LIVE @ YC Demo Day | Nate Bosshard, Joshua Reeves, Joshua Browder, Burkay Gur, Theo Browne & MORE

(00:00) - Nate Bosshard, founder of Offline Ventures and co-founder of Tonal, has a background in marketing leadership at companies like GoPro and The North Face. In the conversation, he reflects on his early entrepreneurial ventures, such as selling used records on eBay, and discusses the evolution of Y Combinator's Demo Day to a quarterly event. He also highlights Andrew Dudum of Hims & Hers as an underrated entrepreneur, noting the company's rapid growth and successful public offering. (24:17) - Jerry Qian, co-founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered platform that automates creator marketing workflows for brands, discusses how Reacher helps brands find the right creators, personalize outreach, manage payments, and generate scripts to create viral content. He highlights the emergence of TikTok Shop as a significant social commerce platform and emphasizes the role of AI in enhancing creator marketing. Jerry also shares that Reacher has achieved $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue. (27:52) - Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of Gusto, a company reimagining payroll and HR services for small businesses, discusses his journey from Stanford electrical engineering graduate to entrepreneur, highlighting his experience with Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch and the early days of Gusto. He shares insights into the company's initial focus on payroll, the importance of using their own product before paying themselves, and the challenges of raising funds during a time when many startups were centered on social and mobile platforms. Reeves also reflects on the significance of customer-centricity, drawing inspiration from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech, and emphasizes the value of understanding and serving customers to build a successful business. (33:28) - Bruno Koba, co-founder of Gauss, introduces their AI-driven investment analyst designed to assist retail investors in making informed decisions by monitoring markets, filtering noise, and delivering personalized insights. He emphasizes the platform's focus on reducing emotional investment mistakes and catering to thesis-driven investors who lack time for extensive market research. Bruno also shares his background, including roles at Nubank and Monashees, and mentions Gauss's subscription model, charging $19 per month, with plans to transition to a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) model. (39:24) - Jason Cornelius, co-founder and CEO of Perseus Defense, discusses the development of affordable 16-inch guided missiles designed to counter drone threats. He highlights the limitations of existing counter-UAS solutions, such as electronic warfare and high-cost interceptors, and introduces Perseus Defense's cost-effective alternative, aiming to produce missiles for under $10,000 per unit. Cornelius also shares the company's rapid prototyping progress, including multiple missile iterations and live-fire tests, and mentions engagements with the Department of Defense to advance the technology's deployment. (44:53) - Farhan Khan, co-founder of Meteor and former University of Washington computer science student, discusses their AI-native browser designed to automate repetitive online tasks, positioning it as a superior alternative to Google Chrome. He explains that Meteor employs AI agents to handle activities like scheduling meetings and data entry, aiming to save users significant time. Farhan also shares his entrepreneurial journey, including previous projects and his decision to drop out of college to focus on building Meteor. (48:31) - Wyatt Lansford is the co-founder and CTO of Pally, a platform that consolidates contacts and conversations from various platforms into one place, utilizing on-device AI to maintain user privacy. In the conversation, Haz Hubble, Pally's founder, discusses the platform's functionality, emphasizing its local data processing to ensure privacy, and shares the company's growth metrics, including reaching over 3,500 users and achieving $125,000 in annual recurring revenue within two months of launch. He also recounts his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his admiration for Richard Branson and an early venture selling FIFA Ultimate Team coins at age 12. (52:10) - Luigi Pederzani is the co-founder and CTO of mcp-use, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to build and deploy AI agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). In the conversation, he discusses mcp-use's open-source strategy, its growing GitHub repository with over 7,000 stars, and the company's bottom-up approach to enterprise adoption, similar to Supabase. He also mentions raising $6 million in funding and his previous experience in Zurich working on virtual try-on technology for e-commerce. (56:18) - Dhruv Roongta is a 20-year-old entrepreneur and co-founder of Slashy, an AI agent that integrates with various applications to automate repetitive tasks. In the conversation, he discusses how Slashy connects to tools like calendars, Gmail, and Notion to streamline workflows, reducing the need for manual input. He also shares that 40% of their batch uses Slashy, with a 30% week-over-week growth, and mentions that 30% of the VCs at Demo Day are utilizing the product for meeting preparation. (01:01:21) - Anmol Tukrel, CEO of Closera, a Y Combinator-backed startup, discusses how his company leverages AI to automate time-consuming tasks for commercial real estate brokers, such as creating sales materials—a process that traditionally takes four weeks and costs $5,000, but with Closera, can be completed in about five minutes. He also shares his background as a former Google product manager who monetized projects like Gemini and NotebookLM, and as the creator of iDentifi, an app aiding the visually impaired, which was featured in a Google commercial alongside notable figures. (01:05:23) - Joshua Browder, founder and CEO of DoNotPay, discusses the emergence of AI-driven solutions in niche sectors, highlighting a startup utilizing AI for waste collection. He emphasizes the potential for building substantial businesses in specialized areas that large AI models may overlook. Browder also reflects on his early entrepreneurial ventures, including selling jailbroken phone themes at age 13, and expresses admiration for Larry Ellison's pricing strategies and business acumen. (01:12:06) - Anson Yu is the founder of Normal, a company that automates hardware testing and compliance processes, focusing on robotics, drones, and other electrical components with radio features. He discusses how Normal streamlines testing infrastructure, which is often cumbersome or located overseas, to support teams in efficiently validating their hardware products. Since launching three weeks ago, Normal has achieved $35,000 in revenue and completed its funding round. (01:15:47) - Aden Clemente, CTO of Effigove, is developing an AI operating system for local governments, starting with a 24/7 311 call center service. He discusses the limited availability of 311 lines in cities and how Effigove's AI-driven solution aims to provide consistent information services to all municipalities, regardless of size. Clemente also shares that Effigove is live in one city with an $80,000 ARR and has two additional contracts pending. (01:22:10) - Zane Hengsperger, founder of Nox Metals, is revolutionizing the U. S. metal supply chain by integrating software and automation to deliver raw materials more efficiently to manufacturers. In the conversation, he discusses how his company purchases large metal billets, cuts them using advanced band saws, and supplies precisely sized blocks to clients like Hadrian for CNC machining. Hengsperger emphasizes the importance of reindustrializing America by enhancing factory efficiency through technology, aiming to provide next-day delivery of custom-cut metal blocks to factories n...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN. Today is Tuesday, September 9th, 2025. We are live from the Palace of Party Rounds. We are at YC Demo Day. The batch is Fall 2025, right? F 2025? Because it used to just be winter and summer, but now they've added it's a quarterly batch. And so I believe we're in Fall. Is that right?

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so we are here with Nate. Introduce yourself. Tell the stream who you are, why you're here.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Nate Balsard, friend of the pod.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  The first time you came on was at the first time we did YC Demo Day, two quarters ago.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Been in the Bay Area for longer than I care to admit. 2008, I've bounced around a few technology companies, spent some time at some institutional VC firms, have dabbled as an entrepreneur and now have a seed fund.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Take it back further. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet?

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I sold used records on eBay.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Used records?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  This is 2001. Vinyl guy.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  This is crazy because I sold record players on eBay.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  I sold DJ equipment.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  As we know, as everything becomes more digital, tactile, physical things become more important.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  So I was an early adopter there.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Is there, was the arb, so my arb was international shipping. Basically, people wanted top-tier DJ gear in Australia and they couldn't get it because the companies wouldn't export? Or was it more about like going in, what do they call it?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Crate digging.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Crate digging, crate digging, finding stuff that wasn't available in, you know, in Ohio? And then you ship it there, New York and LA?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Wisconsin.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Wisconsin, okay.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  You would travel up and down the Mississippi River corridor, hitting up antique shops, getting rare soul funk jazz and psychedelic rock records?

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  And then you would sell them at a 10x markup to our friends in Japan.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  That's cool. That's cool. We have one more lightning round question. Japan was your exit liquidity. We're starting with the lightning round. Most underrated or greatest entrepreneur of all time? Who you got?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Oh God.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Underrated or greatest is actually kinda hard to throw.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, what's the actual, so we're gonna ask, we're gonna try and ask every single person who comes on the stream, how they made the first dollar on the internet and what their favorite entrepreneur is. Favorite, it could be anyone.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go over the last decade, last five years, and I think Andrew Dudum from Hims and Hers is incredibly underrated.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Fastest consumer company to go public.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  The only successful consumer SPAC, trading at 11 billion dollars.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, they went out as a SPAC, but then they actually held the price.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  He is an absolute killer.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  He's got a retail army.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Which is weird, yeah.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Not, not every boardroom general can lead a retail army.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  And I would just, I think Andrew is incredibly underrated. I'm not gonna say all time, but in the last cycle.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but we're, we're going favorite, we're not going greatest.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  There was some recent news that, that they didn't, didn't compounding like generally get like a, a green light, which is very good for Hims.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've had a great, uh, kind of, uh, new wave with.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, like a regulatory royal flash has been kinda drawn and there's been a lot of uncertainty about which way the, the chips would fall and they got lucky.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And I wanna give one other shout out, his co-founder Hillary Coles, who also doesn't get a lot of publicity, but she is also, you know, an incredible founder and, you know, important to the, to the success of the company.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have to put you in the true zone. This is Y Combinator Demo Day Summer 2025.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Well, this is summer, the end of summer.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  This is summer. We're starting fall, fall batch.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  So we met some founders who had F, who were, I think, going into the fall batch, but they, they've been accepted, they'll be joining the next batch.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  I believe so.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  But this is summer. Ooh, great. My first, my first YC was summer.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  S25.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Wow. I was summer 12, S12. So just a mere 13 years. Yeah, still kicking. Uh, but I mean, I was what, 21 at the time or something like that?

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Just a lad.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Just a lad.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  Just a boy.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Just a lad. What else is at the top of your timeline today? Have, did you watch the Apple event?

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  What did you think of the iPhone 4000?

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Were you shaking? Were you crying? Were you, were you gasping? Were you clapping? Standing ovation from you for the iPhone, the iPhone 4000.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I was looking for more innovation on the wired headphones.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Oh, you're speaking his language.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  That's my boy.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  You know, I like analog.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Okay, you like analog.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  I know they released a new pair of AirPods 3s.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  I haven't gotten the full spec yet.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  I think we have it. I think we have it.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  They released a newer, better iPhone that's lighter, faster, stronger, newer and better.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  So.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Which we need, which we all need.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  So MKBHD summarized the, uh, the launch. He's been live posting, uh, fantastically. So AirPods Pro 3, uh, new foam infused ear tips, 2X, the ANC performance versus last gen. Live translation. Oh, you're getting live translation in those? Yeah, right.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  They also get heart rate sensing during workouts.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Gen Z, do they do Gen Z live translation?

• 4:48John Coogan?

  That's a. Oh, probably. And, uh, and they get, uh, and they'll sense your heart rate during workouts, but most of the people that are doing that already have the Apple Watch. But it matches what, uh, Marquez saw get added to Beats. So, uh, is it actually an audio quality thing or is it RF like what, uh, or is it losing it? I've, I, you know.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  I think the translation feature I think is the most interesting novel new feature.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I, I think as we all travel more and explore the world, I think that becomes super, super important.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  The concept of like the loss in translation.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  You know, universe that we all used to face, like now things can just be super flowing and free.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. That demo, I feel like the live translation demo was hitting kind of the AI circles. Like Google was demoing it like a decade ago, maybe five years ago.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Hasn't like happened like live and free.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  I remember, yeah, I remember in college, probably over a decade ago, there was a product called Google Lens. And you could take out your phone. It was visual intelligence and you could take a picture of a sign and it would automatically do all the OCR, then translate it. And then it would actually Photoshop it back onto the, uh, it would like put in the UI, the, the translation over the actual sign. It was very cool, uh, but didn't really have breakout.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I think when you're just looking at text.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Live dynamic conversation.

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Very different.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Think is a promise fulfilled yet.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I know that, you know, Latin based languages are much easier.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  With that, I think when you go to Japan, it's still not there yet.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  But, you know, as someone who travels and I've got Google Translate open and I'm trying to have live conversation, it still doesn't exist. So I'm like really excited to try that.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  You invested in a company in this batch, is that correct?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  We invested in one company.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Can you break it down for us?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's actually, it's actually an Apple team.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Really? No way.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've all been, we've all been on our own personal vibe coding journey.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Right? And I think that the thing everybody's looking for is a native mobile on-device app that can push live to test flight.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And so there's this team out of Apple who-

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Apps as memes.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Apps, well, memes are the end state of all human communication, we know that, so that's like important. This team came out of the Swift, you, you know, the Swift's like language, they basically are responsible for writing that.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  They've built this product, the company's called Bitrig.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And they've built essentially an on-device, you know, prompt to app live in the App Store.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Test flight.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  From your phone.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  So, you know, every, you know, last batch was cursor for X, Y, and Z. This batch, it's lovable for X, Y, and Z.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at all-

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we'll figure it out.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Find that out, but that's kind of my hunch, but I think everybody's been looking for this like true native mobile app product from your device. And so I tested it out. I've got a child who's approaching college and I actually built a college recruiting task manager for her.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  Really cool.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  And so it actually like loaded it up like very quickly. I was shocked.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  It was like a paragraph or two of prompting.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  And it actually produced like a pretty good product.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  And if you have an Apple Developer account, it just like pushes live.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like the, uh, there's gonna be like a ton of opportunity. We saw this with the, with the initial rollout of the App Store, like, uh, kids being able to build like Flappy Bird and then just go viral. And you're gonna see, like, most of the stuff is just, it's gonna be so much slop and so much, so many zeros, but you're gonna get these crazy, crazy breakout stories of like, some kid just vibe coded something, had a really unique idea, and was able to execute it on it so much faster. Already the barrier to getting an app in the App Store is like way lower than boxed software, like where you had to literally call Masayoshi Son and get like physical distribution.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think, by the way, guys, stream was down for the last five minutes. That was a fantastic conversation, but we're back up.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  We're back up.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  But I think what you said while we were out was, uh, apps as memes. I think the concept of like, kind of transient ephemeral software, software as GIFs.

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the original, like, think, think about, like, 10, 15 years ago, everyone had an app idea and, and like-

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, like 10,000 people in the world were actually like qualified to like ship something pretty decent, right? Maybe more than that, obviously, but but it was like the amount of demand, like the reason that companies like lovable have blown up is like the demand for apps is like so much higher than the supply of developers that can actually like build these things. And then especially to like, most app ideas are not worth investing $100,000 into, or $50,000, or even 10,000, right? It's just like something that should just be created for fun. Maybe it turns into a company. Maybe it's just a little piece of software.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is sort of a gauntlet being thrown down for the ideas, guys, because it's like

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  John Fio.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  But like, seriously, it's like, it's like, now you're in, you're going to be in a paradigm where like, oh, you have an idea? Okay, like, you now can just put your idea into a text box and get it in front of millions of people. Let's see how good your idea really is.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  I think apps, I think the concept of social app marketplace, ala Etsy, where now you have this more artisanal software experience, people with ideas can iterate and build and ship things. I think that there's going to be some sort of new thing. Is the App Store the next app store? I don't know. But I think when you lower the bar, super low, there's a lot of interesting ramifications of that.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was thinking about that in the context of like OpenAI, like, we've, we've been in this era where, you know, it's like, okay, you have this $200 a month plan, you get like the super frontier model in a fantastic iOS app. And if they go towards agentic commerce and ads, and eventually they want to monetize fully, like, do the paid plans go away? And does the product become more one size fits all? Or do we continue to live in this world where if you have the budget, you can get like a really, really, really special app experience? And the flip side of that is like, is like, there are a bunch of pieces of software that I could imagine building that don't work as businesses,

• 10:37John Coogan?

  but would work essentially like, as, as like a one of one piece of software. The example that I always give is like, if I, if I hire an assistant, I can pay that person to Buy a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and print out the articles, physically remove all the ads, and give me just a book of exactly what I want. Very expensive to do. It's probably, you know, like lots of, lots of money. But like, I could have a piece of software that does that. Now, I couldn't go and sell that software because I'm reselling subscriptions and I'm taking ads out of the product. But in terms of like a vibe-coded one-of-one, there's only one person that's using it. Like, it seems like, potentially, you could see more, more stuff that feels like the domain of only, like, you needed a person to do this.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  To take it even a step further, I just want, instead of you being on my contacts, I want the John app.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And so...

• 11:30John Coogan?

  What would the John app have?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  It would just be everything you're into.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Right? And I don't need to ask you any questions. I know what you're reading. I know what you're buying. I know where you're going. I know what you're shopping. And when you think about contacts as this new, dynamic piece of software, there's like a portal through you.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  That's something that's super interesting. And I, I'm just riffing here, but like, I think that where you think, where this goes...

• 11:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  ...becomes really trippy. And, you know, the language...

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  It's like Uber for John, basically.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  It's Uber for John. It's DoorDash for John. It's TripAdvisor for John. It's whatever workout app for John.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  Or, or is it more like...

• 12:03Speaker 01

  It's Thoughts by John.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Like, or is it more like a return to, like, the old, like, 2000s web? Yeah, exactly.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Or something.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Like, like, we, we have, we have all been forced into expressing, expressing ourselves through these, like, narrow boxes and like, yeah, you can put like any MP4 in there or any, any MP3 or any image in there. But, but you can't actually make any social app, like your profile, like, fully your own and customize everything. But you could do that on just a normal website. Maybe that's coming back.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Think, think about every time someone asks you for advice.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Sure. Oh, yeah, that.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Or pings you, and it's just like, you just, it's just like, here's my, here's my app. Like, it's like, you're just a proxy to your... And you can...

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John and I are, John and I are investors in Delphi, which is kind of a similar thesis of, you know, making yourself available 24/7.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, let's, uh, switch gears a little bit. Are you gonna be buying the, uh, Elon, are you gonna be signing up for Elon's SpaceX Telecom Starlink? Direct-to-phone? Are you excited about this?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a, I'm a fan of rural environments.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you are, you are.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And you need connectivity.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  And so absolutely will be.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  What's your, do you, do you travel with a Starlink setup much when you're going on escapades?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  No, but I would say like when I'm situated in place for sure.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Um, my, my partner, Dave, who is a Sprinter van guy is fully mobile, mobile Starlink on his van.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so what are your thoughts on 996? Uh, deep fates on X says, yeah, I work 996, nine minutes coding, nine hours tweeting, six energy drinks.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  It's just, it's just an extension of the performative male meme. Let's just be honest.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  So, so I would totally agree with you, but we had R Karasian from Ramp, the economist over there, uh, on the show yesterday, he looked at the credit card data and there's actually a meaningful uptick in, in business activity in San Francisco, just San Francisco, on Saturday, just as up six months ago. And it's like a meaningful uptick. And so he says it's real.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Sure. There's always people that are living the realness.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  And then there's the performative social media, clout chasing. And so, yeah, of course, there's always there's truth in every meme.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, it's like, maybe there's a 20% uptick in 996ing and then that's been like five X'd by the, the volume of like posts.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Atlas, Atlas was joking. It was like the great lock-in and it's just like working Chinese hours for four months.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I think you have to earn the fun.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Naval had, uh, some new, some new press today. He said Naval Ravikant expects employees to work 24/7 at his new startup. That's the next level. After 996 is just don't sleep. Just stay at your desk.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Just 12, 12, 7.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  12, 12, 12.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  I'm bullish on him's and hers then for the kind of performance enhancing aspects required.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. You think they might get into some, some sleep deprivation tech?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Back in the day, people used to take Pro Vigil.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, there was always that lore about like the, the air force pilots, the most elite combat units.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  I've never done that, but you know, that was always Obama's hack as he would, you know.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  What?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  You came on, you were like, we're not going to talk about politics. And here you are.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's about, yeah, that's performance. That's not politics.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And I'm, you know, I'm sure that, you know, Pro Vigil's not like a partisan issue.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  It's bipartisan.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's as far as we'll go on that.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Do you want to run through the first Elon Treasury company? Do you see this? Have you been following the Treasury stock memes?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Is this like

• 15:30John Coogan?

  MicroStrategy? Oh, MicroStrategy, but then there are a few that do ETH and Solana.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  There's five Solana Treasuries that are all launched within the same like three week period. So like essentially, yeah, if you, if you track it, there's, uh, there's one that Pantera launched. Uh, there's one that I think

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  MultiCoin.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, Joe McCann, I think was working on one. Um, there's a few coming through.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  I truly don't understand it, but maybe it's just because I'm aware of like you can buy crypto directly, but maybe it's like a tax thing.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  No, it's an on-ramp for TradFi to play in crypto.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  As a, as a more safer play.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  It's highly regulated and so they, I think instead of them just buying Solana, they can buy into this thing.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay, so it's a regulatory thing, more than a, more than a tax.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  For traditional finance, and I'm just being super reductive on that, but I think that's, that's the appeal. And then, you know, assume that there's, if they're hoovering up as much of that.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  And then you give retail an opportunity for new forms of basically betting.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  It all comes back to that.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  It's all, it's all betting. But so we were talking about EchoStar, so SpaceX acquired a spectrum that's going to enable them to get into direct to sell.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Seventeen billion?

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was eight and a half billion of cash, eight and a half billion of stock. Uh, EchoStar is not, is up 24% in the last five days, but is pretty much flat today. And, um, people, people were starting, people yesterday realized they were like, wait, a $20 billion public company holds eight and a half billion of SpaceX stock? Like this is an Elon Treasury company.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  Treasury company.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  But small issue, they have $30 billion of debt. And so we were kind of like doing some rough math yesterday and realizing like SpaceX needs to be like, uh, closer to a $2 trillion company for them to just pay off the, and this is a company that's losing a lot of money in, in their core, um, core business.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I mean, that spectrum purchase is, is highly strategic and it makes me very, very bullish. I think people also should be looking at if they want a public market comp, you know, more global play, like look at Rocket Lab. They're almost like a corollary every time Elon kind of does something publicly that's embarrassing or that is against the political zeitgeist, that stock.

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Rocket Lab.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Rocket Lab, okay.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's also publicly traded, but another successful deep tech SPAC.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  They started off like.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  And they're actually launching rockets now, but there are a couple of those, like the anti Elon trade, like there's this satellite company that's ASTS.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  And they've been like mooning in the, in the public markets, but I don't think that they've actually like shipped any satellites. It's all like deals at this point.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Rocket Labs shipping.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Rocket Labs for sure.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  It's like $15 billion market cap SPAC.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Uh, road, kind of like a rough period and now has been ripping.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, Firefly also got out and did quite well, I believe, in the IPO.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  So this SPAC, this SPAC universe, like there's some winners.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Let's be honest.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  None of them that.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  So far, same thing. No, no, no, that's wrong.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 18:18John Coogan?

  So he did so far and so far is up.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, truth zone.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  One out of.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like one out of eight.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So that's like, you know, that's like 250 if you're playing baseball.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Spread across them, it was not a good time, but it was a rough time for a lot of people in a lot of markets.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair enough. Okay.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Did you guys see this company yesterday, Alter Ego? That's doing the, uh, it's like a telepathic, like headset device that you can like think messages in. Thought it was pretty interesting.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  It'll be big in the astrology community.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Um, went pretty, got almost 2 million views since yesterday. Some people were pushing back and saying like, you actually have to like mouth the words.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  I think it's fine though.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's fine.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Like a fish.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Is this actual shippable or preorder? Somebody, I don't know, I don't know.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not live, but.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how true this is. Somebody quoted it and said, this is the same type of thing Altman and, and Iver were launching, by the way. Uh, future is here.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  I think that would, I think that would totally make sense and I think that's a good, good call. The question is just like, yeah, can, how quickly can like AirPods 4 fast follow that technology? But if it's doing something else with like the electrical signals or like the

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  This is a good, this is a good, so we have to talk about this. Hunter SPX Thompson says Nvidia sells chips to Nebius to sell to Microsoft to sell to OpenAI, all for OpenAI to burn 100 billion between now and 2029. So I can ask digital god for company primers and get answers in paragraph format pulled from Seeking Alpha talks.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal. The Nebius deal that got announced yesterday, total, total retail.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  It was insane day in the market, right?

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nebius is up another 40, it's 42% in the last five days, $22 billion company right now. Retail, they had a retail army behind them.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  And then that WorldCoin treasury company, did you see that?

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Was there a treasury for that now?

• 20:16John Coogan?

  So there's a company, there's a company.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  There's gonna be a treasury for everything.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  So I wasn't familiar with these, these folks, but Dan Ives is Wedbush Securities. So he is now leading a crypto treasury strategy focused on WorldCoin, the native token of the blockchain used in OpenAI's creator, Sam Altman's identity startup, World. And they bought, so they bought $250 million, they had a $250 million pipe into the, into the public company, Okto. And the company, I believe, went up 2,500%, which is a lot.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  So Fartcoin treasury went.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Seriously?

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually not kidding.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we were pitching this idea of instead of focusing on these like crypto assets, you could create a company that has a treasury that's just pure scratch off lottery tickets?

• 21:12John Coogan?

  So you have like $10 million of lottery tickets in there?

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Who knows what it could be worth? It's hard to get to a book value on that. You could do the expected value, but who knows? Maybe, maybe the investors will just, will just not do the book value.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Then you securitize it.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Exactly. Get, get derivatives against the, the, the right to scratch off.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Something there. I do want to cover a bit more Nebius. There's, there's some coverage here from TechCrunch. It's pretty solid because we covered this company earlier this year in a different context. So.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Nebius is a real company. It's a, it's hyper scale, right? Or NeoCloud.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  No, so I'll get into it. So Nebius has actually been public for 13 years, floating in May 2011 as Yandex. Envy, the Dutch holding company of Russian internet giant Yandex, which is the Google of Russia.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  It's just been out of Yandex.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Remember?

