OpenAI’s latest “bizarre” mega-deal, datacenters in space, previewing Tesla’s big announcement and more | E2189

27:56I'm listening in here. YC partner simulator start a game a little louder. Hi, I'm Arun. We're the co-founder of the Badda. We've been friends since since 2010 being being dorm mates in college. Post-college we started this company called Wah Analytics which was a driving behavior analytics startup. We were invited to interview for the Y Combinator summer 2017 batch. Just last month we exited Wah Analytics to a larger telematics player entering India? Okay, they're accepted. Okay, let's see what you got it right. Wrong call, rejected. Oh, really? The reason I won't accept it before even hearing their next idea, it's three developers with an exit, where I assume they're three developers.

28:40They look like developers or kind of acting like developers or dress like developers. And it's always at Y Combinator, they want three people, they want two to be developers, they want multiple co-founders, they don't like idea people, They don't like pitchy people. They like hackers. But they're also Indian. And depending on what time period, YC wasn't investing in India all that often. And then they started doing more investing in India. OK, so I'm 0 for 1. Let's do the next one. Hello, I'm the CEO of Yellow Wives. And I'm Daniel. I'm the CTO. And our product enables companies to optimize field profitability.

29:17We do this by connecting to their CRM system, getting sales and revenue data. And on the other side, connecting to the operational system, getting costs and resource data. And using this data, we analyze each deal to show its expected profitability, the different costs and how they're allocated, which enables our customers to optimize the profitability of each deal. Okay, let's pause this one. And oh, it has the year there. So this year is 2018, the application. So this is critical. So in 2018, SaaS was hot and sales and CRM stuff, pretty hot. This seems like a small idea. I think they're Israeli based on the accent.

29:58I could be wrong. And I'm going to say they accepted them. It's technical. It's niche. Let's see. You folks have any idea how many documents and spreadsheets I got to look at every day, every week, every month? I'm reading this ad off for a document right now. I'm going to need my own personal data center soon. But this is why there's Coda. It's the all-in-one collaborative workspace that's not only helping us here at launch, but working for over 50 ,000 teams all over the world. And they've got an amazing new feature that we've got to tell you about. It's called Coda Brain. It's an AI that's been trained on all of your company's data and information that syncs to all of the tools you're already using.

30:40Coda Brain is not just going to eliminate constant searching and keep you organized, but it also crunches the numbers and provides you deep research and insights just based on simple prompts. And because it's powered by Grammarly, you know you're going to get clean, clear, crisp responses that are easy for you to understand. So go right now to coda.io slash twist and get six months of the team plan for startups free. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash twist for six months free.

31:16Wrong again. So these might be both of these might be too niche, the ideas. Well, the first one, I didn't even hear the idea. But the second one, it might have been too niche. Okay, let's go next. Next pitch. Okay, here we go. I'm Jose, CEO and co-founder of The Mosted. Hi, I'm Daniel, and I'm the CMO and co-founder of The Most. Hello, I'm Antonio Bernardino. I'm co-founder and CTO at The Most. The Most is a news content social media platform where people can discover their favorite news and start conversations and events. No, reject. It's social. No. There you go. Yeah, definitely not. So the point here though, Jason, is you can actually see historical YC pitches, see if they got accepted or not, and learn from them.

31:58Watching, I got six right, five wrong. So roughly the same ratio that you did. But it was fascinating to go back in time, see what was hot then, see how people present themselves, see what worked. And I gotta say, it's a great learning experience for founders who want to get in there and work on their pitching. Why not just go see what worked and what did not? I love it. Yeah, it's fun. You know, there's a lot of like anti-YC vibes on X right now. It seems like there's a younger generation who finds them to be very establishment. And I think it's because they are very established, right? They've been around now for 20 years.

32:37So it is the establishment. And there's so many people applying, which means more and more people don't get accepted. And their best advice to you is, oh, we'll wait six months and apply again. That's terrible advice. I mean, it's great advice for them. It's terrible advice for you as a founder. If you get rejected for it, your rejection and your application, most importantly, to yc at launch.co. And my team will take a meeting with you and give us some feedback and see if it's right for our program. I can tell you nobody, when you get to a certain number of applications, nobody can tell you the difference between the top 5%.

33:13I could tell you like this is a top 10%, a top 5%, but amongst that 10%, I couldn't tell you this one's number one, this one's number 10 out of 10 companies, you know, out of the top of the 100. You probably would see, you know, reasonable investors from these programs pick a similar top, you know, five or six of the top 10 would be the same, but they're only accepting 1%, Alex. So when you're accepting 1%, what they're doing is they're just looking for young people without families who are developers. The more developers, the better, which means it's naturally going to screw more skew more male.

