media technology. Yeah, that prosumer thing is fascinating. We saw this with the images in ChatGPT, the Dali moment where it's not an enterprise tool, but it's something that went so viral that everyone has to wake up, even if you're just a marketing manager in a Fortune 500 company. You're gonna see it, you're gonna think about it and be like, okay, I actually need a strategy here.

1:42:21We recently saw this with Nano Banana. Again, we saw a little spike in the Google Trends chart. What have you guys seen on that? What have you seen in the Nano Banana era? How are things changing? Just kind of give me your read. It's incredible. I mean, the demand, the way I look at it is like every time we have new capabilities, there is a jump in demand. And it doesn't seem like these things are eating into each other. It seems like we're really seeing the building blocks coming together. So for example, with Nano Banana and like all the editing models in general, they actually are a key ingredient to really good video models.

1:43:00Meaning when you want to stretch to get like stick together a few clips. Start with a few of those. Yeah, you actually want to, you can keep like the consistency between using these edit models, right? So like it actually solves the consistency problem in video. Yeah. So that enabled video to go even further. Yeah. because now you can just generate like 10 different starting frames and ending frames and combine them together. So these things are really like building blocks and they're kind of compounding on top of each other. So the way we see it in traffic and revenue is that anytime there's like a new model, new capability specifically, we see a huge jump.

1:43:35It was pretty wild. There was a site that spun up, I don't know if you saw this, the day of Nano Bananas launch. It was just called nanobanana.ai. It looked like a Google product. And it was just someone else just vending in Nano Banana under the hood. But I'm sure they got their API access. This happens all the time. If you actually search Nano Banana on App Store, just go to App Store. There will be literally 20 results. Yeah, this is so crazy. It's still Nano Banana.ai is the number one result for Nano Banana. People have nailed it down. AI image editor, edit photos. I mean, the App Store was like that for so long where you searched ChatGPT and it would be like, like, chat with GPT, and it has like 5 ,000 five-star reviews, and you're like, I know that's not from OpenAI, because I can clock it as like, clearly this is not an OpenAI branding, it's slightly off.

1:44:23And all of these things are, believe it or not, they're getting traction. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, the demand is just insane. Yeah, like Apple, I don't know, they're not really doing much to stop this. Maybe they're trying, but not really. It's a game of whack-a-mole. Yeah, it's a game of whack-a-mole, and I think they're benefiting from this, And I think, you know, obviously, like long term, what matters is like how these products differentiate. But I think it just shows you like how insane the demand is. Yeah. What keeps you up at night between the inference cost kind of stack? So are you are you worried about GPU poor?

1:45:00Like are we going to run out of line time at TSMC? Right. Are we going to see a chip shortage versus just large scale data center capacity versus energy? If we play this out a few years, like what do you want to get right? That might be out of your control even, but like you'd like to make sure that it goes right. Yes, I think we're very capacity constrained. And at what level? That's what I'm interested in. So yeah, it's, so it fluctuates. Even this Nebius deal yesterday, right? Like shocked everyone, right? Especially we were hanging with a friend who's a multi-stage you know uh as multi runs you know helps run a multi-billion dollar fund and he was just like like a year ago this company like couldn't you know this company was not taken super seriously as a player and all of a sudden they have a 20 billion dollar deal with with microsoft uh yeah microsoft um so anyways like that that just shows like the the fact that the The fact that Microsoft is going, if you kind of like stack rank where Nebius sits in the NeoCloud space, it certainly wouldn't have been somebody's top choice, but I think that just shows like how capacity constrained everyone is.

1:46:15It's incredible, yeah. I think, I mean, currently we're going through another crunch right now, specifically for H100s. So like we experienced this. And you can kind of feel it coming. and, you know, like... What does it feel like then? It feels pretty bad, right? You're trying to scale. So, like, most of our workloads are inference workloads, right? We don't do any training. So our needs are, like, we don't just, like, buy, you know, 10 ,000 GPUs and just sit there for a whole year, right? That's not how we operate. We're more dynamic. We go and, like, expand our fleet over time. So we... And we're multi-clouds.

1:46:54So we talk to, like, all the, you know, new clouds and we have really great relationships with all of them we test them we benchmark them if if they work for us or if they're reliable support is good we use them so and you know when you need when you need new capacity you literally like hit them up you call all of them up in order old-fashioned way i'm not even kidding like you just you just call them up and you know sometimes it's like you start hearing more no's right like do you have do you have 512 gpus do you have thousand GPUs and it's just like no no you're like oh crap so you you kind of want to like stock up a little bit sure that's how we operate we like like buy buy a little bit in bulk you know but but really prices hit hit a little bit of a bottom which like hasn't happened with a 100 I mean if you look at it like they just kept going down with h100 they kept going down and they kind of hit the bottom they're like now kind of getting back up again how what can you tell me about how inference moves around the globe as a function of time.

1:47:57I heard this story about Mid Journey potentially doing inference in Asia where they're sleeping, they're not running Netflix in Malaysia or Singapore, and so when I generate an image or something, it's inferenced over there. Is that something you're doing? Is that something that you're planning to do? Is that common? Is that happening naturally? So our traffic patterns are basically maxed out when US and Europe is up simultaneously. So that's kind of like the peak time, right? And then we don't have like as much users. We still have customers in Asia, but it's much less. So we do see a deep dip across, when US and EU is asleep, there's a slight dip.

1:48:42Sure. We do a few things. we use like, we basically like have a pool of GPUs that we like, you know, return and bring back simultaneously. But what's really important for us is uptime. So even if it means like we're going to have some idle GPUs, we'd like to take that cost. Because if you can't take those GPUs back, like if you let them go, you can't take them back. You know, then you have a very bad time with your customers. So for us, like reliability is more important at this time, and over long term, I think if - You might be able to move the liquidity across the globe more over time. What, any key lessons, you were at Oracle for four years back in the day, any key lessons from that era that you've kind of brought in?

1:49:28Obviously Oracle's been on a tear and really leaning in. Yeah, so Oracle was my first job out of college. So that's 2012, 2016. Back then, they did not believe in cloud. They were like the anti-cloud company. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, Larry Ellison would go on stage, literally be like, guys, like, we don't believe, you know, he has like a famous quote, you know, it's someone's computer or something, you know, the cloud doesn't exist. They've come a really long way since then. And obviously, like, they're on a rip right now, I think, with AI. What we hear from the field is like, there's really good, you know, Nebius is a very good, like data center operator.

1:50:09And Oracle is a very good data center operator. Because they had to do that because of running Yandex, right? Yes, exactly. They actually had to, I get more worried about NeoCloud products that are, we're doing, you know, like there's one, I think it's like Irene or something like that that's coming online that, you know, just last year, I think was doing like Bitcoin mining. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like fast pivot, maybe a later pivot. Some of those guys are also good. So after Oracle, I was at Coinbase. So the crypto, like some of the companies, including Cori and Cursow, of course. They had a lot of experience, but like what's special about Oracle is that they've got a lot of experience.

1:50:48They know how to operate these machines at, you know, really good costs. So, and uptime is very important. So, you know, all of these things, you know, the economics and like operating the data center play a huge role into this. I think they, you know, I'm glad they chose going in this direction. I think there's only a few opportunities, right? And this is one of them, and they just went ahead and like capitalize on it, which is really great. Lightning round? Yeah, let's do it. We've been asking everyone, who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to throughout history? Oof. Could be anyone.

1:51:23Could be Larry.

1:51:27I really like, okay. Could be anyone. Let's see. I like Brian, Brian Armstrong. There we go. That's a great pick. I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Legend. Second question. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Oof. Okay, I had, do you know these toys, Caretta Fighter? No. Okay, is that too old? How big is the toy? It's like two fighters. Okay. You just make them fight with each other. Okay. So when I was like six or seven, this is not on the internet. Yeah, like almost a rock 'em sock 'em robot. Yeah, yeah, rock 'em sock 'em. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same thing, same thing. I rented those out.

1:52:02You rented those? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Flip the CapEx to OpEx. You don't need to buy these things. You go to him, you rent them today. He's renting. That's actually, kids don't do renting enough. They're always transact. Am I stretching to draw a full circle analogy here? You rent, you buy the servers, you rent out the tokens. He's going to the kid. What's your allowance? Okay, 20 bucks a week. That's the price. 20 bucks a week. There you go. Value-based prices. Yeah, exactly. That's fantastic. All right, well come back on the show. Yeah, guys good to see you. Yeah, I gotta I gotta give you some hats.

1:52:39Please. I'd love some. Give them out to your favorites. Okay, we will. Perfect. Some rich hats. Ooh. These are good hats. We'll have to pick. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, this is great. We got four. Great seeing you. Don't give this away. We'll quiz folks on whether they own GPUs or they merely sit on top of hyperscalers. We got Jack from Slow. How you doing, Jack? What's up, fella? Oh, that's too. You didn't have to. What's up, man? I did. I can't believe it. You look fantastic. Well, I'm here. You look fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. How we doing? How is demo day? It's been fantastic.

