Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186

24:38For$2 million, I can buy the machine and print the blade in 24 hours. There you go. And by the way, the material for the blade is like a few hundred dollars. It's like basically zero. So if you can get hardware built quickly and you use processes like 3D printing, so you can change the design in software and in data, and you have ability to up-iterate designs through automated code, then you can iterate really fast. And if you can do that, then you can actually build new engines rapidly. You can build new airplanes rapidly. Like it took us a long time to do XP1 because we didn't know this yet and we didn't have any of the tools.

25:16I look backwards at XP1. We could have done it in half the time or less, probably with half the cost or less. By the way, it was already 10 times cheaper than anybody else had ever done a supersonic jet. I'd love to hear that. But essentially, hindsight's always 20-20, but you're taking those learnings and applying them forward. So before we talk about capital needs, what's the loose timeline for when Oversure, your supersonic jet, will land at one of your airline customers? Is that 2027, 2028? I'm trying to get my personal calendar in shape here. 29 is the target. Could be 30. 29. Okay, 30. 29 to 30 ready for passengers.

25:53We'll start building the first one next year. You'll see it roll off the line in 27. Our goal is to fly it in 28 and be ready for passengers in 29. And it's probably a little bit sporty on the timeline. I like aggressive timelines. So it's possible that it'll slip, but I don't think it'll slip by more than like a year or two. Okay. but all of that work, all of that work ahead of you still, the fact that you're doing manufacturing in-house, you're doing it vertically, you're building your own engines, is not cheap. And so I have been talking to so many founders in the last, especially 18 months who are building AI companies, which can be very expensive to build or doing infra, but mostly they're using third-party models.

26:34And it's just a lot of AI software, man. And everyone's just throwing money at it, which is cool. Why not? You know, huzzah. But you guys are doing something that takes so much longer to reach revenue and is so much more difficult. How do you set the company up in such a way that you can still attract capital when everyone's eyes are so squarely focused on tokens and LLMs right now? There's a few different things that kind of come to mind here. First off, the notion that hardware companies are more capital intensive is not supported by the data. its mythology. So if you go look at how much venture capital was consumed by the famous asset light businesses like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, I think Airbnb and Uber consumed more than$10 billion of venture.

27:19And then if you look at the supposedly capital-intensive businesses like SpaceX, Tesla, Andro, they consumed much less venture. So the notion that this consumes more capital is just not true. The thing that is different is how much do you spend before you get your first revenue dollar? Yeah. And so what we've learned on the internet is it's hard to tell from a product pitch whether the product is going to have product market fit. So just go build a prototype, ship it, and find out whether people want what you built. Right. Guess what? I can't build a supersonic airliner in order to find out if anybody wants one.

27:55So hardware companies, they need two things. One is they need a way of demonstrating product market fit short of shipping the product. And so pre-orders, pre-orders are that playbook. By the way, this has been done before. It's called Kickstarter. Yes. And effectively, we did Kickstarter for supersonic aviation. We have ordered with deposits from United and American. You know, vouched not just that supersonic flight sounds cool, but if we could only deliver them the product that we've just discussed, they would want it in quantity. We have five and a half years of demand from United American and Japan Airlines in the order book.

28:30The last thing I saw from you guys was that you had 130 overture orders and pre-orders. Is that number going to, are you going to try to extend that number before 2029? Or are you happy with what you have now? We actually stopped selling the airplane. We have so much demand. It's like not worth selling. I mean, like great Lufthansa, British Airways, they ordered overture in addition to United American and Japan Airlines. It doesn't make a difference. Because it's so far out in the future. Because your manufacturing capacity is already pre-sold through 2034, it sounds like. No, no, every airline is going to need this, right?

29:02Like when you can get across the pond in three and a half hours from United, no one's going to fly BA anymore, right? So guess what? BA is going to have to go order this. And so that's inevitable. 100 % of my focus is on delivering this, not on like, you know, checking more boxes in the order book. It doesn't matter. If we deliver this, every airline's buying it, full stop. so the size of the order book beyond five and a half years really doesn't matter like if it was only the fact that we have two North American airlines and one Asian airline like I think that seals the deal yeah but to your point to show investors that what you're building does have product market fit without being able to ship some prototype software program you have you know firm orders and everyone wants it so that probably gives confidence that's right that gives confidence so that's thing one if you want to go ship a product that's capital intensive to build and takes a while, you have to demonstrate that people want very specifically exactly what you're building.