33:52That doesn't mean they're hiring based on gender, or they're accepting based on gender, they're accepting based on developer or not. The percentage of female developers, I think is still under 10 % right now, is my guess. That could be old data that I have. But it's roughly, you know, in that range, not computer science graduates, I'm talking about like developers working at a company. And Sometimes companies will mix in UX and product managers and designers into the development group to kind of make their numbers look better. There's a lot of window dressing that occurs because people are under such DEI attacks.

34:31Claude says it's about 20%. I think that number is a little inflated, but it could be 1 in 5. What that means is they're going to be accepting 80 % males. Now, they will look for a female team member when they do their DEI stats because all these programs, all these venture funds were under so much pressure to share their stats. And I think to YC's credit, Techstars, they all shared their stats. They did. Yeah. And the way they gamed it was, is there a female founder on the team? and you know i'm not saying gamed it but just the way they dealt with the criticism that it was overwhelmingly male is to just be like do you have a female founding team member and uh you know you can you find a lot of them that have you know oh the director of sales the cmo the growth hacker the you know design as if there are not gender differences in work like there are there are definitely careers that draw different groups of people doesn't mean that group of people can't do that career.

35:34It just means there's a bias that people might pick different careers, the end, full stop. But that's all over now. In fact, if you were to do this kind of DEI reporting and stuff like that, you'd probably be advised not to do it and to tell everybody do not pick based on gender, which I did from the beginning. I said, don't pick anybody based on gender. Don't pick anybody based on race. Do not pick anybody based on age. Because I knew it was illegal to do that and you would get sued. But you had a countervailing force, which was, well, why is it so many white, Asian, Indian guys doing startups?

36:08And I just said, just make it based on merit. The chips will fall where they will. Speaking of things in merit, Jason, let's talk about launch for a second. You had a tweet that really caught my eye. You called launch 35, launch patch 35 right now. Yeah. Yeah. You called it the best accelerator class in launches history. Yeah. Which is, I mean, honestly, I mean, after 35 classes, that's quite the claim. So talk to me about what's going on here at home. Yeah, I just think we're getting more applications. I would say since All In started and became like a pop culture phenomenon, it's tripled the number of applications.

36:44And then we're now doing an explicit push to get to 50 ,000 applications a year. Well, most weeks have no problem hitting four or 500 applications, but I want to really get it to 1 ,000 a week. Now, we want 1 ,000 quality applications a week, and we do 100 meetings a week. So we pretty consistently will do 100 first calls, 15, 20-minute calls. The more calls you do, the greater the chance that you're going to find a really outstanding company. That is the nature of what we do in Silicon Valley and in the investing game. So I'm just trying to get to 50 ,000 applications. And then we stay in touch with folks, and we have three ways to invest.

37:23They can come to founding university if they're extremely early. if they're in year zero, they're not incorporated or they're recently incorporated, they haven't finished their product. Accelerator, if they have finished their product or close to finishing it, maybe have a couple of customers. And then the syndicate will do a direct investment maybe from our fund. And then we have the syndicate will send out high quality companies that are, you know, seed to series A. So we have three ways to invest. And if we can get to 200 investments a year next year and have 50 ,000 applications, that would be a pretty good number, I think, a pretty good balance.

37:55And so that's why we're saying no to good companies. We're saying no to great companies sometimes, which means if we do accept you, you're great to excellent in our estimation. And what we try to do is just figure out, will a seed fund or a venture fund lead around in this company either in this next round or in two rounds? Do they have that signaling? And I've developed quite an expertise in knowing what the signal is. Product velocity, deep understanding of customers, a kick-ass team that really is inspired and hardworking. So when you find those things, and then obviously the business model, the go-to market strategy, all those things will also matter, but team, product, customer, that little flywheel always wins.

38:43And we're humble enough to know that we're going to get it wrong most of the time. And it's a very humbling, hard business to be a venture capitalist. You have these incredible moments where I wake up and my top two investments of all time, Robinhood and Uber, if you put the two share prices together at$250, and I paid pennies for those shares. So you can do the math as to like, you know, six, 7 ,000 X, you know, on Uber. And I don't know what I am on Robinhood. But yeah, it's, it's humbling, because those are two of my first 100 investments, then there's 400 investments after there, will those other 400 investments turn into Decacorns, possibly, or, you know, Centurion, I guess, for$100 billion company.

39:31I, I had$200 billion companies in my first 50 investments. It's kind of crazy. A trillion dollar company that would be a thousand billion. So it'd be a millicord, I guess. Who knows? Yeah. Centurions, I think. Centimillionaires is what they call people worth over a hundred billion. Yeah. Versus the pathetic and miserly decimillionaires. They're so annoying. I know. They always think they deserve a parking spot. Unbelievable. Let alone millionaires. Oh, God. Oh, God. So brutal. Yeah. Don't mock the home team over here, Jason. More work to do. All right. Next up. So I'm really glad you talked about the three things you do, Angel University, the Accelerator, and so forth, because I found a really great question over on the startup subreddit.

