Microsoft Layoffs, Immigration Blunders, & Office Hours with Jeremy Redman of Airfive | E2127

26:39And this is going to just make OpenAI, the company go faster and it's going to make everybody who uses it. So this seems like, yeah, pretty um pretty interesting so the thing that took me by surprise though is i thought the windsurf deal was kind of locked up with open ai because everyone reported roughly three billion dollars kind of a done deal actually i don't think it's officially closed yet and so i'm actually kind of watching windsurf go its own path forward here it was everyone's reported it that it's going to happen in the works nearly done three billion dollars but they're doing that it's in talks It's like it's not, we're not, yeah, it's not finalized.

27:17Wait, wait, if it's not finalized, I got a piece of advice here. They made an agreement. That was a week ago to buy it for$3 billion. But it's not, and OpenAI had looked at Cursor, we knew that. And two days ago, the New York Times reported OpenAI in talks to acquire Winsor. That's a big difference. Bloomberg said a week ago that OpenAI reached an agreement to buy Winsor. now it's open ai's and talks i'm gonna go ahead and advise the team at uh windsurf to stop negotiations leave this deal raise a billion for masayoshi san or whoever uae saudi elon elon's got a billion dollars windsurf needs to go talk to three other people because i think they can add i don't know they might be able to add uh 3x this should be a 10 billion dollar deal I think they're selling way too early.

28:12This is a big mistake. Listen, I'm not trying to make the check go up for Sam Altman. I'm just saying pretty clear based on the reporting and based on what I'm seeing here that this company could do better than 3 billion at this moment in time. This is a big category. What is Purser making in revenue? I think the last number we heard was 200 million ARR or 300 million ARR, depending on the reporting. Winsurf is at roughly 100 million plus or minus. and for folks out there who want more on this company, episode 2064 here on Twist from last December is when we had Faroon, the CEO, on. Jason, can I just take a victory lap really quick here?

28:47Sure, please. I'm going to just go ahead and just pull this up. This is my blog. I said, do the deal, but not for$3 billion. How about$5? I like that you're going for a higher number, but I just feel like selling for 30X ARR right now, growing this fast, is just almost like a dereliction of duty. I don't know who's the investor in this company, like who's on the board and who the investor is, but I guess sometimes getting a quick win is good, but this might be an Instagram, YouTube-like situation where, you know, in 10 years, this company could be worth a hundred billion. Like, so what are we doing here?

29:17This is one of the biggest prizes in AI. I would say, you know, if you were going to pick the top 10 prizes in AI, robotics and the humanoid robot is one, self-driving is one, biology, drug discovery, that whole sort of category is one. and uh this is one if we're going to talk and probably military applications is another yeah this is one of the biggest prizes i think the perkins general catalyst green oaks founders fund those are that somebody's got to get on the horn here and block this immediately but if you're general catalyst and you put the last money in last august 3x in eight months you know general Capital Catalyst is like one of these mega multi-billion dollar funds.

30:02I think they are, this is a great moment to be in in our industry. So many companies are developing powerful new AI apps that are going to radically improve your productivity, but Google has been off to the races. They got a new product, it's called Canvas. And this platform comes with Gemini 2.5 Pro model baked in. It's vibe code ready. Ideal for control freaks like me who have ideas and want to see what they look like in practice right away. So you can go from a rough concept to an image or even a functioning website in just minutes with a few prompts. You know how like you build a website for a project you're working on, you don't touch it for three years?

30:43I want you right now to go use Canvas in Gemini 2.5 Pro. And I want you to go say, make this website better. Here's my goals. We're talking about rich, robust, fully functioning prototypes near instantly. Gemini Canvas is reinventing front-end development. So if you got some ideas and you want to turn them into documents, code, or prototypes right now, get your vibe code on Gemini Canvas with the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. Visit Gemini.com slash Canvas to see for yourself. When you can see very clearly the path to a$10 billion company, And when you see that, like I saw that with Uber and Robinhood, it became pretty clear.

