Startup pitch competition: Jason invests $25K | E1714

0:00Today on This Week in Startups, three more founders from Founder University pitch their ideas for the chance to secure a$25 ,000 investment from Jason. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist.

0:44And Mayfair helps venture-backed companies protect and grow their cash automatically. Diversify where you hold your cash, increase your FDIC insurance coverage, and earn up to 4.35 % yield on deposits. Go to getmayfair.com slash twist to get started today. All right, everybody, welcome back to the program. Y 'all had such a great response to our Founder University showcase where I told y 'all I would invest$25 ,000 in one of the four companies and in the last one, three companies, that I thought we'd make this a regular thing. So if you haven't seen the pitch shows we did previously, we did episode 1703 and episode 1709.

1:33We had four people pitch me in the first one. And then we had three people pitch me in episode 1709. I won't spoil it for you. You can see which one I picked for the$25 ,000 investment. And why are we doing this? Well, I started my career writing 25K checks to founders who had ideas. So I thought we'd bring that back, but we put a little more around it. And what we put around it is something called Founder University. This is a 12-week program that we run three times a year. Maybe we'll try for four. We have 200, 300 people who join it each time. And we pick the companies that have performed the best in terms of building an MVP, showing us they can actually build product and they can meet with customers and understand customer need.

2:17once we see those two things if they've got two or three founders hopefully too and they can actually build product uh we're inclined to make the first investment in the company the friends and family round of 25k now of course we invest more as a firm but that's just the starting point with me again today is kelly schricker she is i'm pronouncing your last name correctly right kelly schricker yep i you know you've worked we've worked together for five six seven years I realized I never say your last name. Nobody ever, we all just say, hey, Kelly and whatever. So, and I have dyslexia. So it really is like, your name is kind of tough.

2:54So Kelly worked with me on inside.com, did operations. And then she wanted to be a venture capitalist. She's been working with me here at launch for just over a year. A little over a year. That's right. A little over a year. And Foundry University needed somebody to run it. So Presh and Kelly have taken over Foundry University. We just completed our fourth cohort. and we're working on applications for the FIP, correct? Correct. Yes, we are. Okay. Explain to people what we're looking for today because we started, we let anybody sign up basically, but now we're being a little bit more refined since we have so much demand for the program.

3:32What are we looking for and why? Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we're looking for is multiple builder founders in our ideal scenario. And the reason for that is we have got a lot of ideas in the world. And with ChatGPT and all these other tools, it's not hard to have ideas these days. And so we really want to see multiple folks who are all working on one problem. Maybe they have an idea. Maybe they haven't solidified that yet. That's totally fine with us. But as long as they're folks who have a skill set to bring that into the world, that's what we're looking for. from there as well we are looking for folks that have titles like developer designer ux ui sales and then ops kind of at the end of that list again folks that can actually bring the product into the market and get those early attractions taken care of yeah people um who can build product and if you're three idea people yeah we might accept you but we probably wouldn't be able to invest because we need people who can build product and ideas are easy execution is hard and people are probably overthinking um how hard it is to build an mvp in today's world with the tools that are out there bubble zapier and countless other tools you can build a product even if you're not a developer and if you can't find a developer to be your co-founder or a ux person or a designer well you might have failed the first test of being an entrepreneur which is convincing other people to come on the journey with you so founder university not for everybody if you're an idea person who can't uh get the resources together to build stuff you're going to be at a disadvantage so we're going to prioritize people who can build if we find developers specifically teams of two or more developers we're inclined to give them twenty five thousand dollars even at the early weeks of the program or at the start of the program if they have a great idea and they're just starting to build their mvp why developers have a greater chance of getting a product to market than non-developers so we have a massive bias towards developer founders and multiple founders that doesn't mean we won't invest in a solo founder there are great solo founders in the world but multiple founders means uh you're going to get more done and they have a greater chance of being successful all right so we have three different companies today they're going to pitch for two minutes i'll ask them a couple questions we'll talk about the merits of each of these companies and then we'll decide which one gets the 25 000 today um that will invest in the company.