29:57Right. And it can't be hand-wavy conceptual. It has to be at the level of specs, right? Because a supersonic airliner, there are infinite numbers of potential supersonic airplanes. They could be a private jet. They could be an airliner. They could be a small airliner or a big airliner. They can have more range or less range, more seats or less seats, more fuel economy, less fuel economy. There are a zillion choices that go into what the product is exactly. And you have to demonstrate that the exact choices that you're making are the ones that customers really want. And so that's where United stands behind us.

30:28They want the 4 ,000 nautical mile, 62 seat supersonic airliner designed with business class economics and the cabin layout that we've put in this airplane, right? That's product market fit. It's not woohoo, supersonic, right?

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31:22But after using DevStats, they were able to revise their allocations and workflow and start actually moving the company forward with impactful updates. So it's time to start focusing your team on the work that actually matters. Check out DevStats today, and we're going to give you 20 % off, plus access to their dedicated Slack channel. Just go to devstats.com slash twist for your 20 % discount. That's D-E-V-S-T-A-T-S dot com slash twist. Like Concord, Concord is the down the middle example and you can build a supersonic airplane with no product market fit. Let's not do that again. Amen to that.

31:59So because you've shown product market fit, and I would say really did risk the technology quite a lot through your test flights, through breaking the sound barrier, through the boom endless work that you've done. Will you have access to the capital you need to get us all the way through to when United gets delivered? Yeah, so there's a second thing that's really helpful, which is finding your Starlink. What is that? So the way Elon financed development of the Falcon 9, then the reusable Falcon 9, was through building an ISP in space. I think a lot of people did not know how to think about the launch business.

32:35a lot of investors didn't but but they understood an internet business and uh and it was starlink uh that made the rest of it financeable and and of course starlink you could spin out uh it could ipo on its own and be a multi-hundred billion dollar company on its own independent of the launch business so it's really useful to have a starlink so what is your starlink well i can't tell you yet but i can tell you we found it you found it we found it we found our starlink so So there is... When are you going to tell me what it is? How long do I have to wait, Blake? There is a shipping product that ships before the supersonic airliner that we have over a billion dollars in orders for.

33:15I'm going to have to have you back on the show, aren't I? Yeah. So I can't tell you what it is, but it's based on the same technology, but it's much faster to scale in revenue. And I spent a decade looking for that and saying no to a lot of things that are shiny objects. And then we found it earlier this year. And it's really exciting. And it is the Starlink of Supersonic Flight. Is it a software product or a hardware product? It is a hardware product for which the world is desperate for. Huh. Okay. Well, I'm going to chew on that. When you do announce it, Blake, will you come back on the show and tell us about it?

33:53Absolutely. Or you can come to the reveal. It'll be fun. Where will the reveal take place? TBD? Probably it'll be at our factory in Denver. That's a short fledged for me. So I will come out if my children will grant me the time to do so. If only every flight were as short as the flight from SF to Denver. It's amazing how much more I could do if I wasn't constantly dealing with slow, annoying planes that are apparently from 2004. Blake, I'm supposed to be impartial and a journalist, but I'm stoked for Boom, man. I'm a big believer in the company. And so continue success in the meantime. And apparently I'll talk to you sometime between next week and a year from now.

34:26We'll have to find out. Sounds good. Alex, appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Bye. Bye.

34:38All right. Next up on our pitch competition is Mircha from Confy. Am I pronouncing the name correctly? C-O-N-F-Y, Confy? I usually say Confy, but whatever you prefer. Confy. Okay. Confy. Got it. This is the problem when we misspell names, but you know, you got the nice confy.tech domain name. We love a dot tech. And I can see here that you're optimizing data for better business at events. And I'm really excited to hear your pitch. I'll give you the three, two, one. Are you ready? I am ready. Three, two, go. Hi, Mircea from Confi here and Confi is AI for events. You can think of us kind of like an intelligent data layer for the trillion dollar business events market.

35:21So meet John and Hannah. John is attending an industry event where he needs to meet sales prospects to fulfill his quota and Hannah organizes that event aiming to deliver ROI and keep her attendees happy. But all John gets on his event app is a static guest list. Thousands of names, no way to search for the right people. He doesn't know who he should meet or why and Hannah can't easily capture attendee goals or prove ROI to exhibitors because events are fundamentally data rich but usually insights poor. Enter Confi. Our web app helps guests articulate goals before the event. We then enrich the guest list with public and proprietary signals, including our own dataset of tens of thousands of attendees already on Confi today.