40:21Oh, I love the startup subreddit. And I think it's actually a great question to answer in this context. So Jay First asked, what do these investors want? They say, Jason, they invest as early as possible, that they're pre-seed investors. But then the complaint was their first question is always, what's your MRR or monthly recurring revenue? And this person put out a really funny kind of like translation guide for venture speak. No traction required means you need traction. We invest in pre-seed really means we invest in seed stage companies that we're calling pre-seed. And then it goes on and on.

40:57But you're talking about the companies that you're picking that are the highest caliber for both Angel U and also for Launch Accelerator. So what is this person either missing or not fully understanding about what the VC sees? If it's a team that is absolutely spectacular, that has worked together before and has had previous success, they will invest before the product is launched. For everybody else, you have to compete for those dollars. So if an investor, let's say a VC fund, you know, a$300 million fund with five partners, They can each be on 10 boards, right? And there might be two or three funds in, which means net-net, they probably put 20 to 30 names in each fund.

41:39In other words, each partner, if there's five or four of them, is going to do five or six investments per fund. And then over two or three funds, they might have 12 active board seats or 10 or maybe as high as 15. So that's 60 board meetings a year, right, if they're quarterly. So keep that in perspective. They're going to do one deal. And if the fund is over three years, that means they're doing a deal a year. Maybe one year they do two, maybe another year they do one. But they're not doing a deal a month. Like we're doing two deals a week here because we're an accelerator and an incubator. And it's very different.

42:14So you're in competition with everybody else. If you're an unknown group of founders, first-time founders, the VCs probably got a line of people who have between$500 ,000 in annual revenue and$2 million who can't raise their Series A. And those people are really frustrated. So as frustrated as you are when you hear, oh, yeah, no, we'll invest pre-revenue, pre-launch. The caveat to that is if the team is legendary, if the team has had previous exits, if the team has an incredible skill and they built the most absurd product in the world, maybe. and it means if we can't find anything else, that's not a better bet.

42:58So you are taking what's on the website. Hey, we invest pre-seed. They probably have. Oh, we invest when they have traction. Okay, they probably do that the majority of time, but you have to understand who they invest in pre-seed, which is legendary founders with track records. I'm trying to find the original news coverage of Brett Taylor's company, Sierra, that raised a bunch of money, Jason, right out of the gate. As an example of how to get a lot of money early on, even if you don't have a product yet, Brett Taylor founded FriendFeed, which sold to Facebook. Then he became, he was high up at Facebook.

43:36Then he was almost co-CEO at Salesforce. And he's done everything, right? So if Brett Taylor walks outside and says, I'm starting a company, checks fall from the sky. That's not everybody. I think that's the issue. You're also obligated, Alex. If you made money with the previous founder's company and they have a new company, you're kind of obligated to say, okay, I'll see the new one. Oh, because they made you money. They're not expecting you to come back around. It would be rude not to. It'd be rude to turn down, you know, if you were Ruloff and the founder of YouTube started a new company or, you know, you'd be like, of course we'll back it.

44:10Right. Pretty hard to say no. And in fact, Sequoia, I don't think, invested in Tesla and they had invested in X and PayPal, right? So, you know, it's pretty good evidence that you should, unless it's a complete vanity project, and even if it is a vanity project, you're probably going to throw in$250 ,000. And you might say it's not in the funds thesis, the partner's going to get around it, but I'll personally put in$250 ,000 because you made me$10 million, right? So there's a little bit of that that goes on. If your friend stakes you in the poker game, you buy him lunch, you know? Yeah, something.

44:40Just common courtesy. Let's keep going. All right, next up on the docket, an update from our friends over at Figure, the AI robotics company, Jason. We've talked about them quite a lot over the years, not only because they just raised a$1 billion round at a$39 billion valuation, but also because we talked about their use of their robots inside of a B &W plant. Were they actually live in production? Were they just about to become live in production? We talked about the importance of not BSing your marketing. But the CEO put out a new video that I'm going to show you of their robot doing the thing we all thought it was going to do, repetitive work inside of a B &W factory.

45:14So Jason, for the folks out there on the audio version, tell them what's happening. Well, you've got a robot at a station with doors opening and closing and something being put in front of them for them to manipulate. Doesn't look particularly complicated, but it does look incredibly smooth. And it doesn't look like the robot is tethered, but it obviously is in a controlled box. Yes. And the big controversy in the Wall Street Journal story, and I'm not sure when that story was, but maybe it was in 2024. I see there's a story with them for their funding round, but I'm not sure if that's the BMW story.