1:53:15It's been great. Tons of cool companies. Yeah, everybody's kind of ripping. We kind of came in thinking, like, let's try and find the theme. Other than AI. Cursor. Yeah, there's like a little bit of an AI theme. but we had metal we had uh zane yeah metal cutting we had a missile company already uh there's been a few different companies and i i feel like the narrative is shifting now to just like ai is just a tool like cloud computing yeah it's just like are you using like a pi uh like a python or you know it's like or are do you have a mobile strategy are you pulling mobile off the show it's like like it's like at this point you're not gonna use like oh yeah i know we're building in the cloud exactly exactly exactly what do you actually yeah it's like okay yeah you're a software company but What are you actually doing?

1:53:58It very much feels like we're in this era of vertical software for AI. So it's like vertical AI. This is vertical SaaS all over again. But the traction is really good. The businesses are super niche and super interesting. So you're learning a lot about a guy who set up a 311 line in Florida, and he's getting a lot of calls about alligators. And that's interesting to me. Anyway, what's new with you? Well, so it's funny. Most of the investors are here to invest capital in companies. Quickly, introduce yourself for the stream. I'm Jack Raines. I'm on the investment team over at Slow Ventures, early stage venture fund.

1:54:29We run about a billion dollars now, invest, generalist, a little bit of everything, one to three million dollar checks. But unlike every other venture fund here, we actually are launching the Slow Ventures Etiquette Finishing School. So I don't know if you can see this. You guys are dressed sharp. Obviously, our GP is dressed sharp. I remember this photo. This is a fantastic photo. We had this. We got to Photoshop you on there. I know. Once I make GP, maybe I can be on there. But there's a lot of capital floating around now that's like financial capital to invest in founders. But the real problem in San Francisco is you don't know how to dress.

1:55:06Wait, but if people don't know how to dress, why are you just expecting them to go to a black tie event? Well, we say that. It's kind of self-select. Okay, okay, okay. You show up in a sloppy tux. You want a high bar, and then you want to take someone from good degree. Instructive feedback. I don't know if you guys were in fraternities in college, but there's this whole, you kind of get hazed if you're a pledge out that sucks. I mean, this is just like pitching a startup. You come to you, the pitch is a little sloppy. You go around, by the time you come back and pitch the second, third time, the business is polished.

1:55:34Yeah, literally. It's the same thing. There's business upside of this. Fixing your etiquette makes you, you can command a boardroom better. I like it. Boardroom generals. We love boardroom generals. We also want to help founders get girlfriends or boyfriends. There's, especially in SF, everybody's complaining, the 996 is great, except, what about your It's collapsing. Has slow flipped bullish on AI? Oh yeah, that's a good question. Are you guys still bearish AI? Speak for the entire firm right now, please. Speak for the entire firm. And especially a friend of the program, Sam Lassen, my boss, who sends my paycheck, who's ideally watching this right now.

1:56:07We're bullish on AI when it's a good company that uses AI. It's like the whole, like, our take the whole time has been that the models are gonna eat pretty much everything. Microsoft's gonna eat everything. I mean, that's what we're seeing today at DEMODA. Microsoft is going to eat Nebius. A lot of the companies I feel like are in that Sam Lesson idea of like AI cherry on top, I think was his phrase. I like that framing. I thought he did well there. It's the more vertically integrated. And the thing is, if the founders actually have real domain expertise in the thing versus somebody who knew AI well, and then they're trying to like, oh, this is an obvious problem, maybe.

1:56:40But you're seeing some interesting, one co-founder is incredibly sharp in AI, been doing machine learning forever. And then the other co-founder actually is that dude in their space for 20 years. That dude. That's when it gets interesting. Is he him? He's saying he's him? He's him? When you have AI wizard plus co-founder who is him or her. I like that. Or her. Yeah, that's the magic. So I would not say that we're bullish on AI any more than we have been, but we respect AI used well. It's like AI's table stakes. If your only thing is AI, get a post out there, slow respects AI. Slow respects AI.

1:57:13Yep. You heard it here first. Breaking news. Cool. Okay. We've been asking everyone, lightning round. Who is your favorite entrepreneur in history of all time? In history? Can be anybody. Probably outside of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is like ESPN, so you're supposed to say that. Yeah. No, John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller. Yeah, I knew. Yeah, I knew. What about you guys? I don't think we've answered the question ourselves yet. Yeah, you should ask. Mine is always Steve. It's just the obvious answer, but growing up. Yeah. You just, it's my favorite products ever have consistently been Apple products.

1:57:52Yeah. And I just would listen to so much Founders podcast. I say Jay Gould, of course. But yeah. Can we flip around? Who's your least favorite entrepreneurs ever? Least favorite entrepreneurs? They had to be good enough to be famous, but you just don't like them. Yeah. Probably SBF or something. Yeah. One of those. That's a good pick. Although maybe he's underrated because he got that in philanthropic bags and he's ripping now. Okay. SBF is underrated venture investor, overrated entrepreneur. Perhaps, perhaps. Overrated gamer. Not the strongest operator. Do you think - Do you think the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account is real?

1:58:25I believe it is run by her husband. Okay. And I do not believe it. I actually disagree. I don't think it screams like Ghostwriter coded. Because for it to be run by her husband, her husband would have had to be like hyper online on X. And like, it just feels like very good. Like you can tell when an account is ghost written. Sure, sure, sure. And it's ghost written. I believe that he probably has the keys. Okay, sure. Hired a ghost writer. Yes, yes, yes. At ghostwriter. But we agree that she does not have the everything app installed on a phone that is connected to some sort of 5G network within the prison.

1:59:01We agree on that. Could she? Because SBF is tweeting from prison. It is possible, but it's very much looked down upon. And of course, as soon as the tweet goes out, the warden should be able to get the news. Someone calls the warden because someone sees the post, calls the governor, and then the governor calls the warden and says like one of your prisoners is breaking the rules like can you do something about this like it should flow through i don't know maybe if she i don't know what her prison terms are but like if and when she gets out like how quickly do you think she could raise like 50 million 100 million do you think do you think it's like i think john's take is john's take is if you really want to she she can rebuild her her personal brand but that's and and people, people are like, people are just, it just marketing works, right?

1:59:47So she's just like marketing to the timeline right now. People are deciding like, Oh, maybe I like her like, Oh, she's making me laugh. So people naturally start to like her. I don't think it's going to repair her brand in the, in the capital markets. Uh, I think if she wanted to truly repair brand, it'd be like deep threads and long posts on like biotech. That was my take was, was, was Martin screlly uh he has posted about biotech about trading he's gotten a lot of picks right he talks about capital markets he talks about yes he he did get in legal trouble right uh but he has but he has said the thing that i was doing before i went to prison i i'm still doing it and i'm an expert and you can kind of judge me by my opinions and my takes and i'll go on live streams and you can judge me by my words and i haven't seen enough posts from her on the state of mrna or the state of GLP ones or the state of gene editing technology.

2:00:44Like if she really is an incredible biologist who's been like wrongly convicted, like show me some incredible biology takes, right? Don't just be, okay, yeah, you're just a meme poster. The Martin Shkreli like short selling reports where like it's like Friday at lunchtime, he just tweets, this company's a fraud. Their tests are gonna fail. Stock drops 70 % on Monday. Incredible performance. Yeah, yeah, and it shows that he's like, he's like at least a student of the game in the world, in the financial world. Now he has a kid. He dropped his kid on the internet. Anyway, we have a lightning round.

2:01:15We did the favorite entrepreneur. The second one is, how did you make your first dollar online or in business? Oh, that's first dollar online or in business. I was trading SPACs in my Roth IRA, which is, yeah. So like most people lost money on these. One of my buddies - You made money? You're the guy? You're the one? You're the one guy. I swear to God, this is why - Tim Cook. This is why Sam hired me because he really appreciated my SPAC story. But basically, like, I graduated December 2019. I was bored. COVID hits. Like, the first week I start my job, corporate finance. Very boring. And one of my buddies texted me.

2:01:50He's like, DraftKings is going public through a SPAC. If you buy this thing, you'll own DraftKings stock. I didn't get it. I was like, why don't they just IPO? I read through the structure. And it's like, oh, if you buy these warrants, it's like a call option. It doesn't expire for five years. And then SPAC's turned into a bubble. I built some web scrapers that would like ping me whenever Whenever like a new SPAC got listed or like a merger was announced So this was like fairly autistic but I saw that Apollo had a SPAC And I noticed that they had changed their website header from oil rigs to windmills in like June 2020 And my hypothesis was everybody's chasing the next Tesla They're gonna announce like an EV deal And the warrants are gonna go from 50 cents to like whatever And I just put all my money in Apollo warrants and then they announced a deal with Fisker Automotive like a month later.

