Stanford Students Pitch Us Their Startups | $3500 Prize Money (#449)

Shaan Puri 0:01 [upbeat music] All right, we're back. We had a little technical difficulty. We accidentally let the kids from Samford 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-

Speaker 0:29 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 0:30 ... Fire Housel, as I call him. Uh, your nickname is Fire 'cause last time you came in with, with absolute [laughs] fire. Uh, we almost couldn't tame you as you were on the podcast, but cont- but go ahead, give us the intro,

Shaan Puri 0:40 uh, for this.

Speaker 0:40 Hey, what's up? I'm back. I'm the guy from the Michigan episode. Uh, we've 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 sh- changing the game entirely. Uh, we got Ananth here, who's our community lead over at Stanford. Um, things are moving. We launched a syndicate. We're hyped. Um, but today, uh, we're moving away from Michigan and we're meeting the Stanford Killers. Uh, and so I'm hyped to, uh, pass it over to Ananth, who's gonna get us rolling and, and introduce the

Shaan Puri 1:12 And, and Bobby-

Speaker 1:13 Love you

Shaan Puri 1:14 ... Bobby, I got a question for you.

Speaker 1:16 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:16 Is it true what they say about the post My First Million bump? Like, uh-

Speaker 1:20 Yeah, what happened?

Shaan Puri 1:21 ... 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?

Speaker 1:27 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:27 What's, what-

Speaker 1:28 For me, it's, uh-

Shaan Puri 1:28 What was life like after we changed your life?

Speaker 1:29 For me, it's, I mean, the, my girlfriend was starting to get jealous. She's like, "Uh, who, who, who, who's this?"

Shaan Puri 1:34 [laughs]

Speaker 1:34 The female founders are coming out of nowhere, coming up and saying hello.

Shaan Puri 1:37 [laughs] Yeah, okay. [laughs] W- we need the, we need the Conor McGregor clip where he goes-

Speaker 1:46 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:47 ... "It's red panty night when you sign to fight me. You call home, you call your wife."

Speaker 1:51 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:51 "You say, 'Conor McGregor m- made us rich, baby."

Speaker 1:53 We've done it. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:53 "Break out the red panties."

Speaker 1:55 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:55 That, that's what happens when, uh, when, when My First Million comes to your college campus. "Baby, we've done it. [laughs] Sam and Shaan b- coming to our campus. We've done it."

Speaker 2:03 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 2:05 "Bring out the red Solo cups, baby. We done it." [laughs]

Speaker 2:09 It's either the angel investors or the female founders. I don't know who to worry about more.

Shaan Puri 2:13 [laughs] All right, so let's get started. Go ahead, uh, go ahead. Let's kick it off, Ananth.

Ananth Veluvali 2:17 Yeah, well, cheers. Thanks so much. Seems like we're putting this business podcast turning into a rizness podcast.

Shaan Puri 2:22 [laughs] Nice.

Ananth Veluvali 2:25 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 meandering, so I'll introduce our first guy, Tom, 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 wanna steal Tommy's thunder, so I'll kinda let him take things from here.

Speaker 2:52 How old is old?

Ananth Veluvali 2:54 I'll let Tom answer that 'cause I actually have no idea how old, but 20-plus.

Speaker 2:57 [laughs] Yeah.

Shaan Puri 2:58 He's gonna be t- he's gonna be 22.

Speaker 2:59 I'm 24, you guys. Um-

Speaker 3:01 Oh, gray bush

Speaker 3:02 ... so I guess that is old

Speaker 3:02 You're a real gray bush, my friend. [laughs]

Speaker 3:05 Yeah. I know, I know. Well, um, thanks and yeah, thanks for the intro, uh, Ananth. Uh, super pumped to be here. Um, should we dive-

Speaker 3:13 Yeah

Speaker 3:13 ... right into the pitch or-

Speaker 3:15 Yeah, is it five minutes or two?

Shaan Puri 3:17 Yeah, I th- I think we have... Wait, wait, what's the timing on these? So two minutes?

Speaker 3:19 I think we did three last time. Somewhere like three or five.

Shaan Puri 3:22 Three, Bobby's saying?

Speaker 3:23 Let's do three.

Shaan Puri 3:24 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 can just jump in at any time and interrupt you after that. Okay, so let's, let's do it.

Speaker 3:33 Okay, keep that in mind. Cool.

Speaker 3:35 So, uh, okay. Uh, so hi. Tom here, uh, Transcribe Glass, and we're building wearable subtitles for the deaf/hard 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 can spew 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 in cancer or diabetes, and it's growing. By 2050, one in 10 people will have a disabling hearing loss. It also is co- comorbid with a lot of things, including dementia. You're three to five times more likely to get dementia if you have hearing loss. Despite, uh, everything I just said, hearing solutions today are horrible. They're really expensive. $2,000 to $8,000, often out of pocket for hearing aids because insurance like Medicare doesn't cover them. The biggest killer thing for me, though, is that 75% 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 that, "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/hard of hearing people like myself is that we love caption. And what's not to love? They're really, you know, cost-effective-

Speaker 4:50 [laughs]

Speaker 4:50 ... uh, incredibly accu- uh, sorry?

Speaker 4:52 Keep going. I, I like it. Keep going.

Speaker 4:54 Incredibly accurate, uh, and, um, you know, intuitive. People know what captions are. They know how to use them. Uh, in fact, deaf/hard 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/hard 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. 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 Nep- 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 p- in our 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 wanna put on your head.

Shaan Puri 6:11 Now, into the immediate use case-

Sam Parr 6:12 Uh, and describe this, d- d- describe the product, what it looks like for the listener because a lot of people aren't watching.

Speaker 6:18 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 inside. It's really quick. Uh, 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 hear- who already use glasses, so it can fit onto any glasses and work straight out of the box. You have numerous features like, uh, focus adjustment that are catered to the deaf/hard 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, is that helpful context?

Shaan Puri 6:57 So to, to, to clarify, uh, 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.

Sam Parr 7:09 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.

Shaan Puri 7:20 And you're, you're at the end of your time here, so, so wr- let's wrap the pitch.

Speaker 7:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So yeah, that's, that's the product. That's what we're building. Um, users love it. Uh, we have over 700 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 B2B. They're all required to provide these accommodations. Uh, and we recently signed an NDA with 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 c- 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 aids 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 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, 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. Uh, 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-

Shaan Puri 8:46 I'm curious

Speaker 8:46 ... of my co-founder in the corner meeting the president of India, um, for this work.