5:57These are all from the fourth cohort or some of these from the first three? Correct. All from our fourth cohort of founder university. Fantastic. Now we are maintaining relationships with the first four cohorts. So we are emailing in a group way, the first cohort, the second cohort, the third cohort, cohort, and now the fourth and saying, hey, keep us updated on your business. If you make progress, we'd love to invest that 25k, maybe have you come to our accelerator where we put in a hundred thousand or even a direct investment from our fund which tends to be 250k and then we have the syndicate where we can expand an investment so you can apply at founder.university go to founder.university read more about the program there's a 12-week program there's a two-day program and there is a podcast and some blog posts to help you the tactical stuff but we're talking here about the 12-week program which is really the heart of what we do at founder university okay let's meet our first contestant on uh who's gonna get 25k from jacal sticker is the first company up yep sticker so shin you can come out yeah all right glad to be here i'll share my screen hey shin is here congratulations on graduating the program you have two minutes three to go my brother and i both used to play instruments but it was so hard for us to stay motivated to practice because they were such individual tasks.

7:23So we decided we wanted to hold each other accountable. And we said, let's send pictures to each other and send texts to each other to prove that we're making progress. And it was actually really motivating for a while until we started to forget to text each other. And we realized that it's really easy to get distracted from your goals. So that's why we're building Sticker, which is an app to create challenges with your friends so that we can actually accomplish our goals. So first you would create a challenge for any goal area. Then you would input how you want to measure the goal and how long you want the challenge to last.

7:56Then you'll add your friends as competitors and the challenge begins. When you log your progress, you'll also take a photo as evidence and these photos can be seen in a separate activity screen here. And when the challenge is over, the person who reached the most towards the metric that you selected is the winner. With Sticker, you have a dedicated place for social accountability. And we've also found through research that competition is conducive for motivation. And Sticker helps you do that very easily. And with Sticker, you can create any goals you want to have. So for example, your goal is to apply to jobs, you select job applications as your metric, and then you add your friends as your competitors.

8:35The duration of the challenge would be, of course, the recruitment season. So there's no other app out there or other platforms that can be the kind of natural challenges that can come up in natural conversations. And this is because they're either not engaging to remind you to complete your goals, such as docs or notes, and they're not competitive and you so you lose that kind of motivation aspect, or they're just not specific for your goal. So we're looking at affiliate marketing where challenges can when brands can create challenge templates and also a premium plan currently we're at mvp with 55 users on our wait list and this is our team with two developers and a designer and me as a product manager so at sticker we want to help each other become our best selves thank you all right incredibly well done i love this idea i use um the fitbit challenge with steps i was in another challenge where some friends and i who were trying to lose weight were all taking screenshots of our fasts inside of a fasting app called zero and i think they eventually brought those into the app.

9:50But not every app does this. And I started doing a push up challenge for myself. And I just created a Google sheet, but I would love to be able to create a push up challenge for my brother, or basically my two brothers and see if we could each do 10 push ups a day than 20. So I love the idea. I think it's great that it's an open ended platform. I love your idea of maybe putting in affiliate ideas, where I don't know, somebody like Gatorade could say you know hey start a challenge with your friends and whoever wins will send you some of this incredible uh you know liquid iv or element one of these uh those are our sponsors for our show better than gatorade i think um certainly much more healthy so tons of great ideas oh you could even you know do athletic greens hey drink your athletic greens every day these have really great potential so i love the creativity i've never seen anything like this in the field where it's an open platform for doing this and so there's a revenue model with the affiliates just if you could get critical mass and you throw in the athletic greens one in between two or three other ones where you throw in eight sleep for hey who can record their best sleep and then with apis you could build the eight sleep api into it or you could pull health data so what a wonderful great idea you said you had a couple of co-founders here tell me what do you do and And tell me about your co-founders.

