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

Feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my lawn in it like a day so on a ball. 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. Uh those other guys were on uh, you know, using Android or something like that. But We're ready to get started. First A word

From Bobby. Fire Houncil as I call them. Uh, your nickname is fire because last time you came in with with absolute fire. We almost couldn't tame you as you were on the podcast, but continue but go ahead, give us the intro for this. Hey, what's up? I'm back. I'm the guy from the Michigan episode. Uh we built our entrepreneurship community from Michigan to Stanford since we saw you last. It's called entrepreneur power hour. We're chaining out college founders meet.

We're changing out Angel Investors, Meetings College Founders. We're sh changing the game entirely. Uh we got a non steer who's our community lead over at Stanford. Um things are moving. We launched the syndicate. We're hype. Um but today Uh we're moving away from Michigan and we're meeting the Stanford Killers. Uh and so I'm hyped to pass over to Nant, who's gonna get us rolling and and introduce uh Bobby.

Bobby, I got a question for you. Is it true what they say about the post My First Million bump like uh for college kids like you know? Are you getting kisses on the cheek around campus? Are you uh do you get free lunch in the cafeteria? What's it what was life right now is that I mean my girlfriend was starting to get jealous. She's like who who who who's this? The female founders are coming out of nowhere, coming up and say no. Yeah, okay. We do the we do the Connor 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 Connor McGregor made us rich, baby, break out the red panties. That that's what happens when uh when when my first million comes to your college campus, baby, we've done it. Sam and Sean coming to our campus. We done it. Bring out the red solo cups, baby. We done it.

It's either the angel investors or the female founders. I don't know who to worry about more. All right. So let's get started. Go ahead. Uh go ahead. Let's kick it off. Yeah, well cheers. Thanks so much. Seems like we're putting this business podcast on Into a Riziness Podcast. Um Nice. 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 You're interested in learning more. you know, feel free to reach out to me. I don't wanna spend too much time meandering, so I'll introduce our first guy. Time.

Tommy P, as 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 want to steal Tommy's thunder, so I'll kinda let him take things from here. How old is old? I'll let Tom answer that because I actually have no idea how old, but twenty one. Yeah. He's gonna be twenty four. You guys. You're a real gray boy, my friend. I know, I know. Well, um thanks and yeah, thanks for the intro, uh Anant. Uh super pumped to be here. Um should we dive right into the pitch or uh

Yeah, the five minutes Or two. Yeah, I think we have wait, wait, what's the timing on these? So three last time. Somewhere like three or five? Three, Bobby's saying? Let's do three. All right. Here's the deal. 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. Okay, keep that in mind. Cool. So uh Okay. Uh so hi. Tom here, uh Transcribeblast, and we're building wearable subtitles for the depth part of here. Essentially taking your Netflix or YouTube captions and putting them heads up. Um

Hearing loss is a massive issue. Uh I'm I used to be pre med, so uh I guess if you med staff 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 in cancer or diabetes, and it's growing.

By twenty fifty, one in ten people will have a disabling hearing loss. And also it's Cor cor morbid with a lot of things, including dementia. Three to five times more likely to get dementia if you have hearing loss. Despite all everything I just said.

Curing solutions today are horrible. They're really expensive. Two to eight thousand off dollars. often out of pocket for hearing aids because insurance like Medicare Doesn't cover them. The biggest killer to

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 it 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 part of hearing people like myself is that we love caption. And what's not to love.

You know, cost effective. Uh incredibly acc uh sorry. Keep going. I I like it. Keep going. Incredibly accurate. Uh and um, you know, intuitive. People know what captions are, they know how to use them. In fact, Dev Harding people love caption so much that we actually sue 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

Prochip. 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 that. For conversations. Uh and read more.

at all the AR players. We, you know, tried a whole bunch of AR headsets. uh to brose captioned into your PLW. We made this really fancy chart and we realized one thing. 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 up the campus except me.

Um There's a lot of reasons why AR adoptions have been show shitty. Um, but um the fundamental trade off in our PNR thesis is this trade off of fully immersive content. versus true wearability. At Transcribe 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 me and describe this d d d describe the product, what it looks like for the listener, because a lot of people aren't watching. Oh yeah, for sure. Uh 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.

Uh but it's a lightweight air product. It's designed in a retrofit manner, meaning it attaches to your glasses. A lot of your users are older with your who already use. Classes. So it can fit onto any glasses and work straight out of the box. Yeah, numerous features like uh focus adjustment.

That are cater to the depth part of hearing. Um 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. uh text floating in your field of view.

Uh and you can position it anywhere you want. Is that helpful to clarify. I 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.

It basically just looks uh for 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. And you're you're at the end of your time here. So so r let's wrap the pitch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So yeah, that's that's Product. That's where we're building. Um

Users love it. Uh we have over seven hundred pre orders, uh 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. Uh, we also have uh tremendous inbound interest. uh from cinema halls and be to be they're all required to provide these accommodations. Uh and we recently signed an NDA was one of the largest media companies as a way to put captions into your field of view. Uh

Now is also a great time to do this. Hearing aids have been deregulated this year. Which is crazy. You you 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 gates at Best Buy. First time ever that this is possible. And finally, last thing I wanna 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 thirty other versions of Bitbit. 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. Um uh on this product.

