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This Week in Startups
iPhone Air is “inspiring,” and a first step toward Apple Glasses (w/ Zach Handshoe of SpatialGen) | E2200
01:18:59
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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody. Welcome back to Twist. This is Alex and today's show is all about founders. What they're building, what they're learning, and how cool they really are. So first up, Jason and I talked to a company called Spatial Gin. This is from Launch Accelerator 35 and the company wants to make it possible and easy to both make and distribute Spatial video. And during this chat we also got to learn what it takes to go on stage at an Apple event and how casual Apple is when it comes to public relations. Then we're talking to the founder behind Hux. It's a personal voice AI experience that operates a bit like radio and a bit like a podcast kind of merger between the two. Now, if you know NotebookLM from Google and like it, a lot of the folks that built that are now building Hux. So stay tuned. It's a really fun chat. Then to wrap up Chess ever from our Gamma Pitch competition. It's one founder's plan to shake up the growing chess market and make it better for both broadcasts and and better for your friendly local grandmaster. As a longtime advocate of esports, I love this idea. Though I do need to work on my chess game. All right, let's learn, let's talk to some founders. Let's have some fun. This week in Startups is brought to you by Lemon IO. Hire pre vetted remote developers and get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon IO Twist. This week in Startups is brought to you by Crusoe. Crusoe is the AI factory company. Reliable infrastructure and expert support. Visit Crusoe AI startup to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today. That's C R U S O E AI startup. Interpret. Interpret turns feedback noise into customer intelligence so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to interpret.com twist to to book a demo and see it in action. That's E N T e r p R-E-T.com twist. I have a riddle for you. Who is this gentleman here standing up at an Apple event the other day? I think you know this guy Spatial.
- [02:09]
B
Gen. Yum yum yum yum for JCal in our accelerator. This is a great founder. When we saw this product we were like man AR and VR and all this stuff is going to eventually land and you're going to need tools, picks, shovels and partners. Speaking of partners to do stuff and you can go further with partners. So let's bring on guess. Well let's play the clip and then we'll bring on Our guest.
- [02:31]
A
Next up, Jason. We have a company called SpatialGen, which you can see here all about building spatial video for different contexts. What's the thesis here?
- [02:39]
B
So people will want immersive content eventually. And so imagine exploring sports is probably the one where people get a lot of. It's easy to imagine wanting to watch sports in an immersive way and being able to stream that is highly technical. Okay. Yeah. Welcome to the program. Zach from SpatialGen. You went through our accelerator? Yeah.
- [03:08]
C
Yes, yes. Thanks for having us on. Love the talks about cloud providers. One thing I. I tried not to say publicly at the time was we were not down during the AWS outage, but we try not to make some enemies because we're certain there's going to be a time in the future where we may.
- [03:25]
B
No need to. Not good for karma to poke the bear.
- [03:29]
C
Exactly, exactly.
- [03:30]
B
AWS thing is more a compliment than anything. The fact that they went down for 12 hours once every two or three years is totally expected. All these clouds go down once every two or three years. It's just the nature of it. But, hey, welcome back to the program. And you gave this great talk. Let's play the other clip, which is you at some Apple event. What's the name of this Apple event?
- [03:51]
C
Yeah, so this was about immersive video experiences and how to create them. And they brought on Apple, brought on a lot of third parties near the end, like blackmagic Design that does the camera system for this and colorfront, which does your onset dailies, which is really something that a lot of production teams need. And then we were brought on near the end of that about how to distribute your content and get it in the hands of your customers. So. So we gave, I believe like a 8 minute or so presentation on the Apple stage live. And yeah, I mean, there's. There's a certain level of precision that they require and there's days of prep. So it's. Yes, it's pretty cool.
- [04:31]
B
I've heard about this. Like you get called down to Cupertino or the mothership and you practice, practice, practice.
- [04:37]
C
Yeah.
- [04:37]
B
And they give you tips and you have to basically try to hit. Rest in peace, Steve Jobs levels of presentation ability, which is like presentation God level. Yeah.
- [04:47]
C
Where you put your feet on the stage. Go ahead, go ahead, Alex. Sorry.
- [04:51]
A
Oh, I was going to say, why don't we watch it while you guys talk over. Because I had the Zach talking right here.
- [04:55]
D
All right, sweet.
