AI demos + Jason invests $25K live! | E1789

0:00you know like reddit or this or twitter when you can have anonymity in the system you know all kinds of fugacity stuff can come along you can pay people to get your you know edits through and then other folks are you know like reddit you know like reddit you know you know like reddit you know you know you know you know they just there's no resolution that's and that's why people who you know anybody who's notable looks at wikipedia and they're like yeah says yeah they trust it in a different way right yeah yeah then people who don't have a i wish my page got deleted i tried to have it deleted a couple times it's not notable um and that didn't work so this week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io need to speed up your product development without draining your budget hire vetted engineers from europe at lemon.io go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15 off for the first four weeks and broker startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today at and broker.com slash twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist and house of macadamias is the next big health trend.

1:27Get a free box of Namibian sea salted macadamia nuts at houseofmacadamias.com slash twist. Plus get an extra 20 % off your order by using code twist 20. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. It's Monday. Sunny Madra is back to do some AI demos and talk about the state of AI. We like to kick the week off with that, as you all know. and then i got three startups from our founder university program we're going to pitch me live on air and i'm going to invest 25 000 in one of them so uh and all three are ai based products so you can get to see some great ai demos sunny welcome back to the show good to be back yeah excited all right it's uh it's august and it's the industry is not slowing down feels like things are accelerating i can't imagine what the fall is going to be like i mean the the amount of effort people are putting into iterating on these AI models and building new experiences for consumers is unlike anything I've ever seen.

2:30Yeah, I saw a tweet the other day that there's 6500 companies in AI right now. That feels directionally correct. And I have to say, one of the things that I'm super amazed at is how much product people are building given the resources they have in other words two or three person teams are building stuff that is wicked um and so reminds me just like cloud computing used to be like hey when can you get this up and running and then all of a sudden they'd have an app up and running and uh you know a site up and running within 30 to 60 days and you thought hey it wasn't take three months to set up your co-location facility and order the servers and do all that now you're going to be up and running in days to weeks as opposed to months or quarters uh it's really really fast but i think it's awesome the pace is good and i think that's a good intro into our demos yeah let's get started on the demos and i showed you some of the stuff i'm working at inside on without talking about it uh it feels like um i got something i got something yeah you've built something that you know is representative of two or three companies today but then haven't put that together and i think it's like the next iteration of it so i really really like it i'm very excited for it all right so let's do our first demo here let's do our first demo all right so this one jacal i think you'll have a lot to say about it because it's sort of reminds me of a lot of what you were doing a little bit with mahalo and human power search yeah but you know kind of building the you were building the pages and so in this case um i asked it to build a uh like an seo page for the all-in summit and i gave it uh some keywords which you know i can pull up in a second and you can see here it came up with a little graphic and an overview so i just said all-in summit royce hall give it you know all the host names and it you know did all this on its own amazing um i thought that was really good and this is this particular one was designed to be keyword optimized for seo and so i thought that was you know really exciting um and it took me less than five minutes to do this um and you can kind of see the settings here you can add custom prompts to it word count tone of voice that is becoming obvious now or you know table stakes exactly they give you also and i'm just clicking for those those folks listening i'm just clicking on like the socials button and so they also give you a little previews that you can dump into instagram linkedin different tweets that you can do um super powerful and so they have everything from like single article generators uh you know which i'm clicking on here which is what i used you can also do batch article generation oh no i mean the pollution of the web now is going to be insane i can see this already because i'm starting to get ai reply guys on my twitter people reply with something that makes a little bit of sense and then it feels like okay either a person who barely speaks english or an ai bot is replying to this you know like when you would have your facebook groups get in infiltrated by you know manila spammers right and they were being told to put links and just you know reply to anything just to get clicks it reminds me of that where people who had english as a second language and were trying to make some contextual reply and that's i think what this is going to do this is going to pollute the heck out of the web i hate this kind of automated batch generation i do like this as a starting point for a website builder to kind of give them ideas right and then take it from there yeah or like you know i'm considering using it for definitive like you know we have a bunch of articles that we want written on certain topics and it kind of gives us the framework for those things and and you know in these custom formats you can have it be programmatic or pull things from urls and things like that as well so i mean so yeah you could say write a story you could point to let's say i don't know the new york times home page and you could say go to the new york times.com pick a story and rewrite it essentially and uh or write a summary of i don't know i'm trying to think of something that gets public oh a mr beast video here's the mr beast video of the week write up an article about it so every time he posts on saturdays the latest video write an article about it and post it to my mr beast blog and then it's just kind of feels like automated spam but i guess if done right it could be high quality content to navigate the Mr.

7:17Beast video. So we'll see. It's a whole new world here. I mean, I think what this will force is the search engines to get a lot better. And, you know, I think this is good for your website, but I think if you're using it for kind of spam purposes, I think the, you know, we're going to see technology that can start to detect that these things were written by AIs, but I, you know, you've been doing this a lot longer. So i'm really in because your reaction is pretty you know lukewarm to negative on these yeah so what i think is because the quality is like generic it's i think it's enough to confuse the algorithm into thinking it's a human but not good enough to provide value for humans so it's kind of like falling between i think it's going to beat google and bing and they're going to have a hard time dealing with this and figuring out if it's computer generated or by a human um and then i think conversely i think humans are gonna get to this and feel like one of my is this just filler calories so it's it's reminds me of like you know you eat some organic strawberries and they're small and they're delicious and they're dense with flavor and but they're imperfect you know kind of human ish and then they make these factory ones you know that are giant strawberries that are like the size of like a small apple or a lemon and you're like That's too big for a strawberry.