31:26Like you don't see that with every company, you know, you see, okay, yeah, I could see this getting to a hundred million in revenue. I could see this getting to 500 million in revenue, but if there's 16 to, I've heard the number 15 million and 30 million as the number of developers in the world, I'll pick 20 million as just an easy bogey here. You know, these things are going to make each developer 10 % more effective and developer being 10 % more effective on an average salary of 100 ,000 globally is$10 ,000. $10 ,000 times 2 million would be 10, wait, 2 ,000 developers at 10 ,000 per developer is$20 billion.

32:05And if you were to double that, you know,$40 billion. And the TAM here is enormous. And also the whole future is going to run off software right so like it's these trends aren't going to slow down 40 billion in value even if you only claim 10 of that that's 4 billion in revenue yep so i what i did here in this back of the envelope calculation is what a lot of um is what we call bottom up tam we we study this in our accelerators tam total addressable market you can say you know what's the market for you know a co-pilots and you could say okay well um this is the number of players. Here's what they're making.

32:45They're growing at this percentage. That's one way to make the TAM. What I did was I did a bottom-up TAM of using a different variable. The implied efficiency created per year, per developer, how many developers, average salary. So the value creation is at least a 10 % lift. It might be 25 % lift per year, per developer. A 10 % lift on their salaries is a market value of$30,$40,$50 billion, maybe$100 billion if it was 20 % lift. So then how much of that could the cursor market capture and the windsurf market? Yeah. Deal off. Best advice, deal off. Go for the gold. And here's the thing. These founders, go ahead and sell$100 million in secondary each.

33:34Tell General Catalyst, tell Founders Fund, they got the money, call Brian Singerman. Hey, Brian, I need$50 million. My two co-founders, they need$50 million each. We're going to go buy our NetJets cards and our ski houses, and we're done here. Next story. Well, let's talk about Cohere. So they're an enterprise AI startup. They build AI models and tools to index corporate data for AI use, and also software to help customers build their own AI agents. So they're growing quickly, but they dramatically missed some early revenue projections. It looks like the information reported that their projected revenue, 450 million in 2024, 1.8 billion in 2025, and they projected 4.3 billion in revenue for 2026.

34:19Tripling, tripling, tripling. Got it. Right. However, the actual IRL ARR only hit 35 million in March of 2024 and 70 million in February of 2025. A pretty big gap. They're showing just how hard it is to make these kinds of projections in the frothy world of AI. So they're valued at 5.5 billion when they raised 500 million last July and a six billion dollar valuation at 70 million ARR in February. that's around an 86 times AR multiple. Yeah, if you were to look at what the market's trading at, if you pulled up HubSpot or Palantir, these are two very hot companies that have subscription models. You know, what are they trading at?

35:03Those are the two hottest. Palantir has left reality. That's a meme stock. So we'll take that one off the table. But if you were to look at... HubSpot, 12.67 % on a price sales basis, Jason. That's trailing. AR is a little bit more aggressive, um but that's the number for that right now so call 13 times their top line sales four times that equals their market cap that's called price to sales so that would be yeah 120th of this 13x trading revenue jason sorry i must have spoken okay so that's you know eventually these private market valuations will run into a public market and a re-underwriting as my friend shaman would say you have to re-underwrite it.

35:46And when you re-underwrite it, and Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman or pick your public market investor, when you get re-underwrited, they're going to say, okay, yeah, this is what it's worth. But that's the no crying in the casino. You're making a bet. We just talked about the previous company, Winsurf. They're making a bet too. So maybe this group had the chance to sell at a crazy valuation and didn't. And oh, they should have taken it. So they are trying to sort of paint a picture that it's not quite as bad as it seems. The company told the information that while its early estimates were obviously overly optimistic, they're now seeing hockey stick shaped revenue growth that they anticipated before they just think it was maybe happening a little later than usual.

36:31So that's at least the smiley face they're putting on it for the moment. And I reached out to the company because we do that now. we have a lot of emails going back and forth with founders and such. They sent us a link to a Reuters article and said, we can't comment further, but read this. And that piece noted that they had crossed roughly 100 million ARR as of May. So plus 30 from February, Jason, feels very strong to me. Yeah. So, all right. Well, that's breaking news here on This Week in Startups. There was a great post from our friends over at Wired Magazine going through some folks who work in the legal immigration profession, discussing how there is more pushback from the administration about H-1B visas.