- [04:56]
A
Here it is from day two of the Create Immersive Media experiences for Vision OS event. Here we go.
- [05:02]
C
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Zachary Hanshu, co founder of SpatialGen. I'm honored to have been invited to speak today. Yes. So we're here to self talk about how to host and distribute Apple Immersive video. That's how it is. They. They scrutinize everything you do, which is. Is really cool. Where you put your feet on the stage. The punctuation in your slides.
- [05:21]
B
Yeah, let's pause the video.
- [05:23]
C
The story. Yeah, so where you put your feet on the stage. So, like this, this was something we had to do where if there was a transition where logos start showing up, you have to kind of walk with the transition and try and get out of the text view. So it's pretty complex. There's two teleprompters, actually, that if you need it, you can write in your own stage positioning. Oh, wow.
- [05:46]
B
So now you're walking to stage left. Is stage left when you're in the audience left or when you're on the stage left? I don't know.
- [05:56]
C
I don't know either. I just looked at the slide on the teleprompter and I was like, I should be over here. Over here.
- [06:03]
B
It's the audience pov. I'm going with editorial director Lon, not producer Oliver. I think it's the audience pov. So you went from center stage to center right, then center left as the text moved across. Now when I see that presentation, it looks twice as wide as my laptop screen. Is it a different presentation spec for that video wall?
- [06:25]
C
It is. They were wrong.
- [06:26]
B
Okay, wait, producer Lon was wrong. Okay. It's the actor's point of view. Oliver was right. So I take it back. Okay.
- [06:32]
A
Five demerits Lawn.
- [06:33]
C
But yeah, they send you a template, basically, and it's their own stuff with their own styles, their own fonts and everything. The San Francisco font group. And then you have to build your presentation to spec and have all these review calls with them, and then you go in person and you do dry runs.
- [06:51]
B
Is it wider, though? Is it a double wide screen?
- [06:54]
C
It's super wide. The total screen resolution is actually very close to what the Vision Pro is. So if you can think of that, that entire screen shrunk down and put in front of your. Your eyes. That's. That's the level of resolution and fidelity you get inside of Apple products.
- [07:10]
A
So excellent segue, Jason, into what SpatialGen does.
- [07:14]
B
About to ask that question. So explain in plain English what you do for the NBA or for tennis or for whoever uses your product or service.
- [07:23]
C
Yeah, of Course. So we're building the spatial cloud and what I mean by spatial is really 3D media. So 3D videos, Apple immersive videos, 3D models, gaugen splats for the US Air Force. Really things that, that live inside the 3D space. There need to be tools that handle these type of uploads that are sophisticated enough to process them and cheap enough to stream. Because going back to old cloud costs, if you are a developer setting up a Apple immersive video, the cost of just storing your video inside AWS will eclipse a total spatial gen monthly plan to just get it up. So there need to be affordable solutions that have the technical resources to pull it off and that's what we provide.
- [08:11]
A
What's the demand like for spatial video? Because when I think about it, I'm only thinking about through the context of the Apple Vision Pro and I know you can watch this stuff on Oculus headsets and so forth, but to me it's so sounds like a very much a. Like a champagne customer base as in small and rich.
- [08:27]
C
Well yeah, I mean you can think back to the, the first Mac I think it's like $7,000 in today's dollars. Right. I mean this is a, a flagship real product that's pushing the industry forward. But yeah we, we cross stream there's a lot of demand in spatial video Enterprise is, is really where it's at. So making sure that there's live Apple immersive video which is that 16K ingest is, is a huge priority. K yes, yes.
- [08:53]
B
So it's four 4K televisions worth of.
- [08:56]
C
Data about, about that much. Yeah. So, so if you think of that and the bit rates are higher too so the, the level of the data coming out is actually over 30 gigabits a second. So you have to, you just can't, can't send that over the public Internet. So like you can imagine how does.
- [09:14]
B
It get sent if it's not the public Internet?
- [09:17]
C
You have a direct fiber line and that does the encoding on site and that is then sent out to the CDN where it is streamed from.