36:01John runs AI searches like Find Me Fintech Investors or Find MCP Engineers, and he finds relevant prospects. He connects with them instantly. And at the same time, HANA boosts engagement and sponsor ROI, justifying higher ticket and sponsorship prices. Our go-to-market is a real game changer. We use a permissionless approach that engages attendees directly without requiring organizer buy-in and this has fueled a consistent 227 month-over-month growth and a 24 cold email conversion rate in the past four months alone we've added 36 000 new attendees on confit we are live on luma where we plan to charge attendees a 20 subscription for unlimited access across all events but the much larger opportunity here is conferences because there are over 200 million conference tickets sold worldwide annually and a$30 per attendee.

36:51That's a$6 billion market. More importantly, exhibitors and sponsors spend six to seven figures per conference and Confi's proprietary intent data will enable us to charge pricing of above$10 ,000 per exhibitor per event, which in itself is a$10 billion opportunity. We are Techstars-backed founders with deep domain authority. We've delivered paid event software to 100 plus companies. I drive growth and my co-founder is a full stack and DevOps engineer building our platform end-to-end. We are now working to unlock self-scraping, which is our next viral loop. This will let us automatically ingest data and service events that we can't yet access with our model projecting$10 million in ARR within 18 months of realization.

37:29That's Confi, and you should add it to your next event. All right. Great pitch. I didn't like the tagline at the beginning. I'm going to talk to you about that. So let's go back to the first slide because it's always great to go through these. But I do love the problem you've stated. Everybody now has apps for their event, right? That's like now become kind of a standard. The All In Summit has an app. I went to the Code 2 conference, there was an app. And in these apps, you get a directory. But the directory is, you know, the two complaints I have with this app software. And there's one big app company.

38:10I forgot the name of it. What's the big 800 pound gorilla that does these event apps now? The oldest one that is really well known is Cvent, but that's not the only one by far. Yeah. What's the next most prominent one? Funnily enough, based on company size, I would say Bizabo is really big, but more recently I see more people using Brella and other things like that. Swapcard is another one out of Europe. Yeah. So these platforms tend to be expensive and they're not great. And the problem is you get that app and you're like, okay, there's now a list alphabetical of all these people. Like, how am I supposed to use this?

38:46Are people even on the app? It's just a disaster. And so it is a real problem and it would be really nice if there was an algorithm inside of these that could help you sort through them. So what you're saying is as an attendee or as a sponsor, we're going to give you some tools, some weapons. We're an arms dealer. We're going to give you some weapons so that you can do this independent of the platform. So whether you get a CSV file from the planners that has all the attendees or you have to scrape it by going to the website, we're going to help you figure this out. Get them into your CRM or your AI-based CRM, and we're going to do AI matchmaking.

39:26So you're saying, hey, we're not going to rip out the existing software, not going to try to displace them. We're just going to make a tool that people are willing to pay for, whether you're an attendee or a sponsor, that helps you get maximum value and do AI on those specific datasets. Correct? Do I understand the product? You understand it perfectly. You're missing a few steps and there are things that we can do better, but that's the basic problem. I got it. Yeah. So I think showing the apps of these other ones and just slowing down there to explain the problem. This is a salesperson. They go to this event, right?

40:01And they see this, right? So this slide is great. So they now have, and this could be like, you could scroll through this and show the app and how meaningless it is with a video. So videos are more convincing than pictures. Pictures are more convincing than text. So each time you replace one of those objects with the next most convincing object, your pitch is gonna be received even better. So here, John logs into the app. He works and he's looking for attorneys who are at this event who work in specifically litigation. This event has 10 ,000 attorneys. He needs to find the litigators. Boom. And here we go.

40:37So here you have this video. And now this is your app here. This is us. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think explaining the go-to market works two different ways. One, you can use existing data sets that you scrape, ingest, et cetera. or we're building APIs into those. Are any of these people letting you build an API into them or are they just see you as competitive? You mean the apps providers? Yeah, like Cvent, whatever. We typically don't even work with the app providers at this point. We would love to in the future and would love to build integrations. But at the moment, we're just serving the attendees directly.