• 21:57John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  So at the tail end of 2021, Yandex hit a peak valuation of 31 billion. But in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, everything changed. NASDAQ halted trading on Yandex shares in February due to sanctions imposed on Russian affiliated companies. And a year later, NASDAQ said it would de-list Yandex altogether. But Yandex successfully appealed on the basis that it was restructuring, a process that would take an additional 16 months to fully complete. Part of this included offloading all of its Russian assets, which was where most of the real business value lay. But what remained under Yandex's ownership was a random assortment of infrastructure and business units that just so happened to be located outside of Russia.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  So they had set up data centers outside of Russia.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, as one does.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  And everything effectively in Russia was, was seized and sort of like pulled back into the country.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  What a wild story.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  This divestment concluded in July with Yandex changing its name to Nebius AI, a cloud compute platform with its own finished data center.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Finished.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  We saw a billboard for Nebius on the drive in today.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the new business was to be spear, spearheaded by Arkady, the Russian Yandex co-founder and former CEO, who was removed from a European sanctions list in March after he publicly condemned Russia's assault on Ukraine. The core Nebius business sells GPUs as a service to companies needing compute. And that is, I don't need to continue that. So anyways, crazy, crazy story.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  I have no idea of the history here.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Highway 101 billboard?

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Maybe not.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Not, not 101, but we, we saw it rolling in today.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  What did I took a picture of it because I love advertising. Anyway, for the East Bay, the East Bay people coming in.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  That's us.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Came from Oakland.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay. It said AI runs better on us.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  Echo Star has a wild story too. Brandon Gurrell dug into it on the Substack. Go to Substack. What is it? tbpn.substack.com?

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Subscribe. We, I believe we have our first guest. So thank you so much for coming on.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. You Titans.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Enjoy the rest of your demo day. Get out there.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Your founder gets on the show. I will find that team. Bring him over.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Did you bring enough checks? Is your checkbook full? I hope you're not running out of checks.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  It's all Apple Pay.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  All Apple Pay now.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  We need a ping sound effect. Ching. Anyway, if you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day, Summer 2025. And we will bring in our first team. Look at this. How you doing? Welcome to the stream.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 24:28John Coogan?

  How you doing? Do you want to bring over another chair for them? Here, you can grab this chair. We'll bring in one for you. We'll put this here.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Last, last, last. Are we going to space?

• 24:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Introduce yourselves.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Outfits because our logo is a rocket.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  And we help. I need to talk into the mic.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, as much as you can.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm Bora. This is Jerry. We're co-founders of Reacher and the outfits are because we help brands reach more creators.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  And make viral content to help them reach more people.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  How, how, how do you do that? Like, what is the actual product?

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we build AI agents to help brands find the right creators, personalize the outreach.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Get them to respond, pay them, and then also generate scripts and hooks so that they can make viral content.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Got it. Is the, is the long-term a marketplace for brands to connect to creators? Do you want to create like liquidity, two-sided marketplace?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Definitely. Right now, like, let's build as much tools for brands as possible. There's so much work there. And then, once we have a critical mass of, let's say, 50,000 brands, we open up the deal marketplace to creators and that's when they can make money.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay. First question, I'm going to hit you with a hard question. I'm bullish on the tool in its current state. There's been so many attempts to build creator marketing tools over the last decade. None that I'm aware of have become, you know, truly, truly massive companies, right? How, what, what, what do you think has changed now that can enable this to be sort of a billion-dollar company?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  So I would say one thing is the fact that TikTok Shop exists and social commerce is like the first real social commerce platform. Everything is native, native checkout. The attribution is really dialed in in terms of everything happens on the platform. And it's the first real attempt at getting anybody like you, me, regular creators that don't have millions of followers to make content. And with the algorithm, the way it works is you can go viral, right? Yeah. So I think that's one big aspect of it. And the other part is AI. And I'll let you speak to that.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  So you guys, just, just one second. So you guys are focused on TikTok, TikTok Shop initially as a category?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Currently, currently, yes.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  Yes. Yep.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, what, what, you said AI agents going around finding creators. Uh, is there pushback from scraping TikTok? Like what, what's the actual interaction like there?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  No pushback because we're number one on the TikTok Shop App Store.

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  So we're, we're in the backend.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  We help TikTok make money, so they don't want to push back.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Uh, we, we have some lightning round questions. Uh, favorite entrepreneur. What you got?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  You can say anybody.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Could be just a buddy of yours.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  I was gonna say Elon, but I think it's, uh, Jensen.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Jensen.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Okay, the first Jensen. Let's start counting them up.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Uh, also, uh, we've been asking everyone, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet?

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Oh, first dollar on the internet?

• 27:06John Coogan?

  We're just dollar in business.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Dollar in business. I was fixing people's iPhone crack screens.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  No way.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  That's a great story.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, guys. Uh, traction, traction. What, what, what kind of numbers do you report on for Demade?

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Demade was great. Oh, my Demade was great. Our traction is $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Thank you, thank you.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Okay. Series B tariffs, all right?

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  I've seen enough get 100 million.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Oh, we heard series A and B investors don't like outfits, so we're gonna see about that.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. Well, we love the aesthetics. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, guys.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Tremendous, tremendous progress.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Cheers. And we have a surprise guest. We have the CEO of Gusto, I believe. Josh is here. Uh, we're gonna bring in Josh.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  How you doing? It's been too long. Good to see you. Oh, it's been so long. I'm so glad to see you. Good to catch up.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  It's good to be here.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Uh, introduce yourself at the stream really quickly.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  Hello, I'm Josh. I'm a CEO, co-founder of Gusto and we are right across the street.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Well, no way.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  Literally my team walked up and was like, they're across the street. Do you want to go say hi?

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  I'm like, sure.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 28:15Speaker 05

  I have zero prep.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Good, good placement too. Did you guys do that on purpose?

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Well, we were an early adopter of Dogpatch. We came here 2017.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  And we were surrounded by Juul.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  It used to be this building.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. That's crazy lore.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  Uber autonomous cars was the other tenant. Now it's Astronis NYC.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Uh, what batch were you in? It was 2020?

• 28:38Speaker 05

  Winter 2012.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  2012?

• 28:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Winter 2012. That must've been just after summer 2012 when I went through. Now, because I remember we used Gusto.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  What? How did, how did Demo Day go for you?

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  So first off, it was smaller.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  It was down in Mountain View.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  But it was still like, it was still like 70 teams?

• 28:53Speaker 05

  There was about 50, 60 in the batch.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 05

  And it was twice a year. You know, it's four times a year. Um, and yeah, uh, I mean, the shift was just starting to San Francisco.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 05

  So we were actually still based in Palo Alto up until four employees.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:06Speaker 05

  And then we moved up to the city and then a lot of companies are now here.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Were you, did you guys start with the payroll? Was that the thing you were planning to build or did you kind of pivot into it?

• 29:16Speaker 05

  We were before YC, definitely iterating and experimenting. Once YC officially started, we were like heads down.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So were you running payroll prior to Demo Day or did you need more time to build?

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Did you ever not dog food the product?

• 29:31Speaker 05

  So we, we decided we weren't going to pay ourselves.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Okay, until you could do it.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  Product.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 29:37Speaker 05

  And then we had two milestones.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  I like it.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Soundboard's going hard.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, we didn't pay ourselves till we could use our own product. And then we onboarded like 10 other companies.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but that was during YC?

• 29:48Speaker 05

  During YC.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  That was during the batch.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  For Demo Day, we had to be able to say to everyone.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're using our own product.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  Process payroll.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise you have to be, put a clown mat, you know, outfit on or something.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  We were, we were three electrical engineering PhD dropouts. What credibility do we have building payroll software?

• 30:03John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the, the, the craziest MVP version of running payroll? Like legally, can you just hand someone cash and fill out a form?

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, aren't there, aren't there stores?

• 30:12John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you ramp up?

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  They're still, they're still like.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  You can do it on a spreadsheet, right? Obviously you should use gusto, but like,

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Don't do it by hand.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Legally, legally, can you just do it on a?

• 30:21Speaker 05

  When we started the company, 40% of businesses in the US were doing it by hand.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  Right?

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  And you could, you, there's like physical businesses out there in the world that still like run, they do payroll as a service.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  They're called payroll service bureaus.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  And you can like go into them.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  And it's not a tech business.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  And.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  It looks more like retail.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, about a third of companies are still using that type of system. It's error prone, mistakes get made, you get penalized, yada, yada.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  How was, how was, how was, did you guys have any trouble raising or were people by that point were pretty bullish, I'm guessing?

• 30:56Speaker 05

  I think we stood out. There was luck, there was hard work. A lot of stuff has to line up because you're raising at the same time with a bunch of other founders. Instagram had just gotten bought in the last year or two, I think, before that. And so a lot of the companies in the batch were in the social, mobile, local.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  I remember this.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Kind of craze.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  So low.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  The best time to build SaaS is when everyone, everyone.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  We stuck out as like, we're building a business that has like very concrete need, very, very established market. So we ended up doing really well in the batch in terms of the fundraising process. We raised a $6 million seed round.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Back then was a large amount. And, and then it wasn't about spending yet. Like when we did our series A, we still had two thirds of that in the bank. But yeah, we had some great investors get involved and we're really grateful.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Uh, we have a lightning round. We have two questions.

• 31:41Speaker 05

  Let's do it.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  We've been asking everyone. Favorite entrepreneur, doesn't have to be greatest, it can just be anyone, but who's your favorite entrepreneur?

• 31:50Speaker 05

  Can I be snarky in my answer?

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Please.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Tomer and Eddie are my co-founders. They're amazing. I think really highly of them.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  That's a fair, that's a fair answer.

• 31:58Speaker 05

  I can go with a classic.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Any biographies that you are on your nightstand?

• 32:01Speaker 05

  Here's a personal story. Graduated 2005, Stanford, and the commencement speaker that year was Steve Jobs.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  That speech was, was live.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  It's like a viral video.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  And that was a formative moment and I really admire like that customer centricity that like imagine the future aspect of Steve Jobs.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah, that's great.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  And then what's the first dollar that you made online? Was it Gusto or were you doing anything before that?

• 32:28Speaker 05

  I mean, back in the 90s, I was building websites.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  I built a website for a coffee shop.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  For a coffee shop.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  So, I mean, that was, I got paid for that.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Do you remember how much you got paid?

• 32:37Speaker 05

  I think I did it for like 500 bucks.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  500 bucks? That's pretty good.

• 32:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  In the 90s with inflation, that's like $25,000 today.

• 32:45Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you just waited some time, bought Bitcoin, you'd be a trillionaire.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Well, you put it all in a payroll and I think it worked out.

• 32:52Speaker 05

  Maybe I'm Satoshi.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What, uh, more guests just ready to go?

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, perfect. I got a lot more questions.

• 32:59Speaker 05

  Good to see you. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 33:02Speaker 05

  Congrats on all the progress with what you guys are doing.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And yeah, good luck out there if you're, if you're a founder.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  What percentage, what, what, what percentage of the batch is already using Gusto, do you think?

• 33:13Speaker 05

  We tend to do pretty well with YC batches.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  It's fantastic.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  And we also do a Boba get together.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Boba.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Boba Gusto, make payroll easy, set up healthcare really easy. We're here to serve.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for helping.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Good to see you.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  And we will bring in our next guest who will also tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Welcome to the show.

• 33:36Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you a salute. There you go.

• 33:39Speaker 06

  I'm a big fan of the show.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself for the stream. What are you building? What are you pitching here today?

• 33:45Speaker 06

  So I'm Bruno. We're building Gauss, a personal AI investment analyst for retail investors.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:51Speaker 06

  So you know, B to C, if you invest in stocks, you're welcome to join our platform.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, there's been a ton of moves in the, in the retail world, tons of meme stocks going on. Is this gonna help me find the next great meme stock or avoid getting caught up in the meme stock?

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Stuff is it more for the retail investor who doesn't want to get burned or the retail investor?

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Can I tell the apps to not make mistakes?

• 34:11Speaker 06

  Exactly. That's actually our number one use case. We want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Emotional mistakes.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  Right now, we're focusing on thesis driven investors, so not the, the meme stock buyers. So you have a clear thesis, you want to monitor the market, but you're a busy professional, you don't have time to keep track of everything that's happening. We can find opportunities, you know, you connect your portfolio to us.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:33Speaker 06

  And we can start giving tailored advice.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 06

  That fits your.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  So yeah, talk to me about the puzzle pieces that you're putting together. I imagine Plaid's important. There's probably some broker dealer at some point. There's probably a frontier model that you're partnering with. You're not training your own models. But what are the puzzle pieces that you're putting together to build a platform?

• 34:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So Plaid is part of our platform. We have read only access to your accounts. We don't do trades.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Okay, you just recommend right now.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  We recommend, so we're an advisor base. We want to tackle the advisory market and replace RIAs with agents.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  So what kind of, what's the compliance framework if you're giving people investment advice as an app?

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Everyone always says, so you just say not investment advice and then you're fine, right? And then you can give as much investment advice as possible.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Right now, that's what we do, but we're in the process of getting the RIA registration.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 06

  Hopefully by the end of the month, we will be an RIA.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what would you come into, did you, did you come into YC with this idea or did you pivot into it?

• 35:28Speaker 06

  We did, yeah, actually. We've been, Michael Farr and I have been working on this for the past like three, four months. We applied with this idea. Uh, we're one of the few B2C companies in this batch. Cause most companies have been B2B, but it's been exciting. We got like 1.7 thousand users using our platform, generating revenue.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And is your KPI like assets that are linked on Plaid? Is that what you shared today?

• 35:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's one of the, the KPIs, but right now we're focusing on signups and retention.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Totally users.

• 35:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, we want to get, you know, users coming to our platform and staying with us. And we want to eventually be the best in giving like tailored investment advice for people.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, lightning round?

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, I was gonna say, how are you monetizing today?

• 36:07Speaker 06

  It's a subscription model. So we're charging $19 a month for customers. And, you know, we'll plan to continue with this for a while and then eventually we're gonna switch to the more RIA-like model.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Free plan or everyone paid?

• 36:19Speaker 06

  Free plan. It's a freemium. You can just like sign up the platform, use the free features and then you can pay and access more.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  I like businesses like this because people run the calculus of like if I pay $19 a month, but I can make a slightly better investment.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Totally. Also, I mean, you can definitely, I don't wanna, you know, degrade the business in any way, but you can also underwrite this as almost like an edutainment product. Like, even if I'm not always making the trade that recommends, if I'm just saying, okay, here's my thesis, walk me through the stocks, that's almost like a deep research type product, that's something that somebody can read like an investment newsletter.

• 36:54Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 36:57Speaker 06

  I was, so I started my career at New Bank, big Brazilian fintech. I was doing data science there, then I moved to VC. I did three years of fintech investing in Latin America. VCs, I like VCs. I was in the industry, you know, and then I switched to the other side of the table. Now I wanted to start something on my own. Did two years of business school at Stanford. Just graduated two months ago. Did YC and now we're here.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Non-traditional background.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  So, how's the fundraiser going?

• 37:28Speaker 06

  We closed around already.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Whoa, let's go, okay.

• 37:33Speaker 06

  Still undisclosed, but we have a small location for smaller angel checks. You know, hopefully that's good runway for us.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  He's like, call me, but not financial advice. But also it's going, it's gonna be a thousand bagger, but also not financial advice.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Dude, congrats.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, lightning round question. Favorite entrepreneur, we've been asking everyone, who comes to mind throughout history?

• 37:57Speaker 06

  I have to say Davi Velas from New Bank. He's an inspiration for me. He challenged, you know, the most traditional industry in Brazil, big banks, and he managed to create a generational company.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Fantastic. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet?

• 38:10Speaker 06

  Oof. Um, so when I was a kid, um, you know, I started kind of like this small ecommerce shop to sell, um, materials for, you know, school, school materials.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 06

  Um, it was just like a

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Where was it?

• 38:26Speaker 06

  Very simple website in Brazil. Uh, I was in São Paulo and you know, kids were always like, they asked their moms to buy school materials. And I was like, I think there's a way to just like sell directly to kids. And they were like, starting to go to this website. And I was just like, and it was like, there was no payment system or anything. It was just like a storefront and you know, they could select a material.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  They pay you cash.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  And they, they pay me cash. That's cool.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  But you use the internet as

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was like an order management system.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Wow, that's amazing. That's a great story. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream.

• 38:54Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  It's a great talk to you.

• 38:55Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the round.

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  That was, uh, not general solicitation, by the way. He was not saying to reach out to him if you want to invest in the company. Uh, but I love to see it. Uh, I love to see a non-traditional background into, uh,

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Stanford representation.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  Stanford MBA, worked as a venture capitalist, worked at a, at a, at a hyperscaler. Uh, we, we love to, not a hyperscaler, but

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Just like one of the power law outcomes. Welcome to the stream, Perseus Defense. I saw your stuff on, on X. I saw the image of this massive, like

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Should be Perseus Warfare.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Wow. Got to update the shirts.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show, guys.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. No, you're good.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  No, you're good. Cool.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks so much for hopping on. Uh, we're going to kind of have you pass back the mic and, uh, back and forth. Uh, just get as close as you can.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  But, uh, introduce yourselves. Who are you? What are you building?

• 39:46Speaker 07

  Cool. So my name is Jason Cornelius. Uh, this is Steve. Hey, what's up, guys? Steve with Perseus Defense.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  What's up?

• 39:52Speaker 07

  And we're building 16 inch missiles to shoot down drones.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  16 inch missiles to shoot down drones. Okay. Uh, what, what, yeah, what, what, like, do we not have 16?

• 40:01Speaker 07

  We should have brought one.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Do we not have 16 inch missiles in the arsenal currently? Is this something that's like, like we're familiar with like the Patriot and then the Bullet?

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  How much do they cost and how do you fire them?

• 40:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's a good question. So there are some existing solutions for like the counter UAS problem, right?

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  We see And walk through it. Well, yeah, walk through the solutions.

• 40:17Speaker 07

  For sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:20Speaker 07

  Yeah. So GPS jamming.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Which is unreliable, right?

• 40:23Speaker 07

  There's the, there's easy ways to defeat them. You know, you can make a more advanced drone. And this is what we see.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  And then you have the fiber optic cables.

• 40:28Speaker 07

  There's fiber optics. So this is like already defeating some of those solutions that we have.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 07

  And then there's like the Death Star laser beam, which is very expensive, immobile, very heavy, requires a lot of power. There's AI machine guns and so like there's a million solutions and we were

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Who's your buddy that does that?

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  ACS.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  ACS, it's gone on in the truck, yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 07

  And so there's some really good solutions out there for different use cases and we all

• 40:49Jordi Hays?

  But we need more.

• 40:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, we need more and they all have pros and cons and they have like a layered. So some of them like ACS is very short range. Some of them like a Patriot is very long range. And so we looked at it, who's going to fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend a $10 million missile to shoot it at 10 miles away, but we also don't want it to get so close to us that it's, you know, right on top of us.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  So what's the, what's the range? It's a 16 inch missile?

• 41:10Speaker 07

  Half mile.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Half mile. Okay.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  And is the benefit of that, the payload, like you can blow up a bigger drone or you can just fly farther? Like what are the trade offs that go or what are the benefits?

• 41:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, really the, the cost.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  The cost.

• 41:22Speaker 07

  Yeah. So if you look at like the best solutions today, you know, Raytheon has something called Coyote, that's still $250,000 per drone that we take out. The drone that we take out costs $1,000. So it's not a great scale, right? So we're building these things for a sub $10,000 a shot, trying to drive that cost down. And then you have a missile.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  How is, how does it do targeting and like actual fire?

• 41:43Speaker 08

  Yeah. So there's a thermal seeker onboard the missile. All the computes onboard the missile, it's fire and forget. So it just seeks out the drones.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so you can just shoot these out into the

• 41:52Speaker 08

  And um, so we have the display out back with like the missile pod mounted on some unmanned vehicles. And we got some Navy SEALs to send us. But you can see like these things could, they're cheap, they can pop off. You can have like, they're only a pound each. So you can have like 25 missiles in one pod. That's only like 30 pounds or so. So a guy can carry around like a mini surface to air missile site, basically.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  Crazy.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Uh, what's the progress of the business? Are you going straight to program of record? Are you doing some, uh, some different grants? What, what, what's the business model?

• 42:20Speaker 07

  Sure. It's a good question. So, you know, typical way to do this is you apply for a CIBR, Small Business Innovation Project. I mean, we've, so we've done some of those applications. We're kind of trying to attack it from all different possible angles. So I was in the Pentagon three weeks ago. I carried missiles inside the Pentagon to show two offices there. We're working with Fort Hood, so First Cavalry Division down there. They've been super helpful, giving us feedback on our solution, trying to help us accelerate it into the DOD. So we're talking to the soldiers at the ground level. We're talking to the Pentagon, we're talking to the science and technology communities inside the DOD and really have a list of supporters. They're just waiting for us to get the technology ready so that they can bring us out. We can demo it and get it ready to rock.

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  What's it like?

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  Testing a product like this.

• 43:01Speaker 07

  Oh, it's cool.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  It's, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, uh, but, but, you know, a lot of your batchmates here can go and just ship a product, you know, to make, make an edit, ship it to prod, and then the stakes are a little bit lower. So like, where are you guys even testing?

• 43:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, can't say on here where we test at.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 07

  But every two weeks, we do, we do a long drive very far outside of San Francisco and we load the truck up. We take a bunch of missiles out into a very far away land. Uh, and we test. So that's been the entire YC batch. Every two weeks we've done it. So four or five cycles. And then in between those two weeks, we have the entire team doing major iterations to the design, improving it. So in the 10 weeks of YC, we've done five major missile iterations, launched over 30 missiles, and it's, it's progressing quite fast.

• 43:43Speaker 08

  I will say the, the first thing that we bought with the YC company or with the YC money was a Ford Expedition. And so we just packed that thing full of all the.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 43:52Speaker 08

  And then we blew it up. Yeah. Exactly.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Lightning round, uh, favorite entrepreneur. Who do you look to for advice or, uh, or as a role model?

• 44:02Speaker 08

  We're looking at Dino at Sironic right now and trying to match that trajectory, growth trajectory that they're having a lot.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 44:08Speaker 08

  And I'll say Steve Blank, we're, we're kind of friends with him down at the Stanford.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  I love him.

• 44:12Speaker 08

  Class. He's awesome.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  I love him. Yeah. I interviewed him a while back. He's great. Uh, second lightning round question. How do you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 44:22Speaker 08

  First. I used to wash horse trailers.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Wash horse trailers?

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  Question.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Analog, yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 08

  There you go. Let's give it up for people who make their money.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 44:33Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Good luck at the rest of the demo.

• 44:36Speaker 07

  Cheers.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Uh, we, if you're tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We, uh, are going to have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tan stop by. Uh, the team's going to bring in Gary Tan as soon as he's available. But up next, we have Meteor. Welcome to the stream.

• 44:52Speaker 08

  Welcome to the show.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you. Uh, introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building?

• 44:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'm Purnav. We're building Meteor and this is Farhan. The AI native browser that's gonna kill Google Chrome.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, we got that browser wars going, let's go.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, Meteor, are you guys going after Comet too?

• 45:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely, everyone, yeah.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, well, what's the plan? I mean, everyone is installed Chrome at this point, everyone runs it, it's so hard to rip it out. How do you, how do you create a solution that's 10x better?

• 45:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, I mean, we all spend seven or eight hours every day on our browser, right? We spend, we do most of our work on the browser, right? Most of it is redundant work.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:33Speaker 09

  We're saying we can automate all of that away.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:35Speaker 09

  Right, we're saying, we want AI, we want to spawn AI agents that work with you as your co-pilot to the web, that can do your work for you, so you don't have to waste your seven, eight hours.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Okay, but, but, but like, what does that look like as I use the product? How do you pitch it to somebody who says Chrome works well enough for me?

• 45:49Speaker 09

  Right, Chrome does work well enough for you if you're okay wasting many hours a day.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:53Speaker 09

  What we're saying is we're giving you time savings.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 09

  It's sort of like, people pay thousands of dollars for personal assistance.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 45:58Speaker 09

  Right, people pay thousands of dollars for employees to hire, like to create automation.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:02Speaker 09

  We're saying, we want to create virtual employees.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 46:05Speaker 09

  That run on your browser.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 09

  Right, and that's Meteor, so like, let's say you want to handle your calendar.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 46:10Speaker 09

  Right, just automate all like meeting creation, you know, based on your, your emails. Like if you want, if you want, you know, some kind of like data entry, just hand, like tell Meteor and we'll handle it for you, right?

• 46:20John Coogan?

  How is the AI agent interfacing with the actual data? Are you screen scraping, taking screenshots, trying to interpret it that way? Are you, you doing computer use or, you know, interacting with the HTML API underneath?

• 46:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're in alpha right now, so we're trying out a bunch of things. Right now, we're primarily using vision.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:36Speaker 09

  So we use screenshots.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 46:38Speaker 09

  Also helps a little bit with like some of the, the, the prompt injection stuff, so definitely. We're primarily using vision, but you know, we've been playing around with a bunch of things.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 46:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  What's the best frontier model right now for what you do?

• 46:50Speaker 09

  Uh, right now, it's, it's probably Claude Sonnet.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:52Speaker 09

  But, you know, we use a mixture of models, right? We use GPT, we use Claude, we use all of them, and we are state of the art. Uh, yeah, so.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  What were you guys doing before YC?

• 47:01Speaker 10

  Yeah. We were at the UW. We were both doing computer science.

• 47:04John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 47:05Speaker 10

  To build Meteor.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  We have a lightning round. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?

• 47:10Speaker 09

  It's gotta be Steve Jobs.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs, okay. And how did you make your first money online, your first dollar in business or online?

• 47:17Speaker 10

  Selling Pokemon cards.

• 47:18John Coogan?

  Selling Pokemon cards.

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 47:20Speaker 09

  There we go.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations on Demo Day. Thank you so much.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  How's the race going? First year, college dropouts, you're here, you're going through IC.

• 47:28Speaker 09

  Oh, it's been, it's been going great. Yeah. Uh, we're, you know, we're both second time entrepreneurs.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 47:33Speaker 09

  Been a bunch of coaching in the past.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  First time dropout, second time entrepreneur.