Shaan Puri 8:50 [laughs] By the way, here's a picture of me with Drake. Um, all right.

Speaker 8:54 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 8:55 So, 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, or are you using some open source tools-

Speaker 9:05 Yeah, yeah

Shaan Puri 9:05 ... or are you using AI?

Speaker 9:06 Um, so-

Shaan Puri 9:06 What are you doing?

Speaker 9:07 Yeah, so we're right now using, um, third-party AS- automated speech recognition services. We're source agnostic, meaning right now we support three, Google, Microsoft, IBM. They're a automated system that, you know, we stream 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, CART interpreting, um, where you s- can... You know, a person types, and then you can stream the captions to your device. We're moving towards-

Sam Parr 9:39 I've done that

Speaker 9:39 ... a on-device model that's Wi-Fi agnostic, uh, and can work anywhere a- as these models im- get better and decrease in latency. Things like Whisper.

Sam Parr 9:49 Two questions.

Speaker 9:50 Yeah.

Sam Parr 9:50 Quest- or point number one, you're in luck. I am a soon-to-be hearing aid wearer, and Shaan 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.

Speaker 10:01 Okay.

Sam Parr 10:02 Um, the biggest thing with my hearing aid or why I have a hearing, uh, 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 wanna know about that. And number two, um, it, 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 gets dementia is because that part of their brain isn't working, and so they, like, part, uh, 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 l- reading?

Speaker 10:47 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-

Sam Parr 11:25 Right

Speaker 11:25 ... the other, uh, the other, to address your other point, was dementia. Um, yes, the, the part of the brain isn't being, uh, 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. 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

Shaan Puri 11:59 Um-

Sam Parr 11:59 And wouldn't this thing be mo- more embarrassing to wear than a thing in my ear-

Shaan Puri 12:02 Yeah

Sam Parr 12:02 ... that no one could see?

Shaan Puri 12:03 [laughs] Exactly, like-

Sam Parr 12:03 'Cause like you, like, like, I don't know, man, you take those glasses off, I might wanna hook up with you more than-

Shaan Puri 12:09 [laughs]

Sam Parr 12:09 ... without them. Like...

Speaker 12:11 That's, uh, that's an honor. But, uh, um, so-

Shaan Puri 12:13 [laughs]

Speaker 12:14 [laughs] Um, yeah. Uh, you know, on our website we say you can use this on dates, so you can use it on dates, but, uh, our, um-

Sam Parr 12:22 It wo- it, it, it won't work-

Speaker 12:23 Yeah [laughs]

Sam Parr 12:23 ... but you can use it.

Shaan Puri 12:24 You could try.

Speaker 12:25 [laughs]

Sam Parr 12:25 You could, yeah.

Speaker 12:26 My pitch moved off topic a bit, but, um, so yeah.

Sam Parr 12:30 Welcome to the pod, my friend.

Speaker 12:32 Our, our goal, our goal is to integrate it fully into the, like, glasses. You know, we, this is an early version of the form factor. It's, was built on, you know, exclusively grant-based funding, uh, that we've gotten, uh, by the US State Department and government of India. Um, but we're moving to an integrated form factor in your glasses. Um, we also built it in a retro 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. So I'm gonna give you my-

Shaan Puri 13:00 I agree, it's not as big as it can get.

Speaker 13:01 Oh, sorry?

Shaan Puri 13:02 I'm gonna give you my, I'll give you my reaction to this.

Speaker 13:03 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 13:04 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 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 cellphones 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.

Speaker 13:53 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 13:53 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 them, basically. And so you're gonna be trying to slim down your form factor using grant funding and all this 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. S- the big companies are gonna do it. So I think that's the problem. Now, the one thing you said that I'm just gonna call out, which is that you said, uh, hearing aids, 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 wanna 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, D2C 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 the 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 s- the captions are gonna be a feature on top of those.

Speaker 15:28 100%. Uh, could I hit that point real quick? Um, yeah. So I completely agree with you. Uh, 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. 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 that's the world's-

Shaan Puri 15:52 They're not gonna validate it. They're gonna own it. They're gonna own it, man.

Speaker 15:54 They're gonna own it.

Shaan Puri 15:54 They're not gonna validate it for you to go own. They're gonna own it.

Speaker 15:58 100%. But they need an immersive AR headset to run what is the metaverse. They want to build an headset that can support their existing platform. Mark's, I mean, Zuckerberg'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. Uh, so we can much more quickly build a wearable product because we're focused on captions and critical information for the deaf/hard of hearing. 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. That, that is actually-

Shaan Puri 16:42 Yeah, but there's other companies.

Speaker 16:43 Oh, sorry.

Shaan Puri 16:43 Snapchat wants to... Snapchat's doing it. They just wanna put a camera on there to snap a photo.

Speaker 16:47 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 16:47 Right? That's the only use case they care about right now.

Speaker 16:49 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 16:50 Google wants to put your notifications and your text messages and your email on it, right? Um, you know, so, so everybody's got a different vision, and so it's not just Facebook who's trying to do this, who's trying to build a, a whole multiverse or metaverse, whatever the hell.

Speaker 17:01 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 17:01 It's like, you know, everybody's trying to make the thing that consumers will buy that turns their glasses into a phone, basically.

Speaker 17:07 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 17:07 And, um, i- into some version of a phone.

Speaker 17:09 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 17:09 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're, you're a smart guy, I don't think this is an investable product. What do you think, Sam?

Sam Parr 17:23 I agree, but I do wanna 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, 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 h- 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-

Speaker 17:57 Yeah, deregulated

Sam Parr 17:58 ... 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.

Speaker 18:09 Cool. Um, yeah.

Sam Parr 18:10 And this is coming from- ... a half deaf guy. So like-

Shaan Puri 18:14 [laughs]

Sam Parr 18:15 I would not wanna 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.

Shaan Puri 18:23 Cool. Right on. All right, thanks Tom. Th- thanks so much.

Speaker 18:26 Yeah. Thank you, guys.

Shaan Puri 18:27 Best of luck.

Sam Parr 18:28 Our next one is gonna start with a big D, democratizing.

Shaan Puri 18:32 Oh, no.

Sam Parr 18:32 Right? [laughs] Whenever-

Shaan Puri 18:33 Oh, no. [laughs]

Sam Parr 18:33 Whenever I see, whenever I see the big D, uh, uh, I, I'm curious. So what do we got?

Speaker 18:39 Yeah, from Gandalf the Grey, we go to Frodo the Young. Soham is the freshman of the group.