41:17Yeah, the matchmaking piece of this AI matchmaking for events in and of itself is really interesting. So I wonder if going after, your go-to market is to find the attendees and get them to use this or go to the event providers and get them to do it? What's the go-to market? Attendees. And that's where we're really smart. I have to be a little careful about what I divulge in a public setting, but we have to be, this is part of our special sauce, but we are really smart about this stuff. And what we can do is beyond actually just grabbing the list of people and matching it with the right people, we are also interviewing and encouraging all the other attendees as well to share their goals.

41:59You see, if you think about it from an incentive perspective, when you get a request to fulfill a survey or something, there's nothing, or to fill out the survey, there's nothing incenting you to actually do it. But in this case, if you tell me what they're looking for, I will find people for you. And that helps us actually gather a lot of proprietary data, which can be resold to the organizers, to sponsors, to other attendees like this. And so we're not just aggregating existing data, we're generating our own. And that's one of the big things that other players in this space have not figured out, how to actually get people to respond.

42:31And when we decide to cover an event, we don't just find information about the people and the customers that we're working with. We find information and we generate new information about everyone, or at least the people that want to use us. Yeah, so that's great. This concept of lead enrichment, it exists. We have a company, Lead IQ, we're investors in, and there's many companies that do similar things where you give an email address, a URL, a domain name, or just a first and last name in a city. And it will go and try find a Twitter, an Instagram, a LinkedIn, a blog, an x.com account, whatever it is.

43:06And Lead Enrichment is also very powerful. I think you're off to the races. I think you'll know you'll have made it when the event people start to get upset about your existence, or you actually are a competitor to some of these other services. And I think there's an opportunity to just make a matchmaking platform and have an API. I wonder if, are you building all this technology with an API in mind or no? In the future, yes, absolutely. And we already have a list of all the events that are covered. Some of them are accessible publicly, others are not. And you can go right now on our website. And I'm not sure if you can still see my screen, if this is okay for me to share, but it's literally, you're able to go on our website right now and choose from a few hundred events that we've powered in the past.

43:56And the ones with a green rectangle around them are the free ones and the other ones are paid. And you can go at any one of these events and put in your goals and the types of people that they're trying to meet. And you can find people specifically at that event that you are in right now. And of course, eventually we're building tools that will enable you to look for things universally, but there are some data sharing concerns there that need to be addressed carefully in the future. So for the moment, it's very much event by event based. But imagine in the future, if you know what everybody's trying to accomplish, why not use this as a tool to find more attendees for your event?

44:30Why not use this as a tool to create your own events, if you would like? The potential of this data to be reutilized and to be monetized in different ways, I think, is almost infinite. Yeah, I think you have a lot of great ideas, a lot of data, and then building this into an elegant, seamless product is the last piece of the puzzle here. I think you're on the way, and it seems like you're getting some early signs of product market fit. So I think you're going to be successful here. I love the idea of there being an API for this or a white-labeled service. For example, at the All-In Summit, we had 3 ,500 people there.

45:05I'm not sure what event software they used or if it even has this type of features. but we run bird of a feather dinners and that kind of stuff. It would be great to have a white label service where we can just pay a thousand dollars a month or 10 ,000 a year, whatever it is, 5 ,000 a year to put everybody in and then have them just do that matching or some AI matching service. It's really clever what you're building and you got great potential. So why are we not doing it? Let's do it. Let's get the online summit on board. It was in LA. I live, I live like close to where the last one happened.

45:38I think you also have to just, my last thing is your design is mid, like maybe a five out of 10, a six out of 10 in terms of like UX, UI, the pitch deck itself. One thing is people do judge books by their cover design matters. So I would think about investing a little bit in getting the design from what I would say is a five out of 10 to maybe a seven. And then, you know, struggle again for a couple of months, try to get it to an eight and a half. And then a year later, maybe you can get it to a nine and a half. If you look at the journey that Uber went on or, you know, Facebook or et cetera, like a lot of them were janky apps at first, or they were also mid five or sixes out of 10 and they just invested over time and they built that muscle.

46:22You've obviously got the data muscle in this organization. I'd love to see you add the designing UX muscle to it next. Great job. And I wish you continued success with it. Thanks again to - Thank you so much. Confi and Mircha. It's C-O-N-F-Y. And what's your domain name? So we can give you a shout out. Dot Tech. Another great crossover there. Dot Tech domains. I love those. All right. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.