2:02:36Made a lot of money. And I just basically parlayed that like 20 times. So my first online money was trading SPACs in my retirement account. That's a fantastic story. So shout out Chamath. A lot of people lost money on his SPACs. I would like to thank him for bankrolling a trip to Argentina. Oh, let's go. Hopefully you had a nice steak, a bottle of wine, maybe some tequila. And SPACs are back, so maybe it's time to do it again. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe this time is different. A couple of IPOs coming. Good to see you. Fantastic. We'll see you soon. Great to see you. Bye, guys. See you. And we will bring in our next guest to our YC Demo Day stream.

2:03:11We are live. How you doing? What's up? Of course. How you doing? Great, great. Yeah. Very Gen Z coded. I love it. I love it. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? My name is Arlan. I am building Nozomio, which is an API that gives more context to agents. Okay. So if you're a Cursor user, you can pretty much just go to Cursor, index any documentation or code base and give it as a context to an agent. What exactly is happening? I know cursor does kind of roll ups of what's happening. There's some rag infrastructure that's popular. What else is going on in the actual product to unlock value?

2:03:46Yeah, so the two reasons I built this is because I was so fucking pissed when I would go to Google, copy paste all the docs and paste them right into cursor. We've all been there. Yeah, the memory is not persistent. So they will fucking forget that in like two seconds. And second one is that you also pollute context window, which causes context fraud. It's actually a study done by Chroma, which is like a company. Oh, yeah, we know Jeff well. Yeah, saying like post 4 ,000 tokens, I think, like the performance of any LLMs goes like this. So that's like the reason I build this. That makes sense. Do you have a take on Jeff's take on like context windows and the need for RAG?

2:04:18Like how do you think about the trade-offs in where the frontier models are scaling? Like there's one world where you just throw bigger and bigger context windows endlessly. Maybe that doesn't work. Yeah, you know what? There are two different architectures right now. So if you look at Cursor and Cloud Code, Cloud Code doesn't index your code base. So they only do agentic RAC, which like only uses terminal tools like creep grab, grab and Cursor, they use both. They use local index and also vector store. So like RAC. Okay. It's really hard to say right now. A lot of people started hating on RAC, but I think it's still effective if you're like combining it with like graph RAC, which is also a very good approach.

2:04:52Okay. What's the traction of the business been like? Yeah, so in the past three weeks, I signed up 25 % of the current batch. Wow. We're paying. Here we go. Let's go. Yeah, thank you. And 5 % of the spring batch. No way. Amazing. So yeah, total like more than 90 WC companies. That's amazing. And yeah, about like 11.5K MRR. There we go. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Let's go. Are you profitable? Yes, sir. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah, because like WC deals cover everything. like all the infrastructure costs. And yeah, so yeah, I guess it's profitable. Oh yeah, yeah, it comes to the infrastructure costs.

2:05:29Okay. Incredible. What were you doing? You have a crazy story, right? What were you doing before this? So I was bored of high school when I was 17 and I wanted to build. So I dropped out, raised a million in a couple of days in London. Couple of days, how did that go? Yeah, so usually like people race, like it takes weeks to race in London, especially in Europe. Cause they're so fucking slow, but like, if you find the right approach and like good people. So in my case, it was local globe. They're really, really good and they're really fast. So I guess I just got lucky I built from London for a couple couple months and then applied for I see Okay, so same company same company.

2:06:00Yeah, yeah, yeah, right for what see for my third time Yeah, third time rejected the first my dad applied three years ago. He got rejected So I sort of like put a goal for myself to like fucking apply again and again. Yeah How did you make your first dollar on the internet? Yeah on the internet? Yeah So when I was 15 I was a student and I wanted to build something and I needed some domain expertise and since I was a student EdTech was the solution. So I built an AI scholarship database for high school students from underrepresented backgrounds to go and apply to summer programs in the US. So I did a couple of those myself at Berkeley and then at UPenn, came back, scaled it to 20 ,000 active users, and made$2 ,000 or something.

2:06:40Congrats, that's amazing. Take it to the bank. Last question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Yeah, who the fuck the most money, bro? Like Elon Musk, yeah. Yeah, he was the richest man, bro. But otherwise, yeah, Brian Chesky is my goal. I love Brian Chesky. Brian Chesky, founder mode. There you go. Fantastic. EOG. How's the fundraiser going? I closed a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago. Okay. Incredible. That's great. Crushing it, dude. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Great to meet you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

2:07:10Have a good one. Up next. Who we got next? We are continuing our coverage live from YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. What's happening? I'm John. Alexia, Alexia. Alexia, a pleasure. Great to meet you. Alexia. How are you doing? Would you mind introducing yourself and your company? Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Alexia. VibeFlow is the only one solution to build production-ready apps in no code. Okay. We've seen a lot of news recently that there's now a whole industry of Vibecode cleanup specialists. What's your reaction? Can Vibecoding ever make it to production? No. No? Not now, at least. It's like all the solutions out there are really broken and they can give you this wow effect in the front end, but on the back end side there is so much to do and there is a huge need.

2:07:54People are, like they have hair on fire problems and they need to solve these problems. The market is huge. So how are you plugging in? How do you deliver value to your customers? So we have a solution which is a hybrid approach between Lovable and Anytan and a database plugged in. So we have this no code interface that is AI, like the AI generates this flow and then maps deterministically to code. So the code is never going to be hallucinating. And yeah, that's a robust solution. How's traction been so far? Traction is amazing. As soon as we launched, as I said, people have these hair on fire problems.

2:08:24So they just want to throw money at you for you to onboard them on platforms that they can actually continue developing the application on. Did you share any metrics today at Demo Day? I will share it. I haven't presented yet. Okay. Okay, you will. Front run it. Front run it. Front run it for the audience. 8 ,000 applications in three weeks. Congratulations. Congratulations. What were you doing before this? I worked with a software engineer for four years for a company and I actually built a no-code tool which is very similar to what I've listed in for animation and 3D modeling. Oh, that's cool.

2:08:55For Disney. Disney, crazy. Yeah, that's amazing. How have you reacted to like the way that Disney's approached AI? I know they kind of seemingly, it's like they're very careful not to get into hot water around like using like too much AI, but clearly want to stay on the edge. I think they use AI everywhere, like literally everywhere. In rendering, 3D modeling everywhere. And it's cool. You can just make everything faster and super high resolution rendering. Yeah, makes sense. Let's move into our lightning round. We've been asking two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

2:09:32My favorite entrepreneur is Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift, that's a good one. I'm a big fan and she is amazing. That's great. Icon, mogul. Both of the resilience and persistence. Second, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? By selling stuff that my brothers didn't use at home. Really? Yes. No way. No way. That's amazing. Nice. Anyway. Incredible. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. Thank you. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Cheers. We'll bring on, oh wait, I forgot to ask about the GPU. We got to ask if they, if their GPU opened. Hey. How you doing? Good. Nice to meet you.

2:10:07Welcome to the show. I'm John. Welcome to the show.

2:10:12Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? Well, I'm Joshua March. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Veritas Agent. We build AI agents for the consumer lending industry. So interfacing with borrowers to help doing sales, servicing, collections for like fintechs, banks, credit unions, services, that kind of thing. Do you see your company as GPU poor or GPU rich? We're rich everything. Rich everything. GPU rich. There you go. You can have this happen.

2:10:42What's go-to-market look like? Who are you partnering with? I imagine that you have banks involved. Yeah, I imagine there's a couple BNPL players that would be... The ideal. Yeah, no, we're currently... Our first design partner was in the collection space, collecting on medical payments. That's been super successful. We've done thousands of outbound calls. But sort of like not a name that you necessarily recognize. And we're now launching... These businesses are big. Yeah, exactly. We're now getting live with a fintech who's launching us into their conversion funnel for sales. There's a big servicer that's in the solar space.

2:11:14There's collections agencies, so a big handful. Did you have experience in the space prior to this? Yeah, so I previously built a contact center software company, so like 15 million ARR before it got acquired. And then immediately prior to launching this company, I was essentially working at like a Web3 credit fund and had invested into some emerging market debt buyers who are doing collections and servicing, which kind of exposed me to the whole world. Oh, that makes sense. And I was like, we should just do this with AI, basically. Did you share any metrics today at Demo Day? We haven't converted any of our...

2:11:47We got our first design customer live like six weeks ago. We're now launching with like five more. And the first customer, the first design partner, we did like 4 ,000 outbound calls and collected like 50K in the first month, which is like a big success. But like, yeah, so we're still getting going. Are you thinking of selling the result in some way? Like over time, would you just charge a percentage? Yeah, it depends who we're selling to. So when we're selling to a servicer or collections agency, we'll probably just sell on usage-based kind of pricing. But when we're selling to fintechs and banks, then we'd love to do as much outcome-based pricing as possible.

