← The Peel with Turner Novak
The Peel with Turner Novak
Building the Wearable That Gets You Stronger | Miranda Nover, Co-founder of Fort Health
01:34:32
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Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host Turner Novak, Founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is Miranda Nover, co founder and CEO of Fort Health. FORT builds wearables that automatically track strength, training people who care about longevity. This is a new format of an episode I'm experimenting with. It's the first time I've had a Banana Portfolio company founder on the show while they're still at the pre seed stage. When I surveyed my subscribers a few weeks ago, you were most interested in more early stage VC backed founders and I'd love your feedback on what you think of this. Miranda is still very much working through the idea maze and iterating on the four product. We talk about all the megatrends driving consumer health that she's thinking about, why she's building a company that helps people get stronger and everything she's learned getting a hardware company off the ground. She's also in the middle of the current YC batch and gives an inside look at what it's been like and if she'd recommend it to other founders. As a reminder, I publish repositories of the Peel every week, exploring the world's greatest startup stories just like this one. Check out the back catalog of over 100 episodes and tune in over the next few weeks for guests like Gary Tan at yc, Chatham Putagunta at Benchmark, Jake Stoke at Serval, Mike and Nikhil at Footwork, and Scott Stevenson at Spellbook, the fastest growing startup in Canada. Let's talk to Miranda after a quick word from Numerl and Flex. This episode is brought to you by numerl. Numerl is the fastest, easiest way to stay compliant with US Sales tax and global vat.
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tax on AutoPilot, check out numerl at
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their new domain numerl.com that's n u m e R-A-L.com for the end to end platform for sales tax and VAT compliance. This episode is Brought to you by Flex, it's the AI native private bank for business owners. I use Flex personally and I love it because they use AI to underwrite the cash flow of your business, giving you a real credit line. The best part is 60 days afloat, double the industry standard. Flex has all the features you'd expect from a modern financial platform like unlimited cards, expense management, bill pay that syncs with your credit line and their new consumer card, Flex Elite. FlexElite is a brand new ramp like experience for your personal life. A credit card with points, premium perks, concierge services, personal banking, cars and expense management for your family. Net worth tracking across public and private assets, and a whole lot more fully integrated with your business spend. One card for your businesses, one card for your personal life, one card for everything. To skip the waitlist, head to Flex 1 and use My Code Turner to get an additional 100,000 points worth $1,000. After spending your first $10,000 with FlexElite, that's Flex 1 and Code Turner for $1,000 on your first $10,000 of spending. Thank you, Flex. And now let's jump in.
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B
Miranda, welcome to the show.
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Thank you.
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B
So I'm excited. We're going to talk a lot about just consumer health topics and hardware stuff like building a hardware company and you're very in the thick of it. Still trying to figure it out and get it all to work.
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C
Yeah.
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B
So can you real quick. For people who aren't familiar with fort, what is it?
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C
FORT is a wearable device. I actually have one on right now and it automatically tracks strength training and it's for people who care about longevity.
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B
So what's like, the importance of that?
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C
Yeah, so we as like a society have recently emphasized strength a lot more than we have in the past several decades of wellness. There's been a lot of great research about how important strength is to maintaining our independence, our metabolism as we age. And then also, like, I think culturally there's been a lot of memes and a lot of public interest around people getting jacked, but it's not in, like the bodybuilding way that it was in the 80s. I feel like a lot of the people that do kind of like get jacked, like Mark Zuckerberg is an interesting example of this. Like, he's not a bodybuilder, but he certainly like cares a lot about fitness and cares a lot more about being like muscular than a lot of the public figures, I guess, did in the past.
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B
Even Bezos.
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C
Bezos.
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B
Bezos is like that one iconic picture of him at. I think it's probably like a Sun Valley conference where he's got the vest on and he has the sunglasses and he's just like, you look Jack. Like, shoulders look like a box because he's. He's just so big.
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C
Yeah. And there's like, obviously influencer culture has played a huge role in this because now there's all these people who post like crazy gym footage and they, you know, people learn how to work out online and people share not only their physique, but also they're like kind of this like morning routine, wellness routine. I think there's also like Covid played a big role in the rise of wellness culture and also tangentially, the rise of strength, especially for my generation. I feel like we were really like, I feel like brought to the surface a lot of distrust in the medical system that was already brewing. And I think that people who experienced some of that distrust, a lot of them took to more like, homeopathic is not the right word, but more like DIY ways to stay well. I think there's also been a lot more of like a sharing culture because, like, people are like figuring out new ways to keep themselves well. And then they talk with others about like, what's your supplement stack, what's your sleep score? And this is something that other wearable companies have brought into like, the public discourse. So I think like the. There's this like distrust in the medical system and not so much it's very expensive to receive different types of healthcare, especially preventative healthcare in America. And people are also just more open to sharing and talking about it.
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B
And what are the benefits of being strong and muscle strength, aside from maybe you do or you don't look jacked? What's the health benefits of just being stronger?
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C
Yeah, so there's a lot of them. I think the most obvious ones pertain to your ability to walk, to pick things up, to go up and down the stairs comfortably, to do the basic things like sitting in a chair and standing up. And we take those things for granted. But as you age, those things become a lot more difficult. And it's a lot harder to start putting on muscle as you age. I think you lose something like 8% of your muscle mass every year after 30. Not 100% sure of the numbers, but it certainly declines with age.
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B
I'm on the point of no return as an almost 35 year old. Like, I'm like 80%. Like, if you compound that, I'm like,
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C
well, I mean, that's when. That's when People might say, if you were to hormonally engineer yourselves.
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B
Oh, yeah, that's true.
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Then you could certainly build a lot of muscle. But regardless, like, you're still. You still have plenty of time.
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B
I got some Runway to figure this out. I'm glad.
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C
Fortune definitely. I think then outside of, like, you know, being able to perform basic movements, there's, like, back pain, knee pain, pain reduction in general. It's a huge deal for Americans. Like, musculoskeletal disorders are a huge cost burden on our healthcare system. There's a lot of surgeries and pain medications that are used as treatments for a lot of musculoskeletal disorders that could have been prevented with, you know, better posture, better, like, stronger muscles that. That someone could use as a preventative measure. So you never really get to the point where you're having to deal with severe back and knee pain just because
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your back is stronger, you have less pain.
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C
A lot of times it's compensatory. So it could be your back being stronger, it could be your core being stronger. It could be that, you know, you sit all day and you have weakness in, like, your glutes or your. Your hips in a way that tweaks your back. Like, everything is so interconnected, and. And like, physical therapy and rehab is so complicated.
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Like, and it's boring.
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And it's boring. Yeah. Which is why I think, like, people should strength train, because it's a lot more fun to do it recreationally and just still think about it in the context of a health practice, like a wellness practice, not like a. I mean, I personally, like, train because it's fun and for esthetics and for health, and there's a great way to balance all those things. But, yeah, like, once you get to the point of doing physical therapy, it's really boring, and it's really hard to tell if you're getting any results.
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Yeah, it's kind of like a chore.
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C
Very complex.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, complex. And then. But it. Yeah, because you. You think of when somebody says, I'm trying to get stronger or, like, I care about my muscle health, you would. Your mind would just go to, oh, that person's just trying to look.
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C
Yeah.
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Jacked.
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And it's. It's maybe like your. Your hypothesis and thesis behind Ford is it's actually kind of like a health thing also. Like, maybe there's an aesthetic thing, like, oh, looking strong is like an aesthetically more attractive thing, but also it's actually, like, healthier.
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C
It is. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's like also with like the rise of DLPs, I think, like there's a lot of talk about how to preserve muscle while you lose weight. And muscle is metabolically active tissue, which means it helps you burn more calories at rest than fat or other tissues. So like somebody could weigh the same as somebody else. But if that person had more lean mass relative to like body fat, the person with more lean mass would burn more calories even if they didn't do anything different.
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B
How does that play out?
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I, I guess I'm not, I'm not a biology expert, but I think that it's, it's. Yeah. If you build more lean tissue, your body, is it because that tissue is like firing and is doing a lot of metabolic processes, you burn more calories.
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B
Interesting. Okay, and so you're, you're kind of building some software products, you're building some hardware products. There's kind of already some health care hardware, things that are sort of out there. Like, couldn't somebody just use like an Apple Watch to, I don't know, track strength? Maybe it's like an interesting way to tell people, understand, like what's, what are you even doing? Like, what's even the opportunity in building like a strength measuring hardware product?
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C
Yeah. So a platform like Apple Watch, they can do a lot. If you get apps on top of your Apple Watch, they can automatically count reps and they're pretty good at exercise detection. The real limitation of the Apple Watch is that it lives on your wrist. Our device can be used so it has like a magnet.
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B
You have it on your wrist right now?
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C
Yeah, I have it on my wrist right now. So it does. So I envision the device being used like an all day health tracker. Like we measure heart rate and we measure motion on the wrist. Yeah. The same way like Whoop or Apple Watch would do. But when it's time to train and you want to do something that you can't track from the wrist. So think of something like a leg press. Like my wrist doesn't move when I'm doing leg press. But if I stuck a magnet onto the leg press carriage with this device on it, I could track the reps via a motion tracker in the device.
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B
Should stick it on the equipment. Or you'd stick it on your leg.
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C
You could do either. I think I find it easier personally to use the magnet. I like to wear leggings in the gym, so a lot of times using the body strap is more difficult for me. But we do produce body straps. So if our users want to wear it around their leg. We can give them those. And when we originally started building fort, we had a hypothesis that the reason Whoop. Apple Watch and others couldn't track strength effectively was because motion tracking is not sufficient to fully understand someone's, like, muscle fatigue during strength training. So the original version of FORT utilized a different type of sensor called surface electromyography. And this is a type of sensor that you do need to wear locally to the muscle. So if you flex your bicep and you want to measure the strength of that contraction, you can use this type of sensor, but you have to wear it on your bicep. You can't detect bicep from wrist or leg from wrist. Yeah. So originally we thought that novel sensors were necessary to sufficiently track strength training, even in, like, a wellness or recreational context. I think now our working thesis is that motion is sufficient, but motion only at the wrist is not.