- [09:28]
B
If you're not listening to your customers and iterating based on their feedback, your startup will fail. So if you're drowning in feedback from support reviews calls, it's time for N terpret. Interpret is the customer intelligence platform that helps you turn random comments and feedback into actionable insights that help grow your company. They're a AI system is already trained on your business and your product. It then reads all your support tickets. It reads all your reviews, call transcripts and surveys. Then their agents actually update your team in Jira, Linear, Zendesk and Slack. So this feedback doesn't just sit in some email or messaging thread, but it actually helps keep your team moving the ball forward. Find out why Canva Notion and Perplexity are already using Interpret to stay on top of what they need to fix or build next. So if you're ready to turn feedback chaos into customer intelligence, head to interpret.com twist to book a demo and see it in action. That's E N T E R p r e t.com twist so this is not a cheap thing to do. If people are going to do this, it's not going to be cheap. If they're going to do it live, it's not going to be cheap, it's going to be expensive. And you're also going to need one of these Ursa Sin immersive cameras from blackmagic I believe.
- [10:47]
C
That's right. Yeah. So they presented right before us about $40,000 for that guy.
- [10:51]
B
So, so I'm showing the camera here and just to describe this camera, it's got two, I guess those are lenses that look like eyes. So you can, I know this isn't your product, but this is part of the stack.
- [11:07]
C
It is.
- [11:07]
B
What is this camera? It costs $40,000. Obviously people rent these, but how does it work and how does your system get this information and then get it to the customer?
- [11:17]
C
So this, this camera is a Apple versus video approved camera, which is we should, we should be very clear about because there's a lot more to it than just a video feed. There's what, what Apple will call dynamic metadata that comes with every single shot. And this will tell the, the viewer how to unwrap the lens according to the, the lens out of the manufacturing. So each one of these cameras, regardless of of of unit, have a different lens calibration. So you need this dynamic metadata to be live streamed or passed through the system. It's a completely different video workflow on the encoding side. Yeah. So it's quite a beefy guy as well. Big camera, but you are basically with.
- [12:07]
B
Your company skating to where the puck is going, which is exactly where I like to invest. You, you had a heck of a time I think getting investors or people to understand what you're doing over the last couple of years we met, I was like, yeah, this is the kind of crazy I'm in for. How long is this going to take to build this into a business, do you think? You know, you Got a modest amount of funding from us. I know you've got a lot of investors who've been interested, but how do you think about being cutting edge technology and on the hardware side?
- [12:40]
C
Right.
- [12:40]
B
Yeah. You have to figure out how to get to the puck. Puck being revenue and consumer adoption. How far out are we from non developer weirdos wearing Vision Pro prototypes on planes, which I've seen twice in the year or two. I literally saw two people in first class over the last couple years wearing these and I think they were working. But when will consumers be watching NBA games or you know, one battle after the next or who knows what immersive content on this?
- [13:17]
C
Yeah, well, we can jump straight to NBA. Apple and Spectrum announced that there's going to be live NBA games early next year in 2026. So that, that's super exciting development. Along with the past few weeks, there was the new Vision Pro that came out with the M5 chip along with Samsung and Google's headset Galaxy XR. And on top of that there were Spatial glasses, smart glasses with Meta. And those are gaining a lot of traction. So our Vision is to be the backbone, the cloud infrastructure for all of these devices and all of the apps people want to make both on the regular video side to Apple immersive video, this top of the line product and 3D models, meshes and Gaussians. So what we're doing with the Air Force is, is not necessarily always deployed on a Vision Pro or XR headset, but actually run on laptops. It just has to do with spatial data.
- [14:18]
B
And I'm showing here the, the Galaxy xr which is available to buy now as well.
- [14:24]
C
Yeah, much cheaper.
- [14:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's only 1800.
- [14:28]
C
Only $800.
- [14:29]
B
Yeah, we're getting there.
- [14:31]
C
We're getting there. Yeah, we're getting there.
- [14:33]
B
So compare and contrast apples and this one, they're, you know, they're both two or three grand. But when will these become, let's say, you know, the Christmas present for, you know, the holiday present for, you know, the Vanguard or the technology early adopters. When will they be buying this? For Christmas? Because they've been buying Oculuses and.
- [15:02]
C
Well, what were, what was your first experience with the Quest? Because before the Vision Pro, I thought it was kind of a gimmick in a sense. I didn't, I didn't like the resolution of the image. It was very fuzzy. But you know, when you try this on, it's a whole different experience.