11:11Yes, for sure. So I'm a co-founder as the product manager. So essentially, from the ideation phase, I was in charge of user research mainly. So talking to tons and tons of people, understanding exactly what the mental model is from wanting to have a goal all the way to pulling your friends in or family in, and then all the way to how you track those goals. So understanding this mental model is mainly my job and then directing the designers and the developers to work together. the designers of course mainly for the ui ux as well as the pitch decks as you've seen today and the developers are shipping the product and hopefully launching tomorrow great and how many co-founders is it right now there's two four co-founders fantastic listen it's 2023 the macro picture is a little shaky it's uneasy out there and tech is getting hit super hard.

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12:42One major customer, that could be the difference between your startup thriving or going away. So get it done right now. Vanta's going to give you$1 ,000 off because you listened to this podcast. Think about it. $1 ,000 off vanta.com slash twist you got to write that down put it in your notes vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your sock tube well this is great why do you want to be an entrepreneur why not just go get the easy money why not go work at google or facebook i mean i know they're both firing people right now but theoretically why not just join a big company and get a huge check as a product manager of course so being an entrepreneur i think specifically for this company is really meaningful to me going back to the story that i told at the beginning of the pitch it's important just from a personal standpoint i want to bond with my brother better having this sort of app allows me to bond with my brother who's back home um many many miles away and so i think that this is a wonderful tool for people to connect um in a time where it might be harder to connect because of geographical um you know different places that you're living in so i think from a personal standpoint i just think that this is solving a problem i think this is helping people become more fulfilled in their social lives.

13:52Fantastic. This is incredibly well done. Did you have a good time in the founding university? Yes, of course. I learned a lot. Awesome. Did you sincerely learn stuff or was it just some people tell us like, oh, I knew a lot about entrepreneurship. I knew most of the stuff you were teaching. But it was the 12 weeks of like, having to commit and, you know, submit our progress every week and the accountability. So which which was more important for you, the accountability of the program, or the information program or equal? I think definitely the information helped. I think, you know, it set me in kind of like a product thinking perspective, but definitely emailing Kelly every week, understanding, you know, that we have to be shipping products, shipping kind of updates quickly.

14:34I think that really helped our team as a whole to continue working throughout the few months. Well, pace matters and speed is why little companies beat the big slow ones. So I think you'll learn some valuable lessons that are amazing. Let's meet our next contestant on who will win. Jake House 25 Dimes. Okay. He's our next contestant. Shin, you can turn your video off. We will have Joe from Outmost next. All right. Here we go. Big Joe, how you doing? Good. How are you doing? I'm excited to see your presentation. I've heard great things about you. Three, two, go. Hey, my name is Joe and I'm a co-founder of Outmost.

15:11Outmost is an online marketplace for securely buying and selling high quality used outdoor gear. It is a community of people who are passionate about human powered sports. Meet Emily. She's looking for a pair of used vans and few snowboarding boots. And like most adventure seekers, she's discerning about her purchases and cares about sustainability. Emily checks Facebook marketplace and Craigslist and the experience is horrible. Nothing of quality is available in her area. Scams are prevalent and it seems like no one knows what they're talking about. And then Emily discovered Outmost, and she found an incredible selection of high-quality outdoor gear sold by other adventure seekers.

15:46On Outmost, she found those vans she was looking for in her size and in like-new condition. Sellers post for free, and they're paid instantly once their gear sells. Users communicate directly with each other, and everyone is covered under the Outmost protection guarantee. There's a 10 % commission on every sale, and that's a key source of revenue for Outmost. The demand for resale services is evident in public markets, and consumers like Emily are increasingly turning to online platforms. Consumers are demanding sustainability, and influential outdoor brands have responded with buyback programs.

16:15Unlike them, Elmos offers a wide range of products from various brands. Elmos is currently available in over 10 cities across Canada and the United States, and the community is starting to sustain itself. Our go-to-market strategy has helped generate over 200 listings and 5 ,000 site visitors. our business has been validated and is showing early signs of product market fit. At our current velocity, we're projecting Elmos to earn a net revenue of$17 ,000 in 2023. By Q4 2025, we anticipate$60 million in gross merchandise value and$6.5 million in revenue. Based on feedback from our community, including you, Jason, we are pursuing these initiatives, which are going to help us reach our goals in 2023.