45:54Anyway, this BMW story came out, maybe it was in the spring of this year, because figure robotics. April 2006. Sorry, April 6, 2025. So the founder, Brett, is obviously very talented. He has raised a ton of money. And there have been realistic questions of how do you raise$675 million? How do you raise a billion without having a product in market to our previous conversation? Well, he's gone the non-traditional route in who he's investing from, according to his tweets. He tweeted, you know, he's got a different pool of investors. They're obviously not valuation sensitive. There's been a lot of criticism about SPVs, special purpose vehicles, which we do at the syndicate, which is what AngelList does and other folks.

46:41We do it at an early stage. But these late stage ones, people just take 10 % of the money invested. In other words, they don't take carry. So they're like, you want to put$10 million into figure. I'll do that for you. I have an allocation. They go to a bunch of rich people and$9 million goes into figure and$1 million goes into that SPV person's pocket. and maybe the minimum check size is 500. So they get 20 people. And that's actually maybe a fair trade. If that 10 doubled in value, it'd be 20%. So you'd take 2 million. But those SPVs can upset VCs who want to invest in the company at a reasonable price so they can get 10 or 20 times their money.

47:23Whereas retail investors might be happy to just be in a fun name and tell their friends at the poker game, I own OpenAI shares. I own SpaceX shares. And if I double my money, I triple my money. And if it's as good as a stock market index or better, I feel pretty good about myself. A VC can't make a living because of all the duds in their portfolio in that way. So there's a bunch of tension. I think Figure has been caught up in that tension where these SPVs, and I think VCs are insulted by this concept that there are what they consider hucksters out there running running SPVs and running traffic between high net worth individuals or the dentist crowd, you know, and, you know, taking a VIG, you know, a percentage of the investment as opposed to being long term partners with the company.

48:11It feels transactional to them. But founders get to choose. And so do the dentists or the high net worth individuals who, you know, they fancy themselves stock pickers and they want to pick. I want to be in figure. It's their right. I want to be in SpaceX. I want to be in opening. I we talked about the 500 million dollar valuation for open AI. I could think of many different places to put your money that could get a much better return in public companies, you know, that you can just buy without having to pay a 10 percent onboarding price or a 5 percent onboard price or any carry. You don't have to pay carry when you buy stocks.

48:44So it doesn't make any sense to me. I would I would almost guarantee that if you took the investment in, I don't know, something like figure or something like open AI, and then you put it into the max seven, I don't think you'll see much difference in 10 years. No, no. Yeah. So at these high prices, because it's entry price matters. These low cost index funds that people now have access to are such an amazing vehicle for wealth appreciation. I don't think they get enough enough love. But Jason, Brett got back to you. You asked him very specifically, what's going on in this video. And Brett responded just a few minutes ago, actually.

49:25This is the Body Shop production line. Metal parts are picked up and loaded into a fixture that then gets welded together on the other side. So instead of having, you know, Eminem and 8 Miles standing there with the stamping machine, it's going to be our figure robot. And, you know, in his original tweet, he said they're doing this in 10-hour shifts. Not bad. Yeah. I mean, that 10-hour shift is probably predicated on a human monitoring it for now. And if they can do the simplest part of the task, which is aligning the pieces, that seems pretty reasonable. And then the other person has to do the difficult task, the welding of the pieces.

49:58That means they're only a couple of years from this robot doing the welding as well. And so. Can figure a Ford to have that still be a couple of years out? Because I'm bullish, but also I'm long-term bullish, short-term uncertain about these companies. I think if you raise a billion dollars and you're burning 100 million a year, you have 10 years of runway. So they can literally burn$10 million a month for 100 months. A billion dollars is a lot of money. 10 billion is a lot of money, folks. Wow. Yes. All right. I mean, it's almost, yeah. Or if that money is just going to last them a year, let's say they were going to spend that money over a year.

50:43They could spend$2.7 million per day. That's a lot of money. So I think that they have plenty of runway. And so they're in no rush. Thanks for Brett for getting back to us. Appreciate that. Yeah. Come on the show anytime. Brett, we'd love to have you on. We have so many questions about robots. Other companies in the space, of course, Tesla's Optimus, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Unitree, Aptronic, and the list, Jason, goes on and on and on. Billions of dollars invested. Space to watch. All right. I think Figure will be one of the top three. I think Optimus will be number one. Figure will be in the top three, four, five.

51:20And then you got a lot of people in China working on this stuff. So there'll be a lot of low cost folks in China doing this. All right. Next up on the docket, Jason, the benefits of on-shoring. You flagged an article from our friends over at the Wall Street Journal talking about how Sharpies, the pen that everyone likes, found a way to make their actual items more cheaply in the US, which was a surprise to me. What here caught your attention? Just the headline. I thought it was kind of funny that, you know, this is the least important product in the world to onshore. But the fact that it was able to be done cheaper in the US just led me to wonder why.

