Startup pitch competition! Jason invests $25K into one of three founders | E1932

0:00You have to ask yourself, well, if I'm not able to build anything and I'm not able to find co-founders. am I ready to be a founder? What I've heard candidly from other investors is if you can't find co-founders and you can't build a product, well, you failed the first two tests of being an entrepreneur. So just be aware of how you'll be perceived in the marketplace if you don't know how to build a product. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Wistia is the all-in-one video platform for business with tools that help you create, manage, and measure the impact of your videos. Try Wistia for free at wistia.com slash startups.

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1:28All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Everybody loves to know what startups are we investing in at my venture capital fund. The fund is called Launch. You can go to launch.co to learn a little bit more about our fund. We are a pre-seed and a seed stage fund primarily and one of the things we learned how to do uh early on was find startups um that were very nascent they were in their formation uh stage and we love to help those founders navigate you know all the blocking and tackling the simple steps that you need to get done in that first year or as we like to call it year zero when you're just getting ready to start up and so we created a product called founder university and founder universities i i like to refer to it as a pre-accelerator so before you go to y combinator tech stars or in fact our accelerator launch accelerator we like to have something uh and it turns out this 12-week course we created has been highly effective at least that's what founders tell us in helping them get started and And about half the companies that apply to Foundry University, they come to the program, not even incorporated yet.

2:41So with me is Presh. He's an associate here at Launch. He helps run the Foundry University program with Kelly on my team. Presh, welcome back to the program. You heard my little preamble there. Thank you, Jason. Good to be here. Tell everybody a little bit about Foundry University and maybe how it's evolved over the last couple of classes as we've invested more of our time and effort into running the program. Yeah. So yeah, as you said, 12-week program. We started cohort one, which was really we let anyone with an idea into the program. Then we evolved the program, each cohort slightly changing.

3:18And so now we're starting our eighth cohort, which starts just under a month, May 9th. Applications are still open for that. And with the eighth cohort and the last iterations, we've really been prioritizing builder founders into the program. And builder founders, we define that specifically. So that's like a combination of developer, designer, growth hacker, a combination, or all three. So that's how we define a builder. And we prioritize teams because we've noticed startups are hard. They are. Correct. Yeah. And so having a co founder, you know, makes things just a little bit easier, maybe even a lot easier, you know, especially when you have three people going after it, you know, two or three co founders, if somebody's having a bad day, bad week, or they don't have a certain skill set, you can rely on your co founder, or even two co founders, three seems to be the magic number.

4:11we see sometimes people start with four go down to two or three sometimes we see people start with one and that person burns out or you know just isn't able to raise capital or have enough talent in that organization uh to compete with the people who maybe have two or three co-founders so finding a co-founder is job one and being able to build something i mean what what have we found with solo founders and idea people idea people you know i have an idea but i can't execute on it what have we found with those startups historically yeah i think it's just lack of direction as well so the solo founder with an idea will come in um and then not really build anything in the 12 weeks and so that's what we kind of consider a failure of the program as long as you build something and you put it out in the world that's you know step number one um but the solo founders that don't do that's what we're not optimizing for kind way of saying it um you know we we have to place bets and so you have to ask yourself as a founder coming into it hey you're listening to this week in startups maybe you want to come to founder.university that's where you can apply you have to ask yourself well if i'm not able to build anything and i'm not able to find co-founders am i ready to be a founder uh what i've heard candidly from other investors is if you can't find co-founders and you can't build a product well you failed the first two tests of being an entrepreneur so just be aware of how you'll be perceived in the marketplace if you don't know how to build a product and gosh in today's uh world you're building your side hustle you have your your plunge app you're able to build it you have a co-founder and you've got product velocity the product keeps improving yeah that's right yeah and so you've learned this first and yeah yeah i mean i've kind of just taken the lessons in in the program from our our content that we do and done that as a kind of experiment alongside founder university so kind of dogfooding the founder university curriculum and product you can go see that is it go polar is the uh url yeah go polar dot app okay there you go you can go check out his cold plunge uh app and uh see how precious built it all right so today we're going to have three or four of the founders from this cohort pitch me and then we'll decide who we're going to invest in here live on the air right That's correct.