16:54We are still understanding the true bottom-up TAM, however, high-level statistics suggest there is potential for a unicorn company in this space, and it will be Outmost. The team behind Outmost is comprised of decades of experience in outdoor recreation, retail technology, and we have strong board of advisors committed to our success. Thank you. Great job. I had seen this idea from you a couple of weeks ago when I did a session with the founding university founders, and it looks like the product has gotten better. Maybe a little design refresh, or you've evolved it a bit? a little bit for sure i think also the um the last time i worked on this deck it was from uh the nicu on my phone so it wasn't as as polished but oh you had a baby i had a baby and so that's a graduation is every everybody good now or still in the nicu everybody's good yeah everyone's home mazel tov that's incredible um thank you so uh you have uh how many co-founders in this company two so we have uh there's myself two or you and your and your co-founder me and my co-founder got it yeah and you are one of you a developer or both of you uh both of us so the two of you um ones you're both developers did you work together previously no we actually met at yc's uh co-founder match oh fantastic great yeah yeah it's it worked out really well so he's he's taking over the technical lead it's been me up until now really this started off as a project and it's just really grown kind of out of control now to the point where i'm i have a business on my hands and it's demanding all of my attention but he's taking over the technical lead and he's been on board for the last couple of months and he's really actually has some pretty grand didn't get in but you got into founding university uh i actually didn't apply to yc because presh pulled me into this course so this is why well nobody listen our hope is you know with founder university is that a hundred percent of the graduates go on to make great products and apply to yc tech stars and our accelerator and uh we just want to see people be successful so i think actually now with uh what you've accomplished already you have a good chance of getting into a yc or tech stars or even our accelerator so tell us tell us a little bit about why you're so passionate about this space are you an outdoorsman oh yeah that's i think that's probably the uh a good place to start is this is you know i spent all of my time all my free time skiing and biking um i used to be a guide i've worked in uh outdoor retail like the canadian version of one of the challenges with gear so i'm an avid skier as you know today was my 32nd day of the season so i will hit hopefully knock on wood if i stay healthy my 40 day goal um but what are the what's the nature of skiing gear of other mountaineering gear climbing gear whatever it is that you're going to have on this site that makes it unique what unique insights do you have into this space that we wouldn't know what's the number one insight you have into the resale of this equipment and these people i think generally it comes down to knowledge and it comes down on comes down to who you're buying this from if you're going to go and buy used gear from somebody you could go to facebook marketplace you could go to craigslist and you might meet someone's aunt who's selling her, you know, her son's or her nephew's gear in their garage.

20:18But if you're actually buying gear from somebody who knows what they're talking about, they've taken care of the gear, they can tell you all about the gear. If you're making an expensive investment, or if you're buying something that's, you know, well over$300 or$400, you want to make sure that it's in good condition and that the person you're buying from knows a little bit, knows a thing or two about the product itself so i think in short answer the community is and then is tied to the quality of gear that we have do you build a community of these like-minded folks and deal with reputation and people returning stuff etc what's your plan there so i guess i'll start with the returns first i think risk mitigation is probably one of the largest um potential expenses worked into this business model for example if we have to deal with fraud if we have to deal with returns if there is a dispute um we're going to handle that on a case by case basis and so far that's how it's been handled um pretty rare that it happens also we're you know we're still we're still scaling um so yeah i think it's it's really just a matter of case-by-case basis yeah all right well done and uh the program for you what did you get out of the program if uh you had to mention of you know one or number one and number two things you got out of the program i think honestly it helped filled in it helped to fill in cracks in my knowledge and my understanding i came into this with having worked at a few startups i've worked in tech I've listened to podcasts like yours for years.

21:59I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of things. And I guess the, um, the quality and the, and the quantity of content in the course, there was a lot of it that, you know, was, wasn't news to me, but there was a lot of it that had me checking myself. Um, I think I was, yeah. Can you think of a moment where you checked yourself specifically, like some piece of information or some thought bomb, you know, exploded in your lap?