52:04Because the only cost difference I can think of is the shipping costs. And the shipping cost for pens doesn't, you know, it's not like a very heavy object, but it's a low margin. It's got to be a low margin business. And so I wondered if this was cap or not. And if this was being done as Trump bait, because Trump wants to on President Trump wants to onboard reshore and build factories here, I could see people doing it to curry favor with the administration. but I would think that this had to happen before. Oh yeah, this is a much longer project. If they've actually completed it. But, you know, it's, also the company seems to be a bit of a disaster.

52:51Their balance sheet, people were commenting on that. But what's the secret here? Why are they able to do this cheaper here? So a lot of work. So they started this project back in 2018. This is a facility in Maryville, Tennessee, a town that I'm not going to lie until this article I'd never heard of, Jason. But they've done a couple of things. One is they've invested in robotics and they've also invested in upskilling their staff. And the combination of the two has yielded a workforce that has lower turnover and higher efficiency. And so they're able to make products at a cost effective basis here in the United States.

53:26I think - So robots is the answer. Robots and more skilled humans. They did have a program to reduce turnover rate for manual jobs. and so I think they tried to reskill their staff so that they could support the factory versus just getting rid of the people. We've talked quite a lot about mentorship and upskilling people here on the show in the last 18 months as AIs come onto the scene. But I think that the thing that I want to show is just this picture from the journal. Sorry. And I love a good Sharpie. I'll be totally honest. I'm a Sharpie fan. I love the brand. I would never buy any other permanent marker because why would you?

54:02I trust a Sharpie. it's like a consistent brand promise sharpie it's like gorilla glue like i was ordering some double-sided tape from gorilla glue you know and like that really industrial stuff and i'm like why would i ever trust the amazon choice when gorilla glue is available or sharpie's available i don't want to buy the amazon basic i want to buy the real deal yeah it's because sharpie tremendous product um but this picture here jason from the world's two journal i think shows exactly You're saying this shows a woman working on a robotic, I'm going to guess, ink supply line of some sort here.

54:40And it's highly technical. But it does show that you can, with foresight, time, and investment, you can make stuff here at a cost-effective basis. I think the difference is that it's hard. Like, I bet this was not easy. It's probably very easy to get manufacturing spun up in China where there's a lower cost of labor and they already have more industrial machines set up for this type of work. but you can do it. It's a will question, not a how question, I think. Yeah. And if you think about people graduating from college or entrepreneurs, if I told you, you can design a product, have somebody else make it, and then you get to sell it and take 95 % of the profits.

55:21And the person who made it is like marking it up 5 % from their costs. Which business would you want to be in? You obviously pick the former, not the latter. And Steve Jobs had this same realization. It used to be, his machines used to be made in Cupertino. Then they were kind of assembled in Cupertino. And now they're designed in Cupertino. Foxconn, I think they're like a cost plus 5 % manufacturer. What does Foxconn make on the average phone? Like if the, versus what Apple makes. Apple, and I was, I literally was explaining this to my 15 year old about how, even though the phones are made in China or India or wherever, all the profits reside here in America.

56:07And so American workers like turning tiny screws and, you know, doing six days a week, 10 hour shifts, it's just, it's not going to happen all that often. Oh man, Jason, this is brutal. So I'm on, so Foxconn, I'm on their latest monthly earnings report. Just going to quote here, gross profit margin, operating profit margin, and net profit margin were 6.3%, 3.2%, and 2.5 % respectively. Which is exactly what I said. I was like, yeah, they make 5 %? Something like that? That's almost groceries. That's almost groceries for some of the hardest work in the world. Well, because if they don't make it, they know they can make it in India, or they can make it in Vietnam.

56:48And if the factory in Shenzhen can't make it, they can go to the one in Guangzhou. It's like there's massive competition for this labor. And you might be talking about making 10 million phones, in which case, if you're making 10 million phones and you're making$5 on each, yeah, it's a lot of money. I mean, if you're making 100 million, now you got a half billion dollars in revenue. It's good money. And if you've got more labor than you could ever use, it's great money. Ah, but that's changing. That's the interesting thing about the Chinese workforce is their past peak working age population, similar to things between Japan and so forth.

57:25So So I think when we think about the great investment and acceleration of robotics in Chinese manufacturing, it's not only making things more efficient, it's also, I think, fending off just having fewer bodies to throw out problems. Absolutely. Let's do the Deloitte AI slop story because we are running out of time here. And this one, when I saw you guys talking about it, I was like, oh, my Lord. All right. So Deloitte, of course, is a well-known global consulting group. If you know McKinsey, you know Deloitte. They are a private company, so you can't go look up their stock price. But they did get in trouble over in Australia because they got caught using generative AI, Jason, to put together a report that they charged in Australian dollars, 440K for classic generative AI mistakes, citing sources that weren't there, all sorts of things.