- [15:17]
B
Interesting. You know, my experience with it years ago was every Thanksgiving or Christmas you.
- [15:22]
C
Know, somebody in the family member.
- [15:24]
B
And I coined it Try oh my. Goodbye. They would try it. Everybody like, oh, my, this is really interesting. I'm in Jurassic park and there's a raptor or T. Rex chasing me. And then it would go in the closet and nobody ever took it out again. So what's going to be the killer app in your mind having?
- [15:43]
C
Absolutely. Media, 100% media. So.
- [15:46]
B
Okay, double click on that. Yeah.
- [15:48]
C
So. So you. You have. I think I saw an iPhone air earlier today.
- [15:52]
B
Yeah, I just got it. And I have to say, the iPhone air is completely inspiring. I'm putting it here between my glasses and it literally, you can see both sides of my nose. The battery life is obviously not fantastic, but it's not terrible. It's so thin. And the only really, I think, bad decision is they went with this very fancy camera that juts out. I would have just put a regular camera in and just made it totally flat. But it is the first time I held an Apple product since maybe iPhone4 and said, Holy cow, this is incredible. Or maybe the original MacBook airs. I haven't said, oh, my God, this is incredible in years for Apple. And this is insane how thin and lightweight it is. Continue.
- [16:43]
C
Yeah. So. Well, that's a great product, let's say. Right. So the iPhones can take spatial videos and they can take spatial photos right now. So you have the capability to already start capturing the media you want because you can, instead of just looking at it on a screen later, a photo of a family member. You can step back into that scene with the Vision Pro. And, you know, I brought up some of the. The media's concerns about the Vision Pro being dead. Actually, when I was in the green room, some of the engineers and they just looked at me with this blank face like I was stupid, and they said, we just released another headset, Zach. So.
- [17:21]
A
So I don't.
- [17:21]
C
I don't know if it'll be this year, maybe not necessarily next year, but it's coming. And there is no lack of energy on the engineering side from Apple. They are on top of things.
- [17:34]
B
So the Vision Pro 2 is coming.
- [17:38]
C
They won't tell me if that's the case, but I'm certain you don't get.
- [17:43]
A
The free inside information when you show up to do all the demos.
- [17:45]
C
No, no, no. They tell me what to do. Yeah. So it's their stage. It's their stage.
- [17:50]
B
Yeah. I just pulled this up. This is what people are Expecting is an M5 chip in instead of the M2. And this is the endorsements?
- [18:00]
C
Yeah.
- [18:01]
B
Oh, was this the actual announcement? So they did the M2. Yes.
- [18:04]
C
This is a refresh, really, to give it some extra power, especially ahead of their deal with Spectrum on the NBA side earlier next year. And people have been talking about the weight. This is actually increased, but that's because of that dual knit band on the back. So a more comfortable experience. They actually have some metal inside the band this time to help counteract that balance on your head.
- [18:29]
B
Somebody was telling me that they had on a crane, their Vision Pro that had attached something to the top of it to take the strain off of it. But this would. Because there's a strap going over your head. Like, what are the things that people wear on the top of their heads to push their hair back? I don't know.
- [18:46]
A
Headbands.
- [18:46]
C
Oh, headbands.
- [18:47]
B
Well, Jason, you could go across your forehead. I'm thinking about the one that I, you know, my daughters might wear to have long hair, to, you know, just push it. Yeah, I forgot what they call that. But then there. So there's a strap on the top and there's a strap on the back of your head. This would balance out the weight.
- [19:01]
C
It does.
- [19:02]
B
Apple has, basically, if I'm interpreting it correctly. You tell me if I'm wrong here, Zach. They've said this is a developer kit. We're going to make it. It's going to weigh a little bit more. Obviously, components come down like the iPhone air. So for now, we want you to get as much resolution, as much of the power, as much of the experience. We're not optimizing for weight. We're not optimizing for battery life right now. Correct.
- [19:28]
C
It seems like interpretation. I would modify your interpretation a little bit. And I say they're optimizing for comfort in this latest release. Comfort and performance. So even though that weight has gone up, the distribution of it is much more comfortable to the wearer. So you're going to be able to sit through a full NBA game. And I think that's really what they're. They're going for in the upcoming year.