• 47:36Speaker 09

  Yeah. Unfortunately, you can only do that once.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is all.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  No, you could go back and get a, you could get an MBA.

• 47:41Speaker 09

  I just found my way immediately.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could go to med school at 35, dropout.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  What was your last, what was your last company?

• 47:48Speaker 09

  Um, so he built Maxima, which is an FPGA ID. That was 10 times faster than the industry standard.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 47:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. A lot of, lot of code optimization. I've built a bunch of projects at UW that went viral.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 47:59Speaker 10

  He almost got kicked out twice.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  No way.

• 48:00Speaker 09

  Yeah, I did.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  Okay, tell the story. What was the worst, the worst thing you did to get kicked out?

• 48:04Speaker 09

  So, well, the, the thing that went most viral was, uh, I figured out there was a data leak that allowed students to get access to their professors before UW published it. And I published it within eight hours, within eight days, it got taken down. I got called in. Uh, but you know, everything's okay now. We're, we're.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Okay, everything's okay now.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, congrats, guys.

• 48:22Speaker 09

  Appreciate it.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Good luck out there. Good luck.

• 48:24Speaker 09

  Thank you so much.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  If you see Sundar Pichai, just run the other direction. Just run the other direction.

• 48:30Speaker 09

  Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for coming on.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  We have our next guest.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  We've been trying not to do handshakes. People are insistent on handshakes. And we're gonna do handshakes all day.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Uh, congratulations on a fantastic Demo Day. Why don't you introduce yourself?

• 48:47Speaker 11

  Yes, we just literally came directly from the stage.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We love you.

• 48:51Speaker 11

  I think it was really good.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  You look calm and collected.

• 48:53Speaker 11

  Okay, that's good.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself and the company.

• 48:55Speaker 11

  Cool. I'm Has Hobble. I'm the founder of Pally. We're bringing every contact and every conversation from every platform into one place.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:02Speaker 11

  And using AI to help you keep track.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Okay, iMessage. How do you get my iMessage?

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  Modern, modern work. I got iMessage. There's Signal, there's XChat, there's LinkedIn, there's email, there's personal email.

• 49:11Speaker 11

  Tell me about it.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  And there's been a few people that have tried to crack this. I think like text.com.

• 49:17Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Highest, maybe highest profile solution.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  There was Eric Nikoski, the YC founder, working on something like this deeper.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what's the unique insight and what kind of value do I get from connecting all these services and giving you all my data?

• 49:33Speaker 11

  Well, one, you don't give us all your data. We do it fully locally on your device.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:36Speaker 11

  With on-device LLMs, on-device backed databases, your data remains local, which is amazing for you guys and for us because we don't want to see your data either.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  So I have to run it on a computer that's always on, basically?

• 49:47Speaker 11

  No, so it's on your MacBook and then it syncs to your iPhone as well.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Okay, but if my MacBook's closed right now, it's not going to sync to my phone?

• 49:54Speaker 11

  If it's switched off fully, it won't sync, but if it's chilling like that, it's okay.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  So never turn off.

• 49:59Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  But realistically, if I really cared about this, I could get a Mac Mini and throw it, and it's just running. Okay, got it. How are you actually scraping? Can you share how you're scraping out of iMessage?

• 50:12Speaker 11

  It's very clever.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Everyone always has one secret trick that Tim Cook hates. And good luck to you holding on to that.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  What's the traction been like? What kind of metrics were you recording?

• 50:25Speaker 11

  I mean, so we launched two months ago, reached Product of the Week on Product Hunt, and it's since grown to over, thank you.

• 50:33Speaker 11

  It's since grown to over three and a half thousand users, 125K of ARR.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow, so people are really paying.

• 50:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. Growing at 22% week over week.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. We have some lightning round questions for you. Who's your favorite entrepreneur? Who are you learning a lot from?

• 50:48Speaker 11

  My favorite entrepreneur of all time, actually would be like Richard Branson. And here's a fun story. So when I was, I dropped out of high school and I remember when I was like 14 to 15, speaking to my mom about this, I pointed to him as someone who was successful who dropped out.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  Did he drop out of high school though?

• 51:04Speaker 11

  Yeah. And then 10 years later, I was invited to spend a week on his island with him. And I spent actually time with him on Necker Island. And so it was like a very cool full circle moment. And he's been a great, great like mentor over the years.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. Second lightning round question. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 51:20Speaker 11

  I was 12 years old and I sold FIFA ultimate team coins.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  What do coins mean in that context?

• 51:28Speaker 11

  You can buy and sell players and create a team. And I would.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  It's like virtual currency inside the game.

• 51:33Speaker 11

  But how I'll do it is I'd find a player and buy up every single version of that player and then price fix. Three times higher than the like classic price. And so it made so much money, definitely illegal in the real world, but on this game it was fair game.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  Fair game.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Fair game.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  How's the raise going?

• 51:53Speaker 11

  I mean, we're either subscribed and we're still deciding on who to partner with. So reach out if you want to chat.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice, but.

• 52:02Speaker 11

  Thanks so much. Guys, thanks so much.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Can't wait to test the product out. We will bring in our next guest and we are live here from YC Demo Day. Welcome to the stream. Nice to meet you. What a direct name. Let me guess. Model context protocol, AI, something like that? What's going on? Introduce yourself. What do you do?

• 52:21Speaker 12

  Yeah, my name is Peter. I'm the CEO of MCPUs. We help people use MCP, of course. It'll be an open source that has tools and infrastructure.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  I was gonna say, what's the open source strategy?

• 52:30Speaker 12

  Yeah, open source, I mean, is a no brainer.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  The strategy is to open source.

• 52:34Speaker 12

  MIT license, everything is free.

• 52:36John Coogan?

  Okay, everything's free. And then there's probably GitHub repo that's growing and some measured by stars or something like that.

• 52:40Speaker 12

  7K stars.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  I knew it. It's here for 7K stars. Congrats. And then at some point, do you want to be more like red hat Linux? Like who are you looking to in terms of well run? Is GitLab like?

• 52:51Speaker 12

  Superbase.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Superbase. Okay. Breakdown. How will their business model look like yours?

• 52:56Speaker 12

  Yeah, because they, they have a bottom up approach. They get developers and then those developers introduced inside the company, the tool.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:03Speaker 12

  And I love it.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  And, and is the goal there to sell a, a non-self-hosted version long-term?

• 53:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, like a cloud, you know?

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Great. What else is driving adoption right now? Like, who are the key businesses or customers that are really going all in on MCP?

• 53:18Speaker 12

  Enterprise.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Enterprise.

• 53:19Speaker 12

  Twenty percent.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Is there any, is there, is there any like specific subset of enterprise that's particularly all in on AI or MCP? Like, we saw this data point yesterday that when the census polls, people, maybe enterprises are less likely to adopt AI. Maybe they got over their skis, but you can imagine that it's different if you're a farmer adopting AI or a large agricultural conglomerate, chemical plant, or a widgets business versus like your Visa or your fintech company and like AI is, it's already, already a digital business. So is there, have you noticed any trends in who your customers are?

• 53:55Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think what you said makes a lot of sense, like tech forward enterprise are doubling down. Like PayPal, this kind of companies because they have like a very software, like they have a very valuable software. MCP allows to expose this software to agents, so they're the ones, you know, doubling down.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  How's the raise going?

• 54:12Speaker 12

  Very good, very good. You raised six already.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  What?

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Six thousand dollars.

• 54:19Speaker 12

  Six thousand.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Six thousand dollars.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  How many times did you have to apply to YC to get in?

• 54:24Speaker 12

  Oh, three.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Three.

• 54:25Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Never give up.

• 54:27Speaker 12

  Never give up.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing?

• 54:29Speaker 12

  I was, I was in Zurich, you know, also so far there and virtual try on for ecommerce.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:36Speaker 12

  Miserable.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Oh, virtual try.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  Did you just say miserable?

• 54:39Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 12

  Very hard to sell to fashion. Don't do it, founders.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's crazy how many companies have taken that crack.

• 54:47Speaker 12

  Yeah. It's just. But now it's getting better, you know.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you always wonder if it's gonna, is that functionality gonna live like at Shopify or at an independent enterprise?

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the AI scene like in Zurich?

• 55:04John Coogan?

  I, there's a team over at Meta. They're poaching all the time.

• 55:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. Zurich is a great place for talent, like deep research and yeah. I think last year you had another Zurich guy.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 55:16Speaker 12

  So we're also getting it.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  But you're staying in the Bay.

• 55:19Speaker 12

  Yeah, we're seeing it.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  Woo, America, play the America eagle.

• 55:22Speaker 12

  We gotta get them.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  We have a lightning round. We like to ask two questions first. What is your favorite entrepreneur or someone in business that you look up to?

• 55:34Speaker 12

  Yeah, Brian Chesky, I think.

• 55:35John Coogan?

  Brian Chesky.

• 55:36Speaker 12

  There we go.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  YC alum, no less. And then our second question, how did you make your first dollar online or in business?

• 55:44Speaker 12

  Converting on open source user.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Really?

• 55:47Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  That was when you made your first song.

• 55:49Speaker 12

  No, so I thought it was like an hypothetical question.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  No, no, no, literally, like a lot of people, they they sold records on eBay or they, you know, set up a website for a friend. Everyone has an interesting story of like their first taste of entrepreneurship.

• 56:02Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Could it just been a job? I don't know.

• 56:03Speaker 12

  I think it was an app where people could create picture of their kids.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 12

  I made it with a girlfriend at the time.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  No way. Okay.

• 56:10Speaker 12

  Cool.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  An app.

• 56:11Speaker 12

  Programming, yeah.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you got your first dollar. Well, congratulations. Have a great rest of your demo day. Nice to meet you. We will talk to you soon and we will bring in our next guest at YCD Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Thank you for hopping on the stream. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Please introduce yourself. What do you do? What are you building?

• 56:31Speaker 13

  Yeah, I'm Pranjali. I'm building Slashy.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  What is Slashy?

• 56:35Speaker 13

  Slashy is a general agent that connects to your apps.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:38Speaker 13

  Like your calendar, Gmail, Notion, Slack.

• 56:40John Coogan?

  On Android, iOS, both?

• 56:43Speaker 13

  It's on the browser.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  It's on the browser? Okay. So is this a Chrome plugin or are you engaged in the browser wars? Are you going up against Chrome directly?

• 56:51Speaker 13

  We're not in the browser wars. We're actually built on APIs.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  APIs?

• 56:55Speaker 13

  Yeah, no MCP, no browser.

• 56:57Speaker 12

  Wow, doing it the old fashioned way.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  So does that mean I have to go through like 25 different OAuths to actually log into every single app with you once? And then you have the freedom to move around with your agents inside my life?

• 57:08Speaker 13

  There's ways to get around it. There's ways to get around OAuths. You know, you know, Google.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  Sounds like some Sith Lord magic.

• 57:15Speaker 13

  Right now, it's very basic. We just don't want to, you know, unleash our power to the world just yet.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of power, how powerful is the business now?

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, what is the value that you're that you're telling users they'll get out of the product? Is it more B2B focus, more consumer? Where's the focus?

• 57:32Speaker 13

  The focus is just, you know, you're nine to five, the shit that you don't like doing. And you just like have Sashi do the automating of repetitive tasks.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  So specifically, I have a workflow that I'm doing where I'm going from this document to this app, to this calendar, to this email. And I do that every single day. And so I'm going to use Slashy to automate that.

• 57:50Speaker 13

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's of course, yeah, except Sashi writes the prompt for you and thinks of the edge cases for you as well. And well, one thing you should try on it is people search. I know you're meeting lots of founders today. But yeah, we made, we made a specific template for you for we season alike to be like, find everything about ex founder.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Atlassian just bought the browser company. Do you think they're kind of going after a similar opportunity to what you guys are going after?

• 58:18Speaker 13

  I think, I think the issue is just it's really hard to build habits around browsers.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 13

  It's really hard to get people to use browsers and switch from like what they've already been using.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  Yep. So better to integrate at a deeper level.

• 58:27Speaker 13

  That's exactly it. You need to, you really need to just, you know, be like useful and be something that people want to use.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  So once I, once I authenticate and you're, you're hooked into my digital life, are you going to just automatically detect? Things that could be workflows? You said you're going to write the prompt to yourself. So you're going to notice that every time I get an email from someone saying, hey, I'd like to meet. I open up LinkedIn and I search them and I go over here and I look at their website and then you might do that automatically for me in the future.

• 58:53Speaker 13

  Yeah, like ask Sashi to do one thing and then it'll be like, do you want me to set this up for you every single day?

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  Nice. How, how did you meet your co-founders and what were you guys doing before this?

• 59:02Speaker 13

  We met at college, Alteria was, I'm 18, freshman. My co-founder is sophomore and then the other one is junior.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  What school?

• 59:10Speaker 13

  Georgia Tech.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 59:11Speaker 13

  Yeah, before that I had.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  And you got dropped out?

• 59:14Speaker 13

  Sorry?

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  Dropped out?

• 59:15Speaker 13

  Dropped out.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Freshman dropout.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  How did, how did your parents feel about the dropout?

• 59:26Speaker 13

  They're both PhDs. It's a, you know, it's a little bit of an uphill battle, but you know, they're supportive. So thank you, mom.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  What metrics did you share during your pitch?

• 59:35Speaker 13

  What metrics did I share? Well, 40% of the batch uses us.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  What?

• 59:38Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 59:43Speaker 13

  Growing 30% week over week. 30% of the VCs in Demo Day are using us for meeting prep.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  No way. Okay, that's really good. Very cool. Yeah, you came in with a pretty broad pitch, but you narrowed down really well. I like this.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. How's the fundraiser going?

• 59:57Speaker 13

  Fundraise going well. We're almost, almost done with closing. Um, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  That should make your parents feel a little bit better. It's like, okay, like she dropped out, but she raised, you know?

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  The bag's in the river. Um, we have a lightning round. We asked two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?

• 1:00:14Speaker 13

  Who's my favorite entrepreneur?

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Who's something you look up to?

• 1:00:18Speaker 13

  Elon Musk, Lucy Guo.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, somebody's.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Lucy Guo.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, okay. Wait, somebody's, somebody's asking a question. Freshman dropout on September 9th. That is wild. Did you go, did you go for a week or were you a freshman last year?

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Did you do a full year at Georgia Tech or not?

• 1:00:32Speaker 13

  I did a year.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  You did one year, okay. It would be funny. And then the last question we ask is, how did you make your first money online? Although normally that's like people much younger, a decade ago. But yeah, what was your first introduction to entrepreneurship? Was it this company or did you make money in some other ways? Some people, you know, did some stuff on eBay or built an app or built a, built a website or something?

• 1:00:53Speaker 13

  You know, I started a company when I was 14 that Lucy Guo funded, actually.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  No way. Oh, there you go.

• 1:00:57Speaker 13

  Yeah, we went through H of zero.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Very cool. Okay. What, what did you actually do? How'd you make your money? Like, what, what did someone pay you for?

• 1:01:03Speaker 13

  Uh, summarizing research papers.

• 1:01:05John Coogan?

  No way, there we go.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. All right. Well, legend, legend.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  You just get one shot by deep research eventually.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Legend in the making.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Uh, we will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your Demo Day. If you are just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025 and we are bringing in our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? I'm John. Please sit down.

• 1:01:26Speaker 14

  Good to meet you.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  Talking to that microphone and introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do? What are you building?

• 1:01:30Speaker 14

  Hey, everyone. I'm Anwal. I'm the CEO of Close Era and we build AI agents for commercial real estate.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  What, what, what, what part of the commercial real estate stack, the actual transaction? Do you sit on the buyer's side, the seller's side, like?

• 1:01:44Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's a great question.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Administration, there's so much to that in commercial real estate.

• 1:01:47Speaker 14

  Exactly. It's a huge industry. So, uh, yeah, my co-founder and I, our families actually grew up. In the commercial real estate space are both our families are developers.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:01:56Speaker 14

  Thank you.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for the developer.

• 1:01:59Speaker 14

  Developers, developers.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Usually say that in a different context.

• 1:02:03Speaker 14

  Exactly, yeah. But yeah, we we kind of did a survey of the whole market and we realized actually the most insane amount of manual, tedious, boring work that of course can be automated with AI agents is actually done by brokerages. And so that's where we decided to focus.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  And so where in the brokerage stack do you say, is this somebody who's who's they never actually take possession? They're just facilitating the buy and sell.

• 1:02:25Speaker 14

  Yeah, exactly. So our our customers are commercial real estate brokers. So both on the buy side and sell side.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:02:30Speaker 14

  And that's, yeah, that's what we're focused.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  Then then in terms of we're talking AI agents, are you trying to build an RL environment for some of the other platforms? And and kind of, you know, throw your own agent on top or are you just building like SaaS that pulls the different AI tools off the shelf as needed?

• 1:02:49Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's a great question.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  How should I think about the business?

• 1:02:51Speaker 14

  Yeah. So you should think of us as kind of like AI employees. We automate entire end to end workflows. And so for commercial real estate brokers, there's two workflows in particular that take up the most amount of time and money. And so, for example, one of them is creating sales materials for buying and selling buildings. So today, on average, teams spend about four weeks making these materials and spend about 5K in design fees. And with us, they can do that entire process in about five minutes.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Progress on the traction? The traction, how's the raise going?

• 1:03:20Speaker 14

  Yeah, the raise has been great. We were we were done in 48 hours.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:03:24Speaker 14

  So it was nice. Yeah.

• 1:03:28Speaker 14

  It was fun. Yeah, I think with raising, it kind of either goes one of one of two ways. It's either like, you know, you're hot.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Or plateau productivity.

• 1:03:35Speaker 14

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing right before this?

• 1:03:37Speaker 14

  So I was at Google. So I was a PM working on monetizing Gemini, Notebook LM and D.

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:03:43Speaker 14

  Yeah, that helps with the fun.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, 200 bucks out of me. Thank you.

• 1:03:47Speaker 14

  Amazing. Yeah, so that launch was was super fun. It was like we were in chats with like Sergey. It was crazy.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Why were you rate limiting us so hard? John was paying 500 and he couldn't.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  I wanted to pay you more. I feel like you weren't monetizing hard enough. Come on, man.

• 1:04:01Speaker 14

  Yeah, you know, I don't work there anymore, but I can I can.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  I'm still going to hold you accountable. We have two lightning round questions we like to ask. One, favorite entrepreneur, somebody you look up to?

• 1:04:10Speaker 14

  Yeah, I think, you know, classic answer, definitely Steve Jobs, like reading that biography in middle school is like, well, it got me to want to move to the valley, go to Stanford, D Y C.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  The Walter Isaacson book, fantastic book. Second question, how did you make your first dollar on the internet?

• 1:04:22Speaker 14

  Yeah, how we made our first dollar on the internet was actually we cold called. So brokers are, you know, they always pick up the phone. And so, um, yeah.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Anything as a kid? Some people like sold eBay or like, you know, did like websites as a kid? Any, any, any?

• 1:04:37Speaker 14

  Yeah. So in, in high school, I made an app. It was a free app, but it used AI to help the visually impaired.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:04:43Speaker 14

  And so basically this is like pre multimodal models and stuff. And you could take a photo and if you're blind, like it would tell you, you know, what you're looking at, like say like a can of Coke or a can of Pepsi.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:04:51Speaker 14

  Uh, yeah, that had users in about 120 countries. Um, it was named one of TechCrunch's top AI stories of the year and was also in a Google commercial with Jeffrey Hinton and Justin Trudeau.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  No way. That's amazing.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Wow, that's fantastic.

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations on all the progress.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the day.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good luck out there.

• 1:05:08Speaker 14

  Awesome. Thank you for having me.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cheers. I didn't know all the VCs that couldn't fit in already.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, R I P.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, we are live from Demo Day, Y C, 2025. We will bring in our next guest, uh, whenever they are ready. Uh, in the meantime, any breaking news, Jordy, anything we should run through before we're, uh, bringing in the next guest? Um, I think we have our next guest right here. Hey, Josh Browder, how you doing, man?

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Good to see you. How you doing? I wasn't expecting you.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  How many, did you, did you back all the winners already?

• 1:05:40Speaker 15

  Um, no, I'm here mainly for social.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:05:43Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Just hanging out.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Just hanging out.

• 1:05:44Speaker 15

  There are some amazing companies here.

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  There are, there are. Uh, what, what trends do you like? We heard that last batch was cursor for everything. This batch is lovable for everything. Have you noticed any trends?

• 1:05:56Speaker 15

  I'm seeing a lot of boring software AI. I was just speaking with an amazing founder working on waste collection AI software.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  And, and you, and you're using boring. And you're using boring as a pejorative or not as a pejorative?

• 1:06:08Speaker 15

  No, I think more of these businesses need to be built.

• 1:06:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:11Speaker 15

  Less jargon.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:13Speaker 15

  And more boring stuff.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  More boring stuff. Just find a specific.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've been, I've been impressed with the traction so far. There's been a couple of founders that have come on that, uh, cool ideas expected to, to, to not necessarily have like a bunch of like real.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Traction with, with businesses and.

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you've obviously been working in like the application layer of AI for what? A decade or something like that now?

• 1:06:38Speaker 15

  Yeah, I'm getting old.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  You're still Teal Feller, right?

• 1:06:42Speaker 15

  Yes.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Young at heart, but but but does the does this idea of like going after bore boring kind of vertical SaaS, vertical AI, does that fit with a worldview that maybe like we're not just going to get the the the foundation model labs to one shot every single business opportunity and in fact it is a great time to build a niche business?

• 1:07:05Speaker 15

  I think that there's opportunities that are beneath the foundation models. You're seeing them now getting to like coding and things like that, but those are huge opportunities. They're not going to go into waste management.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:07:15Speaker 15

  And so you can build a hundred million, two hundred million business doing this sort of stuff.

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we I looked at Fijisimo when she became the CEO of applications at OpenAI. She had five things that she was going to knock down and it was like, you know, knowledge retrieval, health, you know, coaching, some shopping stuff.

• 1:07:32Speaker 15

  They're getting into talent now.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Talent.

• 1:07:33Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Coding, but then waste management's not on that list. And so I think you're safe for a little bit. Anyway.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  What what's happening in in your business that's that's exciting? I imagine there's every time the models get better, your product gets better?

• 1:07:51Speaker 15

  Yeah, I think you constantly have to be innovating. We're like always worried about what the big companies are doing to detect our AI robots. There are now SaaS startups that detect our robots.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:02Speaker 15

  And so we're trying to be.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  As a service.

• 1:08:04Speaker 15

  Yeah, exactly. Anti-robots as a service. Fortunately, we're more motivated than the average Comcast SaaS vendor. So we stay ahead. And then on the product side, when Do Not Pay started, it was just like templates. Now you could just ask ChatGPT to generate a template. So we're trying to go deeper, try and go more in the background.

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:25Speaker 15

  And build really exciting things.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you been talking to founders about where prices are sitting? Do you have any sense of? Of what, what, what a, you know, median valuation is for this round or, or, you know, high end of the batch pricing. I remember when I went through, you know, raising at like 12, it's great.

• 1:08:46Speaker 15

  I, I think any company raising below 20, there's like a problem with it. So I think 20 is now the baseline.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  20 is the base and then at high end, what were you saying, 40, 60?

• 1:08:57Speaker 15

  I mean, some even 100.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  100 already?

• 1:08:59Speaker 15

  Yeah. I'm trying, I'm, I'm here to meet 100 people at once and then I can relax. I'm very introverted. So this is my one social event of the year. So.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  One of the year.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  One of the year.

• 1:09:10Jordi Hays?

  We've got four batches. You gotta keep some in the tank.

• 1:09:13Speaker 15

  This is my first YC demo day. It's amazing. You can just meet everyone.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah. We've been doing a lightning round with everyone that comes on the stream today. Favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to?

• 1:09:22Speaker 15

  Um.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  Who comes to mind?

• 1:09:24Speaker 15

  I guess in this batch, there's an amazing founder from Kazakhstan, Nozomi. I think that's the name of his company. His name's Arlen. He's just such a hustler. I'm not an investor in his company, but I wish I was.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  What about throughout history? History's greatest entrepreneurs, who sticks out to you? Someone you maybe read the biography?

• 1:09:40Speaker 15

  Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is an inspiration. He, he's very kind of pricing focused. Did your other guest say that?

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  No one said Larry Ellison, but we've been talking about Larry for a long time. As a deeply underrated founder, just fantastic.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  An absolute animal.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  An animal.

• 1:09:56Speaker 15

  Oracle will sue its customers. They're so focused on money.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, the fact that he's just like, never really sold and like, really just the position that he has in that company is just remarkable. There's just a bunch of things. Also, he just looks great at his age. You can just tell that like a lot of things are going right.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  There's a headline from the LA Times in the year, in June 29th, 2000, called Oracle defends its spying on Microsoft as public service.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  They also called it their civic duty.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great. The other, the other lightning round question, this one would be fascinating for you is how did you make your first dollar ever on the internet?

• 1:10:37Speaker 15

  So I was jailbreaking phones.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:10:39Speaker 15

  And selling themes on Sidia. So this was before the days when the Apple operating system allowed you to change Apple icons. And so I would sell a Disney theme. And this was like a complete copyright violation because I'd take all of Disney's IP and make it. But I guess they weren't detecting it. And it was very lucrative.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  How old were you at the time?

• 1:10:57Speaker 15

  Maybe like 13.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  13.

• 1:10:59Speaker 15

  And there's different waves. So.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  Disney's worst nightmare.

• 1:11:01Speaker 15

  So I was in the jailbreaking wave. And then there was the Minecraft wave.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:05Speaker 15

  Then there was the sneakerbot wave.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  How were people making money on Minecraft?

• 1:11:09Speaker 15

  Minecraft server businesses.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Okay. So you set up a server.

• 1:11:12Speaker 15

  So that was Adam Gilb's generation with Owner. That's.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 15

  The Wonder founder, the amazing T B P N sponsor.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:11:19Speaker 15

  Yeah. They were making money with servers.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 15

  Then there was sneakerbots.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 1:11:24Speaker 15

  The WAP founders.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:25Speaker 15

  And now.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  What's next?