8:41It has no flavor. I think that's kind of this artificial web of content that we're about to create that's going to destroy the open web. I think this is going to flood and destroy the web if it's not contained. Now, if it got good enough that it was providing actual value, great. But when I look at that, you know, all in summit review or any of these, it feels like filler content. So I get it for brainstorming. um and it certainly will get you to like second base to get you 60 of the way there but man you really do need to have a human polish this which i think means the great writers will get will become even more valuable in this world because average to good content is going to be everywhere it's going to flood everything and the automated nature of this is also troubling um that to me is the and the batch stuff so you could say rewrite the entire wikipedia i could rewrite the entire wikipedia right now and say take every section of the wikipedia rewrite every section and do it in this tone a funny tone a clever tone a more professional a less professional you know whatever it is and and then how does the internet deal with that right and it's supposedly it's happening on reddit too that there are reddit bots that are now posting comments okay listen you got an idea for a tech startup great you think you want to change the world you think you got this This is the one.

10:04Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity. You need to go fast. And how are you going to go fast? And how are you going to control your burn rate if you got no engineers? Well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than a thousand on-demand developers? And those developers were all vetted, experienced, result-oriented, and passionate about startups and building great products. Well, what if they also charge competitive rates? Does this all sound too good to be true?

10:31I know it does. well, then you need to head to lemon.io because your dreams have come true right now startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with three or more years of experience and ones that have strong portfolios only 1 % of candidates who apply to work at lemon.io actually get accepted and if anything goes wrong lemon will get you a replacement ASAP a couple of great launch founders have worked with lemon.io people in our portfolio and they have had great experiences so I want you to learn more at lemon.io slash twist and when you go there you're going to find your perfect developer or an entire tech team and you're going to do that in 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15 off the first four weeks i want you to stop burning money i want you to hire developers smarter and faster visit lemon.io slash twist and give it a shot if you're starting a company jcal right and you're obviously supporting this all the time this used to take going out and getting a you know some combination of marketing and pr firms and all that.

11:30And if you're a two-person startup and writing is not your, you know, forte, but you're great engineers, like I think back to when I was starting my first company, it's like, I'd love to have something like this just to give me the basic framework, you know. We live in a weird society where we have to take, you know, concepts that are filtered down and expand them to make us look, you know, more professional. So, that's why we have to do it. Like if I could write three bullets and put it on my website and say, come use, you know, definitive or whatever, but like, you know a big i think as a yeah so i agree with you as a brainstorming tool starting you off on second base yeah yeah i consider it like the templates at squarespace yeah um what was really amazing about the templates that squarespace created in the early days was they were better than what you could pay a designer to make now i don't mean that to diminish any designers but they figured out a way to hire the best designers build this like collection of templates and so i would look at a squarespace website and i still do today and then i'd have a web developer build something like squarespace templates better i literally just went through this because somebody on my team was like i'll just make this and you know webflow whatever i'll you know handcrafted i'll do a no code solution i was like oh that's all great and then i looked at the design and i was like can you just use a squarespace template and make something gorgeous and so and i love all those no code platforms i think they're great for startups etc but that's what this is like doesn't have yet where i don't think the output is is there yet you know uh and so somebody's got to make the output really crisp but sure as a starting point it's like an okay template to start with like a like an yes a five or six as a template as opposed to a nine or a ten i think it'll get to a nine or a ten six months we'll come back to this i mean i think that'll be when you can show me an article written by this and then a professional writer writes it and then i can't tell the difference which is what i've been trying to figure out in my projects is you know at what point can't i tell the work being done by humans versus the work being done by six months machines yeah and so six months okay early 2024 early 2024 you won't be able to tell you won't be able to tell so you think this is going to go from a five or six out of ten to an eight nine or ten out of ten in terms of content it's between eight and nine yeah wow that's a big jump you know these and i think these last couple of jumps are the hardest so i'm very interested what do you think is going to cause that because people have been saying that maybe chat gpt4 is deprecating and it's giving worse results as it ingests more maybe it's getting more garbage in there or something what do you think is going to drive this you know yeah 20 so there there's there's two ways that llms are getting better right now one is more training data, which I think is tougher because of, you know, everyone's much more aware.