- [19:50]
B
I think I'm going to buy this. I think it's time for me to really start to embrace this and understand it. And if there was actually, I love the NBA, so I think doing that would be fun. And I also am a little jealous of people using it as their desktop when they're, you know, when they're, you know, on a plane or something like that. I can imagine, like sitting there in first class and, you know, I was in A business class seat. I just went to Palm beach to give a keynote at Morgan Stanley and I have my laptop open. I'm going over some sensitive stuff. The guy next to me goes, I'm freaking out right now. I'm your biggest fan. I said, let's take the selfie and get it over with and let's be normal. And he left. I said, it's just a podcast. And. But sure enough, I then had to get in my head, oh my God, what was on my screen that this person saw? You know, who was I dming with? And I think the privacy aspect of having these is also kind of rad because you could be watching. You know, sometimes I'm watching a show, you know, if it's an HBO show, you know, I was watching Industry. Great show.
- [20:57]
C
I think it's.
- [20:58]
B
Yeah, I was watching HBO industry and this is a spicy show. And all of a sudden, you know, it goes from PG 13 to R. And I'm like, oh my God, are people thinking I'm a creep watching the show? I didn't know there was going to be a sex scene in the middle of it. And what if there's a kid who's looking over my shoulder? I was like, I can't watch this show on the plane. I like it for that reason too. It's like your own world. You've heard me talk so much on the pod about the importance of renewable energy. That's why I'm so excited to talk to you about Crusoe today. Most AI infrastructure is still powered by fossil fuels, but Crusoe has an innovative energy first approach. They've actually built a high performance AI cloud platform that's powered by wind, hydro and geothermal energy. In Iceland right Now they're using 100% geothermal and hydroelectric power to deploy the Latest Nvidia Blackwell GPUs on Crusoe Cloud. This is the future, folks, and it's here today. That's how Crusoe is making energy and compute easier to access than ever before. So spend less time worrying about infrastructure and more time building. Visit Caruso AI startup to apply for $100,000 in credits for virtualized Nvidia GB200 NVL72 on Caruso Cloud pending availability. That's C R U s O E AI startup to apply for your $100,000 in credits.
- [22:21]
C
I mean, there's a lot of use cases to it. We have gotten a lot of traction on the media side just for the videos, Apple immersive video and so on. But you Know, like a fun, fun fact about it that you just kind of gives you some shock factor is your passwords, when you're entering them in the Vision Pro are actually in plain text. They don't have the password blocked outfield because you're the only person that can see it.
- [22:42]
B
Yeah, that makes total sense.
- [22:44]
A
Why bother? Yeah.
- [22:45]
C
Yeah. So it's very shocking when you're first typing in your password in the Vision Pro and, and you just see it in plain text out, and there's no like blurred field or anything. It's, it's pretty funny, but it's like, oh, wait, who's going to see it?
- [22:57]
B
Is this going to at some point intersect with my Insta360 and my GoPro cameras that do 360 degrees. Like my Insta360 does 360 degrees. When I'm skiing and I record these ski videos, I never look at them because I look at them and I'm like, it doesn't look very good. I don't have time to edit it. But I mean, maybe if you had this immersive experience, it'd be kind of cool.
- [23:22]
C
Yeah. With recent announcements on our end, we're automating support for those actually, so you can upload those types of videos that don't have to come from that $40,000 camera, can come from an Insta360 or a GoPro and you can have a, what they call a unique field of view. So we will handle all that complexity for you and you can just get a video file or stream that works right out of the box.
- [23:43]
B
How can people find you and learn more about SpatialGen?
- [23:47]
C
Yeah, you can, you can send us an email@contactatialgen.com or you can go to our website and even just book a call directly there.
- [23:55]
B
I wonder if you got first name@spatialgen.com as the CEO and founder.
- [23:59]
C
We do, we do. It's Zack. Spatialgen.com but.
- [24:02]
B
Awesome. Are you hiring now? Anything you need that we can be helpful with as investor, early investors in the company or a shout out we can do right now. Do you need any particular position racing?
- [24:14]
C
We're currently raising, but we're not hiring just yet. We will after the raise, but going to stay pretty lean, just the two of us right now.
- [24:22]
A
Oh, wow.
- [24:23]
C
Yeah.
- [24:23]
A
Good man.
- [24:24]
C
Yeah.