Um and you know that scales really heavily. Um, so I can talk more about that, but just wanna wrap it up. We're running a pilot trial at Stanford. this quarter officially if you want, I can connect you to them uh and you can try out this product. Um that's also a picture of my coach here in the corner meeting the president of India.

Um For this work. By the way, here's a picture of me with Drake. Um all right. So that's a great way to end a pitch. So you um two questions.

How does it actually do the live transcription? Is this software you guys are writing? Are you using some open source tools? Are you using AI? What are you doing? Yeah, so we're right now using um Third party AO automated speech recognition services. We're source agnostic. Meaning right now we support three Google, Microsoft, IBM.

They're automated system that, you know, restream the captions and display them here. Um we are also uh able to do subtitle files if you walk into a movie theater. You can load the subtitle file and display it. Uh or another thing called uh card interpreting. Um where you can, you know, a person types and then you can stream the captions to your device. We're moving towards a one device model that's Wi Fi agnostic.

Uh and can work anywhere. uh as these models improv get better and decrease in latency. Things like Whisper. Two questions. Question 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 too. I have a hearing loss, so I'm I'm actually in the process of getting one now. Okay. Um the biggest thing with my hearing aid, or why I have a hearing up 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's 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. Um I the whole dementia thing, I learned about that and I don't I I remember uh 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 get 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 w reading. Yeah. Okay, super good question. Let me hit the first one first. Um so yeah.

Uh hearing loss. The biggest complaint was 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 microphone phones 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. Um but Yes. The the part of the brain isn't being

uh stimulate but the there another thing is just the social withdrawal That you get. Uh, you just as a depth, hard of hearing person, if you have hearing loss. You hate going out. It's really hard. 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 morbid. uh as well was hearing loss. Um and wouldn't this thing be more embarrassing to wear than a thing in my ear that no one could see? Except 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 that.

That's uh that's an honor. But uh Um still um yeah. Uh yeah, on our website we say you can use this on dates, so you can use it on dates. But uh It won't work, but you can use it. You could try. Yeah. Our our our goal. Our goal is to integrate it fully into the like classes. You know, we this is an early version of the form factories was built on you know, exclusively grant based funding. uh that we've gotten uh by their US State Department, Government of India.

Um but we're moving to an integrated form factor in your glasses. Um, we also built it in a retrofull way, meaning mounting. Because most of our deaf people hard of hearing users actually already have glasses. We want it to work with their existing solution. I agree as they can get. Oh, sorry? 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. Uh the problem section, you did a fantastic job. You outline

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

AR glasses. Yeah 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 s put billions of dollars in making the most lightweight Um glasses that have a computer in'em, 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 there first, most likely, as to having the the 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 masses to wear on their their their uh as as like smart glasses. So the big companies are gonna do it. So I think that's the problem. Now There was one thing you said that I'm just gonna call out. Which is that you said uh

Hearing weights 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 light bulb 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's gonna be like, Oh, cool. D to C hearing aids gonna do that now. Like, you know, that that's now more possible than it was before because I don't need the telemedicine component in between. Um

And so I think that's actually a real business opportunity out of all the things you said. And I think you're on the right path, but I don't think you're gonna be the one to do it. I think the big companies are gonna make the glasses and then The captions are gonna be a feature on top of those. Hundred percent. Uh could I hit that point real quick?

Um Yeah, so I completely agree with you. Uh Facebook is spending ten to fifteen billion a year. Right now. on their AR product, you know? All of the Apple wants to come out with AR glasses, hopefully in twenty twenty four.

Um we want them to validate the AR market. Um, we're no and the thing is with you know, let's say Facebook, for example. They're building an AR headset. They're not gonna validate it. They're gonna own it. They're gonna own it. They're not gonna validate it for you to go own. They're gonna own it. 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 Herberg's vision is, you know, the metaburse, this immersive reality. That cannot run on transcribed glass. And as a result, that cannot run on this lightweight porn factor all day battery like.

Wearability setup. Uh so we can much more quickly a wearable product. Because we're focused on captions and critical information. or the depth heart appear. Uh that that is you know the the core focus of our product.

It's building for wearability. Uh and form factor. right now for a core use case of people who clearly need it. Not that broader vision of multiverse multiverse content. Yeah, but there's other companies. So Snapchat wants to do Snapchat's doing it. They just want to put a camera on there to snap a photo.

Yeah. That's the only use case they care about right now. Yeah. Google wants to put your notifications and your text messages and your email on it, right? Um so everybody's got a different vision. And so it's not just Facebook who's trying to do this, we're trying to build a whole multiverse or metaverse, whatever the hell. Yeah. It's like, you know, everybody's trying to make the thing that consumers will buy that turns their glasses into a phone, basically. Yeah. And um into some version of a phone, maybe a lightweight version first. And so I 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 ha you're a smart guy. I don't think this is an investable

product. What do you think, Sam? 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 d 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 gonna find a better solution soon. And I actually think you should continue to pursue it, but you're gonna find a

You ha 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, deregulate. Are deregulated. And I think that those are always good inflections when you can pounce on those things.