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B
Okay, so why is that a big deal?
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C
I think that if you're going to track strength training and you want to do this for a mass market consumer, they don't want to have to. Like I just said, I like to wear leggings to the gym. Most. Most women do. And many people, you know, they like, they don't want to be wearing a chest strap, wearing an arm strap, and moving the device around during strength workouts. So originally, the device that we were designing would have had to been moved around 10 to the muscle group you wanted to measure.
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B
Yep. It was this big, like, clunky thing.
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C
Yeah, it was. First it was like this adhesive sensor. It was like, it was like, literally as big as, like, like you stick
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it on and then you have to
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like, peel it off.
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B
Simply rip it off. I mean, it was like stuck on my arm and that. Yeah, that one time.
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C
Yeah. Even when I first showed you on. On Zoom, you were like, it was like a raw circuit board with some like, adhesive stuff on the bottom. And you were like, is it always going to look like that?
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Yeah, I remember thinking, like, that's. I don't think that will work. I mean, you probably knew it wouldn't work specifically like that too, but yeah,
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yeah, I think, like, there's. So there's definitely two paths for tech in our general niche of, like, health tracking. You can either become more of like, a medical device, and there's a spectrum of like, how much FDA clearance, how invasive, how precise, like, what medical claims you want to make. Um, that's on that med device side. So it's generally still like you're selling into health care. The go to market is very different, the regulatory pathways are very different. And then there's like the consumer fitness angle, which is what we're pursuing, which is, you know, going and competing with whoop, Apple, Watch, Garmin, Oura Ring. And it's a very different, like you win on clinical accuracy and supporting, you know, patients that have a demand for your product in this healthcare segment. And then in consumer health tracking, you really win on how much people love you and how much you can change their behavior with a product. And we didn't feel like going with this, like, certainly not the sticky thing and then also not like the bands that you wear everywhere was really friendly to a consumer. But we still think the core problem of strength tracking being really inaccurate or impossible with the existing consumer health trackers is worth solving.
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B
So why is even strength tracking even that important? Because I can just go to the gym and just bench, squat and write things in a piece of paper or don't even have to track it and probably get stronger. What's the importance of actually tracking this stuff in the first place?
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C
Yeah, there's two groups of people that would find value from the device. One group is they are optimizers. They want to build muscle, they want to get stronger and they want to do so in the most efficient way possible. So with that, it's like you really want to be able to tell if you are fatiguing your muscles enough to see growth while maintaining good form. So I feel like for a while before I was as busy I fell into this camp and I like worked with a personal trainer and I was in the gym all the time and I was super obsessed with my routine. And you know, I would find myself like trying to go up in weight to get stronger, like in my lifts. But then I would be like, am I still hitting the same like range of motion that I was before? Like, or am I kind of like cheating a little bit? And it's really hard to figure out like how much weight. I know I want to lift more weight, but like, when should I increase the weight by how much? Is my form still good? Like, am I unstable? Which are all things that a sensor can help do. Writing in a piece of paper gives you like, like logging the data has inherent value. It's nice to be able to track different, you know, the graph of how the weight went up over time. But you miss a lot of that context of like how someone actually moved and how tired they got objectively rather than subjectively.
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B
So that is a big piece of what you're measuring is the fatigue level when you're doing workouts and then layering that with actually tracking what they did and how they went and then figuring out where to go from there.
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C
Yeah, yeah, we use motion. So when we used the, when we were working with EMG sensors, which were the local ones, like, we could directly see fatigue due to like a frequency shift in the data.
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B
So EMG sensor. What's that?
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C
That is the one that you have to wear locally and it measures muscle activation as an electrical signal.
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B
What's EMG stand for?
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C
Surface electromyography. So EMG is electromyography, but we use. They also have ones with needles. So you like put like this is for like really if you want to access like little muscles in the hand, like, or wrists or you want to access like subsurface muscles anywhere on the body you put a needle in. And it's the same type of sensor. It's literally just like measuring the potential difference, like between two points in the body and then amplifying that electrical difference in a circuit and reporting out the data. So it's a very simple, like non invasive measurement when used at the surface. And it's still simple but invasive when it's used internally.
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B
So there are tools or devices out there that stick little needles in and you work out with them.
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C
Not for working out. It's more for like neurological rehabilitation. So maybe like a stroke patient or someone who is looking to regain the use of like small muscles or like fine motor skills after an accident, or someone who is experiencing pain in their joints, they might go in and get EMG testing done in a lab. They're certainly not selling those for consumers.
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B
So there's the hardcore optimizing a lot of things, tracking things. There's a different type of strength. Interested person.
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C
Yeah, so the optimizers are people who, they want to build strength or build muscle as efficiently as possible. And they're willing to do, you know, a lot of training and devote a lot of resources to that. And then there's this other group that's like, they want to do as little strength training as possible to still be considered healthy. And I feel like these are people like busy parents, people like busy founders,
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B
people who do graduate. Like, I feel like when I was in college I was in the like optimizer, like working out. Like we. There's just workout that me and my friends in college called the Nebraska workout.
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C
I remember you telling me about this.
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B
It's like, I guess it's like the Nebraska championship football team 80s did it. We were, like, obsessed with it. And it's like, just a program for, like, progressing your bench really fast and, like, works really well. And then now I, like, literally don't track things when I work out. I just go to the gym, and it's like bench squat, trying to get back into deadlifting and just, like, other workouts and maybe, like, play basketball. And it's like, I'm kind of tired, like, feeling I should get a workout, and that's the extent of it. Yeah, there's so much else going on, I just don't have time to track it.
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C
Yeah, we think that it's really important that what we build works for people like you and other people in this camp, where it's like, the Persona here is they do a lot of different activities. They probably do go to the gym, but they might not go every single week of the year. They play sports on the side. They often are parents, or maybe they have, like, some type of manual aspect to their job. And a lot of the times, like, what people would be concerned with here is, like, if you're missing some type of foundational movement pattern in your training. So, like, you know, you might be doing just, like, bench squat, deadlift, but, like, you would also want to add some type of, like, pulling movement in general. And this pulling could be good for, like, if you're doing it like this, it's for your biceps, and if you're doing it like this, it's for your back, and you can do, like, kind of. Yeah. So there's, like, there's these foundational movement patterns, and you want to generally, like, to maintain your fitness and. And your health. Like, you generally want to hit most of those on a regular basis, but there's such a lower bar for what you need to do to maintain versus to build. And I think for someone like me, I don't really want to think about what I do in the gym now, but I don't want to lose the gains that I made when I was in this optimizer camp. So it's like, okay, I know I trained legs two days ago and then Pilates or I guess, yeah, legs two days ago, rested yesterday, Pilates this morning. Like, I want to know what's left. I don't really want to keep track of this in my head, but I still want to make sure I'm hitting everything sort of evenly. I think there's different times. Like, we were just talking with Danielle about, like, perimenopause. There's different, like, transitions in life where it Becomes like, we become more aware of our health and we want to, like, do things to kind of prevent decline when things about our bodies change. Either, like we get an injury or we have pain or we're going through hormonal changes. Like. And I think those times are also another really good time to keep up with tracking as well.
- [23:02]
B
I feel like too, as you get older, there's like, if you're. I don't know, I feel like I. Maybe I've already hit this. I'm just like, I don't even care if I'm like the most jacked. It's just I want to be able to be as healthy as possible. Like, I'll care more about am I flexible?
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C
Yeah.
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B
And I feel like that's like a big thing as you get older. Like, let's say you're in your 50s.
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C
Yeah.
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B
You might just have like, accepted, like, I'm not as strong as I was when I was in college. But there's just importance of being able to still. I feel flexibility and joint stability. Hip strength, as in your 60s person, you can just fall and break your hip and die. That's just a thing. That's a way. Not super, super common. But the older you get, the weaker you get in different points of, like, the muscle, like grouping and whatever, like, how that works. Like, it's a big problem.
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C
Huge problems. Yeah. I think, like, flexibility is more tied to strength than a lot of people think. Like, a lot of times it's not that you need like, looser muscles. It's that you have an imbalance and you need to strengthen something that's like, weaker than the other thing and it's kind of pulling various parts of your body out of alignment. I think that, like, I know. So my mom is great about going to the gym and that's who got me into the gym. And I think that in turn now, like, I mean, she doesn't require a lot of motivation, but I certainly, like, encourage her to, you know, do more with fitness or we talk about what's good form and, you know, talk about different ways of training. And I think I noticed this with, like, this was a really common theme from talking to a lot of our users and potential users is like the intergenerational dynamic. It's like if your parents aren't strength training, you start seeing them experiencing falls, you start seeing them experiencing limited mobility and needing aids to do everyday activities. And the impact of that is twofold. You're obviously worried about them and their health and want them to maintain their Independence. And then at the same time you also start worrying about is that happening to me? And so I think like, I think the product that we are designing, I definitely want it to be or some version of it that exists in the future to be like the thing that you get your parents when you're worried about them not being able to be as mobile or as strong as they used to be.
- [25:31]
B
So basically your hypothesis or just thesis behind all the things that you're trying right now to do is just that like strength is something that humanity will care more about. Like a super way to distill it down to the most simple concept. It's like a, like the strength company.
- [25:50]
C
Yeah. Strength is a pillar of health. And I think that nobody really owns like the mind share and the market share around like being the strength company. I mean there's gyms, there's protein shakes and creatine and stuff. But a lot of that is like resembling this like gym bro culture that I think is not really like, like yeah, I really want to reframe the public's idea of strength as a tool for health and wellness which I think people are generally like coming around to and sympathetic to.