46:53All right. Next on our pitch competition is Bijan from The Drive AI. How are you doing, Bijan? Good. How are you? I'm great. and I'm really excited to see your pitch built in Gamma.app. Let's start. I'll give you the big countdown. Are you ready? Yep. Three, two, go. Hi, I'm Vigyan, founder of The Drive AI, the world's first authentic workspace. Meet Ken. He works as a VP of venture and community at Edmonton Unlimited. And his reality is his files are spread across different shared Google drives and tools. and spends hours searching, organizing, and sharing files. Each event that his team runs generates hundreds of documents.

47:43For his new event, he's working with 10 companies. And here is what it looks like. Ken opens up Google Drive, clicks new folder 10 times, writes the name of the company, adds people, fixes permission, and uploads same templates into each of these 10 folders manually. It's tedious, repetitive, and by the time he's done, an hour is already gone and the real work has not even started. Now imagine, what if Ken could simply say, create folders for all of these 10 companies that I'm working with, invite their team members, and upload the templates, and it just does that within few seconds. Oh, Ken has missed the files.

48:26else, why don't you ask the Drive AI to just organize it by its content, and it just automatically organizes it neatly within the nested folder structure. Too bored to type it out, just drag and drop it. And then the Drive AI automatically organizes it within the neat folder structure. And that is what we are creating, the Drive AI, the world's first authentic workspace where all file operations can be done using natural language or even voice. It's the only drive that you'll ever need. I started working on the Drive AI as a note-taking app for students and scaled it to 20 ,000 users. And here's something that I discovered, very insightful.

49:08One in three user queries are actionable queries. That means users naturally ask the Drive AI to do things and not just expect to get answers back. Right now we are focused on enterprise and we already have 4 LOIs from companies and we are starting our paid pilot with one company starting this month at$500 per workspace per month. Starting with consulting, engineering and accounting firms, we only need 2 ,000 of these companies to reach dual million ARR, a very very tiny fraction of$96 billion market. Previously, I've built superhuman-level challenge-chekers Alpha Zero Ascent and have extensive AI and reinforcement research experience from this year's during award-winning institution.

49:58Right now, we are raising$2 million to scale up our research, infrastructure, and go-to-market strategy to onboard those 2 ,000 companies to get to 12 million ARR. See, the Drive AI is here to end the era of static, dumb file stories. Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, you name it, they are all file cabinets at this point of time. What we are building is the only workspace that thinks and acts alongside you. The Drive AI. The only drive that you'll ever need. Thank you. Okay, well done. What's great about this is you have traction. We need to do a better job showing that traction and what it means. and let's go back to your first slide here we'll do a little um some tips on presenting um so you said the drive ai world's first agentic workspace that's generally word salad when you use buzz words and you say oh it's the first and it's agentic it's kind of not as um evocative or as powerful as just saying it in plain English.

51:07At the end, you had a different tagline, which was the only one you ever need or something to that effect. And then you had another tagline that you said before it. So I want you to work on just a really simple sentence that explains the value proposition to investors. Hey, we're the drive AI. We're an AI first file management system, whatever it is. We're an AI first version of Dropbox or, you know, box.com. Something so that people understand what you're doing. Now, when you go to the next slide, this is an incredibly text heavy slide. Okay. So I'm going to give you a couple of just general tips because you nail it on the next slide.

51:52On the next slide, you show your product and you do a product demo that's great on this one you're trying to queue up an actual user now is this a real user or is this one you made up this is the real user so you should say that this is a real user his name is ken he is uh at edmonton unlimited he's a vice president and um you just need to know two things about him one he currently is very frustrated with box and dropbox and google drive And two, he wastes hours and hours and hours doing the following. Then show it. So this is a very simple rule of presenting. Show, don't tell. Show, don't tell.

52:36So here you told us he creates 10 folders, he invites team members, he sets up permissions, and he uploads templates. This should be a screen. And you should say, and you could even, you know, put it on the left. You could just, you know, show it really quick. I'm speeding this up, but what you're seeing here is an hour of his day. And you speed it up, you know, and you show it in a minute while you're talking. So you definitely want to show that. The one hour, you know, show the one hour of work, you know, really fast. Then you go to your next slide and you say, and here's how Ken does the same exact task today.

