In short
Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - E1745
Episode Overview
- Title: Viral fundraising tactics with Rewind AI’s Dan Siroker + How to build a strong brand
- Host: Jason Calacanis
- Guest: Dan Siroker (CEO and Co-Founder of Rewind AI)
- Additional Speaker: Scott Bair (Lunour)
- Main Topics:
- Innovative fundraising strategies
- Building a strong brand identity
Key Sponsorships
- Merge: API service for app integrations.
- Embroker: Startup insurance program.
- Hyperice: Health and recovery products.
---
Segment 1
Dan Siroker on Fundraising Strategies Overview
- Dan Siroker shares his unconventional fundraising approach by publicizing his investor presentation.
Key Points Discussed
- Public Pitching:
- Issued a public investor presentation to build trust and efficiency in fundraising.
- Received 1.7 million views and over 1,000 preliminary investment offers.
- Valuation Insights:
- While Siroker received offers valuing Rewind AI at over $350 million, he chose NEA based on their longer investment horizon and strategic alignment.
- Commitment and Due Diligence:
- Outlined the importance of relationship-building with investors and performing thorough diligence.
- Revenue and Growth Expectations:
- Currently has 15 employees and $700,000 in annual recurring revenue. Aims for substantial growth, projecting a possible $32 billion market opportunity.
Takeaways
- Focus Beyond Valuation: Emphasizes the importance of partnership over mere valuation.
- Market Awareness: Importance of understanding market dynamics through public fundraising.
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Segment 2
Demo of Rewind AI Overview
- Dan showcases Rewind AI's capabilities, focusing on its privacy-first approach and unique features.
Key Features Highlighted
- Memory Augmentation: Captures everything seen, said, and heard on desktop, creating a searchable repository.
- Privacy Considerations: All data is stored locally, maintaining user privacy.
- Integration with AI: Uses GPT-4 to generate context-aware emails and summaries based on past interactions.
Concerns Addressed
- Privacy Issues: Discusses legal implications of recording and how to ethically manage disclosures.
- Surveillance Fears: Reiterates that the tool is not designed for surveillance but as a co-pilot for individual productivity.
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Segment 3
Scott Bair on Building a Strong Brand Overview
- Scott Bair discusses effective branding strategies for startups.
Key Points Discussed
- Branding Fundamentals:
- Branding is not just a logo; it’s about how customers perceive the company.
- Brand Strategy Pyramid:
- Elements include purpose, mission, vision, values, and visual identity.
- Visual Identity:
- Importance of a logo that is clear, scalable, and memorable.
- User Engagement:
- Establishing a strong first impression through effective website design and user interaction.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on Purpose: Ensure branding aligns with deep-rooted values and mission statements.
- Clarity and Differentiation: Brands should aim to differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
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Conclusion
- Rewind's Ambition: Dan Siroker aims to redefine personal productivity and memory augmentation through innovative AI.
- Branding Insights: Building a strong brand requires clarity in purpose and consistent customer experiences.
Additional Information
- Follow Dan Siroker: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dsiroker)
- Check out Rewind: [Rewind AI](https://www.rewind.ai)
- Follow Scott Bair: [Lunour](https://lunour.com) (Branding Studio)
---
Note: For more insights, you can explore additional resources shared in the episode and consider applying the discussed strategies to your startup journey.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You know, my first advice would be not to fixate too much on valuation. I know you've asked a lot of questions on that. It was actually not really the critical thing I was focused on here. It was really around the firm and partnership. Sure. You've also focused on the next one or two years. I'm thinking much longer time horizon. And that's one of the reasons I chose NEA. Their fund structure is very unique. They have a 15-year fund, not a 10-year fund. They're very often buying at the IPO, not selling. So that horizon is kind of what I was really looking for as somebody who wants to be doing this with me for a while.
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1:27hey everybody welcome back to the program we've got an interesting interview lined up for you today i'm joined by dan sirocco he is the co-founder and ceo of rewind ai it's been viral for a tweet about how he raised his last round of capital dan welcome to the program explain how you raised money for your startup. This is the most innovative thing I've seen in a long time. And I've been around a long time. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me, Jason. We did something a little unconventional, which is we put our investor presentation out publicly. And the reason to do that was inspired by a couple of factors.
2:06One was that AI is hot right now. I And we've been getting inundated by investors who want to meet. And I realized that instead of just meeting with folks and repeating myself, it'd be much more efficient to share what we've been doing. The biggest reason we thought that would make sense was because it would really build a lot of trust with customers. As we'll talk about, my product really requires customers to trust us. We take a very privacy-first approach to how we solve the problem. and by sharing our metrics, our deck publicly, we thought at minimum, it would build some customer trust. Turns out it also got us a great outcome in terms of the fundraise as well.