But I don't know if this is the right solution, but it is interesting technology that I think is actually gonna be used for something else. Hm. Um 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. Yeah. Right on. All right. Thanks, Tom. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you guys.

Best of luck. Our next one is gonna start with the big D, democratizing. Oh right. Whenever I see whenever I see the big D, uh uh I I'm curious. So what do we got? 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. It's all yours, bro.

So come come democratize us. What's on sharks? My name is Soham. I'm the founder of Admin 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 kinda wanna start with a personal story about myself. I went to high school in one of the largest public high school across America. Down in good old Round Rock, Texas. My class had over a thousand students, including myself.

And although our counselors were incredibly hard working 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 show literally thousands of dollars for these private college consultants.

And this Is a nationwide. Right. 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 gateked by this mafia of six thousand dollar Six thousand dollar college consultant. 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 French applications. Reading through some of their essays, extracurriculars, and awards was Really meaningful to me because I gotta see how they told their stories. So intern. I could learn how I wanted to tell my own.

No. With Ahmed Yogi. I want to ensure that Everyone from rural Texas To the bustling big apple.

Can experience that same feeling of magic. We've all this platform, this database of over five thousand 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 Dan it's a lot. Sharks, we're a feast it. And We are a startup in twenty twenty three, so we'd be remiss without mentioning AI so. 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 it. For literally the price of a cup of cotton.

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. So my I got a question. Yeah. Um H uh, can you skip to the two parts about the business? So I wanna know

Uh how this makes money and I want to know Are you uh if you're raising money, how how much are you raising and w and what's your valuation? Absolutely. So we started this business in September of twenty twenty two with zero dollars of outside bunding. We're on track to finish our first year with a hundred thirty thousand dollars of revenue. Currently eighty five in the bank. Oh we're going to Drew.

Congratulations. So wait, so you started this in Nov uh so you're the two thousand twenty three, your full fiscal year was a hundred and eighty grand. Oh. Around hundred and eighty by the end of twenty twenty three. Oh okay, all right, all right. I got you.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so Uh from t September twenty twenty two. To August twenty twenty three will have made a hundred thirty thousand dollars in revenue. And what's really exciting is we've

actually helped over eleven thousand 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. So what what do you charge? How do you make money on this? Yeah. So College gents? 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, Gotcha. And uh so you charge uh how much? To unlock one S one one application? So it ranges between five and ten dollars per application.

And why are the college kids uploading their thing? 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 thirty seconds for a college student to upload everything from their extracurriculars, their essays. to their activities lists and We have over five thousand applications on our service and a lot of these are coming from schools across the country. Oh. And how'd you get the the customers? How'd you get the people to hear about this?

We think that distribution is really important in twenty twenty three, so We have a TikTok of over sixty one thousand followers. All organic and thirty million organic social impressions. We think that really marking the Gen Z is super important today because there's not a single college consultancy out there that can really say that they can access sixty one thousand minds of Seventeen, eighteen year olds at any given instant.

So I'm shocked like we haven't made a joke about like is the upsell if you're playing to Harvard like to tell you not to be an Asian person? Like has that hap w why haven't we made like this joke yet? Why has it sounds like Uh are you raising money right now? At the moment we're not raising. We uh we we've never had an each race since we've always been profitable since day one.

But in the future we are open to exploring it. Uh I only want to m invest more now. Yes, you did great pitch. Perfect answer. Yes, that was the perfect answer. Awesome job. Awesome. Progress so far. This is very, very cool. But by the way, I was gonna shop 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 w yeah, whatever. Who came back in the database. And now they have this database of of college like admissions essays and like the the 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 that'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 wanna call out.

The first is you said. At the beginning, you go, you know, before I tell you, you know, I'm the founder of Admin 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 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 they can't really leave, that's a great way to to to start a pitch. Um Because it t 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, like 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?

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 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. Uh The fact that you're only charging five dollars, that's like a Yeah.

I don't love that. I think it's really hard to build a bus big business on five dollars. Um so I would I wanna 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. Um, yeah. Can I touch on that a little bit? Yeah.

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. How many st students uh are apply like how big is the customer base for this? How many students are applying to college, um, or let's say you know Yeah, in like kind of the the serious callers where they'd be willing to pay Yeah, for for something like this. How many students is that is that per year? 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. And so how does this get huge, given given that 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, hundred thousand customers, uh, that would be like, you know, the absolute like you guys are dominating the market at that point, right? Like so what's that five million? Absolutely. That's a great question. And That's something we've actually thought about a lot at Admin Yogi.

So 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 if that was the case. Right. So correctly. Yeah, and and we're gonna d we're gonna define big as like fifty million in revenue. We'll say that's like the threshold of like it things get really interesting. Sure. Yeah. So Currently the college missions market is around ten billion dollars, but that's just spending coming out of the top one percent of America.

We think that by providing more affordable services we can reach the other ninety nine percent. And not only capture that Massive. Initial target? But also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space.

