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

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary

LIVE @ YC Demo Day | Fall 2025

Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Special Guests: Dozens of founders, VCs, and operators including Nate Bosshard, Joshua Reeves, Joshua Browder, Burkay Gur, Theo Browne & more
Date: September 10, 2025

---

Main Theme & Purpose

This special, marathon episode of TBPN was broadcast live from Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 Demo Day venue, bringing together the pulse of Silicon Valley’s investment hype, operator insights, and founder journeys. The hosts, John and Jordi, aim to spotlight the newest generation of startups, capture the demo day vibes, and dig into the deeper mechanics and trends underlying the current tech/AI startup landscape.

They run rapid-fire interviews ("Lightning Rounds") with founders and investors, always asking:

• "How did you make your first dollar on the internet?"
• "Who’s your favorite entrepreneur of all time?"

There is a special emphasis on product-market fit, AI-native businesses, lessons learned the hard way, the nuances of early traction, and the increasingly vertical, application-focused nature of new startups.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Demo Day Atmosphere and Evolving YC

• Fall 2025 batch is a mix of classic internet businesses, deep tech, AI tooling, and real-world verticals.
• YC now runs quarterly batches (not just Summer/Winter), leading to faster iteration and more rounds of ambitious founders.
• Multiple veteran YC founders (Nate Bosshard, Joshua Reeves, etc.) reflect on how the game has shifted ("My first YC was in S12, just 70 startups, now there’s thousands." - John [03:30]).

2. Lightning Rounds & Entrepreneurial Origins

• Nearly every guest shares an entrepreneurial “origin story.” Many made their first dollar online:
  • Selling record players or fixing iPhones (Nate Bosshard, Bora from Reacher)
  • Building websites in the '90s (Josh Reeves, CEO of Gusto)
  • Selling Pokémon cards or DJ gear
  • Running Minecraft servers, flipping sneakers, selling FIFA Ultimate Team coins.

---

3. Notable Founder and Startup Interviews

Notable Startups Demoed:

• Reacher: AI agents to connect brands with TikTok creators (lightning ramp, $137k MRR, focus on TikTok Shop) [26:56]
• Gusto: HR/payroll SaaS legend, with CEO Josh Reeves sharing early YC days and company culture ("We didn’t pay ourselves until we could use our own product" [29:35])
• Perseus Defense: Affordable ($10k/shot) 16-inch missiles for counter-drone operations—a gritty example of YC’s reach into defense tech [39:46]
• Meteor: "The AI native browser that will kill Chrome." Focus on productivity automation with copilot agents [44:59]
• Slashie: Browser-based general agents that automate workflows using APIs, led by college dropout founders [56:31]
• Clousera: AI agents for commercial real estate brokers, automating tedious sales materials and processes [61:30]
• Juxta: GPS alternative for precise tracking anywhere—major pre-orders for asset tracking in warehouses and defense [172:43]
• Knox Metals: Founder Zane spots inefficiencies in American metal service centers; aims for "reindustrialization" and local supply chain resilience [82:39]

Other Types:

• AI Tools for Investors (Gauss), compliance for hardware, litigation discovery, CRM for contacts (Pali), open source dev infra (McPus), “Prompt SEO” (The Prompting Company), B2C AI investment analysts, and much more.

---

4. Tech Analysis & Market Themes

• AI as Table Stakes: Many verticals (law, voice, email, finance, browser automation) are now "AI with X"—AI is no longer a differentiator but a fundamental ingredient.
• Lowering Barriers to Building: "You can now text-prompt-vibe your way to a real app; let’s see how good your idea really is." (Jordi [09:11])
• Social App Marketplaces & Vibe Coding: Platforms like Meteor and Bit Rig facilitate one-off "software as memes"—artisanal apps for ultra-niche use cases.
• Boring Software Goes Big: There's rich opportunity in “vertical SaaS for the boring stuff”—waste collection, compliance, litigation, etc.
• AI Infrastructure Constraints: Squeeze on GPU supply remains real—“GPU poor vs GPU rich” is both a technical and a social in-joke.

---

5. Standout Moments & Memorable Quotes

On Technology and Building

• "As everything becomes more digital, tactile physical things become more important." – Nate Bosshard [01:01]
• "Boards are run by generals, but Andrew Dudum (Hims & Hers) leads a retail army."
• "Apps as memes... transient ephemeral software... the demand for apps is higher than the supply of devs." – John [08:21]
• "Now you can just put your idea in a text box and get it in front of millions. Let’s see how good your idea is." – Jordi [09:11]
• "We didn’t pay ourselves till we could use our own product." – Josh Reeves, Gusto [29:35]

Startup Vibes / YC Considerations

• "The App Store is not the next App Store—there's something new coming when you lower the bar." [09:53]
• "The truth is, if you’re raising below $20M at YC Demo Day, there’s probably a problem." – Joshua Browder [68:46]

Industry & Investing

• "AI is just a tool now, like Python or cloud was; the platform shift is over—the real questions are about the market and differentiation." – Jordi [113:42]
• "The best time to build SaaS is when everyone else is building social/mobile/loco." – Josh Reeves, Gusto [31:14]

Memes, Humor, and Culture

• "My first YC was summer '12 – just a lad, just a boy." [03:44]
• "GPU middle class is disappearing—you gotta go up or down." – Theo Browne [146:12]

Lightning Round Favorites

• Favorite Entrepreneurs (across the episode):
  • Steve Jobs (multiple)
  • Brian Chesky (Airbnb)
  • Richard Branson
  • Drake & Dr. Dre ("for business and culture")
  • Larry Ellison ("Oracle will sue its own customers... an animal" – Joshua Browder [69:41])
  • Warren Buffett, Taylor Swift, Peter Thiel, Tim Sweeney (Epic Games), Einstein

---

Notable Segment Timestamps

• [01:42] — Lightning round kicks off: “Favorite entrepreneur? First dollar online?”
• [04:25] — Apple event breakdown & AI hardware launches
• [07:26] — Bit Rig: On-device, prompt-to-app creation
• [26:56] — Reacher (viral content agents for brands)
• [28:04] — Josh Reeves (Gusto) on YC, SaaS fundraising, and product focus
• [39:46] — Perseus Defense: affordable missile counter-drone
• [44:59] — Meteor (AI native browser)
• [56:31] — Slashie (browser-based workflow automation)
• [61:30] — Clousera (AI for commercial real estate)
• [68:46] — Joshua Browder (DoNotPay): “AI beneath the labs: boring SaaS, real money.”
• [82:39] — Knox Metals (American re-industrialization/backstory)
• [113:42] — Shift from "AI as magic" to “AI as table stakes”
• [126:12] — Nozomio founder on repeated YC rejection, Europe-US contrast
• [144:03] — Theo Browne on live content, Twitch chat design, and creator tools
• [149:22] — Elena (Google Ventures) on record high valuations, YC energy, and the rise of international ambition
• [172:43] — Juxta (GPS alternative) founder on military family, massive traction

---

Overall Episode Takeaways

• Demo Day is back—bigger, more electric, more verticalized than ever.
• AI is deeply integrated into every conceivable vertical, but founders and investors are returning to basics: “What’s the hard problem? Who’s the real customer? Is the product 10x better?”
• The new builder cohort is young, scrappy, and skipping straight past “side hustles” to real enterprise SaaS.
• Legacy AI infrastructure constraints (“GPU poor”) are still present, but startups now have more options (multi-cloud, global data center arbitrage).
• The episode captures the raw optimism, creative energy, and relentless pace that defines Silicon Valley—and especially YC—at its best.

---

Quick-Glance Takeaways for Non-Listeners

• Demo Day is not just a showcase; it’s the best live snapshot of what Silicon Valley is betting on next.
• Lightning rounds reveal the wide creative pipelines and war stories—nearly every founder has a unique, hustle-filled first dollar story.
• New tech themes: "Apps as memes," "Software as a side-effect of vibe coding," vertical AI (voice, litigation, compliance, defense, CLM, law, contacts, real estate).
• Favorite entrepreneur? Still Steve Jobs (with a rising nod to Brian Chesky, Drake, and legendary LPs).
• YC is now quarterly, batches are bigger, and traction expectations are through the roof.
• Investors (Google Ventures, Slow, Topology, Genius Ventures, etc.) all report record FOMO and oversubscribed rounds; even seed rounds can touch $40M+ valuations.

---

Suggested Further Listening/Watching

• The TBPN episode archive for founder "origin stories"
• Live YC Demo Day footage for full pitch context
• Follow guests like: John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Theo Browne, Zane (Knox Metals), and founders of Reacher, Perseus, Clousera, Meteor, Slashie, and more on X

---

Transcript

[John]

You're watching TVPN.

[Jordy]

Today is Tuesday, September 9, 2025. We are live from the palace of party rounds. We are at YC demo day. The batch is fall 2025. Right. F 2025 because it used to just be winter and summer, but now they've added it's a quarterly batch. And so I believe we're in fall. Is that right?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Nate Bossard from Friend of the Pod.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

I sold used records on ebay.

[Jordy]

Reused records.

[John]

Yeah. This record. 2001 vinyl guy. Yes.

[Jordy]

This is crazy because I sold record players on ebay. I sold DJ equipment.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So I was early adopter.

[Jordy]

There is. There was the arb. So my ARB was international shipping. Basically people wanted top tier DJ gear in Australia and they couldn't get it because the companies wouldn't export. Or was it more about like going in, what do they call it? Crate digging? Crate digging. Finding stuff that wasn't available in, you know, in Ohio and then you ship it there.

[John]

New York and la, Travel up and down the Mississippi river corridor, hitting up antique shops, getting soul, funk, jazz, psychedelic rock records.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

That's cool. That's cool. We have one more lightning round.

[John]

Japan was your exit liquidity.

[Jordy]

We're starting with the lightning round. Most underrated or greatest entrepreneur of all time. Who you got?

[John]

Oh, God. Underrated or greatest is actually kind of hard to throw.

[Jordy]

Wait, wait, what's the actual. So we're going to ask. We're going to try and ask every single person who comes on the stream how they made the first dollar on the Internet and what their favorite entrepreneur is. I'm going to go favorite. It could be anyone. I'm going to go over the last.

[John]

Decade, last five years, I think Andrew Dudum from Hims and hers is incredible.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Fastest consumer company to go public.

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah, that's true.

[John]

The only successful consumer SPAC trading at $11 billion. Yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

He is an absolute. And he's got a retail army.

[Jordy]

Exactly. Which is weird. Yeah.

[John]

Not every boardroom general can lead a retail army. And I would just. I think Andrew is incredibly underrated. I'm not gonna say all time in the last cycle.

[Jordy]

Yeah. But we're. We're going favorite.

[John]

There was some recent news that. That they didn't. Didn't compounding, like, generally get like a green light, which is very good for him. Yeah. They've had a great kind of new wave with.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

To the success of the Fantastic.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Well, this is summer.

[John]

This is summer day of summer. We're starting fall.

[Jordy]

We met some founders who had f. Who were, I think, going into the fall batch, but they've been accepted. They'll be joining the next batch, I believe. Summer.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Oh, great. My first. My first YC was summer five. Wow. I was summer 12. S12. So just a mere 13 years.

[John]

You look great.

[Jordy]

Yeah, still kicking. But I mean, I was, what, 21 at the time or something like that?

[John]

Just a lad.

[Jordy]

Just a lad.

[John]

Just a boy. Just a boy.

[Jordy]

What else is at the top of your timeline today? Did you watch the Apple event? Were you shaking? Were you crying? Were you. Were you gasping? Were you clapping? Standing ovation from you for the iPhone. The iPhone 4000.

[John]

I was looking for more innovation on the wired headphones. In his language, that's a vinyl.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

You know, I like analog.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

You like. I know. They released a new pair of AirPod threes. Yep. I haven't gotten the full spec.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I think we have it. I think we have it. Mk.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

So.

[John]

Which we need. Which we all need.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. Right.

[Jordy]

They also get heart rate sensing during workouts.

[John]

Gen Z. Do they need A Gen Z live translation.

[Jordy]

That's the. Oh, probably. And they'll sense your heart rate during workouts. But most of the people that are doing that already have the Apple watch. But it matches what Marques saw get added to Beats. So is it actually an audio quality thing or is an RF like, or is it losing it?

[John]

I think the translation feature I think is the most interesting novel new feature. I think as we all travel more and explore the world, I think that becomes super, super important. The concept of the Lost in Translation, you know, universe we all used to face. Like now things can just be super flowing and free.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

It hasn't like happened like live in free.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

I think when you're just looking at text, live, dynamic conversation, very different. I don't think is a promise fulfilled yet. I know that Latin based languages are much easier with that. I think when you go to Japan, it's still not there yet.

[Jordy]

Sure, sure.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

We invested in one company.

[Jordy]

Can you break it down for us?

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Really? No way.

[John]

Yeah, we've all been, we've, we've all been on our own personal vibe coding journey. Sure. Right. And I think that the thing everybody's looking for is a native mobile on device app that can push live to test flight.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

And so there's this team at Apple who apps as memes Abs. Well memes are the end state of all human communication. We know that. So that's like important. This team came out of the Swift, you know, the Swift like language. They basically are responsible for writing that. Interesting. They've built this product company's called Bit Rig and they've built essentially an on device, you know, prompt to app Live in the App Store.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

Test flight from your phone.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

So, you know, you know, last batch, it was cursor for X, Y and Z. This batch, it's lovable for X, Y and Z. Oh, sure. You know, if you look at that.

[Jordy]

Is that the meme? Yeah, we'll figure it out.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Really cool.

[John]

So it actually, like, loaded it up, like, very quickly.

[Jordy]

I was shocked.

[John]

It was like a paragraph or two of prompting and it actually produced like, a pretty good product. And if you have an Apple Developer account, it just like, pushes live.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

By the way, guys, stream was down the last five minutes. That was a fantastic conversation. But we're back up.

[Jordy]

We're back up.

[John]

But I think what you said while we were out was apps as memes. I think the concept of, like, kind of transient ephemeral software software as GIFs. I mean, the original, like, thing. Think about, like, 10, 15 years ago, everyone had an app idea and like, yep. I don't know, like 10,000 people in the world were actually, like, qualified to like, ship something. Pretty decent, right? Maybe more than that, obviously, but. But it was like the amount of demand. Like, the reason that companies like Lovable have blown up is like, the demand for apps is like, so much higher than the supply of developers that can actually, like, build these things. And then especially too, like, most app ideas are not worth investing $100,000 into or $50,000 or even 10,000. Right. It's just like something that should just be created for fun. Maybe it turns into a company. Maybe it's just a little piece of software.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that it is sort of a gauntlet being thrown down for the ideas guys because it's like John feel. But like, seriously, it's like, it's like now you're in, you're going to be in a paradigm where like, oh, you have an idea. Okay. Like you now can just put your idea into a text box and get in front of millions of people. Let's see how good your idea really is.

[John]

I think, let's figure it out. I think the concept of social app marketplace, all Etsy, where now you have this more artisanal software experience, people with ideas can iterate and build and ship things. I think that there's going to be some sort of new thing. Is the App Store the next App Store? I don't know, but I think when you lower the bar.

[Jordy]

Yep, super low.

[John]

There's a lot of interesting ramifications of that.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I was, I was, I was thinking about that in the context of like OpenAI. Like we've, we've been in this era where you know, it's like, okay, you have this $200 a month plan. You get like the super frontier model in a fantastic iOS app and if they go towards agentic commerce and ads and eventually they want to monetize fully, like do the paid plans go away and does the product become more one size fits all or do we continue to live in this world where if you have the budget, you can get like a really, really, really special app experience? And the flip side of that is like, is like there are a bunch of pieces of software that I could imagine building that don't work as businesses, but would work essentially like, as, as like a one of one piece of software. The example that I always give is like, if I, if I hire an assistant, I can pay that person to buy a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and print out the articles, physically remove all the ads and give me just a book of exactly what I want. Very expensive to do, is probably, you know, like lots of, lots of money. But like I could have a piece of software that does that. Now I couldn't go and sell that software because I'm reselling subscriptions and I'm taking ads out of the product. But in terms of like a vibe coded one of one, there's only one person that's using it. Like, it seems like potentially you could see more, more stuff that feels like the domain of only like you needed a person to do this.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah. That's interesting.

[John]

And so what would the John app have? Well, it would just be everything you're into.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Right. And I don't need to ask you any questions. I know what you're reading, I know what you're buying, I know where you're going, I know what you're shopping. And when you think about, like contacts as this new dynamic piece of software, there's like a portal through you. Yeah, yeah, that's something that's super interesting and I. I'm just riffing here, but, like, I think that where you think where this goes.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

Becomes really trippy. You know, the, the language. Like Uber for John, basically it's Uber for John. It's Doordash For John, it's TripAdvisor for John. It's. Is it that workout app for John or.

[Jordy]

Or is it more like it's thoughts by like. Or is it more like a return to like the old, like Tumblr 2000s web? Yeah, exactly. Or something like we have all been forced into expressing ourselves through these, like, narrow boxes. And like, yeah, you can put like any MP4 in there or any MP3 or any image in there, but you can't actually make any social app like your profile, like fully your own and customize everything. But you could do that on just a normal website. Maybe that's coming back.

[John]

Think about every time someone asks you for advice.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

Oh, yeah, that or pings you and it's just like, you just. It's just like, here's my app. Like, it's like you're just a proxy to yourself and you can. John and I are. John and I are investors in Delphi, which is kind of a similar thesis of, you know, making yourself available 24 7. Yeah, let's switch gears a little bit. Are you going to be buying the Elon? Are you going to be signing up for Elon's SpaceX Telecom Starlink Direct phone? I'm excited about this. Yeah, I'm a. I'm a fan of rural environments. Oh, you are, you are. And you need connectivity. Yeah, and so I absolutely will be. What's your. Do you. Do you travel with a Starlink setup much when you're going on escapades? No, but I would say, like, when I'm situated in place. For sure.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

My. My partner Dave, who is a sprinter van guy, is fully mobile. Mobile Starlink on his van.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. So what are your thoughts on 996-deep-fates on X says. Yeah, I work 9969 minutes coding 9 hours tweeting 6 energy drinks. It's just, it's just an extension of the performative mail meme. Let's just be honest.

[Jordy]

So. So I would totally agree with you. We had R. Karazian from Ramp, the Economist over there on the show yesterday. He looked at the credit card data and there's actually a meaningful uptick in, in business activity in San Francisco. Just San Francisco on Saturday, just as of six months ago. And it's like a meaningful uptick. And so he says it's real. Sure.

[John]

There's always people that are living the realness.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah. It's like, it's like Maybe there's a 20% uptick in996 and then that's been like 5xed by the volume of like Atlas.

[John]

Atlas was joking. It was like the great lock in and it's just like working Chinese hours for four months. I mean I think you have to earn the all Naval had some new press today. He said Naval Ravikant expects employees to work 247 at his new startup. That's the next level after 996 is just don't sleep. Just stay at your desk. Just 121271212 12. I'm bullish on hims and hers then for the kind of performance enhancing aspects required.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Remember back in the day people used to take pro vigil.

[Jordy]

Yeah. There was always that lore about like the Air Force pilots combat.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

You know what?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

We're not going to talk about politics and here you are.

[John]

That's about. Yeah, that's performance. That's not politics. And I'm, you know, I'm sure that, you know Provigil is not like a partisan issue issue.

[Jordy]

Yeah, for sure. It's bipartisan.

[John]

That's as far as we'll go on that.

[Jordy]

Anyway, do you want to run through the first Elon treasury company? Do you see this? Have you been following the treasury stock memes? Is this micro strategy microstrategy. But then there are a few that do eth and salon.

[John]

There's five Solana Treasuries that are launched within the same like three week period. So like essentially. Yeah. If you, if you track it, there's there's one that Pantera launched. There's one that I think Multi coin. Yeah, Joe McCann I think was working on one. There's a few coming through the pipe right now.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

No, it's on ramp for TRADFI to play in crypto as a, as a more safer play because it's highly regulated. And so they, I think instead of them just buying Solana, they can buy into this thing.

[Jordy]

Okay. Regulatory thing. More than a, more than a tax.