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Fortnite? Anything in Fortnite?

• 1:11:28Speaker 15

  I think it's like Roblox.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Roblox.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 15

  You see a lot of kids doing well on Roblox. Yeah.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  People that are printing on Roblox today will be here in five years.

• 1:11:37Speaker 15

  Or maybe just SaaS startups. I mean, there's like a 12 year old who's viral on X with his.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. In a few years, it's gonna be like, yeah, I don't even mess around with the video games. I just went straight to enterprise SaaS at age 12. My first dollar, a business deal between me and Oracle.

• 1:11:53Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Jordi Hays?

  Me and Larry.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  To build out a new data center. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the stream.

• 1:11:58Speaker 15

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Enjoy Demo Day. If you're just tuning in, we are live from Y C Demo Day 2025. Nice to meet you. I'm John.

• 1:12:06Speaker 16

  Nice to meet you.

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  Pleasure. Welcome to the stream.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself for the stream.

• 1:12:10Speaker 16

  All right.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Who are you? What are you building?

• 1:12:12Speaker 16

  Okay, awesome.

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  How's Demo Day going?

• 1:12:13Speaker 16

  Yeah. Hi. Do I look at you or do I look at the camera?

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  Whatever you want.

• 1:12:15Speaker 16

  Okay, I'm gonna look at you.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:12:17Speaker 16

  I'm Anson. We're building Normal and we're automating hardware testing and compliance.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Hardware testing and compliance. Any specific verticals? Are we talking like semiconductors, rockets, spaceships, cars?

• 1:12:27Speaker 16

  Yeah, we're starting with like robotics and drones and other, any electrical components that have like a radio?

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:32Speaker 16

  Part to it. So that's mostly it.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  So there's like a test stand where you need to actually see just the motor work and pick up the robotic arm.

• 1:12:40Speaker 16

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  And it needs to be, and there's someone there testing that robotic motor. Like every day they get a new robotic arm, they test it. And then they need to put that into some sort of database to manage and you kind of provide the software suite they interact with on the day to day basis.

• 1:12:53Speaker 16

  Awesome. When you pitch it back through.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  Okay. That is what you're doing? Okay, fantastic.

• 1:12:56Speaker 16

  It's very similar to that. So basically as people are trying to build more hardware.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:01Speaker 16

  And try to build more hardware here, a lot of the testing infrastructure is either overseas or it's not like very nice to deal with. It's kind of like working with the IRS a little bit. So just kind of streamlining the process so that as teams go through and like they, they build this like wonderful robot or a wonderful like drone, like sub-assembly. They're able to actually get that tested in, in like a facility and through a process that is like deserving of the thing that they've made.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:24Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25John Coogan?

  Who are you selling to right now? Do you want to start with like, go figure out how to work with big manufacturing, the, the, the, the big automaker OEMs and primes or startups? Like who, who, who's the ideal customer to work with at this stage?

• 1:13:38Speaker 16

  Yeah. So the people that we're working with now are mostly like early stage startup companies. So if anybody's watching, like we'd love to work with you.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:44Speaker 16

  So yeah, mostly drone, robotics, toys, cameras.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 16

  Yeah. Anything with like a RF component.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Okay, great. How's demo day going? Did you share any sort of headline KPI or news on the raise?

• 1:13:58Speaker 16

  Yeah, we're wrapped up. So this is kind of like.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go. It's a celebratory stream. We don't need to be, we've been talking, we should get back to building.

• 1:14:06Speaker 16

  Yeah. Yeah. So this is my co-founder. He's outside. So we're just gonna, we're gonna put him on the stream.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:14:12Speaker 16

  His name is Hudza. Yeah.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Wait, I've seen him on X. He had some wild posts just yesterday I was watching. He was wrong about something. I didn't even put him in the truth zone. I gotta debate him.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Tell him, come on.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  I don't remember anything other than that he was wrong. I just remember seeing his post and being like.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  What about traction? What about traction though? What were you guys able to do?

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, what did you share?

• 1:14:32Speaker 16

  Yeah. So we launched three weeks ago and we have 35K in revenue. So.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  So fast. Three weeks. Congratulations.

• 1:14:38Speaker 16

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:14:39Speaker 16

  Thanks.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then the raise wrapped up, we do have a lightning round. We've been asking everyone two questions. First is who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to? Can be anyone.

• 1:14:51Speaker 16

  Favorite founder?

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Favorite founder.

• 1:14:52Speaker 16

  Can I say?

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Throughout history, anybody.

• 1:14:54Speaker 16

  Sir, Sir John A. McDonald.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Who's that?

• 1:14:56Speaker 16

  Uh, first Prime Minister of Canada.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:14:59Speaker 17

  Started a company?

• 1:15:00Speaker 16

  Started, started Canada.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Started Canada?

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we don't have any buttons for Canada here.

• 1:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, this is somewhat un-American. I don't know if I can fully endorse it, but it's, it's outside the box and I appreciate it for that reason. The second question is, how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? I guess a kid.

• 1:15:19Speaker 16

  Oh, man.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Did you do anything interesting? Some people set up websites, some people.

• 1:15:23Speaker 16

  I taught kids how to argue.

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  Okay. Wait, what?

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Arguing lessons?

• 1:15:27Speaker 16

  Argue, debate.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Okay, debate. Okay, debate, okay. Uh, and, and, and so they, they'd pay you like on an hourly basis? That's fantastic.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

  Uh, watch out, don't get in an argument with her.

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on. Congrats on getting the round done and, uh, thanks for coming on.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on.

• 1:15:43Speaker 16

  Can we do like a handshake?

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if your co-founder wants to debate John too, send him.

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:15:48Speaker 16

  Yeah, I'll, I'll bring him in right now.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  I don't remember what he said, but I know he's wrong.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm angry about it, I'm, I'm ready to debate.

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  He said something wild. What was, sorry, what was that, of all time? Oh, favorite, favorite entrepreneur of all time is what we're gonna be asking.

• 1:16:01Speaker 16

  Of all time, okay.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Thank you, we are clarifying our questions. We will talk to you soon, have the great rest of your day. Uh, we are live from.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news from the timeline, there is now a $2,000 iPhone, it's the iPhone 17 Pro with two terabytes.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Two terabytes, $2,000 iPhone dropped. Welcome to the stream, nice to meet you, I'm John.

• 1:16:19Speaker 17

  What's happening?

• 1:16:19John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you. Uh, will you be picking up the $2,000 iPhone? Just dropped, minutes ago, this is breaking news.

• 1:16:26Speaker 17

  I'm, I'm probably sticking with my.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:16:29Speaker 17

  Short the stock, short the stock. I feel like the incremental.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  What's going on, this is a disaster.

• 1:16:34Speaker 17

  It's below his line.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we look to YC founders as the future, the tastemakers. If they're not adopting the latest and greatest, what's gonna happen? Introduce yourself. What are you doing? What are you building?

• 1:16:43Speaker 17

  So I'm Aiden, the CTO of Ethigo. We're doing the AI operating system for local governments, starting with a 311 in a box.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  311, what are you, is that information hotline?

• 1:16:54Speaker 17

  Yeah, it's the informational counter port to 911.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:58Speaker 17

  So interestingly, only around 2% of cities have a 311 line, even though every city has 911.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:05Speaker 17

  And what we're doing with our first product is creating 24/7 call center that's available to anyone from, if you're in San Francisco.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Speaker 17

  Or if you're in like a city of 10,000 in the middle of Iowa, like you should have the same level of service.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  So you call 311, it automatically routes you to your service. And then if I'm in my city, it'll give me information. What are the, what's the, obviously everyone knows textbook 911 call, someone's breaking into my house. What's the textbook 311 call?

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's. Is this road open? Or when does the trash pickup come? Stuff like that?

• 1:17:39Speaker 17

  Stuff like that. It definitely varies a lot more city to city. So we're live in Florida and we're taking calls about alligators roaming around the city.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And it can kind of route, and I'm sure you've set the system up so that you can route to 911 if you need to.

• 1:17:52Speaker 17

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Or write to animal control, kind of sit above the rest of the stack of all the different city services.

• 1:17:58Speaker 17

  Yeah. And that's kind of why we started with this is because it gives us a really great insight into what are the calls and services that the city's providing. So now we can go down and actually handle these workflows end to end.

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 17

  With our agents.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  What's the secret to actually having like high NPS? I imagine that like, people are not very happy with robot phone trees. You're literally in the clanker business. You're like, you're the meme of like, when the clanker picks up.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Phone trees are, phone trees are terrible.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  For decades.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  But this is conversation.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  This is potentially, what's the secret?

• 1:18:27Speaker 17

  Most people don't realize they're talking to an AI.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  They don't?

• 1:18:30Speaker 17

  No.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Why is that?

• 1:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Is this the cure for male loneliness?

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  Are you building on top of a particular foundation model or specific APIs that just sound so good?

• 1:18:40Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  Who are you using? How do you piece things together to make it great?

• 1:18:43Speaker 17

  Yeah, we're using a voice from Vapi. That's just, we've trialed a bunch of different.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  What company?

• 1:18:50Speaker 17

  Bappy.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Bappy.

• 1:18:51Speaker 17

  Yeah, another Y C company.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Is that in this batch?

• 1:18:54Speaker 17

  Another, I think, winner 24.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Okay. We'll have to check them out.

• 1:18:58Speaker 17

  But yeah, we just trial all these different voices. And this one has a bunch of stutters and makes it sound supernatural.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Okay, so it just feels completely natural. Got it. Very cool.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Traction.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  You've been lining up cities.

• 1:19:11Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Been driving around all over.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  What did you share? Do you share like an ARR or just like number of cities? Like, what's the headline number that you shared today?

• 1:19:18Speaker 17

  We shared live in one city and 80 K ARR.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  80 K ARR, not bad.

• 1:19:23Speaker 17

  Two contracts that have yet to go live, but we signed them.

• 1:19:27John Coogan?

  But in the pipeline.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Let's go. So you're charging, is this 40 K per city effectively?

• 1:19:33Speaker 17

  60 K and then 20 K. Yeah.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  No way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can imagine this replaces, you know, potentially replaces a job or makes somebody a lot more high leverage. And if you want like round the clock coverage on a helpline, which I'm sure these cities don't offer, but even if you're offering like a workday, that's just somebody who has to sit there.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  I would flip it around and just be like, if I'm the mayor and I'm charging every single person in my city, some sort of property tax, and I'm taking in millions and millions of dollars, and my citizens can't get information, but for whatever price he's charging, I can offer this service to my population.

• 1:20:09Jordi Hays?

  It's very valuable.

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  They're gonna be like, wow, the city feels so much more responsive. Like, when that tree fell down on my street, I was able to just dial 311 and send it to the right thing.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting. It's an interesting execution challenge where you can literally create a database of like every potential buyer for your product and then just hound them on day one. And then hound them. Like, it's not like a mystery of like, who are we gonna sell to?

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Oh, the perfect client doesn't know. I don't even know that they're in the market. No, it's like, you know who's in the market.

• 1:20:38Speaker 17

  They were doing kind of a state by state go to market motion.

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:20:41Speaker 17

  Because a lot of the first question they'll ask us is, okay, what other cities in Florida are using you? Because they can also do this thing called piggybacking, where they literally just copy and paste the contract from a neighboring city.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  No way. No way.

• 1:20:54Speaker 17

  So that's kind of, you know, little hacks like this, I think, will help us conquer the GovTech market where historically it's been hard to break in. But now you have this AI, obviously.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Land and expand.

• 1:21:04Speaker 17

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  How did the, how's the fundraiser going?

• 1:21:08Speaker 17

  It's good. We're around three quarters done.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  We have a lightning round that we've been doing. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Someone you look to for advice?

• 1:21:19Speaker 17

  Peter Thiel.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  First person to say PT.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Thiel.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Second question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 1:21:31Speaker 17

  Uh, flipping Supreme T-shirts.

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  How did you, how did you acquire, did you have bots that would buy them?

• 1:21:40Speaker 17

  Yep.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 17

  Into the bot game.

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:44Speaker 17

  When, it was like during my lunch in high school. So I would just like monitor the site.

• 1:21:50Jordi Hays?

  The situation.

• 1:21:52Speaker 17

  Monitoring the situation.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  I love it. Thank you so much.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the progress.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:21:56Jordi Hays?

  Super bullish.

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  Have a good, best of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Uh, if you are just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Uh, we will bring in our next guest when we're ready. Um, just, oh, we got, uh, ah, here we go.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  We got metal.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  Waiting for, you all have been waiting. Will they bring a massive block?

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Metal onto the stream.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  That thing was heavy. Great to see you.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  The answer is like, great to see you.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  You got a little workout on the way.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  How many pounds is that?

• 1:22:26Speaker 18

  No clue.

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  No clue. A lot.

• 1:22:27Speaker 18

  I borrowed it from Astralis.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:22:29Speaker 18

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Did you sell it to them and then you brought, borrowed it back? Or is this just there?

• 1:22:32Speaker 18

  This is theirs. They wanted to help the cause. Yeah.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  It's illustrated.

• 1:22:35Speaker 18

  It's an art.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  So, yeah, why, why is this sitting here? What do you do? Introduce yourself. Who are you?

• 1:22:39Speaker 18

  Yes. My name is Zane. I'm the founder of Nox Metals and we cut metal. So we're trying to build the most efficient metal service centers in America to empower every factory in America to work with better margins and to move faster.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Okay. There's a lot of ways to cut metal.

• 1:22:51Jordi Hays?

  He's doing the meme. He's doing the meme. He's doing the meme. The re-industrializing. Also, also to be clear, this is Zane, uh, from X.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Probably if you're, if you're on.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Famous post.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Everything app. You've seen him before. Uh, he's been on the show via his posts many times before. So it's great. It's great to finally.

• 1:23:07Speaker 18

  I've been printed a few times.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're a print hero.

• 1:23:10Speaker 18

  That was fun. I remember one time I was watching TDPN and I was like, for some reason, I had to go somewhere. And I was like, I just skipped to the print section. So you guys would print the best tweet. So I was like, who they got today?

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Okay. So there's a lot of ways to cut metal. Hadrian's doing a bunch of CNC machines.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Uh, there, there's other people that are doing additive stuff. We've talked to 3D printing guys who build the metal structures up. Uh, what is your specific like, like, put it in like Lego terms for me? Like a, how are we actually cutting this metal?

• 1:23:39Speaker 18

  Okay, so to be clear, we would sell this to Hadron.

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Speaker 18

  To someone like a Hadron.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:23:44Speaker 18

  What we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an F-150.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:47Speaker 18

  Put it on our saw, which is about the size of four F-150s.

• 1:23:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:50Speaker 18

  And then we band saw cut it.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:52Speaker 18

  And then we sell like.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  And then it can go into a CNC machine.

• 1:23:55Speaker 18

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56John Coogan?

  If it's into a CNC.

• 1:23:57Speaker 18

  Yeah, if you want to make an F-18 part.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:59Speaker 18

  Component for your washing machine, you name it.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  This is incredibly deep in the stack. I love it.

• 1:24:03Speaker 18

  So like the operation's really simple. What we're working on is like the complex operations of the factory. Like, I'm sure you guys know the cliche.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  I never want to hear anyone say, why Combinator just does consumer apps and more. Look at this.

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  This is pure metal.

• 1:24:15John Coogan?

  This is insane. It's so, so many steps away from the mobile social local app.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, like, it's not easy to just cut through metal, but it seems like that's relatively solved.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  What you're trying to solve is like the efficiency in the factory.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  Even if you, you make this block, then how do you get it? How do you store it? How do you trans, you know?

• 1:24:37Speaker 18

  You nailed it. So like the metal service industries is like $300 billion these guys do a year. Like if you're a metal service center, that's the total of the market.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Speaker 18

  We strongly believe that they are.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  John, lift them, lift them. Actually, it's gonna destroy. No, it's gonna destroy his suit. We need it for tomorrow.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  I can, I can pick it up.

• 1:24:57Speaker 18

  We basically strongly believe that they have a ton of overhead and lack all the technology in the world that puts a tax on every metal sold in America.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:03Speaker 18

  That's why you're seeing more metal bought from the USA or bought from China.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's coming in.

• 1:25:08Speaker 18

  Like I worked in like, like a small PE shop, but like everyone I talked to, they're like, okay, how do we get stuff in from China?

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 18

  So like, we want to re.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  PE shop, like private equity?

• 1:25:15Speaker 18

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:16Speaker 18

  We want to like re-industrialize the metal service center later.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. So, so how much of the value is just, there's going to be a bigger buy, buy American wave? There might be more regulations, more tariffs, and so it makes more sense now to do this work in America. Versus you think that you could long-term go toe-to-toe against a Chinese metal shop? And just with better, better workers, better automation, better technology? You will just have a better product, even in a completely level economic playing field.

• 1:25:46Speaker 18

  Exactly. And like, the key thing you said there is product. And what is product? The factory, right?

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Speaker 18

  So everything that goes into it, procurement.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:52Speaker 18

  Inventory management, like you said, estimating.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:54Speaker 18

  So how do we get blocks, uh, the cheapest block to any factory in America next day?

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:58Speaker 18

  That's the goal.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Got it. Uh, we have a lightning round that we've been doing. Uh, first question, uh, who's your favorite entrepreneur?

• 1:26:04Speaker 18

  Alex Karp.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  Of all time. Alex Karp. We've had him on the show last week. I think that's a great pick.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Bold, good pick.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  How did you make your first dollar online or in business?

• 1:26:14Speaker 18

  Uh, my dad had a machine shop and he made me scrub the floor. I was 14 years old.

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Family business.

• 1:26:20Speaker 18

  Eighty thousand square foot facility.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Eagle sound.

• 1:26:22Speaker 18

  One man of the mob.

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Wait, how's the fundraiser going?

• 1:26:28Speaker 18

  Oh.

• 1:26:30Speaker 18

  It's good. Uh, we closed like, well, yeah, we had like an initial goal and we closed that, but.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:26:40Speaker 18

  Let's go. Go on.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Just break the table.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  It's liftable.

• 1:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Alright, it's liftable.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  I would put that at over a hundred pounds.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's such an awkward.

• 1:26:51Speaker 18

  My guess was, my guess was 97.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  97, okay.

• 1:26:54Speaker 18

  Uh, no, fundraiser's going well. We like had an initial goal. We, we got there and now seeing some more interest. So thinking about raising some more just to have a bit more runway and move faster.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Count me in, Chad. I'm riding with you.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  I know, I should have brought my physical checkbook.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Such a missed opportunity. Great to see you. You're a legend.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Good luck with that. What a terrible prop. Anyway, okay. That was fun. I think I broke a sweat. This is not the right move.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was trying to warn you.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the stream.

• 1:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's happening. Great to see you. You brought your own medal. Okay.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  I lifted one. How are you doing? Okay.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  So we both lifted the metal cubes today.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  We did, we did. Are you in, are you in NOx? You did NOx, right?

• 1:27:40Speaker 19

  Yes, yes, we invest in NOx.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  Yes, introduce yourself for the stream.

• 1:27:43Speaker 19

  Hello, everyone. My name is Paige Fendorty. I'm the founding partner behind Genius Ventures. We invest in technical storytellers at their earliest chapters.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  And you wrote a children's book on venture capital. You're introducing, introducing venture capital to the children. Are you getting paid out by Anthropic in the lawsuit? Did you see this?

• 1:28:00Speaker 19

  Oh, no, I haven't checked.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go check on this.

• 1:28:03Speaker 19

  I gotta check my mailbox.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  A few thousand bucks waiting for you. You can, you can roll that into the fund.

• 1:28:07Speaker 19

  Wait, that would be, I gotta check my email.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, yeah, what, what's your reaction to, to Demode?

• 1:28:15Speaker 19

  Oh my gosh, it's electric.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Prices are too low, right?

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  That's what most people have been saying. I don't feel comfortable investing. The prices are just too low.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Suspiciously low.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Suspiciously low.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  When you go on Timo, when you go on Timo and there's like $12 couch and you're like, how can a couch be $12? You're like, how can this, how can this clearly billion dollar company be worth $60 million?

• 1:28:34Speaker 19

  Let me tell you, the energy is electric today. Um, it's been so fun bumping into friends. Uh, my friend, shout out Casey Caruso, she brought me bone broth to pregame the day.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:28:47Speaker 19

  Yeah, I drove over in the Waymo.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  This is the SF lock-in right here.

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember when I explained, uh, uh, uh, bone broth to you for the first time?

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Uh, no.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  I think I said something like protein tea or something like that.

• 1:29:00Speaker 19

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like a nature's protein shake.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, because you warm it up. We warmed it up and we drank half a gallon on the stream one day. It's fantastic.

• 1:29:12Speaker 19

  You guys gonna do a mukbang of all the bone, the bone broths?

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Well, we are, we are completely non impartial. We're aligned with kettle and fire because we're buddies with Justin Mayer.

• 1:29:22Speaker 19

  Okay, that's fair.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  So we cannot be, we, we, we cannot be impartial when it comes to.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  So what, what's the strategy going into demo day for you? You had already invested, deployed?

• 1:29:33Speaker 19

  Yeah, so we looked at a bunch of companies, but actually the story on Knox was pretty unique. Uh, Zane and I met, um, probably four years ago, uh, when I was fundraising for my first fund. And at the time he was working at a firm and they were like buying and selling machine shops. Uh, and then we just stayed in touch over that time. Um, and I would send him like some of our manufacturing investments. Like we have a company, Maneva, and I would send that to him for his thoughts on manufacturing. And then I saw on LinkedIn, he was posting, he got into IC and I was like, dude, like this is amazing. Uh, and then we hopped on a call, was really excited by what they're building. Uh, really fits into the reindustrialization of America, the whole American dynamism.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Speaker 19

  Um, and I actually was on my friend's roof last night. We were talking and she was just like, you know, if you just like. Love company, just like gotta go in. And I remember being like, okay, I gotta call Zane and be like, yo, like, like, please, like, I really want to be a part of this journey. And he was like, yeah, we would love to have you be a part of it. So I sent the wire this morning.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go. You did not want, don't want to wait until the end of the day, you know?

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  We've been doing a lightning round with everyone. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Who is the genius behind Genius Ventures?

• 1:30:50Speaker 19

  But that's so hard. The first name that popped into my head was Jerry Lopez, who's a surfer, zen master philosopher. I feel like very much not in like the tech world.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Founder of his movement.

• 1:31:02Speaker 19

  Yeah. And what I love about him is he, he's just has this incredible sense of grace riding super aggressive waves and then took that same sense of-

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Speaking jury's language, yeah.

• 1:31:15Speaker 19

  Yeah, took that same sense of grace into building companies.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  He gets barreled?

• 1:31:19Speaker 19

  Oh, he gets barreled.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I know all about getting barreled. I've learned that in this shore break.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 19

  Shore break.

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. John, I teach John about surfing. Every time we see the ocean, I explain, this is a beach break. That would be a point break.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  It's great. Second question of our lightning round. How did you make your first dollar online or in business? Did you do anything crazy as a kid or early on?

• 1:31:43Speaker 19

  Um, yeah, I tutored.

• 1:31:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:46Speaker 19

  Well, okay, I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of like the first dollar. Oh, you know what it is? Okay. So my mom is an impressionist artist, can do art. My brothers and I, when we were camping, we would go and sell her art cards in the campground when we were like five.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  Captive audience.

• 1:32:02Speaker 19

  Yeah, it was like seven, five and a three year old going around being like, can you buy our art cards? And like, I became an amazing salesperson through that experience.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, nice selling money.

• 1:32:13Speaker 19

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Where, are you on Fund Two now? What's, what's the update on the fund?

• 1:32:18Speaker 19

  Mm hmm. Yep. We're wrapping up our last couple investments in Fund Two. Two, two more to go.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Very exciting.

• 1:32:26Speaker 19

  More to come soon.

• 1:32:28Jordi Hays?

  Big announcements, big announcements on the way.

• 1:32:30Speaker 19

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Come on, show, we'll ring the gong.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll ring the gong. We don't have our gong with us, but uh,

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Do we have a gong sound effect today or no?

• 1:32:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, barely. No, we don't. We don't. Fortunately, no.

• 1:32:39Speaker 19

  Okay, well, the claps are okay.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  The, the, the gong, we will save for a proper announcement.

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, here we go.

• 1:32:45Speaker 19

  Okay, I like that.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Make sure to send us any founders you like and have fun out there.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for having me on.

• 1:32:54Speaker 19

  It was a pleasure seeing both of you.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  It was a pleasure. We'll see you soon. If you're watching live, we are at YC Demo Day and we have our next guest on the stream.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Orange Slice.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. Orange Slice, that's a fantastic jacket.

• 1:33:07Speaker 10

  Oh, thank you. Thank you.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you building?

• 1:33:10Speaker 10

  Yeah. So, hi, my name is Vihar and we're building Orange Slice. We're basically AI search infra to help you find customers that already want your product.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm so distracted by the, it's orangier than the YC orange.

• 1:33:23Speaker 10

  I know, I was scared.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  You went orange for orange and you won.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  You won. It's actually crazy. Okay, so, give me, give me the, give me the pitch for the company at the customer level.

• 1:33:34Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35John Coogan?

  Who's buying and why?

• 1:33:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we take all the data in the internet and we figure out, okay, out of your customers, who actually needs your product today? And we just tell you, hey, these are the people that need it today. And that's the people you reach out to.

• 1:33:46John Coogan?

  There's so many products that we're starting.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Is this for other B2B companies?

• 1:33:51Speaker 10

  B2B sales teams, yeah.

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  B2B sales teams, okay.

• 1:33:52Speaker 10

  So we can track your total addressable market, whatever's in your CRM, whoever you're talking to. We figure out, okay, who needs your product today? What have they been posting? What are they been filing? What is, maybe a new blog is out that indicates they need something from you guys.