14:21We've talked about it a few times on the pod. The second is the expansion of the parameter space. And what that particularly means is when you give an LLM more parameters, it's like giving a brain more neurons. That's the best analogy. And so as the parameter spaces increase, and we already see in the open source, we have 7 billion parameter open source models you can run on your Mac, right? um we're going to start to see the open source expansion of models with a lot more parameters which means they're going to get smarter and smarter not having to pull in more data yeah so we're going to see that yeah yeah i mean the hallucinating is a thing i saw this week like people are getting somebody was suing because uh an ai was hallucinating on a real person's bio so you ask and this happens with mine um you ask it who's jason galkanis and you know get 60 correct 40 is going to be a complete hallucination about what somebody in my field might have like it might think i went to stanford because people in my circle went to stanford kind of thing yeah but you know what i've already got a dry run for this which is the wikipedia if you're the the biggest problem on wikipedia is bios of living persons blps if you're a living person you know your bio is complete utter rubbish and it's driven by all your haters or people with an axe to grind anybody you fired or you crushed in business they basically spend all day long reverting changes and with your sorry with curse messing with your uh bio on wikipedia and like my bio wikipedia has nothing to do with all the great things i've done in my career it's like little weird fights i got into or obscure you know uh projects that i did yeah none of the like major stuff is on there and i gave up even trying to change it i think this is where the lms are gonna have challenges isn't the core other fact that there's only like really like 100 or 200 people that ultimately all that bubbles up into like anybody can go and edit but the real kind of masters of the universe are just a few hundred people there are secret cobbles of uh editors who you can either pay or are just very principled so there's a you know like any other anonymous social network you're you know like reddit or this or twitter when you can have anonymity in the system you know all kinds of fugacity stuff can come along you can pay people to get your you know edits through and then other folks are incredibly principled and they will lock pages and they will fight to the last dying death to revert stuff right um and anytime you try to appeal or do something like they just kind of admonish you for how dare you try to correct an error on the page of your body they just there's no resolution that's and that's why people who you know anybody who's notable looks at wikipedia and they're like yeah it says yeah they trust it in a different way right yeah yeah then people who don't have a i wish my page got deleted i tried to have it deleted a couple times it's not notable um and that didn't work so what else you got for us okay next one um this one is you know kind of inspired by so making sure my windows right here inspired by uh you know for me there's the guys that take the all-in pod and then turn it into like these tiktoks and so um you know earlier today on our chat thread i asked nick for a little video and all you do is you upload the video it'll transcribe it uh you can make some design choices around fonts and colors and then it'll even give you a description for posting so this is a little short little video so i'm going to play it's only like 15 seconds long all right yep and uh the company we're reviewing here is submagic.co the thing i love most about this is like we have this oppenheimer film comes out all of this energy at the same time of people who are just really stoked do material science to do basic science to figure out uh you know what we're seeing here is a typical tiktok stories type tiktok or uh yeah what do they call them on youtube shorts sure and so it's like a shorts or a tiktok video but it puts the subs on it magically uh and you can pick the colors etc so you know that would be something that would normally take um you know an editor 20 minutes to do properly maybe even 30 minutes so the fact that you can do this quickly is pretty magical and the ability i get pitched every day by people who want to for a hundred dollars a clip 50 a clip 20 bucks an hour 30 bucks an hour 50 bucks an hour want to make clips of stuff and um i think the level of clips they're making which is to say they don't understand context and put a ton of time into them and kind of are of minimal impact the ones that make great impact is where they understand the context and they put supplemental video in and they edit it and they really are thoughtful about constructing a message so again i think this is like i'm going to create a bunch of clutter on the internet to start um and because you just point any clip at it and then if you could auto post it i could just literally make a joe rogan clips or a lex friedman clips or an all-in clips or twist clips channel and just have the automated and just throw garbage out just take every section of the show and who cares if you flood the zone with a thousand or ten thousand clips if one of them clicks they click so what's the end game then jacal like because i think we all want to consume these like i i actually like the all-in talk i i think i follow them they spend two hours and they're like college educated really gifted guys and they do a great job with all in talk where they pick three or four great moments and they really edit it down so you know they might take a 10-minute discussion and turn it into a 90-second discussion with the best moments and they really are thinking it through so that's what this isn't doing so but again here we go the brute force of ai just you know giving you a clip putting subtitles on it and maybe even thinking this is an interesting discussion for some reason um you know give it a prompt act like a producer find me the three most interesting moments in here i don't know how it would do that versus a human saying hey i listened to the pod this argument over trump indictment this argument about this discussion of lk99 and this discussion of you know uh venture capital seed funding are the three really interesting ones i'm going to frame them i'm going to start with chamath and then i'm going to go to jacal i'm going to start with sax and then cut to a you know whatever a clip of trump actually you know in the real world between those two is a lot of work i would say it's like a three out of 10 versus a 10 out of 10 and it's really hard to make viral clips on tiktok and figure into you You know, that's basically like Mr.