2:48Got it. So you raised a couple hundred million dollars in your career. You're not a first-time founder and you put the pitch out publicly. You got viewed 1.7 million times on Twitter. You received over 1 ,000 preliminary offers to invest. and that led to 170 committed offers uh what's the definition of a committed offer basically but you know i i uh i told them this is binding uh so i may make sure okay yes handshake protocol yeah exactly or a term sheet one or the other yeah got it uh and you did spend back to back meetings getting to know the investors finding the right fit that's what you should do you did reference checks that's what you should do you did diligence well that's great stuff you did your homework um and now you turn down offers from 61 investors who offered valuations over 350 million dollars uh for your startup your startup has how many employees and how much revenue i think you disclosed this yeah we have 15 employees and uh about 700 000 in annual recurring revenue okay so if we rounded that up to a million this was like a or so it would be a 400x which is absurd valuation you got offered 400 times not bottom line but top line revenue the public markets are trading at two three four five times top line and maybe at 12 multiple on pe so how do you justify such an outrageous valuation yeah i mean part of it is just the growth rate i mean we we launched uh just you know november of last year publicly end of december so we got to about a million in just a few months.
4:31Our market is massive to you know, we serve basically all knowledge workers. And, you know, the way we've priced our product, we feel like we can have a ultimately a$32 billion ARR market. So in the grand scheme of things, yeah, you're right, the multiple is pretty high today. But the rate of growth we have the huge opportunity to it's absurd. It's unprecedented. And just to be clear, we're not we didn't take the highest offer either. I mean, we definitely had the highest off, we had over 20 offers over a billion um oh my god so so a thousand x revenue right yeah and so was this for like legitimate firms well i mean yeah these are all legitimate folks you know part of it they just wanted to be you know they they believed in the you know and the thing that encouraged me most is most of the higher prices came from active users of the product so i think that that really uh reflected well i hope on the value they see we're creating and what we're doing is very new You know, it's not, it's not something people are familiar with.
5:27It's not a known category. Um, so. And you went with Eddie A, great firm, new enterprise associates. They are a legendary firm that's been around for probably three or four decades. I think they're, they're, they're a legit, legit firm. So how long did this whole fundraising process take? Yeah, it took about, um, about three weeks between, um, the first public pitch and signing a term sheet. So that was pretty fast. In my experience, even when things are going well, it usually doesn't go that fast. That's another major benefit of doing it all in public is you can sequence it all. I even tweeted out my calendar for a week there.
6:04It was pretty crazy. And the good news about also doing it in public is that most of those meetings are actually really productive. They're not just me repeating myself. They're really getting to know the investor. I want to be doing what I'm doing now for the rest of my life. So the relationship I build in this round will be one I have for decades. How much is your risk? 12 million is what nea is investing oh great yeah are you gonna with all these other folks are you going to selectively include people you think would be accretive to the cap table absolutely yeah yeah we are doing that we're doing a using a angel list roll-up vehicle so it makes it very easy to do uh yeah we are going to have some uh well you know several folks obviously feel really good that you know they offered a valuation much higher and we're going to let them in at 350 we think that's the fair thing to do fantastic and uh you know our hope is to make them all look really good.
6:50And while today, that may be a high valuation, I hope in the grand scheme of things, this will be the best time to get in on the deal. You're going to need to grow into that valuation. What do you think your revenue needs to be to justify that valuation? Well, it's a combination of revenue and growth rate. I think if we sustain the growth rate we have, frankly, if we keep growing the way we've been growing, we'll be bigger than Apple soon. So at some point, I mean, that's hilarious. Yeah, I know. insane and deranged but uh if you were you expect to 10x year over year your revenue i think so i think that's reasonable you know we have two major launches 10x randomly is that the actual expectation in the target what do you plan to do year over year yeah i mean so so today we've only launched on apple silicon so max that are the newest version that you can buy sure later this year we're launching on iphone and windows and the much rumored apple glasses uh and so those will be platforms that i think will dramatically increase the market size today we're kind of a niche product for tech enthusiasts who's got the latest and greatest once you move to those do you actually have a number you want to hit in 2024 that you shared in the deck we don't no we have not given the uncertainty on how those platforms how you know how that could you know windows for example today we got more people trying to download our product on windows than on mac we don't even have a windows product so we know that will at least double our uh our you know income and growth so 10 times uh would be 7 million 7 million uh 350 uh you're still at 50 times revenue rent so top 50 times top line and so if you did if then you tripled which you know when you get bigger numbers it's harder so then if you tripled and you hit 21 or you know even if you let's give you a 5x you get to 35 and now you'll be 10 times revenue in 2025 so they'll be giving you credit for two extraordinary years of growth in my mind i think 10 times revenue is the reasonable number in the startup that's what i see uh doing this for a living 10 times is what i'm seeing so normally your startup valuation would be 7 to 15 in a logical world without a an ai bump like this or incredible speed um so this is um you gotta thread the needle here you better 10x that or else you're gonna have the most traumatic down round in history and now you've set yourself up for complete and utter scrutiny.
9:08Closing big enterprise deals is never easy. The last thing you want to do is slow down your sales team because of a lack of integrations in your product. And you know, B2B buyers, they expect integrations. You're a startup founder, you're building B2B software, they expect people management tools to work seamlessly with the payroll provider to work with your CRM to work with the accounting software, all this stuff has to be integrated in 2023 and going forward. And if it doesn't, it's a huge problem, you're probably going to lose the customer, right? But integrations, as you know, they're brutal to implement, and they take a long time, and you have to maintain them.