37:09This is a story that I wanted to bring up because one, Jason, over on your other show, you did have the president on, pushed him on high school immigration. And he said, staple those green cards to those diplomas. You and I virtually high-fived over the idea. And now we're seeing kind of the opposite. Now, this is not shocking, but I did see in that piece, a tweet from your friend, Mr. Peshman from Pear VC that I thought was particularly apropos to the current moment. I want to just talk about this. So our friend from Paris says too many pair of VC founders are getting their visas challenge and it's downright absurd.

37:41Entrepreneurs build America. So let's open the doors for innovators, not shut them. I am, I guess a little surprised given how prominent we have seen technology people be in the administration that there hasn't been a longer grace period for high school immigration, especially for founders of startups than we're currently seeing and i'm just curious jason are you seeing this show up at founder you at the launch accelerator or on your group chats that i'm not part of so those are two information sources i don't have an example of a founder not getting a green card uh or into the country i have heard one or two i want to bring a developer i'm trying to bring somebody in from canada they're kind of like in the canadian way station So there should be a little more discussion about this from our friends who are in the administration.

38:28I'm not going to say like, I'm not going to call people out by need. You all know my friends who are in the administration. I think it's a delicate balance inside the MAGA party. They all know, with the exception of maybe Stephen Miller and Steve Manning, who are like, generally seem like lunatics to me, I'll be totally honest, like when it comes to this issue. I mean, they seem to like literally want to deport 15 or 20 million people and drag them out of the country at an expense of 20, 30,$40 ,000 each. And people who have kids in schools here who are cleaning bathrooms, picking cherries and washing dishes and just incredible human beings living the American dream.

39:07It's just abhorrent and ridiculous and impractical. And you could come up with a million ways to describe how stupid it is to how stupid, cruel or impractical it is to drag 15 million people that we brought into this country. And when I say we, I mean America. We have to own that fact, whether it happened under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump won with plenty of people who came in under Trump won or Biden when a lot of people came in. You can't make this a partisan issue. We're a country of immigrants. This country let people in across the last five, six, seven presidents since the 80s. The Republicans were the biggest proponents of immigration and NAFTA.

39:49NAFTA, am I pronouncing that correctly? NAFTA. NAFTA. NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement. We don't talk about it anymore. NAFTA. Why don't we talk about that anymore? NAFTA was this whole EU before the EU. The Republicans wanted an open border in the North and the South. They were the proponents and the architects of it. And everybody else just executed on it. So putting it aside, fight for this skilled immigration. And there's a very simple way to frame it. If you want to get everybody on board, America has to own, if it is a mistake that we let so many people in, we have to own it. And we have to deal with it in a gracious, intelligent way.

40:27And the most gracious, intelligent way and thoughtful way to do it, an economically sound way to do it is to say, if you're contributing to our society, here's 10 years of taxes you need to pay and a path to citizenship and behave yourself like everybody else. Don't commit any crimes. And if you stay on the straight and narrow and you pay some taxes 10 years from now, whatever, we'll get you the green card. We'll get you citizenship. Just do the right thing. And then for everybody else, hey, if you're going to come here and create jobs, go get the Trump gold and get the Trump gold card. And you get you get three thousand extra miles on United.

41:02Yeah. And none of us want to live in a society where secret police are rounding people up on the streets and forcing them into vans and shipping them off to other countries. Like I'm not in danger of being deported. I was born and raised in America, but I don't want to live in that. I want to say that I think we're losing a little bit of the start of focus here, which is that if we make it harder to get a visa to come build here and to hire here, we are literally handing the baton of technological leadership to places where those people would have come from. Like, U.S. technology companies would not be as strong if so many Europeans weren't hopping United flights over from London and Paris.

41:39Not even just Europeans. I mean, you know, Indian people and people from China, South America. all around the world. I was just thinking about a couple of the companies in particular, but to me, this is seeding our competitive advantage as the technology and startup capital of the world that is a mistake. That is stupid. A huge mistake. I want more companies here. Shooting ourselves in the foot. Yeah. It's all about framing. I literally was having this discussion with high-profile people in and around the administration and I just said, frame this as talent recruitment and job creation and you're done.

