Stanford Students Pitch Us Their Startups For $3500 In Prize Money

Episode 449: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) judge the second My First Million college pitch competition with students at Stanford University for a prize of $3,500. The future is being built from dorm rooms - find out who wins the cash! Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. ------ Links: • Transcribe Glass (Empowering the deaf with AR Glasses) - https://www.transcribeglass.com/ | [email protected] • Admit Yogi (Democratizing college admissions with AI) - https://www.admityogi.com | [email protected] • Candid (AI driven soft therapy through video) - https://www.candidsocial.app/ | [email protected] • Simplify (A common application for jobs and internships) - https://simplify.jobs/ | [email protected] • Bobby Housel, Host (Want to see more startups like these - College Startup Syndicate ) - https://founderscupid.com/ | [email protected] • Ananth Veluvali, Host (Stanford Entrepreneur Community Lead) - [email protected] • Entrepreneur Student Founder Community - https://www.entrepreneurpowerhour.com/ Join the community ^^ https://tinyurl.com/JoinPowerHourNow ------ Show Notes: (00:00) - Intro (00:40) - Bobby Firehouse intro (03:35) - #1 Transcribe Glasses (18:55) - #2 Admityogi (36:24) - #3 Candid (48:46) - #4 Simplify ------ Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:05Speaker 00

  I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

• 0:13Shaan Puri?

  All right, we're back. We had a little technical difficulty. We accidentally let the kids from Sanford Community College in. Now we got the real Stanford in. Their computers work. Their internet's good. They use Google Chrome. Those other guys were on, you know, using Android or something like that. But we're ready to get started. First, a word from Bobby Firehouse, as I call him. Your nickname is Fire because last time you came in with absolute fire. We almost couldn't tame you as you were on the podcast, but go ahead, give us the intro for this.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up? I'm back. I'm the guy from the Michigan episode. We built our entrepreneurship community from Michigan to Stanford since we saw you last. It's called Entrepreneur Power Hour. We're changing how college founders meet. We're changing how angel investors meet these college founders. We're changing the game entirely. We got a non-theor who's our community lead over at Stanford. Things are moving. We launched a syndicate. We're hyped. But today, we're moving away from Michigan and we're meeting the Stanford killers. And so I'm hyped to pass over to a knot. He's going to get us rolling and it's beautiful.

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  Bobby, Bobby, I got a question for you. Is it true what they say about the post my first million bump like for college kids like, you know, are you getting kisses on the cheek around campus? Are you, do you get free lunch in the cafeteria? What's, what was life like?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I mean, my girlfriend was starting to get jealous. She's like, who's this? The female founders are coming out of nowhere, coming up and saying hello.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  We need the, we need the Conor McGregor clip where he goes, "It's red panty night when you sign to fight me. You call home, you call your wife, you say Conor McGregor made us rich, baby. Break out the red panties." That's what happens when, when my first million comes to your college campus. "Baby, we done it. Sam and Sean come into our campus. We done it. Bring out the red solo cups, baby. We done it."

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Either the angel investors or the female founders. I don't know who to worry about more.

• 2:14Shaan Puri?

  All right, so let's get started. Go ahead. Go ahead. Let's kick it off.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, well cheers. Thanks so much. Seems like we're put in this business podcast into a business podcast. Um.

• 2:24Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we got a great group of Stanford founders over here. Bobby's an absolute killer. Love that man dearly. And I hope that you're gonna love the founders we have. Got a great community. We're building it out. So if you're interested in learning more, you know, feel free to reach out to me. I don't wanna spend too much time reentering, so I'll introduce our first guy, Tom. Tommy P is I like to call him. He's a hardware dude. He's actually the old head of the group. He's actually a master's student. Doing a lot of cool stuff, but I don't wanna steal Tommy's thunder, so I'll kinda let him take things from here.

• 2:51Shaan Puri?

  How old is old?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  I'll let Tom answer that, cuz I actually have no idea how old, but twenty plus.

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

  He's gonna be, he's gonna be twenty-two.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  Twenty-four, you guys.

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  Gray blush. You're a real gray blush, my friend.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  I know, I know. Well, um, thanks and yeah, thanks for the intro, Anand. Uh, super pumped to be here. Um, should we dive right into the pitch or?

• 3:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the five minutes or two? Yeah, I think we have. Wait, wait, what's the timing on these?

• 3:18Speaker 04

  I think we did three last time, somewhere like three or five.

• 3:21Shaan Puri?

  Three, Bobby saying? Let's do three. All right. Here, here's the deal. You, you, you got, you got three minutes. You got one where we're not gonna interrupt you, but after that, we could just jump in at any time and interrupt you after that. Okay, so let's, let's do it.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Okay, keep that in mind. Cool. So, uh, okay. Uh, so hi, Tom here, Transcriglas, and we're building wearable subtitles for the deaf heart of hearing. Essentially taking your Netflix or YouTube captions and putting them heads up. Um, hearing loss is a massive issue. Uh, I used to be pre-med, so, uh, I guess a few med stats at you all day, and that's what I'm gonna do. Uh, it affects close to half a billion people. It's twice as common as cancer or diabetes, and it's growing. By 2050, one in 10 people will have a disabling hearing loss. It also is comorbid with a lot of things, including dementia. There's three to five times more likely to get dementia if you have hearing loss.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Despite everything I just said, hearing solutions today are horrible. They're really expensive, two to eight thousand dollars, often out of pocket for hearing aids because insurance like Medicare doesn't cover them. The biggest killer thing for me, though, is that Seventy-five percent of people who could actually use hearing aids use absolutely nothing. If you talk to anyone who has a hearing loss who's tried a hearing aid, what they'll probably tell you is, hey, I bought it, put it in my ear, hated it, put it on the shelf, never used it again. Now, there's a really cool medical reason why, you know, people hate hearing aids more than glasses, but we don't actually have time for that. So what we do know about the deaf heart of hearing people like myself is that we love caption. And what's not to love? They're really, you know, cost effective, incredibly accurate. Uh, sorry?

• 4:51Sam Parr?

  Keep going. I like it. Keep going.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Incredibly accurate, uh, and, um, you know, intuitive. People know what captions are. They know how to use them. Uh, in fact, deaf heart of hearing people love captions so much that we actually sued Netflix. Uh, and now Netflix has to caption all of their content. So if you're watching your foreign film with captions, you know, thank your local deaf heart of hearing person, you know, make sure to enunciate so they hear you. Uh, but yeah, um, pro tip. Um, we knew that captions were incredibly valuable, but we needed a way to get them off your devices and into the real world where you needed them for conversations. Uh, and we looked at all the AR players. We, you know, tried a whole bunch of AR headsets, uh, to bring those captions into your field of view. We made this really fancy chart and we realized one thing.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  People don't actually use AR glasses today. No one uses them. Uh, no one's wearing them in this room. I don't see them around the campus except me. Um, there's a lot of reasons why AR adoptions have been so shitty. Um, but, um, the fundamental trade-off in our thesis is this trade-off of fully immersive content versus true wearability. At Transcri Glass, we're focused on just critical information like text and captions. As a result, we built the lightest AR product with all-day battery life and a form factor you actually want to put on your head. Now, into immediately.

• 6:12Sam Parr?

  And describe this, describe the product, what it looks like for the listener, because a lot of people aren't watching.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, for sure. So it's a wearable device. I actually have a demo video. I'd love to play it after it just shows what it looks like through the insides really quick. But it's a lightweight AR product. It's designed in a retrofit manner, meaning it attaches to your glasses. A lot of your users are older with who already use glasses. So it can fit onto any glasses and work straight out of the box. You have numerous features like focus adjustment that are catered to the deaf part of hearing. And it has an all-day battery life and it's incredibly light. People tell us they don't notice when they're wearing it. You look through it and you see subtitles, text floating in your field of view. And you can position it anywhere you want. Is that helpful?

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  To clarify, I don't know if I'm too sci-fi here, or if this is your product, but I'm talking to you and it would be transcribing what I'm saying right there for your eyes, right? So it's just live transcription of anything you're hearing.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  It basically just looks, for the listener, it looks basically like Google Glass, but it turns any set of eyeglasses into a Google Glass-looking device. So, so sorry, go ahead.

• 7:19Shaan Puri?

  And you're at the end of your time here. So let's wrap the pitch.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's, that's the product. That's what we're building. Users love it. We have over 700 pre-orders, completely inbound from awards we won. We won, you know, for social good, Indian Presidential Gold Medal. We won the Health category of Stanford's largest startup competition. We also have tremendous inbound interest from cinema halls and B2B. They're all required to provide these accommodations. And we recently signed an NDA with one of the largest media companies as a way to put captions into your field of view. Now is also a great time to do this. Hearing aids have been deregulated this year, which is crazy. You'd no longer have to go to a doctor to get them, or an audiologist. You can buy them over the counter. So our product can be right there, right next to hearing aids at Best Buy. First time ever that this is

• 8:07Speaker 04

  possible. And finally, last thing I want to hit is, you know, we built a really cool product, but the immediate thing is like, hey, why can't someone else build this? You know, you have Fitbit and you have 30 other versions of Fitbit. Hardware, especially consumer hardware, is inherently commoditizable. The thing is, what we've done is our revenues do not come from our hardware sale. They come from the recurring subscription revenues that we get on this product. And you know, that scales really heavily. So I can talk more about that, but just want to wrap it up. We're running a pilot trial at Stanford this quarter officially. If you want, I can connect you to them and you can try out this product. That's also a picture of my co-founder in the corner, meeting the president of India for this work.