[John]

Thing for traditional finance. And I'm just being super reductive on that, but I think that's the appeal. And then, you know, assume that there's. If they're hoovering up as much and then you give retail an opportunity for new forms of basically betting. It all comes back to that. It's almost just beyond. But so we were talking about EchoStar. So SpaceX acquired a spectrum that's going to enable them to get into direct to sell. 17 billion. Yeah, it was eight and a half billion of cash. Eight and a half billion of stock. Echo Star is not. Is up 24% in the last five days, but is pretty much flat today. And people were starting people yesterday realized they were like, wait, a $20 billion public company holds eight and a half billion of SpaceX stock. Like this is an Elon treasury company. Treasury company, but small issue. They have $30 billion of debt. And so we were kind of like doing some rough math yesterday and realizing like SpaceX needs to be like closer to a $2 trillion company for them to just pay off the. And this is a company that's losing a lot of money in their core, core business. I mean that spectrum purchases is highly strategic and makes me very, very bullish. I think people also should be looking at if they want a public market comp, you know, more global play. Like look at Rocket Lab. They're almost like a corollary to every time Elon kind of does something publicly that's embarrassing or that is against, you know, the political zeitgeist. That, that stock.

[Jordy]

Which one?

[John]

Rocket Lab.

[Jordy]

Rocket Lab. Okay.

[John]

It's also a publicly traded. Another successful deep tech spac.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

They started off like.

[Jordy]

And they're actually launching rockets now. But there are a couple of those, like the anti elon trade. Like there's this satellite company that's asts and they've been like mooning in the. In the public markets. But I don't think that they've actually like shipped any satellites. It's all like deals at this point.

[John]

Rocket Labs.

[Jordy]

Rocket labs for sure.

[John]

$15 billion market cap SPAC.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Kind of like a rough period. And now has been ripping.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

So the spec. The spec universe, like there's some winners.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

Let's be honest.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. None of them same thing. No, no, no, that's wrong. So he did so.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Yeah. So truth zone.

[John]

One out of.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's like one out of eight.

[John]

So that's like, you know, that's like.

[Jordy]

250 if you're playing baseball spread across them. It was not a good time, but it was a rough time for a lot of people in a lot of markets.

[John]

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. Sorry. Did you guys see this company yesterday? Alter Ego. It's like a telepathic headset device that you can think messages in thought. It was pretty interesting. That'll be big in the astrology community. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that went pretty. Got almost 2 million views since yesterday. Some people were pushing back and saying like you actually have to like mouth the worst. But I think it's fine.

[Jordy]

Like a fish.

[John]

Is this actual shippable or pre order somebody. I don't know. I don't know.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. It's not live, but I don't know.

[John]

How true this is. Somebody quoted it and said this is the same type of thing. Altman and Ivory launching. By the way. Future is here.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

This is a good. This is a good. So we have to talk about this. Hunter SPX Thompson says Nvidia sells chips to Nebbys to sell to Microsoft to sell to OpenAI. All for OpenAI to burn. 100 billion between now and 2029. So I can ask digital God for company primers and get answers in paragraph format pulled from Seeking Alpha Dog Shit. Wow. Absolutely brutal. The Nebbyus deal that got announced yesterday. Total, total retail.

[Jordy]

It was an insane day in the market.

[John]

Right? Yeah. Nevius is up another 40. It's 42% in the last five days. 22 billion dollar company right now. Retail. They had a retail army behind them.

[Jordy]

Remember when we treasury company. Did you see that?

[John]

Oh, is there a Treasury for that now.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Be a Treasury for everything.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Which is a lot so fartcoin treasury when seriously, I'm actually not kidding.

[Jordy]

Yeah, well, we were pitching this idea of instead of focusing on these like crypto assets, you could create a company that has a Treasury that's just pure scratch off lottery tickets. So you have like $10 million of lottery tickets in there and it's like, who knows what it could be worth? It's hard to get to a book value on that. You could do the expected value, but who knows, maybe the investors will just not do the book value.

[John]

Well, then you securitize it.

[Jordy]

Exactly. Get derivatives against the right to scratch off something there.

[John]

I do want to cover a bit more Nebbyous. There's some coverage here from TechCrunch that's pretty solid because we covered this company earlier this year in a different context.

[Jordy]

So Nebius is a real company. It's a Hyperspace. Right. Or NeoCloud.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

That's crazy.

[John]

At the tail end of 2021, Yandex hit a peak valuation of 31 billion. But in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, everything changed. Nasdaq halted trading on Yandex shares in February due to sanctions imposed on Russian affiliated companies. And a year later, Nasdaq said it would delist Yandex altogether. But Yandex successfully appealed on the basis that it was restructuring, a process that would take an additional 16 months to fully complete. Part of this included offloading all of its Russian assets, which was where most of the real business value lay. What remained under Yandex's ownership was a random assortment of infrastructure and business units that just so happened to be located outside of Russia. That's up data centers outside of Russia and everything effectively in Russia was Seized and sort of like pulled back into the country.

[Jordy]

What a wild story.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. So the new business was to be spear spearheaded by Arcady, the Russian Yandex co founder and former CEO who was removed from a European sanctions list in March after he publicly condemned Russia's assault on Ukraine. The core nebus business sells GPUs as a service to companies needing compute. And that is pro. I don't need to continue that. So anyways, crazy, crazy story here. Highway 101. Billboard. Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe not 101. But we saw it rolling in today.

[Jordy]

Yeah, where did.

[John]

I took a picture of it because I love advertising.

[Jordy]

Anyway, for the East Bay.

[John]

The East Bay people coming in.

[Jordy]

Yeah, exactly.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

That's us.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Came from Oakland.

[John]

Okay. It said AI runs better on us.

[Jordy]

Echo Star has a wild story too. Brandon Girl plugged into it on the substack. Go to substack. What is it? Tvpn.substack.com yeah. Subscribe. We. I believe we have our first guest, so thank you so much for coming on.

[John]

Great to see you Titans.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Make sure your founder gets on the show. I will find that team. Bring them over.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Okay, all Apple pay now.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

What's going on?

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Are we going to space?

[Jordy]

Introduce yourselves.

[John]

Outfit is because our logo is a rocket.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Help. Do I need to talking this mic?

[Jordy]

Yeah, as much as you can. Yeah.

[John]

So I'm Bora, this is Jerry. We're co founders of Reacher and the outfits are because we help brands reach more creators and make viral content to help them reach more people.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. So we build agents to help brands find the right creators, personalize the outreach, get them to respond, pay them, and then also generate scripts and hooks so that they can make viral content.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Definitely. Right now, like let's build as much tools for brands as possible. There's so much work there. And then once we have a critical mass of let's say 50,000 brands, we open up the deal marketplace to creators and that's when they can make money. Okay, first question, I'm going to hit you with a hard question. I'm bullish on the tool in its current state. There's been so many attempts to build creator marketing tools over the last decade. None that I'm aware of have become, you know, truly massive companies. Right. How, what, what, what do you think has changed now that can enable this to be sort of a billion dollar company? So I would say one thing is the fact that TikTok shop exists and social commerce is like the first real social commerce platform. Everything is native, native checkout. The attribution is really dialed in in terms of everything happens on the platform. And it's the first real attempt at getting anybody like you, me, regular creators that don't have millions of followers to make content. And with the algorithm, the way it works is you can go viral. Right. So I think that's one big aspect of it. And the other part is AI.

[Jordy]

And I'll let you speak to that.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Currently, yes.

[John]

Yes. Cool.

[Jordy]

Yeah. You said AI agents going around finding creators. Is there pushback from scraping TikTok? Like what, what's the actual interaction like there?

[John]

No pushback because we're number one on.

[Jordy]

The TikTok shop app store. Okay, there you go. So we're in the back end and we're number one. Fantastic.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. We, we have some lightning round questions. Favorite entrepreneur, what you got? Oh, you can say anybody. Yeah, I know, just a buddy.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

The first Jensen. Let's start counting him up. Yeah. Also we've been asking everyone, how'd you make your first dollar on the Internet?

[John]

Oh, first dollar on the Internet.

[Jordy]

We're just dollar in business.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

No way. That's a great story. Fantastic.

[John]

Awesome, guys. Oh, we have traction. Traction. What, what, what kind of numbers? Demo day was great. Alumni demo day was great. Our traction is $137,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Whoa. Thank you. Thank you.

[Jordy]

Series B territory.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Well, we love the aesthetics. Thank you so much. Have a good rest of your. Definitely. Cheers. Thank you. Hey, we have a surprise guest. We have the CEO of Gusto. I believe Josh is here. We're gonna bring in Josh.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

It's good to be here.

[Jordy]

Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

I was like, sure, let's go.

[John]

Incredible. I have zero prep. Good, good. Good placement, too. Did you guys do that on purpose? Well, we were an early adopter of Dogpatch. We came here 2017. Okay.

[Jordy]

And we were surrounded by juul. Oh, yeah. Building.

[John]

Crazy. That's crazy. Lore. Uber autonomous cars.

[Jordy]

Okay. Yeah. The other Tenant now it's Astranas and YC. Okay, awesome. What batch were you in? It was 2023. Winter 2012. 2012. Winter 2012. That must have been just after summer 2012 when I went through, because I remember we used Gusto.

[John]

What. How did. How did demo day go for you?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So first off, it was smaller.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

It was down in Mountain View, but.

[Jordy]

It was still, like. It was still, like, 70 teams.

[John]

There was about 56 in the batch.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And it was twice a year.

[Jordy]

Yeah, it's four times a year.

[John]

And, yeah. I mean, the shift was just starting to San Francisco, so we were actually still based in Palo Alto up until four employees.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

And then we moved up to the city, and then a lot of companies are now here. Were you. Did you guys start with the payroll? Was that the thing you were planning to build, or did you kind of pivot into it? We were before yc, definitely iterating and experimenting. Once YC officially started, we were like, heads down. Okay. So were you running payroll prior to demo day, or did you need more time? So we.

[Jordy]

Because you ever knock dog food? The product.

[John]

So we. We decided we weren't going to pay ourselves. Okay.

[Jordy]

Until you could do it.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

That's cool. Great.

[John]

There we go. We hit two milestones. I like it.

[Jordy]

The soundboard's going cartoon.

[John]

Yeah. No, we didn't pay ourselves till we could use our own product. And then we onboarded like 10 other companies. Okay, but that was during YC. During YC. That was during the day for demo day. We had to be able to say to everyone, yeah, yeah, we're using our own to process payroll. Otherwise you have to be put a clown mat, you know, outfit on or something. We were three electrical engineering PhD dropouts. What credibility do we have building payroll software?

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Aren't there stores?

[Jordy]

How do you. How do you ramp up? You can do it on a spreadsheet, right? Obviously you should use gusto, but, like, don't do it legally. Legally, can you just do it on a.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

And you can. There's like physical businesses out there in the world that still like, run. They do payroll, Payroll service bureaus. And you can like go into that tech business. Yeah, exactly. And it looks more like retail. Yeah. About a third of companies are still using that type of system. It's error prone. Mistakes get made, you get penalized, yada, yada.

[Jordy]

That's wild.

[John]

Insane.

[Jordy]

That's crazy.

[John]

How was, how was. How was. Did you guys have any trouble raising or. People by that point were pretty bullish, I'm guessing. I think we stood out. There was luck, there was hard work.

[Jordy]

A lot of stuff has to line up because you're raising at the same.

[John]

Time with a bunch of other founders. Instagram had just gotten bought in the last year or two, I think, before that. And so a lot of the companies in the batch were in the social, mobile, local kind of craze.

[Jordy]

So low mobile.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

No way. That's great. Which back then was a large amount and then it wasn't about spending it. Like when we did our Series A, we still had two thirds of that in the bank. But yeah, we had some great investors get involved and we're really grateful.

[Jordy]

We have a lightning round. We have two questions we've been asking everyone. Favorite entrepreneur doesn't have to be greatest. It can just be anyone. But who's your favorite Entrepreneur.

[John]

Can I be snarky in my answer, please? Tomer and Eddie are my co founders.

[Jordy]

They're amazing. I think really highly of them.

[John]

That's a fair answer. I mean, I can go with a classic.

[Jordy]

Any biographies that you are on your nightstand.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

That speech was live.

[Jordy]

It's like a viral video.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah. That's great.

[John]

And then what's the first dollar that you made online? Was it gusto or were you doing anything before? I mean, back in the 90s, I was building websites. I built a website for a coffee shop. For a coffee shop. So, I mean, that was. I got paid for that.

[Jordy]

Do you remember how much you got paid?

[John]

I think I did it for, like, 500 bucks.

[Jordy]

500 bucks.

[John]

That's pretty good.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

I mean. Yeah. If you just waited some time. Bought bitcoin. Yeah. Put it all in crypto.

[Jordy]

Well, you put it all in a payroll, and I think it worked out maybe. I'm sat. Toshi, you know. Fantastic. More guests just ready to go. Okay, perfect. I just want.

[John]

I got a lot more questions. Good to see you.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. Good to see you. Thanks so much. Congrats on all the progress with what.

[John]

You guys are doing.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And, yeah, good luck out there. If you're. If you're.

[John]

What percent. What, what, what percentage of the batch is already using? Gusto, do you think? We tend to do pretty well with YC batches.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

And we also do a Boba get together. Ooh. There you go. Boba.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Boba Gusto. Make payroll. Easy.

[Jordy]

Set up healthcare. Really easy.

[John]

We're here to serve.

[Jordy]

Well, thank you so much for hopping.

[John]

Incredible.

[Jordy]

We'll see you.

[John]

Good to see you.

[Jordy]

And we will bring in our next guest. We'll also tell you about ramp.com. time is money. Save both. Go to ramp.com.

[John]

What'S happening? Welcome to the show. Hello.

[Jordy]

Hey, nice to meet you.

[John]

I'll give you a salute. There you go. I'm a big fan of the show.

[Jordy]

Thanks.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Oh, interesting.

[John]

B2C. If you invest in stocks, you're welcome to join our Platform?

[Jordy]

Yeah. I mean, there's been a ton of moves in the, in the retail world. Tons of meme stocks going on. Is this going to help me find the next great meme stock or avoid getting caught up in the meme stock stuff? Is it more for the retail investor who doesn't want to get burned or the retail investor?

[John]

Can I tell them to not make mistakes? Exactly. That's actually our number one use case. We want retail investors to make less emotional mistakes.

[Jordy]

Emotional mistakes.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Talk to me about the puzzle pieces that you're putting together. I imagine plaid's important. There's probably some broker dealer at some point. There's probably a frontier model that you're partnering with. You're not training your own models, but.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

What are the puzzle pieces that you're putting together to build a platform.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Okay. You just recommend.

[John]

Right now we recommend we're in an advisor base, tackle the advisory market and replace with agents. So what kind of. What's the compliance framework? If you're giving people investment advice as.

[Jordy]

An app, everyone always says so. You just say not investment advice and then you're fine.

[John]

Right.

[Jordy]

And then you get as much advancement.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. Right now that's what we do. But we're in the process of getting the RIA registration. Hopefully by the end of the month we will be. Did you come into. Did you, did you come into YC with this idea or did you pivot into it? We did, yeah. Actually, we've been. Michael Far and I have been working on this for the past like three, four months. We applied with this idea. We're one of the few B2C companies in this batch because most companies have been B2B. But it's been exciting. We got like 1.7 thousand users using our platform generating revenue.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah, that's one of the KPIs. But right now we're focusing on signups and retention. Yeah. We want to get users coming to our platform and staying with us and we want to eventually be the best in giving tailored investment advice for people.

[Jordy]

That's great. Lightning round.

[John]

Yeah, I was going to say, how are you monetizing today? It's a subscription model, so we're charging $19 a month for customers and we'll plan to continue with this for a while and then eventually we're going to switch. Switch to the more RIA like model.

[Jordy]

Free plan or everyone paid free plan.

[John]

It's a freemium. You can just sign up the platform, use the free features and you can pay an X more. I like businesses like this because people run the calculus of like, if I pay $19 a month, but I can make a slightly better investment.

[Jordy]

Pays for itself also. I mean you can definitely, I don't want to, you know, degrade the business anyway, but you can also underwrite this as almost like an edutainment product. Like, like, even if I'm not always making the trade that it recommends. If I'm just saying, okay, here's my thesis. Walk me through the stocks. That's almost like a deep research type product. That's something that somebody can read like an investment newsletter.

[John]

What were you doing before this? I was. So I started my career at Nubank. I was doing data science there. Then I moved to vc. Yeah, I did three years of fintech investing in Latin America.

[Jordy]

Thank you.

[John]

I like VCs. I was in the industry, you know, I. And then I switched to the other side of the table now wanted to start something on my own. Did two years of business school at Stanford, just graduated two months ago, did YC and now we're here. Non traditional background. So how's the fundraise going? We close a round around.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Still undisclosed, but we have as much location for smaller angel checks. You know, hopefully that's good.

[Jordy]

Good Runway for us. He's like, call me. But not financial advice. But also it's going, it's going to be a thousand bagger. But also not financial advice.

[John]

Dude, congrats.

[Jordy]

Lightning round question, favorite entrepreneur. We've been asking everyone who comes to mind throughout history, I have to say.

[John]

David Velas from Nubank, he's an inspiration for me. He challenged, you know, the most traditional industry in Brazil, big banks. And he managed to create a, a generational company.

[Jordy]

Like how did you make your first dollar on the Internet?

[John]

Ooh. So when I was a kid, you know, I started kind of like the small e commerce shop to sell materials for, you know, school. School materials. Yeah, it was just like a. Where was, where was website In Brazil. I was in Sao Paulo. And you know, kids were always like, they asked their moms to buy school materials. I was like, I think there's a way to just like sell directly to kids. And they were like starting to go to these websites and I was just like. And it was like there was no payment system or anything. It was just like a storefront and they could select the material cash and they pay me cash. That's cool.

[Jordy]

But you use the Internet as an order management. Order management system. Wow, that's amazing. That's a great story. Thank you so much for hopping on.

[John]

Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

Congratulations. In the round.

[John]

That was not general solicitation, by the way. He was not saying to reach out to him if you want to invest in the company, but love to see it. I'd love to see a non traditional background into Stanford representation. Stanford mba, worked as a venture capitalist, worked at a, at a, at a hyperscaler. We, we love to.

[Jordy]

Not, not hyperscaler, but just like one.

[John]

Of the biggest gigascalers. Welcome to the stream.

[Jordy]

Perseus Defense. I saw your stuff on, on X. I saw the image of this massive weapons warfare.

[John]

Oh yeah, wow.

[Jordy]

Gotta update the shirt.

[John]

Welcome to the show, guys.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Cool. Welcome.

[Jordy]

Thanks so much for hopping on. We're gonna kind of have you pass back the mic and back and forth. Just get as close as you can.

[John]

Sure.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Cool. So my name is Jason Cornelius. This is Steve. Hey, what's up, guys?

[Jordy]

Steve with Perseus Defense. What's up?

[John]

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

[Jordy]

16 inch missiles down drones.

[John]

Okay, okay.

[Jordy]

Do we not have.

[John]

We should have got one.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

How much do they cost and how do you fire them? Yeah, it's a good question. So there are some existing solutions for like the counter. UAS problem, right? Yeah, walk through the solutions for sure. So there's, you know, electronic warfare. So GPS jamming, unreliable. Right. There's, there's easy ways to defeat them. You know, you can make a more advanced drone and this is what. And then you have the fiber optic cables, fiber optics.

[Jordy]

Oh yeah.

[John]

Like already defeating some of those solutions that we have.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

We were your buddy that does that.

[John]

Acs, AC gone on in the truck.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And so there's some really good solutions out there for different use cases. And we need more. Yeah, we, we need more. And they all have pros and cons and they have like a layered. So some of them like ACS is very short range, some of them like a patriot is very long range. And so we looked at it. Who's going to fill this gap that's in between when we don't want to spend a $10 million missile to shoot it at 10 miles away, but we also don't want it to get so close to us that it's, you know, right on top. So what's the, what's the range? It's a 16 inch missile. Half mile. Half mile.

[Jordy]

Okay. And is the benefit of that the payload like you can blow up a bigger drone or you can just fly farther? Like what are the trade offs that go. Or what are the benefits that go into having really.

[John]

The cost. The cost, yeah. So if you look at like the best solutions today, you know, Raytheon has something called coyote that's still $250,000 per drone that we take out. The drone that we take out cost $1,000.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So that's a great scale. So we're building these things for sub $10,000 a shot trying to drive that cost down. And then you have how, how is, how, how does it do targeting and like actual fire about it. Yeah. So there's a thermal seeker on board the missile. All the computes on board the missile, it's fire and forget. So it just seeks out the drones. Oh, so you can just shoot these out into the. And so we have the display out back with like the missile pod mounted on some unmanned vehicles that we got some Navy SEALs to send us. But you can see like these things could, they're cheap, they can pop off, you can have like, they're only a pound each. So you can have like 25 missiles in one pod. That's only like £30 or so. So a guy can carry around like a mini surface to air missile site. Basically.

[Jordy]

That's crazy.