- [26:20]
B
So somebody who might, they may like they're like a 45 year old mom who's a teacher. Like she does not identify with like a Jim row. I mean like I'm trying to think of like what's the opposite of a gym row. Yeah, but like that person can still like identify with being strong.
- [26:36]
C
Yes. Yeah, I think that that person, I mean the ideal is that they find fun and pleasure and confidence in strength training. But at minimum it's nice to have guidelines for what is enough. And it's nice to have some type of tool to help you like help take some of the mental load of like planning workouts, tracking workouts, like thinking about what to do. Sort of like a personal trainer, like a tech, tech based personal trainer. But I think like that's not necessarily what we want to be like. I think we just see ourselves as like passive tracking and a simple way to check in. Like have I hit all of the foundational movement patterns with sufficient intensity this week? I think a teacher, anyone could benefit from something like that.
- [27:26]
B
So what ways do you think healthcare is changing? Like we maybe hit on it a little bit earlier maybe, maybe we talked about before we started recording. I don't even remember but like I don't know, like I'm. I maybe I maybe think of this seems like almost like too abstract of an idea that maybe wouldn't have. If we go back like in time a little bit, like, this seems like a hard thing to like, maybe like. So, like, how is healthcare kind of changing to make you think this is gonna work?
- [27:54]
C
There's a lot of layers to it. There's like the, the points that we touched on before where like, consumers are fed up with rising costs, a lack of preventative care that is accessible either by price or by, you know, location or availability of providers. And then there's like some distrust that Covid really made worse. Like there's, there's not always a positive relationship between providers and patients. And it's unfortunate because, like, I still firmly believe that evidence based medicine is king, but there's a lot of like, convoluted incentives in that system that make it really hard for providers to serve patients in a way that it makes both parties happy. Basically.
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B
It's like, how so explain what evidence based care is and then like what. The incentives are messed up.
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C
Yeah. So when you're a physician and when you're operating in a regulatory environment where you're, you know, FDA controlled, like you're diagnosing and treating actual conditions, you need to perform good science if you're going to offer a product. And then if you're somebody who's diagnosing and treating diseases, like, it's on you to be up to date with the literature and making sure that you read the good science that other people produce and you make decisions of clinical care based off of that. But there's also like, the insurance landscape plays a big role in what people have access to and where and when they have access to that care. And it makes, and then there's hospital administrators and people who run large networks of clinics and healthcare facilities that are in the loop. There's a lot of regulation in the space that, yeah, like that controls where money goes. And the players are so entrenched because everything has to be done by such like, bureaucratic processes. And like tech has really. This is a bit tangential, but tech has really like failed to penetrate the healthcare market in the way that it seems like it could. And I think tech bros, like, we always think, like, we'll just do things more efficiently. Like there's clearly all these inefficiencies. Like just pick one, tackle it and then you like, try to go down that path. And there's like all these entrenched interests and procedures and it's like at the end of the day, like the system, like the healthcare system as it is right now, like it doesn't seek efficiency, it seeks compliance, which is like good for some people. Like, it's good because like, you know, you're always doing things by the book and you don't want to move fast and break things when it comes to people's health. But at the same time it's like also to the detriment of a lot of people. It's like a really. Yeah. And there's like one the largest example of this kind of like dynamic of tech starting to penetrate healthcare but failing to really like fully materialize, I would say, is like the EHR or EMR situation. So like electronic medical records were kind of introduced as this thing where you can digitize all of like the clinical notes and the lab tests and you know, give providers access to data. And it's like great because it's like preserves a record of everything. But it's really like created a lot of extra work and burden for clinicians.
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B
Oh really?
- [31:14]
C
Yeah. So like the, the clinicians are like struggling to use this system that's like. I don't know if you've seen those memes, they usually refer to creative tools, but it'll be like it's like the cockpit of an airplane. It's like how it looks when I open After Effects or something. I think that that applies with like epic, which is like the primary like electronic medical records software that like many hospital hospitals use. Like it's like it's really full featured, it's really intense. Like you have to manually record everything. And there's all these startups that are trying to like disrupt that. But like it's a system that's very resistant to disruption and all that. To say like tech hasn't necessarily like helped healthcare find a lot of efficiencies. And I think it's a very like entrenched structural problem. So then there's like all of these more like wellness focused products.
- [31:58]
B
And so these are just like wellness focused product is like the consumer makes a decision on it based on how they just feel.
- [32:08]
C
Yes.
- [32:08]
B
Or want versus going through a healthcare, you know, order of procedures, order of operations of how a healthcare, you know, system is designed to diagnose or prescribe things.
- [32:20]
C
And those two things like are inherently distinct. But I think that they're increasingly starting to mingle, which I think is a really like if tech can't or has to date like failed to fully penetrate in the actual like capital H healthcare system and then in the consumer market you face issues of like saturation, lack of trust because you don't have to adhere to these like medical standards or you don't have to adhere to being an evidence based product. There's data privacy, there's so many. And just like consumer businesses like your inventor, I'm a founder, like we all have heard like there's a lot of, you know, the revenue isn't stable. The consumers are very difficult to make happy. It's very difficult to make them change their behavior. And you can't like diagnose or treat diseases with consumer products. So there's like a lot of limitations there, both about like the economics of it and like the capabilities of the products. But there's like still starting to be more of a like consumerization of actual healthcare products, which I think is driven both by the consumer demand and by like the access to more flexible spending dollars. Like an HSA and FSA accounts I think is a big, is a big driver of consumer spending on wellness products. And then there's also like bills that they're trying to pass most recently like the Choice act, which gives people access to flexible spending dollars as part of their employer provided insurance plans. And there's all these services kind of like noom or headspace. There's a lot of like mental health, like digital mental health clinics that consumers find and consumers choose but are still insurance supported. Like these insurance supported like consumer, I don't know, driven marketplaces.
- [34:10]
B
Yeah. It's almost like we had to make up new categories that weren't touched by the like entrenched healthcare. So like yeah. Mental health, if you think of 30 years ago, there was no like mental health.
- [34:25]
C
Right.
- [34:25]
B
You were just crazy. Or like they get there like that's how they would describe it.
- [34:29]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:30]
B
And so it's probably like like calm and headspace. They like created products that just weren't being served by existing kind of entrenched categories and like weren't maybe like touched by regulations. Like you could pot. Honestly, you could possibly make the argument that like affecting someone's brain is like, should be way more regulated than anything else.
- [34:55]
C
Oh yeah.
- [34:56]
B
But, but, but the current healthcare system, there's like no way to like provide like mental health support. And so it kind of was able to evolve like in more of a decentralized way.
- [35:08]
C
Yeah.
- [35:08]
B
Maybe that's like the opportunity is like there needs to be like new categories that aren't under the umbrella.
- [35:14]
C
Yeah.
- [35:15]
B
Of existing infrastructure of like providing care and support in healthcare.
- [35:19]
C
Yeah. There's a lot of interesting takes on this where people are inventing new markets. I think that like concierge medical Services at the highest end. I know a lot of people who are, you know, high net worth relative to the average American, but certainly not like ultra high net worth. Like people in, in the tech space, like they'll go see. Solace Health is one example of this. There's been a lot that have, you know, kind of popped up and failed. So yeah, like that, like the kind of the high end and then there's like these like blood testing services. Function Health, one of the fastest growing consumer health tech companies I believe ever. Certainly recently, you know, they offer blood testing which has always been around, but you used to get it through your doctor and now they just offer it through independent labs and they offer like feedback and follow up space on that. Wearables.
- [36:09]
B
Yeah. Cause I feel like blood testing was always like a background of like, you know, you're just at the doctor, like oh, by the way, we'll just test your blood and like do something. But it was never like a, because like Quest is like the big player. It's like an infrastructure company in healthcare. And Function Health made it like a product that the consumer could interface with maybe. But there was no, like you didn't just go to get your blood tested just to see what it said. That's not something most people did.
- [36:39]
C
Yeah. And even though you could theoretically have googled the results before or chatgpt the results more recently, which is a whole other thing, we should definitely Talk about like ChatGPT health, like Anthropic's new health product, like being able to have. You know what's crazy, this is like I, I was at a healthcare like founder dinner recently and I don't know the exact mechanics of how this works, but I'll paraphrase and apologies if I get anything wrong. But basically like I am legally, like if I want to access my medical records as a consumer, I'm like legally entitled to do so. But nobody has to make it easy for me. So you a lot of times have to like go chase down different files. Like if you got imaging done or blood work done in a different lab, like maybe those files are really hard to access. You have to go in person, file some, like fax them something, you know, very archaic. But like if I was to make a company, there are certain hoops you have to jump through. You have to employ a physician and there's like female. But like if I was to be a company who wanted to get access to my medical records or your medical records, like I could just set up my company in such a way and like it exists in a centralized database online. So now I have access to all those things without having to go through the like archaic access procedure that a consumer would have to do to access their own medical records. And it's just like up to the hospital system or the doctor's office if they want to like make it easy for you or make it hard for you. And like you certainly like don't get them all in one place place unless you go to one of those companies who has the access that you can't get as an individual.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah.
- [38:09]
C
So it seems like the like ChatGPT Health and others will probably integrate with some providers like that who like go and get people's medical records and then deliver them to the individual.
- [38:20]
B
Yeah, it seems like a lot of stuff that's happening in sort of like consumer health. It's not like we're not like inventing new things, it's just, we're just like doing things that no one's done before.