9:42What if there was a better solution? Well, there is. You need to use Merge, which makes app integrations. Seamless Merge is the leading unified API that allows you to launch your integrations in days, not quarters. Merge is going to unlock new revenue opportunities and make your customers happier. Merge offers hundreds of integrations across seven important categories. HRIS, that's Human Resource Information Systems, ATS, that's Application Tracking Systems, accounting, CRM, ticketing, you know, all those, marketing, automation, of course, and, you know, table stakes, file storage. Merge has unlimited integrations, and they charge based on how many of your customers use these integrations.
10:20You only pay for what you use, or I should say, what your customers use. So they're going to give you three linked accounts for free today at merge.dev slash twist. Again, you get three linked accounts for free already at merge.dev slash twist. Check it out. It is a game changer. For founders who are listening, what is your caution for them in terms of because you must have people saying like, Oh, I should do this too. Do you have any as a seasoned founder cautions or guardrails here in terms of because you didn't take the billion dollar valuation. So you left two thirds on the table, you diluted yourself two thirds more than you could have.
10:58So you're trying to be reasonably thoughtful about this as extraordinary and insane as this valuation is. So what's your advice to startup founders who want to copy? Yeah, well, the first thing is, you know, I, I do think I have a pretty good clear sense of the market, given the data points. So oftentimes, you do these private fundraisers, you meet with a handful of folks, you really don't get a sense of where the market is. So in that sense, I do think today, as I mentioned, a lot of folks are willing to invest at a higher price. Will they want to do that in a year or two years when we've got more data that we have to prove?
11:26I don't know. But at least I know today what the market looks like. My first advice would be not to fixate too much on valuation. I know you've asked a lot of questions on that. It was actually not really the critical thing I was focused on here. It was really around the firm and partnership. Sure. You've also focused on the next one or two years. I'm thinking much longer time horizon. And that's one of the reasons I chose NEA. Their fund structure is very unique. They have a 15-year fund, not a 10-year fund, they're very often buying at the IPO, not selling. So that horizon is kind of what I was really looking for as somebody who wants to be doing this with me for a while.
11:59While I hope we achieve all our aspirations in the next few years, I also know I've done this before. My last company grew to about$120 million in ARR. And there's a lot of bumps along the way. I guarantee you that between now and when people look at our valuation and say, okay, that makes sense mathematically, there will be bumps along the way. And so that's why I also chose a partner. That'd be my advice is choose a partner firm that's going to be there and thick and thin, you know, and they're also, they've done their diligence. They know the risks, they know the chance, you know, what our odds are of success are, and they'll still jump in willingly.
12:30so i think that's very thoughtful dan um i think you always want to pick the right partner because you're going into a marriage and here you're saying hey you're thinking in decades they're thinking in a decade and a half for their venture fund typically a venture fund is a 10-year you know when people expect it to dribble on you know 11 12 13 while you clean up maybe some stragglers good and bad where you can have stragglers in either direction uh zombie companies or just extraordinary companies like uber or airbnb that took their time going public um and uh you do have to fill in that valuation you have enough money to run for 18 months 24 months how long will the capital last you in your projections well so that's another factor too and we actually prior to raising we had about three years of runway this will extend that pretty significantly so this is not about adding runway to the company uh this is really about um you know building a war chest to go out and win and build you know this market we think is huge um so because you have only 15 employees you said before 20 or something yeah right yeah so you are experiencing what AI is providing in the world, which is massive, massive gains in efficiency with your own team.
13:36Is that correct? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It blows my mind every day to see the ways that our team is using AI to build a better product and just shows you why things are moving so quickly. It's this exponential math of everything we're doing today is better because of the AI of the past. We're building an AI for the future and the people who use our product will be better and more productive. And we're right in that sweet spot. And of course, I would be completely hypocritical if uh i didn't mention that i'm doing the exact same thing that you did with my venture fund so if you go to watch.co slash memo they'll throw it up on the screen here for a second i literally took our deal memo and i was like you know what i'm going to raise 506c which is a sec designation for raising publicly i mentioned it on the all-in podcast i mentioned here on the speaking startups and i tweeted it over a thousand people uh showed interest and came to webinars with me i did webinars and then i was like well screw it i'll just share the deal memo here's our strategy for a fun four if you do have a reputation if you do have a track record like you and i have and why not cast a wide net and then this also acts as marketing for your product your company which will then dan in your case get you better employees more employees more press mission accomplished and employees and press that all leads to better product and that all leads to more customers right so that is your uh i mean absolutely and even the customers alone that part has been totally worth it you know you could argue the downside is more scrutiny and what may potentially invite some competitors but we felt so good about where we've been and the product we built and you know i don't think the risks are definitely nearly as bad as people worry.
15:17And one analogy here, and I wonder if you agree with this, is this may be the future of what once was considered weird, online dating. You think about online dating, why wouldn't you just go meet somebody down at a bar? I mean, that's how people have been raising money before. You go to the five or 10 firms that everyone tells you to go to. And yeah, if it works, it doesn't. But cast a wide net. Certainly, there's a lot of people out there that are great value-add investors, believe in your mission. And even if you don't have a great reputation, you know, people find love every day on online dating.
15:46I think you can do the same with raising money for your company or for your fund. People say it's a numbers game in dating, in sales, and in raising money for your startup. You got to, I think the other phrase is kiss a lot of frogs to find your Prince charming. Don't know if we should be using that phrase anymore. I might get canceled for it, but there was this phrase that existed for a long time. So you got to kiss a lot of frogs. So tell us about your company. What is it that you do? Yeah. So the name of the company is Rewind. It is a co-pilot for your mind. It was inspired by my experience going deaf in my 20s.