[John]

Crazy.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Sure, it's a good question. So you know, typical way to do this is you apply for a SIBER small business innovation project. And we've, so we've done some of those applications. But we're kind of trying to attack it from all different possible angles. So I was in the Pentagon three weeks ago. I carried missiles inside the pentagon to show two offices there. We're working with Fort Hood, so 1st Cavalry Division down there, they've been super helpful giving us feedback on our solution, trying to help us accelerate it into the DoD. So we're talking to the soldiers at the ground level, we're talking to the Pentagon, we're talking to the science and technology communities inside the DoD and really have a list of supporters. They're just waiting for us to get the technology ready so that they can bring us out, we can demo it and get it ready to rock. What's it like testing a product like this? Oh, it's cool. It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but you know, a lot of your batchmates here can go and just ship a product, you know, to make, make an edit, ship it to prod, and then the stakes are a little bit lower. So like, where are you guys even testing and all that stuff? Can't say on here where we test at, but every two weeks we don't. We do a long drive very far outside of San Francisco and we load the truck up, we take a bunch of missiles out into a very far away land and we test. So that's been the entire YC batch. Every two weeks we've done it, so four or five cycles. And then in between those two weeks, we have the entire team doing major iterations to the design, improving it. So in the 10 weeks of YC, we've done five major missile iterations, launched over 30 missiles, and it's progressing quite fast. I would say. The first thing that we bought with the YC company or with the YC money was a Ford Expedition. And so we just packed that thing full of all. That's crazy.

[Jordy]

And then we blew it up. Lightning round favorite entrepreneur, who do you look to for advice or, or as a role model?

[John]

We're looking at Dino at Sironic right now and trying to match that growth trajectory that they're having A lot makes sense. And then I'll say Steve Blank. We're kind of friends with him down at the Stanford class. He's awesome.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

I used to wash horse trailers.

[Jordy]

Wash horse trailers.

[John]

Equestrian analog.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

For people who pay their money.

[Jordy]

Equestrian. Thank you so much for coming on. Good luck.

[John]

Cheers.

[Jordy]

We Will talk to you soon. We if you're tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We are going to have some special guests hop on the stream. We might have Gary Tan stop by. The team's gonna bring in Gary Tan as soon as he's available. But up next we have Meteor. Welcome to the stream. Nice to meet you. Introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you building?

[John]

Yeah, I'm Pranav.

[Jordy]

Nice to meet.

[John]

We're building Meteor and this is Farhan, the AI native browser that's going to kill Google Chrome. Oh, okay.

[Jordy]

We got the browser wars going. Let's go. Yes.

[John]

Okay. Okay. You guys going after Comet too? Yeah, absolutely. Everyone? Yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. Well, I mean we all spend seven or eight hours every day on our browser. We spend, we do most of our work on the browser.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

Right. Most of it is redundant work.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

We're saying we can automate all of that away. Okay, Right. We're saying we want, we want to spawn AI agents that work with you as your copilot to the web, that can do your work for you so you don't have to waste your seven, eight hours.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Right. Chrome does work well enough for you if you're okay wasting many hours a day. What we're seeing is we're giving you time savings. It's sort of like people pay thousands of dollars for personal assistance.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

Right. People pay thousands of dollars for employees, like to create automations. We're saying we want to create virtual employees.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

That run on your browser.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Right. And that's Meteor. So like let's say you want to handle your calendar.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. So we're in alpha right now. So we're trying out a bunch of things. Right now we're primarily using vision, so we use screenshots. Also helps a little bit with some of the prompt injection stuff, definitely. We're primarily using vision, but we've been playing around with a bunch of things.

[Jordy]

Very cool. Yeah, I think what's the best frontier model right now for what you do?

[John]

Right now it's probably Claude Sonet, but we use a mixture of models. We use GPT, we use cloud, we use all of them. And we are state of the art. What were you guys doing before yc? Yeah, we were at the uw. We were both studying computer science.

[Jordy]

Oh, no way to build Meteor. There you go.

[John]

Amazing.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

It's gotta be Steve Jobs.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Selling Pokemon cards.

[Jordy]

Selling Pokemon cards.

[John]

There we go. There we go.

[Jordy]

Congratulations on demo day.

[John]

Thank you so much. How's the race going? First year college dropouts. You're here, you're going through yc. Oh, it's been going great. Yeah. We're both second time entrepreneurs and a bunch of pooch in the past. First time dropout, second dropout, first time dropouts. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can only do that once. No, you could go back and get a. You could get an MB.

[Jordy]

You go to med school at 35 drop off.

[John]

What was your last company? So he built Maxima, which is an FPGA IDE that was 10 times faster than the industry standard. Okay, yeah, yeah, A lot of code optimization. I built a bunch of projects that you dubbed that went viral. He almost got kicked out twice. No way.

[Jordy]

I did all the story. What was the worst thing you did.

[John]

To get kicked out? Okay, so the thing that went most viral was I figured out there was a data leak that allowed students to get access to their professors before UW published it. And I published it within eight down. Within eight days. It got taken down. I got called in, but, you know, everything's okay now. We're.

[Jordy]

Everything's okay now.

[John]

Congrats, guys. Appreciate it.

[Jordy]

Good luck out there. Good luck.

[John]

Thank you so much.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Cheers, guys. Thanks for coming on.

[Jordy]

We have our.

[John]

Also, we've been trying not to do handshakes. People are. We're going to do handshakes.

[Jordy]

We're going to do handshakes. Okay. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

[John]

Welcome.

[Jordy]

How you doing?

[John]

Cheers.

[Jordy]

Congratulations on a fantastic demo day. Why don't you introduce yourself?

[John]

And just literally came directly from the stage. Fantastic. I think it was really good. You look calm and Collected. Okay, that's good.

[Jordy]

Introduce yourself in the company.

[John]

Cool. I'm has Hubble. I'm the founder of Pali. We're bringing every contact and every conversation from every platform into one place.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

And using AI to help you keep track.

[Jordy]

Okay. Imess. How do you get my imessage?

[John]

Modern, modern work. I got imessage. There's signal, there's action, there's LinkedIn, there's email. Tell me about it. And there's been a few people that. That have like tried to crack this. I think like text.com. yeah. Highest maybe highest profile solution there was a.

[Jordy]

What's the YC founder working on something like this?

[John]

What's the unique for your site and what kind of value do I get from connecting all these services and giving you all of my data? Well one, you don't give us all your data. We do it fully locally on your device, with on device LLMs, on device vector databases. Your data remains local, which is amazing for you guys and for us because we don't want to see your data either.

[Jordy]

So I have to run it on a computer that's always on. Basically.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

If it's switched off fully, it won't sink. But if it's. If it's chilling like that, it's okay. So never turn off. Yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

It's very clever. So I don't. I don't really want.

[Jordy]

Always has one trick that Tim Cook hates and. And good luck to you holding on to that.

[John]

But what's attraction been like, what kind of metrics were you. Yeah, I mean so we launched two months ago, reached product of the week on product hunt and have since grown to over. Thank you.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

We've since grown to over 3 and a half thousand users. 125k of arrow. People are. People are really paying a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Growing at 22% week over week.

[Jordy]

That's fantastic.

[John]

Double kill.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Actually did he drop out of high school though? Yeah. Oh wow. And then 10 years later I was invited to spend a week on his island with him.

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

And I spent actually time with him on Necker island and so it was like a very cool full circle moment. He's been a great, great like mentor over the years.

[Jordy]

That's amazing. That's amazing. Second lightning round question. How did you make your first dollar? On the Internet or in business?

[John]

I was 12 years old and I sold FIFA ultimate team coins. What do coins mean? Basically it's like you can buy and sell players and create a team and I would virtual currency inside the game. But how I'd do it is I'd find a player, buy up every single version of that player and then price fit three times higher than the like classic price. And so it made so much money. Definitely illegal in the real world but on this game it was fair game.

[Jordy]

Fair game. Well how's the raise going?

[John]

I mean we're over subscribed and we're still deciding on who to partner with. So reach out if you want to chat. Not financial advice, but thanks so much. Great to meet you.

[Jordy]

Can't wait to test the product out. We will bring in our next guest and we are live here from YC demo day. Welcome to the stream. I'm.

[John]

Nice to meet you man.

[Jordy]

Nice to meet you. What a direct name. Let me guess, Model, context, protocol, AI, something like that. What's going on? Introduce yourself. What do you do?

[John]

Yeah, my name is Petro, I'm the CEO of McPus.

[Jordy]

We help people use MCP of course to build open source dev tools and infrastructure. I was going to say what's the open source strategy?

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

MIT license. Everything is free.

[Jordy]

Okay, Everything's free. And then there's probably a GitHub repo that's growing and some measured by stars or something like that. Let's Hear it for 7k stars. Congrats. And then at some point do you want to be more like Red Hat Linux? Like who are you looking to in terms of well run? Is it GitLab like Supabase? Supabase. Okay, break down. How will their business model look like yours? Yeah, because they, they have a bottom up approach.

[John]

They get developers and then those developers introduce inside the company the tool.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

And I love it.

[Jordy]

And, and is the Goal there to sell a. A non self hosted version long term, like a cloud, you know. Great.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Enterprise.

[Jordy]

Enterprise.

[John]

Enterprise. 20%.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah, I think what you said makes a lot of sense. Like tech forward, enterprise are doubling down.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Like PayPal, these kind of companies because they have like a very software. Like they have a very valuable software. MCP allows to expose this software to agents.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So they're the ones, you know, doubling down.

[Jordy]

How's the raise going?

[John]

Very good, very good.

[Jordy]

We raised six already. What, $6,000?

[John]

6,000. 6,000. How many times did you have to apply to YC to get in? Oh, three. Three. Yeah, let's go. Never give up. What were you doing? I was, I was in Zurich. You know, fire there and virtual try on for E commerce.

[Jordy]

Okay. Oh, virtual trial.

[John]

Did you say miserable? Yeah, it's very hard to sell to fashion. Don't do it. Founders. It's crazy how many companies have taken in that crack. Yeah, it's just. But now it's getting better, you know?

[Jordy]

But yeah, I mean you always wonder if it's gonna. Is that functionality gonna live like at Shopify or at. At an independent. Independent enterprise?

[John]

See, what's the AI scene like in Zurich? Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's great. Zurich is a great place for t, like deep research and. Yeah, I think last year you had another Zurich guy. Yeah, there we go. So we're also getting it. But you're staying in the bay. Yeah, yeah, we're staying in the bay. Okay.

[Jordy]

America. Play the America Eagle.

[John]

We got it.

[Jordy]

Thank you. We have a lightning round. We like to ask two questions. First, who is your favorite entrepreneur or someone in business that you look up to? Yeah, Brian Chesky, I think. Brian Chesky.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

No less. And then our second question. How did you make your first dollar online or in business?

[John]

Converting an open source user really? Yeah. That was with McPus. No, so I thought it was like an hypothetical question.

[Jordy]

No, no, no. Literally like a lot of people, they, they sold records on ebay or they, you know, set up a website for a friend. Everyone has an interesting story of like their first taste of entrepreneurship. Could have just been a job. I don't know.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Oh yeah, I made it with a girlfriend at the time. No way. Okay, cool programming. Yeah, yeah. And you got your first dollar. Well, congratulations. Have a great rest of your demo day to meet you. We will talk to you soon and we will bring in our next guest. NYC Demo Day 2025 welcome to the stream. How you doing? Thank you for hopping on the stream. I'm John, nice to meet you. Please introduce yourself. What do you do? What are you building?

[John]

Yeah, I'm sure pretty Franjali. I'm building Slashie.

[Jordy]

What is Slashie?

[John]

Slashie is a general agent that connects to your apps, your calendar, Gmail, Notion, Slack.

[Jordy]

This does stuff for you, Android, iOS, both.

[John]

It's on the browser.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

APIs?

[John]

Yeah. No MCP, no browser, no MCP. Doing it the old fashioned way.

[Jordy]

So does that mean I have to go through like 25 different OAuth to actually log into every single app with you once and then you have the freedom to move around with your agents.

[John]

And there's ways to get around it. There's ways to get around to us. You know, Google Sith Lord magic right now. It's very basic. We just don't want to, you know, unleash our power to the world.

[Jordy]

Of course, of course. Well, speaking of power, how powerful is the business?

[John]

What is the value? Like what is the value that you're, that you're telling users they'll get out of the, the product? Is it more B2B focus, more consumer? Where, where's the focus? The, the focus just to, you know, you're nine to five, the shit that you don't like doing and you just like have Slashy do the automating of the repetitive tasks.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Well, yeah, I mean, that's. That's great.

[Jordy]

Workflows.

[John]

Yeah, except Slashie writes the prompt for you and thinks of the edge cases for you as well. Well, one thing you should try on it is people search. I know you're meeting lots of founders today, but. Yeah, we made a specific template for you for we season alike to be like, find everything about X founder.

[Jordy]

Okay. Okay.

[John]

Atlassian just bought the browser company. Do you think they're kind of going after a similar opportunity to what you guys are going after? I think the issue is just it's really hard to build habits around browsers. It's really hard to get people to use browsers and switch from, like, what they've already been.

[Jordy]

So better to integrate at a deeper level.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

That's nice. How. How did you meet your co founders and what were you guys doing before this? We met at College, all three of us. I'm 18, freshman. My co founder is sophomore, and then the other one is junior. Wow. What school? Georgia Tech. Nice. Yeah, before that I had you guys dropped out. Sorry. Dropped out. Dropped out. There we go.

[Jordy]

Freshman dropout for that.

[John]

Freshman dropout.

[Jordy]

Make it very far.

[John]

How did. How did your parents. Parents feel about the dropout? They're both PhDs. It's, you know, it's a little bit of an uphill battle, but, you know, they're supportive, so. Thank you. Mom, what metrics did you share during your pitch? What metrics did I share? Well, 40% of the batch uses us.

[Jordy]

What? That's great.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

Crazy.

[Jordy]

Really good. Very cool. Yeah, you came in with a pretty broad pitch, but you narrowed down really well. I like this.

[John]

Amazing. How's the fundraise going? Fundraise going? Well, we're almost. Almost done with closing. Yeah. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

You know, the bag's in the river. We have a lighting round. We asked two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur?

[John]

Who's my favorite entrepreneur?

[Jordy]

Which one you look up to.

[John]

Elon Musk. Lucy Guo. Wait, somebody. Love that. Wait, somebody. Somebody's asking a question. Freshman dropout on September 9th is wild. Did you go. Did you go for a week or.

[Jordy]

Were you a freshman year at Georgia Tech or not?

[John]

I did a year.

[Jordy]

You did one year. Okay. It would be funny. And then the last question we ask is, how did you make your first money online? Although normally that's like people might say a decade ago, but. Yeah. What was your first introduction to entrepreneurship? Was it this company or did you make money in some other ways? Some people, you know, did some stuff on ebay or built an app or built a. Built a website or something.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

We went to age of zero.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Summarizing research papers? Crazy. All right, well, legend.

[Jordy]

Deep research eventually.

[John]

Legend in the making.

[Jordy]

Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your demo day. If you are just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025 and we are bringing in our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, John? Please talk into that microphone and introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What do you do? What are you building?

[John]

Hi, everyone. I'm Anmol. I'm the CEO of Closera and we build AI agents for commercial real estate.

[Jordy]

Ooh, okay.

[John]

Nice.

[Jordy]

Big industry.

[John]

Huge.

[Jordy]

What part of the commercial real estate stack, the actual transaction, do you sit on? The buyer side, the seller side, like.

[John]

Yeah, that's a great question.

[Jordy]

Administration. There's so much that in commercial real estate.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Cool. Thank you. Let's hear it for the developer. It's time to build.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah, exactly. So our customers are commercial real estate brokers.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

So both on the buy side and sell side. Very cool. And that's. Yeah, that's what we focus then in.

[Jordy]

Terms of, of we're talking AI agents. Are you trying to build an RL environment for some of the other platforms and, and kind of, you know, throw your own agent on top or are you just building like SaaS that pulls the different AI tools off the shelf as needed? Like, how should I think about the business?

[John]

Yeah, so you should think of us as kind of like AI employees. We automate entire end to end workflows. And so for commercial real estate brokers, there's two workflows in particular that take up the most amount of time and money. And so for example, one of them is creating sales materials for buying and selling buildings. So today on average teams spend about 4 weeks making these materials and spend about 5k in design fees. And with us, they can do that entire process in about five minutes.

[Jordy]

Very cool. There we go. Progress on the traction? The traction. How's the raise going? How's demo?

[John]

Yeah, the raise has been great. We were done in 48 hours, so it was actually. Yeah, I think with raising it kind of either goes one of, one of two ways. It's either like know you're hot. Exactly. Yeah. What were you doing right before this? So I was at Google, so I was a PM working on monetizing Gemini Notebook lm. And that helps with the fact that you got Twitter box out of me. Amazing.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

So that launch was, was super fun. It was like we were in chats with like Sergey. It was, it was crazy. Why were you rate limiting us so hard? John was paying 500 and he couldn't.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

You know I don't work there anymore, but I can, I can, I'm still.

[Jordy]

Going to hold you accountable. We have two lightning round questions we like to ask. One favorite entrepreneur, somebody you look up to.

[John]

Yeah, I think, you know, classic answer, definitely Steve Jobs. Like reading that biography in middle school is like what got me to want to move to the Valley, go to Stanford.

[Jordy]

The Walter Isaacson book. Fantastic book. Second question, how do you make your first dollar on The Internet?

[John]

Yeah. How we made our first dollar on the Internet was actually we cold called. So brokers are, you know, they always pick up the phone and so anything as a kid.

[Jordy]

So people like sold ebay or like you know, did like websites as a kid. Any, any, any stories.

[John]

In high school I made an app. It was a free app but it, I used AI to help the visually impaired. And so basically this is like pre multimodal models and stuff and you could take a photo and if you're blind like it would tell you, you know what you're looking at. Like say like a can of Coke or a can of Pepsi. And yeah, that had users in about 120 countries. It was named one of TechCrunch's top AI stories of the year and was also in a Google commercial with Jeffrey Hinton and Justin Trudeau.

[Jordy]

No way. That's amazing.

[John]

Legend. Well, congratulations. Thank you. And yeah, good luck out there. Awesome. Thank you for having me.

[Jordy]

Yeah, good luck saying no to all the VCs that couldn't fit in already. RIP Anyway, we are live from Demo Day YC 2025. We will bring in our next guest whenever they are ready. In the meantime, any breaking news, Jordy, anything we should run through before we're bringing our next guest? I think we have our next guest right here. Hey, Josh Browder. How you doing?

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

How many did you. Did you back all the winners already? No, I'm here mainly for social.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Okay. Yeah, just hanging out.

[Jordy]

Just hanging out.

[John]

There are some amazing companies.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

And more boring stuff.

[Jordy]

More boring stuff. Just find a specific.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah, I'm getting old.

[Jordy]

Yeah. You're still teal fellow, right?

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

I agree.

[John]

And so you can build 100 million, 200 million business doing this sort of stuff.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. I looked at Fiji Simo when she became the CEO of applications at OpenAI, she had five things that she was going to knock down and it was like, you know, knowledge retrieval, health, you know, coaching, talent coding. But then waste management's not on that list. And so I think you're safe for a little bit anyway.

[John]

What's happening in, in your business that's, that's exciting. I imagine there's every time the models get better, your product gets better. Yeah. I think you constantly have to be innovating. We're like always worried about what the big companies are doing to detect our AI robots. There are now SaaS, startups that detect our robots. Sure. And so we're trying. Yeah, exact anti robots as a service. Fortunately, we're more motivated than the average Comcast SaaS vendor, so we stay ahead. And then on the product side, when Do Not Pay started, it was just like templates. Now you could just ask ChatGPT to generate a template. So we're trying to go deeper, try and go more in the background and build really exciting things.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Baseline, 20 is the base and then at high end. What are you saying? 40, 60.

[John]

I mean some even 100 already. I'm here to meet 100 people at once and then I can relax. I'm very introverted. So this is my one social event of the year. One of the year. We got four badges. You gotta keep some of this. My first YC demo day. It's amazing. You can just meet everyone.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

What about throughout history, history's greatest entrepreneurs? Who sticks out to you?

[John]

Larry Ellison.

[Jordy]

Larry Ellison.

[John]

Larry Ellison is an inspiration. He's very kind of pricing focused. Did your other guests say that? No one said Larry Ellison said Larry.

[Jordy]

But we've been talking about Larry for a long time as a deeply underrated founder. Just an absolute animal. An animal.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Lot of things are going on. There's a headline from the LA Times in the year in June 29, 2000 called Oracle Defends its Spying on Microsoft as Public Service.