- [38:30]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Combining services with like a consumer friendly interface or. Yeah, like just making things available at different times in someone's life when the medical system hasn't deemed them necessary. But the person like wants to know more. Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. I think that it's a huge market but I think like the products like in order to be durable, like it's very difficult to build a durable brand in that space. I would say there's a lot of competition and it's a lot of times people will like use one of these products once, like discover behaviors that they need to change and have like a magical moment with the product and really like it. And then once they change the behaviors it's sort of like it goes out of fashion or like with the blood testing companies like you only look at the results of the blood test. Like realistically. At most you're getting your blood tested once a month. If you're like maybe on some type of medicine that requires that you get your blood testing once a month, but most people it's going to be once or twice a year. So like how does that company like interact with their users in the meantime? Which is one thing we're excited about with wearables like Whoop and Aura have started doing labs like blood work through their platforms. I would assume we'll see more access to medical records in those platforms. Integrations with like glucose monitors. But the wearable is something that the user can wear every day and like ideally they're looking at the app every day. But even if it's like once a week. Like it's still a product that's rare in the space because it has like a, it's part of the daily ritual of like sleep tracking or fitness or calories or steps. Like whatever it is, it's things that we do on a daily basis or we might think about on a daily basis.
- [40:12]
B
So you're actually like, you're building different devices and like testing different things. Like I don't know where the appropriate time to start this story or journey of building for, but what made you feel like I could make a hardware company like you could make something? Because I feel like maybe now we're at a point where it's maybe slightly more acceptable or slightly more of a non insane thing to say. I'm building a hardware company. So what's gotten you comfortable with saying, oh, we're going to try building a
- [40:48]
C
health hardware, consumer health hardware, all of those things together. VCs are running for the hills. I can already tell. No, I think it was a combination of things. So my background is in mechanical engineering. That's what I studied in college. And then after school I worked at Tesla doing mechanical design for lithium ion battery cells. And we were designing like it was the first time Tesla had ever fully designed a cell in house. Like previously they were joint ventures like the big Panasonic factory that Tesla stood up. A lot of the IP didn't belong to Tesla, so it was like they were trying to bring all the IP in house and make a bunch of design changes both on the mechanical side of the cell. So like how everything is shaped and the materials that were used and then also on the chemical side. So it was like a really risky, ambitious project. And I interned when things were really early and I came back when we were just prototyping a cell that later went into the cybertruck. And I stayed through the launch of the cybertruck cell. Even though I wasn't there for very long, it did give me exposure to this safety critical, really risky product that, that had to be manufactured at high volumes without failing. And I think that that made the prospect of developing my own hardware device that's like. It still matters immensely to me that this device is extremely accurate and is way more helpful than it is hurtful. But ultimately it's not going to light a vehicle on fire. The worst this does is tell you you did 10 reps and you actually did 12. But like at Tesla, the cell like it has a lot of safety risks. So I think like that was, that was one thing But I also think that like, there's a real structural advantage now in the market of doing things that have even just a little bit more moat that like AI can't immediately like do all of the hardware design and development tasks that we need to do. Whereas like, with software engineering, I feel like a lot of software products, there's still relationships, distribution, there's still a lot of ways to build a moat. But like, I think it. Some of these like less approachable categories are becoming more approachable.
- [43:14]
B
You know, it's like capturing. I feel like the thesis on any kind of like AI company is like, figure out how to like capture a workflow, capture data, like unique data.
- [43:21]
C
Yeah.
- [43:22]
B
And you can argue this is a way to do it in consumer health.
- [43:27]
C
Yeah.
- [43:28]
B
Like, I feel like it's still. You haven't launched yet, right. I think, well, this will maybe, this will maybe actually come out like right after you launch. Right after you launch. So you're still like very earlier and like iterating on building all this stuff.
- [43:40]
C
Yeah, because it was like a lot of, so we've been operational for like almost exactly a year to date and it was a lot of like figuring out like building different prototypes, like the ones that were like, you know, attaching to the muscle. And it was like pursuing a more med device route for the product. And then it was like, okay, we're pursuing consumer, but the thing that we have is very dorky and the iteration speed and hardware, it's like it's getting a lot faster. And it is faster because we're building like a small consumer device. It's not going to have to build like a big crazy machine. But it's still like, it's, it's amazing. Like I'm now writing a lot of our company's code. Like my primary role, I would say at Ford is like, you know, software and product and like I can just change things. Like I can just tear the app down and rebuild it if I want to. Like, and there's obviously some time sunk and like hassle in doing that. But like if I want to tear down the hardware architecture and rebuild it, like there's lead time, there's supply chain issues, there's, you know, physics that often gets in the way and, and it's just like the process is way more friction filled than it is to design software.
- [44:56]
B
So what are the hardest parts about iterating on and shipping and building a hardware product?
- [45:03]
C
I think it's, it's, there's just a, a lot of technical surface area is the first thing. So, like, there's mechanical hardware, right? Like, the. The case is like a hard good that we make out of plastic. These interfaces between the hard good and the fabric strap are made out of metal because they need a tighter tolerance. Then there's like, the electronics and the sensors that go inside here, the boards, they're very difficult to design and manufacture. And then there's the firmware that runs on the chip in here. And the firmware has to do, like, a lot of heavy lifting because we need to, like, store and process data on the device to avoid, like, sending too much over to the phone. And then there's like, the phone app, and then there's like the backend, like, data processing server and stuff. So it's just there's all these, like, different things to maintain. Whereas, like, if you're in a software company, you just, like, don't have half of those things. And then I think, like, the way you can get around that if you don't have the skills in house is, like, outsourcing. But then you're working with people who don't care as much as you and who don't, like. You have to work really hard on communicating your vision effectively. To, like, say, a Chinese supplier. You have to figure out what parts of the process and product design you want to own versus what they should own. You want to make sure you're building the right thing before you invest in a manufacturing line. I think that's been a big thing for us is it's like, it would be so much easier if we could work with a manufacturing partner on a lot of things because they have tons of engineers and tons of expertise. But then it's like, if we tell them to build something, they'll do it. If we tell them the wrong thing, they'll build the wrong thing. So we. Yeah, it's. It's really helpful that our team. It's like, I'm a mechanical engineer. My co founder, Paul, is an electrical engineer. He worked at Tesla much longer than I did. And then we have another engineer, Zach, and he's a mechanical engineer. So, like, now I write code and he does most of our hardware design. But we're capable of, like, as rapidly as one could, like, rapidly prototyping stuff and making changes based on, like, feedback that we get from testing and from users.
- [47:13]
B
And then so with Paul, what. What was he working on at Tesla?
- [47:16]
C
He did, like, sensing systems for the Tesla semi and some other programs. So one of the cool ones was cabin radar, which are, like, these radar sensors in the vehicle that are, they can detect like if someone's having a heart attack.
- [47:30]
B
Why is that important for the Tesla vehicle?
- [47:33]
C
I mean Tesla is just a very safe vehicle and I think they might have other uses. Like I'm actually not familiar with the cabin radar system at all. So it might have just been a health feature that is interesting to the Tesla consumers or it might have some other use in autonomy. But yeah, I'm not familiar with how they actually deploy the sensors and use them in the Tesla vehicles.
- [47:53]
B
And then I know Zach, I don't know. Are you allowed to say what Zach worked on? Is that like a public thing that
- [47:58]
C
you said Zaf worked on Cybercab?
- [48:01]
B
Okay. Yeah, there's a lot of different like probably like more mission critical life or death safety types of features and products versus like traffic tracking. Some muscle.
- [48:16]
C
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely like less intimidating from a safety perspective. But there is a like the thing with wearables is like I'm someone who cares a lot about like design, brand and aesthetics and like I think that like when I like at various points in this journey I've thought like maybe we should just build like a better looking whoop. But like it would be like people will use a wearable that looks bad, but it's very accurate. People will not use a wearable. They might buy it, but they're not going to actually keep using a wearable that looks good but isn't accurate. Like I think accuracy and having some like type of differentiated metrics that actually work reliably is more important than having something that's really like aesthetically pleasing in the beginning. So like I fully imagine that our device will be half the size, made of metal, like a lot more elegant in its future iterations. But like we don't want to devote so many resources to that. We want to devote resources to like making sure like the rep counting, exercise identification form analysis and the software interface is like really accurate and robust.
- [49:30]
B
First, how's it evolved over time? I think you mentioned it sounds like it's just, it's gotten smaller over time.
- [49:36]
C
Yeah, it's gotten smaller and like we've reduced the amount of sensors that we use. Well so this device actually does have like the EMG sensors that we talked about that can do like kind of local sensing that we were investigating as a primary like sensing methodology. So we haven't actually like fully removed them yet. Despite like we generally think we want to focus more on motion tracking as a proxy for exercise fatigue and exercise form versus the local stuff. This Also has near infrared spectroscopy which is a optical sensor. So it's like a light based sensor similar to the heart rate sensors. It's again though you have to wear it locally. So this actually is still pretty beefy in terms of what it has on board. It has a lot more sensors than Whoop and Aura and Apple Watch do. If we get demand from our beta testers to use those sensors more like they really want to wear it locally and get more data, more accurate data, more localized data, we can still do it with this hardware. But if not, our hypothesis is that motion is generally sufficient as long as you're not bound to the wrist. And so we should just make the device smaller and cut some of this extra sensors.
- [50:52]
B
Yeah, that's fair. One thing you mentioned was you're doing a lot of the, the software and product stuff yourself. I remember I feel like you've been like a ground zero case study of like, like what Vibe coding can do or whatever. Like I remember there's one night in the for office where it was like one of the earlier versions of Cursor where you're like learning to use cursor.
- [51:17]
C
Yeah.
- [51:17]
B
To make a product.
- [51:18]
C
Yeah.
- [51:18]
B
So what has that been like? I feel like you've been in like grand rounds. You're capitalizing on what you can do with Vibe coding.