I think that sounds good. That that sounds good'cause it's democratizing, but in reality what's gonna happen is You're actually just gonna try to take that same one percent,'cause the one percent care the most, have the most money. are the most obsessed and maybe you expand that to like, you know, the one to nine percent. Uh of of the most Competitive.

you know, willing to pay type of customers. Uh, and it's actually never the the other ninety nine percent 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, um, you know, really, really stressing about what colleges they're gonna go to, they're the ones who are willing to pay for a new solution too. That's that's really interesting. And that's actually the initial hypothesis that we had as well. That we're gonna target these one percenters who are traditionally paying for college consulting services in this uh 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.

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 opicant. Never knew about Traditional consultants.

They were too expensive for her. But I mean yoga wasn't. So Right. Initially thought that hypothesis too, but as we started serving our customers, really collecting the data on this, we realized that that actually wasn't the case.

What happens when Harvard's like you're like oh man, we're getting all these robots, uh you're or uh you know, and then the s 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? 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. Right. I think what Sam's saying is If could the common app shut off your access? Yes, that's what I'm asking. 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 and 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 Admin Yogi.

And we are done. So Here here's why you kinda 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 out 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 founders.

uh perspective. So I think you're really fascinating. 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 thirty years old, you can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars because you own a business that makes uh thirty or forty million bucks that potentially you could sell for a hundred million dollars or something by the age of twenty eight 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 coat, I find that to be incredibly impressive. Thank you so much. Yeah. I uh

I really like this. The one thing I would do is I kinda 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 pr 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 Chat GPT. So basically I should basically be able to

Go to s go to some uh bot that's gonna basically set 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 the information I put on my application. How to structure it better or or present it better.

Um B and it should learn off of the successful applications so 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 ten dollars to unlock her essay? Okay, I 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 to make my my essay more like her essay. No no no no I'll pay you ninety nine bucks. Just help me get into college. Right. Like Give me a gr 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 click submit and go to all these schools. That's what I think the Like if I think about how how's somebody gonna do this in the next three years, that's what the solution looks like.

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 G V T like chatbot that can answer any question about college admissions and it's like Fine tune on this. Proprietary data set we built this Massive data set of college applications and We actually tweeted an MVP about it a couple months ago.

But we really think that with big data and artificial intelligence, especially with generative AI. We can provide students with these hyper personalized specific recommendations For literally like you said, a hundred bucks. Yeah, because you know, the college application process, first you got to figure out what school should I even apply to? Where do I wanna go? And the chat back and forth about like, well, where do you wanna 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? Mm-hmm.

Polish consultants charge us six thousand dollars on average. Cool. Instead of six thousand dollars, pay ninety nine 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'cause I think that is a very, very big idea.

We should we should go to the next one, but Dude, this is wildly impressive. I saw uh 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.

Uh And so like I don't know if that would I don't yeah, I I think that that's like weird to hear how kids are gonna be doing that in the future, but Brother, you're impressive. Congratulations. Don't raise money, by the way. Just own the whole thing. Can you remind everyone just how how old are you? There was some speculation. I'm nineteen years old.

Wow. You're ahead of the game. You are at the game. 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 uh while you're building a company while they go to class every day. You should one hundred percent bail, by the way. You should one hundred percent bail. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you need help talking to your mom, I'll I'll I'll call her and uh help you out.

Appreciate that, Sean. Thank you. Cool. All right. See ya. All right, who's next?

So next up we got Zayn and Matthew electric call them the two twin towers. They're absolute menaces to bone out candid. Um So let him take it away. American gladiator or shark tank. Blazer and Blazer Blazer. What a bunch of buttes. Let's get'em up here. Oh the turn. We wasn't lying. Uh okay, cool. And we gotta 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 gotta do. Say what you're doing. Say while 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. Sounds good. Sounds good. Let's do it. I'm saying 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.

Get in touch with their mental health. 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 would that what does that mean? Give me the example. 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 of any of these videos they want to share with friends. And from these v these videos, we do topic detection sentiment analysis. Um 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. Okay. So like an a almost like an AI therapist. Exactly. Like soft soft therapy, yeah. Like call.

Soft therapy. Okay, love it. None of that hard therapy Sam's been doing for the last two years. Yeah. All right. Carry on. 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.

It did practically seek out those resources. No 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 the stick? So when you started ideing around Tanet, 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 were In college, experience depression.

And most of them didn't go actively seek out help. Our vision for the future of consumer mental health Is that They're products that don't seem and come off. As mental health product but have a back end component that's strong mental health focus.

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

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 surge, right? Um 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. Um For what you're

For you what you're a week looked like emotionally. And it's specifically a color scheme built and tailored to you. Yeah. And so is this an idea? Do you have cust do you have users? Where where are you guys at with that? 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 Stamford to really get that product market. How are you gonna get customers? Right.

So we're gonna launch at Stanford in the next in the next month. And that's gonna be a hard launcher. We're gonna You all sorts of distribution strategies. And how much did you raise that you said you raised the seed round or something like that? Yeah, we raised the three seed of half a million dollars. Wow, from who?