21:14B's skill. So, this one, I say there's a big gap, a big, big gap of understanding what the most important parts are. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, again. Well, I mean, I think what you just said is what Nick and I did. So, Nick gave us a little compelling clip. You're talking about Oppenheimer and you're talking about how people should be really inspired right now. And then it's a really nice clip to add, you know, into the repertoire of things that, you know, Twist puts out there, right? in terms of your all your socials and everything else we use a product called veed that does auto captions and it takes us an hour or two depending on the video to do really good clips that are thoughtful but he does save us a lot of time and so i think the ai tools the one the piece it really needs to figure out is what is the most interesting part of the podcast and i don't know how we could do that now i know how youtube can do it youtube knows when somebody rewinds a video and scrubs so youtube could have a big advantage here if youtube said hey these are the ones where the most interesting videos are or you can put comments onto um if you put a time stamp in the youtube comments it will create a link right so if you put 505 colon 10 and we'll go to five minutes and 10 seconds that could be very interesting because if people are calling it out and enough people are calling out a moment that could be used as signal right so that's what veed should do and these other things is look at the comments and see if they correlate in some way with the moments in it i think twitter would be able to do or x will be able to do that too right because you know you guys are posting natively there and uh well i mean on this week's one even elon chimed in on the oh you know how important is lk99 right so you can imagine he did he did yeah yeah yeah um yeah so that was yeah so i mean this that's the kind of signal that you're looking for so then you have two pieces you know uh to train the aion you have the core piece of data and then you have the world's reaction to that data yeah uh implicit or explicit explicit being a comment or people rewinding implicit is sort of the views dropping off stuff dropping off yeah like that kind of behavior so interesting i think this is again where you know augmenting human performance these gains are going to be 30 this year 30 next year and that's double so once again if you are running a company right now you need to get everybody in a room everybody has to learn these new tools everybody has to learn ai or else your company is going to fall behind dramatically.

23:53Listen, I work with super early stage companies at launch, like literally year zero, they haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the series A, people have thousands of dollars in MRR, and they maybe they've only raised a couple 100 ,000 before that series A, and they don't have their insurance set up. And in fact, we recently had a great startup that didn't have D &O. And we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings, they were making massive decisions, there were legal issues. And they didn't have the basic D &O insurance that protects directors and officers.

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24:59That's E M B R O K E R.com slash twist. And use the code twist for 10 % off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Give us another example love a tool all right these are two really good tools these are like this is like the content creation suite you got seo you got clips what's next well what's next this is actually a request from um one of the listeners on twitter and he wanted to see how the new feature which is called custom instructions works oh okay inside of chad gpt so i don't know if you've played with this yet i have not so you have to go enable it in your settings oh my god there's settings now i didn't know there was settings yeah yeah when did they add a settings to uh gbt work because i mean they really put out a yeah a really basic product didn't even have settings right yeah i mean but you know look they're doing it startup style so i give them credit for that and so totally what you can do now is there's two boxes and so the top box here i'm just going to read it says what would you like chat gbt to know about uh you to provide better responses and things that you can tell it is where your base and who do you work for and then it can use all this in the context and then in in another instruction you can give it is how would you like chat gpt respond and here you can say respond formally or you know longer make sure keep your responses short so you know all the things that maybe you get tired of putting in every single prompt right and uh so i'll do something like respond like a pirate right and so if i do that and uh you know we'll just go here and And they give me a short summary about, let's call it, back to the future.

26:47And what this will do is, you'll see here now, it is giving a response written in, I guess, Pyrdese. Because that's what I gave it in the custom instruction. and this is obviously a simplistic example to highlight you know how you can better use this but for folks that are heavily using chat gpt and i know you are jcal i know your team is this is a real lifesaver because you can start to now tune and customize and this is the next iteration of you know where these llms are going is like customize them for how you need them and how you want them to interact with your personal information and also oh my god this is incredible I just, I just nailed it.

27:34This is hysterical. Pull yours up. Okay. So it says like, you know, what you didn't know about you, where are you based? What do you do for work? I didn't put that in, but it says, how would you like chat GPT to respond? And I put in, I like to see data in a table. I'd like to see data in those tables with hyperlinks. Right. Great. And I just ask it because we're doing the all in summit. and i want to i always like to have like the best ice cream purveyors at the event and i said what are some good ice cream stores in los angeles says of course here are some popular stores in los angeles salt and straw yada yada jenny's uh splendid grom scoops etc and what's really interesting about this is um it put the links in yeah i always tell it to do that now if i didn't have that in there would it have done that i don't know uh so i'm going to take these custom instructions out.

28:29And I'm going to ask it again. What are some quality ice cream stores in Los Angeles? And let's see if it does a table or not.

28:47It did not do a table bullet and it did not do links. This is a game changer for sure a game changer. So I have to go back in and make sure i don't lose that because a lot of those settings in there wow and that is this is just insane and so it's just a start yeah it's just and think about this jake how like it should be telling us what to put in there so you right now it has a little tool tip i think you have it on as well and those are generic again my guess is in less than six months those tool tips will be mined and farmed from all your prompts yeah pretty great um awesome this is a very cool tool all right well we got a short show for you today folks sunny anything else we want to mention before we get going here no we're gonna save the rest and we got some other cool ones we got some maybe we gotta i mean uh and then there's so much going on in the news i gotta get a new show going we're having all-star summer all-star summer's been crazy here yes uh we had some real hits woof woof i mean what a roster of murderers row oh i know we had darmesh from hubspot we had ryan from qualtrics in the uh utah jazz uh we had the ceo of mongo db it's been crazy what's making the flywheel kind of go to the next gear so um we did a um we we slowed down to speed up the show is not going anywhere right we've done it for 12 years i'm gonna do it till i die so i said okay make a list the hundred people who've been just incredible guests you know people you want to have on over and over again right so people always ask to have chris socca back on although chris sock is a little upset at me because of twitter you know my friend bought twitter i didn't buy chris um and uh keith for boy everybody loves when keith for boy comes on so you got those you know let's call those like people have been on the show three four five times or more uh and people just love those folks and then there's aspirational folks we really want to have on like i've been trying to have mike ovitz on for since his book came out yeah it's always been like you know problem uh you're just scheduling and then um you know we got other ones like i always want to have charles schultz the ceo of starbucks starbucks yep so now we're making a list of the aspirational ones and then um just like you might do a mail merge uh if you were a salesperson you say hey these are my 100 targets we start thinking about 200 targets at a time for the show and then we start thinking about hey what would be a good time to invite them on and then we do a custom uh email to them so you showed that crm system the other week that would be writing like yep you know the emails we don't like to do that but if you make a list and you say hey for the next two years let's work on these 200 guests and let's really write them thoughtful emails where we talk about what we want to talk about why we want to have them on the show the benefit of coming on the show etc and then we send them links to people that we know they might know who've been on the show so yeah and we just can you know check box check box check box you know glenn from redfin you know and then we're trying to get the ceo zillow for two years we just we got to stick with it and so if you have a more systematic approach to the targets that's what's driving it awesome yeah that's it's and it's working you know as opposed to hey what should we do this week you know it's like let's really be i call it like the term paper kind of approach as opposed to like the pop quiz approach we can always pop quiz people like we had the guys from varda on you know space uh station they did the lk99 and then we were going to have the ceo varda on just to talk about varda but then i was like get him on now you know and then we'll still We'll do his Varda episode.