- [51:24]
C
I actually feel like I am somewhat so like non technical people, I feel like now could get a lot out of Vibe coding and will be able to get a lot more out of Vibe coding in the future. Highly technical people obviously can get a lot out of Vibe coding and they can do more complex like agent orchestration and have these like interesting development workflows. I, as someone who's semi technical I would say like I, I did some AI research in college but that's mostly like Python in notebooks and like Python deployed on servers. It's not like the same as like full stack. Like it's certainly not writing a mobile app. And I did some like data analysis work at Tesla. Again it's like Python based. It's like not soft software engineering in the way that I do now. Like I feel like I'm an absolute weapon because I had some context for like how computers work, like how programming languages work. Like you know, I've been in VS code, I'd made like a Twitter bot before. I'd made my personal website before. Like I am just like so like what I can do I feel like is it's just like insane. I feel like I'm at the perfect like I Didn't really have to actually learn to be a software engineer, but I still like get so much more out of it than if I was like fully non technical. And yeah, it's evolved a lot. Like I remember like first using ChatGPT, like when I was at Tesla I would ask it little Python questions and I could do that and then we got code cursor and cursor was good at first, but I remember it would like just lead me down paths that weren't actually going to work. I think when you came to the afore office I was trying to set up some streaming service for our data to get from the device through Bluetooth into cloud storage. And it was, the architecture was awful. It was so horrible it was never going to work. And I kept being like, oh, we're 95% of the way there. Just one more bug fix, just one more prompt. And it like, it just like the neither I nor the like coding agent was smart enough to figure it out. But now I feel like, I feel like I'm certainly especially with like Opus 4.5 and like Claude code with cloud code's recent updates. Like I feel like the at least like my community of founders has generally like converged on Claude code as a primary tool. And, and it's interesting to see how like as the models evolve, like different clusters of people go to different things and use different models for different things. There's all this like sharing of different workflows. But yeah, I like vibe coding is incredible. It's amazing. Have you been vibe coding at all?
- [53:49]
B
Not enough. Maybe a little bit, but I just like don't have anything I need to build.
- [53:54]
C
You know what you could do?
- [53:55]
B
What could I do?
- [53:56]
C
You should do some like Valentine's Day thing, like I feel like holiday or like, like or like a podcast thing like Shweta. One of my friends, she did a tarot deck that was a vibe coated project. That was witch tech, bro. Tarot readings. But I'm curious because I'm certain someone's gonna do a Valentine's Day themed one that will be really viral and I haven't come up with any ideas that I feel like are viral enough to actually go do it myself. But maybe you could.
- [54:28]
B
That's a good idea.
- [54:29]
C
Or you could do something with your kids. Your kids are into music production. We were just talking about that. Maybe you could make them an interesting synth interface or something.
- [54:38]
B
Yeah, my daughter does love coding. So there's this program that the school does, it's called pltw Project Lead. The way. And for whatever reason, they do a lot of coding in it. Learning to code. And it's a lot of. It's some kids program. I forgot what the program's called, but it's. It's not like cursor or anything anyone's probably heard of, but it's like some kind of like you learn to like make the computer do actions and stuff like that. And she calls it coding. I don't think anyone listening to this would call it coding. But like that's how they like describe to the kids where you like make things. So I've. I've been thinking about like one of these weekends we should spend like a couple hours of like make a game together.
- [55:20]
C
Yeah.
- [55:21]
B
Like Claude or something like that, which would probably work.
- [55:25]
C
Yeah, I think it would be super feasible. I think it helps like, the more. Well, this is the great thing about like doing it with your kids too is it's like the more strong of an idea of like the creative vision you have for the project, like, the easier it is for Claude to just like handle the boring stuff. So like she can really let her imagination run wild. And I feel like then you can maybe translate that into more like executive instructions. Like, you know, how, in what order to do things and what are the success criteria? Because I feel like that's really important as well. I think we're quickly approaching the time when prompt engineering doesn't really matter. You can give some abstract idea to the models and the inference will be able to tell what you really mean. But I still feel like now I get a lot better, more out of it if I'm like, specific about like order success criteria, how it's supposed to evaluate the success criteria. Um, but yeah, like the creative stuff, like it's so cool to be able to see people's visions come to life.
- [56:30]
B
Yeah. One thing you mentioned, you said you made a Twitter bot. What was the Twitter bot?
- [56:35]
C
Okay, so I. This was like pre me having any type of like Twitter. Like, I didn't tweet or anything. This was like in. I guess it was right after college. But I. It was like when crypto was really popular and I felt like I as like a mechanical engineering student and like just freshly moving to San Francisco right in the heyday of crypto. I like didn't know a lot of the words that people would say on like crypto Twitter. Like I didn't understand what they meant. So I made a bot that I could like tag in the comments and it was like parse the tweet. For any like finance or crypto related words and like define them for me. Like, I didn't know what like a DCF was either. Like it. So it was like finance, like, like a discount, like a cash flow model. Like, I didn't know any of the finance words. I didn't know any of the like crypto words. So like if it was like a ticker symbol, it would tell me what company was. If it was like a acronym that they use in finance, it would tell me what that was. And if it was like a, a coin or a crypto like term, it would tell me what that was.
- [57:31]
B
Okay.
- [57:32]
C
Yeah, Nice.
- [57:33]
B
So you would reply to the tweet, you were one of those people.
- [57:36]
C
I would go on the bots account and I would just have it tag itself. And it was kind of like, this is very an overstatement of its capabilities, but it's like, you know how people now are like at Grok. Explain this. It was like an early primitive version of that. Yeah, I basically invented Grok.
- [57:53]
B
Yeah, no big deal. And so do you. And you kind of like. So we actually met on Twitter. You like use Twitter a decent amount in like how you think about forced and like being being a founder? I guess.
- [58:03]
C
Yeah.
- [58:03]
B
So like, what's your relationship with like it.
- [58:06]
C
Yeah, I think it's evolved somewhat. I mean, maybe externally it probably doesn't look like it's evolved a lot, but I feel like now I'm worse at tweeting, unfortunately.
- [58:17]
B
So how do you approach Twitter as a founder?
- [58:19]
C
I think it's really important to be authentic. This is cliche. I'll explain what I mean. I think that the mistake. I see a lot of people who want to engage with social media and use it to grow their platform. Like the, the mistake that they make is they try to tweet LinkedIn Slop on Twitter and like, it doesn't work. Like, not.
- [58:48]
B
It's just all social media. Isn't it the same?
- [58:50]
C
Twitter is similar to founding a company where if you're in a bad market, even if your product is good, it's going to flop. And what I mean by that is the topic that you're discussing has to be either the current thing or one of these evergreen topics. And even then, if your take is kind of lukewarm, but it's worded well, I feel like your tweet does well, but if you talk about something that nobody cares about, it's never gonna do well, even if it's like funny or interesting. So I think you have to figure out what? The intersection of, like, things that you authentically care about? Because, like, what I meant when I said, like, people tweet a lot of LinkedIn slob is it's like, it's very generic. It'll be like, oh, I don't. Yeah, I don't know. They'll be like, I'm working so hard, like, trying to meet customers or something. I don't know. It's just like. It's kind of boring. It's kind of, like, vague. And, like, maybe the. The. The, like, Hot Topic would be like, nine, nine, six. So even if you're thinking about that, like, you have to kind of figure out a way to slot it into, like, the current discourse. Or like, my co founder, he was trying to get into Twitter at one point, and he tweeted something about red pandas. And I was like, first of all, you don't really care about red pandas. And second of all, like, no, nobody else is really talking about red pandas right now. So, like, it's. It's probably like, doesn't have a good chance of success. But, yeah, so like, something that you know about and then also something that you notice other people talking about a lot on there is generally what's going to do.
- [60:17]
B
Well, is that annoying, though, that you have to talk about the current thing?
- [60:21]
C
I think you hit escape velocity at a certain point. As in, if you have a following and people generally start to know who you are from talking about the current thing, you can start talking about other things, and it'll still get traction because you have a core group of people that are now interested in you. So for me, like, the way that I first had a few, like, viral tweets was, like, talking about San Francisco culture, like, specifically dating culture at first. Cause I was, like, single at the time, and I was, like, dating. And I'd observed all of these interesting things that happened.
- [60:57]
B
Backpack at a bar.
- [60:58]
C
Yeah.
- [60:58]
B
I think I was like, the first we were out. What was that? What was that?
- [61:02]
C
It was like, guys in San Francisco will say it's hard to find a girlfriend and then wear a backpack to the bar.
- [61:09]
B
Yeah.
- [61:10]
C
And I had another one that was like, guys in SF say it's harder to find a girlfriend than it is to raise $10 million or something like that. And this was, like, something that people had. Actually, I didn't know that it was, like, discourse on Twitter around dating, to be honest. Like, I didn't see other people talking about it and then start, like, talking about it because other people were talking about it. But in hindsight, like, people. People were definitely talking about it. And I had a novel take, I guess, because I'm a woman and because I phrased it in a way that was engaging. And I feel like that format worked really well for me in the beginning. But now a lot of the stuff that goes viral, just random wholesome posts. My mom sent me a cute picture and I posted it and it went super viral. And I replied a bunch of times to my own tweet.
- [61:57]
B
Yeah. You have a series of your mom's pictures that you see?
- [62:00]
C
Yeah, yeah, my mom, she. She knows what she's doing. There's actually another one that I didn't tweet, but I probably should. She sent me a really funny picture.
- [62:10]
B
So then what about if you're a founder and you're thinking about doing a launch video?
- [62:13]
A
You did.
- [62:14]
B
You didn't do a launch video. You just like an announcement video.
- [62:17]
C
Yeah, announcement.
- [62:18]
B
You're just like sitting in your webcam talking. So, like, how should. And I think that was like, pretty successful. I mean, it wasn't like the most viral video ever on Twitter, but I feel like it went pretty well. What's like the. The keys to doing a good sort of like, announcement or launch on Twitter?