42:11Talent recruitment's great. Frame it as asylum you know and everything else and it's just going to become bedlam just we want 1 million incredibly highly qualified people per year who create jobs to come to this country the number is 1 million i've decided 1 million that's it everybody could i mean a million people who create jobs and you have to create jobs and if you don't if you want to come here and you create 10 jobs on average you can stay if you create less than 10 jobs in five years hit the road yeah the end create some economic value or, you know, that's it. You can't stay. All right.

42:49Now that we've gone through the key news stories of the day, we are going to go to office hours. And today, Jason, we're talking all about email, customer support, and the world of AI and how they all come together at a company called Air 5. This is in the Launch Accelerator cohort number 34. And we're talking to Jeremy Redmond, who's doing his second round of Launch Accelerator work. Please welcome Jeremy to the program. All right, Jeremy, welcome to the program. What was your first company? I'm trying to remember. Yeah, it was V1. Do you remember that? The no-code app builder. Yes, I do remember that.

43:24Yes. What was your first cohort that you were in for V1? LA-18. Okay. That was when we were in person in San Francisco. Every Thursday, we'd go get burgers and yeah. You want to know what's funny? I was the very first. I had a visit to San Francisco where we first met the week before COVID hit. And it was like, I think you actually announced as like the COVID launch or something like that. It's like one of the presentations, which I thought was funny. And that was the last in-person one. And so like when I came, I think a couple of weeks later, like maybe a month later, we were the first fully remote cohort.

44:10Wow. All over Zoom. Crazy. And so tell us about the new company. Give a little pitch here, elevator pitch, a really simple sentence and tell us what you're working on now. Yeah. So Air5 is an AI assistant that automates customer support email. So small teams can focus on growth. pretty amazing. This is an incredibly competitive space. Why are you going to win this space in the face of so many competitors who want to attack customer support with AI? Yeah, so I didn't even want to build this. So I wanted to use some of these competitors of which you speak. So we were going to use Intercom. And Intercom got real expensive really fast.

44:58I think it started the entry price was like 150 bucks a month. And then you start every response was a dollar. And you're like, this is getting beyond my control. And then every response that they generated that sent to our customers, it was from Intercom's AI fin. So they're really servicing enterprise based companies. And a lot of the other competitors are doing that as well. So we kind of swoop in there and get the freelancers, the small teams, solo founders, and kind of build a suite of products to support them. Got it. And so this is a tried and true competitive strategy. We're going to make something simpler, easier to use, more affordable for SMBs.

45:45if you were to look at a product like Salesforce, considered like the gold standard in managing a sales team, you could come in with a lightweight version that's not, what does Salesforce cost per salesperson today? Is it like 2 ,000 a person or something? I mean, it's like 50 grand to set up, right? Like that's the thing with Salesforce is you need then a Salesforce engineer. Yeah, the whole thing's super expensive. And then you look at, I remember we used to set up mail servers and then MailChimp came along and it was cheap. and then Beehive came along and you could pay a flat rate fee and have your own domain name and then Substack is free, but they take 10 % of your revenue.

46:21Anyway, infinite options available. So that's a great strategy. What's the go-to market strategy for somebody trying to create something that's easy to use and super affordable? What is the pricing? And then I'm assuming the pricing is so low, you can't have a sales team out there selling it, yeah? Yeah, that's great. So, and that actually dovetails into two of my office hours questions. So our go to market strategy is somewhat unique. When we see competitors in the market space that, like you said, small team support is somewhat inundated with a lot of solutions. I mean, you could use Airtable for a similar thing.

47:00So what we do is we see those companies with products, we will then build a simpler version of that product. Like, we built a lovable clone actually called likable. And we delivered it to our community. So what we do is we will do an Airtable clone, which we did. We do a cold email clone, which we did. We do a build your landing page clone, which we did. And then we distribute those to our community, which we have about 2 ,800 affiliates that then go sell that. And they've brought in over half of our revenue to date. Wow. And then we just gather feedback and then build the next thing with the next competitor.

47:50And we knew that - Oh, wow. So this is a strategy of not just doing the email responses and competing with Intercom, but just going down the SaaS stack, creating simpler, cheaper versions and using this affiliate network to distribute it and get feedback on how to make the product better. So you're basically building a SaaS killing platform. Yes. So like with this whole inundation of like vibe coding, you can spin up something open source and customize it or something from scratch or vibe code something with cursor or likable, which everyone can find at likable.co. So tell me, what is the question you have for me?