22:26um i can't i can't say i can think of one specific thing but i think that's a pretty reoccurring narrative that happened throughout the whole course like every single day opening up the curriculum you might see a full page on a certain subject and you feel like you're the you're the expert or you know it or at least you have a pretty good sense but yeah filling in those cracks really really helped so everything from this i mean this entire pitch deck um you know that was based on the outline that was provided here. How do you, you know, prioritize the kinds of kind of information you put in the deck, what you're focusing on, how do you prioritize and your MVP, these sort of things.

23:04So prior, you know, customer feedback, that's actually probably one of the biggest things I took away. Awesome. Yeah. Getting customer feedback, super critical. The March to 1 billion users continues for our friends at LinkedIn. 875 million people are using that platform. them. Wow. Let's face it. It's been tough here in tech. There's been a recent surge in layoffs. And that means there are insanely qualified people out there on LinkedIn looking for work. And they're looking to work hard and even join startups like yours. So the stakes are high right now. You need to get great people into your startup.

23:38And all of this talent is flooding the market. So what I want you to do is go post your first job for free. That's right. LinkedIn knows what they're doing. They're going to show you how great this product is. Go to linkedin.com slash twist to post your first job for free. That's it, nothing to lose and everything to gain. What if you get that bar raiser, the person who knows more than you about the vertical they're working in, whether it's sales, UX, marketing communications, growth hacking, HR, accounting, whatever it is, now is the time to get that person and LinkedIn is where they're waiting to meet you.

24:10When I say LinkedIn jobs, I want you to just think better can today, it's faster. Let's do it right now. A little neuro-linguistic programming here. linkedin jobs better candidates faster better candidates comma faster a little pausing better candidates faster linkedin jobs linkedin jobs better candidates faster do what i do go to linkedin jobs and find qualified candidates faster post your job for free linkedin.com twist that's linkedin.com slash t-w-i-s-t to post your job for free terms and conditions of course apply because they're giving you something for free let's meet our next contestant on who's going to get 25 dimes from jacob next up we have cam with pay squad and cam we can see you excellent hi jason hey cam how are you nice to see you guys all right three two go kira i'm cam founder of pay squad we've created a group payments option at checkout so you can easily split the cost of your cart with others meet kelly she's shopping online for her best friend's 21st birthday kelly doesn't want to just buy something lame but she also doesn't have the money to buy the kayak she knows her friend really wants.

25:12Luckily, she sees the pay with PaySquad option is available at the checkout. He only answers a couple questions, makes her own contribution, then sends a simple link to other people who may be interested in contributing as well. When they click the link, they can immediately see where the item is being bought from, how close they are to the target, and who has already contributed. No app download required. In no time, the total is reached, PaySquad pays the merchant, and the item is shipped. Her friend will be stoked. 29 % of Gen Z split the cost in scenarios like these every day, and this is being accelerated by inflation.

25:42However, visual wallets and bill splitting apps fail to solve pain points in a way that's globally available and actually includes the merchant. By actively including merchants, PaySquad increases their cart sizes and helps extend reach. Rather than only seeing one customer in the transaction, they have the chance to connect with many, reducing CAC. It's like a firm, but for groups. You could call it a buy now pay together. Our business model is similar to buy now pay laters, where we charge a commission fee to merchants for every successful sale. We achieve better net transaction margins because we don't require lending credit.

26:13Since starting FounderU, we've launched our MVP selling over$2 ,000 of product to over 100 users, earning a 3 % margin, signed up three merchants with several more in the pipeline, and connected to a global integrations partner to speed up our go-to-market by helping onboard merchants in the five main e-commerce platforms setting up massive network effects. Our path to 100 million starts with retail checkouts, where we aim to capture 2 % of transactions in 100 retail merchants in the next 12 months before expanding to group ticketing and travel verticals, then moving to a fully hosted marketplace with card issuing.