- [62:36]
C
I think last year there was all this, like, cluly stuff. And before that, even, like, obviously Shiftman's friend, like, video was super viral, but I think, like, it wasn't quite like there wasn't this, like, launch video industry until last year with the clulies industry.
- [62:53]
B
It was like, industrial still.
- [62:55]
C
An industrial complex still.
- [62:56]
B
Like, hey, we're doing a series A, like, launch video.
- [62:58]
C
Yeah. And I think it's like, I think that that's fine. Like, you can think about it as an expression of like, your creative vision for the company or whatever. But I personally think there's a lot of ways you can express your creative vision for the company more simplistically. So, like, when I did my, like, simple sitting at a table launch video is like, I wore a particular shirt, I. I sat in front of a particular background. Like, the lighting was a particular way. I thought about those things. And maybe you could intentionally not think about those things. Maybe you want to signal we are just cracked degenerate engineers and we do not care about any type of aesthetics and we are just grinding all the time and we want the video to look like that. But I think there's a lot of ways you can do that without spending 10, 20, 50, 100 grand on a high production video. I think the production, like, Growth in your business should fuel spending on these types of stunts, not the other way around. In my opinion. I think you should really challenge yourself to have some type of customers or traction before you go and splurge on this stuff. I think a lot of people see it as a ticket to getting a lot of inbound, which it is. But I think you can keep it simple, still get the same level of inbound or approximately the same level of inbound, and, like, not spend 20 grand on a launch video.
- [64:22]
B
Yeah, I remember one interesting one to be Paul Klein at Browserbase. His first video he did was just in front of his computer recording a video. He had, like a whiteboard behind him. His particular thing was he's like, I made sure I had an American flag. Because he knew that the Gundo.
- [64:41]
C
Yeah.
- [64:42]
B
Community would, like, support flag. So he was like, you know, that's an extra thing I could do to just like, get a little bit more of attention. Like having an American flag in the background, which is like, kind of like, smart.
- [64:54]
C
It's smart. Yeah. Those tricks are, like, so good. Like, one of my friends and batchmates just went pretty viral on Twitter and it was like his co founder posted like they were trying to sell hospitality software. And his co founder. Yeah, the co founder was like, I dressed up in a suit and tie to go talk to the, like, general manager at local hotels to try to sell them software. Like, he was wearing, like, jeans and a backpack. And it like, was not a suit and tie, but it was like he was wearing a jacket. So it was like a SF take on a suit and tie. And everyone in the comments was like, that's not a suit and tie. But they like, did really, like. It's like, there's so many little, like, visual tricks you can do either to rage bait or to just, like, engagement bait more subtly.
- [65:41]
B
Do you want to rage bait and engagement bait, though? Because somebody might say, like, oh, these guys are clowns.
- [65:47]
C
Yeah.
- [65:47]
B
Would I really trust the product if they're rage baiting? I feel like we've seen, like, the upsides and the downsides of those over the past year. If you've been like, kind of observing. Yeah, like, should you do that or
- [65:59]
C
I don't think I should do that. No. I think there's like a certain amount of. Well, there's like a little bit of engagement baiting that I think is fair. I think for us, it's really important that we demonstrate, like, commitment and like, people who maybe we don't, like, have 10 years of engineering expertise at this company and, like, you know, millions of dollars under our belts. But, like, we want to seem like we could get there. We want to seem like we are working tirelessly for our customers, which is what we are doing. And I think we don't want to. Selling this as a tool to get jacked is absolutely not how I want to market it. I think naturally people that want to get jacked will use for it. I like those people. I am one of those people. But I think we need to build a lot of trust in our ability to accurately measure strength and then deliver the information in a way that's like, helps people change their behaviors. And I don't think any of that really revolves around, like, a crazy viral moment. Plus, it's just like the purchase price of, like, one of these apps. Like, if you're trying to sell Cluey, like, you need someone to pay you whatever, like, 10, 20 bucks a month. I don't know what exactly it costs, but, like, it's relatively low fee and they can cancel whenever, and they're not buying a hardware product, and it doesn't really measure any of their, like, sensitive health metrics. So, like, maybe it's better to just, like, get a lot of top of funnel. Whereas for something like what I'm doing, like, I need someone to spend, you know, call it 300 on my device plus software subscription for a year. I need them to trust me to take their heart rate and to know certain things about their health before maybe even they do. And if I want somebody to do that, like, we need to establish a different kind of relationship than just, like, selling it. A viral app.
- [67:56]
B
Yeah. And you. You mentioned something that your friend who had the post with the backpack, suit and tie was a batch made. So you're. You're in yc?
- [68:06]
C
Yeah.
- [68:06]
B
Right now?
- [68:07]
C
Yeah.
- [68:07]
B
When did it start?
- [68:08]
C
It started. I think we're in the third week now.
- [68:12]
B
Okay, so you're pretty early.
- [68:13]
C
Yeah.
- [68:14]
B
What. What's it been like doing yc?
- [68:17]
C
It's been. I mean, I honestly love it. Like, I think that, like, I don't know what the sentiment about YC is in, like, the actual general population, but, like, in San Francisco, certainly there's like, mixed feelings from, like, people. Like, there's generally, like. I would say it's generally a positive thing. But then there's also, like, some founders are like, oh, because of all the launch videos and because they're funding a lot of, like, kooky ideas, you know, like, what was it? Like, fusion reactors on ships or something? Or, like, there's a chat id. There was pair id, which was like a fork of cursor before. And there's. There's a moon hotel in our current badge. Like, because they fund companies like this and people have these, like, crazy viral moments. I think a lot of people, they
- [69:00]
B
assume every single thing in the YC batch is just some ridiculous moon hotel.
- [69:06]
C
Yeah. I think what I really like about YC is it. It kills a lot of the fear and hesitation that people have around, like, launching and talking to users. And I think it's like, you know, I wish I could say that I never had. I'm not really afraid of putting myself out there, but it's different. Like, putting something that you make out there and also being an engineer and knowing all of, like, how the sausage is made and all the things I want to fix and all the features I want to add. But they, like, really encourage you to, like, sell while you're still uncomfortable, which I think you have to do to have a successful business. Like, I think there's always going to be a point in everyone's business when they're like, they want to add more features or polish something or change the way something works. But you need to make money. And you need to also, like, a lot of the times you don't know what the right thing to build is, your customers do. They're the one who is going to pay for it and use the product. So, like, a lot of the times, like, I mean, if you know your customers well, you can make an educated guess, but a lot of the times they're going to tell you something that's, like, unexpected or valuable. So yc, I think, like, it's also just so much fun for me to go be around other founders all the time. Because it's something that I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know that that's what I wanted. But now I can identify a lot of patterns of thinking and behavior in myself growing up that I can identify as wanting to be an entrepreneur. Now, what I was like, well, I mean, this is pretty straightforward, but when I was even in elementary school, I had various entrepreneurial ventures of questionable morality. The less questionable. Well, I guess they were all kind of questionable, but at that age, like, nothing is really regulated. So what I read is, like, I would make paper cranes and I would sell them to other kids in the playground. But the money that the kids were giving me, like, we were in third grade. So, like, the money that they were giving me was maybe like lunch money or like, Money that their parents had given them. And I got in a lot of trouble for doing that. And then.
- [71:10]
B
Oh. Because kids couldn't buy lunch.
- [71:12]
C
I don't think it was that they, like. I hope that they weren't giving me their actual lunch money. I don't know. I was, like, really way too young to realize, like, that that might have been a consequence of the action, but certainly, like, they just didn't want commerce being done on the playground. So they sat our whole class down,
- [71:29]
B
and they were, like, regulated market.
- [71:30]
C
No more playground commerce. So at that point, I was sore out of luck with the selling paper cranes, and I changed my business model because in our class, there was like a. Like a. What this be called? Like, a lottery. It's like a drawing like, that you would get tickets for, like, doing good things in class. And then at the end, like, she would. The teacher would, like, draw one of the tickets out of the bowl, and, like, that person would get a prize. And so I would take, like, toys that me and my sister didn't want anymore, and I would bring them to school, and I would sell them for tickets Because I couldn't sell things for real money anymore. So I decided the next best currency was tickets. And so by the end of it, I had, like, so many more tickets, like, probably, like, 10, 20x the tickets of, like, anyone else in my class. So I feel like that was like. And, yeah, there's, like, a million other examples of, like, things I did when I was a kid that I feel like were what I would now consider entrepreneurial.
- [72:26]
B
Yeah. I feel like maybe one interesting one I had was, like, I had a lemonade stand in third grade, and my brother helped me, and so I think I made. My mom also helped me and, like, made all the products.
- [72:39]
C
Yeah.
- [72:41]
B
I didn't pay my mom for any of the materials. She made it all for free.
- [72:44]
C
Nice.
- [72:45]
B
I made $47, and I paid my brother a dollar for helping, and he did, like, the same amount of work as me.
- [72:52]
C
So funny.
- [72:53]
B
And then I bought Pokemon Yellow Vers, the money that I got from the lemonade stand.
- [72:57]
C
Yeah, you were rich.
- [72:58]
B
That we had. Yeah. And it was, like, pretty high margins when you, like, don't have to pay anyone.
- [73:03]
C
Yeah.
- [73:04]
B
But, like, as a kid, it's like, I don't know. I was like, peyton, I'll give you a dollar if you help me. He's like, yeah, okay. It's like. And then my mom, she was a willing participant in just making cookies.
- [73:15]
C
Yeah.
- [73:16]
B
And then I think they probably, like, bought all the Materials too. And I just like kept all the money.
- [73:20]
C
Nice.