• 8:51Shaan Puri?

  By the way, here's a picture of me with Drake. All right, so that's a great way to end a pitch. So you, two questions. How does it actually do the live transcription? Is this software you guys are writing? Are you using some open source tools?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:04Shaan Puri?

  Using AI? What are you doing?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're right now using third-party AS automated speech recognition services. We're source agnostic, meaning right now we support three, Google, Microsoft, IBM. Their automated system that, you know, restream the captions and display them here. We are also able to do subtitle files. If you walk into a movie theater, you can load the subtitle file and display it. Or another thing called card interpreting, where you can, you know, a person types and then you can stream the captions to your device. We're moving towards a on-device model that's wifi agnostic and can work anywhere as these models and get better and decrease in latency. Things like Whisper.

• 9:48Sam Parr?

  Two questions. Question or point number one, you're in luck. I am a soon-to-be hearing aid wearer and Sean has someone in his life who wears one or two. I have a hearing loss, so I'm actually in the process of getting one now. The biggest thing with my hearing aid or why I have a hearing of my hearing loss is not watching TV. It's when I'm out in public, I can't hear the difference between you talking to me and the background noise of the restaurant. It all sounds like one thing to me, so I constantly have to lean in. So I want to know about that. And number two.

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  The whole dementia thing, I learned about that and I don't, I remember reading a little bit about it. But, but from my understanding dementia, the reason why it's you, why hearing, people who have hearing loss gets dementia is because that part of their brain isn't working and so they like part, partially get a little funky. I think that's what it is. How does this actually solve that if I'm still not using, if I'm not hearing, I'm just reading?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. Super good question. Let me hit the first one first. Um, so yeah. Uh, hearing loss, the biggest complaint with people who actually use their hearing aids is high noise settings. I hate bars and I hate clubs as a result of the, well, actually everyone has a hard time hearing, but I have a much worse time hearing. Uh, what we're building here is adding directional microphones so you can isolate the speaker of interest. Uh, so we're targeting both through the model, right? The ASR model, voice reduction through software and also hardware. Uh, pointing directional microphones at the speaker of interest. That may be able to improve, uh, the situation, uh, a bit. But it is a, it is an inherent challenge. Um, the other, uh, the other, to address your other point was dementia.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  Um, yes, the, the part of the brain isn't being stimulated, but the, there, another thing is just the social withdrawal that you get. Uh, you just, as a deaf, hard of hearing person, if you have hearing loss, you hate going out. It's really hard and sounds sound weird. Um, so you, you lose the quality of your social interactions and that withdrawal, the lack of stimulation, that really triggers dementia and a host of other depression as well is actually very comorbid, uh, as well with hearing loss.

• 11:58Sam Parr?

  Um, and wouldn't this thing be more, more embarrassing to wear than a thing in my ear that no one could see?

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 12:03Sam Parr?

  Cause like, you like, like, I don't know, man. You take those glasses off. I might want to hook up with you more than without them.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  That's a, that's an honor, but, uh, um, so.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, on our website, we say you can use this on dates. So you can use on dates. But our

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  It won't work, but you could use it.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  You could try.

• 12:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  We've moved off a bit, but so, yeah.

• 12:29Sam Parr?

  Welcome to the pod, my friend.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Our goal, our goal is to integrate it fully into the, like, glasses. You know, we, this is that early version of the form factor was built on, you know, exclusively grant based funding that we've got in by the US State Department, Government of India. But we're moving to an integrated form factor in your glasses. We also built it in a retrograde way, meaning mounting, because most of our deaf people, hard of hearing users actually already have glasses. We wanted to work with their existing solution. I agree.

• 12:59Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna give you my

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Oh, sorry.

• 13:01Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna give you my, I'll give you my reaction to this, right? So I think you did a great job on your pitch, especially at the beginning. The problem section, you did a fantastic job. You outlined it's a problem. It's a bigger problem than you think, and it has all these knock on effects. So you nailed the problem part. On the solution part, you're clearly a smart guy and you are building something that's cool and useful, but I don't think it's realistic for two reasons. Number one, like Sam said, I think that the thing looks a little dorky and people are gonna have an aversion to wearing it right now, right? So you're like, well, this is V1. This is the, this is the equivalent of the big giant cell phones that we used to have before we got the cool, like sleek ones.

• 13:42Shaan Puri?

  And I believe you, but you're in an arms race against Google, Facebook, Apple, all these companies that basically everybody wants to build AR glasses.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:52Shaan Puri?

  It's like the hottest thing outside of AI is AR glasses. And whoever gets AR glasses, that's the new phone. You can put the screen on your eyes. And so they're all gonna put billions of dollars in making the most lightweight glasses that have a computer in them, basically. And so you're gonna be trying to slim down your form factor using grant funding and all the stuff. And Apple and Google and Facebook are gonna be doing this with everything that they've got. And they're gonna get their first, most likely, as to having the lightweight form factor. And at that point, captions might just be a feature or an app on top of their thing. And so you're gonna waste a ton of money, I think, doing, trying to get the hardware to work, when you're not gonna be the one who makes hardware for the

• 14:34Shaan Puri?

  masses to wear on their, as like smart glasses. The big companies are gonna do it. So I think that's the problem. Now. The one thing you said that I'm just going to call out, which is that you said hearing aids have been deregulated this year. So for the first time ever, you can sell them without, you know, going through a doctor. That was the big lightbulb moment for me of, oh, there's a business opportunity here. It may not be the thing you want to build because you're like, sounds like you're trying to do good in the world by like changing the world and, you know, helping people, blah, blah, blah, you know, that good stuff. But there's somebody out there who's gonna be like, oh, cool. D to C hearing aids. Going to do that now. Like, you know, that's now more possible than it was before because I don't need the telemedicine component in between. And so I think that's actually the real business opportunity out of all the things you said.

• 15:18Shaan Puri?

  And I think you're on the right path, but I don't think you're going to be the one to do it. I think the big companies are going to make the glasses and then the captions are going to be a feature on top of those.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. Could I hit that point real quick?

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I completely agree with you. Facebook is spending 10 to 15 billion a year right now on their AR product. You know, all of the, Apple wants to come out with AR glasses, hopefully in 2024. We want them to validate the AR market. We are, the thing is, was, you know, let's say, Facebook, for example, they're building an AR headset.

• 15:51Shaan Puri?

  They're not going to validate it. They're going to own it. They're going to own it. They're not going to validate it for you to go own. They're going to own it.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. But they need an immersive AR headset to run what is the metaverse. They want to build a headset that can support their existing platform. Mark's, I mean, Zach Hurburg's vision is, you know, the metaverse, this immersive reality that cannot run on Transcribe glass. And as a result, that cannot run on this lightweight form factor, all day battery life, wearability setup. So we can much more quickly build a wearable product because we're focused on captions and critical information for the depth, heart of hearing. That, that is, you know, the core focus of our product. It's building for wearability and form factor right now for a core use case of people who clearly need it, not that broader vision of multiverse, multiverse content.

• 16:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but there's other companies. Snapchat wants to, Snapchat's doing it. They just want to put a camera on there to snap a photo. Right? That's the only use case they care about right now. Google wants to put your notifications and your text messages and your email on it. Right? Um, you know, so everybody's got a different vision. And so it's not just Facebook is trying to do this. We try to build a whole multiverse or metaverse, whatever the hell.

• 17:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you know, everybody's trying to make the thing that consumers will buy that turns their glasses into a phone, basically.

• 17:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Shaan Puri?

  And um, into some version of a phone, maybe a lightweight version first. And so I, I don't buy that. And uh, yeah. So for that reason, for that reason, even though I, I think you're, you're good intention and you're a smart guy, I don't think this is an investable product. What do you think, Sam?

• 17:22Sam Parr?

  I agree, but I do want to give you kudos because uh, I think you creating something hardware related is ballsy. And I think it's awesome that you're, you're going this route. As it is now, no, I don't think it's, it's the way it is. But I have a feeling that if you keep going down this route, you're going to find a better solution soon. And I actually think you should continue to pursue it, but you're going to find a, you've come up with some interesting technology. I also like the fact that there's like an inflection here, which is that uh, hearing aids are now uh, Yeah, deregulated. Are deregulated. And I think that those are always good inflections when you can pounce on those things.

• 18:01Sam Parr?

  But I don't know if this is the right solution, but it is interesting technology that I think is actually going to be used for something else. Cool. Um, yeah. And this is coming from a half deaf guy. So like, I would not want to use this as it is now. But I, I think it's a cool problem you're trying to solve, and I think it's cool technology. I just don't think they're aligned.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  Cool. Right on. Alright, thanks, Tom. Thanks so much.

• 18:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, thank you, guys.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Best of luck.