Sam Parr 18:43 [laughs]

Speaker 18:44 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. Soham, it's all yours, bro.

Shaan Puri 18:52 Soham, come, come democratize us.

Speaker 18:54 [laughs]

Speaker 18:55 What's up, sharks? My name is Soham.

Shaan Puri 18:57 [laughs]

Speaker 18:58 I'm the founder of AdmitYogi. 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 schools across America, down in good old Round Rock, Texas. My class had over 1,000 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 shell out literally thousands of dollars for these private college consultants. And this is a nationwide problem. You see, today if you wanna get into one of these elite schools, you'll need insider strategies. But for the longest time, they've been maintained and gate kept by this mafia of $6,000, $6,000 college consultants. 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 friends' 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. Now, with AdmitYogi, I want to ensure that everyone, from rural Texas to the bustling Big Apple, can experience that same feeling of magic. We've built 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 a feasting. And we are a startup in 2023, so we'd be remiss without mentioning AI somewhere. 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. And what's really cool is as we start to kind of stockpile this massive data moat, 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.

Shaan Puri 21:40 Soham, I, I got a question.

Speaker 21:42 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 21:43 Um, how, how, uh, can you skip to the two parts about the business? So I wanna know, uh, how this makes money, and I wanna know are you, uh, if you're raising money, how, how much are you raising and what, and what's your valuation?

Speaker 21:54 Absolutely.

Shaan Puri 21:54 I would like to know those two things.

Speaker 21:55 So we started this business in September of 2022 with $0 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 at a rate-

Sam Parr 22:05 Wow. Congratulations.

Speaker 22:06 Thank you.

Sam Parr 22:07 So wait. Uh, so you started this in Nove- uh, so you're, the 2023, your full fiscal year was 180 grand?

Speaker 22:14 Oh, around, yeah.

Shaan Puri 22:16 No, this is-

Speaker 22:16 100, 180 by the end of 2023.

Sam Parr 22:18 Oh, okay. All right. All right. I got you.

Speaker 22:20 Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, uh-

Shaan Puri 22:22 Yeah

Speaker 22:22 ... 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.

Shaan Puri 22:38 So, so what, what do you charge? How do you make money on this?

Speaker 22:40 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, you name it.

Shaan Puri 22:56 Gotcha. And, uh, so you charge, uh, how much to unlock one s- one, one application?

Speaker 23:02 So it ranges between $5 and $10 per application.

Sam Parr 23:05 And why are the college kids uploading their thing?

Speaker 23:07 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 schools across the country.

Sam Parr 23:31 Wow. And how'd you get the, the customers? How'd you get the people to hear about this?

Speaker 23:35 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.

Sam Parr 23:56 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- well, why haven't we made, like, this joke yet?

Shaan Puri 24:05 [laughs]

Sam Parr 24:06 Why has this not happened?

Shaan Puri 24:06 Uh, we're, we're off our game. So, uh-

Speaker 24:08 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 24:09 ... are you raising money right now?

Speaker 24:11 At the moment we're not raising. We, um, we, 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 it.

Shaan Puri 24:20 Ah, I really wanna invest more now. God-

Sam Parr 24:23 Yes

Shaan Puri 24:23 ... you did it

Sam Parr 24:23 Great pitch, dude

Shaan Puri 24:24 The perfect answer. [laughs]

Sam Parr 24:25 Yes, that was the perfect answer. Awesome job. Awesome progress so far. This is very, very cool. Uh, you are-

Shaan Puri 24:32 But by the way, I was gonna-

Sam Parr 24:33 This is amazing

Shaan Puri 24:33 ... shout this product out next podcast anyways. I saw you on Twitter-

Sam Parr 24:37 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 24:37 ... and I saw, I, I saw AdmitYogi 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 what, yeah, whatever. Who cares?"

Sam Parr 24:47 Exactly

Shaan Puri 24:48 Put it in the database.

Sam Parr 24:49 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 24:49 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, it's f- 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... Yeah, yeah, I'm the founder of AdmitYogi. 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 te- it shows your, you know, founder fit with the problem. But also, people just wanna 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?

Sam Parr 25:55 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, 19 or 20 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 $5, that's, like, a meh. I don't love that. I think it's really hard to build a bus- big business on $5. Um, so I would, I want, I would wanna 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-

Speaker 26:26 Absolutely, yeah. Can I touch on that a little bit?

Sam Parr 26:29 Yeah.

Speaker 26:29 Yeah, so our average customer spend right now is $130. So people pay to unlock these profiles in bulk, anywhere from 1 to 50 profiles at once, and people on average want to unlock 26 profiles of someone at their 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.

Shaan Puri 26:48 How many s- 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, uh, in, like, kind of the s- the serious colleges where they'd be willing to pay, you know, for, for something like this?

Speaker 27:01 Two hundred thousand.

Shaan Puri 27:01 How many students is, uh, h- is that per year?

Speaker 27:02 Yeah, so in America, there's 2.2 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 400,000 to 500,000 students every single year that are coming into this market.

Shaan Puri 27:16 And so how does this get huge given, given that what you just said, right? So let's say it's 500,000.

Speaker 27:21 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 27:21 And let's say even 20% of that market was to use something like this, so $100,000, or sorry, 100,000 customers.

Speaker 27:27 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 27:27 Uh, that would be, like, you know, the absolute, like, you guys are dominating the market at that point, right? Like-

Sam Parr 27:32 So what's that, 5 million?

Speaker 27:33 Absolutely. That's a great question, and that's something we've actually thought about a lot at AdmitYogi. So to-

Shaan Puri 27:38 But, sorry, just to do the math.

Speaker 27:39 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 27:40 If 100,000 people did it, you said about, they spent about 100 bucks each, that would be $10 million in revenue if, if that was the case.

Speaker 27:45 Mm-hmm, right. So currently-

Sam Parr 27:46 Yeah, and, and, and we're gonna d- we're gonna define big as, like, 50 million in revenue. We'll say that's, like, the threshold-

Speaker 27:52 Right

Sam Parr 27:52 ... of, like, uh, uh, things get really interesting.

Speaker 27:54 Sure, yeah. So currently the college admissions market is around $10 billion, but that's just spending coming out of the top 1% of Americans. We think that by providing more affordable services, we can reach the other 99% and not only capture that massive i- initial market, but also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space.

Shaan Puri 28:14 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 1%, 'cause 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%, uh, of, of the most competitive, you know, willing-to-pay type of customers. Uh, and it's actually never the, 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, 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.