• 1:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Smart, so it's always on.

• 1:34:05Speaker 10

  It's always on. Let's like see who actually wants you instead of...

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  When, when, how old were you when you realized you wanted to build agents for the enterprise?

• 1:34:13Speaker 10

  That's a great question. You know, I think that's a fantastic question. Really started really, really young, but no.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five years old. I woke up. I spawned into the world and I said, I must sell.

• 1:34:26John Coogan?

  I have to help enterprise go market teams.

• 1:34:28Speaker 10

  What were you doing before this? I was basically hacking in college, but I was an investor banker at JP Morgan.

• 1:34:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, let's go, let's go.

• 1:34:34Speaker 10

  So, complete, complete 180.

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then, did you, did you, was that like summer internship?

• 1:34:43Speaker 10

  Summer internship.

• 1:34:44Jordi Hays?

  Did you, are you, did you drop out?

• 1:34:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, and then I, I, I, no, graduated, thankfully.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. Contrarian, contrarian. I'm super bullish.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 1:34:52Speaker 10

  I like college. It was fun, right?

• 1:34:54Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. It's, it's a good, it's a good time.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  That's great. We've been doing a lightning round, asking two questions.

• 1:34:59Jordi Hays?

  Wait, no, no, no. Before the lightning round, how much money are you making right now?

• 1:35:03Speaker 10

  Oh, that's true. Oh, so we're at like 53K MRR.

• 1:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, let's go.

• 1:35:07Speaker 10

  A bit more than, what is that, 600,000 a year?

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:35:10Jordi Hays?

  From and profitable?

• 1:35:11Speaker 10

  Yeah, of course. We have like 90% margins, printing cash.

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Printing. Let's go. Let's go.

• 1:35:18Speaker 10

  This is just the start, though.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the round's closed?

• 1:35:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, the round is closed, unfortunately. But if you always...

• 1:35:27Jordi Hays?

  Let us in, let us in.

• 1:35:31Speaker 10

  I think for you guys, we can make room. For you guys, you can make room.

• 1:35:34Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna keep booing unless you let the sharks in.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  When you say us, you mean we can do it.

• 1:35:39Speaker 10

  Maybe it's super strategic, you know?

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Bring in 25 mil from QIA and Kya.

• 1:35:45Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that's awesome. That's awesome. This makes, this makes a ton of sense. And I can see why, I can see why it's ripping. Uh, lightning round?

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I have one more question. So, uh, so I'm, uh, I'm, I'm selling a business-to-business product. And I get some sort of alert from you saying, hey, there's a new customer. And are you focused on a person or a company?

• 1:36:06Speaker 10

  We're focused on the company level. We do both. So we'll track all the executives at the company.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Speaker 10

  That could be the one...

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  When you say this is the company and then...

• 1:36:14Speaker 10

  And then this is also the person. This is the person that owns...

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Who might be the internal champion.

• 1:36:17Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:36:18Speaker 10

  All of that stuff.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  A crazy idea for you. So you guys sell to a company, you detect a customer for that company, you partner with Tesla optimists to actually deploy a robot to go have a steak dinner with the end customer and close the loop and then pick up the commission on that deal. I think you gotta go full stack. Full stack.

• 1:36:38Speaker 10

  No, totally. And that's one of the biggest reasons we haven't done the end of the stack yet. Like, people sell in so many different ways.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, and a lot of people are just like fighting and competing over the end of the stack with a bunch of slop.

• 1:36:50Speaker 10

  Yeah, I don't want any more emails in my inbox.

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so all you need to do is serve the person, you know, serve the lead up at the right time and then let a, uh, a steak expert take it all away.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's beautifully anti-slop because, um, the, like, the human's just in the loop at the right point. I don't really care if you, if you misidentify someone and I click on a website, I'm like, actually, they're out of like the core value prop right now. Or maybe I'll deal with that one later. Like, that's fine. Um, fantastic. So, lightning round. Uh, two questions. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

• 1:37:24Speaker 10

  Oh, that's a good one. I'm not, I don't actually know that many entrepreneurs in general.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Someone that you read a biography of or look up to, or maybe just saw a recent interview with and thought was, I could learn something from them.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  He's Lisan Al-Gaib of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need, it's his blank slate. He doesn't need any influence.

• 1:37:40Speaker 10

  Well, honestly, I don't think, I don't draw that much inspiration just because I think the biggest motivating factor in this might be contrarian. It's not actually inspiration, but like the fear of mediocrity of it not working out has been way bigger for us. That's the biggest reason I don't have that much inspiration. But Eric from the, my co-founder used to work at Ramp. So, I mean, they are absolutely killing it.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  You picked one, you picked a legend from the modern era.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:10Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, you can't not like what he's doing.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Future Hall of Famer.

• 1:38:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Second question, how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 1:38:20Speaker 10

  Oh, man, first dollar would have to be in like elementary school. I used to like do origami of like folding up like ninja stars for like other people. And then I used to sell it on like the school bus of like at half an hour in the morning and then half an hour at the end to do all my sales. And then you go home and you just keep folding the rest of the day. I remember having so many paper cuts when I started.

• 1:38:41Jordi Hays?

  Damn, just fingers bleeding, just one more ninja star.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Prospecting. I see the kid in the second row, they need a ninja star. They're ready for a ninja star.

• 1:38:50Jordi Hays?

  You had to go to a dark place for this ninja star.

• 1:38:52Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  They're ready for a ninja star. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:38:56Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the traction. Are you gonna go, are you gonna hang out for the rest of the day?

• 1:39:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. Always like to chat with sort of cool founders. Thanks for doing this, guys. This is so cool.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Yeah, we'll find you after. Cheers. Good to meet you.

• 1:39:08Speaker 10

  Great team. Talking to you guys.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Let's bring in our next guest. We have the co-founder Fall. Do we have?

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good to see you first.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:39:21Speaker 20

  What's happening?

• 1:39:22John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly. Welcome to YC DED.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  Great shirt, by the way.

• 1:39:30Speaker 20

  Thank you.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  We just talked to a founder that made their first money flipping flipping Supreme box logo t-shirts.

• 1:39:38Speaker 20

  There you go. There you go. Yeah, I'm decked out in Fall swag.

• 1:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but GPU poor. Are you guys GPU poor anymore?

• 1:39:45Speaker 20

  Well, I have a GPU-rich hats, too.

• 1:39:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:48Speaker 20

  I gotta give you guys some.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:50Speaker 20

  So I'm one of the co-founders of Fall.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Speaker 20

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Also, one of our latest sponsors.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  That makes this possible. So thank you.

• 1:39:59Jordi Hays?

  Corporate media.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Give us your reaction to YC Demo Day. How, what's the mood like?

• 1:40:04Jordi Hays?

  I think he just rolled in here from, but give us the vibe from outside.

• 1:40:08Speaker 20

  I just rolled in from our office. We're like five minute drive away. I mean, it's amazing energy. I love it.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Speaker 20

  I mean, being in the Silicon Valley for, I don't know, 15 years, close to 15, I actually never been to a Demo Day.

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Brought you over.

• 1:40:23Speaker 20

  This is my first time. And yeah, love the energy.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Give us, yeah, so, so I guess what's been, how much, how much have you guys, from a, from a customer acquisition standpoint, it feels like there's like incredible pull from the market. You guys have crazy logos from, you know, Decacorns, public companies, all the way down. I imagine a bunch of, bunch of just companies are getting off the ground and signing up for you guys. But like, what does that customer acquisition kind of motion look like? Are you guys, do you pay much attention to kind of the super early stage? Or do you just like let people find you?

• 1:40:59Speaker 20

  Yeah, we pay a lot of attention to early stage. A lot of our customers are early stage. And it is, I think it's one of the best times to build, like on top of Fall and, you know, other, other LLMs as well. But like, if you want to build anything in consumer AI specifically, I think Fall is probably like the best way to accelerate, you know, building something out there. There's incredible demand. I think, I was doing some math on the way here. Like, I think in our startup segment, I think the revenue of like all of our startups combined and what I define startups is let's let's call it like 200 people or less.

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, raise less than a billion dollars.

• 1:41:40Speaker 20

  Yeah, sure. I think the total combined revenue of our customers is in the billions.

• 1:41:45Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:41:45Speaker 20

  So so it's kind of it's kind of ridiculous like how much demand there is in the in the consumer AI market or or even like prosumer, but you can build amazing applications that that you know that leverage the gen media technology.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that prosumer thing is fascinating. We saw this with the the images in chat GPT, the Dolly moment where you know, it's not like it's not an enterprise tool, but it's something that went so viral that everyone has to wake up, even if you're just a marketing manager in a Fortune 500 company. Like you're gonna see it, you're gonna think about it and be like, okay, I actually need a strategy here. We recently saw this with Nano Banana. Again, we saw a little spike in the Google Trends chart.

• 1:42:27Jordi Hays?

  What is? Yeah, what have you guys seen on that?

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  What have you seen in the Nano Banana era? How are things changing? Just kind of give me your read.

• 1:42:34Speaker 20

  It's incredible. I mean, the demand, the way the way I look at it is like every time we have new capabilities, there is a jump in demand.

• 1:42:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Speaker 20

  And it it doesn't seem like these things are eating into each other. It seems like we're really seeing like the the building blocks coming coming together.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:51Speaker 20

  So for example, with Nano Banana and like all the editing models in general, they actually are a key ingredient to really good video models. Meaning when you want to stretch to get like stick together a few clips.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Start with a few of those.

• 1:43:05Speaker 20

  Yeah, you you actually want to, you can keep like the consistency between using these edit models, right? So like it actually solves the consistency problem in video.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:14Speaker 20

  So that enabled video to go even further.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Speaker 20

  Because now you can just generate like, you know, 10 different starting frames and ending frames and then combine them together.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:23Speaker 20

  So so these things are really like building blocks and they're kind of compounding on top of each other.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:28Speaker 20

  So the way we see it in traffic and revenue is that anytime there's like a new model, new capability specifically, we we see a huge jump.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty wild. There was a site that spun up. I don't know if you saw this, the day of Nano Banana's launch. It was just called Nano Banana.ai. Had full, like it was a full, looked like a Google product. It was just someone else just vending in Nano Banana under the hood. But I'm sure they got their API access.

• 1:43:52Speaker 20

  This happens all the time. Like if you actually search Nano Banana on App Store, like just go to App Store, there will be literally 20 results.

• 1:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is so crazy. It's still Nano Banana.ai is the number one result for Nano Banana. And it just says AI Image Editor, edit photos and text.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  I mean, the App Store was like that for so long where you search ChatGPT and it'd be like chat with GPT. And it has like 5,000 five star reviews. And you're like, I know that's not from OpenAI because I can clock it as like, clearly this is not an OpenAI branding. It's slightly off.

• 1:44:23Speaker 20

  And, and all of these things are, believe it or not, they're getting traction.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:27Speaker 20

  So, so, and I think, yeah, like, like Apple, I don't know, like they're not really doing much to stop this. Maybe they're trying, but like not really.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  It's a game of whack a mole.

• 1:44:36Speaker 20

  Yeah, it's a game of whack a mole. And, and I think they're benefiting from this. And, and I think, you know, obviously like long term, what matters is like how these products differentiate. But I think it just shows you like how insane the demand is.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. What keeps you up at night between the inference cost kind of stack? So are you, are you worried about GPU poor? Like, are we going to run out of line time at TSMC?

• 1:45:02Speaker 20

  Right.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Are we going to see a chip shortage versus just large scale data center capacity versus energy? Like if we play this out a few years, like what, what, what do you want to get right that might be out of your control even?

• 1:45:15Speaker 20

  Yes.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  But like you'd like to make it, make sure that it goes right.

• 1:45:17Speaker 20

  Yes. I think we're very capacity constrained.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  But at what level? That's what I'm interested in.

• 1:45:24Speaker 20

  So, so yeah, it's, it's, so it fluctuates.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  Even this, this Nebbia's deal yesterday, right? Like, like shocked everyone, right? Especially we were hanging with a, a friend who's a multi-stage, you know, as multi runs, you know, helps, helps run a multi-billion dollar fund. And he was just like, like a year ago, this company like couldn't, you know, this company was not taken super seriously as a player. And all of a sudden they have a $20 billion deal with, with Microsoft. Uh, yeah, Microsoft. So anyways, like that, that just shows like the, the fact that, the fact that, you know, Microsoft is going, I, I, You know, if you if you kind of like stack rank where Nebius sits in in the NeoCloud space, it certainly wouldn't have been somebody's top choice. But I think that just shows like

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  how capacity constrained everyone is.

• 1:46:15Speaker 20

  It's incredible. Yeah, I think I mean, currently, we're going through another crunch right now, specifically for H100s. So like, we experienced this.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:46:25Speaker 20

  And and you can you can kind of feel it coming. And and you know, like,

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  What does it feel like, though?

• 1:46:30Speaker 20

  It it it feels pretty bad, right? You're trying to you're trying to scale. So like, most of our workloads are inference workloads, right? We don't do any training.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:38Speaker 20

  So our needs are like, we don't just like, buy, you know, 10,000 GPUs and just sit there for another for a whole year, right? That's not how we operate. We're more dynamic. We go and like, expand our our fleet over time. So we and we were multi-cloud. So we talked to like, all the, you know, NeoClouds. And we have really great relationships with all of them. We test them, we benchmark them. If they work for us, or if their reliable support is good, we use them. So and you know, when you need when you need new capacity, you literally like, hit them up. You call all of them up in order.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Old fashioned, right?

• 1:47:13Speaker 20

  And literally, I'm not even kidding. Like, you just you just call them up. And, you know, sometimes, it's like, you start hearing more no's, right? Like, do you have do you have 512 GPUs? Do you have 1000 GPUs? And it's just like, no, no, you're like, oh, crap. So you kind of want to like, stock up a little bit.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:31Speaker 20

  That's how we operate. We like, we like, buy buy a little bit in bulk, you know, but but really, prices hit hit a little bit of a bottom, which like, hasn't happened with A100s. I mean, if you look at it, like, they just kept going down. With H100s, they kept going down, and they kind of hit the bottom. They're like, now, now, like, kind of picking back up again.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  How, what can you tell me about how inference moves around the globe as a function of time? I heard the story about mid-journey, potentially doing inference in Asia.

• 1:48:02Speaker 20

  Right.

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  Where they're sleeping, they're not using, they're not running Netflix in Malaysia or Singapore. And so when I generate an image or something, you know, it's inference over there.

• 1:48:12Speaker 20

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Is that something you're doing? Is that something that you're planning to do? Is that common? Does that happen naturally?

• 1:48:17Speaker 20

  So our traffic patterns are basically maxed out when US and Europe is up simultaneously. So that's that's kind of like, the peak time, right? And then, we don't have like, as much Users, like we still have customers in Asia, but like it's much less. Yeah. So, you know, we do see a deep dip. Okay. Across, you know, when US and EU is asleep. Yeah. There's a slight dip. Sure. We do, we do a few things. Yeah. Uh, we use like, we basically like, uh, have a pool of GPUs that we like, you know, return and, and, and bring back. Sure. Simultaneously, but what's really important for us is uptime. Yep. So even if it means like, we're gonna have some idle GPUs. Sure. We, we'd like to take that cost.

• 1:49:01Speaker 20

  Because if you can't take those GPUs back, like if you let them go. Yeah. You can't take them back. Yeah. You know, that then you, you have a very bad time with your customers. Interesting. For us, like reliability is more important. Got it. At, at this time, you know, and over long term, I think if. You might be able to move the liquidity across the globe more over time.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, any, any key lessons, you were at Oracle for four years.

• 1:49:24Speaker 20

  Yes.

• 1:49:24Jordi Hays?

  Back in the day, any key lessons from that era that you've kind of brought in? Obviously Oracle's been on a tear, um, and really leaning in.

• 1:49:31Speaker 20

  Yeah. So Oracle was my first job out of college. So, you know, that's 2012, 2016. Back then, they did not believe in cloud. They were like the anti-cloud company.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:43Speaker 20

  Remember that? Yeah. So, so like Larry Ellison would go on stage, literally be like, guys, like, we don't believe, you know? He has like a famous quote, you know, it's someone's computer or something, you know? The cloud doesn't exist.

• 1:49:55Speaker 20

  They've come a really long time, long way since then. And obviously like they're on a rip right now, I think with, with AI. What we hear from the field is like, um, there's really good, you know, Nebius including, Nebius is a very good like data center operator. Yeah. And Oracle is a very good data center operator.

• 1:50:11Jordi Hays?

  They had to do that because of running Yandex, right?

• 1:50:14Speaker 20

  Yes.

• 1:50:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Like they actually had to, I, I get more worried about Neo cloud products that are, we're doing, you know? Like there, there's one, I think it's like Irene or something like that that's coming online that, that, you know, just last year, I think was doing like Bitcoin mining, right? And so like fast pivot, maybe a later pivot.

• 1:50:34Speaker 20

  Some of those guys are also good, but so after Oracle, I was at Coinbase. So the crypto, like some of the companies, including.

• 1:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Crusoe, Crusoe.

• 1:50:43Speaker 20

  Like they, they had a lot of experience, but like what's, what's special about Oracle is that they've, they've got a lot of experience. They know how to operate these machines at, at, you know, really good costs. So, and, and uptime is very important. So, you know, all of these things, you know, the economics and, and like the operating the data center play a huge role into this. I think they, you know, I'm, I'm glad they chose going in this direction. You know, I, I think there's only a few opportunities, right? And this is, this is one of them and they like, they just went ahead and like capitalized on it, which is really great.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  Lightning round?

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  We've been asking everyone, who is your favorite entrepreneur, someone you look up to throughout history?

• 1:51:20Speaker 20

  Oof.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Can be anyone.

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  Could be Larry.

• 1:51:27Speaker 20

  I really like, okay.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  Can be anyone.

• 1:51:30Speaker 20

  Let's see, I like Brian, Brian Armstrong.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:51:33Speaker 20

  It's pretty good.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  That's a great pick. I love it.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Second question, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 1:51:40Speaker 20

  Oof. Okay. I had, um, do you know these toys, Karate Fighter?

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:51:46Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:51:46Speaker 20

  Okay. It's like, is that too old?

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  How big is the toy?

• 1:51:49Speaker 20

  It's, it's like, it's like two fighters.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:52Speaker 20

  You just like make them fight with each other.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:53Speaker 20

  So when I was like six or seven, this is not on the internet.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, like almost a rock'em, sock'em robot.

• 1:51:58Speaker 20

  Yeah, rock'em, sock'em. Same thing, same thing. I, I rented those out.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  You rented those?

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Rented.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Flip the Capex to Opex. You don't need to, you don't need to buy these things. You go to him, you rent them today, he's renting.

• 1:52:12Jordi Hays?

  That's actually, kids don't do renting enough. They're always trained.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Am I stretching to draw a full circle analogy here? You rent, you, you buy the servers, you rent out the tokens.

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  He's going to the kid, what's your allowance? Okay, 20 bucks a week. That's what that's the price.

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  There you go. Value based prices.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. All right. Well, come back on the show.

• 1:52:36John Coogan?

  Awesome, guys. Good to see you.

• 1:52:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  I gotta, I gotta give you some hats.

• 1:52:39Speaker 20

  Please.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  I'd love some.

• 1:52:40Speaker 20

  Give them, give them out to your favorites.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we will. Perfect.

• 1:52:43Speaker 20

  Some rich hats.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  GPU.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  Oh, these are good hats.

• 1:52:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to pick.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, this is great. We got.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  We got, we got four.

• 1:52:51Speaker 20

  Great seeing you.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Great seeing you. Thanks for coming by.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Don't, don't give this away. We'll quiz, we'll quiz folks on whether their own GPUs or they merely sit on top of hyperscalers. We got Jack from Slow. How you doing, Jack?

• 1:53:04Speaker 21

  What's up, fella?

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Oh, that's soon. You didn't have to.

• 1:53:07Speaker 21

  What's up, man?

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  Good to see you. I can't believe it. You look fantastic.

• 1:53:10Speaker 21

  Well.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 1:53:12Speaker 21

  Thank you. Thank you. How we doing? How is, how is Demo Day?

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  It's been fantastic. It's been great. Tons of cool companies.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody's kinda, kinda ripping.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  We kinda came in thinking like, let's try and find the theme. Cause like.

• 1:53:25Speaker 21

  Other than AI.

• 1:53:26John Coogan?

  Cursor for, yeah, there, there's like a little bit of an AI theme, but.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  We had metal, we had Zane.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, yeah, metal cutting. We had a missile company already.

• 1:53:34Speaker 21

  Nice.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  There's been a few different companies and I, I feel like the narrative is shifting now to just like, AI is just a tool like cloud computing.

• 1:53:42Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  It's just like, are you using like a Py, like a Python? Or, you know, it's like, or, or do you have a mobile strategy? Or are you pulling mobile off the shelf?

• 1:53:50Speaker 21

  Yeah, it's like, like it's like at this point, you're not gonna use like, oh yeah, I know we're building in the cloud.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:53:53Speaker 21

  Where everybody is. It's like, what do you actually do?

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, okay, yeah, you're a software company, but like, what are you actually doing?

• 1:53:58Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  It very much feels like we're in this era of like vertical software for AI. So it's like vertical AIs, this is vertical SaaS all over again.

• 1:54:05Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  But the traction's really good. The businesses are super niche and super interesting. So you're learning a lot about like a guy who set up a 311 line in Florida and he's getting a lot of calls about alligators. And like, that's interesting to me.

• 1:54:15Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, what's new with you?

• 1:54:17Speaker 21

  Well, so it's funny, like everybody, most of the investors are here to like invest capital in companies.

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  Quickly introduce yourself for the stream for those who don't know.

• 1:54:23Speaker 21

  Um, I'm Jack Rains. I'm on the investment team over at Slow Ventures, early stage venture fund. We, um, run about a billion dollars now, invest, generalist, little bit of everything, one to three million dollar checks.

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:54:36Speaker 21

  But unlike every other venture fund here, we actually are launching the, uh, the Slow Ventures etiquette finishing school.

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:54:43Speaker 21

  So I don't know if you can see this.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Okay, let me see.

• 1:54:45Speaker 21

  You guys are dressed sharp. Obviously.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  I remember this photo. This is a fantastic photo.

• 1:54:50Speaker 21

  We had this.

• 1:54:51Jordi Hays?

  We got to Photoshop you on there.

• 1:54:52Speaker 21

  I know. Once I make, once I make GP, maybe I can be on there. But you know, there's, there's a lot of capital floating around now. That's like, like financial capital to invest in founders. But the real problem in San Francisco is you don't know how to dress.

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but if people don't know how to dress, why is it you're just expecting them to go to a black tie event?

• 1:55:11Speaker 21

  Well, you know, they can, we, we say that. It's kind of self-select.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  You show up in a sloppy tux.

• 1:55:17Jordi Hays?

  You want a high bar and then you want to take, you want to take someone from good to great.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  I'm just looking for feedback.

• 1:55:21Speaker 21

  Right. I don't know if you guys were in like fraternities in college, but there's this whole like, you kind of get hazed if you're like.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  Totally. I mean, this is just like pitching a startup. You come to you, the, the, the pitch is a little sloppy. You go around, by the time you come back and pitch the second, third time, the business is polished.

• 1:55:34Speaker 21

  Literally. And it's like, there's, you know, there's, there's business upside to this. Like fixing your etiquette makes you like, you can command a boardroom better.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  I like it. Yeah. Boardroom generals. We love boardroom generals.

• 1:55:42Speaker 21

  We also want to help founders like get girlfriends or boyfriends. Like there's especially in SF, like everybody's complaining, you know, the nine nine six is great, except, you know.

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Has, uh, has Slow flipped bullish on AI?

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:56Speaker 21

  Has Slow flipped bullish on AI?

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  Speak for the entire firm right now, please.

• 1:55:59Speaker 21

  For the entire firm.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Speak for the entire firm.

• 1:56:01Speaker 21

  And especially a friend of the program, Sam Lessin, my boss, who signs my paychecks, is ideally watching this right now. We're bullish on AI. When it's a good company that uses AI.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:56:11Speaker 21

  The whole like, our, our take the whole time has been that like the models are going to eat pretty much everything. Microsoft's going to eat everything.

• 1:56:18John Coogan?

  I mean, that's what we're seeing today, today.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft is going to eat Nebius.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  A lot of the companies I feel like are in that Sam Lessin idea of like AI cherry on top, I think was his phrase. I, I like that framing. I thought he did well there.

• 1:56:29Speaker 21

  It's the more, the more vertically integrated. And the thing is like, if the founders actually have like real domain expertise in the thing versus like somebody who knew AI well, and then they're trying to like, oh, this is an obvious problem.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 21

  Maybe, but you're seeing some interesting, like one co-founder is incredibly sharp in AI. I've been doing machine learning forever. And then the other co-founder actually is that dude in their space for 20 years.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  That dude.

• 1:56:50Speaker 21

  That's when it gets interesting.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Is he him?

• 1:56:52Speaker 21

  So.

• 1:56:54Speaker 21

  When you have AI wizard plus co-founder who is him or her.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  Or her.

• 1:56:58Speaker 21

  Yeah, that's, that's the magic. So I would not say that we're bullish on AI anymore than we have been, but like, you know, we respect AI used well. It's like AI is table stakes. If your only thing is AI.

• 1:57:08Jordi Hays?

  Get a, get a post out there. Slow respects AI.

• 1:57:12Speaker 21

  Slow respects AI. Yep. You heard it here first.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  Breaking news.

• 1:57:15Speaker 21

  Cool.

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  Uh, okay. We've been asking everyone, lightning round. Uh, who is your favorite entrepreneur? In history of all time.

• 1:57:21Speaker 21

  In history.

• 1:57:24Speaker 21

  Probably outside of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is like ESPN, so you're supposed to say that.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:31Speaker 21

  Uh, now, John D Rockefeller.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  Rockefeller.

• 1:57:35Speaker 21

  What about you guys?

• 1:57:36John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't think we've, uh, I don't think we've answered the question ourselves.