32:36Yeah. And we'll just keep going from there. So that's what's really worked is like, you know, you can do the pop quiz. Hey, this is breaking news. Let's try to get them. And then we can do the, what I call the term papers or the thesis. Like, let's try to get people who, you know, have been trying for 10 years to get on the program, five years to get on the program. And that's a better combination. You know, a lot of people did like when I did the news with Molly on a regular basis, people got into like news every day but it kind of alienated the core this week in startups audience which is founders who are like i don't really care about the daily news or low content or what elon's doing at twitter x and you know there's all these kind of like battles and tech policy and you know if you want to you have to really think about you know what is the purpose of the show and who's the audience of the show the audience is startup founders and vcs and they keep telling me although they love when i talk about news maybe not five days a week maybe one day a week of news four days a week i'm trying to get down to four days be honest because it's taking all my life four days a week three days uh one day news three days other you know founders you know and then of the founders all stars legends and then up and comers yeah that's that's the combination so that's what i'm really trying to balance the the howard stern show format dude you've got it down outside the skits right but you've got it down we don't have we don't we don't do bits or skits i wanted to do bits and skits um i did you used to do guess the fake startup um i wanted to get a person to come on um who can do impersonations and i wanted to have like fake zuck on the show uh and we did actually do it we had a puppeteer lauren feldman who would come on in the early episodes and you know we just tried to do it and try to see if we could have chemistry of like me talking to a puppet you know or ai's up and so if they could if somebody would make like a real-time ai's up where i could be doing the news roundtable and you could have a comedian who could say funny stuff is ai's up that would be pretty hilarious i think and you know you know just thinking creatively like being able to talk to steve jobs like some people made videos of me talking to steve jobs yeah yeah without being morbid or you know and i certainly would never want to offend somebody's family or something like that but me being able to talk to people who are no longer with us be quite compelling in some ways you know um and so i i tried to do the bits uh the problem is bits take time and production and it's a different type of creative that you need for that the one that we have been doing i don't know if you saw we did um the blackberry movie and lessons from the blackberry movie with lon i didn't see that one oh yeah business Business breakdowns is a new one.

35:24One of our highest ranked episodes of the past two months. Oh, wow. So, we're going to do business breakdowns once a month. It's kind of like Acquired FM does it, or there's like We Study Billionaires. There's a couple of people who have this format of like, we're going to just take something you know, Nintendo, and we're going to talk about it for two hours. Yeah. So, I don't want to crib that format too much. I would call it a mix between Acquired, what they do, and the rewatchables by the reader. Yes. It's a blendable. Rewatchables. Yeah. so if you want to get in on that at some point with lawn yeah um what are we doing next nick what's on the i think we should do the founder next let's do the founder next absolutely that's my favorite mcdonald's one right yeah all right totally my favorite also because mark knoffler did the song boom like that after reading the mcdonald's ray crox biography so mark knoffler from dire straight is my favorite wrote the song boom like that uh because he had read ray crox biography biography a director heard the song boom like that and then got inspired to read the biography and then wanted to make the founder incredible and then in the film they have the song the song yeah can i also just say what i think when our show is the best when it's the most helpful when it's the most impactful when it's the most different right because that's really what we want to be we want to be different because so much of this content is the same nowadays i think our show is the best and son you exemplify this in many ways when the conversation feels like it's jason and a founder or an investor or a peer at a bar at like 7 30 p.m on a friday night in palo alfa and they're talking about right fly on the wall exactly that is when i think the magic is made on this podcast which happened with dharmash and hubspot which happened from mamba db and oh he went whoo spelled by dev but pronounced dave he went hard he went hard on remote work and a lot of other things i you and then ryan smith was great yeah um tim urban was great awesome mike knopp from zapio was great i like that new kid ben from soul reader you see that soul reader yet have you seen soul reader yet it's basically glasses you wear and it puts a kindle in your glasses so single use device for basically not vr but you put glasses on you sit in bed at night and you read and you just press the thing and next slide next slide and it's immersive reading yeah yeah and i'm like that's either gonna be a total flop or there's gonna be a group of people become addicted to it now i'm like i'm addicted to audiobooks like i think this is going to be addicting for people to just be able to zone out and read without having to hold anything and just hit the next button it's pretty neat very cool we'll check it out all right next up three great startups from founder university if you'd like to come to founder university founder.university.