58:13But the real killing blow, if you will, came from the Labor Senator Deborah O 'Neill. She says that Deloitte has a human intelligence problem. The situation would be, quote, laughable if it wasn't so lamentable. And then she said, perhaps instead of a big consulting firm, procurers would better off signing up for a chat GPT subscription. I mean, that's what consultants are afraid of, being replaced by an AI chatbot. Yeah, what you're going to have to do, I don't think that these firms are going to go away like Deloitte. I think what they're going to do is they will start and they will have these tools, you know, deep research tools at their fingertips, it'll present them a bunch of information.

58:58Then their job is going to be doing first person interviews, acts of actual research, going to a factory, interviewing customers, all that stuff. Because if all the world's knowledge isn't just available online and your job as a consultant was to collate that information and make sense of it. Well, if the AI can collate, not just collate it, but they can also make sense of it, great. If they do a reasonable enough job, it's your job to check it and then start your work from that point, not just hit publish or send and then go off and, oh, sorry, blew that out. But then go off and, you know, I don't know, do like these video, what we see in these day of the life of videos where people are like, then I got a matcha.

59:45And then of course I went to yoga. And then of course I went to the salad bar. And then I met with my friends and we played foosball. You ever see these videos that they're on? I mean, I did it in 2021. I didn't know they were still making them. They're back. And the second I see one of those, you post one of those working for me, it's instant firing, instant. Like somebody make a day in the life working for me. And it's like, you see somebody's schedule. It's like, I met with four founders. Then I ate lunch at my desk. then I did a meeting with seven of my teammates to introduce founders to vcs to see if they can help close their round then I did four due diligence packages and then I collapsed at my desk and then I died and I didn't even get my matcha yeah like yeah I mean come on like the matcha bar is there for you to get to you want to get a matcha because you got a customer partner comes by the office and you want to hang out outside that's totally fine but get the matcha like let's get back to work you know take a little walk for 15 minutes but like it doesn't need to be like you could do yoga after work i'm not against yoga but what is yoga at work yeah like what world do you think is google in 2007 like like crazy everybody also also pro tip if you have a great life and you're getting paid a lot of money to not do a lot of work shut up like why why would you tell on yourself i've never had one of those jobs but i would and if i if i ever get one man And imagine we got that job.

1:01:06We do one podcast a week, but then we walk around and drink matcha lattes and get toasted bagels. Do you know what I would say? I would say in that situation, I would tell everybody, oh my gosh, I've never had more work to do. I am drowning. Yes, yes. Yes. Anyway. Don't cheat. Come on, guys. This feels like cheating. That's the problem. And this is where I think you're going to have to show your work going forward. and it's going to have to happen when you're in high school and college all the way to when you're, you know, if you can get a job at like a place like McKinsey or Deloitte, you're going to have to show your work.

1:01:48And the way that's going to work is in a document, they now have software in colleges where you write your paper and it doesn't let you cut and paste into the document. They've removed cutting and pasting. You have to type and you have to form your own sentences, which I taught journalists. I had journalists who were cutting and pasting other people's work, pasting it into the document and then editing a bit and they would get caught. And it'd be like, are you guys dumb? Like literally just if you read in the Wall Street Journal that BMW had the figure robot and they were testing it, but they wasn't in production.

1:02:27and then Brett said this on whatever, just say it in your own words. And if you don't know how to say it in your own words, you can just hit the speech to text button now, say it out loud, watch the text go by, and then clean it up. I mean, it's so, I don't want to use the R word on air, but it is so R word. What's going on here with people? You've been given this gift of a tool, an LLM that can answer any question. And then you decide, oh, that's how I'm going to do my job. I'm being paid money for it. No. If you can get that information in four minutes, the other 56 minutes of the hour is you improving it.

1:03:08Yes. Find something to do, people. I now get to use ChatGPT for a lot of small things. And you know what that makes me, I'm able to do? More things. All right. A better show. More facts. More answers. The dockets are longer. Instead of us saying, oh, we'll get you that answer for the next show. It's like, no, we're going to get it this show. We're going to check the source. Yes. But Jason, speaking of founders, speaking of use of AI tools, why don't we hear from a founder that used Gamma to create an awesome pitch deck that they want to show to you? Oh, I would love to do that. Is this our Twist pitch deck competition brought to you by Gamma?

1:03:39It is. It is our Twist pitch deck competition brought to you by Gamma. Yes. We're going to take pitches from 10 amazing startups and then I think we're going to invest in one of them, yeah? I believe that's the plan. And today we're going to have Ryan Yeneli from Next Visit AI. Ryan. Hi, Alex. Hi, Jason. How are you? Oh, you're in the accelerator, I see. Yes, I am. Beautiful. Oh, I can see by your background. Okay. So we'll get to hear your pitch. You ready to go? Share your screen? Absolutely. And we'll start your pitch in.