• 1:57:39Jordi Hays?

  Mine is always Steve. It's just the obvious answer, but growing up.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Jordi Hays?

  Use just, it, it, it's, it's, uh, my favorite products ever have consistently been Apple products.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I, I just would listen to so much founders podcast, I say Jay Gould, of course, but.

• 1:57:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Speaker 21

  Can we, can we flip around? Who's your least favorite, least favorite entrepreneurs ever?

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:02Speaker 21

  Favorite entrepreneurs? They had to be good enough to be famous, but you just don't like.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably SPF or something.

• 1:58:08Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  One of those.

• 1:58:09Speaker 21

  That's, that's a good pick.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Although, although maybe he's underrated because he got that anthropic bags and he's ripping now.

• 1:58:14Speaker 21

  Okay, SPF is underrated venture investor, underrated entrepreneur.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Perhaps, perhaps.

• 1:58:18Jordi Hays?

  Overrated gamer.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  Operator.

• 1:58:21Speaker 21

  Do you think?

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Overrated gamer.

• 1:58:22Speaker 21

  Do you think the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account is real?

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I believe it is run by her husband.

• 1:58:27Speaker 21

  Okay.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  Uh, and I do not believe it.

• 1:58:28Jordi Hays?

  I, I actually disagree. I, I don't, I don't think, uh, I, it screams like ghostwriter coded.

• 1:58:35Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 1:58:35Jordi Hays?

  Because for it to be run by her husband, her husband would have had to be like hyper online on X and like, it just feels like very go, like you can tell when an account is ghostwritten.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's ghostwritten. I believe that he probably has the keys.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Hired a ghostwriter.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  At Ghostwriter.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  But we agree that she does not have.

• 1:58:55Jordi Hays?

  A prison phone.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  The, the everything app installed on a phone that is connected to some sort of 5G network within the prison. We agree on that. Okay, great.

• 1:59:02Speaker 21

  Could she? Cause SPF is tweeting for prison, right?

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  It is, it is possible, but it's very much looked down upon. And of course, like, as soon as it, as soon as the tweet goes out, like, the warden should be able to get the news. Like, someone calls the warden because like, someone sees the post, calls the, the governor, and then the governor calls the warden and says like, "One of your prisoners is breaking the rules. Like, can you do something about this?" Like, it should flow through. I don't know.

• 1:59:24Speaker 21

  If she, I don't know what her prison terms are, but like, if and when she gets out, like, how quickly do you think she could raise, like? 50 million, 100 million. Do you think it's like?

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  I think.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  John's take is, if you really wanna, she can rebuild her, her personal brand, but that's, and, and people, people are, like, people are just, it just, marketing works, right? So she's just like marketing to the timeline right now. People are deciding like, oh, maybe I like her. Like, oh, she's making me laugh. So people naturally start to like her. I don't think it's gonna repair her brand in the, in the capital markets. Uh, I think if she wanted to truly repair, the brand would be like, deep threads and long posts on like biotech.

• 2:00:08John Coogan?

  That was my take, was, was, was Martin Shkreli. Uh, he has posted about biotech, about trading. He's gotten a lot of picks right. He talks about capital markets. He talks about, yes, he, he did get in legal trouble, right? Uh, but he has, but he has said, the thing that I was doing before I went to prison, I, I'm still doing it and I'm an expert and you can kind of judge me by my opinions and my takes. And I'll go on live streams and you can judge me by my words. And I haven't seen enough posts from her on the state of mRNA or the state of, of GLP-1s or the state of, of gene editing technology. Like, if she really is an incredible biologist who's been like wrongly convicted, like, show me some incredible biology takes, right?

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Don't just be, okay, yeah, you're just a mean poster.

• 2:00:55Speaker 21

  The Martin Shkreli, like, short selling reports where like, it's like Friday at lunchtime and he just tweets, this company's a fraud, like, their tests are gonna fail. Stock drops 70% on Monday, incredible performance.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and it shows that he's like, he's like, at least a student of the game in, in the world, in the financial world.

• 2:01:11Speaker 21

  Now he has a kid.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, congrats.

• 2:01:13Speaker 21

  He dropped his kid on the internet.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we have a lightning round. Uh, we did the, we did the favorite entrepreneur. The second one is, how did you make your first dollar online or in business?

• 2:01:21Speaker 21

  Oh, that's, uh, first dollar online or in business. Um, I was trading SPACs in my Roth IRA, which is, yeah, so like, most people lost money on these. I, one of my buddies.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  You're the guy, you're the one.

• 2:01:34Speaker 21

  It's my son. I swear to God, this is why Sam, this is why Sam hired me, cause he really appreciated my SPAC story. But basically, like, I graduated December 2019, was bored, COVID hits, like, the first week I start my job, corporate finance, very boring. And one of my buddies texts me, he's like, DraftKings is going public through a SPAC. If you buy this thing, you'll own DraftKings stock. I didn't get it. I was like, why don't they just IPO? I read the structure and it's like, oh, if you buy these warrants, it's like a call option that doesn't expire for five years. And then SPACs turned into a bubble. I built some web scrapers that would like ping me whenever, um, whenever like a new SPAC got listed or like a merger was announced. So this was like fairly autistic, but I saw that Apollo had a SPAC.

• 2:02:16Speaker 21

  And I noticed that they had changed their website header from oil rigs to windmills in like June 2020. And my hypothesis was everybody's chasing the next Tesla. They're gonna announce like an EV deal. And the warrants are gonna go from 50 cents to like whatever. And I just put all my money in Apollo warrants. And then they announced a deal with Fisker Automotive like a month later, made a lot of money. And I just basically

• 2:02:40Speaker 21

  parlayed that like 20 times. So my first online money was trading SPACs in my retirement account.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic story.

• 2:02:45Speaker 21

  Shout out Chamath. A lot of people lost money on his SPACs. I would like to thank him for, uh, bankrolling a trip to Argentina.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go. Hopefully you had a nice steak, a bottle of wine, maybe some tequila.

• 2:02:56Speaker 21

  And SPACs are back. So maybe it's time to do it again. I don't know.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  Maybe. Maybe this time is different. Couple IPOs coming. Good to see you.

• 2:03:03Speaker 21

  Cheers.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  See ya. And we will bring in our next guest to our YC Demo Day stream. We are live. How you doing? Of course. How you doing?

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  Very Gen Z coded. I love it. I love it. Introduce yourself. What are you? Who are you? What do you do?

• 2:03:21Speaker 22

  Uh, my name is Arlen. I am building Azomeo, which is an API that gives more context to agents. So if you're a Cursor user, you can pretty much just go to Cursor, index any documentation or codebase, and give it as a context to an agent.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  We, uh, what exactly is happening? I, I know Cursor does kind of rollups of what's happening. There's, there's some rag infrastructure that's popular. What else is going on in, in the actual product to unlock value?

• 2:03:46Speaker 22

  Yeah. So the two reasons I built this is because like I was so fucking pissed where I would like go to Google, copy paste all the docs and paste them right into Cursor.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  We've all been there.

• 2:03:55Speaker 22

  Yeah. The memory is not persistent. So they will fucking forget that in like two seconds. And second one is that you also pollute context window, which like causes context rot. It's actually a study done by Chroma, which is like a AI

• 2:04:05John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, we know Jeff well.

• 2:04:06Speaker 22

  Yeah, saying like post 4000 tokens, I think, like the performance of any LLMs goes like this.

• 2:04:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:10Speaker 22

  So that's like the reason I built this.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Wait, do you have a take on Jeff? Jeff's take on like context windows and and the need for RAG? Like, how do you think about the the trade offs and where the frontier models are scaling? Like, there's one world where you just throw bigger and bigger context windows endlessly. Maybe that doesn't work.

• 2:04:28Speaker 22

  Yeah, you know what? There are two different architectures right now. So if you look at Cursor and Cloud Code. Cloud Code doesn't index your code base. So they only do agentic RAG, which like only uses terminal tools like Creep Grab, Grab.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:39Speaker 22

  And Cursor, they use both. They use local index and also vector store. So like RAG.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:43Speaker 22

  Uh, it's really hard to say right now. A lot of people started hating on RAG.

• 2:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 22

  But I think it's still effective if you're like combining it with like GraphRAG, which is also a very good approach.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:52Speaker 22

  Yeah.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Uh, what's the traction of the business been like?

• 2:04:55Speaker 22

  Yeah. So in the past three weeks, I send up 25% of the current batch or paying and.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:05:01Speaker 22

  Let's go. Yeah, thank you. And 5% of the spring batch.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:05:07Speaker 22

  So yeah, total like more than 90 VC companies.

• 2:05:10John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:05:10Speaker 22

  And yeah, about like 11.5K MRR.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  There we go. Congratulations.

• 2:05:15Speaker 22

  Thank you, thank you. Let's go. Are you profitable? Yes, sir. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, because like VC deals cover everything, like all the infrastructure costs. And yeah, so yeah, I guess I'm profitable.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It covers the infrastructure, guys. Okay.

• 2:05:29Speaker 22

  Incredible. What were you doing? You have a crazy story, right? Yeah, I so I was bored of high school when I was 17 and I wanted to build. So I dropped out, raised a million in a couple of days in London. Couple of days? How did that go? Yeah. So usually like people raise, like it takes weeks to raise in London, especially in Europe. Because they're so fucking slow, but like.

• 2:05:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:47Speaker 22

  If you find the right approach and like good people. So in my case, it was LocalGlobe. They're really, really good and they're really fast. So I guess I just got lucky. Built from London for a couple, couple of months and then applied for VC. Okay, so same company? Same company, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Applied for VC for my third time. Uh, yeah. Third time. Rejected the first? My dad applied three years ago. He got rejected. So I sort of like put a goal for myself to like fucking apply again and again. And yeah, yeah. That's incredible.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:06:12Speaker 22

  Uh, how did how did you make your first dollar on?

• 2:06:15Jordi Hays?

  The internet.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:16Speaker 22

  On the internet, yeah. So when I was fifteen, I was a student and I wanted to build something and I needed some domain expertise. And since I was a student, ad tech was like the solution. So I built like an AI scholarship database for high school students from like underrepresented backgrounds to go and apply to summer programs in US. So I did a couple of those myself, like at Berkeley and then at UPenn, came back, scaled it to twenty thousand active users and made like two thousand dollars or something.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Congrats, that's amazing.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Take it to the bank.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  Last question, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

• 2:06:46Speaker 22

  Yeah, who the fuck that most money, bro? Like Elon Musk, yeah. Yeah, he's the richest man, bro, yeah.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:50Speaker 22

  But otherwise, yeah, Brian Chesky is my goat. I love Brian Chesky.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Brian Chesky, founder mode.

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  EOG. How's the fundraiser going?

• 2:06:58Speaker 22

  I closed a couple of weeks ago, yeah.

• 2:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Couple of weeks ago, okay, incredible.

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Um, crushing it, dude.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thanks so much.

• 2:07:06Speaker 22

  Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.

• 2:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:07:08Speaker 22

  Thank you. Yeah.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Up next.

• 2:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Who we got next?

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  We are continuing our coverage live from YC Demo Day twenty twenty five. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  I'm John. Alessia, Alessia. I'm Alessia, a pleasure. Nice to meet you. How you doing? Uh, would you mind introducing yourself and your company?

• 2:07:25Speaker 23

  Sure. So, uh, hi, everyone. I'm Alessia. Um, Vibe Flow is the only one solution to build production ready apps in no code.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Okay, uh, we've seen a lot of news recently that, uh, there's now a whole industry of vibe code cleanup specialists. What's your reaction? Can vibe coding ever make it to production?

• 2:07:42Speaker 23

  Uh, no.

• 2:07:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:07:44Speaker 23

  Not now, at least. Like, all the solutions out there are really broken and they can, they give you this wow effect in the front end. But on the back end side, there is so much, uh, to do and there is a huge need. People are, like, they have hair on fire problems and they need to solve these problems. The market is huge.

• 2:07:59John Coogan?

  So how are you plugging in? How do you deliver value to your customers?

• 2:08:02Speaker 23

  So we, uh, have a solution which is a hybrid approach between lovable and any time and a database plugged in. So we have this no code interface that is AI, like the AI generate this flow and then maps deterministically to code. So the code is never gonna be hallucinating. And, uh, yeah, that's a robust solution.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  How's traction been so far?

• 2:08:19Speaker 23

  Traction is amazing. Uh, as soon as we launched, uh, as I said, like, people have this hair on fire problem. So they just, they want to throw money at you.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:08:27Speaker 23

  For you to onboard them on platforms that they can actually, uh, continue developing the application on.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  Did you share any metrics today at Demo Day?

• 2:08:34Speaker 23

  I will share it. I haven't presented yet.

• 2:08:35John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, you will.

• 2:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Front run it, front run it, front run it for the, for the audience.

• 2:08:39Speaker 23

  Eight thousand, eight thousand applications in three weeks.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 2:08:46Speaker 23

  I worked as a software engineer for four years for a company and actually built a Noco tool which is very similar to what I've listed in for animation and 3D modeling.

• 2:08:54John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:08:55Speaker 23

  For Disney.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:08:56Jordi Hays?

  Disney, crazy.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:08:58Jordi Hays?

  How have you reacted to like the way that Disney's approached AI? I know they kind of seemingly, it's like they're very careful not to get into hot water around like using like too much AI, but clearly want to stay on the edge.

• 2:09:16Speaker 23

  I think they use AI everywhere, like literally everywhere in rendering, 3D modeling, everywhere. And it's cool. Like you can just make everything faster and super high resolution rendering.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Let's move into our lightning round. We've been asking two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

• 2:09:32Speaker 23

  My favorite entrepreneur is Taylor Swift.

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  Taylor Swift, that's a good one.

• 2:09:37Speaker 23

  I'm a big fan and she is amazing.

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Icon.

• 2:09:40John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 2:09:40Jordi Hays?

  Mogul.

• 2:09:41Speaker 23

  Resilience and persistence.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  Second, how'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 2:09:47Speaker 23

  By selling stuff that my brothers didn't use at home.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:09:52Speaker 23

  Yes.

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the stream.

• 2:09:57Speaker 23

  Thank you.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We will bring on, oh, I forgot to ask about the GPU. We gotta ask if they, is there GPU working? How you doing?

• 2:10:06Speaker 24

  Good.

• 2:10:06John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you.

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  I'm John, welcome to the show.

• 2:10:09Speaker 24

  Josh.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  Josh, pleasure.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Jordy.

• 2:10:11Speaker 24

  Good to meet you.

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself for the stream.

• 2:10:14Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  Who are you? What are you building?

• 2:10:15Speaker 24

  Well, I'm Joshua March. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Veritas Agent. We build AI agents for the consumer lending industry.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:22Speaker 24

  So interfacing with borrowers to help doing sales, servicing, collections for like fintechs, banks, credit unions, services, that kind of thing.

• 2:10:30John Coogan?

  Do you see your company as GPU poor or GPU rich?

• 2:10:33Speaker 24

  Uh, we're rich, everything.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  To be rich.

• 2:10:36Speaker 24

  To be rich.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  There you go, you can have this hat.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how have you, like, how have you, what's go to market look like?

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Are you focusing like, are you trying to?

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  Banks involved.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I imagine there's like a couple, the NPL players that would, you know, be.

• 2:10:51Speaker 24

  Be ideal. Yeah, no, we're, we're currently, our first design partner was in the collection space, collecting on medical payments. It's been super successful. We've done thousands of outbound calls.

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  But, but, but sort of like a, not a name that you necessarily recognize.

• 2:11:03Speaker 24

  No, but we're, and we're now launching.

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  These businesses are big.

• 2:11:05Speaker 24

  Yeah, exactly. We're now getting live with a fintech who's launching us into their conversion funnel for like, for sales. There's a big servicer that's in the solar space, there's collections agencies, so a big handful.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Did you have experience in the, in the space prior to this?

• 2:11:20Speaker 24

  Yeah, so I actually, I previously built a contact center software company, so like 15 million ARR before I got acquired.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:11:26Speaker 24

  Um, and then immediately prior to launching this company, I was essentially working in like a web three credit fund and had invested into some emerging market debt buyers who are doing collections and servicing, which kind of exposed me to the whole world.

• 2:11:38John Coogan?

  Oh, that makes sense.

• 2:11:38Speaker 24

  And I was like, we should just do this with AI, basically.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  Did you share any metrics today at Doma Day?

• 2:11:44Speaker 24

  Um, yeah, the only, we haven't converted any of our, we got our first design customer live like six weeks ago. We're now launching like five more.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:52Speaker 24

  And the first customer, uh, the first design partner, we did like 4,000 outbound calls and collected like 50K in the first month. Which is like a big success, but like, yeah.

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:12:01Speaker 24

  So we're still getting going.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Are you, how are you thinking about the, are you thinking of selling like the result in some way? Like over time, would you just charge a percentage of whatever you want?

• 2:12:09Speaker 24

  Yeah, it depends who we're selling to.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Speaker 24

  So when we're selling to like a servicer or collections agency, we'll probably just sell on a usage based kind of pricing. But when we're selling to fintechs and banks, then we'd love to do as much outcome based pricing as possible. And that's on the sales side, the collection side, everything.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  We have been asking everyone two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

• 2:12:31Speaker 24

  So there's this guy Felix Dennis, who was a British entrepreneur. And he wrote this book called How to Get Rich.

• 2:12:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:39Speaker 24

  Which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship.

• 2:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:12:42Speaker 24

  And he's like a crazy guy. He's dead now, but he was like a crazy, crazy guy.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Big into magazines.

• 2:12:46Speaker 24

  Big into magazines.

• 2:12:47Jordi Hays?

  You would love this guy.

• 2:12:48Speaker 24

  He owned like, he was like PC Magazine, Maxim, The Week. He was like a big publisher, did a load of different stuff.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  Felix Dennis.

• 2:12:55Speaker 24

  Felix Dennis.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  Great. I'll have to look him up. Uh, second question. How'd you make your first dollar online, on the internet or in business?

• 2:13:01Speaker 24

  Yeah, so I launched an e-commerce website when I was like 19, still at college. And was selling, uh, selling like a load of homewares online.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Homewares. Nice. Nice. John was selling, uh, were you selling DJ equipment internationally? He's an international businessman from a young age.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Businessman at age 13. It was great.

• 2:13:20Speaker 24

  13. Nice. Awesome.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:13:24Speaker 24

  Great to meet you.

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the progress.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Congrats on the progress. Let's move on to our next guest. We are live from Y C Demo Day 2025. How you doing? We're getting some photos taken by Bryce Johnson. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  We got our next guest.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Wait, the prompting company? Come on!

• 2:13:41Jordi Hays?

  The prompting company.

• 2:13:42Speaker 25

  Prompting company.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  We're prompts maxing.

• 2:13:45Speaker 25

  Yes, sir.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Of where? Where could you possibly be based?

• 2:13:48Speaker 25

  Of San Francisco.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  The prompting company of San Francisco.

• 2:13:51Speaker 25

  Don't capitalize the "of" though.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  I'm just looking at this. It's funny.

• 2:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, bull market and companies named, uh, that start with "the."

• 2:14:00Speaker 25

  Exactly. The issue tracking of a company of Australia, right?

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. It was hilarious.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  When did you pick that name and logo and design?

• 2:14:07Speaker 25

  Um, we picked it two months ago.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Two months ago.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. You should be the last one to do it, though.

• 2:14:13Speaker 25

  I hope so. I think, uh, it's getting kind of boring.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  The trade is over.

• 2:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the trade is over.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  So, so you're prompting. It's pretty self-evident, but tell the stream who you are, what you actually do.

• 2:14:22Speaker 25

  Yeah, my name is Kevin. I'm the CEO and co-founder of the prompting company and we help product get mentioned in ChatGPT.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:28Speaker 25

  Okay, okay. Not just another generative engine optimization tool. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's different about it?

• 2:14:34Speaker 25

  How do you differentiate? Yeah, for sure. So we play in the infrastructure layer. We're not just creating articles for you.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:39Speaker 25

  We create shadow sites for our companies to, you know, influence all of them.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Is there, is there any special design in, in, in the type of shadow site that you're building? Like, what, what exactly does that look like?

• 2:14:50Speaker 25

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  There's HTTP servers, there's APIs, there's documentation, there's a lot of different stuff.

• 2:14:54Speaker 25

  For sure. So these shadow sites are basically like markdown versions of your site.

• 2:14:56John Coogan?

  Okay, markdown.

• 2:14:57Speaker 25

  Yeah, we basically iterate on more of those.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Why do the foundation models like markdown so much?

• 2:15:02Speaker 25

  Because it takes like, no, it's, it's just 90% less tokens, man.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, it's just more compressed.

• 2:15:07Speaker 25

  Super fast.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  Got it. Then HTML?

• 2:15:08Speaker 25

  Yeah.

• 2:15:09John Coogan?

  Okay, because if they scrape the HTML, they're bringing in all the CSS and stuff.

• 2:15:12Speaker 25

  Yeah, sir.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 2:15:13Speaker 25

  Did you come into the batch with this idea? Yes, we did. We did not pivot. Okay. We came in with the idea. It's a pure play.

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  That's nice.

• 2:15:21Speaker 25

  What were you doing before this? I was at Beehive. I was working there. Oh, no way. Cool.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:26Speaker 25

  Made your money in newsletters.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  Newsmaxing.

• 2:15:30Speaker 25

  What's, what's traction been like? It's been pretty good, dude. We are at 300K in ARR now. Nvidia's a big customer.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:15:38Speaker 25

  Nvidia, interesting. How did you, how did you land Nvidia? Oh, dude, it's, it was a crazy bake-off, but ultimately the better product one. A bake-off? Yeah. I love, I love bake-offs. Very cool.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  What, speaking of Jensen, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history?

• 2:15:55Speaker 25

  In history?

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  I mean, anyone, alive or dead.

• 2:15:57Speaker 25

  Dude, Steve Jobs.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs, there we go.

• 2:16:00Speaker 25

  Hands down. Yeah, good answer. Good answer.

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  What about how you made your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 2:16:05Speaker 25

  Oof, on the internet? I actually ran a service back then to jailbreak iPhones.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:16:10Speaker 25

  No way. That's come up before. Yeah. Josh Browder, Josh Browder.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was jailbreaking iPhones. And there was someone else who was fixing broken iPhone screens. So the, yeah, the, the little low hanging fruit in the digital economy.

• 2:16:22Speaker 25

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Very, very popular. Would you consider yourself GPU poor or GPU rich?

• 2:16:28Speaker 26

  GPU poor at the moment.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  GPU poor at the moment.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  How's the fundraiser going?

• 2:16:32Speaker 26

  It's going pretty great, man. We're way oversubscribed.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:16:35Speaker 26

  Picking our lead right now.

• 2:16:36John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congratulations.

• 2:16:38Speaker 26

  Thank you so much. Love it. Great to meet you. Good to meet you. Coming on.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest from YC Demo Day. How are we doing on time, guys? We have to get out of here to catch a flight, correct? Okay, let Nick know. How you doing?

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you, Theo. Good to meet you guys.

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:16:58Speaker 26

  Yeah, fellow content creator, streamer, accidental business guy turned into an influencer somehow.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself to the stream.

• 2:17:04Speaker 26

  Yeah, for those who don't know me, I'm Theo. I started, I was actually doing a YC company for making stuff like this easier because I worked at Twitch for five years. I wanted to be easier to do live content collaborations. So I built Zoom for streamers, make it easier to bring a guest like you onto a show like mine in HD. I'm assuming you guys are actually not using OBS. That's cool. But we built everything around OBS so that you can use your professional existing solutions, copy paste somebody straight from your browser into our, or into OBS at 1080p HD.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  No matter what you're using, if you're using Hangouts or Zoom.

• 2:17:31Speaker 26

  We're an alternative to Hangouts and Zoom.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:33Speaker 26

  We're like, but to be clear, we don't really focus on this product anymore. We built it because it was so needed and nothing else like this existed before. And I saw the need when I was at Twitch. We won half the top streamers. Our reward was 8K a month. So we started exploring more.

• 2:17:45Jordi Hays?

  It's like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers and have a tiny business.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had a buddy who built this amazing tool for helping make documentaries. And I was just like, this is very small market, man. It's coming from any friend.

• 2:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  And I was like, this is the best. I was making YouTube videos, like videos.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  What are you, so did you, you guys?

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Tag them all.

• 2:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Kept the product running?

• 2:18:06Speaker 26

  Yeah, still running to this day. It's relatively easy to maintain, thankfully. We, I'm proud of what we built there. But at the same time, I wanted to better understand creators. And I just missed going deep on tech because when I was at Twitch, my favorite time of day was lunch and dinner where I could just nerd out with these super experienced engineers. COVID took that away from me. So I built my YouTube channel to better understand what creators needed and to just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest. And it blew up almost immediately. I'm still, I, the last-

• 2:18:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you have a head of membership?

• 2:18:35Speaker 26

  So you've seen the browser company video. I love that. So.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  It was fantastic reaction. Jordy was saying the same thing in the morning.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved. I think I think I can see it. I can see Atlassian like wanting to take the browser very seriously. And so there's a way that in the fullness of time that it will look like, you know, incredible deal for both sides. But I did see the video. I was like, wait, had a membership? What's going on there?

• 2:19:03Speaker 26

  There are just certain things in that scenario that are like hard to not have your eyes catch. So the chaos I've engaged with since my YouTube channel blew up accidentally, just got more into dev tool stuff, built some dev tools as well for the business, got so annoyed with the state of all the AI chat apps. DeepSeek V3 drops like, oh, my God, this model is incredible. But the website was somehow even worse. So I said, time to make a better one. Cause I'm a nerd about like full stack web and application performance and just quality of experience. I helped build a lot of Twitch chat when I was over there. World, as far as I know, fastest updating text interface on the web.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. People love Twitch chat.

• 2:19:33Speaker 26

  Twitch is so much better than YouTube. It's unbelievable to this day. So I wanted to make that something.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  We unpack that because I believe that Twitch chat is specifically like, doesn't just endlessly load. It loads blocks at a time.