16:22I tried a hearing aid at the age of 30, and it was magical. To lose a sense and gain it back again feels like gaining a superpower. And ever since that moment, I have been on a hunt for ways that technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers. That led me to memory. memory, just like hearing gradually gets worse as we get older. Typically, people forget about 90 % of what happens after just one week. And so the question that started this company was really if there's a hearing aid for hearing, which I which I wear, and I can hear great, and glasses for vision, what's the equivalent for memory.
16:55So our vision is to give humans perfect memory. And the product for building does that it is a macOS app today soon will be on Windows and iPhone that captures everything you see, say, and hear. It makes it searchable. It stores it all locally. So for your privacy, it's all stored on your Mac. We don't have access to it. Your employer doesn't have access to it. And recently, we've integrated with GPT-4. So you can actually ask questions of anything you've seen, said, or heard. You can ask, rewind, write me an email, investor update, write me an email to somebody I know. And it uses all of the context of your past to actually achieve that goal.
17:29So that's why we call it a co-pilot for your mind. it's a great idea and a great vision obviously it's super creepy when you first come up with it oh my god it's in the system tray it's recording everything if i were to look at a website about pop culture and i'm on tmz maybe i don't want people thinking i'm clicking on certain celebrities or worse if you had an incognito window film blanks yada yada um so it's recording everything you do on your desktop and it's in the system tray so it's not a chrome and it's pretty interesting there was a company that ideolab did and i think you're of the age that you might know this there's a company called x which um uh it came out of ideolab and it was x1 i think and it was called desktop search what it did was it searched it indexed your entire hard drive and made the pitch was it's Google for your desktop.
18:23So what you're doing is essentially a search index, but then you can put a logic layer on it with a language model to actually do productive stuff, not just find stuff. Correct? Exactly. Yeah. And it's not files. That's a distinction I want to make, which is it's really memories. It's things you've seen, things you've heard, things you've said. And just that distinction alone dramatically improves search. A good example is Twitter search. You know, Twitter search sucks. And a big reason it sucks is that when you search, it searches every tweet in the history of Twitter, when really most of the time what you want is actually a tweet you've recently seen.
18:56And so just that lens alone of restricting the things to the things you've seen said or heard can make the experience of the product much better. Listen, we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm launch, you know, pre series A, maybe got a couple of $1 ,000 a month in revenue, you've raised a couple of$100 ,000, maybe$1 ,000 ,000, right? It's the early days, year one or two of a startup. And I'll be honest, a lot of times startups, they don't have their insurance. They haven't set that up yet. They haven't set up their accounting properly. They're getting things cleaned up.
19:29In fact, I was recently had a great startup, but they didn't have D &O insurance. That basically protects your directors and officers. That's the D, directors, people on the board, officers, the people who work at the company, right? Directors and officers insurance is super important. So what do we do? We send them right to in broker our friends over in broker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups you just fill out a simple application right and then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes four quotes four lines of coverage 15 minutes easy breezy lemon squeezy that's right they connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy and listen you might think oh it's too early to have insurance it's not that expensive.
20:12It's not that complicated, because in broker makes it easy. So here's what I want you to do. Try and broker today with the code twist. And you'll get 10 % off their startup package at in broker.com slash twist. That's in broker.com slash twist. We love in broker, I use in broker, they're an amazing team. They do a great job for startups, whether you're in year one or year five, go use in broker.com slash twist. I'm happy to give you a demo if you want to see. Yeah, yeah let's do it let's do it great so let me actually uh share my screen and i'll show you my my memories um the way you can get dangerous quick i mean you can you can see i was very busy waiting for you to join the meeting here yeah um so you can you open rewind you just hit you know command shift scroll and now you're scrolling through time so this is our conversation uh this is everything uh you know you're there's a transcript of this everything we're seeing saying hearing i can scroll back in time you know the beginning of this meeting um you can see i was looking up on your Twitter, looking you up on Wikipedia.
21:10So you can see that very easy to go back and forth in time. You've got this timeline at the bottom. So this is a movie of your desktop you've created. Exactly. And not only is it a still image movie, but it's something you can select text from. You can take any piece of text you've previously seen. You can copy and paste it. So it's this amazing repository where you can go back and turn anything you've seen instead or heard basically into action. Make sense so far? Totally. So let me show you the integration of GPT-4. So here is using my rewind data, I'm asking it to write an email to Sam Altman, one of our first investors, asking him to catch up.
21:44It uses all the context of our past, our first introduction by Paul Graham in 2010. This new feature that I'm showing you, this GPT-4 integration, and this thing I saw about AGI on Reddit. it. It combines all of those moments of my past in a very privacy sensitive way just takes the text of those moments, sends it to GPT for GPT for produces this email, and it uses sources to actually verify that this data is or this, this email is accurate, this prevents you from having hallucinations, because you can go directly to these moments in your past. I'll just click on this first one here. This is an introduction to Sam Altman back in 2010 by Paul Graham, and we were doing that for my last company.