Uh a variety of these Cs uh in in the Silicon Valley area. Uh Reach, Ovo. Z fellowsze. Uh Stornex. Uh yeah. Okay. And G S R and G branches.

And so you uh you're gonna launch that at Stanford, cool, and you can kinda brute force that'cause you're there, you got friends, you're you're on campus, that sort of thing. What happens after that? How do you get this to like ten thousand users or a hundred thousand users? Yeah, absolutely. So we really do at first want to take a very controlled approach. So we're gonna go c campus to campus. We're starting at Stanford, like Zayn said. We're gonna really lock in the method that works the best. And then we're gonna pick a few uh similar universities like Harvard, Caltech. um maybe some some universities in 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 it test especially the ethics behind this.

Um And ensuring that this is something that's scalable. And like we're not doing any active harm to users. All right. So Sam, let's let's pause the pitch here and I want to get your reaction to to ideas to an idea like this. Uh How do you think about this, either as an entrepreneur or an investor? What you what do you think?

As an investor, I I I don't understand how uh the 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, fifty or hundred 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 you just it's a very it's a it's just a math problem. uh it's very challenging to do that, particularly when it's like a 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 five hundred thousand dollars and if this Dies next. m next year, then it's like no big deal. You're young, you Did something amazing and you're gonna have another swing. So from your perspective, I think this is the greatest thing ever. From an investor's perspective.

I'm not It 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 with it? We have a friend who um has an app she uh called Rooted, and it's basically around panic attacks. Similar space here. And what she found was She didn't raise any money because she's not saying this is gonna 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 a huge outcome. But because she built the company

a r in a way that suited how big that market is, she's gonna be really, really successful with it, right? She's got seven figures of revenue. She boots herself. She's the only employee. It's profitable. And it serves that nation. She acquires most of her needs. She has two million users, by the way. And and it it could it could be a ten million dollar a year business with four or five people. Right. And so she 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 she had a strategy around ASO Right, like SEO, like ASO app store optimization, uh to be to be the top ranked term here.

And so um 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. Uh, second, good for you for chasing um like a problem that that matters with, you know, cool new tech. So you're gonna learn a bunch about this problem, you're gonna learn a bunch about this tech. Um good for you, like Sam said, for raising some money. So you know, you're gonna 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 do you'll go on to have 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 uh you know, I 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.

Yeah, the very first pitch he's 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's it sits on the shelf. Like adherence is a really big problem. They'd rather get dementia than charge their their their battery out. Um 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 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 bit more addictive to do, and has some variable reward that's like, you know, worth the the work that you put in. If you've ever read this book, go go read Hooked by Nir I Al.

Uh have you guys ever heard of that book? Yeah, I've read it actually. It's it's a great book. 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 gonna be way too much friction for the average person. Um

Like it you know, so so I think you gotta find something that's simpler. Um, if you want people to actually use it. I think simplicity is at the at the crunch of what we're trying to do. I definitely think You know, we need to distill it even more. Well really what we're trying to get at here

is tapping into people's existing habit cycles of log. 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 phones. And just like You know, spewing their shit, talking their truth. Right.

Um And that's what we're really trying to do. But you should 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 the 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, because 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 it in a PowerPoint deck.

What would be an awesome Product. And I didn't let reality into the room and the re and when I let reality in the room it was Yeah, users aren't gonna do all that work at the beginning. So then so they're never gonna get the benefits. And um it's that's that's a challenge I've had in the past, and I I suspect this reminds me of of mistakes I've made in the past. Are you guys dropping out?

What are you gonna do once you have your five hundred K? Yeah, so we're actually taking the leave of absence right now, working full time on the product. Smart. This is amazing, man. Like Look, my my trip my my belief is that this is not gonna work as you guys have it set up. I think that that's still a massive win for you.

Um and my like big takeaway is like You we we say this a a bunch, how 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 can 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 is it gonna be this one or the next one or the next one? But this is really amazing what you're doing. This is the classic thing of like I can't wait to see your second company or your third company. Um, because you know, I had my sushi restaurant as my first thing. Sam had his thing as his first thing. Like stand, guys. You guys are doing like you guys are way, way better. Yeah, just generative generative hot dogs. He said generate them.

Yeah. I put them in the barn on my hand and I handed them. They were very generally. It sounds more provocate, too. If anybody else wants to take a leave of excellence and come work with me for for a year, come do that. You can email me, Sean at SeanPuri.com. How old are you guys? We're both twenty one. Wow. Well, congratulations on your success and uh thanks for doing this. Thank you guys. Awesome guys.

Next up. What do we got? Simplify. How how many more do we have, by the way? Last one. Last one. Last one. We got Michael. Mikey Mike. Michael the Mikester. So many different names for this guy. He's a great dude. And uh Yeah. He'll close us out strong.

See, that's what I miss about college. I used to have so many nicknames. Like what? They used to call me the blender because uh somebody thought my last they thought my last name was Pure. And so one guy was like, Yeah, Pure, right? And they're like like the blender setting there. And so they called me Blender for like a year. That's pretty good. I'll I'll I'll start calling you that. Uh Michael, what do you got? Hey Sam, hey Sean, I'm Michael, I'm one of the co founders of Simplifying.