Speaker 28:57 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 decis- 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 applicant. Never knew about traditional consultants, and they were too expensive for her, but AdmitYogi wasn't. So-

Shaan Puri 29:29 Right

Speaker 29:29 ... w- 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.

Sam Parr 29:37 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 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?

Speaker 29:53 Uh, so we integrate with the Common Application, which is agnostic to universities. 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.

Shaan Puri 30:06 Right. I think what Sam's saying is if, could the Common App shut off your access?

Sam Parr 30:10 Yes, that's what I'm asking.

Speaker 30:11 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 s- or college students own this data, so they're in the, they have permission to upload it to whatever platforms they want, including AdmitYogi.

Shaan Puri 30:32 Right.

Speaker 30:32 And we own the data.

Sam Parr 30:34 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.

Speaker 30:47 Mm-hmm.

Sam Parr 30:48 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 a- 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, 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-

Speaker 31:17 Mm

Sam Parr 31:17 ... 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 could 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 or something by the age of 28 or something like that. But, like, just the fact that you've pulled off the, the... 'Cause it's a marketplace a, a bit. Because you've already kind of cracked that code, I find that to be incredibly impressive.

Speaker 31:45 Mm-hmm. Thank you so much.

Shaan Puri 31:46 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 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 ChatGPT." So basically, I should basically be able to go to s- go to some, uh, bot that's gonna 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." Um, ba- 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.

Sam Parr 32:41 [laughs] .

Shaan Puri 32:41 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 to make my ma- my essay more like her essay. No, no, no, no, no. I'll pay you 99 bucks, just help me get into college.

Speaker 33:00 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 33:00 Right? Like, give me a gr- you know, give me a 2X shot at getting into my dream school because you have a ChatGPT that's trained on successful college applications-

Speaker 33:10 Mm-hmm

Shaan Puri 33:10 ... 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 is somebody gonna do this in the next three years, that's what the solution looks like.

Speaker 33:23 Yeah. Shaan, it's really funny that you mention that because actually that's the exact vision that we had for Admit Yogi. We actually tweeted an MVP of this ChatGPT-like chatbot that can answer any question about college admissions, and it's like fine-tuned off of 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, 100 bucks.

Shaan Puri 33:53 Yeah, 'cause, you know, the college application process, first you gotta figure out, "What school should I even apply to? Where do I wanna go?" And the chat back and forth about like-

Speaker 34:01 Mm

Shaan Puri 34:01 ... "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?

Speaker 34:16 Mm-hmm. College consultants charge $6,000 on average.

Shaan Puri 34:20 Cool. So you say instead of $6,000, pay 99 bucks once and-

Speaker 34:24 Mm-hmm

Shaan Puri 34:24 ... 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.

Speaker 34:34 Mm-hmm.

Sam Parr 34:34 We should, we should go to the next one, but dude, this is wildly impressive. I saw, uh... Shaan, 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 ChatGPT-3 to, to, to plagiarize one another."

Speaker 34:58 [laughs] .

Sam Parr 34:59 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.

Shaan Puri 35:10 Shaan-

Speaker 35:10 Thank you

Shaan Puri 35:10 ... before you go, can you remind everyone just how, how old are you? There was some speculation.

Speaker 35:15 I'm 19 years old.

Shaan Puri 35:16 Wow.

Sam Parr 35:18 You're ahead of the game. You are ahead of the game.

Shaan Puri 35:20 Yeah.

Sam Parr 35:20 Congratulations.

Shaan Puri 35:20 You should take your leave of absence, but you should just stay right next to the campus-

Speaker 35:23 Mm-hmm

Shaan Puri 35:23 ... 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.

Speaker 35:29 [laughs]

Sam Parr 35:30 You should 100% bail, by the way. You should 100% bail.

Speaker 35:33 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 35:34 Yeah.

Speaker 35:34 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 35:34 If, if you need help talking to your mom, I'll, I'll, I'll call her and, uh-

Speaker 35:37 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 35:37 ... help you out.

Speaker 35:38 Appreciate that, Shaan. Thank you.

Shaan Puri 35:40 Cool. All right, see ya. All right, who's next?

Ananth Veluvali 35:44 So next up we got Zain and Matthew, Electric Column, two twin towers. They're absolute menaces. They're going out Candid.

Shaan Puri 35:50 [laughs]

Ananth Veluvali 35:51 Um, they're... You'll love 'em. So I'll let 'em take it away.

Sam Parr 35:54 Just a bunch of beauties.

Shaan Puri 35:55 Is this American Gladiator or Shark Tank? [laughs]

Ananth Veluvali 35:57 A little bit of both.

Shaan Puri 35:58 Blazer and Blazer. [laughs]

Sam Parr 36:00 [laughs] Blazer. What a bunch of beauts. Let's get 'em up here. Maybe-

Shaan Puri 36:04 Oh, the twin towers.

Ananth Veluvali 36:05 Let me share that.

Shaan Puri 36:05 Look at 'em. [laughs] He, he wasn't lying. Uh, okay, cool. And we gotta go a little bit faster-

Ananth Veluvali 36:09 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 36:09 ... 'cause 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 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.

Sam Parr 36:23 Sounds good. Sounds good. Let's do

Sam Parr 36:24 it.

Speaker 36:24 I'm Zain.

Speaker 36:25 And I'm Matthew. So we're building Candid. At Candid we apply generative AI to vlog-based social videos with the goal of helping users get in touch with their mental health.

Shaan Puri 36:34 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?

Speaker 36:41 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 36:41 Give me an example.

Speaker 36:41 Here's what it look like. So essentially we ask users to record daily highs, daily lows-

Shaan Puri 36:45 Mm

Speaker 36:45 ... 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 wanna share with friends. And from these v- these videos, we do topic detection and sentiment analysis-

Speaker 36:57 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 of it.

Shaan Puri 37:08 Okay, so like an, almost like an AI therapist.

Speaker 37:10 Exactly.

Shaan Puri 37:10 Yeah. It- it's like-

Speaker 37:10 It's like soft, soft therapy, yeah, like to call it.

Shaan Puri 37:13 S- soft therapy. Okay, love it. None of that hard therapy Sam's been doing for the last [laughs] few, few years.

Speaker 37:18 [laughs] Yeah.

Shaan Puri 37:21 All right. C- carry on.