22:19And so you have this amazing ability to sort of combine these moments, these emails in the past, but things you've read on Reddit, and synthesize that into an email. That's just exactly what we mean by co pilot for your minds taking work that you'd otherwise have to do and doing it for you. Make sense so far? Yep. So I'll show you another quick example. Here's one where it takes things I've done in the past, I asked, what did I do last week? It says I participate in a company wide slack conversation received notifications on linear checks, you know, some some data analysis. And to my point earlier on Twitter, the last thing, this, the summary of my week says, Hey, I posted a tweet, discussing how recent advances in AI could eliminate jobs.
22:57And here's some examples. So let's click on that source. And I go directly to that tweet. So again, really quickly, and certainly for I'm sure your context switching all the time, going from meeting to meeting, if you ever want to just pull up, what was that thing? You've ever had this tip of that tongue feeling? What was that? Yeah, like I just did with x1. Yeah, I'm like, Ah, what is that a search engine? I know it was ideal lab. And I was in hex desktop search ideal lab i found it yeah exactly it's that here it would search a movie recording of my desktop for the last 30 years ideally yeah if you have to run that long that's that's that's the hope is that you're able to anytime you've had this desire to go back and synthesize information we can we can do it for you and make it much easier last example i'll show you sort of shows the power of gpt4 is i can ask it you know what's our founding story envision uh and it knows what our means it means rewind the company i founded it talks about what i mentioned earlier, losing my hearing in my 20s, our vision to give humans a perfect memory, and it synthesizes that all down into a simple paragraph.
23:55We didn't have to tell GPT-4 what is our, what is founding. It knew from the context of my past, you know, it's heard me say this now a couple times in meetings, which by the way, we transcribe meetings, so that's another source of data. So it makes it super easy to take data of anything you've seen, said, or heard, and turn it into action. In Hiduru, a William Gibson novel, he had a little Zeppelin. and I think it was called God's Machine or something. It was a little balloon that floated above everybody's head, recorded everything in their life. Not a quadcopter. He made it a balloon for some reason with little propellers on it.
24:31Anyway, it recorded everything. And so everybody had a little thing following them around, like a little drone, and it recorded everything. And you could then, with your glasses, AR, whatever, rewind your entire life. So if we had Matt in person, he would be like, oh you've been in person and let me replay this for you real quick a summary of that time and it would have a dvr of your life and what you've created is a dvr of your desktop and you put that analysis on top of it um how so you keep this video recording locally of everything i've ever done over my desktop that's right and a key technical breakthrough that we had to achieve was storing this in a way that doesn't hog your drive or your storage so we compress the data about 3000 times smaller, to be able to basically indefinitely store data for many, many years on your local hard drive, that enables it to be all private, it's locally encrypted, you don't have to worry about, you know, what happens if this is up in the cloud.
25:25And, and that doing that imperceptibly was another huge technical feat. Like, how do you do that in the background? Another reason we started with Apple Silicon, you know, how do you do that without it feeling heavy without it feeling like the it's hogging resources? So without breaking the law too, because if you were to record a conversation in california with this one uh zoom and the other party was not known you'd be breaking law and then if you were searching for stuff and then it got subpoenaed in a lawsuit and you had the software running it would all be uh something that could be subpoenaed as we've seen with people's conversations on email and text being subpoenaed over time so how do you deal with these two legal issues yeah so so consent is super important so we have a few things that we make really easy one is at any point uh you know in this being assumed you assumed we'd be recording it you're recording it well is it public yes but the conversation we had at the beginning wasn't i didn't know you were recording it and depending on if you're in a two-party consent state and you would be breaking the law or not yeah one thing is we recommend folks doing this a little banner on the on the screen saying hey recording with rewind uh that's one way to sort of disclose it publicly it's it's a little less ominous than the big loud red dot.
26:31But this is, from a legal perspective, all it really takes is reducing this presumption of privacy. We also tell folks to add to their calendar invite ahead of time a little phrase that says, hey, I'm going to record this meeting with rewinds. It's going to help me be more present. It stores all the data locally on my Mac. Let me know if you have any issues. So that's another sort of more subtle, more comfortable social dynamic where people can do this without making it awkward at the beginning of a meeting. So those are just two things that we recommend. At the end of the day, it is, you know, it's great power comes great responsibility.
27:00This is, you know, we ask our users to do this. And this tool makes it easier for them to record. But most of the folks who use this, you know, they tell the folks they meet with, especially if they're meeting with a lot of people. What about being subpoenaed? And like, you see all the research. So if you were researching competitors, and then a competitor sues you for stealing features, or they believe you did, or you had a conversation with somebody who was an employee of that company who you were interviewing and they disclosed some information you didn't ask for it to be disclosed and they told you something that was proprietary data and now you go to court that you you're using rewind man they just pull everything up and they're like here's your conversation with this person this employee of x1 or google you know spilled the beans and now you've got an actual recording of your desktop with you looking stuff up and you've basically given a you know at opposing counsel a buffet of stuff to misinterpret yeah so a couple points on that one is um we don't have access to it as a company so we we could never be subpoenaed and handed over but the person could be subpoenaed yeah exactly uh number two is you know ray dalio has been recording meetings at bridgewater associates for decades now and he gets this question all the time and he says more often than not the recordings help the company not hurt the company you can actually use the data you know for example wrongful termination lawsuit as soon as the party that might be trying to sue them knows that the meetings have been recorded, they immediately drop their charges because they know, hey, there's there's substantive to actually defend ourselves.