2:12:22And that's on the sales side, the collection side, everything. We have been asking everyone two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? So there's this guy, Felix Dennis, who was a British entrepreneur. And he wrote this book called How to Get Rich, which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship. And he's like a crazy guy. He's dead now, but he was like a crazy, crazy guy. Big into magazines. You would love this guy. He was like PC Magazine, Maxim, The Week. He was like a big publisher. Did a load of different stuff. Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis. Great. I'll have to look him up.

2:12:57Second question, how do you make your first dollar online, on the internet or in business? Yeah, so I launched an e-commerce website when I was like 19, still at college, and was selling like a load of homewares online. Homewares, nice. John was selling, were you selling DJ equipment? DJ equipment, that's cool. He's an international businessman from a young age. I was an international businessman at age 13, it was great. 13, nice, awesome. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Great to meet you as well. Have a great rest of your day. Congrats on the progress. Congrats on the progress. Let's move on to our next guest.

2:13:30We are live from YC Demo Day 2025. How are you doing? We're getting some photos taken by Bryce Johnson. Welcome to the stream. We got our next guest. Wait, the Prompting Company? Come on. The Prompting Company. The Prompting Company. We're prompt maxing. Yes, sir. But of where? Where could you possibly be based? Of San Francisco. The Prompting Company of San Francisco. That's correct. Don't capitalize the of, though. I'm just looking at this. Oh, cool. Yeah. Bull market and companies named that start with the. Exactly. The issue tracking of a company of Australia, right? Yeah, exactly. When did you pick that name and logo and design?

2:14:08We picked it two months ago. Two months ago. Okay. Okay. You should be the last one to do it though. I hope so. I think, I think, let's just call it. The trade is over. Yeah, the trade is over. So, so you're prompting, it's pretty self-evident, but tell the stream who you are, what you actually do. Yeah, my name is Kevin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the Prompting Company and we help product get mentioned in ChatGPT. Okay, okay. Not just another generative engine optimization tool. How do you differentiate? Yeah, for sure. So we plan the infrastructure layer. We're not just creating articles for you.

2:14:39We create shadow sites for our companies to influence all of us. Is there any special design in the type of shadow site that you're building? like what exactly does that look like? There's FTP servers, there's APIs, there's documentation, there's a lot of different stuff. Yeah, for sure. So these shadow sites are basically like markdown versions of your site. And then we basically iterate on more of those. Why do the foundation models like markdown so much? Because it takes like, no, it's just 90 % less tokens, man. Oh, okay, it's just more compressed. Super fast and super accurate. Yeah, that's correct.

2:15:09Because if they scrape the HTML, they're bringing in all the CSS and stuff. Okay, got it. Did you come into the batch with this idea? Yes, we did. We did not pivot. Okay, pure play. It's a pure play. What were you doing before this? I was at Beehive. I was working there. Oh, no way. Cool. Made your money in newsletters. Newsmaxing. What's Traction been like? It's been pretty good, dude. We are at 300k in ARR now. NVIDIA is a paying customer. No way. How did you land NVIDIA? Oh, dude, it was a crazy Bake Off but ultimately a better product one. A Bake Off. I love Bake Off. Very cool. Speaking of Jensen, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history?

2:15:55In history? Anyone, alive or dead? Dude, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. What about how you made your first dollar on the internet or in business? On the internet, I actually ran a service back then to jailbreak iPhones. No way. No way. That's come up before. Josh Browder. Josh Browder. Yeah, he was jailbreaking. I do a lot of that. I do a lot of that. And there was someone else who was fixing broken iPhone screens. So, yeah, the little low-hanging fruit in the digital economy. Very, very popular. Very cool. Would you consider yourself GPU poor or GPU rich? GPU poor at the moment. GPU poor at the moment.

2:16:30How's the fundraise going? It's going pretty great, man. We're way oversubscribed. Fantastic. And picking our lead right now. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Great to meet you. Good to meet you. Coming on. Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest from YC Demo Day. How are we doing on time, guys? We have to get out of here to catch a flight, correct? Okay, let Nick know. How you doing? What's happening? Nice to meet you, Theo. Good to meet you guys. What's happening? Fellow content creator streamer, accidental business guy, turned into an influencer somehow. Introduce yourself to the streamer.

2:17:04For those who don't know me, I'm Theo. I started, I was actually doing a YC company for making stuff like this easier because I worked at Twitch for five years. I wanted it to be easier to do live content collaborations, so I built Zoom for streamers, make it easier to bring a guest like you onto a show like mine in HD. I'm assuming you guys are actually not using OBS. That's cool, but we built everything around OBS so that you can use your professional existing solutions, copy-paste somebody straight from your browser into OBS at 1080p HD. So no matter what you're using, if you're using Hangouts or Zoom in the browser.

2:17:31We're an alternative to Hangouts and Zoom. But to be clear, we don't really focus on this product anymore. we built it because it was so needed and nothing else like this existed before and i saw the need when i was at twitch we won half the top streamers our reward was 8k a month so we started exploring more i was gonna say it's like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers and have a tiny business yeah i had a buddy who built uh this amazing tool for helping make documentaries and i was just like this is a very small market man this is coming from any fun oh yeah yeah yeah and i was like this is the best i was making youtube videos like video What do you, what do you, so did you, you guys, you tag them all, kept the product running?

2:18:07Yeah, still running to this day. It's relatively easy to maintain. Thankfully we, I'm proud of what we built there, but at the same time I wanted to better understand creators and I just missed going deep on tech. Cause when I was at Twitch, my favorite time of day was lunch and dinner where I could just nerd out with these super experienced engineers. COVID took that away from me. So I built my YouTube channel to better understand what creators needed and to just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest. And it blew up almost immediately. I'm still, the last - you do you have a head of membership?

2:18:35So you've seen the browser company video. I love that. So it was a fantastic reaction. Jody was saying the same thing in the morning. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved. I think I think I can see it. I can see Atlassian like wanting to take the browser very seriously. And so there's a way that in the fullness of time that it will look like, you know, incredible deal for both sides. But I did didn't see the video, I was like, wait, had a membership? What's going on there? There are just certain things in that scenario that are like hard to not have your eyes catch.

2:19:06So the chaos I've engaged with since my YouTube channel blew up accidentally, just got more into DevTools stuff, built some DevTools as well for the business, got so annoyed with the state of all the AI chat apps. DeepSeek v3 drops like, oh my god, this model's incredible, but the website was somehow even worse. So I said, time to make a better one, because I'm a nerd about like full stack web and application performance and just quality of experience. I helped build a lot of Twitch chat when I was over there. As far as I know, fastest updating text interface on the web. Oh yeah, people love Twitch chat.

2:19:33Yeah, Twitch is so much better than YouTube. It's unbelievable to this day. So I wanted to make this something - Wait, wait, wait, unpack that because I believe that Twitch chat is specifically like doesn't just endlessly load. It loads blocks at a time. Yeah, it's blocks, but they come in really fast. Is that a mistake? No, that's by design. That's absolutely by design. Like chat readability is like comprehensive. Like your ability to comprehend what's happening in chat is like - I was listening to Ludwig and he was saying like, could I start over if I didn't have any Twitch followers and he did this experiment and he was like, I think I have an edge just because I'm good at reading chat.

2:20:01And I was like, I never would have clocked that as like a thing, but it is. Actually one of the things I do differently is I film all my YouTube videos live on Twitch. So I'll be like, and I have chat open next to my like, a return feed. Yes, I have a team that like helps me manage that. We've built some custom software to auto chop the individual topics so we can get a video out within an hour of it being recorded, which I'm really proud of. But the goal is really to do it live. So any like mistakes I make, any sources I need help finding, any weird comments or questions I would get about the thing can happen while I'm filming.

2:20:29So then the final thing is much better. Yeah. It just cuts like it takes us an hour and a half to film an hour long video and then like 30 minutes to edit it. It's great. I'm really proud of our workflow there. That's cool. Super fun. Was that a content creation injury? It's got in a fight with a Firefox user. Joking. It was a skateboard injury from a long time ago. Oh, wow. Yeah. It slowly built up. Yeah. I was a sponsor skater for a little bit. I'm really into that to this day. But yeah, 10 years ago, had a really bad, 15 years ago, had a really bad wrist break. Also tore the entire ligament for my thumb, and it's just slowly been like falling off of my hand.

2:21:00So finally got that reconstructed. Well, you should build an app that uses computer vision to teach people how to kickflip. I think there could be a bull market in that space. Yeah, it'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but it's a public service, right? Teaching the world to kickflip. Yeah. You just come out. Our mission is to kickflip. So that's been fun for me recently that I actually really appreciate you guys for too, is it seems like the hunger for people to understand how the startup stuff actually works has been growing a lot recently. I've always been a nerd about it recently.