[Jordy]

I love it.

[John]

They also called it their civic duty.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah. How old were you at the time?

[John]

Maybe like 13.

[Jordy]

13.

[John]

And there's different waves.

[Jordy]

So Disney's worst nightmare.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Then there was the how are people.

[Jordy]

Making money on Minecraft?

[John]

Minecraft server businesses.

[Jordy]

Okay. So you set up server.

[John]

So that was Adam Guild's generation with owner. That's the Wonder founder, the amazing tpp. And sponsor.

[Jordy]

Yes, yes.

[John]

They were making money with servers. Then there was Sneakerbots.

[Jordy]

And that's the WAP founders.

[John]

And now what's next? Fortnite. Anything in Fortnite? I think it's right. Roblox. Roblox, yeah. Roblox, yeah.

[Jordy]

Fascinating.

[John]

People that are printing on Roblox today will be here in five years or maybe just SaaS, startups. I mean there's like a 12 year old who's viral on X in a few years.

[Jordy]

I don't even mess around with the video game. I just went straight to enterprise age 12. My first dollar, a business deal between me and Oracle. Yeah, me and Larry to build out a new data center. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.

[John]

Thanks for having me.

[Jordy]

Have a great day. Enjoy Demo day. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Nice to meet you, I'm John. Pleasure, welcome to the stream.

[John]

Great to meet you.

[Jordy]

Please introduce yourself for the stream. Who are you? What are you building? How's demo day going?

[John]

Yeah, hi. Do I look at you or do.

[Jordy]

I look at you? Whatever you want.

[John]

Okay, I'm going to look at you.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

I'm Anson. We're building normal and we're automating. Hardware testing and compliance.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

Part to it. So that's mostly it.

[Jordy]

So there's like a test stand where you need to actually see does the motor work when pick up those robotic arm? Yeah, basically and it needs to be. And there's someone there testing that robotic motor. Like every day they get a new robotic arm, they test it and then they need to put that into some sort of database to manage. And you kind of provide the software suite that they interact with on the day to day basis.

[John]

Awesome. When you pitch it back to me.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah, so the people that we're working with now are mostly like early stage startup companies. So if anybody's watching, like, we'd love to work with you. Okay. So yeah, mostly drone, robotics, toys, cameras. Yeah, yeah, anything with like a RF component.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Let's go. It's a celebratory stream. We don't need to be talking. We should get back to building.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. So this is my co founder who couldn't be. He's outside.

[Jordy]

So we're just gonna.

[John]

We're gonna put him on the stream. His name is Hudsa. Yeah. Great to meet you.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Bring him in. Come on.

[Jordy]

I don't remember anything. Oh. Other than that he was wrong. I just remember seeing his post and being like, what about his post?

[John]

Traction, though. What were you guys able to do?

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah. What did you share?

[John]

Yeah, so we launched three weeks ago and we have 35k in revenue.

[Jordy]

So fast.

[John]

Three weeks.

[Jordy]

Congratulations. Yeah, it's fantastic.

[John]

Thanks.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Favorite founder?

[Jordy]

Favorite founder.

[John]

Can I say, throughout history. Sir. Sir John A. MacDonald.

[Jordy]

Who's that?

[John]

First Prime Minister of Canada.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Did he start Canada? Okay, we don't have any buttons.

[Jordy]

This is something American. I don't know if I could fully endorse it, but it's. It's outside the box and I appreciate it for that reason. The second question is how did you make your first first dollar? On the Internet or in business, like as a kid?

[John]

Oh, man.

[Jordy]

Do anything interesting? Some people set up websites, some people.

[John]

I taught kids how to argue.

[Jordy]

Okay. Wait, what?

[John]

No argue lessons. Debate.

[Jordy]

Okay. Debate. Okay. And, and, and so they, they pay you like on an hourly basis. That's fantastic.

[John]

There you go.

[Jordy]

That's great. Well, watch out. Don't get an argument with her.

[John]

Congrats. Professional argument. Congrats on getting the round done and thanks for coming on.

[Jordy]

Yeah, thanks.

[John]

If you're. If you're. Of course, yeah. If your co founder wants to debate John too.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Yeah, I'll bring him in right after.

[Jordy]

I don't remember what he said, but.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

He said something wild.

[John]

Nice.

[Jordy]

What was. Sorry, what was that? Of all time. Oh, favorite. Favorite entrepreneur of all time is one of the best.

[John]

Of all time.

[Jordy]

Okay, thank you. We are clarifying our questions. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

[John]

We are live breaking news from the timeline. There is now a $2,000 iPhone. It's the iPhone 17 Pro with 2 TB.

[Jordy]

2 TB? $2,000 iPhone dropped. Welcome to the stream. Nice to meet you.

[John]

I'm John.

[Jordy]

Pleasure. Will you be picking up the $2,000 iPhone? It just dropped minutes ago. This is breaking news.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

You're good. He's sticking with this.

[John]

Short the stock. Short the stock. I feel like the incremental. Yeah.

[Jordy]

We look to YC founders as the future the tastemakers.

[John]

They're not adopting the latest show.

[Jordy]

Happen. Introduce yourself. What do you do? What are you building?

[John]

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

[Jordy]

31 1. What do you. Is that information hotline?

[John]

Yes, the informational counterpart to 911.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah. Yeah.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Call 31 1. It automatically routes you to your service. And then if I'm in my city, it'll give me information. What are the. What's the. Obviously, everyone knows. Textbook 911 call. Someone's breaking into my house. What's the textbook 311 call.

[John]

Yeah, I think. Is this road open or when does the trash pickup come? Stuff like that. Stuff like that. It definitely varies a lot more city to city. So we're live in Florida and we're taking calls about alligators roaming around the city.

[Jordy]

So anything kind of route. And I'm sure you've set the system up so that you can route to 911 if you need to. Absolutely. Right to animal control. Kind of sit above the rest of the stack of all the different city services.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Are phone trees.

[Jordy]

Are they terrible? For decades.

[John]

This is conversation.

[Jordy]

This is potentially. What's the secret.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

They don't?

[John]

No.

[Jordy]

Okay, why is this?

[John]

Are you for male loneliness?

[Jordy]

Are you building on top of a particular foundation model or specific APIs? That just sound so good. Yeah. Who are you using? How do you piece things together to make it great?

[John]

Yeah, we're using a voice from vapi that's just great. Trialed at a bunch of different companies. Vapi? Yeah. Another YC company.

[Jordy]

Oh, cool.

[John]

Is that in this batch? Another, I think winter 24.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

We'll have to check them out.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Okay. So it just feels completely natural. Got it.

[John]

Very cool traction.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

You've been lining up cities. Yeah. Driving around.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

We shared live in one city and 80k ARR. So two contracts that have yet to go live, but we signed them in the pipeline. Let's go, let's go. So you're charging. Is it. Is this 40k per city, effectively 60k and then 20k.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

I would flip it around and just be like, if I'm the mayor and I'm charging every single person in my city some sort of property tax and I'm taking in millions and millions of dollars and my citizens can't get information, but for whatever price he's charging, I can offer this. This service to my population. It's very like, wow, the city feels so much more responsive. Like when that tree fell down on my street, I was able to just dial 311 and send it to the right thing instead of like website.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

They were doing how this state by state go to market motion. Because a lot of the first question they'll ask us is, okay, what other cities in Florida are. Are using? Because they can also do this thing called piggybacking where they literally just copy and paste the contract from a new city. No way. So that's kind of, you know, little hacks like this I think will help us conquer the govtech market. Where historically it's been hard to break in, but now you have this AI Obviously land and expand. Yeah. How. How did the. How's the fundraise going? It's good. We're around three quarters done. There you go.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Peter Thiel. First.

[Jordy]

First person, second question. How did you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?

[John]

This flipping supreme. T shirts. There we go there. How did you.

[Jordy]

How did you acquire. Did you have bots that would buy them?

[John]

Y. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Into the. Into the bot game.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

I love it. Thank you.

[John]

Amazing. Congrats on all the progress.

[Jordy]

Super.

[John]

For.

[Jordy]

We'll talk to you soon. If you are just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025. We will bring in our next guest when we're ready. Just. Oh, we got. Here we go.

[John]

You've been waiting for.

[Jordy]

You all have been waiting. Will they bring a massive block metal onto the stream? Yes.

[John]

Great to see you.

[Jordy]

The answers, like, they just.

[John]

Dude, you got a little workout on the way. How many pounds is that?

[Jordy]

No clue.

[John]

No clue. A lot.

[Jordy]

I borrowed it from Astranis. Oh, okay. Yeah. Did you sell it to them and then you borrowed it back or is this just theirs?

[John]

This is theirs.

[Jordy]

They wanted to help the cause.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

It's illustrated. It's not. So. Yeah. Why is this sitting here? What do you do? Introduce Yourself.

[John]

Who are you?

[Jordy]

Yes, my name is Zane.

[John]

I'm the founder of Knox Metals.

[Jordy]

And we cut metal. So we're trying to build the most.

[John]

Efficient metal service centers in America to empower every factory in America to work with better margins and to move faster.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

There's a lot of ways he's doing the meme. He's doing the meme. He's re industrializing. Also. Also to be clear, this is Zane from X. Yeah, probably if you're. If you're on famous post everything app, you've seen him before. He's been on the show via his post many times before. It's great to finally.

[Jordy]

I've been printed a few times. I remember one time I was watching.

[John]

TV VPN and I was like, for.

[Jordy]

Some reason I had to go somewhere.

[John]

And I was like, I just skipped.

[Jordy]

To the print section. The guys would print the best tweets and I was like, who they got today? That's fantastic. Okay, so there's a lot of ways to cut metal. Hadrian's doing a bunch of CNC machines. There's other people that are doing additive stuff. We've talked to 3D printing guys who build the metal structures up. What is your specific like. Like put it in like LEGO terms for me. Like, how are we actually cutting this metal?

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah, to someone like a Hadrian. Okay. Okay.

[John]

What we do is we buy big billets, usually the size of an F150.

[Jordy]

Okay. Put it on our saw, which is.

[John]

About the size of four F150s.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

And then we band saw, cut it.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

And then we sell like.

[Jordy]

And then it can go into a CNC machine.

[John]

Yeah. If you want to make an F18 part. Wow. Component for your washing machine, you name it.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

So, like, the operation's really simple. What we're working on is like the.

[John]

Complex operations of the factory. Like, I'm sure you guys know I.

[Jordy]

Never want to hear anyone say why Combinator just does consumer apps anymore. Look at this.

[John]

This is pure metal.

[Jordy]

This is insane.

[John]

Yeah. So many challenge is the challenge. So it seems like obviously, like, it's not easy to just cut through metal, but it seems like that's relatively solved. Yeah. What you're trying to solve is like the efficiency in the factory. Because even if you make this block, then how do you get it? How do you store it? How do you transfer? You know, you nailed it. So like, the metal service industries is.

[Jordy]

Like $300 billion these guys do a year.

[John]

Like if you're a metal service center, that's the total of the market.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we strongly believe that they are.

[John]

Yeah. John, lift them actually. It's going to destroy. No, it's going to destroy his suit. We need it for tomorrow.

[Jordy]

I can figure out.

[John]

We basically strongly believe that they have a ton of overhead and lack all the technology in the world.

[Jordy]

That puts a tax on every metal source in America.

[John]

That's why you're seeing more metal bought.

[Jordy]

From the USA or bought from China. Yeah. Coming in. Like I worked in like, like a small PE shop.

[John]

Like everyone I talked to, they're like, hey, how do we get stuff in from China?

[Jordy]

So like we want to re shop like private equity.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

We want to like re.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Exactly. And like the key thing you said.

[Jordy]

There is product and what is product?

[John]

The factory. Right.

[Jordy]

Everything that goes into it. Procurement, inventory, management, like you said, estimating.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yep, that's the goal. Got it. We have a lightning round that we've been doing. First question, who's your favorite entrepreneur, Alex, of all time? Alex Karp. We've had him on the show last week, I think. Great pick. How did you make your first dollar online or in business?

[John]

My dad had a machine shop and.

[Jordy]

He made me scrub the floor.

[John]

I was 14 years old.

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

Family business. 3,000 square foot facility.

[Jordy]

One man of the mobile success.

[John]

Incredible. Wait, how's, how's the fundraise going?

[Jordy]

Oh, I'm gonna try and lift this. It's good.

[John]

We closed like.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we had like an initial goal and we closed that, but.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

Let's go.

[John]

Come on.

[Jordy]

There you go.

[John]

Just break the table.

[Jordy]

It's liftable.

[John]

It's lift.

[Jordy]

I would put that at over on.

[John]

Yeah. And it's such an awkward.

[Jordy]

My guess was. My guess was 97. 97. Okay. So no fun is going well. We like had an initial goal. We, we got there and now seeing some more interest, so thinking about raising some more just to have a Bit.

[John]

More Runway and move faster. Count me in. Chad. Come in. I'm riding with you.

[Jordy]

Thanks so much for coming.

[John]

I should have brought my physical check. Such a missed opportunity. Great to see you. You're a legend.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah, I was trying to warn you.

[Jordy]

Thank you so much for coming on the stream.

[John]

What's happening? Great. Okay. You brought your own metal. Okay.

[Jordy]

How you doing? Okay.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

So we both lifted the metal cubes.

[John]

We did. We did. Are you in? Are you a knock? You did knock, right? Yes. We invest in.

[Jordy]

Yes. Introduce yourself for the stream.

[John]

Hello, everyone. My name is Paige Fendoordi. I'm the founding partner behind Genius Ventures. We invest in technical storytellers at their earliest chapters. And you wrote a children's book on venture capital. You're introducing. Introducing venture capital to the children. Are you getting paid out by Anthropic in the lawsuit? Did you see this? Oh, no, I haven't. Got to go check. You got to go check my mailbox. A few thousand bucks waiting for you. You can. You can roll that into the fund. Wait, that would be. I gotta check my email.

[Jordy]

Maybe.

[John]

What? Yeah, what. What's your reaction to. To demo day? Oh, my gosh. It's.

[Jordy]

Prices are too low, right? That's what most.

[John]

Yeah, most people have been saying. I don't feel comfortable investing. The prices are just too low.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Let me tell you, the energy is electric today. It's been so fun bumping into friends. My friend Shout out Casey Caruso, she brought me bone broth to pregame the day. No way. I drove over in the Waymo.

[Jordy]

This is the SF locket right here.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

No.

[John]

I think I said something like protein tea or something like that. Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

One day you guys are going to do a mukbang of all the bone. The bone broths.

[Jordy]

Well, we are. We are completely aligned with Kettle and Fire. We're aligned with Kettle and Fire because we're buddies with Justin Mayer. So we so we cannot be. We. We cannot be impartial when it comes to.

[John]

So what. What's the strategy going into demo day for you? You would. Already invested. Deployed. Yeah. So we looked at a bunch of companies, but actually the story on Knox was pretty unique. Zane and I met probably four years ago when I was fundraising for my first fund. And at the time he was working at a firm and they were like, buying and selling machine shops. And then we just stayed in touch over that time. And I would send him some of our manufacturing investments, like we have a company, Miniva. And I would send that to him. First thoughts on manufacturing? And then I saw on LinkedIn he was posting, he got into IC and I was like, dude, like, this is amazing. And then we hopped on a call. I was really excited by what they're building. Really fits into the re. Industrialization of America, the whole American dynamism. And I actually was on my friend's roof last night. We were talking and she was just like, you know, if you just like, love company, you just like, gotta go in. And I remember being like, okay, I gotta call Zayn and be like, yo, like, like, please, like, I really want to be a part of this journey. And he was like, yeah, we would love to have you be a part of it. So I sent the wire this morning. There you go. There you go. You did not. Don't want to wait until the end of the day.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Like, the tech world of his movement.

[John]

Yeah. And what I love about him is he. He just has this incredible sense of grace. Riding super aggressive waves. And then took that same speaking language here. Yeah. Took that same sense of grace into. Gets barreled.

[Jordy]

I know all about getting barreled. I've learned this. Shore break.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

It's great. Second question of our lightning round.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

How did you make your first dollar online or in business? Did you do anything crazy as a kid or early on?

[John]

Yeah, I tutored.

[Jordy]

Okay, well.

[John]

Okay. I'm trying to. I'm trying to think of, like, the first dollar. Oh, you know what it is? Okay. So my mom is an impressionist artist. Kim Doherty, Art. My brothers and I. When we were camping, we would go and sell her art cards in the campground when we were like five, Captive audience. Yeah, it was like seven five and a three year old going around being like, can you buy our cards? And like I became an amazing salesperson through that experience.

[Jordy]

Now you're selling money.

[John]

Yeah. Where are you on fund two now? What's the update on the fun? Yep. We're wrapping up our last couple investments in fund two. So we have two more to go.

[Jordy]

Very exciting.

[John]

More to come soon. Big announcements. Big announcements.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we'll ring the gong.

[John]

We'll ring the gong. We don't have our gong with us, but do we have a gong sound.

[Jordy]

Effect today or no?

[John]

I don't think so. Barely. No, we don't. We don't. Fortunately, no. Ben is the claps. Okay.

[Jordy]

The. The. The gong. We will save for a proper announcement.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Let them know we are open for business. Thank you.

[John]

It was a pleasure seeing both of you.

[Jordy]

It was a pleasure to see you soon. If you're watching live, we are at YC demo day and we have our next guest on the stream.

[John]

Welcome to the stream Slice.

[Jordy]

That's a fantastic jacket.

[John]

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Okay. I'm so distracted by the. It's oranger than the YC orange.

[John]

I know you went orange for orange and you won.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Who's buying and why?

[John]

Yeah. So we take all the data on the Internet and we figure out, okay, out of your customers who actually needs your product today. And we just tell you, hey, these are the people that need it today and that's the people you reach out to. So many products where you started for other B2B sales teams. So we can track your total addressable market. Whatever's in your CRM, whoever you're talking to, we figure out, okay, who needs your product today. What have they been posting? What have doing they been filing. Maybe a new blog is out that indicates they need something from you guys. Smart. It's always on. It's always on. Let's see who actually wants you instead of. How old were you when you realized you wanted to build agents for the enterprise. That's a great question. I think that's a fantastic question. Really started really, really young. But five years old, I woke up, I spawned into the world and I said I must. So what were you doing before this? I was basically hacking in college, but I was an investor banker at JP Morgan. Oh, let's go.

[Jordy]

Let's go.

[John]

So complete. Complete 180. And then. And then did you. Did you. Was that like summer internship? Summer internship. Did you. Did you drop out? Yeah, and then I graduated, thankfully. Contrarian. Contrarian.

[Jordy]

I'm super bullish. Here we go.

[John]

I like college. It was fun, right? No, I know. It's a good time.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Wait, no, no, no. Before the lightning round, please. How much money are you making right now? Oh, that's true. Oh. So we're at like 53k. Mrr. So let's go a bit more than. What is that? 600,000 a year?

[Jordy]

Yeah, that's great.

[John]

Ramen Profitable. Yeah, of course. Like 90% margins. Printing cash.

[Jordy]

That's great printing.

[John]

Let's go, let's go. This is just the start, though. That's right. The round's close. Yeah, the round is closed, unfortunately. But if. If you always let us in. Let us. I think for you guys, we can make. For you guys. They're gonna keep booing unless you let the sharks in.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

They've been super strategic, you know.

[Jordy]

25 mil from Qiaong. Yeah.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

We're focused on the company. We do both. So we'll track all the executives at the company that could be the one.

[Jordy]

But you. This is the company. And then.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Might be the internal champion.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

Got it all.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Yeah, full stack.

[John]

No, totally. And that's one of the Biggest reasons we haven't done the end of the stack yet. Like people sell in so many different ways. Well, and a lot of people are just like fighting and competing over the end of the stack with a bunch of slop. Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want any more emails in my inbox. Yeah, exactly. And so all you need to do is serve the person, you know, serve the lead up at the right time and then let a stake expert take it all. Yes.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

He's Lisan Al gaib of Enterprise SaaS. He doesn't need his blank slate. He doesn't need any influence. Well, honestly, I don't think, I don't draw that much inspiration just because I think the biggest motivating factor in this might be contrarian. It's not actually inspiration, but the fear of mediocrity, of it not working out has been way bigger for us. That's the biggest reason I don't have that much inspiration. But Eric from Ramp, my co founder used to work at Ramp. So I mean they are absolutely killing. You picked a legend from the modern era.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Yeah, I mean you can't not like what he's doing. Future hall of famer. Yeah, 100%.

[Jordy]

How did you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?

[John]

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

[Jordy]

Just one more ninja star prospecting. The kid in the second row, they're ready for it.