6:28We've got three founders lined up. All right, let's get started. I'm going to give them two or three minutes to pitch their idea, and then I'll ask them some questions. Sounds good. Okay, first up, we've got Jared from Umbrella Sports. Welcome, Jared. Now, Jared, remember, some number of people are only listening, so it's important that if you're showing something, that you sportscast it. In other words, explain what they're seeing on the screen. Okay, sounds good. All right, you're ready. Three, two, go. Hi, I'm Jared Lewandowski, founder of Umbrella Sports and creator of SmartGrip. Golf is hard, very hard, but it doesn't have to be.

7:03Introducing SmartGrip. On a mission to fix my own slice, I created SmartGrip to be discreet and effective, giving me more distance and confidence off the tee. We launched a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2022 to validate the idea and refine the hardware and sold hundreds of units around the world. The feedback has been incredible. We will offer two models. Our entry-level experience SmartGrip is available today, and it's permitted for use in golf tournaments by the USGA, giving us the unique ability to collect critical grip position and swing motion data while under pressure and compare that to practice data.

7:36And next month, we'll be launching a companion app featuring order tracking, a referral program, and an in-app subscription model with premium personalized content. With golf embracing technology and other sports industries already there. Let's talk about SmartGrit Pro, which will let golfers easily view and share their performance data with friends, coaches, and club fitters. Focused first on delivering an exceptional user experience, we will hit our first$100 million by the end of 2025 via B2C through hardware sales and subscriptions. But our biggest opportunity is on the B2B side, where we'll hit $1 billion by 2030 delivering tournament performance data and enabling software integration through exclusive partnerships with golf simulators and launch monitors and entertainment golf companies.

8:20Access to tournament performance data will also enable golf club manufacturers to make better golf equipment for competing under pressure. Professional and collegiate coaches will be more effective with their students, and with a smart grip enhanced fitting process, those seven iron warm-up swings at club fittings will be a lot less awkward. Our unfair advantage is my career as a product design leader, my love for the game of golf, and my co-founder's experience in global production and manufacturing thank you for your time and the opportunity to pitch today all right very good uh massive revenue expectations there 100 million by the end of 2025 a billion by 2030 we like the audacity um and so what you've built is a hardware device that attaches to a golfer's golf glove which are specific for that sport looks like it goes on the back of the hand and it must have a battery an accelerometer and some other sensors in it that let you track the swing and in some way you're able to use an algorithm or some machine learning to figure out what the swing was and then um maybe give some advice on how to improve it yeah this is the core product correct yeah and we built it first and foremost to be effective it solves a problem right now we see a lot of golf technology that tells you more about the problem but doesn't fix it for you at all got it uh where this will be immediately effective as soon as you put it on you'll hit better got it and uh it looks like it's 150 bucks for the regular version 500 for the pro is that per year per month per day one time fee uh how do you charge for the product here because it wasn't exactly clear yep that is for the hardware piece alone both units will be will have the same insides and so what we can do is if you buy the entry level and you decide you one of the higher end model, we can enable the data tracking.

10:12And then on top of that, we'll be charging a$99 per year subscription fee for that as well. It looks like the build of materials on this is not going to be super expensive, probably 10s of dollars, I'm guessing. Yeah, we have it down to around 3035 bucks to so I wonder why put this friction up front of a high price or have two different models? Why not just make it, you know, 20 bucks a month,$150 a year and call it a day and simplify the pricing? We've seen, being a golfer myself, I'm very familiar with the technology and the industry and what golfers are willing to pay. We're right in the middle, actually probably on the lower to middle end of where the price point for this type of technology when you're thinking about anything that can help you related to data.

10:58So TrackMan, for example, is$2 ,000 or up. So we feel like we're pretty competitive in our pricing and won't have any. TrackMan is a, it'll track your swing and where your ball goes it only tracks a six inch zone uh essentially just a launch monitor what's its hardware profile uh it uses a a video and a laser within it so it's able to track that six inch zone where you make the impact smart so this is like something you would install at a potentially yeah so you know what i'm saying that the product you're talking about that's two thousand dollars is a fixed installation it's not something you just strap yes as a wearable got it okay and you can't and to add to that real quick jason you can't bring it to you with a turn on it you can't bring it with you to a tournament put it up on the t-box after before every shot where we'll be able to capture that great awesome and so hardware is hard presh we normally don't invest in hardware but hardware enabled subscriptions uh we do have an exception for hardware is hard what have you seen presh in terms of the investment community when they see not only hardware but consumer hardware what are the lessons we've learned in that space yeah and before i answer that i actually also want to point out to jared was jared came to founder university cohort five oh with just the hardware got it um and no no kind of vision on the software side at that point and then joined cohort seven our latest one with more uh thinking around building the into a hass product has being uh hardware as a service got it as opposed to software as a service that businesses use what have we seen right fresh from the investment community when we introduce our founders you know at the pre-seed stage or seed stage when we email folks and say hey we've got this great hardware company what is the reaction typically yeah typically not not the greatest um for a specific reason of hardware being a one-time sale and having to upsell on different products over time versus, um, a subscription, right.