53:09He opens up our thing. He types the following command. You can go a little bit slower here. Instead of showing, I think you showed like maybe five or six different things here. just show the one apples to apples he did the same thing in how many minutes oh uh i don't know probably a few seconds okay so say that he did in under a minute so he went from an hour of work to under a minute and this is what he said to us and then you do boom full screen the quote from him this incredible you know testimonial from your customer i can't believe this doesn't exist i would pay any amount for this whatever his amazing quote is you just ask him can you give us like a yelp like quote for our presentation deck when we go raise money okay then if we go to the next slide here um you do some more demos the next slide and you maybe did maybe too many of them and maybe too fast so i think slowing down and just showing like maybe one more here's another example whatever let's go to the next one um this slide you probably don't need if you type it out it can do it you kind of showed that already So back to show, don't tell.

54:18And then here, traction was very interesting. But again, very text-heavy slide. What I'd rather see you do here is show a cumulative user slide and an active user slide, something like that, a chart. So how many months has the product been out? It's been almost 16 months at this point of time. So I'd say here's our 16-month cumulative user chart. And then here's our... And you can get rid of the B2B letters of intent because people in our industry call them letters of nothing. like i think it's much better to take the b2c folks and are any of them paying yet or they're just all users unpaid users no we have some paid users perfect so i would get rid of the lois because that lowers lowers your credibility uh because you're like wasting time on getting people to give you a letter that they might use your product we get 20 000 you free users how How many paid do you have?

55:11A hundred? A thousand? And when did you turn on paid? Right now, just 13 paid users. Perfect. And how many months have you been doing paid? Probably last 13 months. Okay, fine. So it's a small number. So that's going to be an issue for folks of why did that convert? Now, of those 20 ,000 users that sampled the product, how many use it every day? Is it 200? How many daily active users? Almost like 5%. Okay, great. So you want to lead with like the most important numbers. You understand when you're talking to VCs, they're going to double click on all of these. And so when they see vanity numbers versus real numbers, credibility can go down.

55:55It's much more credible to say we have a thousand daily users currently. Of those thousand, 13 have converted to paid and they're paying$50 a month. How much are they paying? uh so for individuals it's twenty dollars a month twenty dollars a month um and let me tell you about those thousand users and then you go to the next thing for the thousand users they've uploaded 90 000 files and you show the number of files uploaded cumulatively okay so what i did here is i just looked at all your stats and what founders do is they try to look for the biggest numbers and what investors do they try to look for the most um important numbers the most um the most accurate numbers that will let them understand the footprint of the business.

56:43So the cumulative files uploaded, if it was a cumulative chart, obviously it only goes up, but we could start to see slopes and we could start to see like how people are using it. And then if we talk about those 13 users, here's the 13 users who decided to give us their money. Boom. And you explained where they are. Then you could also talk a little bit about how you're converting them. So we're doing a conversion where when you hit this many files, it prompts you to convert. So you get your first 10 ,000 files and your first five gig for free. After that, you have to pay. Is that the business model, consumption and tiered pricing on consumption?

57:19Right. So we limit, so we have like three plans right now, free, individual and enterprise. For free, we just give like a one GB of free storage plus five AI queries per day. Perfect. So I think explaining that is more important than some of the vanity metrics right okay um and um let's go to the next slide okay um so this is pretty good um you know we're going to be business to business at some point and we think we can get to 2 000 people who are and this is where like maybe having a persona the people who want our product are the top five percent of drive users they don't get this out of their current drives and then there's going to be a question why don't you build a layer on top of box right dropbox and google drive what's the answer to that question i'm curious um one well i hear that question a lot um the answer that i like to give is we want to be one-stop solution for all of your authentic tasks so google drive google drive would never never integrate one drive into its system right or even email services or any other existing services and And that's, I think, the value that we provide.

58:33We want to be one-step solution for your all file organizing tasks. So it doesn't matter whether you use Google Drive, OneDrive. What's interesting about that is you're thinking big. You want to be the full-stack solution. I get that. But if you had a Chrome extension that did all this, or you made a browser that did this, or a wrapper or something like that, then you could have people try it on their existing ones and be able to run these tools on the existing ones and then let them port over if they want to. It's just something to consider because when Superhuman did their email product, they let people keep their Gmail address, their Google Docs, and their Outlook.

59:10And they just became like a layer on top of those, an interface. And people said, oh my God, it's never going to work. You have to be full stack. And I kind of felt that way too. Turned out I was wrong. People just love the interface and they like having their Gmail interface available as a backup. So there is something to it, but you'll make that decision as you go. Let's go to the next slide. Sure. I'll do it. I just want to quickly follow up on that if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. So what we already have is Google Drive integration. So we can sync all of your files from Google Drive into the Drive AI.