• 18:27Sam Parr?

  Our next one, it's going to start with the big D, democratizing.

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  Oh, no.

• 18:32Sam Parr?

  Whenever I see, whenever I see the big D, uh, I, I'm curious. So what do we got?

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, from Gandalf the Grey, we go to Frodo the Young. So home is the freshman to the group. Um, he's an absolute killer, one of my close friends. Um, he's got a pretty sick startup, so I'll, I'll leave the rest to him. So home, so yours, bro.

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  So come, come democratize us.

• 18:55Speaker 06

  What's up, Sharks? My name is Sohom. I'm the founder of Admit Yogi. We're on a mission to democratize college admissions using the power of big data and artificial intelligence. But before I can tell you a little bit more about the business, I first kind of want to start with a personal story about myself. I went to high school in one of the largest public high schools across America, down in good old Round Rock, Texas. My class had over a thousand students, including myself. And although our counselors were incredibly hardworking and supportive, they were also massively under-resourced. So when it came time to apply to college, we were always at a disadvantage compared to these far wealthier, privileged students who could shout out literally thousands of dollars for these private college consultants.

• 19:40Speaker 06

  And this is a nationwide problem. You see, today, if you want to get into one of these elite schools, you'll need insider strategies. But for the longest time, they've been maintained and gatecapped by this mafia of $6,000 college consultants.

• 19:58Speaker 06

  Now, when I was applying to college, one of the strategies that I found the most useful was getting to read through some of my older friend's applications. Reading through some of their essays, extracurriculars, and awards was really meaningful to me because I got to see how they told their stories. So in turn, I could learn how I wanted to tell my own.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  Now, with Admit Yogi, I want to ensure that everyone, from rural Texas to the bustling Big Apple, can experience that same feeling of magic. With all this platform, this database of over 5,000 real applications that were accepted to elite universities like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. And these applications are the real deal. We're talking essays, awards, extracurriculars, SAT scores, GPA, you name it. The whole damn enchilada. Sharks, we're feastin'.

• 20:47Speaker 06

  And we are a startup in 2023, so we'd be remiss without mentioning AI, so.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  We use an AI-powered algorithm to match high schoolers with students at their dream schools who are successful. Let's say there is an Indian student in Texas. He wants to study computer science at Stanford University. He can read through my applications, which I spent hundreds of hours working on, for literally the price of a cup of coffee.

• 21:13Speaker 06

  And what's really cool is as we start to kind of stockpile this massive data mode, we can start to use artificial intelligence to extract really high level amazing insights that demystify the admissions process, turning it from this confusing black box into a precise science. And then we can always become this digital private consultant, giving high schoolers personalized, instantaneous, and affordable recommendations.

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  So I got a question.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:43Shaan Puri?

  Can you skip to the two parts about the business? So I want to know how this makes money? And I want to know, are you, if you're raising money, how much are you raising? And what's your valuation?

• 21:53Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 21:53Shaan Puri?

  Know those two things.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  So we started this business in September of 2022 with zero dollars of outside funding. We're on track to finish our first year with $130,000 of revenue, currently 85 in the bank. Uh, we're growing.

• 22:04Sam Parr?

  Wow. Congratulations.

• 22:06Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 22:07Sam Parr?

  So you started this in November, uh, so you're the 2023, your full fiscal year was 180 grand.

• 22:13Speaker 06

  Oh, around, yeah, 180 by the end of 2023.

• 22:18Sam Parr?

  Oh, okay. All right. All right. I got you.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. So from September 2022 to August 2023, we'll have made $130,000 in revenue. And what's really exciting is we've actually helped over 11,000 high schoolers with their college applications. And we think that that impact is enormously meaningful, coming from a team of students who all went to public high schools.

• 22:37Shaan Puri?

  So what do you charge? How do you make money on this?

• 22:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. So college students upload their applications on our database and high schoolers pay to unlock them. So if I'm a high schooler, then I'm paying for every person's application that I'm reading. And we call those profiles, which include multiple applications, essays, awards, activities, unit.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. And so you charge how much to unlock one S one on application?

• 23:01Speaker 06

  So it ranges between five and $10 per application.

• 23:04Sam Parr?

  And why are the college kids uploading their thing?

• 23:06Speaker 06

  That's a great question. So we pay college students to upload their applications onto our service. We've actually built out this direct integration with the Common Application Platform, which is the largest national platform for applying to college. And it takes literally 30 seconds for a college student to upload everything from their extracurriculars, their essays, to their activities lists. And we have over 5,000 applications on our service. And a lot of these are coming from school across the country.

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  Wow. And how'd you get the customers? How'd you get the people to hear about this?

• 23:34Speaker 06

  We think that distribution is really important in 2023. So we have a TikTok of over 61,000 followers, all organic and 30 million organic social impressions. We think that really marketing to Gen Z is super important today because there's not a single college consultancy out there that can really say that they can access 61,000 minds of 17, 18-year-olds at any given instant.

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  So I'm shocked, like, we haven't made a joke about, like, is the upsell, if you're applying to Harvard, like, to tell you not to be an Asian person? Like, has that hap- why haven't we made, like, this joke yet? Why has this not happened?

• 24:06Shaan Puri?

  We're off our game. So are you raising money right now?

• 24:10Speaker 06

  At the moment, we're not raising. We, uh, we've never had a need to raise since we've always been profitable since day one, but in the future, we are open to exploring.

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  Ah, I really want to invest more now. God, you did it.

• 24:22Sam Parr?

  Yes, great pitch, dude. Yes, that was the perfect answer. Awesome job. Awesome progress so far. This is very, very cool.

• 24:31Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I was gonna shout this product out next podcast anyways. I saw you on Twitter, and I saw, I saw Admit Yogi on Twitter, and I was like, oh, it's a great idea. They're getting college students, once you don't need your essay anymore, they're paying you a little bit for it. You already did all the hard work, so yeah, whatever, who cares? Put it in the database. And now they have this database of college, like, admissions essays and, like, the stats and the resumes and all that good stuff. So I thought that was really smart. I was gonna bring this up anyhow. Um, that's, it's funny that you're, that you're here. I gotta give you props on two things. Number one, you did two things really good in your pitch I want to call out. The first is, you said, at the beginning, you go, you know, before I tell, you know, I'm the founder of Admit Yogi, here's what we do. Then you go, before I tell you about the business, I gotta tell you a personal story as to, like, you

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  know, why I came up with this idea in the first place. And that's a great way to do a pitch. Once you have somebody's attention, like, if you're in the meeting, um, and they can't really leave, that's a great way to, to, to start a pitch, um, because it, it shows your, you know, founder fit with the problem, but also people just want to hear a story. So, uh, you, you get them from going into kind of this transactional, like, analysis mode to storytelling mode. And so I think that was really, really well done. And, uh, and then the fact that you actually have traction is the, the second good part of your pitch, right? This is not a theory. This is something that you actually have in motion. Now, Sam, give me your take of, uh, would you invest in this? Why or why not?

• 25:54Sam Parr?

  Would I invest? Uh, if I were to learn, like, if you're taking this as a serious company, I mean, you're only, what are you, nineteen or twenty years old? Like, you're a freshman, you've only been working on it for a year, or less than a year. You've got great traction, I think. The fact that you're only charging five dollars, that's like a, eh, I don't love that. I think it's really hard to build a big business on five dollars. So I would, I would want to know about what your average revenue per user is. But I think that you are a very investable person, so I definitely am interested.

• 26:25Speaker 06

  I agree, yeah. Can I question on that a little bit?

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, so our average customer spend right now is a hundred thirty dollars. So people pay to unlock these profiles in bulk, anywhere from one to fifty profiles at once. And people, on average, want to unlock twenty-six profiles of someone at the dream school. And all three of us are really committed to this, so we're actually considering taking a leave of absence to drop out, work on this full-time instead.

• 26:47Shaan Puri?

  How many students are applying? Like, how big is the customer base for this? How many students are applying to college? Or, let's say, you know, in like, kind of the serious colleges where they'd be willing to pay, you know, for something like this? How many students is that per year?

• 27:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, so in America, there's two point two million students who are applying to college every single year. But if you just narrow that to maybe the most elite colleges, then you have around four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand students every single year that are coming into this market.

• 27:15Shaan Puri?

  And so how does this get huge, given, given what you just said, right? So let's say it's five hundred thousand, and let's say even twenty percent of that market was to use something like this. So a hundred thousand dollars, or sorry, a hundred thousand customers, that would be like, you know, the absolute, like, you guys are dominating the market at that point, right?

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  So what's that, five million?

• 27:32Speaker 06

  Absolutely, that's a great question, and that's something we've actually thought about a lot at Admin Yogi. So.

• 27:37Shaan Puri?

  But, sorry, just to do the math, if a hundred thousand people did it, you said about, they spent about a hundred bucks each, that'd be ten million dollars in revenue, if that was the case.

• 27:45Speaker 06

  Right, so.

• 27:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and we're gonna, we're gonna define big as like fifty million in revenue. We'll say that's like the threshold of like, things get really interesting.