13:00Similar to SAS. Um, you get the hardware, which is an upfront fee and then a subscription model. That's going to be more predictable revenue for the company. And then investors like that, because, um, now you can see how that grows. Um, not having to continuously sell into the customer. Awesome. All right. Well done, Jared. Everyone quick shout out to our friends It's at Wistia. Wistia is the ultimate tool every marketer needs to supercharge a video strategy. It's a powerhouse for generating leads. And I want to tell you about one really specific feature that Wistia has. When you're playing a video, let's say it's a tutorial video, and it's teaching people how to use your SaaS product or even your consumer product.

13:38Well, a pop-up can appear in the video that says, for more information or to book a meeting, put your email in right now. This is transformative. You can't do this with other video players. That's why you use Wistia. You get to capture people's email addresses right in the video. You have to see it. It is going to increase conversions for your webinars, for your book demos by at least 10x. And Wistia is going to seamlessly integrate into all your tools, Marketo, HubSpot, Parodot. This means all those fresh leads are going to go automatically into your marketing platform. And you can take those leads and score them and then get them into your nurture flows where you're nurturing those leads and turning them into happy customers.

14:17Keep moving them through your sales funnel effortlessly with Wistia. They even let you add custom CTAs, calls to actions, to your videos to drive prospects to the next stage of your funnel. So if you're looking to elevate your lead gen, streamline lead nurturing, and enhance user engagement with advanced analytics, Wistia is the perfect tool for you. Wistia is everything a marketer needs to create, host, analyze, and market video. Try Wistia for free by heading over to wistia.com slash startups. W-I-S-T-I-A dot com slash startups. Let's meet our next founder. All right, we've got Linda from MasterTech.

14:53Okay, Linda, welcome to the program. You have two minutes to pitch. Three, two, go. Hi, we are MasterTech AI, and we're using AI to make auto repair faster, easier, and safer for shops and DIYers. Meet John. John is an auto technician working at an independent shop. Unlike in dealerships, John needs to be able to service any of the up to 60 ,000 unique models of vehicles that exist in the U.S. today. However, there is no current software platform that can easily aggregate all the information he needs. As a result, John will often only rely on his personal experience, and with a shortage of qualified technicians in the industry, vehicles are often misdiagnosed and repairs are done incorrectly.

15:38Introducing MasterTech AI. Master Tech AI will aggregate all technical service bulletins, community data, along with the vehicle's personal service history so that John can easily access all the information he needs to quickly root cause vehicle issues. Additionally, when it comes to performing repairs, Master Tech AI will guide John through OEM specifications and procedures with an AI conversational interface. To ensure data accuracy, we are finalizing licensing agreements with OEM data providers for all vehicles. MasterTech AI will also index the most relevant DIY demonstrations from YouTube, where parts, tools, steps, and warnings are extracted.

16:17This ensures that the job can be done safely and efficiently, preventing mistakes and comebacks. There are over 240 ,000 auto repair shops in the US. To get to 10 million ARR, we'll need over 2 ,700 shops. To get to 100 million ARR, we'll need over 27 ,000 shops. Our team consists of myself with 17 years of engineering experience at Microsoft and Niantic. My co-founder, Dave, has over two decades of experience in the auto repair industry, including only in operating a seven-figure shop. Thank you. We are MasterTech AI, and we're using AI to make auto repair faster, easier, and safer for shops and DIYers.

16:55Oh, wow. So, absolutely fantastic. Great presentation. organization uh you are taking all of the knowledge out there on how to fix cars you mentioned these bulletins that come out i guess these are things that um you know honda or tesla i think they do most of the repairs themselves but you know the hondas of the world uh the toyotas of the world they come out with these bulletins say here's what's wrong with the axle the transmission the engine spark plugs whatever it happens to be you want to put that into a language model and have technicians be able to ask questions. Hey, this is what I'm seeing.