Speaker 37:22 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 proactively seek out those resources. Now I tried 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 s- to get to stick. So when we started ideating around Candid, 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, 40% of students were, in college, experienced depression, and most of them didn't go actively seeking out help. 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 back-end component that's strong mental health focused. Yeah, so like I was mentioning at the beginning, what does that actually look like at Candid? Users record videos like they would maybe on a, 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. 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? 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 your, for what your week looked like emotionally, and it's a specific color scheme built and tailored to you.

Shaan Puri 39:09 Yeah. And so is this an idea? Do you have cust-? Do you have users? Where, where are you guys at with this?

Speaker 39:13 Right. So right now we're in test flight. We have about 50 users. We just closed our pre-seed. We're in dev and in development r- uh, 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 fit.

Shaan Puri 39:25 And we have a lot of questions raised.

Sam Parr 39:27 How much did you raise?

Speaker 39:27 Say again?

Shaan Puri 39:28 How are you gonna get customers?

Speaker 39:30 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, that are in the market.

Sam Parr 39:39 And how much did you raise? The, you said you raised the seed round or something like that?

Speaker 39:42 Yeah, we raised a pre-seed-

Sam Parr 39:43 What, how much?

Speaker 39:43 ... of half a million dollars.

Sam Parr 39:45 Wow. From who?

Speaker 39:46 A variety of VCs, uh, in, in the Silicon Valley area. Uh, Reach-

Sam Parr 39:51 Yeah, who?

Speaker 39:51 ... Mu, OVO, Z Fellows, uh, StartX. Uh, yeah.

Shaan Puri 39:56 Okay. Um-

Speaker 39:57 And GSR. GSR Ventures.

Shaan Puri 39:59 And so you, uh, y- you're gonna launch that at Stanford, cool, and you can kind of 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, 10,000 users or 100,000 users?

Speaker 40:11 Yeah, absolutely. So we really do, at first, wanna take a very controlled approach, so we're gonna go c- uh, campus to campus. We're starting at Stanford, like Zane said. We're gonna really lock in the method that works the best, and then we're gonna take 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 wanna 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.

Shaan Puri 40:45 All right. And S- all right. So Sam, let's, let's pause the pitch here, and I, I wanna 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 do you, what do you think?

Sam Parr 40:55 As an investor, I, I, I don't understand how... Uh, 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 $100 or something like that a year per customer. It 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 $500,000, 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... Uh, 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, Shaan?

Shaan Puri 41:51 And we, we have a friend who, um, has an app she, uh, called Rootd, and it's basically around panic attacks. A s- s- 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 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.

Sam Parr 42:24 She's the-

Shaan Puri 42:24 She bootstrapped it 100% herself.

Sam Parr 42:24 She's the only employee.

Shaan Puri 42:26 She's the only employee. It's profitable, and it serves that niche, and she acquires most of her users through-

Sam Parr 42:31 It could get... She has 2 million users, by the way. And, and it, it could, it could be a $10 million a year business with four or five people.

Shaan Puri 42:38 Right. And so sh- 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 are, 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 think-

Sam Parr 43:30 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 43:30 ... 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's, you know, 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- sits on the shelf." Like, adherence is a really big problem.

Sam Parr 43:50 They- they'd rather get dementia than charge their, their, their- [laughs]

Shaan Puri 43:53 Charge, yeah.

Sam Parr 43:53 Yeah. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 43:54 Switch the 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, y- 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, the work that you put in. If you've ever read this book, go, go read Hooked by Nir Eyal. Uh, have you guys ever heard of that book?

Speaker 44:32 Yeah, I've read it actually. It's, it's a great book.

Shaan Puri 44:35 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, y- you know, so, so I think you gotta find something that's simpler, um, if you want people to actually use it.

Speaker 45:00 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's the first generation that's, like, super comfortable just getting in front of their phones and just, like, you know, spewing their shit, talking their truth, right? Um, and that's what we're really trying to integrate with.

Shaan Puri 45:20 Then you should, you should make it detect-

Speaker 45:22 Which I think gives us that data

Shaan Puri 45:22 ... 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 a- 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, 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 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, and so that's, that's a challenge I've had in the past, and I suspect this reminds me of, of mistakes that I've made in the past. I mean, I made them all.

Sam Parr 46:04 Are you gu- are you guys dropping out? What are you gonna do once you get your 500K?

Speaker 46:09 Yeah, so we're actually taking a leave of absence right now. We're working full time on the product.

Sam Parr 46:12 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 could still fuck all this up, but just the fact that you are where you are now, even though Shaan said he's not a fan and I said, uh, the same thing, we're fans of you and you're gonna win.

Speaker 46:51 Right.

Sam Parr 46:51 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've built so far.

Shaan Puri 46:57 This is a 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, your first business idea-

Sam Parr 47:07 I had a hotdog stand, guys. You guys are doing, like, you guys are way, way better. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 47:11 Uh, he has generative, generative hot dogs. He- Sam would generate them. [laughs]

Sam Parr 47:14 Yeah. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 47:15 So...

Sam Parr 47:15 Hold on. Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. I put them in the bun on my hand and I handed them. They were very generative, but, uh-

Shaan Puri 47:21 You had to be artificially intelligent to eat them.

Sam Parr 47:22 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 47:23 The, the, um, the, the other thing I would say is, um, you should stop calling it a leave of absence and just start calling it a leave of excellence. People like that shit.

Sam Parr 47:31 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 47:31 All right? It sounds more provocative.

Speaker 47:33 I want one too.

Shaan Puri 47:34 [laughs] If anybody at Stanford wants to take a leave of excellence and come work with me for, for a year, come do that. You can email me, shaan@shainpuri.com.

Sam Parr 47:43 How old are you guys?

Speaker 47:43 We're both 21.

Sam Parr 47:45 Wow. Well, congratulations on your success. And, uh, thanks for doing this.

Speaker 47:48 Thank you, Sam.

Shaan Puri 47:49 Thanks, Sam.

Speaker 47:49 Good to meet you.

Shaan Puri 47:50 Awesome, guys. [upbeat music]

Ananth Veluvali 47:52 I can't find this client info.

Speaker 47:54 Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.

Sam Parr 48:08 Next up, what do we got? Simplify.

Shaan Puri 48:10 How, how many more do we have, by the way?

Speaker 48:12 Last one.

Sam Parr 48:12 Last one.

Speaker 48:13 Last one.

Shaan Puri 48:13 Last one we got.

Speaker 48:13 Last but certainly not least, we got Michael. Mikey, Mike, Michael, The Mikester. So many different names for this guy.