48:31I totally buy the strategy here. I think offering these things for free, collecting data at this stage, since you seem to be pretty good at it, giving some money to the affiliates is a great idea. You've got this really interesting concept around that. Maybe the affiliate network is the business for other and selling that to startups. I would be interested in that. if there was an affiliate network that sold tickets to events or got people to apply to founder university. I mean, that sounds very interesting as a distribution platform that you built for yourself or just getting a bunch of up and coming businesses to get a suite of products for one price.

49:07I don't know. There's something interesting here. Yeah, I feel like we do. We bounce around and a lot of it is around this business model. And this is the first question. So we have, we give our customers an option. They can pay one low monthly fee. So you can start on Air 5 for$16 a month and get going. And then we distribute it, like you said, we have the initial hundreds customers for every product right away. But you can use our prepaid usage-based model. And that starts at$25. So what we're realizing with our customers is 80 % of people will go for the usage-based pricing. And I think you've spoke about this before, but I think everyone's feeling a little bit of subscription fatigue.

49:55And it becomes how much can you get predictable cross-sells and upsells. But I don't know. I believe in that strategy. Our customers believe in buying that strategy. If you can get 2 to 4 years of revenue upfront, that's amazing. Usage-based. But I don't know how to sell that to investors when they all expect just an MRR figure. So what's the way you would polish that? I think you have a secret. So there's a theory in startups. I have a secret, right? The secret I've learned is, oh yeah, people will actually stay at another person's house and they're not the people who stay at five-star hotels.

50:36They're young people or adventurous people who stay at Airbnb, stay at bed and breakfasts already, or they couch surf on Craigslist. So you kind of know this secret. The founders of Airbnb knew this secret that there were people on the underground who would trade vacation homes or let people stay in their home if they could stay in their home. And there was like a house swapping kind of thing where you would come to New York and I would go to Paris and you stayed in my apartment, I stayed in yours. We vetted each other and it was all done on Craigslist, right? So you have a secret. Now, most investors, if they're thinking, you know like robots or like this does not pattern match the mrr arr turn formula that we have created who gives a fuck about those investors you don't want those investors anybody you want the visionary investors who are like tell me more i'd like to consider myself in the non-consensus you know peter tl michael moritz group which is hey and bill girly what if it works what if your crazy idea works so as you've explained it to me i'm so excited about it because i'm like yeah what if this works and i was talking to another founder and um they were in what space they were in a space where people would buy a piece of software or a piece of sas software for an event and they might use it for a year or two and then you know you kind of churn and i said well what if you sold them this on a 50-year basis and you memorialized everything You know, let's say I'm not going to, it's not this, but I'll make up thing.

52:05Like, let's say it was just like a tribute website for a funeral, right? And instead of selling them per month, per year, you just said, pay$500 and we will keep this memorial on the internet for 50 years. 10 bucks a year for 50 years. Pay us 500. You never have to worry going down and you can put in the email addresses of your kids. They can put in their kids' email addresses and their phone numbers. and it's a family legacy, a tribute to Lon, who we worked with and loved dearly. He went too early. I can't believe I died. Sorry, Lon. Is that why you're so pale tonight? Yeah, exactly. It's the lighting.

52:42It's the lighting. I work a little bit on the lighting. So anyway, a new revenue model. And I told her, you know, like, it's so much cognitive dissonance, this monthly bill and the subscription burnout, that paying once. The guys over at 37 Signals came up with a Slack competitor where you pay one time a thousand bucks. I'm sure you know about it. and you basically pay for yourself for one time. I think there's a lot of people who are open to this concept. You figured it out. You've got the passion for it. Let's go for it. Let's hope 19 of 20 investors don't understand it. That means you're onto something.

53:12If the people who are doing cookie cutter investing don't understand it, you don't need them. They're the people who would be like, do what has already been done. We're looking for something that has a small chance of working, but if it does work, changes the world. So I love it. I love the idea of you selling a hundred dollars in credits and use as you go. The reason I unsubscribed from MailChimp and I like literally, we still had one person holding onto their MailChimp account. And I didn't realize it was costing us 500 months, 6 ,000 a year. I was like, get off of that immediately. It was me.