17:32And then it would inform them, here are the possible ways to diagnose it or fix it. And then you also seem to say this would be also for DIY folks. So I guess consumers could go use this language model. The question always becomes here, press, how is this better or different than what you could do natively with you know gemini claude or um you know open ai whatever language model is out there so linda how will this be different than uh what i can natively do if i say hey i'm hearing some clanking from my toyota uh odyssey you know it's a 2017 model how is your system going to have an advantage over, say, ChatGPT?

18:17Absolutely. So the advantage that comes with any AI model or any sort of vertical AI application is with the data. Right now, if you go to ChatGPT or any of the other AI chatbots, you will get some generic answer if you ask those types of questions. But they do not have either in the training data or direct access to all of the OEM specifications and procedures. So So, you know, from my, you know, kind of all those things I've learned in this space, there's actually a vast amount of technical data that's specific to every vehicle, right? That's specific to the Yermic model and even beyond that, the sub model, the trim, the engine type.

18:57And these are things that could make a huge difference as far as, you know, how to do it correctly versus doing it incorrectly and causing the car to be in an unsafe state for the technician and on the road. So we are licensing actually the OEM data directly through a data provider from the OEMs. And we are finalizing the approval process. And we've gotten approved for majority of the data that we need. So we are able to leverage that data with our RAG retrieval so that we can get them the exact data for their vehicle. And so that's for the OEM procedures along with the technical service bulletins.

19:34So these are like known issues that are put out by the manufacturers. What would the interface for these be? what's the interface for the interaction is it going to be the mechanic takes out their smartphone and talks to uh or they type into their phone or do they wear ar glasses and record videos of what they're doing in real time what's the interface like for the mechanic the interface to start off with will be a web interface for the the chatbot so the technicians today often they will have a personal laptop that they use to look up information before they start the job. So this is where how they're looking out technical information today.

20:12So that's, we're providing a faster, easier, more accurate way to do that. They'll have a laptop open, they go to a browser, they ask the question there, they type it in, got it. And in the future, do you ever see, you know, people wearing a camera or something to that effect? Because it does seem to me, proprietary data would be very valuable if you can get this in the hands of 1000 mechanics. And let's say they were wearing AR glasses, or even just like the the the off the shelf, you know, cameras attached to a camera, a camera attached to their shoulder or something. If you could actually record them repairing stuff, my Lord, you could you could get some really good proprietary data.

20:51So just tell me about where you think this might go in the future. Absolutely. All of that is on our roadmap. So we're starting out with the web browser app experience. And then we're going to look to build a voice assistant, right? So these mechanics, you know, they're working on when they're actually doing the job, they need to be hand free from, you know, using a digital device. So the easiest, you know, kind of product to build next is to do a voice assistant, right, maybe a mobile, mobile app that that is voice first. And then really AR has always been our long-term vision. You know, the like Microsoft, you know, AR headset, one of their first demos was for, you know, technicians to be able to visualize all the specifications as they're twerking, like the specific parts of the car.

21:37And there's been a lot of like really interesting demos that people have like had together using Apple Vision Pro as well, where they have like YouTube running on one side with a demonstration along with some technical data. Got it, so HoloLens type thing. Yes. You could put that on and you could get some extra advice. And then there's a middle ground where being able to talk to the assistant and say, you know, I changed spark plug number four, still not working. And it maybe gives you another idea. Absolutely fantastic. How are you going to charge for it? What's the pricing? Yeah, so we are looking to be around$300 per month for these shops.

22:10And that's around the ballpark range that they're paying for similar kind of data providers for how they look up technical information today. Great. 300 bucks a month$4 ,000 a year. Sounds like a great pricing model. And is the product in market yet? Do you have anybody testing it or using it? So for our new MVP, we're launching it May 1. So this is what the OEM data. Yes. Awesome. May 1. We'll have some more information. So this is what happens at the pre seed. We have a vision, we have some mock ups, and we're trying to make a decision. Do we believe Linda's vision? Do believe she can execute with all this great experience at Microsoft and working in AR before.

22:48Well done, Linda. Elite performers have a secret and it helps them stand out in their field. You want to know what that secret is? I can tell you it's sleep. Whether you're an athlete, an entrepreneur, or you're just a career-driven professional like the people who listen to this podcast, quality sleep is the fuel that powers your success. Well, how do you get deep, restful sleep? Very simple. You do what I do. Eight sleep. I got two 8-Sleep mattresses. I never miss a night on my 8-Sleep, and they're selling more than just mattresses right now. You can sleep like a champion with the 8-Sleep Pod Cover.