Sam Parr 48:19 [laughs]

Speaker 48:19 He's a great dude. And, uh, yeah, he'll close us out strong.

Shaan Puri 48:23 See, that's what I miss about college. I used to have so many nicknames.

Sam Parr 48:26 Like what?

Shaan Puri 48:28 They used to call me The Blender.

Sam Parr 48:29 [laughs] Why?

Shaan Puri 48:30 Because, uh, somebody thought my last- they thought my last name was Puree.

Sam Parr 48:33 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 48:33 And so then, so one guy was like, "Yeah, his last name's Puree, right?" And they were like, "Like the blender setting?" [laughs]

Sam Parr 48:38 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 48:39 And so they called me Blender for, like, a year.

Sam Parr 48:41 That's pretty good. I'll, I'll, I'll start calling you that. Uh, Michael, what do you got?

Speaker 48:45 Hey, Sam. Hey,

Speaker 48:46 Shaan. I'm Michael. I'm one of the co-founders of Simplify. We're building a career platform for Gen Z.

Sam Parr 48:51 What's the URL?

Speaker 48:52 Uh, simplify.jobs.

Sam Parr 48:54 'Cause I know you aren't sitting on that dot com.

Speaker 48:58 We've tried our best.

Sam Parr 48:58 That'd be, that'd be a big deal.

Speaker 48:59 MasterCard's got us beat right now. We're gonna, we're gonna get it here soon, I promise. [laughs]

Sam Parr 49:02 Yeah, I bet you will.

Speaker 49:03 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. 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, um, I grew up in a 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 a job together, so that is actually kind of nerdy, even for standards, 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. Um, so you can kind of think of us like the common app-

Shaan Puri 50:09 Hold on. By the way, by the way, I gotta stop you. I'm looking at your thing. You're th- you have 100,000 plus users that have, are using your Chrome extension and three million applications, and you haven't said any of that yet.

Speaker 50:24 Well, it's on, it's actually on the slide right here, so [laughs] but yes.

Shaan Puri 50:27 Well, I gotta give you credit.

Sam Parr 50:29 Oh, go for it.

Shaan Puri 50:29 I gotta give you credit, but I gotta say also, you bur- you buried the lead. Dude, you're killing it.

Sam Parr 50:33 Yeah, don't bury that lead, bro.

Shaan Puri 50:35 You're killing it. And, uh-

Sam Parr 50:36 Shaan, uh, pull-

Shaan Puri 50:36 Congratulations for killing it

Sam Parr 50:37 ... pull up, pull up their site and put it in Similarweb whi- while he's talking.

Shaan Puri 50:41 Yeah. I'm, I'm there.

Sam Parr 50:44 All right.

Shaan Puri 50:44 Woo.

Sam Parr 50:44 Go ahead. Sorry, M-

Speaker 50:45 Oh, yeah.

Shaan Puri 50:45 Nice.

Speaker 50:45 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 Admit 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. Uh, we've got a browser extension that helps us do that.

Shaan Puri 51:03 Wow.

Speaker 51:03 So in the last roughly year and a half when we launched, um, we've gotten more than five million applications submitted through our extension, which has saved, like, users over 70,000 hours of time. Um, we've also got a centralized dashboard instead of, like, 20 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've built this re- machine learning model that is able to recommend you jobs based on where you're applying and also based on the profile y- 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.

Sam Parr 51:43 Do, and you, and you apply to them when you swipe right?

Speaker 51:46 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.

Sam Parr 51:54 Okay. [laughs] That's awesome.

Speaker 51:56 But yeah. So we, 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. Um, so more than four million applications submitted in 2022. We've hit a million already in the first four months of 2023. Um, most of our growth has actually been organic. I think we've built a, a pretty exciting product that really puts the 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 may be first-time job seekers. Um, so we write a newsletter that goes out to 90,000 subscribers, giving general advice-

Shaan Puri 52:30 What?

Speaker 52:30 ... on found, how to find your first job. 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 garnered around 60,000 followers in the last year or so.

Shaan Puri 52:42 Are you a student, or are you, like, 28 years old and just snuck into-

Sam Parr 52:44 Yeah, how old are you?

Shaan Puri 52:45 ... this fake contest?

Speaker 52:46 Um, I actually turned 23 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.

Sam Parr 52:56 And, uh, what's, what's the, uh, how do you make money?

Speaker 52:59 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 this super in-depth profile on candidates, so basically more information than 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 CS for two years and have two years of Python experience," this is all information that we have in a structured format that you can target your job listings to. Um, and, you know, alongside that, you can source through these candidates on our platform.

Shaan Puri 53:39 So w- wait a second. So companies pay you-

Speaker 53:42 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 53:43 ... 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-

Speaker 53:51 Right

Shaan Puri 53:51 ... when you're just using Chrome, you're browsing the internet, or you, you wanna apply to a, you, you go to a, a career page, you can just click submit. So where are they seeing the job? Where's that, that other side?

Speaker 54:01 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 forward jobs to candidates, no matter what site they're on. So even if you'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.

Shaan Puri 54:22 Wow.

Speaker 54:22 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 shown, um, just within the matches, uh, on Simplify.

Sam Parr 54:47 So check this out. If you go to their site, you go to simplify.jobs, 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 YC companies." They have this really cool thing that says Moonshots, and you go to Moonshots, and it says, "Leading Web3 crypto and blockchain startups. Moon, the Moonshot list of 2022." And so you can apply to some of these moonshots. Uh, dude, this is fascinating. Congratulations. This is really cool.

Shaan Puri 55:16 And so what's the revenue like so far?

Speaker 55:18 Yeah, so we're actually still pre-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, kind of like Sam mentioned. Um- Of all these different opportunities on the internet, we put them into kinda like playlists almost, so you can browse them, almost like Spotify. So if you know you wanna 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 50 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 pla- uh, their, their company on Simplify. Uh, 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, and garner inbound.

Shaan Puri 56:14 So-

Speaker 56:14 And I think that's, that's what's next for us

Shaan Puri 56:15 ... how many... You said 150,000 people use it. How many people have gotten a job from it?

Speaker 56:19 Right. So that's something that we're in the process of figuring out. So through our CRM-

Shaan Puri 56:23 [laughs]

Speaker 56:23 ... we can see how many people are, like, in the interview process, 'cause people generally use that to track where they are, just to keep organized for themselves. But once they get a-

Shaan Puri 56:29 So how many interviews?