- [73:21]
B
Like pretty good margins. Like as a kid, we did the same thing with my daughter. We had a garage sale and she, we like, she sold hand squeezed orange juice cookies that we made from scratch, lemonade. We had coffee. And again it was like we just did all the work for her and then keep all the money.
- [73:39]
C
So fun. It's so rewarding. As a kid, I did one where we donated all the money to charity and we, we made way more money than we would have otherwise.
- [73:47]
B
Just by saying you're donating it.
- [73:49]
C
No, well, we, we did, we weren't lying. But like we did donate it to charity. But yeah, we said like it was actually the premise was free lemonade. All tips go to charity. So like, sure, some people would get it for free, but most people, they would come and just like give us a 20.
- [74:01]
B
Like a 10. Yeah. $20.
- [74:02]
C
Yeah. And we like donated it to, I think it was called St. Francis, like some charity in Portland, Oregon where I lived at the time. And they were like really impressed. Cause I think we raised like, I don't know, close to 500 bucks, something like that. Something pretty significant for like a day's day's lemonade stand.
- [74:19]
B
This was in school, like at the side of the road at your house?
- [74:22]
C
I think it was, it may have just been on the side. So it was at my friend's house. It may have been on a day when a lot of people in the neighborhood did garage sales all at once. That might have been how we were able to get so much money. I don't remember if it was like just a normal day or if it was like that specific day.
- [74:40]
B
Interesting. Okay, what's your best garage sale find or vintage searching find?
- [74:45]
C
Oh, I have so many. Yeah, I think. Well, the most recent one, that was exciting, which I, I, you'll see later. It's like this crazy mirror that's like wider than this table is, I guess. And it, we got it for like 25 bucks. But it's like shaped like a flower on the outside. And then the mirror is like a circular part inside the flower. This is a really good deal for like 20 bucks for like a giant like crazy thing.
- [75:12]
B
And it's this like furniture vintage store down the street from the office.
- [75:15]
C
Yeah.
- [75:16]
B
Or.
- [75:16]
C
Okay, yeah, it's like almost like a warehouse because like where we're at in the Mission, which is like a common neighborhood for kind of like robotics startups or like they have a lot of things that are zoned where you can like Manufacture things in the units and you might also live in the units is an interest. Like, like. Paul stayed in our office for a couple months.
- [75:35]
B
Does he still live there?
- [75:36]
C
No, he doesn't live there anymore.
- [75:38]
B
So do you have the full up the upstairs areas?
- [75:40]
C
The upstairs is manufacturing now. You'll see we have, like, two, two 3D printers. We have, like, a workbench up there. We're trying to turn it into the shop because I got really tired of having so much mess downstairs in the office area. And.
- [75:54]
B
Yeah, because you walk in, there's just like a squat rack to the left.
- [75:56]
C
Yeah.
- [75:57]
B
A lot of, like, tools and. Yeah, yeah, just sitting out there.
- [75:59]
C
We still want it. So the squat rack is still there. Also. We got the squat rack for free because Zach's family, like, already owned it, but they weren't using it. So we were able to just like, get that for free. Like, a lot of our office stuff we got for really cheap. But our office is pretty nice. But. Yeah, so we'll keep the squat rack there. And then we have, like, a desk set up to do, like, sensor testing basically there. And then, like, hardware in the loop testing. Like, if we just. We don't have all the infrastructure set up, but, like, we ideally want to be able to, like, push code and then have it tested on real hardware automatedly, automatically. So we'll do that like, lab stuff downstairs. But, like, all the actual tools, like soldering, mechanical work will get done upstairs.
- [76:36]
B
I know we got. We. We're doing a board game night in, like, 52 minutes from now. So we're gonna. We're gonna start winding down. But I was wondering if you have any questions for me at all on anything.
- [76:44]
C
Yeah. So Turner is, like, so different than other VCs, I think. Like, I really. I. I want you to share, like, I know a lot about, like, your investing, like, thesis and. And how you run your business. But, like, I think that the people. It would be really interesting for other people who might be thinking about starting companies to hear about, like, how you run your fund.
- [77:07]
B
Yeah, I mean, I'm still figuring it out. Honestly, I think the most interesting thing is I kind of accidentally also am a media company, and I accidentally became an influencer. I was just trying to get a job in VC8, nine years ago, and I kind of became an influencer. And with people following you on the Internet, it makes it a little bit easier to do something sometimes. And then it's kind of reached a point where I just, like, I just realized, okay, that's my, like, advantage. Is I guess I'm like, I have people that follow me on the Internet and a lot of investors don't. And then you can think about it as like, well, how can I lend my distribution to portfolio companies? And then it got to the point where with, especially after like starting the podcast, I had friends who were like heads of growth at Numeral who was like sponsoring this episode. And Nate was like, I've listened to every episode of the podcast. It's so good. Can I sponsor the podcast? And I was like, I don't know. Yeah, it might be kind of cool, but kind of seems like a hassle. It can't be that much money. I don't know if it's even worth it. And then it's kind of evolved to the point where it's like, oh, I kind of accidentally also have a media business also. So it's kind of like this two pronged. And yeah, a lot of things that I am investing. And I think it's not the only part of the thesis, but I think about if I invest, how can I help out? Can I lend my distribution? So I guess with Ford it's like, I don't know, you're maybe selling to my audience, but it's like, can I help? Or also like, do you understand like the psyche of the customer? Maybe that drives a decision making of like, would you invest or not? Because I didn't. Like, I mean, I used to work out four or five times a week in college and like get married, have kids once a week now consistently, like actually do a good workout. And it's just like you play floor hockey also instead of even like doing like a gym workout. But like, you identify with the product and you realize, oh man, that is some. You, you realize what the customer might want. Yeah, I don't know, it's kind of, it's a lot of investing is like stuff that you feel like you could help or you understand. Would people actually use this and pay for it?
- [79:11]
C
Yeah.
- [79:13]
B
And I don't know, do you think you'll be able to make money? Like, I feel like that's like a big thing that people don't think about is like, you have to make money.
- [79:21]
C
Don't think about making money in a business. It's crazy.
- [79:25]
B
Well, and it's not even just like, can you charge customers for it? But like, is this a valuable company? Yeah, there's a lot of things where like you can sell a dollar for 80 cents and you can generate infinite revenue losing money, but you need to be able to Think of like, okay, like, if I give. If I put a dollar into this company, will I get a billion dollars back in a week?
- [79:48]
C
Yeah.
- [79:48]
B
Like, that's like, probably like the ultimate is like invest a super small amount, you just make a shit ton of money really quickly. And then there's like a spectrum of like, might take a lot longer, like you need to put in more money, et cetera. But like, ultimately I think it was just like, can you make money?
- [80:02]
C
Yeah, that's.
- [80:03]
B
I feel like as a founder, you maybe don't think about that as much. It's all about like the TAM or like the product, like me as the team. And like, people are looking at and thinking about a lot of that stuff, but also it's just like, can I make money? That's what the investors are thinking about. I think there's also a dynamic of, depending on who you talk to, of will I get promoted if I invest in this company? Because a lot of the tenure is pretty short. So the way that might play out in practice is, okay, I invest in Miranda and her seed round, and then in three years later, or maybe honestly three months later, you raise a series A, two months later you raise a series B. It looks like really quick progress on the surface. And me as the investor who did that, my career prospects look good and I can go from being an associate of fund to a principal, or maybe I can leave and start my own firm and it might not actually matter. Was Ford successful? Maybe you are and it becomes a public company or maybe things like crash and burn. But it doesn't matter because I got my promotion. So I feel like there's like, those are some of like the different angles and investors might be thinking about. That's like, it's. It's not the same framing as like, you know, how good is the product? What's the market like, the tam. So it's like a pretty. The way I think maybe is the most helpful is just like, like, you come to the investors and you're like, here's how we're going to make a bunch of money. Because that's also what people are kind of trying to answer.
- [81:33]
C
Yeah.
- [81:33]
B
It's like, make. The investors are going to make a bunch of money and they're gonna. It's gonna help their career.
- [81:39]
C
Yeah.
- [81:39]
B
Cause that's like, ultimately when you're selling a product to someone, like, you're selling like B2B SaaS.
- [81:45]
C
Yeah.
- [81:45]
B
It's like you're saving them time, you're saving them money, or it's like you know, they brought this new AI product into the organization, and that person gets promoted and becomes like, a VP because they, like, brought in this great software that helped the company. So I feel like that's. It's like an angle to maybe think about fundraising. That's a little bit different.
- [82:04]
C
Yeah, they talk a lot about inflection points, and I think obviously the reason for that is the slope is steeper. So the time delta between now and when we're either in theory or in practice going to make some unfathomable sum of money is just so little. It's the classic power law dynamics. I also want to know what were the first things that did well on social media for you? When did you find social media pmf and how did you think about that?
- [82:34]
B
So the probably, like, the first things I started tweeting about. Did you use Snapchat or do you use it?
- [82:41]
C
I. I don't anymore, although I have noticed it's coming back.
- [82:44]
B
Oh, is it okay?
- [82:45]
C
Yeah.
- [82:47]
B
So this is probably like the very early days of it was I started. I kind of, like, wanted to get a job in venture. I was like, oh, I feel like this would be kind of fun. How do I.
- [82:57]
C
Like.
- [82:58]
B
They're on Twitter. I'll just, like, tweet about things I feel like I'm smart about and people follow me and, like, I'll use it to, like, build a public track record of saying things. And, like, I'll get a. This is probably like, 2017, 2018. So the first things I started tweeting about was Snapchat did this big redesign. I don't know if you remember when they added stories to the left side of the app, and they basically turned the Discover section into a endless feed. And Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, I don't even remember who one of the Kardashians tweeted that. She says things like, does anyone use Snapchat anymore? And the stock dropped 20, 20% in a day. And it was pretty interesting. Where Snapchat is a product that pretty much every kid in the developed world, like us, Europe, et cetera, they use it all day, every day, had about two thirds the size user base as Instagram. And Instagram was like, there wasn't a ton of public data around how big Instagram was inside Facebook, but it was probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And Snapchat at one point traded at about $5 billion. And it was basically like, people were like, this company's going bankrupt. No one uses anymore. And it's just because a lot of public negative consensus around it. Now it's kind of like, that's so not even a fair assumption to have literally every kid in the country uses it all day, every day. Facebook is, like, the best business model of all time, and Snapchat is just a worst version of it, but it's still, like, a pretty good business.