38:12It's a 12 week program. We do it four times a year 1500 people apply 250 people get in 12 week course, we invest every time out of the 250 people who come we probably invest in 20 or 30 of them and we give them 25k each for 2.5 % of their company as they're like rich uncle rich aunt, first money in just to give you 25k to get incorporated. If you don't need it, that's fine. We can do a direct investment. If you're raising around or you can come to our launch accelerator if you get your product to you know a couple of customers and that's 100k check for six percent founder dot university we're looking for a space sunny so we're going to have an office a garage well we're going to have founding university taking place live in san mateo soon so that's going to be a game changer i'm going back to the office like you it's way to do it been doing it for a year and a half all right i mean i see mbc just asked me to come on today to talk about my tweet when i was like listen you got to get back to an office here it's like people are getting weird all right uh enjoy and we'll see you next time next sonny yep next week let me tell you about house of macadamias this brand's got a special place in my heart the founders brandon and carmen they are avid listeners to this podcast this week in startups and they actually started their company after listening to this pod and reading my book angel it's incredible it warms my heart and in fact their first angel investment was a huge winner and they use the returns from that investment to start a macadamia business.

39:37So here are some amazing facts about my favorite nut macadamias. They have one of the best fat profiles of any nut, like an avocado on steroids. And macadamias have also been linked to fat loss and longevity. Why? Because they are the only nut rich in rare omega-7 fatty acids, which can support natural collagen production and glucose metabolism and reduced inflammation. House of Macadamia products have no sugar added and no artificial ingredients. So many great ones. I like the dark chocolate myself. They have the macadamia bars. House of Macadamia never runs discounts, but they always give a special offer just for our Twists listeners.

40:16Get a free box of Namibian sea-salted macadamia nuts at houseofmacadamias.com slash twist. Plus, you'll get 20 % off your order with code TWIST20. That's a$35 value plus 20 % off with the code TWIST20. all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups we have a fun time for you today because our program founder university has produced a number of interesting startups over the last cohort and uh i feel like investing some money in these startups i like giving them 25k checks as their first like rich aunt or rich uncle might do uh the friends and family around kelly schricker is with me again she runs the founder university program for us here at launch which is the name of our investment firm kelly tell everybody who maybe hasn't heard what this pre-accelerator founder university is all about and how it works mechanically absolutely so founder university is a 12-week program we run it primarily online although we do an in-person kickoff in san Francisco.

41:23But most attendees will participate entirely remote. And from there, we basically help founders go from zero to one. So sometimes companies already have an MVP, sometimes they're just getting started with an idea, they build it during the program, hopefully they'll launch get early customers, and then some will also go on to raise some money. Yeah, fantastic. And so the reason we started this was because we wanted to meet founders earlier in their journey, get to know them watch their progress so that eventually we could invest in them if they're going to build a company that is venture scale not all companies are and that's okay venture scale means you can get to 100 million in revenue something in that range so venture capitalists would be interested in investing we do four cohorts a year we try to have 250 people in each cohort sometimes we blow past that sometimes we have a little bit less we don't try to force it over a thousand people maybe 1500 people apply to each cohort we accept 250 at the max although we have broken that sometimes and then we try to invest in 10 20 30 40 of those companies what do we look for in companies at this early stage half the companies coming into the program aren't even incorporated yet so what we're looking for is teams of two or three with a developer on the team uh you know basically builders if you have builders on your team you don't only need a lot of money to get the product up and running you can basically use sweat equity so two or three founders is ideal one or two of them being developers two out of the three or three out of the three being actual builders a designer product manager uh developer being the top titles or roles that you would typically see in an early stage company so uh we're starting our sixth cohort on august 11th and we'll have like i said 250 or so builders in that group you can apply at founder.university slash apply there's still time to apply if you hear this next week or if you hear this the week of we hear this before august 11th there's still time to apply but we do it quarterly so not cohort six there'll be cohort seven uh and we invest in like i said i don't know 10 20 of the graduates and sometimes we do it on the way in sometimes we do it in the middle of the program sometimes we do it at the end how many companies have we invested in so far so far cohorts in the last two cohorts we're probably at about 22 all in with all five previous cohorts we've done 41 investments and 11 additional companies have gone on to our accelerator amazing okay so here's what we're going to do today uh we're going to hear some pitches from the last cohort and uh we'll give one of them 25k so we'll see three pitches they'll pitch for two minutes three minutes what's what are they planning on doing two minute pitches two minute pitches perfect so and then i'll ask them some questions we have a little bit of back and forth and then i'll pick one for the 25 okay all right first up we're gonna have querio rami can you please come on and show us your screen absolutely hello everybody hey rami how's it going it's going well all right uh and remember most people are listening so to the extent you can describe what's going on the screen all the better.