[John]

I just had to go To a dark place for this ninja star. Exactly.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Congrats on all the traction. Of course. Are you going to go, Are you going to hang out for. For the rest of the day or you're gonna go? Yeah. Always like to chat with sort of cool founders.

[Jordy]

Awesome.

[John]

Thanks for doing this guys. This is so cool. Awesome. Yeah, we'll find you after. Cheers. Good to meet you. Talking to you guys.

[Jordy]

Let's bring in our next guest. We have the co founder of Fall do we have.

[John]

Here he is.

[Jordy]

How you doing? Good to see you in person.

[John]

Welcome to the show.

[Jordy]

Welcome to the stream.

[John]

What's happening?

[Jordy]

Introduce yourself for the stream really quickly. Welcome to ycw.

[John]

Great shirt by the way.

[Jordy]

Thank you for this.

[John]

We just talked to a founder that made their first money flipping supreme box logo T shirts. There you go.

[Jordy]

That's right, there you go. Yeah, I'm decked out and false swag.

[John]

Yeah. But the GPU poor. Are you guys GPU poor anymore?

[Jordy]

Well, I have a GPU rich hats too. Okay. I gotta give you guys some.

[John]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

So I'm one of the co founders of false. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Also one of our latest sponsors.

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

Makes this possible.

[John]

So thank you corporate media.

[Jordy]

Give us your reaction to YC demo day. How what's the mood?

[John]

You just rolled in here from. But give us the vibe.

[Jordy]

Literally I just rolled in from our office for like five minute drive away. I mean it's amazing energy. I love it. Yeah. I mean being in the Silicon Valley for I don't know, 15 years. Close to 15. I actually never been to a demo day.

[John]

There you go. Brought you over.

[Jordy]

This is my first time and yeah. Love the energy. That's great.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. Raise less than a billion dollars.

[Jordy]

Yeah, sure. I think the total combined revenue of our customers is in the billions. So it's kind of ridiculous like how much demand there is in the consumer AI market or even like prosumer. But you can build amazing applications that leverage the gen media technology. Yeah, that prosumer thing is fascinating. We saw this with the images in ChatGPT, the Dall E moment where it's not like it's not an enterprise tool, but it's something that went so viral that everyone has to wake up. Even if you're just a marketing manager in a Fortune 500 company. Yes. You're going to see it, you're going to think about it and be like, okay, I actually need a strategy here. We recently saw this with Nano Banana. Again, we saw a little spike in the Google trends chart. What is.

[John]

Yeah, what have you guys seen on.

[Jordy]

Yeah, Nano Banana era? How are things changing? Yeah, just kind of give me your read. It's incredible. I mean, the demand, the way, the way I look at it is like every time we have new capabilities, there is a jump in demand. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like these things are eating into each other. It seems like we're really seeing like the, the building blocks coming together. So for example, with Nano Banana and like all the editing models in general, they actually are a key ingredient to really good video models. Meaning when you want to stretch to get like stick together a few clips, start with a few of those. Yeah, you actually want to. You can keep like the consistency between using these edit models. Right. So like it actually solves the consistency problem in video. Yeah. So that enabled video to go even further because now you can just generate like, you know, 10 different starting frames and ending frames and then combine them together. Yep. So these things are really like building blocks and they're kind of compounding on top of each other. So the way we see it in traffic and revenue is that anytime there's like a new model, new capabilities specifically, we see a huge jump.

[John]

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

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Yeah. This is so crazy. Still Nano Banana AI is the number one result for nanobana.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

And it's nailed it down. AI Image Editor Edit photo I mean.

[Jordy]

The app store was like that for so long where you search ChatGPT and it'd be like chat with GPT and it has like 5,000 five star reviews and you're like I know that's not from OpenAI because I can clock it as like like clearly this is not an OpenAI branding. It's slightly off and all of these things are. Believe it or not they're getting traction. Yeah. So that's insane. Yeah. Like Apple, I don't know they're not really doing much to stop this. Maybe they're trying but like not really. Game of Whack a Mole. Yeah, it's a game of Whack a Mole and I think they're benefiting from this and I think obviously long term what matters is how these products differentiate but I think it just shows you like how insane the demand is. Yeah. What keeps you up at night between the inference cost kind of stack. So are you, are you worried about GPU poor? Like are we going to run out of line time at tsmc? Are we going to see a chip shortage versus just large scale data center capacity versus energy if we play this out a few years what do you want to get right. That might be out of your control even but like you'd like to make it. Make sure that it goes right. Yes. I think we're very Capacity constraint but at what level that's interested in so. So yeah it's, it's so it.

[John]

Even this, even this, this nebbyous deal yesterday right. Like like shocked everyone right. Especially we. We were hanging with a, a friend who's a multistage. You know as multi runs, you know help helps run a multibillion dollar fund and he was just like, like a year ago this company like couldn't you know this company was not taken super seriously as a player and all of a sudden they have a $20 billion deal with, with Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft. So anyways like that that just shows like the fact that the fact that Microsoft is going you know if you kind of like stack rank where Nebia sits in the Neo cloud space. It's certainly wouldn't have been somebody's top choice but I think that just shows like how capacity constrained everyone is.

[Jordy]

It's incredible. Yeah, I think, I mean currently we're going through another crunch right now specifically for H1 hundreds. Yeah. So like we experienced this. Interesting. And you can kind of feel it coming and you know like what does.

[John]

It feel like though?

[Jordy]

It feels pretty bad, right? Like you're trying to, you're trying to scale. So like most of our workloads are inference workloads. We don't do any training. So our needs are we don't just buy 10,000 GPUs and just sit there for a whole year.

[John]

Right.

[Jordy]

That's not how we operate. We're more dynamic. We go and expand our fleet over time and we're multi cloud so we talk to all the new clouds and we have really great relationships with all of them. We test them, we benchmark them. If they work for us, if they're reliable support is good, we use them. So and you know when you need, when you need new capacity, you literally like hit them up. You call all of them up in.

[John]

Order old fashioned way.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Sure.

[Jordy]

That's how we operate. We like, like buy, buy a little bit in bulk, you know, but, but really prices hit a little bit of a bottom which like hasn't happened with A one hundreds. I mean if you look at it like they just kept going down with H1 hundreds they kept going down and they kind of hit the bottom. They're like now kind of picking back up again. How, what can you tell me about how inference moves around the globe as a function of time? I heard the story about mid Journey potentially doing inference in Asia. Right. Where they're sleeping, they're not using, they're not running Netflix in Malaysia or Singapore. And so when I generate an image or something, you know it's inferenced over there. Yeah, yeah. Is that something you're doing? Is that something that you're planning to do? Is that common? Yeah, naturally. So our traffic patterns are basically maxed out when US and Europe is up simultaneously. So that's that's kind of like the peak, peak time.

[John]

Right.

[Jordy]

And then we don't have like as much users. Like we still have customers in Asia, but it's much less. Yeah. So, you know, we do see a dip across, you know, when US and EU is asleep, there's a slight dip. We do a few things. Yeah, we use like, we basically like have a pool of GPUs that we like, you know, return and bring back simultaneously. But what's really important for us is uptime. So even if it means like we're going to have some idle GPUs, we'd like to take that cost. Because if you can't take those GPUs back, like if you let them go, you get them back, you know that then you have a very bad time with your customers. So for us, like reliability is more important. Got it. At this time. You know, and over long term, I think if you might be able to move the liquidity across the globe. True. Over time.

[John]

Any key lessons. You were at Oracle for four years back in the day. Any key lessons from that era that you've kind of brought in? Obviously Oracle's been on a tear and really leaning in.

[Jordy]

So Oracle was my first job out of College. So that's 2012, 2016. Back then they did not believe in cloud.

[John]

They were an anti cloud company.

[Jordy]

So Larry Ellison would go on stage, literally be like, guys, we don't believe. He has a famous quote, it's someone's computer or something. The cloud doesn't exist. They've come a really long way since then and obviously they're on a rip right now. I think with AI, what we hear from the field is like, there's really good Nebius, including. Nebius is a very good data center operator and Oracle is a very.

[John]

They had to do that because of running Yandex, right? Yes, yeah, exactly. Had to. I get more worried about Neo cloud products that are, we're doing. You know, like there's one, I think it's like Irene or something like that that's coming online that, that, you know, just last year I think was doing like bitcoin mining. Right. Like fast pivot, maybe a later pivot.

[Jordy]

Some of those guys are also good. But after Oracle I was at Coinbase. So yeah, the crypto, like some of the companies, including Cordoba, they had a lot of experience. But what's special about Oracle is that they've got a lot of experience. They know how to operate these machines at really good cost and uptime is very important. So all of these things, the economics and operating the data center play a huge role into this. I think I'm glad they chose going in this direction. You know, I think there's only a few opportunities, right? And this is, this is one of them. And they, like, they just went ahead and like, capitalize on it, which is really great. Lightning round.

[John]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Could be Larry.

[Jordy]

I really like. Okay. Could be anyone. Let's see. I like Brian. Brian Armstrong. There we go. It's pretty good. That's a great pick. I love it. Legend, second question. How did you make your first dollar? On the Internet or in business? Oof. Okay. I had. Do you know these toys? Karate Fighter. No.

[John]

No.

[Jordy]

Okay. It's like. Is that too old? How big is the toy?

[John]

It's like.

[Jordy]

It's like two fighters. Okay. You just like, make them fight with each other. So when I was like 6 or 7, this is not on the Internet. Yeah, almost. Rock' em. Sock and robot. Yeah, yeah, same thing, Same thing. I rented those out. You rented those? Flip the Capex to opex. You don't need to.

[John]

You don't need to buy anything.

[Jordy]

You go to him, you rent them today. He's renting.

[John]

That's actually. Kids don't do renting enough. They're always transacting. Am I stretching so much better.

[Jordy]

Full circle analogy here. You rent. You rent out the tokens, you rent out the kid.

[John]

What's your allowance? Okay, 20 bucks a week. That's what. That's the price. 20 bucks a week. There you go.

[Jordy]

Value based prices.

[John]

Yeah, exactly. Amazing. All right, well, come back on the show. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Guys, good to see you.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

I gotta. I gotta give you some hats. Please.

[John]

There we go.

[Jordy]

Give them out to your favorites.

[John]

Okay. We will perfect some rich hats.

[Jordy]

Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. This is great. We got amazing. We got. We got four.

[John]

Great seeing you.

[Jordy]

Thanks for coming by. We'll quiz. We'll quiz folks on whether they're GPUs or they merely sit on top of hyperscalers. We got Jack from slow. How you doing, Jack?

[John]

What's up?

[Jordy]

Oh, that's SU D. You didn't have to.

[John]

See you.

[Jordy]

I can't believe. You look fantastic. Well, you look fantastic.

[John]

Thank you.

[Jordy]

Thank you. How are we doing? How is.

[John]

How is demo day?

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Everybody's kind of. Kind of ripping.

[Jordy]

We kind of came in thinking like, let's try and find the theme because like, other than AI cursor. Yeah. There's like a little bit of an AI theme.

[John]

But we had metal. We had Zane.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Metal cutting. We had a missile company. Already there's been a few different companies and I feel like the narrative is shifting now to just like AI is just a tool, like cloud computing.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

It's just like, are you using like a, like a python or, you know, it's like. Or do you have a mobile strategy or are you pulling mobile off the shelf? It's like, like it's like at this point you're not going to use like. Oh yeah, I know.

[John]

We're building in the cloud.

[Jordy]

Exactly, exactly.

[John]

What do you actually do?

[Jordy]

It's like, okay, yeah, to your software company, but like, what are you actually doing? So it very much feels like we're in this era of like vertical software for AI. So it's like vertical AI is this vertical SaaS all over again? Yeah. But the traction is really good. The businesses are super niche and super interesting. So you're learning a lot about like a guy who set up a 311 line in Florida and he's getting a lot of calls about alligators. And like that's interesting to me.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Anyway, what's new with you? Well, so it's funny, like everybody, most.

[John]

The investors are here to like invest.

[Jordy]

Capital and introduce yourself for the story.

[John]

Now, I'm Jack Rains. I'm on the investment team over at.

[Jordy]

Slow Ventures, early stage venture fund.

[John]

We run about $1 billion now. Invest, generalist, a little bit of everything, one to $3 million checks.

[Jordy]

But unlike every other venture fund here.

[John]

We actually are launching the Slow Ventures etiquette finishing school. So I don't see this.

[Jordy]

You guys are dressed sharp, obviously. I remember this photo. This is a fantastic photo. We had this.

[John]

We got to Photoshop you on there. I know once I make, once I.

[Jordy]

Make gp, maybe I can be on there.

[John]

But you know, there's, there's a lot of capital floating around now that's like.

[Jordy]

Like financial capital to invest in founders. But the real problem in San Francisco is you don't know how to dress.

[John]

Like, wait, but if people don't know how to dress, why is it you're just expecting them to go to a black tie event? Well, you know, they can. We say that.

[Jordy]

You show up in.

[John]

A sloppy time, you want a high bar, and then you want to take.

[Jordy]

Them from good to constructive feedback. Right. I don't know if you guys, guys.

[John]

Were in like fraternities in college. There's this whole like you kind of.

[Jordy]

Get hazed if you're totally. This is just like pitching a startup. You come to you. The, the pitch is a little sloppy. You go around. By the time you come back and pitch the second, third time, the business is polished.

[John]

Yeah, literally. And it's like there's, you know, there's, there's business upside of this.

[Jordy]

Like fixing your etiquette makes you like.

[John]

You can command a boardroom better.

[Jordy]

Boardroom generals. We love boardroom. And like we also want to help.

[John]

Founders like get girlfriends or boyfriends.

[Jordy]

Like there's especially an SF like everybody's complaining. You know, the 996 is great except.

[John]

You know, has, has slow flipped bullish on a. Oh yeah, that's a good question. Are you guys still bearish speak for the entire firm?

[Jordy]

The entire firm and especially friend of the program Sam. Of course my boss who sells my paycheck is ideally watching this right now.

[John]

We're bullish on AI when it's a good company that uses AI.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Like the whole like our, our take.

[Jordy]

The whole time has been that like.

[John]

The models are going to eat pretty much everything. Microsoft's going to eat everything.

[Jordy]

I mean that's what we're seeing today at Demode.

[John]

It's micro. A lot of Microsoft is going to eat Nebby.

[Jordy]

A lot of the companies I feel like are in that same lesson idea of like AI cherry on top I.

[John]

Think is his phrase.

[Jordy]

I like that framing and I thought he did well. It's the more, the more vertically integrated. And the thing is like if the.

[John]

Founders actually have like real domain expertise.

[Jordy]

In the thing versus like somebody who.

[John]

Knew AI well and then they're trying.

[Jordy]

To like oh, this is an obvious problem maybe, but you're seeing some interesting.

[John]

Like one co founder is incredibly sharp in AI, been doing machine learning forever.

[Jordy]

And then the other co founder actually is that dude in their space for 20 years. That dude. That's when it gets interesting. Is he him? So when, when you have AI wizard plus co founder, who is him or her?

[John]

Or her? Yeah, that's, that's the magic. So I would not say that we're bullish on AI any more than we have been.

[Jordy]

But like you know, we respect AI used well it's like AI's table stakes.

[John]

If your only thing is AI. Get a, get a post out there. Slow respects AI.

[Jordy]

Yeah, you heard it here first. Breaking news. Cool. Okay, we've been asking everyone lightning round, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history of all time in History.

[John]

Probably outside.

[Jordy]

Of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. This is like espn, so you're supposed to say that. Yeah.

[John]

Now, John D. Rockefeller.

[Jordy]

Rockefeller.

[John]

What about you guys?

[Jordy]

I don't think we've. I don't think we've answered the question ourselves.

[John]

Mine is always Steve. It's just the obvious answer, but growing up.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Use. Just. It's. It's. My favorite products ever have consistently been Apple products.

[Jordy]

Yeah. And I. I just would listen to so much founders podcast. I say Jay Gould, of course, but yeah. Least favorite entrepreneurs ever. Least favorite entrepreneurs. They had to be good enough to be famous.

[John]

But you just don't like.

[Jordy]

Yeah, probably as well. SBF or something. Yeah, one of those. That's a good pick. Although. Although maybe he's underrated because he got that anthropic bags and he's ripping now. Okay.

[John]

Underrated venture investor.

[Jordy]

Underrated entrepreneur. Perhaps. Perhaps operator.

[John]

Do you think.

[Jordy]

Overrated gamer. Do you think the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account is real? I believe it is run by her husband.

[John]

Okay. And I do not believe I actually disagree. I don't. I don't think it screams like ghostwriter coded because for it to be run by her husband, her husband would have had to be like hyper online on X. And like, it just feels like very. Like you can tell when an account is ghost.

[Jordy]

Sure, sure, sure.

[John]

And it's ghostwritten. I believe that he probably has the keys.

[Jordy]

Okay. Sure.

[John]

Hired a ghostwriter.

[Jordy]

Yes, yes. But we agree that she does not have a prison phone. The everything app installed on a phone that is connected to some sort of 5G network within the prison. We agree on that. Okay, great.

[John]

Could she. Because SBF is tweeting for prison.

[Jordy]

It is. It is possible, but it's very much looked down upon. And of course, like, as soon as it. As soon as the tweet goes out, like, the warden should be able to get the news. Like, someone calls the warden because, like, someone sees the post, calls the governor, and then the governor calls the warden and says, like, one of your prisoners is breaking the rules. Like, can you do something about this? Like, it should flow through. I don't know.

[John]

Maybe if she. I don't know what her prison terms are. But like, if and when she gets out, like, how quickly do you think she could raise, like 50 million, 100 million? Do you think it. Do you think it's like John's take is if you really want to, she can rebuild her. Her personal brand. But that's. And people. People are like, people are just. It just marketing works. Right. So she's just like marketing to the timeline. Right now people are deciding, like, oh, maybe I like her. Like, oh, she's making me laugh. So people naturally start to like her. I don't think it's going to repair her brand in the, in the capital markets. I think if she wanted to truly repair brand would be like, deep threads and long posts on, like, biotech.

[Jordy]

That was my take. Was, was, was Martin Shkreli. He has posted about biotech, about trading. He's gotten a lot of picks, right? He talks about capital markets. He talks about, yes, he, he did get in legal trouble, right? But he has, but he has said the thing that I was doing before I went to prison, I'm still doing it, and I'm an expert and you can kind of judge me by my opinions and my takes and I'll go on live streams and you can judge me by my words. And I haven't seen enough posts from her on the state of MRNA or the state of, of GLP1s or the state of, of gene editing technology. Like, if she really is an incredible biologist who's been, like, wrongly convicted, like, show me some incredible biology takes. Right? Don't just be okay. Yeah. You're just a mean person.

[John]

The Martin Shkreli, like, short selling reports were like, it's like Friday at lunchtime. He just tweets, this company's a fraud. Their tests are going to fail. Stock drops 70%.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Yeah. Incredible performance.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

And it shows that he's like, he's like at least a student of the game, in the world, in the financial. Now he has a kid. Yeah, congrats. Drop his kid on the Internet. Anyway, we have a lightning round. We did the, we did the favorite entrepreneur. The second one is, how did you make your first dollar online or in business?

[John]

Oh, that's first dollar online or in business.

[Jordy]

I was trading SPACs in my Roth IRA, which is.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

So, like, most people lost money on these.

[John]

I. One of my buddies.

[Jordy]

You're the guy. You're the one guy.

[John]

I swear to God.

[Jordy]

This is why.

[John]

This is why Sam hired me, because.

[Jordy]

He really appreciated my SPAC story.

[John]

Basically, like, I graduated December 2019, was bored.

[Jordy]

Covid hits like, the first week I.

[John]

Start my job, corporate finance, very boring.

[Jordy]

And one of my buddies text me, he's like, DraftKings is going public through a SPAC. If you buy this thing, you'll own DraftKings stock.

[John]

I was, I didn't get it. I was like, why don't they just IPO structure and it's like, oh, if you buy these warrants, it's like a.

[Jordy]

Call option that doesn't expire for five years. And then spacs turned into a bubble. I built some web scrapers that would.

[John]

Like ping me whenever, whenever, like a.

[Jordy]

New SPAC got listed or like a merger was announced. So this was like fairly autistic.

[John]

But I saw that Apollo had a spac and I noticed that they had changed their website header from oil rigs to windmills in like June 2020. And my hypothesis was everybody's chasing the next Tesla. They're gonna announce like an EV deal.

[Jordy]

And the warrants are gonna go from 50 cents to like whatever.

[John]

And I just put all my money in Apollo warrants and then they announced.

[Jordy]

A deal with Fisker Automotive like a month later.