Speaker 56:31 I think we... I don't have the number off the top of my head, but that's something I can definitely pull up for you. Um, but what I will say about-

Shaan Puri 56:36 Ish. Just, it, gi- give me an ish

Speaker 56:37 ... I think around, like, 30%, um, have reported, like, movement in their job search process. So whether that's an interview, whether that's they've gotten rejected, um, I think that's something that we're, we're, yeah

Shaan Puri 56:47 So, like, fi- 50,000 people have gotten a job interview because of you, ish.

Speaker 56:52 I would say around that.

Shaan Puri 56:54 It's called-

Speaker 56:54 Yeah, because I think, um-

Shaan Puri 56:55 ... capital Ish [laughs]

Speaker 56:55 ... 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, are, are, "Am I gonna 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. Um, that's kinda why we're investing in the newsletter, to help people kind of actually learn the career, uh, aspect. So kinda wanna see ourselves as, like, Credit Karma for jobs. So we can give you, like, "Hey-

Shaan Puri 57:19 Mm

Speaker 57:19 ... you should learn these skills if you're applying to, like, 20 jobs and you still haven't gotten an interview." I think that's kind of what we're looking for.

Shaan Puri 57:25 Explain how, uh, give me the kinda, 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?

Speaker 57:35 Yeah, great question. I think the vision that we have is just to, like, be in every single person's browser exten- uh, 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 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-

Shaan Puri 58:03 Yeah

Speaker 58:03 ... a huge wedge in the recruiting space. The future of recruiting, I think, is gonna be all data-driven. As an employer, you wanna know, like, "Hey, I wanna target people that are applying to my competitors. I wanna 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, an 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 applying to jobs 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 Simplify goes a lot farther, um, in making-

Shaan Puri 58:42 Did you, um-

Speaker 58:43 ... people hire

Shaan Puri 58:44 ... have you raised money?

Speaker 58:45 Yeah, so we actually just closed a seed round. This is the first time we're announcing it, uh, a couple weeks ago. It was a $2 million round, uh, led by Craft.

Shaan Puri 58:52 Oh, wow. Okay. Well-

Speaker 58:54 Yeah

Shaan Puri 58:54 ... I don't know what the hell you're doing here, but that sounds awesome.

Speaker 58:56 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 58:56 Dude, it says you're s-

Speaker 58:57 Yes

Shaan Puri 58:57 ... so listen to the-

Speaker 58:58 Dude, where, where, where was my email?

Shaan Puri 59:00 L- l- yeah. [laughs]

Speaker 59:01 How, how did I not see this? This is, uh... Now I'm upset. You left me upset-

Shaan Puri 59:04 So let-

Speaker 59:04 ... Michael. This is not, not good

Shaan Puri 59:05 ... 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. Uh, Rusheel is the CTO. He's an engineer and product architect who's 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, uh, trio you have. Are they all students, too?

Speaker 59:31 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-

Shaan Puri 59:44 [laughs]

Speaker 59:44 ... so we take a couple 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 Rusheel lives in-

Shaan Puri 59:52 By the way

Speaker 59:52 ... in San Francisco.

Shaan Puri 59:53 I like that you said dropped out versus leave of absence. Leave of absence is, is, uh, you know-

Speaker 59:58 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 59:58 ... 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, you're the pig. You guys are committed. I like that. And, uh, uh, you raised this $2 million round. Can you say the valuation?

Speaker 1:00:16 Yeah, so we raised at a 20 post.

Shaan Puri 1:00:18 Oh, fuck. Really?

Speaker 1:00:20 Yeah. Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:00:21 Good job. They're YC, they're YC-

Speaker 1:00:23 It's a tough market. It's definitely a tough market, but I think, um, it's also an inflection point for us, where, um, when the markets are rougher-

Shaan Puri 1:00:29 Wait, wait, wait. You said tough market as in you think that's too low?

Speaker 1:00:32 No, i- in terms of in general, I think raising today is pretty difficult, and 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. Um, really tough to find a job these days, so I think, uh, job seekers are more willing to give, like, new startups a chance, and I think we've been able to capitalize that. When people install Simplify, they generally don't uninstall, and people, people seem to love-

Shaan Puri 1:00:52 Right

Speaker 1:00:52 ... the product, so I think we're super excited to keep building.

Shaan Puri 1:00:54 Well, Michael, this is great. I love the product. I wanna 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 had the kind of like the, what I'll call, like, the, the vision answer.

Speaker 1:01:08 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:01:08 Which is like, what if everybody, what if everybody used this? Then it would be big. Uh, there's another way to kinda think about that, which is a bo- bottoms-up way, which says, "You know, we think on every customer we're gonna generate this much revenue. So with 100,000 people or 200,000 people or a million people using this extension, we think we would be generating $100 million 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." And so, you know, you wanna have that for you guys. I know you're, quote-unquote, you know, pre-revenue, so, so maybe you don't know exactly how much a user's gonna be worth, but it'd be good to have a guess. So that's kinda my only, my only, like, constructive feedback. Everything else was, was music to my ears, so well done.

Speaker 1:01:50 Definitely appreciate that

Sam Parr 1:01:50 And I love these, I love these businesses. Uh, I think the guy's name was 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 'cause 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- um, [smacks lips] the guy who has, uh, Wilson or Union Ventures in New York.

Speaker 1:02:15 Right.

Sam Parr 1:02:15 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-for-performance type of thing, and it's one of the greatest business I've e- 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. So it's pretty nicely aligned. I think this is awesome.

Speaker 1:02:50 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.

Sam Parr 1:02:57 Yeah.

Speaker 1:02:57 So yeah, would love to hear feedback.

Shaan Puri 1:02:59 He- here's what Fred Wilson said. He goes, um, [clicks tongue] "People, you know, one of the gr- the first great investment we made at USV was in the summer of tw- 2005 in, in, for Indeed." And he talks 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, 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, and I'm happy to have a s- a seat in the front row." Um, so that's, uh, that's, that's pretty cool. Uh, well, listen, this is, this has been, this has been awesome. Thank you for coming up. I think we have to announce a winner. So the winner is gonna get $3500, uh, of the, for the, for today's pitch competition. Bobby-

Sam Parr 1:03:37 I'm gonna message you, Shaan, who, uh, who, what my winner is, and then you could... Yeah, go ahead and ask Bobby what you want.

Shaan Puri 1:03:42 Well, I was gonna say, how did we settle on $3500? It's a very, uh, specific number here. Uh, I mean, Barshop, you might have a, a, have an opinion on this. [glass clinks] That's like one souped-up Mac- a MacBook Pro or something. [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:03:55 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 MFM.