44:30Three, two, go. All right. So my name is Rami. I'm the co-founder of Quirio. Self-service data analytics is a really broken space. There's a ton of really smart people who still can't answer their own questions and need to rely on somebody else in their company. And that's why we built Quirio. Quirio is a personal data analyst for every employee. And that doesn't mean analyzing data. That also means combining all your different data sources into one source of truth and giving you a way to analyze it powered by AI all in an extremely secure way. Here's some ways that it looks like you have a very intuitive platform on the left.

44:59You can make great dashboards, as you can see in the middle. And we also have a lot of over 300 integrations, and you can see some examples on the right. For the team, you have myself. I have five years of experience at Amazon, where I worked on a lot of machine learning and AI, both at Amazon Robotics and Alexa. My COO, Javier, who was a phenomenal operator with also a strong startup background, and our tenured CTO, Vijay, who spent the last 17 years trying to tackle the low-code data problem. We already have a live MVP. We're actually already making revenue. So even though we started about 10 weeks ago, getting close to three months, we released the MVP in four weeks, started getting revenue two weeks ago, and already have another 12 ,000 in annual recurring revenue and LOIs that we have not captured yet.

45:38Our initial target market is going to be small businesses with less than prime budget employees that don't afford a data analyst just yet, because they're the ones who are still feeling this pain point the most and don't have someone to rely on internally. We're going to get to 100 million ARR in eight years, and we're going to do that by charging at the per seat level, because it's an individual contributor problem. And we need about 9.2 thousand companies at 30 seats each to hit that number. If I go to market, obviously, we're going to have our target market. And for a more direct ICP, it's going to be marketers.

46:06We're also going to have a very strong outbound sales approach. We're already trying to collate a ton of marketing managers and just purchasing power people so we can start that outbound and really start getting those customers inside for research and for higher revenue. For our customers, we're the only ones in the industry right now that are doing everything from front to back vertical integration to both actually give you that data and one source of truth and let you analyze it. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the hitch. All right. So, fantastic. Data analysis is something that having a data scientist that's only available to companies typically with hundreds of employees, tens of millions in revenue.

46:41for smaller mid-sized companies it's an expense that they probably can't take on but with ai it's getting easier and a lot of people have pools lakes of data whether it's google analytics or their stripe data just databases generally google sheets there's a lot more data available for you to plug into so 10 or 20 years ago people weren't storing their data 10 years ago you know obviously three years ago chat gpt and and some of these data analysis tools weren't even available so your timing is great uh cloud computing zapier allows you to connect things together i'm assuming you're using zapier uh to do all that but they do oh we're not using zapier what did you how did you get all that all those 300 in there is there some third-party tool that get you all those integrations there was a third-party tool called uh 5chan so they help us pipeline and we're using an ai to actually do the transforming and joining uh we were trying to do them kind of initially by hand but especially for our go-to-market speed and to really get all the use cases immediately we're using a third party for now yeah which is perfect i mean i'd like to hear that because that's not your core business getting the data in so that's great and then you look at the team you know a couple of years at amazon for uh you uh as a product engineer and uh and your uh co-founders front-end dev and a senior software engineer love that and a senior product manager So fantastic that you've got three builders on your team.

48:09Explain to the audience who's listening what that means in terms of your product velocity. I think it means a few things. I mean, again, like four weeks, we got our MVP out. And I think that means that we really understand the problem because we felt it firsthand in our previous roles. And we just also have everything in-house to make it built really quickly in a very scalable way. And I think one thing that we've had a lot of early customers talk about too is just security. and because of our cto who has like a lot of data platform and like experience you know we're going to have sock one sock two compliance right out of the gates and we're going to be able to actually provide that assurance of security and privacy to companies because we are taking their you know we're working with their most intimate uh information right it's all their personal data it's all their company data they want to make sure that it's somewhere safe so yeah fantastic so the market is a great market you got a great team you got product velocity you've got a tested business model um consumer subscription i'm sorry uh business subscriptions sas products tend to do great and you got some early traction so you check off all the major boxes that a seed investor like myself would like to see in a firm like ours would like to see so congratulations on that uh next up is before sunset uh batu am i pronouncing your name correctly batu yes yes great Great.

49:25Awesome. Two minutes on the clock. Three, two, go. Hi, I'm Botswan, co-founder of Before Sunset AI, where we help people plan and execute their day with ease. Meet Paula, our ICP. Paula works for a hybrid team working on multiple tasks and projects at once. Think of an analyst in an investment firm or a software developer, for instance. In an ordinary day, she finds herself jumping from task to task, app to app, and still doesn't feel like she has accomplished much or has visibility to team and project status. Introducing Before Sunset AI. A platform where you can maintain to-dos, have AI planned a day, view your calendars, see how your team is and what they're working on.

50:06It can also process your data in the analytics page to help you improve how you work. So, we've been busy in the last couple of weeks. We launched our product on Product Hunt and finished number one product of the day, week and month. Onboarded over 10 ,000 users and kept people coming to our site to convert following the launch hype. Our continuous revenue streams include individual subscriptions and enterprise plan, charging monthly or annually. The competitive landscape has various players, but we distinguish ourselves with three main capabilities. AI, personal analytics, and team features that are already built into the app.