- [24:24]
B
Well, this is when we like to invest in startups when they're in year zero or year one because we feel like if we're involved we can really help, hopefully with our whisper network, introduce you to the right people, people don't know about the Whisper Network.
- [24:38]
C
It's been helpful. Been using it.
- [24:39]
B
Oh, you've been using it?
- [24:40]
C
We have.
- [24:41]
B
Describe for people what we built and how it's helped you and anything we could add to it.
- [24:46]
C
Yeah, Basically you can go into the Whisper Network and you can look at investors that you may potentially want a connection with and you can find out if someone on the launch team has a relationship with that person. And then you can reach out to that individual on the launch team and ask for an introduction and, you know, give your reasoning behind it and hopefully they introduce you. Yeah, I have been a little aggressive with it. There's a warning not to send too many, so I sent quite a bit last week or the week before, but I think they've been sending them out, so it's been cool.
- [25:20]
B
Yeah. So what we did was, Alex, just to help founders, because of our track record in the industry, investors like when we send a warm intro. But sure, you know, we, we needed to have a way to track this and process it and build systems. So I've been building software internally. We built this whisper network software. So when someone like Zach is looking through our database, it's probably got.
- [25:46]
C
It's getting close to hundreds and hundreds.
- [25:48]
B
Yeah, I think it's getting close to a thousand. I set a goal of getting to a thousand for the team. We don't want everybody, we want people we have relationships with. So I told the 12 members of the investment team, if you each have 50 people in the Whisper network that you've built relationships with, I want you to email them and just say, hey, here's where we invest, would love to understand where you invest, or we're co investors in this company. So if, let's say SpatialGen were to have Sequoia and the partner at Sequoia was Stephanie and I was the contact with Stephanie because I have the best relationship with her. When the next SpatialGen comes out and this other firm. Oh, we have 1,090 in there. Great. So we broke 1,000. Good job. New goal. 1500. Let's go then. Instead of having somebody email Stephanie at Sequoia, cold, I would say, Stephanie, you know, Congratulations on the SpatialGen announcement at the Apple thing. By the way. We have another company in our portfolio, they're doing something in AR and they would love to meet you. Would it be okay for us to. Here's the capsule from the founder. If you'd like to take the meeting, we can introduce you. Click here. Or you can just reach out to them. Here's their Contact information. Here's their mobile phone number, here's their email. So we're just trying to creep that velocity. But the other important thing is something Alexis Ohanian inspired me to do. He built a software system where they keep track of everything they're doing for their founders so that they can say to other founders, hey, you know, for Zach, we did these 17 things. Here's the evidence of it. You know, Alexis retweeted something for him. He came on out. You know, in our case, he came on this week in startups on these two dates. Oh, they spoke at this event. And we introduced you to 72 investors through the Whisper Network, kind of keeping track of all the work we try to do for founders sometimes. Founders, Zach, you're not going to believe this, but if they become incredibly successful, they're like, what have you done for me? Quite helpful to have the dossier and say, well, we did all of these things. We would like an allocation in the next round. We have our pro rata, but we want to go super pro rata. We want to increase our ownership from 4% to 7. Would that be okay with you? And by the way, here's everything we've done for you. Maybe you could compare that to your other investors. When you become outrageously successful and you are oversubscribed, we want to make our case to you for, you know, a little extra investment. So we're building those systems. Zach, it's great to be on the cap table. If you ever need anything, you have my mobile phone number. Text me anytime.
- [28:14]
C
One last note is the Whisper Network's also a really great resource for investor discovery as well, because the database is so large and you can filter by sector and thesis and focus so you can find people who you may not know of that are already in that network. So, yeah, thank you for having me on.
- [28:33]
B
Yeah, Zach, it's been great. Really rooting for you again. If you ever need anything from us, the firm, launch, launch co, you let us know immediately. And if my team takes more than seven minutes to get back to you, just cc me.
- [28:49]
C
I'll help test them at like 3am for you. I'll just send them a few. Send them a few pings.
- [28:54]
B
I've been trying to explain to the team that we need to match the work effort. Speaking of 996, we have to match the effort and the responsiveness of our founders. When we ask our founders for something, they get back to us in minutes. When they ask us for stuff, are we getting back to them in minutes or Are we getting back to them in hours or days? You know, like if it. Once you get into like days to get back to somebody, I just think it's disgraciad. You gotta get back to people at the pace they get back to you. Zach, continued success.