59:42Oh, great. So that you can still work on a Google Drive, but we still import and sync that file within the drive ai got it so if i create one on the drive ai it puts it in my google drive if i create something new on google drive it will sync over there so you're a backup service as well right yeah so that's an interesting one too if you were like i need to have a backup we we invested in a company backupify i think yeah and they let you log into your services like twitter or gmail or g drive and they just use the apis to back all your stuff up in case you lost your gmail account because people would get their Gmail hacked and there's no recourse.

1:00:17It's not like you're a paid customer if you have a Gmail account. And then here, this slide, you're a solo founder. Is that right? Right now, yes. Yeah. So solo founder is always a weakness in the eyes of venture capitalists because they have seen and they have pattern recognition that you got to go big. You need to have like, you know, two or three co-founders to kind of spread out the work. Did you have any other full-time employees or is it just a one-man show at the time? We recently hired a full-stack engineer. Perfect. So I think here you could just put, I'm a solo founder, just own it. And this is our first engineer.

1:00:56Boom. And so you get that credit for having your founding engineer, you could call them. And they say, what's the difference between founding engineers? Oh, he has, you know, X percent equity, right? Right. So when co-founders, when solo founders don't have co-founders, they can do or I advise them to do the founding team. So founding engineer, founding salesperson, founding growth person. And you can just explain, you know, I didn't have a co-founder on this one, but I did build a founding team. And these folks each have on average four percent equity if they stick around for five years. So then they feel like, oh, there is a little bit of a team here.

1:01:33if something happens to you, the company doesn't shut down, which is their fear for early stage companies. When a company gets bigger, you know, if you've got a solo founder, it's not the end of the world. But in the early days, people do have a bias towards it. You did a great job. I think you're probably going for too much money. I think it's going to be hard to raise 2 million. I never want to tell a founder not to try. I think you should go to an accelerator first, go to Y Combinator, Techstars launch. God, there's so many that could then help you find a co-founder or maybe answer some of these questions around how do we convert more of the thousand to paid?

1:02:12And then I think going for a seed round and maybe trying to find an anchor seed fund who will put in 250 to a million. They typically do 500K. They put in 500K and then you could pass the hat with other angel investors for$500K and then deploy that with the goal of I'm going to deploy a million dollars, I'm going to build the team out to five people, and then we're going to get to 10 ,000 free users and 1 ,000 paid users. And with 1 ,000 paid users at$20K a month, we'll be close to break even, whatever it is. And you can explain that use of funds. Going for$2 million at this point with a two-employee team with not a lot of growth and a very small number of paid there it could be easier for you have you raised venture before uh we did get a small check from launch from founder university yeah so you got our check from founder university when you go on i would definitely go to which we like to do we give this 25k check to try to get people started and help them incorporate but you need to go to a next i would go to a um i would try to go to an accelerator yeah um and keep things going if you can add 10 paid users a month, 20 paid users a month at this stage.

1:03:27And then let's say you had 20 a month and you churn three or four, people are going to look at the business and go, oh, okay, he's figuring out product market fit and go to market. But, you know, the challenge for you will be, you're so busy building the product that where's the time for fundraising going to come from? Where's the time to go to Accelerator going to come from? Where's the time for your go to market strategy going to come from? It's just going to be hard. So I wish you the best with it. Great job. And and you're off to the races. And for background, for people who don't know, we have founder.university.

1:03:55We do it three times a year here in the United States, but anybody can go anywhere around the world. And then we just launched our MENA, which will be in Saudi starting in the first week of November. And you can find all that information at founder.university. And we give all of the folks who aren't incorporated yet, or they're just a one or two person team, we give them the option every week, check a box. I would like a 25K check. I'd like 125K check. And we review the progress and we decide if there's, you know, if we can be helpful and we think it's a good investment for our LPs. And hopefully that 25K helps you get into an accelerator.

1:04:31That's my wish for you. So you get into Y Combinator or you get into our accelerator or Antler or any of these great ones, Techstars. The only chat or Pear has a good one. Pear VC has one over the summer. The only problem is you need a co-founder really to get in. So a lot of these programs will not accept a solo founder in my experience. They may not say that explicitly, but realistically they may not. So I wish you continued success and we'll see everybody next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.