[John]

Made a lot of money.

[Jordy]

And I just basically got out because did not do well.

[John]

I just parlayed that like 20 times. My first online money was trading spacs in my retirement.

[Jordy]

That's a fantastic story.

[John]

So shout out. Ch.

[Jordy]

A lot of people lost money on his spacks. I would like to thank him for.

[John]

Bankrolling a trip to Argentina.

[Jordy]

Oh, let's go. Hopefully you had steak, bottle of wine, maybe some tequila.

[John]

And sps are back.

[Jordy]

So maybe it's time to do it again. Maybe, maybe, maybe this time is different.

[John]

Couple IPOs coming on. Good to see you.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

Cheers. Great to see you. Bye guys.

[Jordy]

See ya. And we will bring in our next guest to our YC demo day stream. We are live. How you doing? Of course. How you doing?

[John]

Great.

[Jordy]

Great to meet you.

[John]

Very welcome to Decoded. I love it. I love it.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

My name is Arlen. I am building Nozomio, which is an API that gives more context to agents.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

So if you're a cursor user.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

You can pretty much just go to cursor, index any documentation or code base and give it as a context to an agent.

[Jordy]

What exactly is happening? I know cursor does kind of roll ups of what's happening. There's some rag infrastructure that's popular. What else is going on in the actual product to unlock value?

[John]

Yeah. So the two reasons I built this is because I was so fucking pissed when I would go to Google copy, paste all the docs and paste them right in the cursor. Yeah. The memory is not persistent so they will fucking forget that in like two seconds. And second one is that you also pollute context window, which like causes context fraud. It's actually a study done by Chroma, which is like a company.

[Jordy]

Oh yeah, we know Jeff.

[John]

Well. Yeah. Saying like post 4000 tokens. I think like the performance of any LLMs goes like this.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

So that's like the reason I built this.

[Jordy]

That makes sense. Do you have a take on Jeff, Jeff's take on like context windows and the need for rag? Like how do you think about the trade offs in where the frontier models are scaling? Like there's one world where you just throw bigger and bigger context windows endlessly. Maybe that doesn't work.

[John]

Yeah. You know what, there are two different architectures right now. So if you look at cursor and cloud code, cloud code doesn't index your code base. So they only do agent to crack which like only uses terminal tools like creepgrep, Grep and cursor. They use both. They use local index and also vector store. So like Rack.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

It's really hard to say right now. A lot of people started hating on Rack.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

But I think it's still popular if you're combining it with like graph rack, which is also a very good approach.

[Jordy]

Okay. Yeah. What's the traction of the business been like.

[John]

Yeah. So in the past three weeks I signed up 25% of the current batch. Yeah. Thank you. And 5% of the spring batch.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

So yeah, total like more than 90 OSC companies and. Yeah, about like 11.5 K. Mrr.

[Jordy]

There we go. Congratulations.

[John]

Are you profitable? Yes, sir. Yeah, because like wasted deals cover everything, like all the infrastructure costs. Yeah. So yeah, I guess.

[Jordy]

Oh yeah, yeah. It comes to the infrastructure guys. Okay.

[John]

Incredible. What were you doing? You have a crazy story, right? So I was bored of high school when I was 17 and I wanted to build, so I dropped out. Raised a million in a couple days in London. Couple days. How did that go? Yeah, so usually like people raise, like it takes weeks to race in London, especially in Europe because they're so fucking slow. But like if you find the right approach and like good people. So in my case it was local club. They're really, really good and they're really fast. So I guess I just got lucky. I built from London for a couple. Couple months and then applied for Oscar. Same company. Same company. Yeah. I applied for YC for my third time. Third time rejected the first. My dad applied three years ago, he got rejected. So I sort of like put a goal for myself to like fucking apply again and again. Yeah. That's incredible.

[Jordy]

Amazing.

[John]

How did you make your first dollar? On the Internet? Yeah, on the Internet, Yeah. So When I was 15 I was a student and I wanted to build something and I needed some domain expertise. And since I was a student, EdTech was like the solution. So I built like an AI scholarship database for high school students from like underrepresented backgrounds to go and apply to summer programs in us. So I did a couple of those myself, like at Berkeley and then at UPenn, came back, scaled it to 20,000 active users and made like $2,000 or something. Congrats.

[Jordy]

That's amazing.

[John]

Take it to the bank.

[Jordy]

Last question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

[John]

Yeah, who the fuck the most money, bro? Like Elon Musk? Yeah, yeah. He's the richest man, bro.

[Jordy]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

But otherwise, yeah, Brian Chesky is my goat. I love Brian Chesky.

[Jordy]

Brian Chesky, founder mode.

[John]

There you go.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

How's the fundraise going? I closed it a couple weeks ago. Yeah, a couple weeks ago. Okay. Incredible.

[Jordy]

That's great.

[John]

Crushing it, dude.

[Jordy]

Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming.

[John]

So much. Yeah, thank you. Great to meet you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming on.

[Jordy]

Have a good one.

[John]

Up next, who we got next?

[Jordy]

We are continuing our coverage live from YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream.

[John]

What's happening?

[Jordy]

I'm John. Pleasure.

[John]

Great to meet you. Alessia.

[Jordy]

How you doing? Would you mind introducing yourself and your company?

[John]

Sure. So, hi everyone, I'm Alessia. Virginia Flow is the all in one solution to build production ready apps in no code.

[Jordy]

Okay. We've seen a lot of news recently that there's now a whole industry of vibe code cleanup specialists. What's your reaction? Can Vibe coding ever make it to production?

[John]

No, no, not now at least. Like all the solutions out there are really broken and they can they give you this wow effect in the front end, but on the back end side there is so much to do and there is a huge need. People are, they have hair and fire problems and they need to solve these problems. The market is huge.

[Jordy]

So how are you plugging in? How do you deliver value to your customers?

[John]

So we have a solution which is a hybrid approach between lovable and anytime and a database plugged in. So we have this no code interface that is AI. Like the AI generate this flow and then maps deterministically to code so the code is never going to be hallucinating. And yeah, that's a robust solution.

[Jordy]

How's traction been so far?

[John]

Traction is amazing. As soon as we launched, as I said, people have this hair and fire problems so they just want to throw money at you for you to onboard them on platforms that they can actually continue developing the application on.

[Jordy]

Did you share any metrics today at demo day?

[John]

I will share it. I haven't presented yet.

[Jordy]

Okay. Okay.

[John]

You will front run it. Front run it. Front run it for the audience. 8,000 applications in three weeks.

[Jordy]

Congratulations. Congratulations.

[John]

What were you doing before this? I worked as a software engineer for four years for a company and actually built a no code tool which is very similar to what Beck listed in for animation and 3D modeling. Oh, that's for Disney.

[Jordy]

Interesting.

[John]

Disney Crazy.

[Jordy]

That's amazing.

[John]

How do you. How, how. How have you reacted to like the way that Disney's approached AI? I know they kind of seemingly. It's like they're very careful not to get into hot water around like using like too much AI but clearly want to stand there. I think they use AI everywhere, like literally everywhere in rendering 3D modeling everywhere. And it's cool. Like you can just make everything faster.

[Jordy]

And super high resolution renderings. Makes sense. Let's move into our lightning round. We've been asking two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

[John]

My favorite entrepreneur is Taylor Swift.

[Jordy]

Taylor Swift.

[John]

I'm a big fan and she is amazing.

[Jordy]

That's great icon. Definitely mogul.

[John]

Resilience and persistence.

[Jordy]

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

[John]

Business by selling stuff that my brothers didn't use at home.

[Jordy]

Really?

[John]

Yes.

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

No way.

[Jordy]

It's amazing.

[John]

Nice. Anyway, incredible.

[Jordy]

Thank you so much for coming on the stream.

[John]

Thank you. Great to meet you.

[Jordy]

Have a good. Cheers. We'll bring on. Oh, I forgot to ask about the gpu. We got to ask if they. If their GPU will. Hey, how you doing?

[John]

Good.

[Jordy]

Nice to meet you.

[John]

Welcome to the show.

[Jordy]

I'm John. Welcome to the show.

[John]

Josh.

[Jordy]

Josh, pleasure.

[John]

Jordy. Good to meet you.

[Jordy]

Good you to see introduce yourself for the stream.

[John]

All right.

[Jordy]

What are you building?

[John]

Well, I'm Joshua March. I'm the co founder and CEO of Veritas Agent. We build AI agents for the consumer lending industry.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

So interfacing with borrowers to help doing sales, servicing collections for like fintechs, banks, credit unions, services, that kind of thing.

[Jordy]

Do you see your company as GPU poor or GPU rich?

[John]

We're rich.

[Jordy]

Everything rich. Everything GPU rich.

[John]

What. How have you. Like how have you. What's go to market look like?

[Jordy]

Are you.

[John]

Are you focusing?

[Jordy]

Are you trying to banks involved?

[John]

Yeah, I imagine there's like a couple BNPL players that would you know, be. Be ideal. Yeah. No, we're, we're currently. Our first design partner was in the collection space collecting on medical payments. That's been super successful. We've done thousands of outbound calls, but.

[Jordy]

Sort of like a, not a name that you recognize.

[John]

No, but we're.

[Jordy]

And we're now launching big.

[John]

Yeah, exactly. We're now getting live with a fintech who's launching us into their conversion funnel for like, for sales. There's a big servicer that's in the.

[Jordy]

Solar space, there's collections agencies so big handful, makes sense.

[John]

Did you have experience in the, in the space prior to this? Yeah, so I actually, I previously built a contact center software company so like 15 million ARR before I got acquired. Nice. And then immediately prior to launching this company I was essentially working at like a Web3 credit fund and had invested into some emerging market debt buyers who are doing collections and servicing which kind of exposed me to the whole world and I was like we should just.

[Jordy]

Do this with AI basically. Did you share any metrics today at demo day?

[John]

Yeah, we haven't converted any of our. We got our first design customer live.

[Jordy]

Like six weeks ago.

[John]

We're now launching with like five more. Yeah, the first customer, the first design partner. We did like 4,000 outbound calls and collected like 50k in the first month.

[Jordy]

Which is like a big success. But like. Yeah, still getting gone.

[John]

Are you, how are you thinking about the, are you thinking of selling like the result in some way like over time? Would you just charge a percentage? Yeah, it depends who we're selling to. Yeah. So when we're selling to like a.

[Jordy]

Servicer or collections agency, we'll probably just.

[John]

Sell on usage based kind of pricing.

[Jordy]

But when we're selling to fintechs and.

[John]

Banks then we'd love to do as much outcome based pricing as possible. And that's on the sales side, the collection side, everything.

[Jordy]

We have been asking everyone two questions. First, who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time? So there's this guy Felix Dennis who.

[John]

Was a British entrepreneur and he wrote this book called how to Get Rich which I think is the best book on entrepreneurship. And he's like a crazy guy. He's dead now but he was like a crazy, crazy guy. Big, big into magazines. Yeah, you would love this guy. He owned like, he was like PC magazine, Maxim, the week. He was like a big publisher, did a load of different stuff.

[Jordy]

Felix Dennis.

[John]

Felix Dennis.

[Jordy]

Great. I'll have to look him up. Second question, how do you make your first dollar online, on the Internet or in business?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

So I launched an e commerce website.

[John]

When I was like 19, still at college and was selling. Selling like a load of homewares online. Homewares?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Nice. John was selling. Were you selling DJ equipment? He was an international businessman from a young age.

[Jordy]

Businessman at age 13 is great.

[John]

13, nice. Awesome.

[Jordy]

Anyway, thank you so much for stopping.

[John]

Congrats on. On the progress.

[Jordy]

Congrats on the progress. Let's move on to our next guest. We are live from YC Demo Day 2025. How you doing? We're getting some photos taken by Bryce Johnson. Welcome to the stream.

[John]

We got our next guest.

[Jordy]

Wait, the prompting company. Come on.

[John]

The prompting company. The promise prompt maxing. Yes, sir.

[Jordy]

But of where? Where could you possibly be based?

[John]

Of San Francisco.

[Jordy]

The prompting.

[John]

San Francisco. Don't capitalize the of though.

[Jordy]

I'm just looking at this funny.

[John]

Yeah. Bull market and companies named that start with the Exactly. The issue tracking of company of Australia. Right?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Exactly.

[Jordy]

Where did you pick that name and logo and design?

[John]

We picked it two months ago.

[Jordy]

Two months ago.

[John]

Okay. Okay. You should be the last one to do it though, I hope. I think. I think he's getting kind of bored. Yeah. The trade is over.

[Jordy]

So you're prompting. It's pretty self evident. But tell the stream who you are, what you actually do.

[John]

Yeah. My name is Kevin. I'm the CEO and co founder of the prompting company and we help product get mentioned in ChatGPT.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Okay. Okay. Not just another generative engine optimization tool. Yeah, yeah. How do you differentiate? Yeah, for sure. So we plan the infrastructure layer. We're not just creating articles for you. We create shadow sites for our companies to influence all.

[Jordy]

Is there any special design in the type of shadow site that you're building? Like what exactly does that look like?

[John]

Yeah, for sure.

[Jordy]

Versus APIs. There's documentation. There's a lot of different stuff.

[John]

For sure. So these shadow sites are basically like markdown versions of your site.

[Jordy]

Okay. Markdown.

[John]

Yeah, we basically iterate on more of those.

[Jordy]

Why do the foundation models like markdowns so much?

[John]

Because it takes like. No, it's just 90% less tokens, man.

[Jordy]

Oh, okay.

[John]

It's just more compressed super fast.

[Jordy]

Got it. Than HTML.

[John]

Yeah. Okay.

[Jordy]

Because if they scrape the HTML, they're bringing in all the css. Okay.

[John]

Did you come into the batch with this idea or. Yes, we did. We did not. Pivot came in pure play. It's a pure play. What were you doing before this? I was at Beehive. I was working there. Oh, no way. Cool. Made your money in newsletters Newsmax. Yeah. What's. What's traction been like? It's been pretty good, dude. We are at 300k in ARR now. Nvidia is a paying customers.

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

Nvidia. How did you land Nvidia? Oh, dude, it was a crazy bake off but ultimately the better product one a bake Off. I love Bake Offs. That's great. Very cool.

[Jordy]

Speaking of Jensen, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? In history.

[John]

In history.

[Jordy]

I mean anyone alive or dead, dude.

[John]

Steve Jobs.

[Jordy]

Steve Jobs.

[John]

Good answer, good answer.

[Jordy]

What about how you made your first dollar on the Internet or in business?

[John]

On the Internet. I actually ran a service back then to jailbreak iPhones.

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

Josh Browder.

[Jordy]

Josh Browder, yeah, he was jailbreak a lot of iPhones and there was someone else who is fixing broken iPhone screens. So the little low hanging fruit in the digital economy. Very, very popular. Popular. Would you consider yourself GPU poor or GPU rich?

[John]

GPU poor at the moment.

[Jordy]

Poor at the moment.

[John]

How's the, how's the fundraise going? It's going pretty great, man. We're way over subscribed.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

Picking our lead right now.

[Jordy]

Amazing. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.

[John]

Great to meet you. Good to meet you. Coming on.

[Jordy]

Have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest from YC demo day. How are we doing on time guys? We have to get out of here to get catch a flight. Correct. Okay. Let Nick know. How you doing?

[John]

What's happening?

[Jordy]

Nice to meet you, Theo. Good too.

[John]

I really meet you guys. What's happening?

[Jordy]

How you doing?

[John]

Yeah. Fellow content creator streamer accidental business guy turned into an influencer somehow introduce yourself to the stream. Yeah. For those who don't know me, I'm Theo. I started, I was actually doing a YC company for making stuff like this easier. Because I worked at Twitch for five years, I wanted to be easier to do live content collaborations. So I built Zoom for streamers. Make it easier to bring a guest like you onto a show like mine. And each. I'm assuming you guys are actually not using obs. That's cool. But we built everything around obs so that you can use your professional existing solutions. Copy paste somebody straight from your browser into our or into OBS at 1080p.

[Jordy]

HD depending on what you're using. If you're using Hangouts or Zoom, we're.

[John]

An alternative to Hangouts. In Zoom we're like. But to be clear, we don't really focus on this product anymore. We built it because it was so needed and nothing else like this existed before. And I saw the need. When I was at Twitch, we won half the top streamers, a reward was 8k a month. So we started exploring more. I also like one of those things where you can get all the most important customers and have a tiny business. Yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

I had a buddy who built this amazing tool for helping make documentaries and I was just like, this is a very small market, man. It's coming from any funding.

[John]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

And I was like, this is the best. I was making YouTube videos, like video essays.

[John]

What? What did you. So did you.

[Jordy]

You guys tag them all?

[John]

Kept the product running, people. Yeah, still running to this day. It's relatively easy to maintain. Thankfully. We. I'm proud of what we built there. But at the same time, I wanted to better understand creators and I just missed going deep on tech because when I was at Twitch, my favorite time of day was lunch and dinner where I could just nerd out with these super experienced engineers. Covid took that away from me. So I built my YouTube channel to better understand what creators needed and to just get all this weird tech stuff off my chest. And it blew up almost immediately. I'm still the last. Do you have a head of membership? So you've seen the browser company video? I love that.

[Jordy]

It was a fantastic reaction. Jordy was saying the same thing in the morning.

[John]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fantastic outcome. I'm super happy for everyone involved. I think. I think I can see Atlassian, like, wanting to take the browser very seriously. And so there's a way that in the fullness of time that it will look like, you know, incredible deal for both sides. But I did see the video. I was like, wait, head of membership? What's going on there? There's just certain things in that scenario that are like, hard to not have your eyes catch. So the chaos I've engaged with since my YouTube channel blew up accidentally. Just got more into dev tool stuff. Built some dev tools as well for the business. Got so annoyed with the state of all the AI chat apps. Deep seq v3 drops like, oh my God, this model is incredible. But the website was somehow even worse. So I said, time to make a better one. So I'm a nerd about like full stack web and application performance and just quality of experience. I helped build a lot of Twitch chat when I was over there. As far as I know, fastest updating text interface on the web.

[Jordy]

Oh yeah, people love Twitch.

[John]

Yeah, Twitch is so much better than YouTube. It's unbelievable to this day. So I wanted to make this something.

[Jordy]

We unpack that because I believe that Twitch chat, it specifically like doesn't just endlessly load, it loads blocks at a time.

[John]

It's blocks, but they come in really fast.

[Jordy]

Is that a mistake?

[John]

No, that's by design. Absolutely by design. Like chat readability is like comprehensive. Like your ability to comprehend what's happening in chat is like I was really.

[Jordy]

Ludwig and he was saying like, could I start over if I didn't have any Twitch followers? And he did this experiment and he was like, I think I have an edge just because I'm good at reading chat. And I was like, I never would have clocked that as like an. As like a thing.

[John]

But it is actually one of the things I do differently is I film all my YouTube videos live on Twitch. So I'll be like. And I have chat open next to my like a return feed. Yes. I have a team that like helps, you know, chat. We've built some custom software to auto chop the individual topics so we can get a video out within an hour of it being recorded, which I'm really proud of. But the goal is really to do it live. So any like mistakes I make, any sources I need help finding, any weird comments or questions I would get about the thing can happen while I'm filming.

[Jordy]

So then the final thing is much better.

[John]

Yeah, it just cuts like it takes us an hour and a half to film an hour long video and then like 30 minutes to edit it. It's great. I'm really proud of our workflow there.

[Jordy]

That's cool.

[John]

Super fun. Was that a content creation injury? Got in a fight with a Firefox user joking it was a skateboard injury from a long time ago. Oh, wow. Years have slowly built up. Yeah, I was a sponsor skater for a little bit. I really into that to this day. But yeah, 10 years ago had a really bad. 15 years ago had a really bad wrist break. Also tore the entire ligament for my thumb and it just slowly been like falling off of my hand. So. Finally got that reconstructed. Will you. You should build an app that uses computer vision to teach people how to kick flip. I think there could be a bull market in that. In that space. Yeah. It'll be slightly bigger than the one for content creator tools. No, but it's a public service. Right. Teaching the world to kickflip. You just come out. Our mission is to kick flip. So that's been fun for me recently that I actually really appreciate you guys for too. Is it seems like the hunger for people to understand how to the startup stuff actually works has been growing a lot recently. I've always been a nerd about it. Recently I've been investing in a lot more. I think I've been over 100 yc startups at this point. It's been really fun for me and love it. The and recently it feels like I can actually talk about that stuff more. Where previously people's eyes would just glaze over, they wouldn't care. But I'm doing like one startup E video a week at least right now and they're performing incredibly well. The response has been awesome. It feels like people are ready to talk about this now. Yeah, it's a really good time.