- [29:25]
D
Thank you.
- [29:26]
C
All right.
- [29:27]
B
So excited about this startup. I'm so excited. I mean, the crop of startups we're hitting right now, I was telling you before we got on air that, you know, things are firing on all cylinders. Our Foundry University program where we work with, you know, companies like Zach before they're even incorporated. You don't even have to be incorporated to come to Founder University. We do it three times a year here in the U.S. it's a virtual program, but we do have some in person components. And the first week in November, November 3rd, 4th and 5th, I will be in Riyadh. Mina Launch Co. This is the Founder University website. We've had thousands of people go through the program and then if you go to Mina Launch Co, you'll see that we partnered with the PIF Sanabel specifically, which is their venture arm, to bring Founder University to the city of Riyadh. I will be there for three days and we're going to host it at Senabel's offices. I'll be doing three dinners Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night with different, you know, so many fascinating, interesting people in the region doing great work. So I'm very proud of that. And just this week we signed another city.
- [30:36]
A
Oh, I didn't know that. Congratulations.
- [30:38]
B
We're not going to announce it yet.
- [30:39]
A
But it's Providence, Rhode Island.
- [30:41]
B
Yes. No, it's another international city. So the Founder University program continues and the empire, the sun will never set on the Founder University launch empire. And we're also going to be announcing another city for this week in startups. So there will be a regional weekly version of this week in startups in another city soon. So we're going to take this week in Startups, the franchise and have it in hopefully there's like four regions I really want to do so. So there'll be an Alex and Jason, not us, in each of these different regions. You can imagine maybe one in the Middle east, one in Asia, one in Europe, et cetera. So that we'll franchise in a way this week in startups and then we'll have those Alex and Jason's come on the program. Alex, this is my grand vision.
- [31:27]
A
I love it.
- [31:28]
B
There'll be like an Alex and Jason pairing or Jason and Molly or a Molly and Alex Picket and they'll come on the show with us and we'll do a little promo for who's on their episode this week and what's going on in, let's say, China, Japan, Singapore, what's going on in Europe, what's going on in South America. So we're looking for those type of partnerships. Typically we partner with a government agency that's trying to grow the region or a top sovereign wealth fund that's looking to increase deal flow. Founders, let's be real. Finding the right developers is really hard when you're trying to run and scale your startup. But lemon.comio can save you time, money and a ton of headaches. They've pre vetted high quality developers and they've ensured that they're experience result oriented and that they're seeking competitive rates. These are handpicked devs with a minimum of 3 years of on the job experience and only 1% of applications to Lemon IO are accepted into their program. So forget the long drawn out hiring process. Lemon's going to match you with the skilled developer in just a few days. And they're not just recruiting talent either. They're helping you integrate them into your team. And if anything goes wrong, Lemon will find you a replacement developer asap. We've had a ton of launch founders work with Lemon IO. So go to Lemon IO twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. That's Lemon IO twist. L e m o n IO twist.
- [33:05]
A
If you're a listener of the show, you know that we are big fans of NotebookLM here at the show. It's Google's research assistant. And as it turns out, three of the folks behind that app actually left Google spun out and decided to build something for themselves. So what do they come up with? It's an app called Hux. It's essentially an audio forward personal AI app that I've played with and I really, really like to tell us more about Hux and the company behind it. Please welcome the show, it's co founder Risen Martin. Hey, how you doing?
- [33:33]
E
Hi, Alex. Thanks for having me.
- [33:35]
A
I'm so glad that you're here because I love playing with new apps and I got to play with Hux and frankly, I really like it. But instead of me butchering an explanation of what it is and what it does, why don't we just ask the expert, what have you built?
- [33:46]
E
Oh, amazing. Well, again, thank you for having me. Really excited to talk about Hux. It's super new, but what it is is it's personalized and proactive audio. And so it's a little bit of a mouthful. But the way that we think about it is instead of writing prompts to try to get value out of AI.
- [34:04]
A
Yeah.
- [34:04]
E
What if we could just generate interesting and thoughtful content for you automatically without you having to do anything?