• 2:19:43Speaker 26

  It's blocks, but they come in really fast.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  Is that a mistake?

• 2:19:46Speaker 26

  No, that's by design. That's absolutely by design. Like chat readability is like comprehensive, like your ability to comprehend what's happening in chat is like really.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  I was listening to Ludwig and he was saying like, could I start over if I didn't have any Twitch followers? And he did this experiment and he was like, I think I have an edge just because I'm good at reading chat. And I was like, I never would have clocked that as like, as like a thing, but it is.

• 2:20:05Speaker 26

  Actually, one of the things I do differently is I film all my YouTube videos live on Twitch. So I'll be like, and I have chat open next to my like return feed. Yes, I have a team that like helps me with that. We built some custom software to auto chop the individual topics. So we can get a video out within an hour of it being recorded, which I'm really proud of. But the goal is really to do it live. So any like mistakes I make, any sources I need help finding, any weird comments or questions I would get about the thing can happen while I'm filming.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  Yep. So then the final thing is much better.

• 2:20:30Speaker 26

  Yeah, it just cuts like it takes us an hour and a half to film an hour long video and then like 30 minutes to edit it. It's great. I'm really proud of our workflow there.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:20:37Speaker 26

  Super fun.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Was that a content creation injury?

• 2:20:41Speaker 26

  It's gotten in a fight with a Firefox user. Joking, it was a skateboard injury from a long time ago.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:20:47Speaker 26

  Yeah, it slowly built up. Yeah, I was a sponsor skater for a little bit. I'm really into that to this day. But, uh, yeah, 10 years ago, had a really bad, 15 years ago, had a really bad wrist break. Also tore the entire ligament for my thumb and it's just slowly been like falling off of my hand. So finally got that reconstructed.

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  Will you, you should build an app that uses computer vision to teach people how to kickflip. I think there's a, there could be a bull market in that, in that space.

• 2:21:11Speaker 26

  Yeah, it'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's a, it's a, it's a public service, right? Teaching the world to kickflip. You just come out, our mission is to kickflip.

• 2:21:20Speaker 26

  So that's been fun for me recently that I actually really appreciate you guys for too, is it seems like the hunger for people to understand how the startup stuff actually works has been growing a lot recently. I've always been a nerd about it. Recently I've been investing in a lot more. I think I've been over a hundred YC startups at this point. It's been really fun for me and love it. The, and recently it feels like I can actually talk about that stuff more where previously people's eyes would just glaze over. They wouldn't care, but I'm doing like one startup e-video a week at least right now. And they're performing incredibly well. The response has been awesome. It feels like people are ready to talk about this now.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:52Speaker 26

  It's a really good time.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  It's highly big enough. I mean, you look at the, the traction on like the actual Y Combinator account and like on YouTube. And it says like over a million followers.

• 2:22:00Speaker 26

  Still one of the most underrated YouTube channels too. Like the old Michael Seibel Dalton podcast, like I reference it all of the time.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  So good. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, they have, but all this stuff that Gary's done, they've done really well.

• 2:22:10Speaker 26

  Absolutely. Love all of them. It's like, like the Y Combinator like program, Y Combinator content, Y Combinator partners, everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful. And now Y T three chat's successful too. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. What, uh, what's, what's your goal over the next five, 10 years?

• 2:22:25Speaker 26

  If I had a five to 10 year goal, I would be probably not here, be working on it. I have no idea. I've always kind of just went with the flow and that works really well. My thing's always been it's better to be late than early. I find that people try way too hard to be early to a thing and it ends up kind of rotting their brain a little bit. Like imagine you saw how powerful smartphones were getting back in the day. You're like, oh my God, this is obviously the future. Everything's going to be on phones. So I'm going to go all in making Java applets for the Kyocera Echo and BlackBerry. Are you better or worse off than somebody who got into app development two years after the App Store came out?

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:55Speaker 26

  Yeah. Sometimes it's better to be late. Everybody told me I was too late when we made our chat app and we're, as far as I know, the fastest growing third party chat app.

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:23:01Speaker 26

  Crazy.

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We've been asking everyone two questions. Uh, who's your favorite entrepreneur in history?

• 2:23:10Speaker 26

  History makes it tough. I would say like

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Alive or dead.

• 2:23:13Speaker 26

  Modern history, like Alive makes it a lot easier. Modern history, I think Tim Sweeney is my personal favorite. The way he's aligned his business is incredible. Like, to this day, he still owns exactly 51%. So, nobody can outvote him. His focus on making everything better for developers, knowing the flywheel will eventually like fund him back. It's kind of like Apple's strategy, but way more focused on developers, which I care a lot about. Even things that have been a flop, like Epic Game Store, were with the goal of getting developers more money because he was tired of Apple getting subsidized with 30% revenue from an indie game dev.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Yep, that makes a ton of sense.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  What did you, what did you think of the, the, um, Apple launches today?

• 2:23:47Speaker 26

  Apple launch today was, as a nerdy tech and video guy, I love it. The iPhone 17 Pro is an actual like monumental leap in what you can do for video production. Have you guys paid attention to any of that stuff?

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 2:23:59Speaker 26

  I'm sure these guys are gonna love it.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  I just know 48 megapixel like better cameras.

• 2:24:03Speaker 26

  That's cool, but the, no, I mean that they added Gen Lock support.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:06Speaker 26

  So, like full black magic, like integrations. You can do time code with a new USB, like device that part with black magic to make. You can do crazy synchronization shots where you get like 20 iPhones at different angles and do like frame by frame, like, like freeze frame 3D shots and stuff with it. That was, normally you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before. Now, you just get like 20 iPhones and a couple of USB adapters. It's insane.

• 2:24:28John Coogan?

  And that's gonna be even cheaper in like two years.

• 2:24:30Speaker 26

  Yeah. Oh, and ProRes RAW, which is really cool too. I know way too much about cameras. I'm really nerdy about this. But, uh, the Red Camera Company had an exclusive patent on compressed RAW video encoding. Where on camera specifically. So, the reason that all those like USB, or it used to be like external HDMI recorders got popular.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Atmos Ninja Shogun.

• 2:24:46Speaker 26

  Atmos is a business because of Red's bullshit patent.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:24:49Speaker 26

  That patent allowed them to just get away with things they absolutely shouldn't have and shut down every other camera company trying. The patent was, they had succeeded in suing Apple. They succeeded in suing DJI. They almost got the Bard from the US. They succeeded in suing Sony, Canon, a bunch of other companies. They were suing Nikon. Nikon said, "How expensive are you guys?" And bought them for like $30 million. So, now the patent's not being enforced. So, Apple got to put ProRes RAW in the new iPhone, which is unbelievable.

• 2:25:11John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 2:25:12Speaker 26

  Actual RAW video encoding on a phone is just, I could not have imagined that even two years ago.

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Uh, other question we've been asking. How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 2:25:20Speaker 26

  Minecraft.

• 2:25:21John Coogan?

  Minecraft.

• 2:25:22Speaker 26

  Yeah, I was thinking Minecraft servers.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, somebody else said this.

• 2:25:24Speaker 26

  I, if I hear from a founder that they started in Minecraft servers, I don't even think twice. I just write the check.

• 2:25:30Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. Yeah, it's so crazy. It's sneaker botting, Minecraft, iPhone repairs.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Like buying and selling stuff on eBay was popular in like the 90s, 2000s.

• 2:25:40Speaker 26

  Yeah, there's always one of those every generation. It's been really fun to see. And now I feel like people skip the step and just go straight to the business, which is interesting.

• 2:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're hearing that. Just start in enterprise SaaS. Just go to the end state.

• 2:25:50Speaker 26

  Yeah, just going to like the Founder's Inc. events and seeing how many like excited young founders there are now is just something I never would have imagined before. Like when I was a kid, it was the promise, like the exciting thing is you'll get to work at the Google campus one day. Like that's what you were aspiring for. Now you're aspiring to be here and that's a really interesting shift.

• 2:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Are you GPU poor or GPU rich?

• 2:26:08Speaker 26

  Whew. I'm GPU middle class.

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  GPU middle class. Well, you could pick a hat if you want.

• 2:26:14Speaker 26

  Oh, I want the GPU poor hat for sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

• 2:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Middle class is disappearing. You gotta go, you gotta go up or down.

• 2:26:22Speaker 26

  Well, thank you for joining.

• 2:26:23John Coogan?

  It's not properly fitted, but you can adjust it later.

• 2:26:26Speaker 26

  Yeah, thank you guys. Appreciate the time.

• 2:26:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:26:28Speaker 26

  Great meeting you guys. Well, thank you. You want me to comment on any weird stuff in like the AI chat space or UI or whatever? No worries at all. I miss even more of them than you guys do. Let me know if you ever need help with anything. I'll be around. Have a good day. Cheers.

• 2:26:38John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Lightning round. Let's, let's, oh, there's people out there? Okay, okay.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's run it. Let's run it.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  Let's run it. Come in quickly. Who are you? What do you do? Welcome to the screen.

• 2:26:47Speaker 27

  Bob.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  Just my hand. Say, introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

• 2:26:50Speaker 27

  Bob. Hi, I'm Bob, CTO of Embedder. We build coding agents for firmware.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Okay, coding agents for firmware?

• 2:26:57Speaker 27

  Firmware, yeah.

• 2:26:58John Coogan?

  What, what device are you embedding?

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Could be done.

• 2:27:00Speaker 27

  So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers. So think about any microcontroller you can think of, STM32, ESP, TI, NXP, any, any manufacturer.

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  When did you, when did you learn you wanted to do agents for coding agents for firmware?

• 2:27:12Speaker 27

  That's a good, good question. So I did hardware all my life. Started like, you know, started when I was small, doing robots, moving to more professional stuff in high school.

• 2:27:19Jordi Hays?

  In college, I do. Let's go.

• 2:27:23Speaker 27

  In college, I built humanoids and then went to a startup, did med tech stuff and then went to Tesla, worked on robotaxi. So we just kind of saw it. I saw this problem from like, you know, like a 10% research lab to a trillion dollar company. That firmware development was so inefficient compared to the web dev. And traditional coding agents just couldn't do it. Like Claude code or cursor, they lack context. What we say about context is two different problems, right? One problem is that there's no understanding of the chips. Like it needs to read the documentation for the chips to understand how to actually write the code. And once it has written the code, there's no way to test the code on the device, right? So we built this information layer and this hardware interaction layer where you can actually, you know, read, read out outputs from the, from,

• 2:28:05Speaker 27

  from your board and run out like a GB debugger to like debug.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  How's traction? How's Demo Day going?

• 2:28:10Speaker 27

  Traction's been great. We launched three weeks ago now. We have over 100 paying users, 500 lines.

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:28:17Speaker 27

  500,000 lines of code changed, working on the first enterprise.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

• 2:28:27Speaker 27

  Elon, has to be Elon.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Are you bullish bearish humanoids in the next five years?

• 2:28:34Speaker 27

  I'm very bullish.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  In the next five years?

• 2:28:36John Coogan?

  In the next five years. They'll be walking around.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you think I will have one in my home?

• 2:28:40Speaker 27

  Maybe in all your home factories?

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Factories.

• 2:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Factories? Why factories?

• 2:28:44Speaker 27

  Factories, because like it's a straight up replacement for your human workers. You're just so much lower cost and you don't have to modify anything in your factory, drop in replacement and a free word for us.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Okay, we will see. Well, thank you.

• 2:28:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll hold you to it. We'll hold you to it.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  We'll hold you to it. In five years, expect to hear from us with, with a fact check on that. Thank you so much for coming by.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  We'll see you later. Have a good one. We will bring in our next guest. We're doing lightning round. We got a lot of folks out there. Let's bring in the next founder from YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. Hi, I'm John.

• 2:29:16Speaker 28

  Elena, nice to meet you.

• 2:29:17Jordi Hays?

  Jordan, great to meet you.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself. Who are you? What are you doing?

• 2:29:22Speaker 28

  Elena St. Cash, I'm a partner at Google Ventures.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 2:29:24Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna hit, I was gonna hit this button, but not.

• 2:29:32John Coogan?

  How, what's your reaction to Demo Day been? What are the common trends that you're seeing? How is this one different from other ones? Are valuations the highest they've ever been? What are you seeing?

• 2:29:41Speaker 28

  I feel like valuations are always higher. I think the fact that the public markets have come back has just reinstored a lot of faith.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  IPO windows open.

• 2:29:48Speaker 28

  And people IPO windows open. I'm excited to see a lot of that. I run fintech at Google Ventures. There's a lot of fun fintech and crypto companies in the pipeline. And yeah, it's been a really fun demo day.

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  Have you done, did you do any of the companies in this batch yet? Are you still looking?

• 2:30:04Speaker 28

  Not in this batch yet, but I think.

• 2:30:06Jordi Hays?

  But you guys are, you guys can, are so multi-stage that you can kind of come in for, it's more about, yeah, building, building relationships.

• 2:30:12Speaker 28

  Right now, we're investing out of a $2.8 billion fund every two years. And our sole LP is Google.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot of work.

• 2:30:19Speaker 28

  It's a lot of work. We like work.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  Do you introduce it as Google Ventures, but isn't it rebranded fully to GV or have we gone back?

• 2:30:25Speaker 28

  It's a, you know, it depends on what flavor people are looking for, but it's both GV and Google Ventures.

• 2:30:30Jordi Hays?

  What, give us, give us the state of early-stage fintech today.

• 2:30:35Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Because if this was four years ago, I think we would have seen like half the batch, some, something like that fintech related and very little of that today from, from what we've seen. It probably creates, probably means like now is the right time to be starting company. But what are you seeing?

• 2:30:52Speaker 28

  Yeah, I feel like fintech has always ebbed and flowed. And at GV, we've been investing in fintech since the start. We were seed investors in Robinhood, seed investors in Plaid, seed investors in Gusto. We recently invested in Ramp. And so what you can kind of see in fintech right now, yeah, let's go. Big day, big day today. What you can see in fintech is a barbell. There are people who are solving things at the earliest stages, parts of the world where fintech still hasn't touched. I'll still say fintech's total market cap is 4% of all of financial services. Financial services is 20% of the S and P 500. So there's a lot of ways to go.

• 2:31:31John Coogan?

  Do you think the fact that there are so many? Scaled growth stage, Decacorn plus fintech companies with founders still at the helm. Changes the strategy at the early stage. Like, do you need to be more focused or niche? Because you have Zach at Plaid, you have Eric at Ramp, Brian at Coinbase, Ralat at Robinhood. Like, it's not the same era where it's like, the founders died 50 years ago. And so, yeah, it's probably open season on that category. It's like, no, if you, if you start that company in that space, like, that person, that founder that we all know, who's already on the podcast circuit, is going to be coming for you.

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  And they go multi-product, right? They earn the trust of a consumer and then they get into everything.

• 2:32:14John Coogan?

  And they also are not in manager mode. So, yeah.

• 2:32:16Speaker 28

  And I mean, I think that's a lot of why we invested in Ramp, even at this last round's price, right? Like, I've spent a decade looking at Office of the CFO software. And I think that they'll end up winning ages.

• 2:32:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the Office of the CFO.

• 2:32:28Speaker 28

  Let's do it. And I think the best founders think they're never done.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:34Speaker 28

  And so, with fintech, what I love about it is I look at Amex, it's a $230 billion company.

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:40Speaker 28

  There is a lot of room to run if you're a fintech founder.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Are you pitching Ruth Perrott on Ramp?

• 2:32:45Speaker 28

  Always.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  Okay, let's make it happen.

• 2:32:47Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:32:48Jordi Hays?

  Were you at the last EMO Day?

• 2:32:50Speaker 28

  Yes.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  Why didn't you come on our stream?

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. One, that's, that's more important, but I was gonna say, like, vibes-based analysis. To me, the, I've been more, a lot more excited about this batch than last time. Last time it felt like super derivative, everything, it was a lot of like agents for agents and infrastructure for agents. This is a lot more of like, less infrastructure, more like, here is a product with like a clear value prop and we have 100 people.

• 2:33:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're using AI like we're using cloud or mobile or anything else.

• 2:33:22Speaker 28

  Yeah, and I think, I think I always think of things as variables, right? And when people are building for things that don't yet exist, it becomes stacking a bunch of variables on top of each other. And I think what I love about this batch is it seems pretty grounded and rooted in things that people need today. Like, the market is there. I'm not taking a risk on whether or not the market's going to come into fruition.

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a year ago, if you were doing agentic infrastructure, there was a lot of people that I was seeing, like, not even just in YC, that were like, building infrastructure for agents, and yet, and they would sign up a lot of customers, but none of the customers were creating any value. So, it was like, it was like, infrastructure for companies that weren't really...

• 2:34:01Jordi Hays?

  Working. And I think that's, and I think that the catalyst now is like now you have a bunch of companies building agentic software that are delivering value for customers. And so a lot of the infrastructure companies can probably work now.

• 2:34:13Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:34:13John Coogan?

  Uh, we're doing a lightning round outside of Larry and Sergey, obviously. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history, alive or dead?

• 2:34:21Speaker 28

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  Anyone that you think is inspiring, maybe you read a biography or something.

• 2:34:24Speaker 28

  Oh, wow. Uh, there are, there's so many. This is really difficult.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Anyone?

• 2:34:30Speaker 28

  You know what? I, I think I would say, um, Brian Armstrong Coinbase created a market that didn't exist before. The largest businesses are always market creators in spite of what I said earlier about a market.

• 2:34:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a great one. We love Brian. Uh, second question.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  If you're the next Brian Armstrong, if you're creating a market right now.

• 2:34:49Speaker 28

  Please, please meet me.

• 2:34:50Jordi Hays?

  Get in touch.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, second question, how did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 2:34:55Speaker 28

  Oh, wow. Um, trading crypto.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Trading crypto? I'm surprised we haven't heard that more.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:35:05Jordi Hays?

  She was born in the trenches.

• 2:35:06Speaker 28

  Born in the trenches, still in the trenches, still in the trenches.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  Last question.

• 2:35:11Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Uh, do you consider yourself GPU poor, GPU rich?

• 2:35:15Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  You're bolted onto a hyperscaler.

• 2:35:18Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  I think I know the answer, but I'll hear it from you.

• 2:35:21Speaker 28

  Define GP poor, GP rich.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  GPU poor means that you're struggling to scrap together every H100 you can. GPU rich is you press the button on the massive training run if you want.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  You're relaxed.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  You know, it's a vibe, but it's also a very real thing for foundation model companies.

• 2:35:36Speaker 28

  Yeah.

• 2:35:37John Coogan?

  Now it's just a general vibe. Do you feel constrained by technology or liberated by it?

• 2:35:42Speaker 28

  I feel like liberated by it, right?

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  I think you, I think you qualify as GPU rich.

• 2:35:46Speaker 28

  We gotta lean in, we gotta lean in.

• 2:35:47John Coogan?

  We'll give you this high, GPU rich.

• 2:35:50Speaker 28

  Love it.

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  It, it hasn't been properly said. Oh, maybe it fits.

• 2:35:52Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:35:55Speaker 28

  Nice to meet you.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. See you next batch.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your demo day. Two phones. You know she means business.

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  That's a corporate, that's a corporate.

• 2:36:05Jordi Hays?

  That's a corporate athlete.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Corporate athlete right there.

• 2:36:07Jordi Hays?

  That's a boardroom general.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  Locked it.

• 2:36:10John Coogan?

  How you doing? Welcome to the stream.

• 2:36:11Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the stream. Jordy, good to be you.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself. What do you do?

• 2:36:15Speaker 29

  Hey, uh, my name is Cylon. Uh, we're Kalinda.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  That's a great name.

• 2:36:21Speaker 29

  We're basically a deep research for class action law firms.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting.

• 2:36:24Speaker 29

  Yeah.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for litigation.

• 2:36:28John Coogan?

  What's the secret sauce? Is it, is it just the, the data, bad data in, bad data out? You gotta get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall. It's not scraped into the, the pre-training weights of GPT-5. And so you have some cornered resource in the data? Or is it something in the architecture or something at the UI level? Like where, where, where's the interesting?

• 2:36:46Speaker 29

  Kind of like most startups at YC, like a lot of it sits on the application layer.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:51Speaker 29

  Most of it for, for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things. They can have maybe 10 million pages for litigation.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:36:59Speaker 29

  So with that kind of scale, you can't obviously just toss them to check.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, be a hassle and just click upload another PDF. Upload another PDF. Upload another PDF.

• 2:37:07Speaker 29

  And then the kind of second thing is like, most of the data sort of sits, sits in silos and kind of aggregating it all and making it sort of, you know, comprehensive like human would is.

• 2:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Would you ever, would you ever go full stack? Would you ever start suing people yourself?

• 2:37:21Speaker 29

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:23Jordi Hays?

  We just. That's America. That's the American way. Let's go.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  Watch out.

• 2:37:29Speaker 29

  Yeah, we, we actually just said this in our, in our pitch. We want to become the world's first class action law firm.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:34Speaker 29

  Full stack.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Full stack.

• 2:37:35Jordi Hays?

  AI law firm.

• 2:37:36Speaker 29

  AI law firm, yeah.

• 2:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Uh, how's traction? What'd you share at Demo Day? How's it going? How's the raise going?

• 2:37:43Speaker 29

  Yeah, so we have about 60,000 in revenue in just the last four months.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:37:46Speaker 29

  Since basically launching.

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 2:37:47Speaker 29

  Uh, we have three of the largest plaintiff law firms in the, in the US.

• 2:37:50John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:37:51Speaker 29

  As customers.

• 2:37:54Speaker 29

  But yeah, it's going really well. Pitch is, uh, was a little nerve wracking at first, but got over it.

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  What, what's it like selling into these firms so far? They seem to be responding well.

• 2:38:05Speaker 29

  Yeah, much better than, uh, most would expect, I guess. Like they. They probably don't know a lot about AI at all. So you just kind of say it's magic and then.

• 2:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Has this been an overlooked category broadly, just building software for this type of firm? It feels like they just print cash and they're willing to spend. Some of the numbers I've heard on like some of these even firms that like have a website, they look like a tiny business and they're just printing like $50 million a year.

• 2:38:34Speaker 29

  Yeah, most settlements are a billion plus, but yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, because of natural language being so a lot easier with our generative AI. They it makes it a lot easier. And so the kind of work they do is has basically been overlooked for practically ever. In fact, most of them are.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  You could never throw software at it.

• 2:38:54Speaker 29

  Yeah. And most of them aren't even still paperless. They still have lots of paperwork because they've just gotten over the the cloud, if you want to call it that. So, um, yeah.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Cool. Lightning round.

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

• 2:39:05Speaker 29

  Sam Altman.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Sam Altman.

• 2:39:06Speaker 29

  Just just because I've met him twice, but he's.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's a goat. Second question, how'd you make your first dollar online in business or on the internet?

• 2:39:14Speaker 29

  Uh, cold call.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  Cold call.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:39:17Speaker 29

  It was actually, so we the previous space that we were in was personal injury, still law firms. Uh, my brother, he's an expert cold caller.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Are you, uh, how did, when did you realize you wanted to get into class actions and personal injury law?

• 2:39:30Speaker 29

  Yeah. Uh, well, basically, we literally about last summer, we started walking into businesses cold, just like saying, hey, we do AI. We're both previously AI researchers, like we can probably solve your business problems. Law firms were a huge part of it. So.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:39:44Speaker 29

  Yeah.

• 2:39:44John Coogan?

  Based on where you sit in the stack, do you, do you feel like you're GPU poor or GPU rich?

• 2:39:50Speaker 29

  Uh, GPU rich, but GPU poor soon.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. Good luck to you.

• 2:39:55Jordi Hays?

  Scaling up.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  Hopefully you can scale up. Thanks so much.

• 2:39:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. Congrats.

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. If you're just tuning in, we are live from Y C Demo Day 2025, and we have our next guest coming into the studio. Welcome.

• 2:40:08Jordi Hays?

  It's kernel time.

• 2:40:09Speaker 30

  It's clocking the show. You seem fired up. Did you just pitch?

• 2:40:12John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself.

• 2:40:13Speaker 30

  Uh, we haven't pitched yet.

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Who are you? What do you do?

• 2:40:15Speaker 30

  Um, Raf Garcia, uh, founder of Kernel. We're crazy fast browsers in the cloud for your AI agent.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  The browser wars.

• 2:40:22Speaker 30

  The browser wars are on.

• 2:40:24John Coogan?

  But these are basically computer use. So it's API to go and interact with the website.

• 2:40:29Speaker 30

  Yeah. So nowadays, a lot of AI agents, you want to hook them up to the exact same tools that humans use.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:35Speaker 30

  And. The browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day-to-day basis. And so we're powering automations in healthcare, fintech, QA, lots of different use cases that AI is really good at.

• 2:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through the kind of the history of the market because I know there was, there used to be this company, I'm blanking on the name, but they were doing like browser, they had a browser use product and they were venture backed, but they never really like broke out. It feels like this market has just like exploded in size.

• 2:41:03Speaker 30

  Yeah. So prior to LLMs, the main use case was you run your tests or your QA.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  Chromium.

• 2:41:09Speaker 30

  On a, on a, on a, on a browser, a headless browser in the cloud. But as soon as AI came on the scene, tools got supercharged by this intelligence you could connect to them.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:21Speaker 30

  So, you know, I experienced this firsthand. I founded a company called Clever back in 2012. That was.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  No way. That's right.

• 2:41:29Speaker 30

  I think we might have.

• 2:41:29John Coogan?

  With Tyler. Yeah, we were technically in the same batch.

• 2:41:32Speaker 30

  And we, our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation to pull data out of student information.

• 2:41:38John Coogan?

  Clever's a killer company, by the way. You should look it up. It's massive.

• 2:41:41Speaker 30

  Acquired.

• 2:41:41John Coogan?

  Massive acquisition. Massive deal. Size gone. Size gone.