- [84:23]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [84:24]
B
And I think today Snapchat does, like, 6 billion in revenue. But if at the time, back in, like, 2018 people, it was worth, like, $5 billion, people that was, like, going bankrupt. So I started tweeting a lot of, like, why I thought this was based on, like, all the data. Like, I was kind of, like, listening to the earnings calls, finding different, like, charts, reports, and, like, tweeting things. It's kind of like having an opinion on something that you feel is, like, a unique view.
- [84:49]
C
Yeah.
- [84:50]
B
And you're just kind of putting it out there. And, like, a lot of people are like, oh, it was pretty good. Like, take, like, maybe this guy's actually right. It's probably similar to today when you just, like, you come across someone, you're like, oh, it's like a smart thing this person said. And so I started tweeting about that specifically. And then also probably, like, another big thing that worked for me was when Musical ly rebranded as TikTok. I had, like, meet. I, like, really had never even really heard of musically, because I was like, in my 20s, and there's, like, a Wall Street Journal article about this, like, TikTok app. And I was like, why is there a Wall Street Journal article? Like, some social media app? Like, I, like, tried. And I was like, holy shit, this is like, the best product I've ever used. It feels like Vine 2.0. Like, TikTok, when it first came out, like, it felt like Vine. And I was like, wow, this. And the product was really, really good. And so, like, the thesis with. When I was posting a lot about Snap, it was that, oh, wow, they're adding a ton of more ad inventory. They're basically bringing stories into the messaging section so they can message, they can monetize the messaging. So, like, it was always a big issue with Snapchat was like, all people use it for is messaging. And, like, they can't make any money. They added stories to that part of the app. And then they also made this, like, endless feed that you scroll, and they started showing ads in the feed, and it's like, that's why it's just such a good business is because it's just, you know, you get people addicted to their phone, and the more they scroll, like, you just keep making money. The interesting thing with TikTok was back in, like, 2019, when you opened the Instagram app, or even still, like, you open Facebook and you think of, like, your phone as, like, this rectangle, and like, maybe, like, one third of the screen is actually the video, and then there's, like, a white bar, and it's like Miranda, like, your little circle of, like, your profile picture. And the name and there's, like, big section is just, like, the, like button and, like, the comments. But, like, the phone, like, the apps in the screen space wasn't really optimized. And TikTok, it was just. You open the app and it's all the video.
- [86:50]
C
Yeah.
- [86:51]
B
And the other interesting thing was when you looked at what they were doing in China, you could, like, shop right from the app and, like, buy things from the app. And everyone had kind of always said, like, you know, maybe Instagram could do this. Like, you can shop on Instagram. But TikTok was, like, much more positioned to basically be, like, a video first Amazon, or be, like, like, a more visually optimized version of, like, when you think of, like. Because I think that the thing that Instagram maybe, like, struggled with at first was when you think of, like, Snapchat maybe started, like, the stories concept. And it was like, you're sending people video messages or picture messages. And then the way it evolved was, you know, you have that screen where you can, like, pick who you send the thing to, and you can just at the top, click my story and, like, bolt it onto the story. And it's this kind of, like, thing that, like, accumulated over time that you, like, layered in these different. Different videos and. Or different, like, pieces of media. And it kind of, like, told, like, a story, per se. And then when Instagram like, literally copied it, like, like, they literally copied everything about it. And so they just added these, like, circles at the top of the screen. And that's how Instagram added, like, full screen video to the app. It was like, literally a carbon copy of Snaps had evolved from this, like, messaging feature in Instagram. They almost, like, didn't think from first principles. They're just like, let's exactly clone it and do exactly the same thing. And you're like, why is there this weird, like, circle stream at the top of the app? And it's still there, and then there's kind of reels now, but it's kind of like this Frankenstein thing. And it was just like, I always thought it was kind of fascinating that TikTok was like, if you were to redesign a social media product native to mobile and video, it would be TikTok. So anyways, I started tweeting about this kind of stuff back in 20, 18, 19 20, and it was a lot of serious things. People followed me for that. And then. Yeah, there's one point. I had a friend who ran a meme account. It's not that activated. I won't say the name, but it was like a meme account about like, VC and tech. And I started like, I probably come up with like 10% of the tweets, and they were like, slap. Like, it'd get a thousand likes, which was pretty good back in, you know, six years ago, seven years ago.
- [89:14]
C
Yeah.
- [89:14]
B
But even then it was like, you know, inflation adjusted, it was probably like 5000 likes equivalent, which is great.
- [89:19]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [89:20]
B
And I'd be like, man, I spent all this time, like a. Like a eight hours on a weekend putting out this like, kind of insightful thing. And like, no one cared, like, mid, like, you know, relatedly, like, people just didn't care as much versus, like, huh. I mean, like this, like, dumb meme making fun of VCs. And like, the founder of a public company retweeted, raised venture funding, and like, probably hated his VCs.
- [89:43]
C
Yeah.
- [89:44]
B
So I was like, huh. There's like this weird dynamic that's kind of emerging where you can use humor for marketing and found, like, smart founders would, like, identify with it. So I started, instead of helping my friend with Feast, I would like, make them from my own account and I'd start posting memes. And it's called shit posting now, but it almost a word for it. And it worked really well because it wasn't really a thing that people were doing. And back at the time, it was like a lot of tech, Twitter and vc. Twitter was like earnest cringe posting. Like you would get on LinkedIn. It was much more prevalent on the feeds.
- [90:26]
C
Yeah.
- [90:27]
B
So, like, you'd see, you know, we've all kind of seen those like, really weird, like, congratulatory tweets of like, VCs, like, bragging, like, it was so much more prominent. And so all of a sudden I was like an investor that was just like, making fun of myself and other VCs.
- [90:41]
C
Yeah.
- [90:41]
B
Founder founders, like, just identified with it and liked it. And it just worked like, like, I had a hypothesis that if I just kind of lean into this, I bet it will work. And it was like 10 times more
- [90:52]
C
effective than I Thought you invented shit posting.
- [90:54]
B
Yeah. Like, I would not say invented it, but I probably, like, made it more acceptable because I, like, raised a fund off of it and people are like, oh, this is like a business strategy. Like, you can use memes for like, B2B marketing. Really?
- [91:07]
C
Yeah, yeah, I think it's like an interesting. There's an interesting. I tweeted like, 5k followers on Instagram gets you like a discount code with a drop shipping company, but 5k followers on Twitter gets you like a $5 million pre seed, you know, and it's like crazy because it's like, I think that this is like, inherently, this is an interesting concept of like, you know, having different amounts of leverage for different niches and different platforms. But then I also think, like, there's just like so many. I was actually thinking about writing like a substack post. I'm like, too focused on business to do this, but, like, as a side project, I'd love to interview a bunch of my friends who are like micro influencers in different niches and see how different, like, the lifestyle is. Because so many people are like.
- [91:46]
B
And also what's influencing facade.
- [91:48]
C
Yeah.
- [91:48]
B
And what is the business model?
- [91:49]
C
How durable is it like.
- [91:51]
B
Yeah, because in some categories, like if you're selling, it's basically like how big is the ACV of the product?
- [91:57]
C
Yeah.
- [91:58]
B
So if you're selling enterprise SaaS, that is infrastructure level, except, like average customer pays you a million dollars. The content can be extremely effective versus it might be more challenging with like a super small acv. Like if Apurva, the founder of Instacart, was like, making, you know, TikToks try to like, acquire Instacart users, like, the economics on that kind of just changes and like, looks different.
- [92:28]
C
Yeah. UGC and all these crazy things. Like, I'm actually very excited to try to market, like, to. To run the marketing engine for fort at scale. I think it's like, not time to pull the trigger on that until, like, again, we're like, really sure what we're building and we make our beta users very happy. But I feel like that is something that, like, I'm tremendously excited to do is like, leverage, like social media at scale to like, actually efficiently market a product which has, like, more challenging economics in terms of like, just like consumer products and you can currently have like, lower ACV and you have to get more customers and the customers are more, like, fickle. So there's a lot of. Yeah, that's. That's a very exciting thing. And I'm also really excited to see what happens with AI. Both like AI consumer products, AI devices like sharing generative AI like text based content or like images or whatever. It's like, it'll be really interesting to see how marketing evolves with that too.
- [93:29]
B
Yeah, I feel like it's gonna be. It's gonna be crazy.
- [93:32]
C
Yeah.
- [93:33]
B
But anyways, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for, thanks for doing it.
- [93:35]
C
Thanks for having me. This was great.
- [93:38]
A
And thank you for listening. And thanks to Numeron Flex for supporting this episode. Put your sales tax on autopilot@numeral.com and upgrade to Flex Elite to get $1,000 on your first card using code turner
- [93:49]
B
at the Waitlist link in the description.
- [93:51]
A
If you like this conversation, please like comment, subscribe or name your next workout set after me. If you missed it, make sure to check out the backlog of over 100 episodes. Tune in over the next few weeks for guests that include Gary Tan at yc, Chudaganta at Benchmark, Jake Stoka at
- [94:07]
B
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- [94:09]
A
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B
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- [94:16]
A
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B
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- [94:21]
A
Thanks Sam, for listening.
- [94:22]
B
See you next.