26:44Our founding team has built and scaled banking, billing, payments, and financial education apps. I'm Cam from PaySquad. Let's get checkouts out of single-player mode. okay well done so tell me about the transaction you said you had a hundred folks do two thousand dollars i think uh worth the transactions what were the different scenarios and has that taught you something about maybe a beachhead market for you to go after first it was indeed and the majority of them were people that we didn't know at all um and that was kind of the beauty of it how did you acquire them uh the we had a couple news articles about us being involved in in founder you actually that went out um here in new zealand and uh and so people oh so press to pilot customers press the pilot i like it yeah yeah and so we had um groups that were splitting the cost for their kids coaches for end of year um gifts we had uh groups of co-workers who split the cost for end of year presents and we even had a a big 30th birthday thing where people split the cost for a big gift okay fantastic and so you're you're a new zealand based entrepreneur yeah yes what's the startup scene like there is is there a dynamic startup scene or do people look at entrepreneurs there as like weird mutants a bit of both we have our home runs like zero and push pay and bend and a few of these massive ones but it's it's scrappy you know there's a saying here called number eight wire where we can build something with very little resource and make it and scale it to the world so we're kind of a kind of view ourselves as underdogs with a bit of a chip on our shoulder what does this expression mean you said number eight wire yeah it's a type of wire that's used for like fencing and just tying things together and this is sort of the mentality that we have number eight okay so you'd be like saying duct tape and chewing gum here in the united states like we slap this thing together yes i like it okay very good um and for you what's your background what makes you super qualified to pursue this if it's um it's in growth marketing uh and in product management as well my team and i have built you did growth marketing before yes yeah what was the most successful thing you ever did as a growth marketer financial education app uh scaled it from 15 000 users well over 19 sorry 1500 users to well over 19 000 um inside eight months uh did that as a consultant or as a friend startup or you worked there uh first employee uh first employee yeah and um and that was that for two things the financial education aspect really gave me a passion for the financial space and helping people make better decisions so one of the things for pace squad is leveraging young people's connectedness rather than their than their impulsiveness all right well done all right kelly this is a difficult one i spoke to presh um and i'll just have you give your ranking of who if i could only uh give 25k to one uh who you would give it to two and three okay here we go uh pay squad was precious number three who's your number three kelly my number three is sticker okay your number three sticker pay squad is precious okay and uh you're number two kelly pay squad okay and precious sticker which means you both picked outmost as your number one why do you think a marketplace uh for sports gear is the best idea and what or why did you pick that company yeah absolutely i think specifically in looking at outmost and thinking about what's going to have the best return for us you know this is a space that is incredibly proven right consumer marketplaces focusing on secondhand items have just a ton of traction and doing a little bit of research i found that um poshmark for example has over 70 million users and a gmv of 4 billion which is just crazy uh and i think really that's unbelievable yeah really nuts and i think what is driving this you think when you look at that space uh i'm checking your analytic ability here as an investor now you're one of my mentor i'm one of your you're one of my mentees i want to say that you're one of my padawan here i'm teaching you trying to teach you how to be a jedi uh investor what is it about that space when you think of the mental model um or the factors the why nows why is poshmark and why are these marketplaces you know working now what is it about yeah i think there's two reasons that that i've been looking at one is the sustainability aspect has just become so relevant in pop culture.

31:34So I think that is playing a little bit to what's going on. But I think the more structured and the more intense why now specifically is around, you know, the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. And, you know, folks aren't sure if the next few years are going to look like the last few years in terms of how much money is in their bank. And so I think people have had this appetite for nicer quality products, you know having hobbies that maybe they couldn't afford previously and now with all of this uncertainty the layoffs unsure on on home prices and where that's going to go you know folks are becoming a little bit more uh tight on where they're spending and so i think there's a really incredible why now here i really like your analysis uh this is why you work for me you've really thought this through you did research and you came with a prepared mind today and that's one of the things i learned uh from michael moritz and doug leone and the sequoia squad was hey have a prepared mind the prepared mind would tell you yes people austerity measures are in people's minds and there's a couple of generations that really care about not wasting uh clothes or products and to them the idea of um being able to use a snowboard or a gopro that's previously been used um to them they think they're helping the planet by not buying it new and unboxing it again whereas maybe my generation gen xers we kind of really wanted to have disposable income and be able to afford stuff and we wanted to own a bmw or mercedes or whatever it was uh or you know and the whole yuppie movement was about being a young urban professional and having that disposable income now maybe people look at it a little differently and i think those are two really great observations uh when we look at these companies and the nature of the companies and the teams.