• 27:53Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah. So currently, the college admissions market is around ten billion dollars, but that's just spending coming out of the top one percent of Americans. We think that by providing more affordable services, we can reach the other ninety-nine percent, and not only capture that massive initial market, but also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  I think that sounds good, that that sounds good because it's democratizing. But in reality, what's going to happen is you're actually just going to try to take that same 1% because the 1% care the most, have the most money, are the most obsessed. And maybe you expand that to like, you know, the 1 to 9% of the most competitive, you know, willing to pay type of customers. And it's actually never the the other 99% that uh that you get to be your customer because the other 99% just don't have the problem in the same way or don't have the budget in the same way. And so, you know, it's it's very hard to capture that customer versus the person that's taking test prep, that's hiring a college consultant, that's, you know, you know, really, really stressing about what colleges they're going to go to. They're the ones who are willing to pay for a new solution, too.

• 28:56Speaker 06

  That's that's really interesting. And that's actually the initial hypothesis that we had as well. And we're going to target these 1%ers who are traditionally paying for college consulting services in this in the first place. But actually, with this most recent round of early decision or regular decision applications that came out just two weeks ago, we received floods, like hundreds of emails in our inbox from these students who were traditionally underserved. Like, we're talking an Annie from rural Mississippi, first generation college applicant, never knew about traditional consultants. I mean, they were too expensive for her, but I'm in Yogi, wasn't. So

• 29:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  We initially thought that hypothesis too, but as we started surveying our customers, really collecting the data on this, we realized that that actually wasn't the case.

• 29:36Sam Parr?

  What happens when Harvard's like, you're like, oh, man, we're getting all these robots. Uh, you're, or, you know, and then the the universal college application. I forget what it's called. Like, can they ban you? Uh, like, can they pull API access? Can that, can it work that way?

• 29:52Speaker 06

  Uh, so we integrate with the Common Application, which is agnostic to university. So let's say the Harvard University Admissions Department doesn't like us for whatever reason. We're not sourcing any kind of data from them. We're sourcing it from this national, uh, national standard.

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. I think what Sam's saying is if, could the Common App shut off your access?

• 30:10Sam Parr?

  Yes, that's what I'm asking.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  Okay. Uh, if the Common Application wanted to, they could theoretically turn off API access. But again, college students can still upload their applications manually. So it might take five extra minutes to onboard a new application on our service. But fundamentally, high school or college students own this data. So they're in the, they have permission to upload it to whatever platforms they want, including AdVidYogi, and we own the data.

• 30:33Sam Parr?

  Here's why, here, here's why you kind of make me all hot and bothered. Number one, well, typically, people are usually really good at getting traffic to their website. So, marketing or getting like hype and things like that. And a lot of times, the people who are great at that aren't amazing at creating products. And a lot of times, the people who are amazing at creating products suck at marketing and like getting eyeballs. I'm I'm I've been toying around your website right now. It looks cool. It looks appealing. It looks well done. And you're saying that you've got all these customers early on. I think that that is like very, very, very attractive, like from a founder's perspective. So I think you're really fascinating.

• 31:13Sam Parr?

  The there is like, I I'm not convinced that it could be a huge thing, but I am convinced that you could find upsells that could potentially make it big. I think if I'm in your position, I wouldn't raise money. And I think that by the time you're 30 years old, you can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars because you own a business that makes uh 30 or 40 million bucks that potentially you could sell for 100 million dollars or something by the age of 28 or something like that. But like, just the fact that you've pulled off the the, because it's a marketplace a bit, because you've already kind of cracked that code, I find that to be incredibly impressive.

• 31:44Shaan Puri?

  Hmm. Thank you so much. Yeah. I uh, I really like this. The one thing I would do is I kind of feel like you're using the last business model instead of the next business model. So I think what, like, if somebody came to me today with this, trying to solve this problem of how can I help people apply to colleges in a way that helps them be more successful? I would say, oh, fantastic. This should feel like ChatGPT. So basically, I should basically be able to go to go to some uh bot that's going to basically say, uh, help me with my application. With my essay, write my essay or edit my essay uh with my my application, the you know, the information I put on my application, how to structure it better or or present it better.

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  And it should learn off of the successful applications. So it should take a data set of successful and unsuccessful applications. And then it should just do it for me versus a marketplace where I need to go pick and choose. Okay, Jasmine got into Stanford. Should I pay $10 to unlock her essay? Okay, then I unlock it. Now I need to look at her essay and I need to compare in my mind, how to make her essay, how make my my essay more like her essay. No, no, no, no. I'll pay you 99 bucks, just help me get into college. Right? Like, give me a, you know, give me a two X shot at getting into my dream school. Because you have a chat GPT that's trained on successful college applications and it will write your essay and structure your, your application and even do the application and just let you quick submit and go to all these schools.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  That's what I think the, like, if I think about how, how somebody gonna do this in the next three years, that's what the solution looks like.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Sean, it's really funny that you mentioned that because actually that's the exact vision that we had for Advent Yogi. We actually tweeted an MVP of this chat GPT like chatbot that can answer any question about college admissions and it's like fine tuned on this proprietary data set. We built this massive data set of college applications and we actually tweeted an MVP about it a couple of months ago. But we really think that with big data and artificial intelligence, especially with generative AI, we can provide students with these hybrid personalized specific recommendations for literally, like you said, a hundred bucks.

• 33:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because you know, the college application process, first you gotta figure out what school should I even apply to? Where do I want to go? And the chat back and forth about like, well, where do you want to go? It's like, well, what do you care about? Do you care about weather? Do you care about being near home? What do you care about? Oh, cool. Then we recommend these schools. And, okay, can you help me get in? And, and then you're comparing to like, how much does the college consultant cost?

• 34:16Speaker 06

  College consultants charge us $6,000 on average.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  Cool. So you say, instead of $6,000, pay 99 bucks once and get into your dream school. And like, that's the pitch that now that, that, that I think is, is really, really compelling. So if you were doing that, I would invest because I think that is a very, very big idea.

• 34:33Sam Parr?

  We should, we should go to the next one, but dude, this is wildly impressive. I saw a, Sean, but what you're saying reminds me, I saw this tweet. This lady was like, uh, it just warmed my heart today. That people were doing things in the old school way. I was on a train and I saw two kids copying each other's homework in their notebooks and it just brought me back to better times before kids were using chat GPT three to, to, to plagiarize one another. It's all like, I don't know if that would, I don't, yeah, I, I think that that's like weird to see here how kids are going to be doing that in the future, but brother, you're impressive. Congratulations. Don't raise money, by the way. Just own the whole thing.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Before you go, can you remind everyone just how, how old are you? There were some speculations.

• 35:14Speaker 06

  I'm 19 years old.

• 35:15Sam Parr?

  Wow. You're ahead of the game. You are ahead of the game.

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  You should take your leave of absence, but you should just stay right next to the campus and just recruit smart kids to come work for you for free, basically, while you're while you're building a company while they go to class every day.

• 35:29Sam Parr?

  You should 100% bail, by the way. You should 100% bail.

• 35:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. If you need help talking to your mom, I'll call her and help you out.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Appreciate that, Sean. Thank you.

• 35:39Shaan Puri?

  Cool. All right. See ya. All right. Who's next?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  So next up, we got Zane and Matthew. I like to call them the two twin towers. They're absolute menaces. They're bone out candid. Um, they're, you love them. So I'll let him take it away.

• 35:54Sam Parr?

  There's a bunch of beauties.

• 35:55Shaan Puri?

  American Gladiator or Shark Tank. This is Laser and Blazer.

• 36:01Sam Parr?

  What a bunch of beauties. Let's get them up here.

• 36:03Shaan Puri?

  Oh, the twin towers. Look at them. He wasn't lying. Okay, cool. And we got to go a little bit faster because I think we're taking a little too long on each one of these. So let's try to hit the points. Just here's what you got to do. Say what you're doing. Say why you're doing it. Tell us if you have any traction on it and then tell us if you want money or where you're at with the business.

• 36:22Speaker 07

  Sounds good. Sounds good. Let's do it. I'm Zane. And I'm Matthew. So we're building candid. At candid, we apply generative AI to blog based social videos with the goal of helping users getting in touch with their mental health.

• 36:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, but pause there. I didn't understand any of that. So what? It's generative AI to help you get in touch with my mental health through vlogs? What, what does that, what does that mean? Give me an example.

• 36:41Speaker 07

  So essentially, we ask users to record daily highs, daily lows, and then respond to a thoughtful question, which we source from psychologists and therapists. Then they can choose which, if any, of these videos they want to share with friends. And from these, these videos, we do topic detection and sentiment analysis to present patterns to users to help them get in touch with their mental health. So more specifically. So you vlog and we give you insights into what's going on in your life and help you make sense.

• 37:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so like almost like an AI therapist.

• 37:09Speaker 07

  Exactly. It's like soft therapy. Yeah. Like to call.

• 37:12Shaan Puri?

  Soft therapy. Okay, love it. None of that hard therapy Sam's been doing for the last few years.

• 37:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:20Shaan Puri?

  All right, keep, carry on.