2:21:30I've been investing in a lot more. I think I've been over 100 YC startups at this point. It's been really fun for me. And love it. And recently it feels like I can actually talk about that stuff more where previously people's eyes would just glaze over. They wouldn't care. But I'm doing like one startup e-video a week at least right now. And they're performing incredibly well. The response has been awesome. It feels like people are ready to talk about this now. Yeah, yeah. It's a really good time. I mean, you look at the traction on like the actual Y Combinator account and like on YouTube. It says like over a million followers.

2:22:00Still one of the most underrated YouTube channels too. Like the old Michael Seibel Dalton podcast. Like I reference it all of the time. So good. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, they've, but all the stuff that Gary's done, they've done really well. Absolutely. Love all of them. It's like the Y Combinator like program, Y Combinator content, the Y Combinator partners, everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful. and now why T3Chat's successful too. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Makes sense. What's your goal over the next five, 10 years? If I had a five to 10 year goal, I would be probably not here to be working on it.

2:22:29I have no idea. I've always kind of just went with the flow and that works really well. My thing's always been, it's better to be late than early. I find that people try way too hard to be early to a thing and it ends up kind of rotting their brain a little bit. Like imagine you saw how powerful smartphones were getting back in the day. You're like, oh my God, this is obviously the future. Everything's going to be on phones. So I'm going to go all in making Java applets for the Kyocera, Echo, and Blackberry. Are you better or worse off than somebody who got into app development two years after the app store came out?

2:22:55Yeah. Sometimes it's better to be late. Everybody told me I was too late when we made our chat app and we're, as far as I know, the fastest growing third party chat app. Wow. Crazy. Fantastic. We've been asking everyone two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? Woo. History makes it tough. I would say like - Alive or dead. Modern history. Alive makes it a lot easier. your modern history, I think Tim Sweeney is my personal favorite. The way he's aligned his business is incredible. To this day, he still owns exactly 51%, so nobody can outvote him. His focus on making everything better for developers, knowing the flywheel will eventually fund him back, it's kind of like Apple strategy, but way more focused on developers, which I care a lot about.

2:23:32Even things that have been a flop, like Epic Game Store, were with the goal of getting developers more money because he was tired of Apple getting subsidized with 30 % revenue from an indie game dev. Yep, that makes a ton of sense. What did you think of the Apple launches today? Apple launch today was, as a nerdy tech and video guy, I love it. The iPhone 17 Pro is an actual monumental leap in what you can do for video production. Have you guys paid attention to any of that stuff? I'm sure these guys are going to love it. I just know 48 megapixel better cameras. That's cool. No, I mean that they added Genlock support.

2:24:06Oh, okay. So like full Blackmagic integrations. You can do time code with a new USB, like a device they part with Blackmagic to make. You can do crazy synchronization shots where you get like 20 iPhones at different angles. That's kind of cool. And do like frame by frame, like freeze frame 3D shots and stuff with it. That was normally you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before. Now you just get like 20 iPhones and a couple USB adapters. It's insane. And that's going to be even cheaper in like two years. Yeah. Oh, and ProRes RAW, which is really cool too. I know way too much about cameras.

2:24:34I'm really nerdy about this. but the RED camera company had an exclusive patent on compressed raw video encoding, on camera specifically. So the reason that all those like USB or, that used to be like external HDMI recorders got popular, Atmos is a business because of RED's bullshit patents. Sure, sure. That patent allowed them to just get away with things they absolutely shouldn't have and shut down every other camera company trying. Yep. The patent was, they had succeeded in suing Apple, they succeeded in suing DJI, they almost got the bar from the US. They succeeded in suing Sony, Canon, a bunch of other companies.

2:25:03They were suing Nikon. And I got said, how expensive are you guys? And bought them for like$30 million. So now the patent's not being enforced. So Apple got to put ProRids raw in the new iPhone, which is unbelievable. That's wild. Actual raw video encoding on a phone is just, I could not have imagined that even two years ago. That's crazy. Other question we've been asking, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Minecraft. Minecraft. Yeah, I was asking Minecraft servers. Yeah, somebody else said this. I hear from a founder that they started in Minecraft servers. I don't even think twice.

2:25:28I just write the check. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, it's so crazy. It's sneaker botting, Minecraft, iPhone, repairs. Like buying and selling stuff on eBay was popular in like the 90s, 2000s. Yeah, there's always one of those every generation. It's been really fun to see. And now I feel like people skip the step and just go straight to the business, which is interesting. Yeah, you're hearing that. Just start an enterprise SaaS. Just go to the end state. Yeah, just going to like the Founders Inc. events and seeing how many like excited young founders there are now. It's just something I never would have imagined before.

2:25:56Like when I was a kid, it was the promise. Like the exciting thing is you'll get to work at the Google campus one day. like that's what you were aspiring for now you're aspiring to be here and that's a really interesting shift yeah yeah that's great are you gpu poor gpu rich i'm gpu middle class gpu middle class you could pick a hat if you want oh i want the gpu poor hat for sure absolutely thank you so much middle class is just you guys you gotta go you gotta go up or you gotta go up or down um well thank you for joining it's not properly fitted but you can i will fix that for sure yeah thank you Thank you so much for stopping by.

2:26:28Great meeting you guys. We'll find you. If you need to comment on any weird stuff in the AI chat space or UI or whatever. No worries at all. I miss even more of them than you guys do. Let me know if you ever need help with anything. I'll be around. Have fun, man. Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Lightning round. Oh, there's people out there? Okay. Let's run it. Let's run it. Let's run it. Let's run it. Come in quickly. Speed it up. Who are you? What do you do? Welcome to the screen. Just my hand. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Bob. Hi, I'm Bob. Welcome to the show Bob. CTO of Embedder.

2:26:53We build coding agents for firmware. Okay. Coding agents for firmware? Firmware, yeah. What device are you embedding firmware on? They said it could be done. So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers. So think about any microcontroller you can think of. STM32, ESP, TI, NXP, any manufacturer. When did you learn you wanted to do coding agents for firmware? That's a good question. So I did hardware all my life. Started when I was small doing robots, moving to more professional stuff in high school. In college I did. High school, let's go. In college I built humanoids and then went to a startup, did med tech stuff, and then went to Tesla, worked on RoboTaxi.

2:27:30So we kind of saw it. I saw this problem from like a 10 % research lab to a trillion dollar company. That firmware development was so inefficient compared to web dev. And traditional coding agents just couldn't do it. Like cloud code or cursor, they lack context. What we say about context is two different problems. One problem is that there's no understanding of the chips. It needs to read the documentation for the chips to understand how to actually write the code. And once it has written the code, there's no way to test the code on the device. So we built this information layer and this hardware interaction layer where you can actually read out outputs from your board and run a GB debugger to debug.

2:28:09How's traction? How's demo day going? Tracking has been great. We launched three weeks ago now. We have over 100 paying users, 500 lines of code changed, working on the first enterprise. Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Elon. Are you bullish, bearish humanoids in the next five years? I'm very bullish. In the next five years? Do you think I will have one in my home? Maybe in all your home. Factories? Factories? Why factories? Factories because it's a straight-up replacement for your human workers. you just so much lower cost and you don't have to modify anything in your factory drop-in replacement and free work for us okay we will see okay well thank you we'll hold you to it we'll hold you to it five years expect to hear from us with uh with a fact check on that thank you so much for coming back thanks for coming we'll see you later have a good one uh we will bring in our next guest we're doing lightning round we got a lot of folks out there let's bring in the next founder from ycdemo day 2025 welcome to the stream hi i'm john elena nice george Nice to meet you.

2:29:19Nice to meet you. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you doing? Elena Sakesh. I'm a partner at Google Ventures. Oh, fantastic. Amazing. I was going to hit this button, but not... Partner mode. Partner mode. Partner mode. What's your reaction to Demo Day been? What are the common trends that you're seeing? How is this one different from other ones? Are valuations the highest they've ever been? What are you seeing? I feel like valuations are always higher. They're always. I think the fact that the public markets have come back has just reinstored a lot of faith. IPO window is open. I'm excited to see a lot of that.

2:29:51I run FinTech at Google Ventures. There's a lot of fun FinTech and crypto companies in the pipeline. And yeah, it's been a really fun demo day. Have you done? Did you do any of the companies in this batch yet? Are you still looking? Not in this batch yet, but I think. But you guys are so multi-stage that you can kind of come in forever. It's more about building relationships. Right now we're investing out of a$2.8 billion fund every two years. and our sole LP is Google. That's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. We like work. Do you introduce it as Google Ventures, but isn't it rebranded fully to GV, or have we gone back?