33:21Now you made your decision, I asked you always to make your decision, what's in the best interest of our LPs. So we're clear, we're a finance company. We are not a feel good startup, we're not a content company, we're a finance company. Our job is to get a maximum return for our limited partners. And I have to repeat that often, we're not picking companies to make ourselves feel good or give ourselves a participation trophy, or because of diversity, or any other reasons. We want to see diversity and all this kind of stuff. But what we need to do to be in business is get returns for LPs. No returns for LPs.

33:57There's no business here. So we have a very specific mission, return the maximum amount. What about each of these teams as we go through it has impressed you? Because you are running the program and you've met with them. So maybe you could just say a little bit about each team. Yeah, absolutely. What's impressed you about each of these teams and how do they fit into our mental model and framework of teams we like to back? Yeah, absolutely. So Sticker specifically has multiple co-founders and multiple builders on their team. They've had really great product velocity throughout the program and they are also within our core four as all of these.

34:33For anybody listening, our core four are the business models that we like to invest in here at launch. And so they fit nicely into that thesis that we look for. Moving over to Outmost, next up, we, you know, kind of similar. They have the builder on the team. They've had really great product velocity and they've got some early users on the platform and have been listening to those customers. And so during the program, that really jumped out at me as I got to know them. And then last up, PaySquad. Again, very similar in that core four model. I know he, the founder, Cam, is not a builder himself, but he does have that growth background.

35:08And I think you'll be the one that, you know, once it's built and is a usable tool, and it seems like it is, that he'll be able to scale it pretty quickly through the early days. When you're a founder, priority number one is hitting your payroll. This means you need fast access to cash, no matter what goes down. So startups need to hold their money in more than just one FDIC and short account. We all know that, right? Been pretty choppy out there of late. So let me tell you about Mayfair. Mayfair is a cash vault powered by Stripe, And it's built for startups looking to diversify and grow their funds automatically.

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37:05Product velocity, and it assumes some amount of quality, not spastic, like just throwing stuff against the wall that's ugly. But even throwing stuff against the wall that's ugly is better than not having product velocity. So product velocity is super important because the teams that move faster get to try things, they get to learn more. Then having multiple co-founders means you have redundancy inside the company and the founders don't pay themselves often in these early stages so the company doesn't go away when you have a solo idea founder and they have nobody around them who can build what happens they raise a little bit of money they give it to a dev shop and then it's over and then they need to constantly go back to the well to try to get some more money it's possible you you could be an idea person like i would say adam newman from we work is and now flow and you're just super charismatic you can get people to give you tons of money and hire hire that expertise but not everybody can do that so So in an early stage, it's important to have builders.

38:01And we like to back builders. We think they have a much higher degree of success. And then, you know, business model matters. So you have a marketplace here. You have sticker, which would be either consumers would pay or it would be affiliate slash advertising, marketing based. Got a social network aspect. Consumers might actually pay for that product. I think I would. And then you have pay swap, which is finance, right? So the major business models that work and scale and scale violently are subscription, people paying for software, either consumer subscription or enterprise. They have fintech and they have marketplaces.

38:39Those core four always seem to perform. Now, we don't limit ourselves to those. There could be other business models like data and affiliate and advertising. advertising but the big four we mentioned there tend to do really well um in terms of getting the flywheel going so now comes the hard part it's time for me to assess what i think of each of these i will be candid with each of the founders who can now turn on their cameras candid with each of them if they give me permission to be candid so as part of the program i always tell people i can sugarcoat it i have now learned how to sugarcoat it and throttle myself but i always want to be that partner you have in your company uh where i am brutally honest with each of you give me a thumbs up if you're cool with that i just want to make sure nobody's gonna get their feelings hurt here okay good that of course is a test if you can't take brutal feedback you're gonna fail as an entrepreneur so uh that was just the first test you all passed congratulations Congratulations.