28:21So that's Ray Dalio has been public about the legal benefits. You know, there's this perceived concern. The third thing I'll say is we give you a lot of control over what gets captured, what doesn't, I'll just quickly show you in the app, you can actually choose, you know, which apps get recorded, you can exclude specific apps, you mentioned earlier, incognito windows, by default, we do not record any incognito browsers. Yeah. So that's just checked by default. And similarly, with audio, you can choose what gets recorded, what doesn't, and you can delete anything. So it's, you know, really designed to give you control.
28:51It's not meant to be, you know, all or nothing, you can selectively choose, hey, exclude all my zoom meetings, you know, I don't want those there. Hey, you know, we had a zoom meeting, I didn't, you know, probably shouldn't have a record of that. We can do that. Last thing is, this is a big one for data retention, you can just control how long stuff sticks around, you know, my point earlier is most people forget 90 % of things after a week. So usually what you're looking for in rewind is on the order of a few weeks ago so you can just say hey i only want to have data for the last week store month three months etc so those are all features that we've enabled to make it easier for folks um you know to control what gets captured and what doesn't you are the most fascinating guest i've had on in a long time this is absolutely extraordinary both your execution of your fundraising and product i am terrified and intrigued uh which like most great technology innovations is uh sometimes you know what uh you're looking for here i'm totally comfortable using self-driving for powers and end i am totally uncomfortable using your technology uh right now but i might be absolutely uh converted so i'm gonna definitely try it at some point uh and i really appreciate you coming on the pod and being super uh transparent about it what do you do you charge 50 bucks a month for this or something it is uh a very generous of uh 50 rewind uh free trial so it's a usage-based free trial uh our hope is you know because by the way what you're describing is not atypical a lot of people look at this and they're like this is weird would i use this weird i mean it's it's challenging but in some ways actually the it's weird in the in went in a very similar analogy to would you have imagined the 15 years ago getting into the car of random stranger you're matched with on the internet.
30:36Yeah, probably Airbnb, all the stuff. Yeah. So it's weird in that same class of things. I hope we will be as successful as those companies. Where you know, at first blush, you're like, how would I use this? Why would I use this? You know, and then all the cases, the reason we give this 50 day 50 rewind free trials, what we find is people try it, they install it. And then all of a sudden, they'll have a magical moment, it will be likely, yeah, initially, it'll be like a tab crashes, or they hit discard on an email instead of send. And they'll have this pit in the stomach oh my gosh i just lost everything 50 days to me feels like what i would try or 30 days what does it cost well it's so it's it's the free free trials 50 rewind so it's usage based as much as you want then it's ten dollars per month for the basic plan and 30 a month for the pro plan and you have an enterprise here so you could record everybody's desktop in your organization and if everybody uses their business laptop for compliance reasons anybody who's in finance or health care already has everything recorded so there's a multiplayer version here that would be extraordinary for people in finance where i could search all of my employees desktops as crazy as that is and look at all of them by the way in customer support and in finance this already exists so for people who are like whoa that's creepy if you're doing finance every phone call on the desk is recorded every desktop action is recorded every message every email so there's going to be a compliance big brother version of this for those companies I take it?
31:58Well, not really. We don't view ourselves as a surveillance tool. And today, we actually don't have those enterprise capabilities. Right now, it's really an individual... Are you going to make an enterprise version? We will eventually, but it won't be surveillance. It won't be letting your boss see what you've recorded. It will be giving them control over what gets shared, maybe some data retention controls, like I showed you earlier. Maybe a company, if they're buying this software for you, they can say everything after six months automatically gets deleted. But we'll never let your employer see the recordings.
Read the full transcript
32:26We really believe this is a power tool for individuals. People use it just as much for personal life as for business life. So it will never be a surveillance tool. That's the farthest thing from what we want. That's part of why we started with a sort of prosumer model initially, because we really want to have the folks who would just have this medicine. Would you imagine, if you wear glasses or contacts, would you imagine going a single day without them? Probably not. And that's the experience people have with our product. Once they have that first magical moment, they're like, why would I go a day without being able to capture my memories?
32:53That seems silly. all right everybody uh there you have it rewind pro 30 bucks a month coming soon to windows your phone and everything uh god's little dvr record your entire life and never forget anything dan extraordinary job uh i think i can understand why people wanted to invest at 350 it's an incredible vision and uh good luck and i'm gonna play with it and we'll see you all next time on the speaking startups. Bye bye. Okay, everybody, are you sore and tired? It's hard to keep this peak performance up. But I have an answer for you. Right as I get off the slope, Hyperice is waiting for me here it is.
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34:08That's what I'm getting next. And we all know a bunch of people, they're suffering from that back pain, right? They also have these Normatec air compression boots. These things are insane. Here's a really important call to action. Get 50 bucks off your order of 150 or more with the code TWIST50 at checkout. Go ahead and go to Hyperice, that's H-Y-P-E-R-I-C-E.com and use the code TWIST50, TWIST 5-0, Twist 5-0 for 50 bucks off your purchase of$150 or more. Sincerely, my wife got me into this. And then all of a sudden, they showed up to be partners on this program. I was like, I use that product.