2:30:26It depends on what flavor people are looking for, but it's both GV and Google Ventures. Give us the state of early stage FinTech today, because if this was four years ago, I think we would have seen like half the batch, something like that, FinTech-related, and very little of that today from what we've seen. It probably means now is the right time to be starting a company, but what are you seeing? Yeah, I feel like fintech has always ebbed and flowed. And at GV, we've been investing in fintech since the start. We were seed investors in Robinhood, seed investors in Plaid, seed investors in Gusto.

2:31:03We recently invested in Ramp. And so what you can kind of see in fintech right now, yeah, let's go. Big day, big day today. What you can see in fintech is a barbell. There are people who are solving things at the earliest stages, parts of the world where fintech still hasn't touched. I'll still say fintech's total market cap is 4 % of all financial services. Financial services is 20 % of the S &P 500. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways to go. Do you think the fact that there are so many scaled growth stage, Decacorn Plus fintech companies with founders still at the helm, changes the strategy at the early stage.

2:31:44Like, do you need to be more focused or niche? Because you have Zach at Plaid, you have Eric at Ramp, Brian at Coinbase, Relatt at Robinhood. Like it's not the same era where it's like, the founders died 50 years ago. And so yeah, it's probably open season on that category. It's like, no, if you start that company in that space, like that person, that founder that we all know, who's already on the podcast circuit, is going to be coming for your life. And they go multi-product, right? They earn the trust of a consumer and then they get into everything. There's so many advantages and they also are not in manager mode.

2:32:16So, yeah, it does not change the market. Yeah, and I mean, I think that's a lot of why we invested in RAMP, even at this last round's price, right? Like, I've spent a decade looking at Office of the CFO software. And I think that they'll end up winning agents. Let's give it up for the Office of the CFO. Let's do it. And I think the best founders think they're never done. Yeah. And so with FinTech, what I love about it is I look at Amex. it's a$230 billion company. There is a lot of room to run if you're a fintech founder. Are you pitching Ruth Peratt on Ramp? Always. Okay, let's make it happen.

2:32:49Were you at the last demo day? Yes. Why didn't you come on our stream? Yeah, yeah. One, that's more important, but I was going to say like vibes-based analysis. To me, I've been a lot more excited about this batch than last time. Last time it felt like super derivative. everything. It was a lot of like agents for agents and infrastructure for agents. This is a lot more of like less infrastructure, more like here is a product with like a clear value prop and we have a hundred people. Yeah, we're using AI like we're using cloud or mobile or anything else. Yeah. And I think, I think I always think of things as variables, right?

2:33:25And when people are building for things that don't yet exist, it becomes stacking a bunch of variables on top of each other. And I think what I love about this batch is it seems pretty grounded and rooted in things that people need today. Like the market is there. I'm not taking a risk on whether or not the market's going to come into fruition. Yeah, and a year ago, if you were doing agentic infrastructure, there was a lot of people that I was seeing, like not even just in YC, that were like building infrastructure for agents. And yet, and they would sign up a lot of customers, but none of the customers were creating any value.

2:33:55So it was like infrastructure for companies that weren't really working. And I think that the catalyst now is like now you have a bunch of companies building agentic software that are delivering value for customers. And so a lot of the infrastructure companies can probably work now. Yeah. We're doing a lightning round outside of Larry and Sergey, obviously. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history, alive or dead? Anyone that you think is inspiring? Maybe you read a biography or something. Oh, wow. There are so many. This is really difficult. Anyone? You know what? I think I would say Brian Armstrong, Coinbase created a market that didn't exist before.

2:34:38The largest businesses are always market creators in spite of what I said earlier. That's a great one. We love Brian. Second question. So if you're the next Brian Armstrong, if you're creating a market right now, please get in touch. Please, please me. Get in touch. Second question. How do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Oh, wow. Trading crypto. Trading crypto. I'm surprised we haven't heard that more. I know. Yes, let's go for this. Thank you for clapping. She was born in the trenches. Born in the trenches. Still in the trenches. Still in the trenches. Last question.

2:35:11Yeah. Do you consider yourself GPU poor, GPU rich? Yeah. You're bolted onto a hyperscaler. Yeah. I think I know the answer, but I'll hear it from you. Define GPU poor, GPU rich. GPU poor means that you're struggling to scrap together every H100 you can. GPU rich as you press the button on the massive trading run if you want. You know, it's a vibe, but it's also a very real thing for foundation model companies. Now it's just a general vibe. Do you feel constrained by technology or liberated by it? I feel like liberated by it. I think you qualify as GPU rich. We got to lean in. We got to lean in.

2:35:47We'll give you this high GPU rich. It hasn't been properly said, oh, maybe it fits. There you go. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Nice to meet you. See you next batch. Have a good rest of your demo day. Two phones, you know, she means business. There you go. That's a corporate. That's a corporate athlete. Corporate athlete right there. That's a boardroom general. Clocked in. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Welcome to the stream. Jordy, good to meet you. Introduce yourself. What do you do? Hey, my name is Sion. We're Kalinda.

2:36:19That's a great name. We're basically a deep research for class action law firms. Okay, interesting. Let's give it up for litigation. What's the secret sauce? Is it just the bad data in, bad data out? You got to get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall. It's not scraped into the pre-training weights of GPT-5, and so you have some cornered resource in the data, or is it something in the architecture or something at the UI level? Where's the interesting... Kind of like most startups at YC, a lot of it sits on the application layer. sure um most of it for for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things you know they can have maybe 10 million pages for litigation oh wow so with that kind of scale you can't obviously just toss them yeah be a hassle just click upload another pdf upload another pdf upload another pdf yeah and then the kind of second thing is like most of the data sort of sits in silos and kind of aggregating it all and making it sort of you know comprehensive like human would is is what's trying you ever would you ever go full stack would you ever start suing people yourself yeah yeah yeah we actually uh we just said that's america that's the american way let's go watch out um yeah we actually just said this in our in our pitch we want to become the world's first class action law okay full stack full stack ai law yeah yeah nice fantastic uh how's traction what do you share a demo day how's it going how's the race going yeah so we have about 60 ,000 in revenue in just the last four months since basically launching.

2:37:47Congrats. We have three of the largest plaintiff law firms in the US as customers.

2:37:54But yeah it's going really well. Pitch is a little nerve-wracking at first but got over it. What's it like selling into these firms so far? They seem to be responding well. Yeah much better than most would expect I guess. Like they they probably don't know a lot about me at all so you just kind of say it's magic and then has this been an overlooked category broadly just building software for this type of firm it feels like they just print cash and they're willing to spend um some of the numbers i've heard on like some of these even firms that like have a website they look like a tiny business and they're just printing like 50 million dollars a year it's crazy yeah most settlements are a billion plus but uh yeah absolutely like you know because of natural language being so a lot easier with our general general AI um they it makes it a lot easier and so the kind of work they do is has basically been overlooked for practically ever in fact most of them never throw software out yeah and most of them aren't even still paperless they still have lots of paperwork they've just gotten over the cloud if you want to call it that so yeah cool lightning round do it who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time Sam Altman Sam just just because I've met him twice but yeah he's the goat second question how'd you make your first dollar online in business or on the internet?

2:39:14Cold call. Cold call. What was that? It was actually, so we, the previous space that we were in was personal injury, still law firms. My brother, he's an expert cold caller. Yeah. Are you, how did, when did you realize you wanted to get into class actions and personal injury law? Yeah. Well, basically we literally, about last summer, we started walking into businesses cold, just like saying, hey, we do AI. We're both previously AI researchers. We can probably solve your business problems. Law firms were a huge part of it. Nice. Based on where you sit in the stack, do you feel like you're GPU poor or GPU rich?

2:39:51GPU rich, but GPU poor soon. Okay. Good luck to you. Scaling up. Hopefully you can scale up. Thanks so much. Great to meet you. Congrats on the progress. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you if you're just tuning in. We are live from YC Demo Day 2025, and we have our next guest coming into the studio. It's kernel time. It's a rock of the show. You seem fired up. Did you just pitch? We haven't pitched yet. Who are you? What do you do? Raph Garcia, founder of kernel. We're crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your AI agent. The browser wars. The browser wars are on. But this is basically computer use.

2:40:26So it's API to go and interact with the website. So nowadays, a lot of AI agents, you want to hook them up to the exact same tools that humans use. and the browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day-to-day basis. And so we're powering automations in healthcare, fintech, QA, lots of different use cases that AI is really good at. Walk us through the history of the market because I know there used to be this company, I'm blanking on the name, but they were doing browser, they had a browser-use product and they were venture-backed, but they never really broke out and it feels like this market has just exploded in size.

2:41:03Prior to LLMs, the main use case was you run your tests or your QA on a headless browser in the cloud. But as soon as AI came on the scene, tools got supercharged by this intelligence you could connect to them. So I experienced this firsthand. I founded a company called Clever back in 2012. No way. That's right. With Tyler. Yeah, we were technically in the same batch. And our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation to pull data out of student information systems. Cluver's a killer company, by the way. You should look it up. Massive acquisition. Massive deal. Size gone. What was the number?