• 37:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, and before we jump in, we'd like to tell you a little bit about the problem and, and, and what we were facing. So both of us grew up seriously struggling with mental health. I grew up in Thailand and Uzbekistan and didn't have access to traditional therapy and traditional resources. And Matthew grew up in San Diego and did practically seek out those resources. Now, I found a couple of things, and the thing that worked best for me was journaling. But the problem with journaling was that it took three or four times to start. It's a hell of a hard habit to, to get to stick. So when we started IDing around candidate, it was with the idea of making journaling more accessible and more engaging to users. The problem's a lot bigger than us, though. Last year, forty percent of students who were in college experienced depression, and most of them didn't go actively seek out help.

• 38:02Speaker 08

  Our vision for the future of consumer mental health is that there are products that don't seem and come off as mental health products, but have a backend component that's strong mental health focused.

• 38:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, so like I was mentioning at the beginning, what does that actually look like a candidate? Users record videos like they would maybe on, on another type of social media, specifically highs, lows, and reflective questions. They can share these videos with friends, and then we use a simple AI techniques to present patterns to users.

• 38:28Speaker 08

  So we do three things for them, right? We transcribe the videos, we extract emotions, we extract topics, and we do three things. The first is we identify patterns in people's lives. So let's say you're stressed about the college internship search, right? And we, we play that back for you and help you observe and help you come to your own conclusions about that. The second thing we do is we allow you to smart search through your memories. So you can search for emotions and topics associated with the event you're trying to look at, right? And then the last thing we do is we build this aura for you every week, which is a generative AI visual

• 39:01Speaker 08

  for what your, for what your week looked like emotionally. And it's a sort of a color scheme built and tailored to you.

• 39:08Shaan Puri?

  And so is this an idea? Do you have customers, do you have users? Where, where are you guys at with this?

• 39:12Speaker 07

  Right, so right now we're in test flight. We have about fifty users. We just closed our pre-seed. We're in dev and in development mode right now. We'll be launching on the App Store in two to three weeks, and we'll be focusing specifically on Stanford to really get that product market.

• 39:24Shaan Puri?

  How are you gonna get customers?

• 39:26Speaker 08

  Right, so we're gonna launch at Stanford in the next, in the next month, and that's gonna be a hard launch. And we're gonna use all sorts of distribution strategies that, that are in.

• 39:35Shaan Puri?

  And how much did you raise? You said you raised the seed round or something like that?

• 39:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, we raised a pre-seed of about half a million dollars.

• 39:41Sam Parr?

  Wow, from who?

• 39:42Speaker 07

  A variety of VCs in the Silicon Valley area. Reach, Ovo, Z Fellows, Stornext. Yeah.

• 39:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 39:52Speaker 07

  And GSR.

• 39:55Shaan Puri?

  And so you're going to launch that at Stanford. Cool. And you can kind of brute force that because you're there. You've got friends, you're on campus, that sort of thing. What happens after that? How do you get this to like 10,000 users or 100,000 users?

• 40:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. So we really do at first want to take a very controlled approach. So we're going to go campus to campus. We're starting at Stanford, like Zain said, we're going to really lock in the method that works the best. And then we're going to pick a few similar universities like Harvard, Caltech, maybe some universities in Los Angeles and take that same approach and then grow from there. So we're looking at high-stress environments and we really don't want like massive rapid growth. We don't want half a million users tomorrow because we really want to test especially the ethics behind this. And ensuring that this is something that's scalable and like we're not doing any active harm to users.

• 40:41Shaan Puri?

  All right. So Sam, let's pause the pitch here and I want to get your reaction to ideas, to an idea like this. How do you think about this, either as an entrepreneur or an investor? What do you think?

• 40:51Sam Parr?

  As an investor, I don't understand how, it's the same thing as before. Like when you just do the math, getting to venture size scale companies, which I don't know what that is, 50 or 100 million in revenue, something like that, or a nine-figure exit. It's very, very, very, very, very hard when you're only making a hundred dollars or something like that a year per customer. It's just, it's just a math problem. It's very challenging to do that, particularly when it's like a social-ish app. So as an investor, I don't think it's awesome. As someone working on it, I think you guys are in the best case scenario because you have $500,000. And if this dies next year, then it's like, no big deal.

• 41:34Sam Parr?

  You're young, you did something amazing and you're going to have another swing. So from your perspective, I think this is the greatest thing ever. From an investor's perspective. I'm not, it doesn't, it doesn't tickle my fancy, maybe because I don't see the math on how it becomes huge. Do you agree?

• 41:47Shaan Puri?

  We have a friend who has an app she called Rooted and it's basically around panic attacks. It's similar space here. And what she found was she didn't raise any money because she's not saying this is going to be a billion dollar company, but it was a problem she had and she wanted a solution for it. And she knew that other people have this problem around panic attacks and it was too niche for like a huge outcome. But because she built the company in a way that suited how big that market is, she's going to be really, really successful with it, right? She's got seven figures of revenue.

• 42:20Sam Parr?

  She's the only employee.

• 42:22Shaan Puri?

  She's the only employee. It's profitable and it serves that niche. She acquires most of her users.

• 42:28Sam Parr?

  She has two million users, by the way, and it could, it could be a $10 million a year business with four or five people.

• 42:33Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so, and she got, she's getting the growth through basically being the top ranked search for, if you search for panic attacks, like in the app store. So she had a strategy around ASO, right? Like SEO, like ASO, app store optimization to be, to be the top ranked term here. And so when I hear this idea, I think these guys, you know, first good for you for, for even doing entrepreneurship at this age. That's the first thing. Second, good for you for chasing like a problem that, that matters with, you know, cool new tech. So you're going to learn a bunch about this problem. You're going to learn a bunch about this tech. Good for you, like Sam said, for raising some money. So, you know, you're going to have the ability to take a shot at this. If it doesn't work, no harm done. You just got your first lessons under your belt and you'll, you'll, you'll go on to have

• 43:18Shaan Puri?

  your second company, third company, fourth company, and one of those will succeed. The thing I don't like about this is that it's a lot of work. And what, you know, I think a lot of these solutions look really good in PowerPoint. But when they go, when they go into the real world, people will simply not do the work to help themselves. It's like the guy who was, you know, the very first pitch is like, people get hearing aids and then they get annoyed with them or the battery dies and they don't plug it back in, right? And then it sits on the shelf. Like adherence is a really big problem.

• 43:46Sam Parr?

  They'd rather get dementia than charge their, their.

• 43:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's the battery out. And, and that's, and so, you know, customers go for, for typically like the, the low friction solutions. And so I think what's the, the challenge here is that you have built something that doesn't really tap into. Human behavior the right way, meaning you're saying, do the right thing, it'll help you. And unfortunately, people just don't do the right thing and help themselves. And so I would love to see you guys slim the product down into something that is simple, easier, a little more addictive to do and has some variable reward that's like, you know, worth the work that you put in. If you've ever read this book, go, go read Hooked by Nir Eyal. Have you guys ever heard of that book?

• 44:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, I've read it actually. It's a great book.

• 44:31Shaan Puri?

  It's about habit formation. It's a great book and I would basically say, how can we make this a more habit forming product? Because right now I would suspect that the work that you're asking them to do, which is basically proactively go on video and share what's on their mind is going to be way too much friction for the average person. Like, you know, so, so I think you gotta find something that's simpler. If you want people to actually use it.

• 44:56Speaker 08

  I think simplicity is at the, at the crux of what we're trying to do. I definitely think, you know, we need to distill it even more. But really what we're trying to get at here is tapping into people's existing habit cycles of vlogging. I think the inflection point here is that our generation is the first generation that's like super comfortable just getting in front of the solace and just like, you know, spewing their shit, talking their truths, right? And that's what we're really trying to do.

• 45:16Shaan Puri?

  You should make it detect, you should make it detect off of what they're posting on social media then. So there's no extra work. If, if they're already vlogging or if they're already posting stories about stuff, I wonder if you could read that and give them some insights. And then that would hook them to, to pour out more maybe after that. Cause then you'd have a zero work solution, uh, potentially like, I don't know the exact solution. I just know that I have made this mistake. The reason I'm saying this is I have made this mistake. I put in a PowerPoint deck, what would be an awesome product? And I didn't let reality into the room and the, and when I let reality in the room, it was, yeah, users aren't going to do all that work at the beginning. So then, so they're never going to get the benefits. And, uh, it's a, that's, that's a challenge I've had in the past. And I suspect this reminds me of, of mistakes I've made in the past. I mean, I may be wrong.

• 46:01Sam Parr?

  Are you guys dropping out? What are you going to do once you get your 500K?

• 46:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we're actually taking the leave of absence right now. We're having full time on product.

• 46:08Sam Parr?

  Smart. This is amazing, man. Like, look, my, my, my belief is that this is not going to work as you guys have it set up. I think that that's still a massive win for you. And my like big takeaway is like, You, we, we say this a bunch. There's like levels to this game of like building stuff that makes money and products that people like. You guys are like, just this conversation, you're very clearly at the top of the top. Like, you know, luck's still gonna play a role and you could still fuck all this up. But just the fact that you are where you are now, even though Sean said he's not a fan, and I said it the same thing, we're fans of you and you're gonna win. It's just a matter of, is it gonna be this one, or the next one, or the next one?