50:42Like I said, we launched a little over a month ago, and since then we've been putting in the effort to reach out to our ICPs. These efforts include smart SEO tactics to keep growing organically, small influencer campaigns, and some pilot ads. The calculated market size is$5.8 billion, taking into account 28 million potential users, an average$15 monthly fee. To get to 10 million ARR, we need to maintain about 50 ,000 paying users, which we aim to get by 2026. So we're three co-founders, and each of us have our own unique story about how we found the passion to create Before Sunset AI. Again, I'm Butsohan, co-founder of Before Sunset AI, helping people plan and execute their day with ease.

51:23Thank you for your time. okay fantastic so uh using ai pulling in all of my to-do lists pulling in my calendar and then telling me hey this is what you should do next and maybe doing that with my entire organization that is the goal here correct yes and so is it a do you see it as a scheduling to-do list or project management like asana to-do list like you can do a notion or coda or you know your native to-do list in your preferred operating system google and apple have that uh and then scheduling obviously some people's schedules equal their to-do list so where do you see this sitting is it competing against asana and those other tools is it something new no it is it is a different approach for sure our main purpose is to give tool a tool for the users to be better, to be able to better plan their day individually, and then kind of scale that to the team in the long run to show them what they're working on, what projects they're working on based on the tags that they set, and how much time they have on their day before they log off and stuff like that.

52:32So do you see this being something where you're doing time tracking, like, you know, law firms or consulting firms are saying, hey, we're going to do time tracking. from 9am to 950, I'm going to be working on this billable project for this customer, or just, you know, put my time with Kelly, this is my time for Founder Universe is my time for some other project we're working on the podcast, etc. Or do you see it as monitoring? Because now there's like screen time on your phone, where it monitors and then gives you feedback, a little bit scary, there's obviously screen monitoring, stuff like that people use for remote work, but there's also monitoring systems that are more for optimization hey you spent you know two hours on reddit oh my god you're wasting time unless of course you're doing marketing on reddit in which case that that's like a positive thing right and so people are trying to figure out so i'm interested in the modality of how people record their data or if you're going to be recording it with a system tray item or they're going to explicitly fill it in how do you see that data being acquired into the product collected the the comparison especially the comparison between that monitoring versus like your individual push to record the data on what you're uh trying to do and what you want to do we're definitely on the latter side because um we are trying to provide users a more mindful productivity tool rather than them being always kind of looking over their virtual shoulder to see who's keeping track of what they're doing.

54:11Time tracking is definitely a key part of what we're trying to do. It's a key feature that we've added in. So the integration into the calendar can be done more effectively. And the insights that we provide them in the analytics page, once they record it, can easily be translated saying, you thought you would spend like 30 hours on a specific project this week, but you ended up spending 40. If you're setting yourself to be paid for 30 hours on that project, you just undersold yourself. Just giving the tools to the user to make sure that they're earning their worth, they're not burning out, and being their best self and best worker.

54:54Yeah, so I think there's a lot here. I love the fact that you've got this great team and with remote workers and people wanting to optimize and the mistrust between that's kind of brewing and the standoff, go back to the office, work from home, tracking time, who's screwing around, who's overworking, who's working two jobs at the same time. I mean, there's so much chaos in the space that I think any tool that can make management and individual contributors feel like they're more in sync. We share our calendars at our investment firm. People do a start of day, end of day, and they do a stand-up.

55:37So the total ask, I think, is five minutes at the beginning and the end of the day to sort of plan your day and recap your day. Maybe round it up to 20 minutes if people put a lot of time into it, 10 and 10. and then do a stand-up every day. It's a half hour with your team, 20 minutes with your team. Just, hey, here's what we're going to try to accomplish as a company in the next 24 hours, next week, next month, et cetera. So I think this is a key, key opportunity for you. And then you just have to pick your, who's the ideal customer here? Is it small teams? Is it big teams? Small teams tend to embrace this stuff.

56:11High performers tend to embrace this stuff. And then people who have to track their time, they're also looking for solutions so people who are doing billable stuff so i think you got like two or three different ways to go after these users um who do you think you're going to go after the time people who track time for billing or people who are just super optimizers quantified self people productivity get done gsd people who do you see your ideal customer being so definitely the GSD population is a little bit more appealing with respect to the fact that people that bill hourly, like lawyers and such, they do have very specific tools that are already available to them.

56:53Before Sunset is a tool that they can use as well, because those tools don't have AI. So if they want to lift some weight off their shoulders, they're more than welcome to, and it would be a great addition to their tool stack. But in reality, these productivity hackers, the GSD folks that want to make sure that they optimize what they're doing and how they're doing it would be our prime candidate. And you want to go solo, single player to start for the first year or two, and then maybe add team features in year two or three? Is that the goal? The launch of the individual aspect was June 15th of this year.

57:26And all the users that we've accumulated at 10 ,000 plus have been on that field. Now we're planning on launching the team side of it this fall. And we're going to be, you know, Rolling out the beta version, onboarding people, some small teams to see how they like it, continuously collect feedback, and make sure that we can scale it to larger teams or a great number of teams. Great. And so, for those of you who are watching the show or listening right now, the interaction you're seeing here, what I'm trying to do as an angel and seed investor, early stage investor, is to listen deeply to how the founder thinks about their business.