[Jordy]

Big enough. I mean you look at the traction on like the actual Y Combinator account and like on YouTube this has like over a million followers.

[John]

Still one of the most underrated YouTube channels too. Like the old Michael Cybel Dalton podcast. Like is. I reference it all of the time.

[Jordy]

Good. Yep. Yeah. And I mean they've. But all the stuff that Gary's done, they've done really?

[John]

Absolutely love all of them. It's like, like the Y Combinator, like program Y Combinator content. The Y Combinator partners. Everything I went through there is a huge part of why my YouTube is successful. And now yt3 chat successful too. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

[Jordy]

Makes sense.

[John]

What's your goal over the next five, ten years? If I had a five to ten year goal, I would be probably not here to be working on it. I have no idea. I've always kind of just went with the flow and that works really well. My thing's always been it's better to be late than early. I find that people try way too hard to be early to a thing and it ends up kind of rotting their brain a little bit. Like imagine you saw how powerful smartphones were getting back in the day. You're like, oh my God, this is obviously the future. Everything's going to be on phones. So I'm going to go all in making Java applets for the Kyocera, Echo and BlackBerry. Are you better or worse off than somebody who got into app development two years after the App Store came out?

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah. Sometimes it's better to be late. Everybody told me I was too late when we made our chat app. And we're, as far as I know, the fastest growing third party chat app.

[Jordy]

Wow.

[John]

Crazy.

[Jordy]

Fantastic. We've been asking everyone two questions. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history?

[John]

History makes it tough. I would say like alive or dead? Modern history, like alive makes it a lot easier. Modern history. I think Tim Sweeney is my personal favorite. The way he's aligned his business is incredible. Like, to this day he still owns exactly 51%, so nobody can outvote him. His focus on making everything better for developers, knowing the flywheel will eventually fund him back. It's kind of like Apple strategy, but way more focused on developers, which I care a lot about. Even things that have been a flop like Epic Games Store were with the goal of getting developers more money because he was tired of Apple getting subsidized with 30% revenue from an indie game dev.

[Jordy]

Yep, that makes a ton of sense.

[John]

What did you. What did you think of the Apple launches today? Apple launch today was as a nerdy tech and video guy, I love it. The iPhone 17 Pro is an actual, like monumental leap in what you can do for video production. Have you guys paid into any of that stuff? No, these guys are going to love it.

[Jordy]

I just know 1448 megapixel, like better.

[John]

That's cool. But the. No, I mean that they added Genlock support.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

So like full Black magic S like integrations. You can do timecode with a new USB like device. They part with blackmagic to make. You can do crazy synchronization shots where you get like 20 iPhones at different angles and do like frame by frame, like, like pause, like freeze frame 3D shots and stuff with it. That was. Normally you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars before. Now you just get like 20 iPhones and a couple USB adapters. It's insane.

[Jordy]

And that's gonna be even cheaper in like two years.

[John]

And Prores raw, which is really cool too because I know way too much about cameras. I'm really nerdy about this. But the Red camera company had an exclusive patent on compressed RAW video encoding where on camera specifically. So the reason that all those like USB or I used to be like external HDMI recorders got popular. Atmos is a business because of Red's bullshit patent. That patent allowed them to just get away with things they absolutely shouldn't have and shut down every other camera company trying. The patent was they had succeeded in suing Apple. They succeeded in suing dji. They also got barred from the US they succeeded in suing Sony, Canon, a bunch of other companies. They were suing Nikon. Nikon said, how expensive are you guys? And bought them for like $30 million. So now the patent's not being enforced. So Apple got to Put Pro RAW in the new iPhone, which is unbelievable.

[Jordy]

That's wild.

[John]

Actual RAW video encoding on a phone is just. I could not have imagined that even two years ago.

[Jordy]

That's crazy. Other question we've been asking, how do you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?

[John]

Minecraft.

[Jordy]

Minecraft.

[John]

I was hosting Minecraft servers.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Somebody else said this.

[John]

I. If I hear from a founder that they started in Minecraft servers, I don't even think twice. I just write the channel tech. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, it's so crazy. It's a sneaker botting.

[Jordy]

Sneaker botting.

[John]

Minecraft iPhone repair.

[Jordy]

Way back, like buying and selling stuff on ebay was popular in like the 90s, 2000s.

[John]

Yeah, there's always one of those every generation. It's been really fun to see. And now I feel like people skip the step and just go straight to the business, which is interesting. Just start an enterprise. SaaS, just go to the end state. Yeah. Just going to like the Founders Inc. Events and seeing how many like excited young founders there are now is something I never would have imagined before. Like when I was a kid, it was the promise. Like the exciting thing is you'll get to work at the Google campus one day. Like that's what you were aspiring for. Now you're aspiring to be here. And that's a really interesting shift.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Are you GPU poor or GPU rich?

[John]

I'm GPU middle class.

[Jordy]

Gpu Middle class.

[John]

Middle class.

[Jordy]

You could pick a hat if you want one.

[John]

Oh, I want the GPU poor hat for sure. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Middle class is disappearing. You got to go. You got to go up or something or you gotta go up or down. Well, thank you for joining.

[Jordy]

It's not properly fitted, but you can.

[John]

I will fix that for sure. Yeah. Thank you guys. Appreciate it.

[Jordy]

Thank you so much for stopping you.

[John]

Guys on any weird stuff in like the AI chat space or UI or whatever. No worries at all. I miss even more of them than you guys do. Let me know if you ever need help with anything. I'll be around. Cheers.

[Jordy]

Have a good rest of your day. Lightning round. Let's, let's. Oh, there's people out there. Okay, okay. Let's run it.

[John]

Let's run it.

[Jordy]

Let's run it. Let's run it. Come in quickly. Who are you? What do you do? Welcome. Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself. Who are you?

[John]

What do you do? Bob. Hi, I'm Bob. Welcome to the show. CTO of Embedder we build coding agents of firmware.

[Jordy]

Okay, coding agents for firmware.

[John]

Firmware, yeah.

[Jordy]

What, what device are they?

[John]

Couldn't be done. So we do microcontrollers, Linux computers. So think about any microcontroller you can think of. STM32, ESP, TI, NXV, any, any manufacturer. Did you, when did you learn you wanted to do agents for coding? Agents for firmware. I was going to go, good question. So I did hardware all my life. Started like, you know, started when I was small doing robots, moving to more professional stuff in high school, in college. School. Let's go. In college. I built humanoids and then went to a startup, did medtech stuff and then went to Tesla, worked on Robotaxi. So we kind of saw it. I saw this problem from like, you know, like a 10% research lab to a trillion dollar company. That firmware development was so inefficient compared to web dev and traditional coding agents just couldn't do it. Like cloud code or cursor. They lack context. What we say about context is two different problems. One problem is that has no understanding of the chips. It needs to read the documentation for the chips to understand how to actually write the code. And once it has written the code, there's no way to test the code on the device. Right. So we built this information layer and this hardware interaction layer where you can actually read out outputs from, from your board and run like a GB debugger to debug.

[Jordy]

How's traction? How's demo day going?

[John]

Tracking has been Great. We launched three weeks ago. Now we have over 100 paying users. 500 line.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

500,000 lines of code change. Working on the first enterprise.

[Jordy]

Who's your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

[John]

Oh, Elon. Has to be. Are you bullish? Bearish Humanoids in the next five years. I'm very bullish. In the next five years they'll be walking around. You think I will have one in my home? Maybe not your home. Factories.

[Jordy]

Factories.

[John]

Factories. Why factories Factories? Because like it's a straight up replacement for you human workers. You just so much lower cost and you don't have to modify anything in your factory.

[Jordy]

Drop in replacement free workforce. Okay, we will see. Okay, well thank you so much.

[John]

We'll hold you to it. We'll hold you to it.

[Jordy]

We'll hold you to it. Five years. Expect to hear from from us with with a fact check on that. Thank you so much for coming by. Thanks for coming later. Have a good one. We will bring in our next guest. We're doing lightning Round. We got a lot of folks out there. Let's bring in next founder from YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. Hi, I'm John.

[John]

Elena. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

[Jordy]

Introduce yourself. Who are youman?

[John]

Elena Seash. I'm a partner at Google Ventures.

[Jordy]

Oh, fantastic.

[John]

Amazing.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

I was going to hit this button but not partner.

[Jordy]

Partner how. What's your reaction to demo day been? What are the common trends that you're seeing? How is this one different from other ones? Are valuations the highest they've ever been? What are you seeing?

[John]

I feel like valuations are always higher. I think the fact that the public markets have come back has just reinstated a lot of faith.

[Jordy]

IPO Windows people.

[John]

IPO windows open. I'm excited to see a lot of that. I run fintech at Google Ventures. There's a lot of. Of fun fintech and crypto companies in the pipeline and yeah, it's been a really fun demo day. Have you done Energy is always. Did you do any of the companies in this batch yet? Are you still looking? Not in this batch yet, but I think. But you guys are. You guys can. Are so multi stage that you kind of come in forever. More about.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Building. Building relationships. Right now we're investing out of a $2.8 billion fund every two years.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And our SOL LP is Google. That's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. We like work.

[Jordy]

Do you introduce it as Google Ventures but isn't it rebranded fully to GV or have we gone back?

[John]

It's, you know, it depends on what flavor people are looking for. But it's both GV and Google.

[Jordy]

Got it.

[John]

Give us the state of early stage fintech today because if this was four years ago, I think we would have seen like half the batch. Something like that. Fintech related and very little of that today. From. From what we've seen, it probably creates. Probably means like now is the right time to be starting company. But what are you seeing? Yeah, I feel like fintech has always ebbed and flowed and at gv, we've been investing in fintech since the start. We were seed investors in Robinhood, seed investors in Plaid, seed investors in Gusto. We recently invested in Ramp and so what you can kind of see in fintech right now. Yeah. Let's go. Big day today. What you can see in fintech is a barbell. There are people who are solving things at the earliest stages. Parts of the world where fintech still hasn't touched. I'll still say FinTech's total market cap is 4% of all of financial services. Financial services is 20% of the S&P 500. So there's a lot of ways to go.

[Jordy]

Do you think the fact that there are so many scaled growth stage decacorn + fintech companies with founders still at the helm changes the strategy at the early stage? Like, do you need to be more focused or niche? Because you have Zach at Plaid, you have Eric at Ramp, Brian at Coinbase, Robinhood. Like, it's not the same era. Very much like, the founders died 50 years ago. And so, yeah, it's probably open season on that category. It's like, no, if you. If you start that company in that space, like that person, that founder that we all know who's already on the podcast circuit is going to be coming for your life.

[John]

And they go multi product. Right. They earn the trust of a consumer.

[Jordy]

And then they get into everything and they also are not in manager mode. So. Yeah.

[John]

And I mean, I think that's a lot of why we invested in Ramp, even at this last round's price. Right. Like, I've spent a decade looking at Office of the CFO software, and I think that they'll end up winning. Let's give it up for the Office of the cfo. Let's do it. And I think the best founders think they're never done.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And so with FinTech, what I love about it is I look at Amex, it's a $230 billion company.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

There is a lot of room to run if you're a fintech founder.

[Jordy]

Are you pitching Ruth Perrott on Ramp?

[John]

Always.

[Jordy]

Okay, let's make it happen.

[John]

Yeah. Were you at the last demo day? Yes.

[Jordy]

Why?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

One that's. That's more important. But I was gonna say, like, Vibe space analysis. To me, the. I've been more. A lot more excited about this batch than last time. Last time, it felt like super derivative, everything. It was a lot of, like, agents for agents and infrastructure for agents. This is a lot more of, like, less infrastructure. More like here is a product with like a clear value prop, and we have a hundred people. Yeah.

[Jordy]

We're using AI. We're using AI. Like, we're using cloud or mobile or anything else.

[John]

Yeah. And I think. I think I always think of things as variables. Right. And when people are building for things that don't yet exist, it becomes stacking a bunch of variables on top of each other. And I think what I love about this batch is it seems pretty grounded and Rooted in things that people need today, like the market is there. I'm not taking a risk on whether or not the market's going to come into fruition. Yeah. And a year ago, if you were doing agentic infrastructure, there was a lot of people that I was seeing, like, not even just in yc, that were like building infrastructure for agents and yet. And they would sign up a lot of customers, but none of the customers were creating any value. So it was like infrastructure for companies that weren't really working. And I think that's. And I think that the catalyst now is like, now you have a bunch of companies building Agentex software that are delivering value for customers. And so a lot of the infrastructure companies can probably work now.

[Jordy]

Yeah, we're doing a lightning round. Outside of Larry and Sergey, obviously, who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time in history, alive or dead? Anyone that you think is inspiring? Maybe you read a biography or something.

[John]

Oh, wow. There are. There's so many. This is really difficult. You know what I. I think I would say Brian Armstrong, Coinbase created a market that didn't exist before. The largest businesses are always market creators. In spite of what I said earlier about a market.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that's a great one.

[John]

Love, Brian.

[Jordy]

Second question.

[John]

If you're the next Brian Armstrong, if you're creating a market right now, please, please me get in touch.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Second question. How do you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business?

[John]

Oh, wow. Trading crypto.

[Jordy]

Trading crypto. I'm surprised we haven't heard that more.

[John]

I know.

[Jordy]

Yes.

[John]

Let's go.

[Jordy]

Thank you for.

[John]

She was born in the trenches. Still in the trenches.

[Jordy]

Still in the trench.

[John]

Still in the trenches.

[Jordy]

Last question.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Do you consider yourself GPU poor? GPU rich. You're bolted onto a hyperscaler. I think I know the answer, but I'll hear it from you.

[John]

Define GP4. GPU rich.

[Jordy]

GPU poor means that you're struggling to scrap together every H100 you can GPU rich as you press the button on the mass. You know, it's a vibe, but it's also a very real thing for foundation model companies. Companies. Now it's just a general vibe. Do you feel constrained by technology or liberated?

[John]

I feel like liberated by. I think you qualify. We gotta lean in. We gotta lean in.

[Jordy]

We'll give you this. It hasn't been properly said. Oh, maybe it fits.

[John]

There you go.

[Jordy]

Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[John]

Great to meet you. Great to meet you. See you. Next batch.

[Jordy]

Have a great rest of your demo day. Two phones. You know she means business.

[John]

There you go.

[Jordy]

That's a corporate. That's a corporate.

[John]

That's a corporate athlete.

[Jordy]

Corporate athlete, right.

[John]

That's a boardroom General.

[Jordy]

How you doing? Welcome to the Stream.

[John]

Welcome to the Stream. Jordy. Good to meet you.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Introduce yourself. What do you do?

[John]

Hey, my name is Sion. We're Kalinda.

[Jordy]

That's a great name.

[John]

Yeah. We're basically a deep research for class action law firms.

[Jordy]

Okay. Interesting.

[John]

Yeah. Let's give it up for litigation.

[Jordy]

What's the secret sauce? Is it. Is it just the bad data in, bad data out? You got to get private data that's maybe behind some sort of wall. It's not scraped into the, the pre training weights of GPT5. And so you have some cornered resource in the data or is it something in the architecture or something at the UI level? Like where's the interesting.

[John]

Kind of like most startups at yc, like a lot of it sits on the application layer.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

Most of it for class action law firms is the scale at which they do things. You know, they can have maybe 10 million pages for litigation.

[Jordy]

Oh, wow.

[John]

So with that kind of scale, you can't obviously just toss into chat.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Be a hassle and just click, upload another PDF. Upload another PDF. Upload another PDF.

[John]

Yeah. And then the kind of second thing is like most of the data sort of sits. Sits in silos and kind of aggregating it all and making it sort of, you know, comprehensive like human would.

[Jordy]

Is.

[John]

Would you ever, would you ever go full stack? Would you ever start suing people yourself? We just said it's America. That's the American way. Let's go. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Watch out.

[John]

Yeah. We actually just said this in our, in our pitch. We want to become the world's first class action law firm.

[Jordy]

Okay. Full stack.

[John]

So stack AI law firm.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Nice.

[Jordy]

Fantastic. How's traction? What do you share? Demo day. How's it going? How's the race going?

[John]

Yes, we have about 60,000 in revenue in just the last four months. Wow. Since basically launching.

[Jordy]

Congrats.

[John]

We have three of the largest plaintiff.

[Jordy]

Law firms the in the US as customers.

[John]

But yeah, it's going really well. Pitch is, was a little nerve wracking.

[Jordy]

At first, but got over it.

[John]

That's great. What, what's it like selling into these firms? So far they seem to be responding well. Yeah. Much better than most would expect. I guess like they, they probably don't know a lot about AI at all. So you just kind of say it's magic. And then has this been an overlooked category broadly just building software for this type of firm, it feels like they just print cash and they're willing to spend some of the numbers I've heard on, like some of these. Even firms that like have a website, they look like a tiny business and they're just printing like $50 million a year. It's crazy.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Most settlements are a billion plus, but.

[John]

Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, because of natural language being so a lot easier with AI, they. It makes it a lot easier. And so the kind of work they do is. Has basically been overlooked for practically ever.

[Jordy]

In fact, most of them never throw software at it.

[John]

Yeah. And most of them aren't even still paperless. They still have lots of paperwork. They've just gotten over the. The cloud, if you want to call it that. So. Yeah.

[Jordy]

Cool. Lightning round. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time?

[John]

Sam Altman.

[Jordy]

Sam Altman. Just.

[John]

Just because I met him twice.

[Jordy]

But he's. Yeah, he's the goat. Second question. How'd you make your first dollar online? In business or on the Internet? Cold call. Cold call.

[John]

It was actually. So the previous space that we were in was personal injury.

[Jordy]

Still law firms.

[John]

My brother, he's an expert. Cold caller.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Are you. How did. When did you realize you wanted to get into class actions and personal injury? Yeah, well, basically we literally about last summer we started walking into businesses.

[Jordy]

Corporate.

[John]

Cold. Just like saying, hey, we do AI. We're both previously AI researchers. Like, we. We can probably solve your business problems.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Law firms were a huge part of it. So. Nice.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Based on where you sit in the stack, do you. Do you feel like you're GPU poor or GPU rich?

[John]

GPU rich, but GPU poor soon.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Okay.

[Jordy]

Good luck to you.

[John]

Scaling up.

[Jordy]

Hopefully you can scale up. Thanks so much.

[John]

Great to meet you. Congrats on.

[Jordy]

We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. If you're just tuning in, we are live from YC Demo Day 2025 and we have our next guest coming into the studio. Welcome.

[John]

It's Colonel Time. Welcome to the show. You seem fired up.

[Jordy]

Did you just pitch yourself?

[John]

We haven't pitched yet.

[Jordy]

Who are you? What do you do?

[John]

Raf Garcia, founder of Kernel. We're crazy fast browsers in the cloud. For your AI agent, the browser wars.

[Jordy]

The browser wars are on computer use. So it's AP API to go and interact with the website.

[John]

Yeah. So nowadays a lot of AI agents, you want to hook them up to the exact same tools that humans Use and the browser is one of the main tools that we use on a day to day basis. And so we're powering automations in healthcare, fintech, qa. Lots of different use cases that AI is really good at. Walk us through to kind of the history of the market because I know there was. There used to be this company. I'm blanking on the name but they were doing like browser. They had a browser use product and they were venture backed but they never really like broke out. And it feels like this market is just like exploded in size. Yeah. So prior to the main use case was you run your tests or your QA chromium on. On, on. On a. On a browser in the. Headless browser in the cloud. But as soon as I came on the scene tools got supercharged by this intelligence. You could connect to them. So you know I experienced this firsthand. I founded a company called clever back in 2012. That was.

[Jordy]

No way.

[John]

That's right.

[Jordy]

I think we might have technically in.

[John]

The same batch and we. Our first piece of code we wrote was a browser automation to pull data out of student information systems.

[Jordy]

Clever's a killer company by the way. You should look it up. It's massive. Massive acquisition, massive deal. Size gone. Size gone.

[John]

People don't know they need to 500 million.

[Jordy]

There we go.

[John]

So yeah, both me and my co founder are previous YC founders so we are experienced at the game. And yeah. I was previously a quant at a high frequency trading firm. So like if you want to make your browser infrastructure super fast.

[Jordy]

That's my quant.

[John]

I will help you subscribe. Is around. It's extremely. And it's over.

[Jordy]

It's over. I mean it is a hyper competitive space. I saw even AWS launch something. It seems like something obviously AWS would have a product. How are you thinking about competition in the long term market structure? Are you thinking it's even a winner take all market or is this oligopoly like what we saw with cloud where aws, gcp, Azure, these are all great businesses.