Speaker 1:04:03 Yeah, so that's what we're working on. And Shaan, 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, Sam.

Sam Parr 1:04:30 How old are you, Bobby? Are you in college still?

Speaker 1:04:32 Yeah. I'm 22. I'm a junior at University of Michigan. And so-

Sam Parr 1:04:35 So what happens in two years when you're, when you're out?

Speaker 1:04:38 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. Um, we think that the way that college entrepreneurship is fostered by institutes, centers, clubs at schools is bad, and 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 bringing in dope angels like you guys to make the mix a lot more interesting.

Sam Parr 1:05:04 All right. Well, congratulations. You're onto something. Shaan and I have selected the winner. And, um, I don't angel invest a ton, not nearly as much as Shaan. And I'll... But, so the winner on this one, I would love to, if you guys would accept me, I would put a very small, like 5 or $10,000 if you'd allow it. But, um, I don't know about you, Shaan. 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.

Shaan Puri 1:05:27 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 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. Uh, that's not what I wanted to invest in."

Sam Parr 1:05:53 Like, uh, 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 wanna give you money then.

Shaan Puri 1:06:04 By the way, I invested in those guys, and they are going for it. Uh, so they're, they, they, they are, they are pretty committed to it. But it, I think it is hard, uh, to know, 'cause, 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, so yeah.

Sam Parr 1:06:23 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.

Shaan Puri 1:06:36 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:06:39 You know what I mean? Like-

Shaan Puri 1:06:40 We have simple investment philosophies. [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:06:43 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 learned. I care about me and my money." So, uh-

Shaan Puri 1:06:51 Right. Learning, learning is great, but it is second to earning. Earning is always-

Sam Parr 1:06:54 Yeah. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:06:54 ... better than learning. [laughs] It's the fallback, right? Uh, anyways-

Sam Parr 1:06:58 Um-

Shaan Puri 1:06:59 The, the business that we both selected is Simply. Uh, I think you could probably tell from our excitement during the pitch. You know, solves a real problem.

Sam Parr 1:07:08 Sim- Simplify, bro.

Shaan Puri 1:07:10 Oh, sorry.

Sam Parr 1:07:10 It's called Simplify.

Shaan Puri 1:07:11 simplify.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.

Speaker 1:07:30 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. [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:07:38 You're never gonna get it. You're never gonna get it.

Speaker 1:07:40 What are you gonna do-

Shaan Puri 1:07:41 What are you gonna do with this $3500, Michael?

Speaker 1:07:44 It's a great question. I think-

Sam Parr 1:07:45 Bottle service?

Speaker 1:07:45 [laughs] 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, a huge fan of the podcast. Um-

Speaker 1:07:57 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 wanna invest this in, you know, whether it's our social media, whether it's in 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 use- user growth.

Sam Parr 1:08:17 You can either get a little bit of LinkedIn promotion or an Eight Sleep mattress.

Shaan Puri 1:08:21 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:08:21 The, the answer is [laughs] it's very obvious to me, frankly.

Shaan Puri 1:08:25 Uh, yeah. This is 291 days of Chipotle.

Sam Parr 1:08:28 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:08:28 So that's a lot of fuel-

Sam Parr 1:08:30 That's a lot of-

Shaan Puri 1:08:30 ... that we're giving you for-

Sam Parr 1:08:31 That is [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:08:31 ... for, for you to go forward. Um-

Sam Parr 1:08:33 We get the mattress

Shaan Puri 1:08:34 ... 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 291 days, and at the end of that, you're on your own.

Sam Parr 1:08:44 Sh- Shaan, 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, so 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?

Shaan Puri 1:09:03 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 [laughs] 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 s- 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 now-

Sam Parr 1:09:36 What was the-

Shaan Puri 1:09:37 ... it would be so cringey

Sam Parr 1:09:37 ... what was the 25 for? What was it for?

Shaan Puri 1:09:39 It was for the sushi, the Chipotle for sushi idea. And, uh-

Sam Parr 1:09:42 Dude, those, those, those investors were horrible. How did they-

Shaan Puri 1:09:45 Well, the, there's, we had two things going for us. One, you know, we had the, the h- 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, something like that, and he did it because he owned 50 Applebee's. So he was like, "Oh-

Sam Parr 1:10:09 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:10:09 ... restaurant industry, great industry to be in," whereas 99%-

Sam Parr 1:10:13 Mm

Shaan Puri 1:10:13 ... of the population would've said that's a terrible idea. But this guy had made his living off of Applebee's. Uh, and so, you know [laughs] we had, we had one judge in the bag from that.

Sam Parr 1:10:22 Oh, man. That's a, the, that w- the, that competition was really bad if they, if you won.

Shaan Puri 1:10:27 [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:10:27 'Cause these are so much better.

Shaan Puri 1:10:29 Yeah.

Sam Parr 1:10:29 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.

Shaan Puri 1:10:40 [laughs] 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.

Sam Parr 1:10:49 Ugh.

Shaan Puri 1:10:49 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 from these 21-year-old idiots.

Sam Parr 1:10:59 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:10:59 And we were like-

Sam Parr 1:10:59 Do you know how to roll a sushi roll? Is how he sounds to me

Shaan Puri 1:11:01 ... we, 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, the, 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."

Sam Parr 1:11:14 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-

Speaker 1:11:26 Anand.

Sam Parr 1:11:26 Yeah, you. Uh, what was your name?

Speaker 1:11:29 Anand.

Sam Parr 1:11:29 Anand, 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-

Speaker 1:11:36 Here's to that

Sam Parr 1:11:36 ... 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 fi- on that, like, when you guys are trying to max your bench, or squat, whatever, that shit actually helps, and you're kinda doing the same thing. So kudos to you. It, it, it does actually help psyching these guys up. So congratulations to everyone.

Speaker 1:11:56 Thank you guys so much. And Shaan, 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, the amount of people that reached out to us and, like, outflows saying, "Hit these people up. Hit me up, bhousel@umich.edu. Hit these kids up. We're gonna put 'em, uh, put the descriptor, like, their websites or emails in the description." But, like, you guys are changing these kids' lives too, so we're damn, we're damn grateful.

Shaan Puri 1:12:22 Not necessarily for the better, but we're changing them for sure. [laughs]

Sam Parr 1:12:27 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:12:27 Their lives are changing. [laughs] We don't know which way it's going, though.

Sam Parr 1:12:32 I think that's the pod. [upbeat music]