• 46:51Sam Parr?

  But this is really amazing what you've done so far.

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  This is a classic thing of like, I can't wait to see your second company or your third company. Because, you know, I had my sushi restaurant as my first thing. Sam had his thing as his first thing, like.

• 47:03Sam Parr?

  I had a hot dog stand, guys. You guys are doing like, you guys are way, way better.

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  Yes, generative, generative hot dogs. Sam would generate them.

• 47:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I put them in the bun on my hand and I handed them. They were very generative.

• 47:17Shaan Puri?

  You had to be artificially intelligent to eat them. The, the other thing I would say is, you should stop calling it a leave of absence and just start calling it a leave of excellence. People like that shit. It sounds more provocative. If anybody wants to take a leave of excellence and come work with me for, for a year, come do that. You can email me, [email protected].

• 47:39Sam Parr?

  How old are you guys?

• 47:39Speaker 03

  We're both 21.

• 47:41Sam Parr?

  Wow. Well, congratulations on your success and thanks for doing this.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. Thanks, Sean.

• 47:46Shaan Puri?

  Awesome, guys.

• 47:47Sam Parr?

  Next up, what do we got? Simplify.

• 47:49Shaan Puri?

  How, how many more do we have, by the way?

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Last one, last one. Last one certainly. At least, we got Michael, Mikey Mike, Michael, the Mikester. Someone give your name to this guy. He's a great dude. And, uh, yeah, he'll close us out strong.

• 48:02Shaan Puri?

  See, that's what I miss about college. I used to have so many nicknames.

• 48:05Sam Parr?

  Like what?

• 48:07Shaan Puri?

  They used to call me the Blender, because somebody thought my last, they thought my last name was Puree. And so one guy was like, yeah, his last name's Puree, right? And they're like, like the Blender setting? And so they called me Blender for like a year.

• 48:20Sam Parr?

  That's pretty good. I'll, I'll start calling you that. Uh, Michael, what do you got?

• 48:24Speaker 09

  Hey, Sam. Hey, Sean. I'm Michael. I'm one of the co-founders of Simplify. We're building a career platform for Gen Z.

• 48:30Sam Parr?

  What's the URL?

• 48:31Speaker 09

  Uh, simplify jobs.

• 48:34Sam Parr?

  Because I know you aren't sitting on that dot com.

• 48:36Speaker 09

  We'll try our best. Mastercard's got us beat right now. We're gonna, we're gonna get it here soon. I promise.

• 48:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I bet you will.

• 48:42Speaker 09

  If you were to apply to a job today, you'd quickly realize how frustrating and broken the process is. It's super disorganized. Jobs are scattered across dozens of different job sites. So when you're applying, you're, you're going on 15 different sites. It's super repetitive. Today, career counselors recommend that candidates submit around 100 job applications to just get one offer. It's also super noisy. So existing platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed make it super hard to actually find relevant positions among the millions of different openings out there.

• 49:10Speaker 09

  And you know, as a student at Stanford, we've experienced this pain firsthand. So during my time in college, I applied to actually more than 200 jobs across 15 different job sites. When I came to school, I grew up in a small town in West Virginia. Parents didn't work in tech. Actually, I had no idea how to find my first job. And you know, after trying all these platforms, we realized that the existing solutions out there really didn't work. So actually, I actually met my first, my co-founders when we were applying to job together. So that is actually kind of nerdy even for Stanford standards. But um, I think that's why we decided to build Simplify. So when we designed this platform, we really wanted to put the candidate experience first. So you can kind of think of us like the common app.

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  By the way, by the way, I gotta stop you. I'm looking at your thing. You're, you have 100,000 plus users that are using your Chrome extension and 3 million applications. And you haven't said any of that yet.

• 50:02Speaker 09

  Well, it's on, it's actually on the slide right here. So, but yes.

• 50:06Sam Parr?

  Oh, go for it. Yeah.

• 50:08Shaan Puri?

  I gotta give you credit, but I gotta say also, you're buried, you buried the lead, dude, you're killing it.

• 50:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, don't bury that lead, bro.

• 50:13Shaan Puri?

  You're killing it and congratulations for killing it.

• 50:16Sam Parr?

  Pull up, pull up their site and put it in similar web while he's talking.

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm there.

• 50:22Sam Parr?

  All right, go ahead. Sorry.

• 50:23Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah. No, for sure. No, we've, we've definitely got some super exciting traction. So I think you can think of us like the common application for jobs. So I think Adam and Yogi talked about applying to college. Same process. You come to our website, fill out this five minute application. Then you can apply to basically any job on the internet in one click. We've got a browser extension that helps us do that. So in the last roughly year and a half, when we launched, we've gotten more than 5 million applications submitted through our extension, which has saved like users over 70,000 hours of time. We've also got a centralized dashboard instead of like 20 different platforms. So no matter what site you're applying on, we'll keep tracking your applications on Simplify in a kind of CRM type of thing. So you can stay organized throughout the process. And finally, with all of this information, we built this machine learning model that is able

• 51:07Speaker 09

  to recommend you jobs based on where you're applying and also based on the profile that you filled out with us. So instead of scrolling endlessly on sites like LinkedIn, we'll actually deliver you jobs in like a Tinder-like interface where you can swipe yes or no and apply to those jobs in one click.

• 51:21Sam Parr?

  And you apply to them when you swipe, right?

• 51:25Speaker 09

  So no, we redirect you to their career page and our browser extension will auto-fill the information. So it's effectively two clicks.

• 51:33Sam Parr?

  Okay, that's awesome.

• 51:35Speaker 09

  But yeah, so in the last, since launching in October of 2021, we've grown to over 150,000 users. And I think the most exciting part of all of this is we actually spent $0 in paid marketing. So more than 4 million applications submitted in 2022. We've hit a million already in the first four months of 2023. Most of our growth has actually been organic. I think we've built a pretty exciting product that really puts candidates first. So we see a lot of mentions on Reddit, Discord, GitHub. We've also been able to build a community around supporting people who may be first-time job seekers. So we write a newsletter that goes out to 90,000 subscribers, giving general advice on how to find your first job. I've also been able to find quite an audience on LinkedIn by posting just free career resources, resume templates, list of opportunities. I've garnered around 60,000 followers in the last

• 52:20Shaan Puri?

  Are you a student or are you like 28 years old and just snuck into this page?

• 52:24Speaker 09

  I actually turned 23 a couple of weeks ago. So I think I might be the oldest in the room, but second oldest, I'm a senior right now.

• 52:34Sam Parr?

  But yeah. And what's, what's the, how do you make money?

• 52:37Speaker 09

  Right. So we monetize in a traditional like B2B sense where we charge companies the ability to source through candidates and post jobs. I think what's super exciting about us is through this common application, we've actually generated the super in-depth profile on candidates. So basically, more information that you get on a traditional job application or on a site like LinkedIn. So that way, as a company, if I want to say, hey, I want specifically people at Stanford that were in their society of, you know, Women Engineers Club that applied, you know, that studied CS for two years and have two years of Python experience, this is all information that we have in a structured format and you can target your job listings too. And, you know, alongside that, you can source through these candidates on our platform.

• 53:18Shaan Puri?

  So wait a second. So companies pay you to Post the job to you will show to the audience. Where do they post that? Where does that happen? Because you're saying it's a Chrome extension and

• 53:30Speaker 09

  Right.

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  When you're just using Chrome, you're browsing the internet or you you want to apply to you. You go to a career page, you just click submit. So where are they seeing the job? Where's that that other side?

• 53:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So it's twofold. So actually, within our extension, when you click submit, we'll actually pop up relevant jobs. So basically, we're able to kind of have a medium to four jobs to candidates, no matter what site they're on. So even if they're on LinkedIn, you apply to a job. This that post submission little modal pops up and it'll recommend you similar jobs. And companies have a chance to advertise there.

• 54:01Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 54:01Speaker 09

  In addition to that, our matching algorithm is kind of like the core part of the business as well, where through the matches, like candidates are specifying exactly what companies that they're looking for. Startups, series A companies, you know, companies that are founded by women, companies that are in specific spaces. So that gives us a very targeted audience to show jobs to. I think in the last month or so, I think we've had over 800,000 jobs showed just within the matches on simple.

• 54:26Sam Parr?

  So check this out. If you go to their site, you go to simplify dot job, scroll all the way to the bottom. They have this thing that says, check out some of our popular job lists. And they have things that say top summer internships, internships at unicorns, best remote internships, software roles at top Y C companies. They have this really cool thing that says moonshots. And you go to moonshots and it says, leading web three crypto and blockchain startups, moon, the moonshot list of 2022. And so you can apply to some of these moonshots. Dude, this is fascinating. Congratulations.

• 54:54Shaan Puri?

  And so what's the revenue like so far?