53:42It was me, Alex. God damn it. Now we know I killed him and that's why he's got the Memorial page. I joked him out. God damn it. That's my six times. I didn't know we were done with MailChimp. We're on Bento now. We switched over to Bento folks. Which one? I do inside streaming through Bento now. That's what we set up. Bento, Beehive. There's a bunch of free options there. So all this legacy stuff, if MailChimp just said to me, hey, pay us 500 as you use it, it'll keep working. Great. I would have done it. But, you know, so you're onto something. I love that you're onto something new. I'm going to tell you, hold the string and see where it leads you.

54:20Anyway, Jeremy, you got a great company. Can't wait to see in person. Where are you based now? Los Angeles. And what's your traction like, Jeremy? Oh, dude, way to get that in. Way to get that in. We just got going in December, this last December, and we're about to hit 800K in revenue. Wow. Wow. And we are gunning. We are gunning for a million dollars in revenue in quarter two. Perfect. So before you graduate the accelerator, how are you doing in the, what was it, week six or seven in the accelerator right now? Week two. It's only week two? Or three or four. No, week two pitching investors. Oh, week two pitching investors.

54:58Oh, we have those week zero, whatever. And how's it going with the investors? Bianca doing a good job? Erica doing a good job? Bianca and Lucas, Lucas, I guess, isn't hands-on with that accelerator piece that's more the founder of you. I don't know how you do this, but you find the greatest young founder-friendly talent I've ever come in contact with. Shout out Bianca. She's the best. Shout out Bianca. I don't know how she stays so positive all the time. I could tell you. I could teach you this. So, I literally can teach you. I had a realization when we were trying to hire talent, and I looked at the problem we had from first principles.

55:43We, as an early stage fund, have a lot of people coming at us with ideas. Like, upwards of 20 ,000 applications for funding. Second only, I think, to Y Combinator, which has 45 ,000 applications. And that's because of the two podcasts, right? I say founder of university. I say, hey, launch.co slash apply, 100 applications come in. We got to sort them. So I said to myself, okay, I need an army to sort and meet with folks. So I need to create a system. Remember, systems above goals. The goal is to back enough founders to find another Uber, Robinhood, and have those outlier power law investments pay for all the other ones.

56:21and you know on a philosophical basis i want to be super helpful to founders and i'm passionate about innovation all that stuff but on a pragmatic basis we need to hit a 200 300 400 x company for every hundred we invest in because we want to have a three or four x fund okay great the math is the math so we have to sort through a lot of companies we have to meet with a lot of companies how do you do that we had uh this concept of an introductory meeting what's an introductory meeting we tell people, hey, we got your application, would love to meet you, and do a quick Zoom, which we can record, and share with the rest of the team if it's a really interesting company.

56:59And I said, what's the most efficient way to do that? 20-minute introductory call, 10 minutes of you pitching us your product, five minutes of you asking us questions, five minutes of us asking questions, and then we can both mutually agree on, should we do another call? And do we want to, is there any way we could work together? And so I said, how do we get to 100 of those a week? Well, you need people who can do five of them a day. Some people do eight a day and still have energy on the sixth, seventh, eighth one. So I then just said, I want to have people when they apply for this position of researcher, then they become analysts and they become associates.

57:36I want them to just do a couple of calls and record the calls and then just show me the video. And then instead of hiring people based on what fancy degree they have, I just look at their energy on the video. because the experience of a founder is the person having that conversation with you. Now, they have to be intelligent. They have to be bright. They have to be hardworking. They have to be disciplined. But they also have to be engaging on camera, right? In that Zoom call, the actual work of a venture capitalist at an accelerator or pre-accelerator is doing 500 calls a year, 1 ,000 calls a year with founders and checking in with them and whatever.