We're building a career platform for Gen Z. What's the URL? Uh simplify dot jobs. 'Cause I know you aren't sitting on that dot com. MasterCard's got his B right now. We're gonna we're gonna get it here soon. I promise.

If you were to apply to a job today, you'd quickly realize how frustrating and broken the process is. That's super disorganized. Jobs are scattered across dozens of different job sites. So when you're applying you're you're going on fifteen different sites. It's super repetitive. Today career counselors recommend that candidates submit around a hundred 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. And you know, as a student at Stanford, we've experienced This paid firsthand. So during my time in college, I applied actually more than two hundred jobs across fifteen different job sites.

When I came to school, um I grew up in small town in West Virginia. Parents didn't work in tech. actually had no idea how to find my first job. Um, 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 standard 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 Kenned experience first. Um so you can kind of think of us like the common. By the way.

By the way, I gotta stop you. I'm looking at your thing. You're You have a hundred thousand plus Users that

I've are using your Chrome extension in three million applications and you haven't said any of that yet. It's on it's actually on its wine right here, so But yes. Oh go on, yeah. I gotta give you credit, but I gotta say also You're bury you buried the lead, dude. Yeah, don't bury that lead, bruh. You're killing it. And uh congratulations for killing it. Pull up pull up their site and put it in similar web.

While while he's talking. Yeah. I'm I'm there. All right, go ahead. Sorry. 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 Admet Yogi talked about applying to college.

Same process. You come to our website, fill out this five minute application. that you can apply to basically any job on the internet in one click. Uh, we've got a browser extension that helps us do that. So in the last roughly year and a half and we launched Um We've gotten more than five million applications submitted to our extension, which has saved like

Users over seventy thousand hours of time. Um We've also got a centralized dashboard instead of like twenty different platforms. So no matter what site you're applying on. Uh, we'll keep track of 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 ri machine learning model that is able to recommend you jobs.

Based on where you're applying and also based on the profile you that you filled out with us. So instead of scrolling endlessly on sites like LinkedIn, we'll actually deliver you jobs in like a tender like interface where you can swipe yes or no and apply to those jobs in one click. Do in you and you apply to them when you swipe, right? Uh so no, you you we we redirect you to their career page and our browser extension will auto fill the information. So it's effectively two clicks. Okay.

That's awesome. But yeah. So we so in the last since launching in October of twenty twenty one, we've grown to over a hundred fifty thousand users. And I think the most exciting part of all of this is we actually spent zero dollars in paid marketing. Um, so more than four million applications submitted in twenty twenty two. We've hit a million already in the first four months of twenty twenty three. Uh most of our growth has actually been organic.

I think we've built uh a pretty exciting product that really puts candidates first. So we see a lot of mentions on Reddit. Discord, GitHub. Um, we've also been able to build a community around supporting people who Maybe first time job seekers?

Um so we read a newsletter that goes out to ninety thousand subscribers giving general advice on found. Um 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 gotten around sixty thousand followers in the last student or are you like twenty eight years old and just snuck in old page content? I actually turned twenty three a couple weeks ago. Um so I think I might be the oldest in the room, but Um

Second oldest. I'm a I'm a senior right now. Um But yeah, what's What's the uh how do you make money? Right, so

We monetize in a traditional like B to B 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 this 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 um you know that studied C S for t two years and have two years of Python experience. This is all information that we have in a structured format and can target your job listings too.

Um and you know, alongside that, you can source through these candidates on our platform. So w wait a second. So Companies pay you. T. post the job to that you 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

when you're just using Chrome, you're browsing the internet or you you want to apply to you you go to a a career page, you gotta Click. Submit. So where are they seeing the job? Where's that that other side? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So It's twofold. So actually within our extension, when you click submit.

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. Um This that post submission little modal pops up and it'll recommend you similar jobs. Um and companies have a chance to advertise there.

Well in addition to that, our matching algorithm is kind of like the core part of the business as well, where Through the mattress. Like tenants 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 eight hundred thousand jobs showed.

Um, just within the matches. Uh on the So check this out. If you go to their site, you go to simplify.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 moon shot list of two thousand twenty-two. And so you can apply to some of these moonshots. Uh Dude, this is fascinating.

Congratulations. So what's the revenue like so far? Yeah, so we're actually still pre re revenue. Um 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 fleshed 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've built these scrapers that pick up jobs. And like Sam mentioned.

Um 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 email. Um we recently put up a form that is now allowing us to collect. Inbound from companies.

Um, where they say they've actually hired somebody that discovered that uh their their company. On simplified. Uh so very soon I think We're Fleshing out the recruiter side of things, allowing you to

I'm a self served. model where you can post jobs. And Garner in bomb and I think that's how many you said one hundred fifty thousand people use it. How many people have gotten a job from it? 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're just to keep organized for themselves. So how many interviews? 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. Um but what I want to say about just it g give me an ish.

I think around like thirty percent. um have reported like movement in their Job search process. So whether that's an interview, whether that's they've gotten rejected. Oh, I think that's something that we're like fift fifty thousand people have gotten a job interview. Because of you. Yes.