2:41:46500 million. So yeah, both me and my co-founder are previous YC founders, so we are experienced at the game. And yeah, I was previously a quant at a high-frequency trading firm, so Speed is the name of the game. If you want to make your browser infrastructure super fast, I will help you. How over-subscribed is the round? It's extremely and it's over. It's over. It's over. It's actually over. We're not back. I mean, it is a hyper-competitive space. I saw even AWS launch something. It seems like something obviously AWS would have a product. How are you thinking about competition in the long-term market structure?

2:42:26Are you thinking it's even a winner-take-all market or is this oligopoly like what we saw with cloud where AWS, GCP, Azure, these are all great businesses. Yeah, I think, you know, with DevTools, I think there's an opportunity for companies to come into the space and just be laser focused on the technical quality of the product. So you see this with like PlanetScale and RDS. You know, Amazon has a competitor that like, you know, has a huge market share, but PlanetScale is like eating their lunch when it comes to Mindshare and some bigger customers. There's a lot of examples. So we are like infra nerds, trying to make browsers super fast in the cloud.

2:43:01And I don't think they're, the lengths we are going to do that, like AWS is going to be years behind whatever we're working on. So how are the bake-offs going? The bake-offs are going well. So we, you know, we did YC and, you know, YC is now like five or 6 ,000 companies. So it's a huge early adopter market to kind of launch and sell into. But now we're starting to see deals come on that are Fortune 500, more enterprise deals. So yeah, size gong is going off in the office. And yeah, we're seeing really good revenue growth over, I guess, 1 ,000%, you could call it month over month, 400 % usage month over month.

2:43:44We've spun up like 200 ,000 browsers in the last three months. So yeah, things are going well. Fantastic. How big is the team today? We're six full-time. So hiring a lot of people I worked with at Clever and yeah. No, I love, I love when a founder comes in and put, runs it back. Does it like they did it the first time, like goes back through YC and then just puts on a master class. Yeah. The mistake. And I don't know if you'll agree. The mistake is like, okay. You could have done the next, I mean, I'm going to incubate 25 different things. Yeah. You could have, you could have at the beach for the next bar gets so high.

2:44:21But I'd like you to build things as hard. and they completely forget how hard it is at the early stage. That's the value of going through YC again. The partners put you in that mindset like, okay, you actually have to do things that don't scale. You have to build a product something wants. You could have done the whole raise 50 million, get the really crazy office out the gates, and then you got to earn it every time. You got to earn it every time, for sure. Well, speaking of people who earned it, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history? Who do you look to? Favorite entrepreneur? How far back are we going?

2:44:50We can go live or dead. I've had literally thousands of years if you want. You can go Edison. Somebody has mentioned Jesus Christ. Somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at RAMP. I mean, I didn't make the comparison, but it was made today. I mean, cliche, I'll have to go Steve Jobs. I mean, I grew up reading and studying Apple. That was my first computer as a kid. So I got a shout out to Steve. I said Edwin Land, Steve Jobs' mentor, but it's not. Anyway, second question. How did you make your first dollar online or in business? I mean, do you count trading futures as a quant? Is there a more noble way to make your first dollar?

2:45:30What are we talking about? I mean, that is my first job out of college. That's my quant. That's my quant. Anyway, congratulations on the progress. Come back on the show as you have more news. When you're ready to announce the round, jump on. We're very excited. Anyway, we will bring in our, we have what? 10 minutes countdown. 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Come in. We're in the lightning round. What do you do? Explain yourself. My name's Adi, I'm a co-founder of AgentMill. It's the first email provider built for AI agents. The key distinction, there we go. The key distinction is we're not AI for your email, we're email for your AI.

2:46:02Okay. Whoa. Oh, interesting, like browser use for agents. Okay. I was wondering about this because I go to agent mode and oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like, okay, now it should just email the person to actually kick off that process and it can't do it. Yeah. Interesting. How much money are you making? How much money are we making? Yeah. Did you share a KPI at Demo Day? Did you share progress? What KPI should we focus on? We did not, but we love our customers. Okay. Okay. But customers plural. So I know there's more than one. Yes. Okay. I'm learning. I'm learning. There we go. Did you come in with this idea or did you pivot to it?

2:46:34So we were trying to get rich quick. Is somebody vlogging out there or is that someone else? Yeah, exactly. We were like hustlers. You're doing that YouTube AdSense right now. I know what question I'm asking next. Let's go. So we wanted agents to go on the internet, make us money, farm free trials. And then we realized, okay, it's kind of hard to give agents their own inboxes. But they should have them. Sequoia is talking about them. Langchain is talking about them. Agents need their own email inboxes. Okay, so you did it. This brings me to the lightning round question. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

2:47:06Like as a kid or maybe took you a while. So I got cut from the basketball team and I was like, damn, I want to be a part of it. What's basketball?

2:47:23yeah yeah um so i was like hey i want to be involved man i want to feel like i'm a part of something so i just said hey coach what can i do he's like okay be the scorekeeper that's how i made like my first 300 bucks that's fantastic and there we go that's an honest that's an honest living yeah uh second question who's your favorite entrepreneur in history alive or dead i like Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett. Yeah. Interesting. I think he's one of those guys who's like actually humble. Yeah. Right. Like it's not like, okay, hey, I'm worth a hundred million. I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game.

2:47:52He does. He's in it for the love of the game. Hopefully one day, you know, I can be like that. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Let's bring on our next guest at YCW Day 2025. We got eight minutes. Let's bring him in. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? What do you do? Here, sit down here, shake my hand. Nice to meet you. Who are you? What do you do? Hey, I'm Amit. I'm building Riff, which is Cursor for music production. Ooh, that's fun. Are you sitting, so Cursor sits on top of an open source IDE. Are you sitting on top of Ableton or something?

2:48:25That doesn't exist for music. So we actually built everything from scratch, trained our own models. Sure. We have our own, like, editor. It kind of looks like GarageBand, but you can use AI tools to generate sounds and mess around. Interesting. Do you bring your own samples or do you plug into a sample library? Like where, or are all the samples AI generated? Yeah, we have like a user community of samples, but we also like let you generate your own. And also like lots of bells and whistles to make it easier. Like for example, you can hum out a melody and we'll play it on an instrument for you.

2:48:53That's very cool. What's your most popular song? You make music, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I, let me see. I produced a song for this artist named Rio Cragen. He's pretty big. He works with a lot of EM artists. Nice. That's awesome. Love to play it. Off the string. So, how do you see the market here? Is there a million people that you think will pay for a product like this? Or do you want to go more enterprise, work with labels? What's the play? Yeah, I mean, we're definitely targeting pros. It's a pro tool. But pros for us means... Pro tools? Oh yeah. from that. The good one. Like, it doesn't just mean music producers.

2:49:35It's really anyone who releases music on the internet. Like imagine you're just a singer. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for your producer, you can produce your own music. Yeah, that's great. And that's like 80 million people release music on the internet, yeah. How's traction, how's Demo Day going? Great, I mean, yeah, we grew to 400 DAUs. People are already dropping songs on Spotify that were made on Riff, and getting some listens already. Fantastic. Yeah, the raise is fantastic. I honestly have to really pick the investors now. like the round is completely filling up so great spot last question wrist check oh yeah yeah what do you got is this yeah it's it's a breadlink nice one not enough watches on the wrist here at yc lightning round questions favorite entrepreneur in history live or dead dr dr dr dr dr good i knew i had to ask you anyway thank you so much for that thanks great to me let's bring in the next one how are you doing five minutes left at YC Demo Day livestream.

2:50:29Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself. Who are you? It's Freya time. I'm Tunga and I'm the CEO of Freya. What do you do? We build voice AI for European enterprises. Okay. Especially regulated ones like finance. Okay. And we're pretty much voice AI for Europe. How's traction? Traction, eight paid pilots converting to 24k MRR. That's great. Let's go. Within the past four weeks. And the rest of the demo day. Are you getting ASML in the round? are you gonna be the hot investor say goodbye to the tier ones ASML's in the business next round we're rooting for you are you GPU poor by any chance? do you want a GPU poor hat?

2:51:07I might as well be so what's the strategy? are you gonna build the company here or are you moving back to Europe? back and forth so we have office in San Francisco and in Istanbul as well as Prague we're based in three places so our go-to-market is Europe, especially finance industry. But since we started working with banks and insurance companies there, especially we're working with some of the biggest banks there. In the U.S., we got some interest with some of these neobanks and credit unions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? And I would love a European example if you have one. European example.