1:04:16Sure. All righty. Here we go. In. Search your time if it's okay. Now, before we get started, Ryan, you went to Founder University, our 10th cohort, and then you're in Launch Accelerator's 35th cohort, yeah? Absolutely, yes. Amazing. So when you came to Founder University, where were you at as an entrepreneur, as a company? I mean, after going through Founder's University, now being in the Accelerator, looking back at it, it wasn't even a company. before. It became a company once we actually followed everything that we were taught at Founders University. So just invaluable for us. Oh, great. So lots of blocking and tackling, incorporating, doing a cap table, accounting, all that important stuff.

1:05:10You learn some of those tactical things and then getting a product to market, obviously. Absolutely. Yeah. Hi, I'm Ryan Yinelli, CTO and co-founder of NextWizit AI. We saw burnout by doing the charting, so doctors can do the healing. I spent years going to doctors seeking answers and ended up hours away from my death because my care was fragmented. My providers were overloaded with paperwork, my history was scattered, and it resulted in my care being neglected. I'm not alone. One in four patient charts contain errors. Clinicians spend over three hours a day on charting, and this leads to burnout.

1:05:46I want you to meet Dr. Rathor. Before Nexfusit, he saw 16 patients a day, was burnt out, and had clinical errors. Now he sees 24 patients a day, saves time, and also saw a 30 % revenue increase. Here's how it works. Dr. Rathor selects a patient, starts his session, and next visit listens. Clinical data is built in real time with deep insights into the patient chart. When the patient leaves, the chart is finished and the notes reviewed by Dr. Rathor, then it's ready for billing. It's fast, EHR ready, and HIPAA compliant. Since launch, we've gained 311 users and have 68 paying customers, and our customers are addicted.

1:06:27We have 1.6 % churn, 24 % conversion, and a near-perfect MPS score. We've scaled to$9 ,000 MRR since launch. Our CAC is$189 with a$1 ,700 LTV, and our average revenue per user is$133 dollars per month. We're starting with behavioral health in the U.S. A two billion dollar TAM capturing five percent or 60 ,000 customers gets us to 100 million ARR. Most competitors are just scribes. We're a complete platform that providers trust. We provide real-time clinical decision support, build accurate data, and become irreplaceable. I'm a full-stack engineer with 15 years of experience in enterprise environments.

1:07:07My co-founder, Dr. Rafiq, is a psychiatrist with over 15 years of delivering patient care. We're next to visit AI. We sell burnout by doing the charting so doctors can do the healing. Thank you. Unbelievable. Incredible. I'll give a little golf clap here. A little golf clap going. That was perfect. A perfect pitch. You explained exactly what the problem was. You explained what the solution is and the opportunity in terms of the total addressable market and why you are uniquely and your partner, who's a psychiatrist, are uniquely qualified to do this. So this is as close to a perfect pitch as you can get If I were to score it, maybe 8.5 out of 10.

1:07:44I don't give 10. So 8.59 and 9.5 would be the three choices. I think making sure people understand this is for psychiatrists and psychiatry and that you're very focused on that. Because listen, it's only a two-minute pitch is what we gave you. So you can't get to everything in a longer pitch. Obviously, you would get into competition and the niche. But as close as you can get to a perfect pitch. And I do wonder if you're charging too little, but at$133 a month is what you're averaging. Alex, that's, you know, what are we talking about here? We're talking about almost$1 ,500 per year per doctor.

1:08:22They use it for five years,$7 ,500. Those doctors make a half million dollars a year. So you're not even charging 1 % of their total billable value. What do they bill out a year? A million dollars? Two million? I know from just our statistics that they can bill an extra probably$1 ,500 a day once they start using us, which is - You have to charge more. My wife is a practicing psychiatrist. Oh. Bro. Brian. I was on your site before, so I looked into this. This is what I was going to say, Jason, is$199 a month for unlimited notes for your Provider Plus plan is just too small. Not only can psychiatrists afford it themselves if they're in private practice, but if you tell a hospital, they can get 30 % more patients through one of their rare, hard to get providers, especially if they're a child psychiatrist.

1:09:14Man, that's worth two zeros more per month than you're talking for. Yeah, and I think the way to frame it is this is either another professional doing this. So this is your billing slash note taker. It's a salaried person. So it's$20 ,000 a year equivalent or something, or to do it per record, or to do it per billing. And so there's consumption-based pricing, which you might want to experiment with at some time, which is, hey, every time you do one of these, it's$10. And it's like, what is an average visit? $500? So that's not even, or$1 ,000? It's not even 1 % of$1 ,000 a visit. So it might be that consumption-based pricing would be better here.

1:09:57Either way, if you're undercharging for it now, that means, you know, that's why your conversion rate is so high. What are you converting right now, Ryan, in terms of from a demo to a purchase? It's a very, you know, it fluctuates a lot right now because last month we had a huge uptick in users, probably 300 new users. and what we're seeing is like now just this week they're starting to actually start paying for it ah so so it's hard yeah it's hard to know early in a startup so this is where you're this is like a next card you have to turn over as a poker game you know you've seen the flop but the turn is going to tell you like your conversion data get a lot more information on that turn card because 80 of the information is now on the board there's only 20 left to come that's going to be really important for you to understand is, you know, of this source, could be a conference, could be a referral, could be an insurance partner asking people to use it, whatever it is.