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. Um a lot of people ask like Or am I gonna get a job if I use SimplePy? I think the goal is just To make it easy to apply, whether or not you get an interview is still up to you. Um, that's kind of why we're investing in the newsletter to help people kind of actually learn. The career.

Uh aspects of Kinda wanna see ourselves like credit karma for jobs. So we can give you like Hey, learned these skills if you're applying to like twenty jobs, you still haven't gotten an interview. I think that's kind of what we're looking for. Explain how uh give me the kind of like

Two line explanation. How does this get huge? So how does this become a massive company? Um What would be your best pitch for that? Yeah, great question. I think the vision that we have is just a like B in every single person's browser stand uh Be in every single person's browser.

So we have a ninety percent 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. Um, so we have oversight on where people are applying. And through that I think this gives us like a huge wedge in the recruiting space.

The future of recruiting, I think, is gotta 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 you know are interested in software and current platforms. have very minimal visibility on where people are actually applying what jobs they're actually interested in. I think on LinkedIn I've been recommended many jobs as like

electrician or a plumber. Um so I I don't really think that they know what I'm interested in. I think through kind of our browser extension, we're able to collect the data and make the process of buying the job much more like personalized. And I think through that Companies are gonna 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. Um in making Have you raised money? Yeah, so we actually just closed a C round. This is the first time we're announcing it, uh a couple of weeks ago. It was a two million dollar round uh led by Kraft. Oh, wow. Okay. Well yeah, I don't know what the hell you're doing here, but that sounds awesome. Dude, it says you're So listen to the where where where was my email? Yeah. How how did I not see this? This is uh now I'm upset. You left me up. Michael, this is

Let me read the team bio. So there's Michael here. He's a designer, LinkedIn trader with thirty million views and sixty thousand followers. Uh Rashil is the CTO. He's an engine and product architect who scaled products to over a million users. And then there's Ethan, the CPO. We I guess he runs a career newsletter with ninety thousand subscribers. Are those all accurate?'Cause that's a very impressive Uh trio, you all students too? 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'cause we both are on uh near full scholarships at Stanford. So we basically get free housing here. Um uh take a couple classes. Get free housing. It's a great gig. Uh, but we've been full time on this for the last year and a half.

Um and Rachel lives in San Francisco. 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. Drop down 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 you're the pig. You guys are committed. I like that. And uh Uh you raised this two million dollar round. Can you say the valuation?

Yeah, so we raised it at twenty posts. Oh fuck, really? Yeah. Good job. It's definitely tough mortgage, but I think Um, it's also an inflection point for us where Um when the markets are rougher. Wait, wait, wait. You said tough market as and you think that's too low?

No, in in terms of in general, I think raising Today is pretty difficult. I think we'd have 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 uh 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 something by they generally don't uninstall and people

We'll seem to love the product, so I think we're super excited about the cool thing. This is great. I love the product. I want to invest. Uh 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 you've had the kind of like the what I'll call like the The vision answer. She's like What if everybody's gonna be able to do it But if everybody used this, then it would be big. Uh there's another way to kind of think about that, which is a b bottoms up way, which says

You know, we think on every customer we're gonna generate this much revenue. So with a hundred thousand people or two hundred thousand 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. the you know revenue. And so, you know, you wanna have that for you guys. I know you're

quote unquote, you know, pre revenue. So you so maybe you don't know exactly how much our user is gonna 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. Definitely. I love these businesses. Uh I think the guy's name is Ian Siegel, I think that's the guy who started ZipRecruiter, if I remember correctly, Zip Recruiter was like It had the largest series A at the time, like five years ago ever. It was like a sixty 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 ch uh The guy who has uh Wilson or Union Ventures in New York. I forget his uh Fred Wilson. He has this awesome blog post and he's like Uh we were seed investors of Indeed and it's the greatest business model of all time because it's basically Google AdWords. Uh, you know, like people only it's like a pay performance type of thing and it's one of the greatest business I've at businesses I've ever seen. I love these types of businesses because

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. But so it's pretty nicely aligned. I think this is awesome. Yeah, no, 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, we'd love to hear feedback. He here's what Fred Wilson said. He goes, um

People, you know, one of the gr the first great investment we made at USV was in the summer of tw two thousand five 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 eighty million people worldwide every month. Um and they have a business model like Google is the best on the internet. Revenues, profits, sh customer satisfaction, shareholder value. They've built a fortress. I'm happy to have a seat in the front row. Um So that's uh 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 gonna get thirty five hundred dollars uh of the for the for today's pitch competition. I'm gonna message you, Sean, who uh who up my winner is, and then you could yeah, go ahead, ask Bobby what you want. Well I was gonna say how do we settle on thirty five hundred? That's a very uh specific number here. Uh maybe Bar shop you might have a uh have an opinion on this. That's like one souped up Mac uh MacBook Pro or something. Yeah. Do you have Bobby like

So you have a syndicate now. Like it would be very wise if you just gave twenty thousand dollars to every single person who's presented on. 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 and Michigan. And so right now we're trying to prove the model with a syndicate. Um and helping support startups like you saw today and like the ones you saw on the Michigan show.