58:15So I optimized for that. And you're experiencing that, which is, I tell them, hire people with enthusiasm. And if they're not fired up with enthusiasm, fire them with enthusiasm. Oh, that is that, you know, I am so lost all the time. I ask you for advice or hear your answers because it's, I sit there and I'm like, how does he, how does he come up with this? Like, I am actually beside myself with that answer. I've never heard that ever. if you i've talked with on my google sheet it's 180 vcs right a lot of associates um and they don't think the same way they're not trained the same way it's really like how do i climb the ladder and become a principal or a partner and you kind of feel that with launch you really do uh double click on the right things with these people and they are they are just absolutely stellar well Well, and, you know, we try to be like, if you think about what you need as a founder, like you need a quick answer and you need to make sure that we understand your company.

59:22And one of the things I realized early on was I started letting founders review us. So we send them an email 48 or 72 hours after we do a meeting and then it goes automatically into our Slack with the rating for each person. And it's public to the whole company. I got really bad ratings. You did. I did. And it was the same piece of advice over and over again. Jason didn't understand our business. Jason, you know, and what it is, is I process things very quickly. So people felt like I didn't hear them out enough and I didn't understand their vision. You got there faster than they could verbalize it.

59:55Exactly. So that's like being a chess player and you're just like, yep, I win. And it's like, but we're four moves in. It's like, yeah, you made a mistake and here's how it's going to end. That's not what they want to hear. You know, it's like a master Jedi with their Padawan or something. And they're just like, yeah, I just took off your two legs and your arm and, you know, game over. You got to like kind of slow down to speed up. So I just slowed down and I asked very simple questions and I started pacing the founder. Founder had high energy, was going fast. I go high fast. If they're going slow, I just ask them.

1:00:24And then I added something to the script when we meet with founders, Alex, very simple. At the end of every call when they pitch, I wrote the script for myself and then I trained everybody. Hey, Jeremy, may I repeat back to you my understanding of what you're doing here in the business to make sure I understand your vision? Yes, you can. Okay. So you're building a business that makes a more affordable version of common mission-critical SaaS products, and you're coming up with a new way to distribute it with these 2 ,800 affiliates. And at the same time, you're using a different business model that makes it easier and frictionless for people to give you money in advance of them using the product.

1:01:14Do I understand your vision correctly, Jeremy? I'd walk away with, how's this guy? How did you take... Do you remember that? That is so good. You know, like... Yeah, that feeling you have is the feeling we all want to have, whether it's a friendship or a business. Alex wants me to be able to say to him, Alex, you know, it's great working with you. I know you care about your kids greatly, spending time with them. You love your wife. And you really care about journalistic integrity and fairness because you would even sacrifice your own salary when you were at TechCrunch to help the team. I was...

1:01:45And cautious optimism. you know really does embody what your passion is which is to write every day and communicate these complicated topics like he knows i understand what makes him tick because i listen to him you know and i can do jason jason shows up to work every single day to make more money so we can play high stakes poker on television basically yes i haven't been on high stakes poker tv in a while i gotta go back all right listen jeremy you're awesome wait can i ask you one other question please and it was the one thing i wanted to learn while i was here at launch Okay. Initially on week zero, we had a, what are your challenges?

1:02:22And the one thing I came away with right there on the spot was I can come up with good answers, right? Like I can come up with good answers. I eat, sleep, breathe the business, right? It's second nature. The thing that I would love to hear from you as the world's greatest moderator would be, how do you ask great questions? Okay. How do you ask quick questions? You got to listen to the answer. You'll listen to the previous answer and then you form your next question. So it's always about proactively listening. active listening is a concept uh it's interesting to say proactive there is a concept called active listening in therapy and in um the cia and fbi and profilers active listening which is you're really thinking what the person's saying how they're saying it why they're saying it but when you go from there yeah i love it thank you jeremy that was my only thing 200 prep that's that's my jason's dead on but i i undergird that with by doing more prep than anyone else will do and when i talk to founders for like 200 interviews and such you can always tell the moment they realize that i cared enough to do the prep work and then they get so much happier they just light up i feel like i definitely get that sense from you the way you geek out about s1s only wants to make me go public you know every time i hear that you get excited about it i'm like oh i'd love to feed that excitement you know that's the only goal for us so it really comes across air5.com and like likable.co are the two websites that I have up from you, Jeremy.

1:04:00Just want to give a moment a shout out. Go there. We're launching the likable.co today. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Service. Bye-bye. Great job, Jeremy.