23:21That's right. You don't have to get rid of your existing mattress. You put the cover on. It slips right on top of your bed and instantly transforms your sleep game. We're talking about dual-zone heating and cooling. So if you have a partner and you're both in the same bed, you know, one might sleep hot, one might sleep cold. I like it a little chilly-willy. And this smart temperature adjustment keeps you in your ideal zone for a deeper, uninterrupted rest. In other words, you set how you like it, but it adjusts the temperature to make you sleep more. This is really interesting science, folks. And this advanced sleep tracking will help you monitor your metrics like your heart rate.

23:52And if you can measure it, you can manage it. That's the secret of eight sleep and get that eight sleep pod cover. If it's any mattress, it's going to work well with whatever you got. And when you maximize your sleep, you maximize your potential, you know that. So whether you're having sleep problems, or you just want to optimize, here's your call to action. I want you to invest in the rest that you deserve. Go to 8sleep.com slash twist and get 200 bucks off the pod cover. What a great deal. 8sleep.com slash twist for$200 off the pod plus free shipping. Who's up next, Fresh? All right. Next up, we've got Alexander from Ellis.

24:25Okay. Alexander, welcome to the program. Tell us a little bit about what you're working on with Ellis. Hey, I'm Alexander, the CEO and co-founder of Ellis, where we help startups get customers. Oh, so imagine for a second, you're a business owner, you're a startup founder. And the first thing you want to do is go out into the market and try to get some customers. So you're going to try and do that with a cold email campaign. First thing you're going to do is work with the registrar to buy a domain. I hope you chose one with a great UI because you're going to spend some time manually configuring it.

24:55Work with one of these providers, demarking or postmark to have continuous monitoring in place so spammers don't use your domain. You're going to work with Microsoft private email or Gmail to get an actual inbox, and then warm that inbox up with instantly your warmup inbox. Now you're going to have to buy a MailChimp, SandGrid, or HubSpot subscription, set up the campaign, make sure that your campaign and all of your services are compliant with Google and Yahoo's new sender guidelines, buy a B2B contact database or find the people you're going to contact manually, and then glue all this together.

25:25And now you can finally go out and start an email campaign. But that was extremely exhausting. And when I first wanted to do this, I just wanted to pay someone that knew what they were doing to handle all this for me. So I built Ellis, a unified B2B email marketing platform that lets you reach out to leads like you know them. We automate all the setup I just mentioned. And we personalize every single email that goes out with AI. And our spam rates are less than two in a thousand of our emails go to spam. At the end of the day, that's a 5x better conversion rate for you than if you use the traditional templated email marketing system.

26:00We charge a monthly subscription and a credit for each person we contact. We never charge if your email bounces or go to spam. And it's 50 % plus margins on all of our accounts. In our first four months of launch, we've got nine customers, eight startups and an enterprise. And we've crossed 1200 MRR last November. Happy to answer any questions you have, Jason. Okay, you can call me J. Cal if you like. Very nicely done. I know this problem firsthand. I've had countless startups ask me how do we warm up our emails how do we not wind up in spam filters how do we do sequences that don't annoy people you know anybody who's in business right now you get far too many off-topic spammy feel uh you know sequences but sometimes you get a sequence and I get some that I'm like wow this is really interesting it is targeted I'd like to know more about it so i think what you're building um should uh because it's going to cost money and because it's not free you should get people who have real products real services and i guess you'll say no to people who feel spammy so that you can keep your service a little bit more high end what does it cost for somebody to use the service how do you charge 300 a month subscription and 500 for a thousand people to contact okay so 300 a month for a subscription.

27:18That's the baseline subscription for a one domain name, 10 salespeople, one salesperson. How does it work in terms of, you know, somebody using it for, you know, if you had 500 salespeople versus I don't know how many salespeople or emails you can send with a$300 a month version. So we work with startups. So we don't have any seat based pricing right now. That's just for your company. got it okay so you'll figure out when you get to larger enterprises how much to charge you'll have small medium large uh fresh you've done a lot of this kind of email sequencing before in your career um tell me a little bit about how you would assess this service compared to the franken service you would have to build yourself and you probably have built yeah um problems definitely there you know we do this for a lunch a bunch of launch domains had to go through a similar process.