34:45What? So it's amazing. You're gonna love it. Hey there, I'm Scott. I'm going to talk through the founders crash course on building a strong brand. So a little background about me. I'm a family man with three kids. I'm a designer with 15 years of experience. I'm a founder of Timewell and I'm also a certified brand specialist at a branding studio called Lunar. So let me dive right in. My first question is out of all of these options of water bottles, which one would you buy? You'll find that most of the time people don't make a decision of what's inside the water bottle but actually on the outside and everything else that it means.
35:21So if we look at something like Arrowhead, you might think that that's the one that you get at your soccer games or Voss, that's somebody that, you know, you could assume what kind of car they drive with that or Liquid Death, the fact that they valued at$700 million and it had very little to do with what was inside and again, more on the outside. Taking a look at this design, which one of these do you think works better? Without knowing anything about it, most people, if not 100%, say it's the right one because it's simply designed better. So the question is, what is branding? and to still admit branding is not your logo.
36:00And to describe that a little further, I'd love for you to think about how you would describe why someone should buy from Apple. And most of the time, it's something like, it's really simple, it's easy to use, it's fun, it just works. And I can almost guarantee that those are not words that Apple has told you to say, but it's something that you felt over time through a lot of different experiences. So we could argue that, more branding is someone's gut feeling about your company or service. In reality, it's what they say it is. It's not what you say it is. So again, in a nutshell, branding isn't your logo, but it is somebody else's feeling and how that they describe it.
36:41So the goal at the end for branding is to align what you say it is and what they say it is. And that's what we're going to talk about. Again, we'll start at the top of this mountain here, which again, running a branding studio, people come to us often and say, hey, we need a new brand. And typically what that means is we need a new flag planted on the top of a mountain, being our logo, or we need new styles. And so we go into the conversation more and they say, well, maybe it's more of our website or we need a new product. It doesn't quite feel right. And so as we go in a little further, as you can see from this visual, is that we need to go under the water to what isn't seen.
37:22And that's brand strategy. And this is where we talk about their purpose, mission, vision, values, what their culture is like, what's their goals as a company, and also how do they position themselves in a way that's so unique that people come to them. And to illustrate that a little further is that brand strategy leads to deliberate differentiation. And this is what I do all in a nutshell. As we look at how we want to position your brand, it's that in a sea of competitors, we want you to be the only one that customers will go with because you are so different. And your job as a leader is to give clarity about that.
38:03So as you see that you want to lead your team in a specific direction, you need to cast a vision to say, here's where we're going. And in the days where you can't be the one leading, and I would argue you shouldn't be the one who is telling everybody all the time, every single task, what they need to do, you need to be able to cast a vision for them to be able to run on their own. In reality, that's what brand strategy should lead to is for your team to be able to answer this question on their own, which is what's the right decision here that could come to how do we respond to this customer in a consistent way?
38:35How should we design this billboard? What should we do for this screen? And that should be all around that you have a clear vision for your company of where we need to go. There is a structure for that. It's what I like to use, which is a brand strategy pyramid. And this is what we use with clients, but we're going to go through a couple of these today. So there's purpose, mission, vision, values, look and feel, goals, and tactics. And just for us right now, we're going to cover purpose, vision, values, and look and feel. First of all, purpose. This is your why and deeper cause that would be written about in the history books when you succeed.
39:16And here is a template for how to do it. We won't go through that now, but you can take a look at it later, which is two and then fill in the blank, some positive improving verb, and then aimed at a specific group of people, two, and then the end goal is for them to reach a specific state. And again, this has nothing to do with money. It won't change with the market and it should almost feel impossible. An example of this is Tesla's, which is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. And you can see if, and I'd argue when they accomplish this, it will be written about in the history books.
39:51And you can take this the next step further is their mission would be in line with the how that they do that is they build Tesla's Tesla cars to be able to accomplish this purpose. Next is the vision, which is a clear scene that can be easily understood and visualized. and this is where we see a world where, and then fill in the blank. Microsoft, for example, which is exciting to see that they've accomplished this, their vision statement used to be a computer on every desktop and every home. And what's really helpful about a vision statement is it will help your team have a clear picture of what they need to do to accomplish it.
40:27So back when this was written, a computer couldn't fit on a desktop at all. And so they had to think, how could we continue to refine our process to be able to accomplish this? Next is your values. These are the core beliefs that will ultimately guide what you do and how you do it. And understanding these values, something like we take care of our customers above and beyond, will allow your team to run freely to know if somebody needs help resetting their password for Netflix while they're on a phone call with you, is that that's completely okay. And when asked what he'd do differently, if he could start his company all over again, Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh had this to say, if I could go back and do Zappos all over again, I would actually come up with our values from day one.
41:16And for someone who sold his company to Amazon for$1.2 billion, I think I'd pay attention. So next we'll dive into visual identity. And again, this is arguably what people come to most often when they say, hey, I need a new brand, which is I need a new logo. But first, really your brand comes first in people's minds by your name. And I argue this is more important to get right than your visual because you can change that over time. But you think of a company like Coca-Cola, for them to change their name would have huge impacts on their business. And the test that I like to run with is if you're at a loud party and you have to say, I'm the founder of blank name, and we do blank.