1:11:02It could be from a paid ad. Of those, how many actually take a demo? Of people who complete a demo, how many actually convert to paid? And then how do you convert them to paid? So I would say you do the demo with them. And then at the end of it, say, can I have your credit card and sign you up right now? We'd love to sign you up right now. Can I get your credit card number? I'll put it in. It's only$150 a month. You can cancel at any time. And then you might see your conversions. If you have the right people doing the onboarding, like founder onboarding, this is what Raul did. Now, Raul is very successful executive at Superhuman.

1:11:42And he did these himself. This way as a founder, he got that knowledge. And when he onboarded me as one of the first users and the first investor, he said, OK, and now that you've seen it, I'll take you. Would you like me to sign you up? I said, yeah, of course, I may. He signs me up. He goes, and he gets to the screen. He goes, OK, now it's time for your credit card. Can I have a credit card? I'm at Cyclast Coffee. I'm like, I just put$500 ,000 into this and you're going to make me pay 30 bucks a month? Absolutely. I gave him the card. I was like, absolutely, I want to pay for it. So I think they're going to absolutely want to pay.

1:12:09um since this is so perfect i don't have too much feedback from you for you you're also for a cto you're a gifted natural presenter did you ever do a little summer stock or something were you in the poetry slam contest what's the story ryan no uh i actually wasn't sure i was going to do on this because i just gave presentations in high school and that was really it but uh no i just really enjoy what we do. Like, you know, I'll get an idea at 3 a.m., I'll wake up, and I can't fall back asleep until I do it. Love it. I'm just very passionate. You know what we call that? We call that founder product fit or founder market fit.

1:12:48You really love the market and you're engaged. And that comes through in a presentation. You can tell if somebody's faking it and going through the motions. It's obvious you're not. So even though you weren't trained to be on stage, man, your enthusiasm came through, your excitement, your passion for this product came through you're going to do fantastic with this business i think this is going to be a tremendous success uh and i'm really excited that you allowed us to participate in it brian uh any questions for us any way we can be helpful or any questions about how the business is going i mean i would just ask if you were me you know what would you just obsessively focus on right now okay uh product and customer are probably the most important thing right now so that you have you want to have very low churn because keeping a customer that you've already sold is a lot less work than finding another customer and onboarding them as you probably learned so checking in with the people who aren't using it figuring out why figuring out oh do they need an onboarding in person or are they fine doing it over zoom you You know, there could be all kinds of different factors, but really studying the churn data and the engagement data, you can't go wrong.

1:14:06So look at that engagement data. How are they using it? How often are they using it? Did they do 10 meetings today and not use it? What happened? Was it they didn't like having their laptop out? Okay, maybe they need an iPad. Maybe they need an iPad mini is the best tool for this. There could be all kinds of factors. Maybe like their desk, you know, like turning their monitor around on their desk is uncomfortable or whatever. and they don't like that vibe when they're meeting with the patient. So you get them a small computer with a small LCD portable monitor and a Mac Mini underneath, maybe that form factor works better.

1:14:38So there's going to be little nuances like that. You could never go wrong studying the engagement data and watching a customer use your product. So that's where I would spend your time. Alex, any thoughts there? I think that's dead on. I'm just really curious to see what they can do with AI on the note-taking side, because doctors spend too much time doing it and the resulting product is trash. So if they can make it not only faster and more efficient, but also better, that's gonna make them, I think, an unstoppable market force because doctors hate notes famously. Just, they do them all the time and they hate them.

1:15:09Absolutely. It is the bane of their existence. It's like for salespeople, like updating the CRM. They're like, ah, I'm a good salesperson. Why do I have to do this? Like, I'm a good psychiatrist. Why do I have to do this? You know, it's like, wow, because you want to get paid. Yeah, because billing, that's why. Billing is kind of important. All right, man. Great job, Brian. And you can find out more at nextvisit.ai. Just so great when we have one of our founders come on because they've been in pitch training and you can learn more about Gamma. Where? How can they learn more about Gamma? If you're feeling inspired, my friends, head to gamma.app and start working on an idea of your own.

1:15:49And maybe we'll see you here on a future episode of This Week in Startups. We do it Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, Jason. There's always more twist on the way. Awesome. All right, everybody. Speaking of that, we'll see you on, is there a show tomorrow, Lon, or is it Monday, Wednesday? Okay. Back on Wednesday. We'll see everybody on Wednesday, October 8th. Go to youtube.com, search for This Week in Startups and click subscribe, hit the bell and get all the notifications so you can talk to us live. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Jason. Bye, everybody. Thank you.