2:51:43But you can say anyone. If there were good European entrepreneurs, they would come to SF. Mog. I'm just bogged. Well, just zooming out, who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? I would say - Alive or dead? I'm impressed by what Elon Musk has done. There we go. That's a great one. Yeah, his track record is very impressive. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? In my own business? Yeah, just no, in life. Any - You know, like as a kid, did you make any money on the internet? What'd you do? Yeah, I mean, on internet, pretty much, I didn't make my first money on internet.

2:52:14I was doing sales. Sales. Yeah, I was trying to get some people to a real estate shop. Okay. Nice. pretty much what I did. There you go. That's fantastic. Yeah. Nice. Well, congrats on the progress. Thanks for the legends. Great to meet you. Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest. How much more time do we have? Four minutes. Let's keep going. We're going. We're going. We're going. Bring them in. Bring them in. How are you doing? Welcome to the stream. What's happening? Long time listener, first time caller. Thank you for coming on the stream. Let's go. It's great to have you. Who are you?

2:52:42What are you building? I'm John Ferrara. I'm building Juxta, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth with no hardware. I feel like I've seen this on X. You might have seen our, we had a pretty cool launch video. Very cool. Yeah. Okay. So how does it work? There's some company that spun out of Google that just sold it, does something similar like magnetics. But how are you doing it? Yeah. So we basically use simulated technology to basically render any environment using satellite imagery or indoor floor plans into 3D. So you do a geoguessor? You could put it that way. Yeah. We should have the company that way.

2:53:12Yeah. And then we simulate millions of people or objects moving through outer space, simulate their sensor measurements, like accelerometers, gyroscopes. Okay. and then train models on that and then basically deploy the software and we can leverage the IMU which are like sensors that are already into every phone and most other devices today to track you. This is Jason, like I can see you through your Wi-Fi. Lots of people love this. If you've seen that film in like the dark night, there's like a scene where Batman kind of does something. Oh yeah, I know the one you're talking about. You know, that's how you can envision it.

2:53:40That's going to be entertaining on the internet. What? Who's the buyer here? Yeah, we sell a lot to like actually at this point, like warehousing, manufacturing logistics because 90 % of all movement happens in GPS denied areas, indoors, underground, defense is a big one. I grew up in a military family, so we sell a lot to like, trying to sell a lot to like DOD, stuff like that. But right now we've made a lot of progress like selling to companies who want to like ship thousands of pallets or containers or move around a warehouse, stuff like that. Do you require any custom hardware or could this be distilled at some point into just an iPhone ad?

2:54:12No, it's just software. It's just software. So like actually, Actually it was almost, we were this close. If you come next demo day, we're actually gonna be in the demo day app. We were, YC, Gary and Jared wanted to track all the investors and founders to see where they were going, but we weren't able to work with their app team quite in time. So next demo day, it'll be there, but that's already existing. We're building actually small asset tags that are like two inch by two inch that allow us to basically stack them. Yeah, I was gonna say, cause a lot of stuff is important, but it doesn't have software type.

2:54:37And so that's where like, we'll get to the point where we can do that sort of thing. That's super, super cool. Lightning round questions. How do you make your first dollar? track like traction and how some fun. Sure. Yeah, we've we've done about$150 ,000 revenue last six weeks. And then thanks. And then we're actually on pace to be at like 500 K in the next two months. There's a lot of demand. We have like hundreds of thousands of these tags pre ordered. Wow. That's fantastic. And yeah, we raised our round. 5 million 40. That's what our there we go. There we go. Drop giving the honestly given it away.

2:55:09Sorry, I didn't mean to maybe that was too much. No, no, no, no, no. We try not to drag it out of you. Oh, my bad. No, no, no, but it's helpful. It's very interesting. So come back on the show when you want to announce the actual round. Yeah, I guess you kind of pre announced I get a gong. Yeah, you can get a gong. We'll get the gong for you. Appreciate it. How do you make your first dollar on in life in life or as a kid? As a kid, I would well, I worked a lot of really weird jobs. I got my first one. I was 13 working at a working 13 at a hot dog stand in a shack in Phoenix, Arizona. Um, so it was shoveling hot dogs and it was gourmet hot dogs.

2:55:45So like you basically pay$9 for a hot dog that got wrapped in non bread instead of a normal bun. Yep. We charge you nine bucks. Uh, who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? Live or dead? Oh my God. Um, I would say, I would say, I know the riff guys just said Dr. Dre, but I'll say Drake because he just came out that Amazon store and Drake's my favorite artist. So there we go. What Amazon store? I don't know. You haven't seen this. He's, it's, this is his actual plot to take over Amazon music as a distribution platform, but he's working with Amazon to sell all of his merch and all of his goods through their storefront and basically facilitate all their distribution through there.

2:56:16So that's my cop-out answer, but I just love Drake. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. We have our next guest, Casey. Let's bring her in. How you doing? Welcome. Final guest. Closing it out. Closing it out. Saving best or last. Great to meet you. Welcome. Introduce yourself for the stream. Tell us who you are. My name is Casey Caruso. I'm the managing partner of a fun called topology fantastic to be here uh reaction to demo day electric electric electric more electric than the last demo day particularly electric what is what about it is electric i just think the founder quality is so high and i think it's just an incredible thing that yc does for the valley yeah and it's very unique i mean there's a lot of things that are like this and still the essence of yc has been i think retained yeah totally totally uh were you at the last demo day I was.

2:57:09To me, it seems like the bar is consistently higher across this batch. I don't know if you feel the same. Maybe it's the founder the same, but the quality of the company and the traction. The industry has kind of figured out how to tell the story that's not just AI only. And it's actually going back to the basics of what's the problem we're solving. And so when I talk to a lot of the founders, they come in and they lead, yeah, there's AI being said, but it's almost in the background and they're more focused on the market or or the problem or the product. So I feel like all the stories have been a lot more tractable than just like AI infrastructure stuff.

2:57:43I agree. I also think the founders are getting younger and younger. I honestly feel that there's like 14-year-olds up there and they're like, we just launched 30 seconds ago and we have 10K in MRR. And I'm like, oh my God. Like this is crazy. Yeah, they're skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker flipping. They're just going straight into enterprise SaaS. It's absolutely beautiful. Where have you been most excited to invest broadly just outside of YC over the past year? Yeah, I mean, so the fund is a$75 million fund one. And we're backed by people like Marc Andreessen, founder of OpenAI. And we really focus on technical founders that are commercially minded, building cool shit.

2:58:21And that's really important. We only back cool shit. And so we will look everywhere, but that's like the motto or that's the one-liner. We spend a lot of time in neurotech. We spend a lot of time in maybe less popular AI categories. yeah yeah uh any reaction uh since you said neurotech there was a company that had went pretty viral yesterday with doing like telepathy yeah what what's going on there how proprietary do you think that is is that is that something that we're going to see more of as like a form factor yeah absolutely so actually if you go to topology.vc slash neuro dash map you can see a really sick visualization market map of all this i love it it's but it's more than a market map okay um but i love market maps we're pro market map here by the way and if they're crowdsourced even better right yeah of course um but that specific technology is called silent speech it's becoming more popular uh it's actually do you have to actually move your mouth in order that's right so it's using muscle movement instead of brain signals and there's some that are trying to do silent speech with brain uh but like alter ego is going with the muscle approach And to actually get it with like the EKG, or is it EK, not EKG, whatever the - EMG maybe?

2:59:34Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you need like 60 sensors or something like that. So it's not necessarily - Yeah, right now the biggest thing in neuro is to become what's called multimodal, kind of like what happened with AI. So people are using things like ultrasound with EEG, which is one of the most popular non-invasive technologies with muscle movement and combining them all together. The other cool neurotech company though that we're investing in is Sam Altman's new company called merge Oh, that one's gonna become really popular too, but I thought they killed that demo on Twitter. Yeah, great great demo Great demo.

3:00:06Yeah Lightning round lightning round we got here. So Favorite entrepreneur alive or dead. I can't do that all my children. I love equally

3:00:18Biography of who's like, you know from a hundred years ago You're like, no, my favorite, my favorite entrepreneurs are only the only the companies I invest in. Yeah, no, no, no, no, not favorite entrepreneur that you've necessarily. No, all right. You got to go Einstein. Einstein. Yeah, you just got it. That's good. No one said Einstein yet. And how'd you make your first money, first dollar either on the internet or in business? Yeah, I started coding when I was really young as an Anon because my mom wanted to keep my like gender kind of under wraps. So I didn't get any like creepy messages. and I used to do website development as an on.

3:00:52That's a great one. I love that. Great start. Awesome. Great having you on. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. Nice to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. Good to meet you. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Anyway, thank you for watching our show. Thank you to our - We will see you tomorrow live from New York City. Live from New York City, maybe live from New York Stock Exchange. You never know. It might very well happen. We could very well be there. Thank you to our incredible sponsors for making TBPN possible. We love you all. And thank you for watching. We'll see you. We'll see you tomorrow.

3:01:24See you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.