• 54:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're actually still pre revenue. Right now, really focused on building out the consumer side of things. I think when we set out to this, we just really wanted to focus and make sure that the consumer side was flushed out before we turned on the jets on the monetization side. I will say the kind of the way the product works now is we built these scrapers that pick up jobs. And like Sam mentioned, of all these different opportunities on the internet, we put them into kind of like playlists almost so you can browse them almost like Spotify. So if you know you want to work at a unicorn, here's an example of jobs at these at these specific companies. And basically through that, we've actually been able to funnel a lot of candidates into their existing jobs. So in the last couple of months, more than Fifty companies have reached out to us via emails. We recently put up a form that is now allowing us to collect inbound from companies.

• 55:39Speaker 09

  Where they say they've actually hired somebody that discovered that their company on Simplify. So very soon, I think we're fleshing out the recruiter side of things, allowing you to have a self-serve model where you can post jobs for a month and garner in.

• 55:52Shaan Puri?

  And I think that's. How many, you said 150,000 people use it. How many people have gotten a job from it?

• 55:58Speaker 09

  Right. So that's something that we're in the process of figuring out. So through our CRM, we can see how many people are like in the interview process because people generally use that to track where they are just to keep organized for themselves.

• 56:08Sam Parr?

  So how many interviews?

• 56:09Speaker 09

  I think we, I don't have the number off the top of my head, but that's something I could definitely pull up for you. But what I want to say about.

• 56:15Sam Parr?

  Give me an ish.

• 56:17Speaker 09

  I think around like 30% have reported like movement in their job search process. So whether that's an interview, whether that's they've gotten rejected. I think that's something.

• 56:25Sam Parr?

  So like 50,000 people have gotten a job interview because of you ish.

• 56:31Speaker 09

  I would say around that. Yeah. Because I think we don't really contribute to helping you get an interview. We just help you apply faster. I think that's the thing. A lot of people ask like, am I going to get a job if I use Simplify? I think the goal is just to make it easy to apply. Whether or not you get an interview is still up to you. That's kind of why we're investing in the newsletter to help people kind of actually learn the career aspect. So kind of want to see ourselves like credit karma for jobs. So we can give you like, hey, you should learn these skills. If you're applying to like 20 jobs, you still haven't gotten an interview. I think that's kind of what we're looking for.

• 57:04Shaan Puri?

  Explain how, give me the kind of like two line explanation. How does this get huge? So how does this become a massive company? What would be your best pitch for that?

• 57:14Speaker 09

  Yeah. Great question. I think the vision that we have is just to like be in every single person's browser, be in every single person's browser. So we have a 90% retention rate on our extension, which is basically generally the case for most browser extensions. People install them, kind of forget about them. And they're only really pop up when they're relevant. So I think the goal is to be able to make this universal. Everybody that's applying to jobs wants to save time. Let's live in everybody's browser extension. So we have oversight on where people are applying and through that, I think this gives us like a huge way. Edge in the recruiting space. The future of recruiting, I think, is going to be all data driven. As an employer, you want to know like, hey, I want to target people that are applying to my competitors. I want to target people that are interested in software. And current platforms have very minimal visibility on where people are actually applying, what jobs they're actually interested in.

• 57:58Speaker 09

  I think on LinkedIn, I've been recommended many jobs as like an electrician or a plumber. So I don't really think that they know what I'm interested in. I think through kind of art browser extension, we're able to collect the data and make the process of applying the job much more like personalized. And I think through that, companies are going to be signing up to recruit on our platform and to post jobs when they find out that their dollar on supply goes a lot farther in making.

• 58:21Sam Parr?

  Did you, um, have you raised money?

• 58:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we actually just closed a seed round. It's the first time we're announcing it a couple of weeks ago. It was a $2 million round led by Kraft.

• 58:31Sam Parr?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I don't know what the hell you're doing here, but that sounds awesome. Dude, it says you're, so listen to the.

• 58:37Shaan Puri?

  Where was my email?

• 58:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Shaan Puri?

  How did I not see this? This is, uh, now I'm upset. You left me upset, Michael. This is not good.

• 58:44Sam Parr?

  Let me read the, uh, let me read the team bio. So there's Michael here. He's a designer and LinkedIn creator with 30 million views and 60,000 followers. Rashil is the CTO. He's an engineer and product architect who scaled products to over a million users. And then there's Ethan, the CPO, who I guess he runs a career newsletter with 90,000 subscribers. Are those all accurate? Cause that's a very impressive trio.

• 59:09Shaan Puri?

  Are they all students too?

• 59:10Speaker 09

  Uh, yeah, we're, well, so actually we, interestingly, we've all dropped out, but recently Ethan and I came back to live on campus because we both are on near full scholarships at Stanford. So we basically get free housing here, um, take a couple of classes, get free housing. It's a great, it's a great gig, uh, but we've been full time on this for the last year and a half. Um, and Rashil lives in.

• 59:30Shaan Puri?

  By the way.

• 59:31Speaker 09

  San Francisco.

• 59:31Shaan Puri?

  I like that you said dropped out versus leave of absence. Leave of absence is, is, uh, you know, one foot in, one foot out. Dropped out is committed, right? It's the, uh, the old pig versus chicken, uh, breakfast, breakfast analogy. The, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. You're, you're the pig. You guys are committed. I like that.

• 59:50Sam Parr?

  And, uh, you raised this $2 million round. Can you say the valuation?

• 59:55Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we raised at a 20 post.

• 59:57Sam Parr?

  Oh, fuck. Really? Yeah. Good job.

• 1:00:00Shaan Puri?

  They're Y C.

• 1:00:01Sam Parr?

  They're Y C.

• 1:00:02Speaker 09

  It's definitely a tough market, but I think it's also an inflection point for us where when the markets are rougher.

• 1:00:08Sam Parr?

  Wait, wait, wait. You said tough market as in you think that's too low?

• 1:00:11Speaker 09

  No, in terms of in general, I think raising today is pretty difficult. I think we had a little bit of a harder time. But I think we definitely benefited in the sense that we've gotten a lot of growth of really tough to find a job these days. So I think job seekers are more willing to give like new startups the chance. And I think we've been able to capitalize that when people install them, why they generally don't uninstall and people will seem to love the product. So I think we're super excited.

• 1:00:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, Michael, this is great. I love the product. I want to invest. I really like your approach here. I do think, you know, when I asked the question of how can this be big and you're you had the kind of like the, what I'll call like the vision answer. Which is like, what if everybody, what if everybody used this, then it would be big. There's another way to kind of think about that, which is a bottoms up way, which says, you know, we think on every customer, we're going to generate this much revenue. So with a hundred thousand people or 200,000 people or a million people using this extension, we think we would be generating a hundred million dollars a year, right? That would be, you know, so, so there's usually a formula that says X users times Y value per user equals Z, you know, revenue.

• 1:01:15Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, you want to have that for you guys. I know you're quote unquote, you know, pre revenue. So maybe you don't know exactly how much a user is going to be worth, but it'd be good to have a guess. So that's kind of my only, my only like constructive feedback. Everything else was, was music to my ears. So well done.

• 1:01:28Sam Parr?

  Definitely. And I love these, I love these businesses. I think the guy's name is Ian Siegel. I think that's the guy who started ZipRecruiter. If I remember correctly, ZipRecruiter was like, it had the largest series A at the time, like five years ago ever. It was like a 60 million series A because they bootstrapped the business to many, many tens of millions in revenue. And then what's the guy's name? Wilson? What's his first name? Is it? The guy who has Wilson or Union Ventures in New York, I forget his Fred Wilson. He has this awesome blog post and he's like, we were seed investors of Indeed, and it's the greatest business model of all time, because it's basically Google AdWords, you know, like people only, it's like a paid performance type of thing. And it's one of the greatest businesses I've, businesses I've ever seen. I love these types of businesses because.

• 1:02:14Sam Parr?

  They're perfectly aligned, like the, the, what you pay for, you, the pay for performance is perfectly aligned. All everyone's incentives are pretty aligned. It would be even better if it was like paid per job placement, but that's a little bit more challenging. So it's pretty nicely aligned. I think this is awesome.

• 1:02:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I know. Super. Really appreciate that. I think we're still working out the business model. Right now we're trying a subscription based thing, but definitely open to, to try new things. So yeah, would love to hear feedback.

• 1:02:37Shaan Puri?

  Here's what Fred Wilson said. He goes, um, people, you know, one of the, the first great investment we made at USV was in the summer of 2005 in, in for indeed. And they talked about the founders were great. The team was great, blah, blah, blah. He says they have a product that's used by 80 million people worldwide every month. And they have a business model like Google is the best on the internet. Revenues, profits, customer satisfaction, shareholder value. They've built a fortress and I'm happy to have a seat in the front row. So that's a, that's, that's pretty cool. Um, well, listen, this is, this has been, this has been awesome. Thank you for coming up. I think we have to announce the winner. So the winner is going to get $3,500 of the, for, for today's pitch competition.

• 1:03:16Sam Parr?

  I'm going to message you, Sean, who, uh, who my winner is, and then you could, yeah, go ahead and ask Bobby what you want.

• 1:03:21Shaan Puri?

  Well, I was gonna say, how did we settle on 3,500? It's a very specific number here. Uh, I may bar shop, you might have a, have an opinion on this. That's like one souped up Mac, a MacBook Pro or something.

• 1:03:33Sam Parr?