28:14So that all makes sense. I think a lot of the interesting piece is not landing in spam and having creative emails that catch people's attention. So the combination of those two things, I think is what is really to outline here and why we think like Ellis is interesting. It's a huge problem. Everyone's doing for B2B companies, like you mentioned, you know, email is the primary source of communication there for all those deals. And so So as long as you can get in front of all the thousands of females you get in a day, there's like some insight there that I think is interesting. Love to see it just put all these services together, even, you know, like the zoom info, like getting the leads in there as well.

28:55So eventually, like, I think you can you really build the full sack here. Really fascinating. And startups are a great place to start selling into because they're resource constrained. They're clever. And they're willing to adopt new technologies because they're looking for an advantage over the big companies. And they're very promiscuous when it comes to trying new things or maybe seeking out new solutions so that they get an edge on their larger competitors who have more resources and can throw people or money or advertising. You know, a startup with five people, they may not have a bunch of cash laying around.

29:35So they will use services like yours. So really well done. okay so now i got to make a decision which one i would invest in um and so let's go back and forth through these um and tell me when we put it through the launch system of evaluating a company and the qualities we look for in a company candidly which qualities uh did each of these companies tick off let's go through each one and we have the reasons why we like to invest in a company. So what did our team come up with here investing at our firm is a team sport. But we like to make individual decisions. So we act as a team, when we deliberate on which companies to invest in.

30:19And then we like somebody to take ownership of that investment. So let's do the deliberation process here. Tell me about one of the companies and what were the things that you have of why we should invest and I'll challenge you on those. Yeah, okay, cool. So let's do master tech. The couple tags here, builder founders, that's Linda and her co founder, builders out what specifically? Yeah, yeah. So Linda is a was head of engineering at Pokemon Go at Niantic. And then also at Microsoft, I believe as well. So that qualifies to builder founders there. And she has a co founder as well. Okay, so there's co founders, we like that.

31:00and then she's an actual engineer is she writing the code for this startup because you know that's going to be my follow-up question you know sometimes we'll have uh somebody on the team will say oh it's a builder founder they're a developer but they're not actually writing the code for this company the last time they wrote code was you know when bill clinton was president you know they were a frontline coder we're looking for people who are writing code today so is she writing code yes or no yes okay fantastic so we have builder founders that's great um and we have two co-founders two reasons what else do we have in there of reasons of why we might invest yeah the other is a business model or a core what we call our core five business models um and so in this case master tech is a software as a service and that is what we consider our core five okay sas subscription pretty straightforward uh so we have three great qualities here out of the 13 that we look for currently some of the other ones would be um world-class design this doesn't have world-class design yet we would define world-class design in our rubric as um apple would feature it as the app of the day obviously we're not there yet um you know like com or robin hood level award-winning design so when we see award-winning design we might check that box off that's not the case here or for any of the companies here today yet we very rarely see that um had a previous exit before that's not the case here or have raised venture capital not the case here those are two of the other qualities we look for product velocity not yet the case here but they're getting there so we have three solid qualities and then conversely reasons to not invest what would be some reasons we might not invest in this company in your mind fresh yeah so i mean one is and you mentioned it earlier was can't other ai models just do the same thing if you give them the information um and so that might be a concern right these models are getting so good that'd be something to flag yeah yeah is how do you compete against what you can natively do great let's assess the next startup of why we might invest in the next startup so we we ask ourselves these two questions internally we try to have a dialogue this is an abridged version of it why we should invest why we shouldn't invest when we see two or three reasons to invest we get curious take second or third meeting uh let alone four or five or six reasons and when we see two three four or five reasons to not invest red flags let's call them um you know we may work with the founder and say hey we have these concerns what do you think right and one of the concerns might be there's an accounting problem or maybe they uh diluted the equity too much um you know uh you know maybe it's too competitive a fail to slow sell cycle to all different reasons of why you might not invest in a startup so let's do the next one all right next one let's do umbrella sports so jared's company another thing here builder founder uh you can see a theme here um jared was um led ux at a golfing company um prior and also has two other co-founders got it so we have multiple co-founders and uh at least we know one of them is a builder the other two are they builders or not you know they are i'm pretty sure certain there are uh one is a cto and then one is the product person as well so does a ct what i would want to double click on there is is the cto actually writing code or the other two founders writing the code when they say their product product manager that's not really what we're looking for in terms of a builder we're looking for somebody who actually He does the actual design, the UX, putting those pixels together.