Uh but the long run is hope to do something just like you mentioned, sir. How old are you, Bobby? Are you in college still? Yeah. I'm twenty two. I'm a junior at University of Michigan. And so what happens in two years when you're when you're out?

We're gonna we're gonna 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. Mm. We think that the way that college entrepreneurship is fostered by institutes, centers, clubs. At schools is bad. We think that the V C funds that are targeting college entrepreneurs are just looking for poached deal with them?

We have a better way of doing it by building the best communities and then intelligently bringing in dope angels like you guys to Make a lot more interesting. All right. Well Congratulations, you're on to something. Sean and I have selected the winner and um 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 to if you guys would accept me, I would put a very small like five or ten thousand dollars if you'd allow it.

But um I don't know about you, Sean. I don't know if you're you're in that same boat, but we both uh we both are aligned on who we think won this one. Yeah, I think you know the what is the best pitch, uh who wins the pitch competition, it's the person who can Have a clear pitch.

That's compelling, that gets you excited and um 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 reenrolled 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. Uh, that's not what I want to do. Like uh Like those fishing guys, you know. Rem 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. By the way, I invested in those guys and they are

Going for it. Uh they they they are they're pretty committed to it, but I I think it is hard uh 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 And by the way, a lot of times they should like go out there and and get laid and do whatever you want, but if you're gonna 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. You know what I mean? 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. So learning is great, but it is second to earning. Earning is always better than learning. It's the fallback, right? Uh anyways, the the business that we've both selected. Is Simply. Uh I think you could probably tell from our excitement during the pitch.

You know it solves a real problem. Simplify, bro. Oh sorry, simplify j jobs. Um Yes, yes, there he is. Michael from Simplify Uh 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. Um So congratulations. You got you you you have done it. Yeah, thank you guys so much. Huge fan of the podcast. And yeah, simplify I think it's uh We really gotta get that URL for sure.

You're never gonna get it. You're never gonna get it. What are we gonna do with this thirty five hundred dollars, Michael? Sh. Hey, if you guys want, we can make that happen. But um, I think what's most important for us is investing in our social channels. I think you know, huge fan of the podcast. Um

One of the hardest things for us is getting in the hands of more college students. Um, our users have been super helpful in kind of organically spreading it. We don't even have referral rewards, so they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. I think we want to invest this in You know, whether it's our social media, whether it's an on the grounds kind of Uh

Referral programs, I think these are all things that Would help us really Take us to the next level in terms of do user growth. You can either get A little bit of LinkedIn promotion or an eight sleep mattress.

The the answer is it's very obvious to me, frankly. Uh yeah, this is two hundred and ninety one days of Chipotle. So that's a lot of fuel that we're giving you for for for you to go forward. Think of us every day at lunch. Just be like this lunch was brought to you by my first million every single day as you build this company. For two hundred ninety one days and at the end of that. You're on your own. Sean, let's do a wrap up here about like what about the these whole things. I alwa I mean, we've only done it two or three times. I leave these things energized. I also leave these things intimidated. Um

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? 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 uh

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 at it, what was the twenty five four? What was this for? Sushi the Chipotle for sushi idea. How did they 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, twenty, fifty million dollars, something like that. And he he did it because he owned fifty Applebees. So he was like Oh, restaurant industry. Great industry to be in. Whereas ninety nine percent of the population would have said that's a terrible idea. But this guy had made his living off of Applebee's. Uh and so, you know, he we had we had one Judging the bag from that.

Oh man. That's a th that would The that competition was really bad, if they if you won. These are so much better. This guy just raised money. at a twenty million dollar valuation. From like, you know, a top twenty venture capital. I mean, it's like pretty uh it's so much better than when you and I were doing this type of stuff.

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 twenty one year old idiots and we were like Do you know how to roll a sushi roll and 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, but you know, this doesn'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. Well, congratulations guys. You're you're amazing.

Bobby. Good job organizing these guys. And uh I forget your your the other guy's name, who's the the MC over there, but uh good job, uh uh yeah, you. Uh What was your name? And um

Anon, good job. Uh, you know, that energy that you have. It's it's it's really actually great for setting these guys up. You know, trading 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 f on that like when you guys are trying to max your bench or squad or ever, that shit actually helps. And you're kinda doing the same thing. So kudos to you. It it it does actually help psychic these guys up. So congratulations to everyone. Thank you guys so much. And Sean, I'll just close with a you mentioned that going on a Uh, the second semester you've seen year like pretty much changed your future. You guys are changing these kids' futures. Like after the mission episode

the amount of people that reached out to us and like I thought saying hit these people up. Hit me up. B Howlswall. Hit these kids up. We're gonna put'em uh put the descrip or like their websites their emails in the description, but like You guys are changing these kid vibes too, so We're damn we're damn great. Not necessarily for the better, but we're changing them for sure. Lives are changing. We don't know which way it's going, though.

I think that's the part. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I'm putting my all in it like my days off On the roadless travel, never looking back

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