[John]

Yeah. I think with DevTools I think there's an opportunity for companies to come into the space and just be laser focused on the technical quality of the product. I agree with this. You see this with like planetscale and rds. Amazon has a competitor that like you know, has a huge Market Share But PlanetScale is like eating their lunch when it comes to Mindshare and.

[Jordy]

Yep.

[John]

And some bigger customers databricks like there's.

[Jordy]

A lot of examples of.

[John]

So we're we are like infra nerds, like trying to make browsers super fast in the cloud and I don't think they're the lengths we are going to do that. Like AWS is going to be years behind whatever we're. We're working on. So how are the bake offs going? The bake offs are going well. So we, you know, we, we did YC and you know, YC is now like five or six thousand companies. So it's a huge early adopter market to kind of launch and sell into. But now we're starting to see deals come on that are, you know, Fortune 500, more enterprise deals. So yeah, size gong is going off in the office and yeah, we're seeing really good revenue growth over I guess 1000%, you could call it month over month, 400% usage month over month. We've spun up like 200,000 browsers in the last three months. So yeah, things are going well.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

How big is the team today? We're six full time, so hiring a lot of people I worked with at Clever. No, I love, I, I love when a founder comes in and put. Runs it back. Does it like they did it the first time. Like goes back through YC and then just puts on a master class.

[Jordy]

Yeah. The mistake and I don't know if you'll agree the mistake is like, okay.

[John]

You could have done the next.

[Jordy]

I'm going to incubate 25 different things. I'll be at the beach for the.

[John]

Next bar gets so high.

[Jordy]

But I'd like you to build things as hard. And they've completely forgot how hard it is in the early stage. Yeah, that's the value of going through YC again is like the partners put you in that mindset. Like, okay, you actually have to do things that don't scale. You have to build a product something wants. Right?

[John]

Yep. Yeah, yeah. Just you could have done the whole like raise 50 million, get the really crazy office out the gates and then, and then you wouldn't. You got to earn it every time.

[Jordy]

You gotta earn it every time for sure. Well, speaking of people who earned it, who is your favorite entrepreneur in history? Who do you look to?

[John]

Favorite entrepreneur? How far back are we going?

[Jordy]

We can go live or dead. Literally thousands.

[John]

You can go Addison.

[Jordy]

Somebody has mentioned. Jesus Christ. Somebody has mentioned Eric Lyman at Ramp.

[John]

So I mean I didn't make the.

[Jordy]

Comparison, but it was me today.

[John]

I mean, cliche. I'll have to go Steve Jobs. I mean I grew up reading that was Jordy's answer.

[Jordy]

Too.

[John]

And studying Apple like that was my first computer as a kid. So I got a shout out to Steve.

[Jordy]

I said, edwin Land, Steve Jobs mentor. But it's not. Anyway, second question. How did you make your first dollar online or in business?

[John]

I mean, do you count trading futures as a 22? I mean, that was my first job out of college.

[Jordy]

There we go. That's my quant. Anyway, congratulations.

[John]

Congratulations on the progress.

[Jordy]

Thank you so much.

[John]

Come back on the show as you have more news. When you're ready to announce, jump on.

[Jordy]

We're very excited. Anyway, we will bring at our. We have what, 10 minute countdown.

[John]

10 minutes.

[Jordy]

Come in. We're in the lighting round.

[John]

Who are you?

[Jordy]

What do you do? Explain yourself. My name is Adi.

[John]

I'm a co founder of Agent Mail.

[Jordy]

It's the first email provider built for AI agents. The key distinction. There we go.

[John]

The key distinction is we're not AI for your email, we're email for your AI.

[Jordy]

Okay. W. Oh, interesting. Like browser use for agents. Okay. I was wondering about this because I go to agent mode and often, oftentimes it hits a wall where it's like, okay, it should just. Now it should just email the person to actually kick off that process. And it can't do it.

[John]

Yeah. How much money are you making?

[Jordy]

How much money are we making?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Did you share a KPI at demo day? Did you share progress?

[John]

What KPI? We did not.

[Jordy]

But we love our customers. Okay, but you. Customers, plural. So I know there's more than one. Yes. Okay. I'm learning, I'm learning. Okay.

[John]

Did you come in with this idea or did you pivot to it?

[Jordy]

So we were trying to get rich quick.

[John]

Is that why you're. Is somebody vlogging out there or is that someone else?

[Jordy]

Exactly. Let's go. So we wanted agents to go on.

[John]

The Internet, make us money, farm, free trials.

[Jordy]

And then.

[John]

Interesting.

[Jordy]

Exactly. We realized, okay, it's kind of hard to give agents their own inboxes, but.

[John]

They should have them.

[Jordy]

Sequoia is talking about them. LangChain's talking about them. Yeah.

[John]

Agency their own email inbox.

[Jordy]

Okay, so you did. This brings me to the lightning round question. How'd you make your first dollar on the Internet or in business, like as a kid or maybe took you a while?

[John]

So I got cut from the basketball.

[Jordy]

Team and I was like, damn, I.

[John]

Want to be a part of basketball.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

So I was like, hey, I want.

[John]

To be involved, man.

[Jordy]

I want to feel like I'm a player, part of something. So I just said, hey, Coach, what can I do? He's like, okay, be the scorekeeper. That's how I made like my first 300 bucks. That's fantastic. And there we go. That's an honest. That's an honest living. Second question. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history, alive or dead? I like Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett?

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

Interesting.

[John]

I think he's one of those guys who's like, actually humble.

[Jordy]

Yeah, right. Like, it's not like, okay, hey, I'm worth 100 million. I think he just genuinely is in it for the love of the game. He does. He's in it for the love of the game. The game. Hopefully one day, you know, I could be like that. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for.

[John]

Great to meet you. Cheers.

[Jordy]

Have a good one. Let's bring on our next guest at YCWA 2025. We got eight minutes. Let's bring them in. Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

[John]

What do you do?

[Jordy]

Sit down here, shake my hand.

[John]

It's time to meet you.

[Jordy]

Who are you? What do you do?

[John]

Hey, I'm allit building Riff, which is Cursor, for music production.

[Jordy]

Ooh, that's. Are you sitting. So Cursor sits on top of an open source ide. Are you sitting on top of Ableton or something?

[John]

That doesn't exist for music. So we actually built everything from scratch. Trained our own models.

[Jordy]

Sure.

[John]

We have our own editor. It kind of looks like GarageBand, but you can use AI tools to generate sounds and mess around.

[Jordy]

Interesting. Do you bring your own samples or do you plug into a sample library? Or are all the samples AI generated?

[John]

Yeah, we have a user community of samples, but we also let you generate your own.

[Jordy]

Cool.

[John]

And also, like lots of bells and whistles to make it easier. Like, for example, you can hum out a melody.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

And we'll play it on an instrument for you.

[Jordy]

That's very cool.

[John]

What's your most popular song? You make music, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I. Let me see. I produced a song for this artist named Rio Kragan. He's. He's pretty big. He works with like, a lot of EM artists. Yeah.

[Jordy]

That's awesome. Love to play it.

[John]

What's so. So what. What's like, how do you see the market here? Is there a million people that you think will pay for a product like this? Or do you want to go more enterprise, work with labels? Like, what's the play? Yeah, I mean, so like, you know, we're definitely targeting pros. It's a pro tool.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

But pros for us means pro tools. Oh yeah, good one. Like, it doesn't just mean music producers. It's really anyone who releases music on the Internet, like imagine you're just a singer. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for your producer, you can produce your own music.

[Jordy]

Yeah, that's great.

[John]

And that's like 80 million people release music on the Internet. Yeah.

[Jordy]

How's traction? How's demo day going?

[John]

Great. I mean, yeah, we grew to 400 DAUs. People are already dropping songs on Spotify that are made on Riff and getting some. Getting some listens already.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

Yeah, the raise is fantastic. I want to see like, have to like really pick the investors now. Like the round is completely filling up. So. Great spot. Last question. Risk check. Oh yeah, yeah.

[Jordy]

What do you got?

[John]

Yeah, it's a Brett link. Nice. Not enough watches on the wrist here.

[Jordy]

At YC Lightning Round questions. Favorite entrepreneur in history, live or dead?

[John]

Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre.

[Jordy]

Good. I knew I had to ask you. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on.

[John]

Thanks guys.

[Jordy]

Let's bring in the next one. How are you doing? Five minutes left at the YC demo day livestream. Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself. Who are you?

[John]

Freya Time. Yeah, I'm Tunga and I'm the CEO of Freya.

[Jordy]

What do you do?

[John]

We build voice AI for European enterprises.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

Especially regulated ones like finance.

[Jordy]

Okay.

[John]

And we pretty much voice AI for Europe.

[Jordy]

How's traction?

[John]

Traction. Eight paid pilots converting to 24k mrr.

[Jordy]

That's great.

[John]

Within the past four weeks and the.

[Jordy]

Rest of the demo day.

[John]

We're getting ASML in the round. Are you?

[Jordy]

Yeah, they're the hot investors. Say goodbye to the tier ones.

[John]

You didn't get asmr.

[Jordy]

Not yet. Next round. Next round. We're rooting for you. Are you GPU poor by any chance? Do you want a GPU poor hat? I might as well be.

[John]

Are you? So. So what's the strategy? Are you going to build the company here? Are you moving back to Europe? Back and forth. So we have office in San Francisco and Istanbul as well as Prague. Yeah. We're based in three places. So I go to market as Europe, especially finance industry. But since we started working with banks and insurance companies there, especially we're working with some of the biggest banks there.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

In US we got some interest with some of these new banks and credit unions.

[Jordy]

So who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? And I would love a European example.

[John]

If you have one European example.

[Jordy]

But. But you can say anyone.

[John]

If there was. If there were good European entrepreneurs.

[Jordy]

You wouldn't be doing it.

[John]

They would come to sf.

[Jordy]

They would come to sf. Well, just zooming out. Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history?

[John]

I would say, alive or dead. I'm impressed by what Elon Musk has done.

[Jordy]

There we go. That's a great one.

[John]

Yeah.

[Jordy]

How'd you make your first dollar? On the Internet or in business?

[John]

In my own business.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Just. No, in, you know, like, as a kid, did you make any money on the Internet?

[John]

Yeah, I mean, on Internet, pretty much. I didn't make my first money on the Internet. I was doing sales.

[Jordy]

Sales, yeah.

[John]

For. I was trying to get some people to a real estate shop.

[Jordy]

Okay, nice.

[John]

Pretty much what I did.

[Jordy]

There you go. Fantastic.

[John]

Yeah, Nice.

[Jordy]

Well, congrats on the progress.

[John]

We're legends are made to talk to you soon.

[Jordy]

All right, have a good one. Let's bring in our next guest. How much more time do we have? Four minutes. Let's keep going. We're going, we're going, we're going. Bring them in, bring them in. How you doing? Welcome to the stream.

[John]

What's happening?

[Jordy]

Long time listener, first time caller. Thank you for coming on.

[John]

Great to have you.

[Jordy]

Who are you? What are you building?

[John]

I'm John Ferrara. I'm building Juxta, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth with no hardware.

[Jordy]

I feel like I've seen this on X. You might have seen our.

[John]

We had a pretty cool launch video.

[Jordy]

Very cool. Yeah. Okay, so how does it work? There's some company that spun out of Google that just sold that does something similar. It's like Magnetics. But how do you. How are you doing it?

[John]

Yeah, so we basically use simulated technology to basically render any environment using satellite imagery or indoor floor plans into 3D.

[Jordy]

So you do a geoguessr?

[John]

You could put it that way. Yeah. We should have the company that way. Yeah. And then we simulate millions of people.

[Jordy]

Or objects moving throughout a space. Cool.

[John]

Simulate their sensor measurement with, like, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and then train models on that and then basically deploy to software and we can leverage the IMUs, which are like sensors that are already into every phone and most other devices today to track you.

[Jordy]

Like, I can see you through your WI fi. Lots of people. Yeah. If you've seen that film in, like.

[John]

The Dark Knight, there's like a scene where Batman.

[Jordy]

Oh, yeah, I know the one you're talking about. That's how you can envision it. That's gonna be entertaining on the Internet.

[John]

What? Who's the who's the buyer here? Yeah, we sell a lot to like actually at this point like warehousing, manufacturing, logistics. Because 90% of all movement happens in GPS denied areas inside a building, indoors. Underground defense is a big one. I grew up in a military family, so we sell a lot to like try a lot to like DOD stuff like that. But right now we've made a lot of progress like selling to companies who want to like ship thousands of pallets or containers or move around a warehouse, stuff like that.

[Jordy]

Do we require any customers custom hardware or could this be distilled at some point into just an iPhone app? No, it's just software. It's just software.

[John]

So like it actually it was almost.

[Jordy]

We were this close. If you come next demo day, we're.

[John]

Actually gonna be in the demo day app. We were yc want Gary and Jared wanted to track all the investors and.

[Jordy]

The founders to see where they were going. But we weren't able to work with.

[John]

Their app team quite in time. So next demo day it'll be there.

[Jordy]

But that's already existing.

[John]

We're building actually small asset tags that are like 2 inch by 2 inch.

[Jordy]

Yeah.

[John]

That allow us to basically stack. Yeah. I was gonna attach them onto like stuff is important but doesn't have software. And so that's where like we'll get to the point where we can do.

[Jordy]

That sort of thing. That's super, super cool. Lightning round questions.

[John]

How did you make your first like traction and how's going.

[Jordy]

Sure. Yeah, we've.

[John]

We've done about $150,000 in revenue in.

[Jordy]

The last like six weeks. Congratulations. Thanks.

[John]

And then we're actually on pace to be at like 500k in the next two months. There's a lot of demand. We have like hundreds of thousands of of these tags pre ordered. Wow, that's fantastic. And yeah, we raised our round. Five million at 40 was what our. There we go. Given the honestly giving it away. Sorry, I didn't mean to.

[Jordy]

Maybe that was too much.

[John]

No, no, no.

[Jordy]

We try not to drag it out of people.

[John]

Oh, my bad.

[Jordy]

No, no, no. But it's helpful. It's very interesting.

[John]

So come back on the show when you want to announce the actual round. I guess you kind of pre announce. Can I get a gong? Yeah, you can get a gong.

[Jordy]

Appreciate it. How'd you make your first dollar on in life. In life or as a kid?

[John]

As a kid I would. Well, I worked a lot of really weird jobs. I got my first one when I.

[Jordy]

Was 13 working at a.

[John]

Working 13 at a hot dog stand in a shack in Phoenix, Arizona. So was shoveling hot dogs and it was gourmet hot dogs. So like you basically pay $9 for a hot dog that got wrapped in naan bread instead of a normal bun. We charge you nine bucks.

[Jordy]

Who's your favorite entrepreneur in history? Live or dead?

[John]

Oh, my God.

[Jordy]

I would say.

[John]

I would say. I know the Rift guys just said Dr. Dre, but I'll say Drake because he just came out that Amazon store and Drake's my favorite artist, so.

[Jordy]

Oh, there we go.

[John]

What Amazon store?

[Jordy]

I don't know. You haven't seen this. He's.

[John]

This is his actual plot to take over Amazon Music as a distribution platform, but he's working with Amazon to sell all of his merch and all of his goods through their storefront and basically facilitate all their distribute distribution through there. So that's my cop out answer. But I just love Drake.

[Jordy]

Thank you so much.

[John]

Thanks. Thanks for coming on.

[Jordy]

We have our next guest, Casey. Let's bring her in. How you doing?

[John]

Welcome.

[Jordy]

Welcome.

[John]

Final guest. Closing it out, closing it out. Saving best for last.

[Jordy]

Great to meet you. Welcome. Introduce yourself for the stream. Tell us who you are.

[John]

My name is Casey Caruso. I'm the managing partner of a fund called Topology.

[Jordy]

Fantastic. Psyched to be here.

[John]

Reaction to demo day. Electric.

[Jordy]

Electric.

[John]

Electric.

[Jordy]

More electric than the last demo day. Particularly electric. What is. What about it is electric?

[John]

I just think the founder quality is so high and I think it's just an incredible thing that YC does for the Valley and it's very unique. I mean, there's a lot of things.

[Jordy]

That are like this and still the.

[John]

Essence of YC has been, I think, retained. Yeah, totally, totally. Were you at the last demo day? I was. To me, like the. It seems like the bar is like consistently higher across this batch. I don't know if you feel the same.

[Jordy]

I feel like the founder, maybe it's.

[John]

The founder the same, but the quality.

[Jordy]

Of the company and the traction has kind of figured out like how to tell the story. That's not just like AI only. And it's actually like putting. Going back to the basics of like, what's the problem we're solving. So when I talk to a lot of the founders, they come in and they lead. Yeah, there's AI being said, but it's almost in the background and they're more focused on the market or the problem or the product. So I've been. I feel like all the stories have been a lot more tractable than just like AI Infrastructure.

[John]

Agree. I also think the founders are getting younger and younger.

[Jordy]

I honestly feel the high school dropouts. Yeah, yeah.

[John]

There's like 14 year olds up there and they're like, we just launched three seconds ago and we have 10K in MRR. And I'm like, oh my God. Yeah, they're skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker flipping. They're just going straight into Enterprise. SaaS is absolutely beautiful. Where have you been most excited to invest broadly? Just outside of YC over the past year. Yeah, I mean so the fund is a 75 million fund one and we're backed by people like Mark Andreessen, founder of OpenAI. And we really focus on technical founders that are commercially minded building cool shit. And that's really important we back cool shit. And so we will look everywhere. But that's like the motto or that's the one liner. We spend a lot of time in neurotech. We spend a lot of time in maybe less popular AI categories. Yeah. Any reaction since you said neurotech? There was a company that went pretty viral yesterday with doing like telepathy. What's going on there? How proprietary do you think that is? Is that something that we're going to see more of as like a form factor? Yeah, absolutely. So actually if you go to topology, bc, neuro map, you can see a really sick visualization of all this. I love it. But it's more than a market map. Okay.

[Jordy]

I love market maps. We're pro market map here by the way.

[John]

And if they're crowdsourced, even better. Right?

[Jordy]

Yeah, of course.

[John]

But that specific technology is called silent speech and it's becoming more popular. Do you have to actually move your mouth in order for. That's right. So it's using muscle movement instead of brain signals. And there's some that are trying to do silent speech with brain but like alter ego is going with the muscle approach and to actually get it with like the EKG. Or is it EK, not EKG, whatever. The EMG, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, EMG. So you need like 60 sensors or something like that. So it's not necessarily. Yeah. Right now the biggest thing in neuro is to be come what's called multimodal, kind of like what happened with AI. So people are using things like ultrasound with eeg, which is one of the most popular non invasive technologies with, you know, Mac or with muscle movement and combining them all together. The other cool neurotech company though that we're investing in is Sam Altman's new company called Merge and That one's going to become really popular too. But I thought they killed that demo on Twitter. Yeah, it was great demo. Great demo.

[Jordy]

Yeah. Lighting round.

[John]

Lightning round.

[Jordy]

We gotta get out of here.

[John]

So we do need to get out of here.

[Jordy]

Favorite entrepreneur, alive or dead.

[John]

Oh, I can't do that. All my children, I love equally non portfolio companies.

[Jordy]

You read a biography of who's like, you know, from 100 years ago.

[John]

You don't have anyone, you're like, no, my favorite, my favorite entrepreneurs are only the. Only the companies I invest in.

[Jordy]

Yeah. No, not favorite entrepreneur that you've necessarily.

[John]

Einstein. Einstein. Back to basics.

[Jordy]

That's good. No one said Einstein yet. And how did you make your first money? First dollar. Either on the Internet or in business.

[John]

Yeah, I started coding when I was really young. As in a non because my mom wanted to keep my like gender kind of under wraps so I, you know, didn't get any like creepy messages.

[Jordy]

Yeah, I used to.

[John]

Yeah. Do website development as an adult.

[Jordy]

That's a great one.

[John]

Nice.

[Jordy]

I love that.

[John]

Great stuff.

[Jordy]

Fantastic.

[John]

Awesome.

[Jordy]

Great having you on for coming on the stream.

[John]

Nice to meet you.

[Jordy]

Have a great rest of your day.

[John]

Good to meet you. Cheers.

[Jordy]

I'll talk to you soon.

[John]

Anyway, thank you for watching is our show. Thank you.

[Jordy]

Tomorrow live from New York City.

[John]

Live from New York City. Maybe live from New York Stock Exchange. You never know.

[Jordy]

Might very well happen.

[John]

We could very well be there. Thank you to our incredible sponsors for making TBPN possible. We love you all and thank you for watching. We'll see you, we'll see you tomorrow.

[Jordy]

See you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.