• 2:41:44Speaker 30

  What was the number? What was the number? 500 million. So yeah, both me and my co-founder are previous YC founders, so we are experienced at the game. And yeah, I was previously a quant at a high-frequency trading firm. So like, speed is the name of the game. If you want to make your browser infrastructure super fast.

• 2:42:04John Coogan?

  That's my quant.

• 2:42:06Speaker 30

  However subscribed is the round. It's extremely, and it's over. It's over. It's officially over. We're not bad. We're not bad.

• 2:42:16John Coogan?

  I mean, it is a hyper-competitive space. I saw even AWS launched something. It seems like something, obviously AWS would have a product. How are you thinking about competition in the long-term market structure? Are you thinking it's even a winner take all market? Or is this oligopoly like what we saw with cloud where AWS, GCP, Azure? These are all great businesses.

• 2:42:34Speaker 30

  Yeah, I think, you know, with DevTools, I think there's an opportunity for companies to come into the space and just be laser focused on the technical quality of the product. You see this with like Planet Scale and RDS. Amazon has a competitor that like, you know, has a huge market share, but Planet Scale is like eating their lunch when it comes to mind share and some bigger customers.

• 2:42:54John Coogan?

  Databricks, like there's a lot of examples of.

• 2:42:56Speaker 30

  So we're, we are like infra nerds, like trying to make browsers super fast in the cloud. And I don't think they're, the lengths we are going to do that, like AWS is going to be years behind, whatever we're, we're working on. So.

• 2:43:09Jordi Hays?

  How are the bake offs going?

• 2:43:11Speaker 30

  The bake offs are going well. So we, you know, we, we did YC and, you know, YC is now like five or 6,000 companies. So it's a huge early adopter market to kind of launch and sell into. But now we're starting to see deals come on that are, you know, Fortune 500, more enterprise deals. So yeah, size gong is going off in the office. And yeah, we're, we're seeing really good revenue growth over, I guess, a thousand percent. You could call it month over month, 400% usage month over month. We've spun up like 200,000 browsers in the last three months. So yeah, things are, things are going well.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:43:52Jordi Hays?

  How big's the team today?

• 2:43:54Speaker 30

  We're six full time. So hiring a lot of people I worked with at Clever.

• 2:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Now I love, I love when a founder comes in, runs it back, does it like they did it the first time, like goes back through YC and then just puts on a masterclass.

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, the mistake, and I don't know if you'll agree, the mistake is like, okay.

• 2:44:13Jordi Hays?

  You could have done the next.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  I'm going to in QB 25 different things. I'll be at the beach for the next.

• 2:44:20Speaker 30

  The bar gets so high.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  But I'd like you to build things as hard and they've completely forgot how hard it is at the early stage. Yeah. Or the value of going through YC again is like the partners put you in that mindset of like, okay, you actually have to do things that don't scale. You have to build a product something wants, right?

• 2:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just you, you could have done the whole like raise 50 million, get the really crazy office out the gates. And then, and then you wouldn't, you, you gotta earn it every time.

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  You gotta earn it every time, for sure. Well, speaking of people who earned it, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history? Who do you look to?

• 2:44:48Speaker 30

  Favorite entrepreneur, I mean, how far back are we going?

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  We can go live or dead, literally thousands of years.

• 2:44:53Speaker 31

  You can go, you can go, Addison.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Somebody has, somebody has mentioned Jesus Christ. Somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at Ramp, so.

• 2:44:59Speaker 30

  I mean.

• 2:44:59John Coogan?

  I didn't make the comparison, but it was made today.

• 2:45:02Speaker 30

  I mean, cliche, I'll have to go Steve Jobs. I mean, I grew up reading.

• 2:45:05John Coogan?

  That was Jordy's answer, too.

• 2:45:06Speaker 30

  And studying Apple, like, that was my first computer as a kid. So I got a shout out to Steve.

• 2:45:11John Coogan?

  I said Edwin Land, Steve Jobs mentor, but it's not. Anyway, second question, how did you make your first dollar online or in business?

• 2:45:21Speaker 30

  I mean, do you count trading futures as a quant?

• 2:45:26John Coogan?

  What, is there a more noble way to make your first dollar? Like, what are we talking about?

• 2:45:31Speaker 30

  I mean, that was my first job out of college.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  There we go, that's fantastic. That's my quant. Anyway, congratulations.

• 2:45:37Speaker 30

  On the progress.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:45:38Speaker 30

  Come back on the show as you have more news. When you're ready to announce a round, jump on.

• 2:45:41John Coogan?

  We're very excited. Anyway, we will bring in our, we have, what?

• 2:45:45Speaker 30

  Ten minute countdown, ten minute countdown.

• 2:45:46John Coogan?

  Come in, we're in the lightning round. Who are you? What do you do? Explain yourself.

• 2:45:51Speaker 31

  My name's Adi, I'm a co-founder of Agent Mail. It's the first email provider built for AI agents. The key distinction, there you go. The key distinction is, we're not AI for your email, we're email for your AI.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:02Speaker 31

  Whoa.

• 2:46:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting, like browser use for agents, okay. I was wondering about this because I go to agent mode and oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like, okay, it should just now, it should just email the person to actually kick off that process and it can't do it.

• 2:46:16Speaker 31

  Yeah.

• 2:46:16Speaker 30

  How much money are you making?

• 2:46:18Speaker 31

  How much money are we making?

• 2:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, did you share a KPI at Demo Day? Did you share progress?

• 2:46:22Speaker 30

  What KPIs?

• 2:46:23Speaker 31

  We did not, but we love our customers.

• 2:46:24John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, but you, customers plural, so I know that there's more than one.

• 2:46:28Speaker 31

  Yes.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm learning, I'm learning.

• 2:46:30Speaker 31

  The key is going.

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  Okay, that's great.

• 2:46:31Speaker 30

  Did you come in with this idea or did you pivot to it?

• 2:46:34Speaker 31

  So, we were trying to get rich quick.

• 2:46:37Speaker 30

  Is that why you're, is somebody vlogging out there or was that someone else?

• 2:46:40Speaker 31

  Yeah, exactly. We're like hustlers.

• 2:46:42Speaker 30

  You're getting that YouTube, you're getting that YouTube.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  I know what question I'm asking next.

• 2:46:47Speaker 31

  So we wanted agents to go on the internet, make us money, farm free trials, and then.

• 2:46:51Speaker 30

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:46:53Speaker 31

  Exactly, and we realized, okay, it's kind of hard to give agents their own inboxes. But they should have them, Sequoia's talking about them, Lang Change is talking about them. Agents need their own email inboxes.

• 2:47:00John Coogan?

  Okay, so you did. This brings me to the lightning round question. How did you make your first dollar on the internet or in business? Like, as a kid, or maybe, took you a while?

• 2:47:09Speaker 31

  So, I got cut from the basketball team and I was like, damn, I want to be a part of it.

• 2:47:13Speaker 30

  What's basketball?

• 2:47:15Speaker 31

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so I was like, hey, I want to be involved, man. I want to feel like I'm a part of something. So I just said, hey, coach, what can I do? He's like, okay, be the scorekeeper. That's how I made like my first 300 bucks.

• 2:47:33John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:47:33Speaker 31

  And there we go.

• 2:47:34John Coogan?

  That's an honest, that's an honest living. Uh, second question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history, alive or dead?

• 2:47:40Speaker 31

  I like Warren Buffett.

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  Warren Buffett?

• 2:47:41Speaker 31

  Yeah.

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:47:42Speaker 31

  I think he's one of those guys who's like actually humble.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:45Speaker 31

  Right? Like, it's not like, okay, hey, I'm worth a hundred million. I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game.

• 2:47:52John Coogan?

  He does. He's in it for the love of the game.

• 2:47:53Speaker 31

  Hopefully one day, you know, I could be like that.

• 2:47:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much.

• 2:47:56Jordi Hays?

  Love the guys. Great to see you.

• 2:47:59John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let's bring on our next guest at YCWA 2025. We got eight minutes. Let's bring him in. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

• 2:48:08Jordi Hays?

  What do you do?

• 2:48:09John Coogan?

  Here, sit down here. Shake my hand.

• 2:48:11Jordi Hays?

  It's time to riff.

• 2:48:12Speaker 32

  Nice to meet you.

• 2:48:13John Coogan?

  Who are you? What do you do?

• 2:48:14Speaker 32

  Hey, uh, I'm on it. Uh, I'm building Riff, which is Cursor for music production.

• 2:48:18John Coogan?

  Ooh, that's fun. Uh, are you sitting? So Cursor sits on top of an open source IDE. Are you sitting on top of Ableton or something?

• 2:48:25Speaker 32

  That doesn't exist for music. So we actually built everything from scratch.

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:48:28Speaker 32

  Uh, trained our own models.

• 2:48:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:48:30Speaker 32

  We have our own like editor. It kind of looks like GarageBand, but you can use AI tools to generate sounds and mess around.

• 2:48:35John Coogan?

  Interesting. Uh, do you bring your own like samples or do you, do you plug into a sample library? Like where, or is all this, are all the samples AI generated?

• 2:48:43Speaker 32

  Yeah, we have like a user community of samples, but we also like let you generate your own.

• 2:48:47John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:48:47Speaker 32

  And also like lots of bells and whistles to make it easier. Like for example, um, you can hum out a melody.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:52Speaker 32

  And we'll play it on an instrument for you.

• 2:48:53John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Um, uh,

• 2:48:56Jordi Hays?

  What's your most popular song? You make music, right?

• 2:48:58Speaker 32

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I, uh, let me see. Uh, I produced a song for this artist named Rio Coogan. Um, he's, he's pretty big. He works with like a lot of EDM artists. Yeah.

• 2:49:07John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Love to play it. Uh,

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  What's, uh, so, so, so, uh, what, what's like, how do you see the market here? Is there a million people that you think will pay for a product like this? Or do you want to get, go? More enterprise, work with labels, like what's the play?

• 2:49:24Speaker 32

  Yeah, I mean, so like, you know, we're definitely targeting pros, the pro tool.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:27Speaker 32

  But pros for us means.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  Pro tools?

• 2:49:30Speaker 32

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:49:32Speaker 32

  Good one. Like, it doesn't just mean music producers. It's really anyone who releases music on the internet. Like, imagine you're just a singer. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for your producer.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:49:40Speaker 32

  You can produce your own music.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:49:42Speaker 32

  And that's like, you know, 80 million people release music on the internet, yeah.

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  How's traction? How's Demo Day going?

• 2:49:47Speaker 32

  Great. I mean, yeah, we grew to 400 DAUs. People are already dropping songs on Spotify that were made on Riff. And getting some, getting some listens already.

• 2:49:54John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:49:55Speaker 32

  Um, yeah, the raise is fantastic. I honestly like, have to like, really pick the investors now. Like, the round is completely filling up, so great spot.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Last question, wrist check?

• 2:50:04Speaker 32

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what do you got?

• 2:50:06Speaker 32

  Yeah, it's a breadline.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Nice, nice. Not enough watches on the wrist here at YC.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  Lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur in history, live or dead?

• 2:50:16Speaker 32

  Dr. Dre.

• 2:50:17John Coogan?

  Dr. Dre. I knew I had to ask you. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:50:21Speaker 32

  Thanks, guys. Great to meet you.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  Let's bring in the next one. How are you doing? Five minutes left at the YC Demo Day livestream. Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself.

• 2:50:31Speaker 33

  It's Freya time. Yeah, I'm Tunga, and I'm the CEO of Freya.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  What do you do?

• 2:50:37Speaker 33

  We build voice AI for European enterprises.

• 2:50:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:39Speaker 33

  Especially regulated ones like finance.

• 2:50:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:42Speaker 33

  And we're pretty much voice AI for Europe.

• 2:50:44John Coogan?

  How's traction?

• 2:50:45Speaker 33

  Traction, eight paid pilots converting to 24K MRR.

• 2:50:48John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:50:49Speaker 33

  Within the past four weeks.

• 2:50:50John Coogan?

  And the rest of the Demo Day, the ratings?

• 2:50:52Speaker 33

  Are you getting ASML in the round?

• 2:50:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're the hot investor. Say goodbye to the tier ones, ASML's in the business.

• 2:50:59Speaker 33

  Didn't get ASML.

• 2:51:00John Coogan?

  Not yet. Next round, next round. We're rooting for you. Are you GPU poor by any chance? Do you want a GPU poor hat?

• 2:51:07Speaker 33

  I might as well be.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Are you, so what's the strategy? Are you gonna build the company here or are you moving back to, to, to, to Europe?

• 2:51:14Speaker 33

  Back and forth. So we have office in San Francisco and Istanbul, as well as Prague, yeah. We're based in three places. So our go-to market is Europe, especially finance industry. But since we started working with banks and insurance companies there, especially, we're working with some of the biggest banks there.

• 2:51:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:32Speaker 33

  In US, we got some interest with some of these neo-banks and credit unions, so. Yeah.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? And I would love a European example if you have one.

• 2:51:42Speaker 33

  European example, huh?

• 2:51:43John Coogan?

  But, but you can say anyone.

• 2:51:45Speaker 33

  If there were, if there were good European entrepreneurs, they would come to SF, they would come to SF.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  Mog. Okay, well, yeah, just zooming out. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history?

• 2:51:57Speaker 33

  I would say.

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  Alive or dead?

• 2:51:58Speaker 33

  I'm, I'm impressed by what Elon Musk has done.

• 2:52:00John Coogan?

  There we go. That's a great one.

• 2:52:01Speaker 33

  Yeah. His track record is very impressive.

• 2:52:02John Coogan?

  How'd you make your first dollar on the internet or in business?

• 2:52:05Speaker 33

  In my own business or?

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, just, no, in, in life. Any, any. You know, like as a kid, did you make any money on the internet?

• 2:52:09Speaker 33

  Yeah, I mean, on internet, uh, pretty much. I didn't make my first money on the internet. I was doing sales.

• 2:52:15John Coogan?

  Sales.

• 2:52:16Speaker 33

  Yeah, for, I was trying to get, uh, some people to a real estate shop.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  Okay. Nice.

• 2:52:20Speaker 33

  Pretty much what I did.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  There you go. That's fantastic.

• 2:52:22Speaker 33

  Yeah.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  Nice. Congrats on the progress. Where legends are made. We will talk to you soon.

• 2:52:26Speaker 33

  All right.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest. How much more time do we have? Four minutes. Let's keep going. We're going, we're going, we're going. Bring him in, bring him in. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Juxta. What's happening?

• 2:52:38Speaker 34

  Longtime listener, first time caller.

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the stream. Let's go. It's great to have you. Who are you? What are you building?

• 2:52:43Speaker 34

  I'm John Ferrara. I'm building Juxta, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth with no hardware.

• 2:52:49John Coogan?

  I feel like I've seen this on X.

• 2:52:51Speaker 34

  You might've seen our, we had a pretty cool launch video.

• 2:52:53John Coogan?

  Very cool. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, how does it work? Uh, we, there, there's some company that spun out of Google that just sold that does something similar. It's like magnetics, but what, what, how do you, how are you doing it?

• 2:53:01Speaker 34

  Yeah. So we basically use simulated technology to basically render any environment using satellite imagery or indoor floor plans into 3D.

• 2:53:07John Coogan?

  So you're a GeoGuessr?

• 2:53:10Speaker 34

  You could, you could put it that way. Yeah. We shouldn't have named the company that way. Yeah. And then we simulate millions of people or objects moving throughout a space.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:53:16Speaker 34

  Simulate their sensor measurements, like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and then train models on that. And then basically deploy it as software. And then we can leverage the IMUs, which are like sensors that are already into every phone and most other devices today to track you.

• 2:53:27John Coogan?

  This is adjacent to that, like, like I can see you through your wifi. Uh, lots of people love this.

• 2:53:32Speaker 34

  Yeah. If you've seen that film in like, uh, The Dark Knight, there's like a scene where Batman kind of does something.

• 2:53:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I know the one you're talking about.

• 2:53:38Speaker 34

  That's how you can envision it.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  Yep. That's gonna be entertaining on the internet. What, uh, who's the, who's the buyer here?

• 2:53:44Speaker 34

  Yeah. We sell a lot to like, actually at this point, uh, like warehousing, manufacturing logistics, because 90% of all movement happens in GPS denied areas.

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  Inside a building.

• 2:53:53Speaker 34

  Indoors, underground, defense is a big one. I grew up in a military family, so we sell a lot to like, try to sell a lot to like DOD, stuff like that. But we, right now, we've made a lot of progress, like. Selling to companies who want to like ship thousands of pallets or containers or move around a warehouse, stuff like that.

• 2:54:08John Coogan?

  Do you require any custom hardware or could this be distilled at some point into just an iPhone app?

• 2:54:12Speaker 34

  No, it's just software.

• 2:54:13John Coogan?

  It's just software.

• 2:54:14Speaker 34

  So like actually it was almost, we were this close. If you come next demo day, we're actually going to be in the demo day app. We were, Y C want, Gary and Jared wanted to track all the investors and founders to see where they were going, but we weren't able to work with their app team quite in time. So next demo day it'll be there, but that's already existing. We're building actually small asset tags that are like two inch by two inch that allow us to basically stack. Yeah, I was going to say, because a lot of stuff is important, but doesn't have software tags. Right. And so that's where like, we'll get to the point where we can do that sort of thing.

• 2:54:39John Coogan?

  That's super, super cool. Lightning round questions. How did you make your first dollar?

• 2:54:44Speaker 34

  Like traction and how's the fundraiser going? Sure, yeah, we've, we've done about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the last six weeks.

• 2:54:51John Coogan?

  That's pretty good. Congratulations.

• 2:54:53Speaker 34

  And then, thanks. And then we're actually on pace to be at like 500K in the next two months. There's a lot of demand. We have like hundreds of thousands of these tags pre-ordered.

• 2:55:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:55:01Speaker 34

  And yeah, we raised our round, five million, forty was what our. There we go. There we go. Honestly, giving it away. Sorry, I didn't mean to, maybe that was too much. No, no, no. Sorry, I'm giving it away.

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  We try not to drag it out of people.

• 2:55:14Speaker 34

  Oh, my bad.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  No, no, no, but it's helpful. It's very interesting.

• 2:55:17Speaker 34

  Come back on the show when you want to announce the actual round. I guess you kind of pre-announce. Can I get a gong? Yeah, you can get a gong. We'll hit the gong for you. Appreciate it.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  How did you make your first dollar on, in life?

• 2:55:30Speaker 34

  In life?

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  Or as a kid?

• 2:55:32Speaker 34

  As a kid, I would, well, I worked a lot of really weird jobs. Like my first one, I was 13, working at a, working 13 at a hot dog stand in a shack in Phoenix, Arizona. Let's go. So I was shoveling hot dogs and it was gourmet hot dogs. So like you basically pay nine dollars for a hot dog that got wrapped in non-bread instead of a normal bun.

• 2:55:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:50Speaker 34

  We charged you nine bucks.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history, live or dead?

• 2:55:53Speaker 34

  Oh, my God.

• 2:55:56Speaker 34

  I would say, I would say, I know the Riff guys just said Dr. Dre, but I'll say Drake because he just came out that Amazon store. And Drake's my favorite artist, so. Oh, there we go.

• 2:56:04John Coogan?

  What Amazon store?

• 2:56:05Speaker 34

  You haven't seen this? He's, this is his actual plot to take over Amazon Music as a distribution platform, but he's working with Amazon to sell all of his merch and all of his goods through their storefront. And basically facilitate all their distribute, distribution through there. So that's my cop out answer, but I just love Drake.

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Right, this is six. Great to meet you.

• 2:56:21Speaker 34

  Thanks.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on. We have our next guest, Casey. Let's bring her in. Welcome. Welcome. Final guest, closing it out. Closing it out.

• 2:56:31Speaker 35

  Saving best for last.

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. Welcome. Introduce yourself for the stream. Tell us who you are.

• 2:56:36Speaker 35

  My name is Casey Caruso. I'm the managing partner of a fund called Apology.

• 2:56:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:56:41Speaker 35

  Glad to be here.

• 2:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Reaction to Demo Day?

• 2:56:45Speaker 35

  Electric.

• 2:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Electric.

• 2:56:46Speaker 35

  Electric.

• 2:56:47John Coogan?

  More electric than the last Demo Day? Particularly electric? What is, what about it is electric?

• 2:56:52Speaker 35

  I just think the founder quality is so high.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:56:54Speaker 35

  And I think it's just an incredible thing that YC does for the Valley.

• 2:56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:58Speaker 35

  And it's very unique. I mean, there's a lot of things that are like this and still the essence of YC has been, I think, retained.

• 2:57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:05Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. Were you at the last Demo Day?

• 2:57:08Speaker 35

  I was.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  To me, like, it seems like the bar is like consistently higher across this batch. I don't know if you feel the same.

• 2:57:15John Coogan?

  I feel like the founder quality is extremely high.

• 2:57:18Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's the founder the same, but the quality of the company and the traction.

• 2:57:20John Coogan?

  The industry has kind of figured out like how to tell the story that's not just like AI only. And it's actually like putting, going back to the basics of like, what's the problem we're solving? And so when I talk to a lot of the founders, they come in and they lead, yeah, there's AI being said, but it's almost in the background and they're more focused on the market or the problem or the product. So I've been, I feel like all the stories have been a lot more tractable than just like AI infrastructure stuff.

• 2:57:43Speaker 35

  Agree. I also think the founders are getting younger and younger. I honestly feel.

• 2:57:46Jordi Hays?

  The high school dropouts?

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:48Speaker 35

  Yeah, there's like 14 years up there and they're like, we just launched 30 seconds ago and we have 10K in MRR. And I'm like, oh my God, like this is crazy.

• 2:57:55Jordi Hays?

  They're skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker flipping. They're just going straight into enterprise SaaS. It's absolutely beautiful. Where, where have you been most excited to invest broadly, just outside of YC over the past year?

• 2:58:08Speaker 35

  Yeah. I mean, so the fund is a 75 million fund one and we're backed by people like Mark Andreessen, founder of OpenAI. And we really focus on technical founders that are commercially minded, building cool shit. And that's really important. We only back cool shit. And so we will look everywhere, but that's like the motto or that's the one liner. We spend a lot of time in neurotech. We spend a lot of time in maybe less popular AI categories.

• 2:58:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:36Speaker 35

  Yeah.

• 2:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, any reaction, uh, since you said neurotech, there was a company that had went pretty viral yesterday with doing like tele- telepathy.

• 2:58:44Speaker 35

  Yeah.

• 2:58:45Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what's going on there? How proprietary do you think that is? Is that, is that something that we're going to see more of as like a form factor?

• 2:58:52Speaker 35

  Yeah, absolutely. So actually, if you go to topology dot V C slash neuro dash map, you can see a really sick visualization of all this. It's, but it's more than a market map, okay?

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  I love market maps. We're, we're pro market map here, by the way.

• 2:59:06Speaker 35

  And if their crowds are us even better, right?

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:59:09Speaker 35

  Uh, but that specific technology is called silent speech.

• 2:59:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:12Speaker 35

  And it's becoming more popular.

• 2:59:13John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:59:14Speaker 35

  Uh, it's actually not-

• 2:59:15Jordi Hays?

  Do you have to actually move your mouth in order for-

• 2:59:18Speaker 35

  That's right. So it's using muscle movement instead of brain signals. And there's some that are trying to do silent speech with brain, uh, but like alter ego is going with the muscle approach.

• 2:59:28Jordi Hays?

  And to actually get it with like the EKG, don't, or is it EK, not EKG, whatever like-

• 2:59:34Speaker 35

  You mean EMG maybe?

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:35Speaker 35

  EMG?

• 2:59:35Jordi Hays?

  So you need, you need like 60 sensors or something like that. So it's not necessarily-

• 2:59:40Speaker 35

  Yeah, right, right now, the, the biggest thing in neuro is to become what's called multimodal, kind of like what happened with AI. So people are using things like ultrasound with EEG, which is one of the most popular non-invasive technologies with, you know, ma- or, um, with muscle movement and combining them all together. The other cool neurotech company though, that we're investing in is Sam Altman's new company called Merge. And that one's going to become really popular too. But I thought they killed that demo on Twitter.

• 3:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a very good demo.

• 3:00:05Jordi Hays?

  Great demo. Great demo.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Lighting round?

• 3:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Lighting round.

• 3:00:08John Coogan?

  We gotta get out of here, so.

• 3:00:09Speaker 35

  We do need to get out of here.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  Favorite entrepreneur, alive or dead?

• 3:00:12Speaker 35

  Oh, I can't do that. All my children, I love equally. All my portfolio.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Non-portfolio companies.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  Who you read a biography of who's like, you know, from 100 years ago?

• 3:00:22Jordi Hays?

  You're like, no, my favorite, my favorite entrepreneurs are only the, only the companies I invest in.

• 3:00:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, not, not, not, not favorite entrepreneur that you've necessarily.

• 3:00:30Speaker 35

  No, all right, then you gotta just go Einstein.

• 3:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Einstein, back to basics.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  That's good. No one said Einstein yet. And how'd you make your first money, first dollar, either on the internet or in business?

• 3:00:41Speaker 35

  Yeah, I, I started coding when I was really young, as an anon, because my mom wanted to keep my, like, gender kind of under wraps. So I, you know, didn't get any creepy messages. And I used to, yeah, do website development as an anon.

• 3:00:52John Coogan?

  That's a great one. I love that. Great start. Fantastic.

• 3:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Great to have you on.

• 3:00:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the stream.

• 3:00:57Speaker 35

  Nice to meet you.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Good to meet you. Cheers.

• 3:00:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Anyway, thank you for.

• 3:01:01Jordi Hays?

  That is our show.

• 3:01:03John Coogan?

  Show.

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to our.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Live from New York City.

• 3:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Live from New York City, maybe live from New York Stock Exchange, you never know.

• 3:01:11John Coogan?

  It might very well happen.

• 3:01:13Jordi Hays?

  We could very well be there. Thank you to our incredible sponsors for making TBPN possible. We love you all. And thank you for watching. We'll see you, we'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.