  Do you have Bobby, like, so you have a syndicate now, like it would be very wise if you just gave $20,000 to every single person who's presented on.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's what we're working on. And Sean, you said something interesting, which is like, why did I not hear about this startup? And there's what we've learned is that angel investors are having a damn hard time finding the top college startups. It takes a ton of time to build these communities like we have at Stanford in Michigan. And so right now we're trying to prove model with a syndicate, um, and helping support startups like you saw today and like the ones you saw on the Michigan show. But the long run is hope to do something just like you mentioned, Sarah.

• 1:04:09Sam Parr?

  How old are you Bobby? Are you in college still?

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm 22. I'm a junior at University of Michigan.

• 1:04:14Sam Parr?

  And so what happens in two years when you're when you're out?

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  We're in, we're going to change the world of college entrepreneurship forever. We started by building communities for founders and now we're bringing in angel investors into the mix. We think that the way that college entrepreneurship is fostered by institutes, centers, clubs at schools is bad. We think that the VC funds that are targeting college entrepreneurs are just looking for poached deal flow. We have a better way of doing it by building the best communities and then intelligently bring in dope angels like you guys to make the mix a lot more interesting.

• 1:04:43Sam Parr?

  All right. Well, congratulations. You're on to something. Sean and I have selected the winner and I don't angel invest a ton, not nearly as much as Sean and out. But so the winner on this one, I would love if you guys would accept me. I would put a very small, like five or $10,000 if you'd allow it. But I don't know about you, Sean. I don't know if you're you're in that same boat, but we both, we both are aligned on who we think won this one.

• 1:05:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think, you know, what is the best pitch? Who wins the pitch competition? It's the person who can have a clear pitch that's compelling, that gets you excited and and they're committed. I think that's the hardest thing with investing in college entrepreneurs is you don't know if next semester they're back re-enrolled in school. It's like, okay, cool. So now you're super part-time on this like, oh, this is now an extracurricular activity. Damn, that's not what I want.

• 1:05:32Sam Parr?

  Like, like those fishing guys, you know, remember the the guys who had the, not the fishing, the the boating company? We loved it and they were like, yeah, but you know, we're in college. It's like, well, I don't want to give you money then.

• 1:05:43Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I invested in those guys and they are going for it. So they're, they are, they are pretty committed to it. But I think it is hard to know because you know, it's just one extra risk factor that you don't have with somebody who's who's out of school is like that they'll just get sucked back in by society to like the safe path. And so

• 1:06:02Sam Parr?

  And by the way, a lot of times they should like go out there and get laid and do whatever you want. But if you're going to get after it, I want you to get after it. Like if I'm giving someone money, it's like, I don't care. This isn't supposed to be cute. Like I want you to give me more money back.

• 1:06:18Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:06:19Shaan Puri?

  We have simple investment philosophies.

• 1:06:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like when you say like, well, you know, but I learned a lot. It's like, yeah, I don't care. I don't care what you learn. I care about me and my money.

• 1:06:29Shaan Puri?

  So learning is great, but it is second to earning. Earning is always better than learning. It's the fallback, right? Anyways, the business that we've both selected is simply, I think you could probably tell from our excitement during the pitch. You know, it solves a real problem.

• 1:06:47Sam Parr?

  Simplify, bro.

• 1:06:49Shaan Puri?

  Oh, sorry. Simplify Jobs.

• 1:06:53Shaan Puri?

  Yes, yes, there he is. Michael from Simplify. You are the winner of the pitch competition. You had the best pitch. You have the most traction. You seem the most committed that this is like happening and there's no, there's no way out. So congratulations, you got, you have done it.

• 1:07:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, thank you guys so much. Huge fan of the podcast. And yeah, simplify, I think it's a, we really got to get that URL for sure.

• 1:07:16Sam Parr?

  You're never gonna get it. You're never gonna get it.

• 1:07:19Shaan Puri?

  What are you gonna do with this $3,500, Michael?

• 1:07:23Speaker 09

  It's a great question. I think.

• 1:07:23Sam Parr?

  Bottle service?

• 1:07:27Speaker 09

  Hey, if you guys want, we can make that happen. But I think what's most important for us is investing in our social channels. I think, you know, huge fan of the podcast. One of the hardest things for us is getting in the hands of more college students. Our users have been super helpful and kind of organically spreading it. We don't even have referral rewards or they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. I think we want to invest this and you know, whether it's our social media, whether it's in on the grounds, kind of referral programs. I think these are all things that would help us really take us to the next level in terms of user growth.

• 1:07:56Sam Parr?

  You can either get a little bit of LinkedIn promotion or an eight sleep mattress. The answer is, it's very obvious to me, frankly.

• 1:08:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is 291 days of Chipotle. So that's a lot of fuel that we're giving you for, for you to go forward.

• 1:08:12Sam Parr?

  The mattress.

• 1:08:13Shaan Puri?

  Think of us every day at lunch. This lunch was brought to you by my first meal here. Every single day as you build this company for 291 days. And at the end of that, you're on your own.

• 1:08:23Sam Parr?

  Sean, let's do a wrap up here about like what about these whole things. I always, I mean, we've only done it two or three times. I leave these things energized. I also leave these things intimidated.

• 1:08:35Sam Parr?

  All, every single person we've had on this, even if we've like given them a hard time, is incredibly impressive. Would you say, would you say so?

• 1:08:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I mean, I just remember where I was at that time and. It's, you know, we're not even in the same room. Like I was, I don't know where I was, but so, so just putting yourself in this position to be doing things like this can make a pretty big impact. I, I did, this is actually how I became an entrepreneur. I did a pitch competition my senior year, second semester, senior year. I had never even thought about business before that. I did a pitch competition. I ended up winning 25 grand and it changed the direction of my life. Like I would, I literally wouldn't have been an entrepreneur had that not happened. And so, and the idea was bad. My pitch was bad. If I go back and look now,

• 1:09:15Sam Parr?

  What was it, what was the 25 for?

• 1:09:17Shaan Puri?

  What was it for? The sushi, the Chipotle for sushi idea.

• 1:09:20Sam Parr?

  Dude, those, those, those investors were horrible. How did they?

• 1:09:24Shaan Puri?

  There's, we had two things going for us. One, you know, we had the, the hot, the most swag of anyone at the pitch competition. So we, we, we gave the best, you know, pitch. I brought the Duke basketball players in as a cameo during the pitch. They threw out T-shirts to the crowd. So we won extra money from the fans and stuff like that. But also one of the judges, he was worth like, I don't know, 20, 50 million dollars, something like that. And he did it because he owned 50 Applebee's. So he was like, oh, restaurant industry, great industry to be in. Whereas 99% of the population would have said that's a terrible idea. But this guy had made his living off of Applebee's. And so, you know, we had, we had one judge in the bag from that.

• 1:10:01Sam Parr?

  Oh, man. That's, that, that, that competition was really bad if they, if you won. Because these are so much better. This guy just raised money at a $20 million valuation from like, you know, a top 20 venture capital. I mean, it's like pretty, it's so much better than when you and I were doing this type of stuff.

• 1:10:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, totally. By the way, the funny thing is, we won the competition and then we also, they also paid for one MBA student to work for us as an intern. So they paid his salary. And we were like, we were younger than this guy. This guy had worked like seven years of like real world experience before then. And so he was taking direction of these 21 year old idiots. And we were like,

• 1:10:38Sam Parr?

  Do you know how to roll a sushi roll?

• 1:10:40Shaan Puri?

  We were just like, yeah, can you build us an Excel model? And he just, and then he would build it. And we'd be like, yeah, those don't look very good. Can you just make it better? And we just had this guy work on an Excel model for like five months. He must have been like, this is the worst experience of my life.

• 1:10:52Sam Parr?

  Well, congratulations, guys. You're, you're amazing. Bobby, good job organizing these guys. And I forget your, the other guy's name, who's the, the MC over there, but good job. Yeah, you.

• 1:11:06Sam Parr?

  What was your name?

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Anan.

• 1:11:08Sam Parr?

  Anan, good job. You know, that energy that you have, it's really actually great for setting these guys up. You know, training stuff is really hard. And like, dude, I don't know if you guys have ever like done high school sports, but like when you're lifting weights and like trying to bench press a ton of weight and you have your team around you who's like, get it, get it, like on that, on that, like when you guys are trying to max your bench or squat or whatever, that shit actually helps and you're kind of doing the same thing. So kudos to you. It does actually help psyching these guys up. So congratulations to everyone.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Thank you guys so much. And Sean, I'll just close with like, you mentioned that going on a pod, the second semester of your senior year, like pretty much changed your future. You guys are changing these kids' futures. Like after the Michigan episode, amount of people that reached out to us and like I'll close saying, hit these people up, hit me up, be how's what you mentioned, edu, hit these kids up. We're gonna put them up with the description, like their websites, their emails in the description. But like, you guys are changing these kids' lives too. So we're damn, we're damn grateful.

• 1:12:01Shaan Puri?

  Not necessarily for the better, but we're changing them for sure.

• 1:12:06Shaan Puri?

  Lives are changing. We don't know which way it's going though.

• 1:12:11Sam Parr?

  I think that's the pod.