41:56If you have to explain every single time how it's spelled, and it's a get name dot so, then they're just going to forget it over time. So again, it's really hard to do. And it's harder than ever. But it's really important to make sure that it can click in someone's mind. And then on the visual side, what should you do for your logo, I like to keep these four points in mind, which is make it clear, make it scalable, make it memorable, and then make sure that it has some sort of connection to your value that you that you offer. And as an example, let's look at Timewell's logo. So here, Timewell is a platform that helps families connect with different generations by recording their life stories to photos with their voice.
42:41So what we have here is the icon on the side. It's actually an hourglass flipped on its side to essentially pause time. And then there's these two linking back and forward arrows showing the future and the past older generation to the younger generation linking together. And this visual here, I wanted to make sure that it's really flexible and scalable. We'll see how that looks. Every brand should be able to be flipped in both white and black as well. So if you have a primary color, make sure that it's flexible there. It should also be scalable on size. So an app icon, browser icon, like a favicon or your logo for your website.
43:19Also, it should be able to be scalable to a billboard size. Now, let's look at some different logos that maybe are some not to do's and some recommended to do's. On the left side, you'll see here, these are something you might find online if you get a logo for, you know, a couple bucks. And on the right, you probably will recognize that these companies are doing all right. On the left side, you'll see that these ones do not work well for mobile. And with the majority of browsing now done on phones, it's more critical than ever that your logo can work with all those scalable methods like I just shared.
43:56So the question is, how do you build this? The first thing I would do for anybody looking to build their logo is to start with some sort of personality sliders like this. And for time, well, I'd probably put mine here. So it's more professional, it's more reserved, and it is loud, it's more clean than experimental, and you get the rest. So you kind of want to put a personality to how it looks. And one thing to keep in mind is that your logo and your icon shouldn't tell the whole story. It's simply a recognizable mark that will connect to people. What about color? So color improves brand recognition by up to 80%.
44:30I often see new founders who mix too many colors together. I would focus on just one. And there's visuals like this that you can find online that get your personality and the feeling to match. So again, you might find that majority of banks use blue because psychologically it evokes trust. So now we've created a huge brand logo. How does that look like in the wild? First thing you'll probably want to do is launch your website. We'll see a couple examples here that guaranteed most people have seen and they all have the same structure and that's really important to get the structure right because you have seven seconds and seven seconds to what?
45:10You have seven seconds before they scroll through and they don't find what they're looking for. And then somebody will press the most press button on the internet, which is the back button. So our goal is to make sure that that doesn't happen. They click and they convert. There is a structure for that and we'll dive in. So this is based off an example I'll show at the end. But looking at point one here, if you follow this structure for above the fold, So on desktop, before you have to scroll, this is showing you you're in the right place and you can keep going from here. So step one is we have explain the value you provide in the title.
45:49Next, in a subtitle, explain how you'll actually create it. Step three, let the user visualize it. Use the visual with a video or photo or some sort of mock-up. Make it believable with social proof. And five, make taking the next step easy. So look at that. What is that clear call to action? And here we have something like get started for just$1. Get started, sign up. Maybe you can push that a little further to be more specific. I would highly recommend looking at marketingexamples.com for the full layout of this. They have done an absolutely incredible job on building a landing page. Kind of summarizing, if you wanted to look at what are next steps for branding, these are some books that have completely changed my thought process and shaped how I think about branding.
46:39Feel free to steal all these. I hope you enjoy them. Please let me know if you've read any of them or will read any. Also some general design resources. Say well, what do I do about, are there any pictures I can use? Are there any examples of maybe some good login screens or desktop screens or something like that? I would take a look at all of these options and all these sites and your designs will be much better off. As a quick thank you is that again, I'm a partner at an awesome branding and design studio. And we like to say that your competitors want you to neglect your brand. And so we don't want that to happen.
47:15If you are a certain spot where you feel like you're not quite presented in the way that you know you should be or you're looking to raise a new round, and you don't quite reflect, your brand doesn't quite reflect the success that you have, I'd love to talk. And then finally, as a founder myself, I would love to get your thoughts on Timewell so you can check it out at timewell.io. Again, thank you so much for your time.
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Today’s show:
Rewind AI CEO and Co-Founder Dan Siroker joins Jason to break down his viral fundraising strategy before diving into a demo of Rewind’s AI software (1:27). Then, Scott Bair of Lunour gives a talk on how to build a strong brand, where he dives into topics like branding, creating a logo and more! (34:49)
Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/dsiroker
Check out Rewind: https://www.rewind.ai
Time stamps:
(0:00) Dan Siroker joins Jason
(1:27) Dan discusses his method of raising capital publicly and the valuation they settled on
(9:08) Merge - Integrate up to 3 customers for free today at https://merge.dev/twist
(10:38) Advice for founders taking a high valuation, choosing the right firm, and differentiating Rewind AI from file search
(19:03) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist
(20:35) Dan demos Rewind AI
(25:04) Privacy concerns, dealing with legal issues, and Rewind’s enterprise use cases
(33:21) Hyperice - Get $50 off your order of $150 or more with code TWIST50 at http://hyperice.com/
(34:49) How to build a strong brand with Scott Bair
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