- [34:11]
A
So one thing I have noticed when I'm talking to AI with typing is that it does feel kind of slow at times. Even though, not to brag, but I can type pretty quick. And so. Well, I mean, I get paid to type for a living, so you think I'd be good at it. But. But people who aren't us type more slowly, so they're probably dealing with quite a lot of lag in their chats. So moving to voice allows people to have a more reactive experience or a more personalized one.
- [34:37]
E
That's right. And I think there's also a little bit more there where, you know, we talk about sort of how we use AI today, and it's a chat and it's almost like I can only get as much as I can based on how much I'm willing to type. Right. And it feels like there's some sort of like, clunky thing we're describing, which is like I have to write a prompt, I have to ask the right questions, I have to do this sort of like back and forth with ChatGPT before it's actually like, truly useful. And so I think your mileage really varies. But with Hux, we're trying to see how do we standardize that for everyone.
- [35:08]
A
So when I signed up for Hux, it said, hey, can you connect your calendar? Can you connect your email? And then what are your major interests? And then from there it started to essentially tell me about things that I'm interested in. It was talking about Apple and stock market and startups, and I was like, okay, well, fair enough. That's pretty much dead on. Why do you need the information? And how much can you personalize this for the average user to make it feel like their own corner of the Internet?
- [35:32]
E
Yeah, I love this question because we started from a really simple place, which was we tried to imagine if you wake up in the morning and there was a friend that was ready to get you caught up. Right? Because we realized, like, especially when you work in tech, I feel like everybody has this funny habit where you wake up, you grab your phone, you check your email, you check your slack, oh, what's going on in Twitter? And it doesn't always feel great, but we all do it. So we were like, why don't we do this really small, simple thing which is have a friend just do this pre read for you and then just read it out to you when you're brushing your teeth, when you're driving to work, when you're having your coffee. And it's such a small little experiment, but when we've talked to the people who use hacks, people love it, right? It's like truly different.
- [36:15]
A
And Hux came out in September out of kind of early access or beta. How has the market response been to it?
- [36:23]
E
I think it's been really exciting. I was actually, I was bragging to some of my friends recently, which I don't do too often, but I was like, guys, oh God, you made a.
- [36:31]
A
Product that everyone knows. I've actually like, no joke. Notebook is in our circles a smash hit. So I really do feel like you could, you know, brush a little dust off and be proud of it.
- [36:40]
E
Well, thank you. Thanks for saying that. And I, and I did. The thing I was telling my friends is I was like, it feels like Early Notebook, right? Where it feels like the next stage, the next chapter, where people are really turning the page. You know, more or less people have heard about AI at this point, but now we're getting to this place where it's like, okay, what can it really do, right? Aside from me just sort of like trying it out one time, how does it become an actual habit?
- [37:05]
B
And.
- [37:06]
E
And so it feels like we're actually.
- [37:07]
A
Getting there on the habit point. You guys had to make a choice between text and audio and you made the decision to have Hux talk to you. And not only in one voice, but one thing I noticed was there was a back and forth between a male voice and a female voice on my end. And that did make it pretty darn engaging. But I can also read faster than I can listen. So I'm kind of curious about the trade offs between those two mediums.
- [37:31]
E
In the case of Huxley, I love this question because I think one of the things we really considered was like, what is most effective for the user? And when you read something really quickly, like, it feels really productive, right? It feels like, okay, I got a lot done, I went through it, now I can go do this 10 more times, right? And I'm like super smart, I'm supercharged. But for the most part, what we realized about audio is that even though the throw put feels a little bit slower, it actually is a passive medium, which means I can actually do something else. Whereas, like, reading is a thing I have to sort of sit down and do and it's the only thing I'm doing.
- [38:08]
A
So then therefore, HUX really is something you take with you as you drive, as you cook, as you eat. So it's designed to be an additive to your daily life, so it can fit into time that you already have. You don't have to make room for it. I quite like that. Okay. One thing you guys talked about though, was this live element to it that it's kind of like almost like. Almost like a live radio station for you. What does that mean? Does that mean that it's constantly finding new stuff to bring to me and there's no end to my stream?
- [38:37]
E
Yes. Well, half of that is true, which is it's always live. We're experimenting with like how we describe some of these concepts and we're borrowing from a lot of stuff that we might recognize. Right. So the concept of live I feel like people understand really well, which is if something is live, it's happening right now. And we use this concept because what we're doing is when you first play this station based on your topic, it will research right now to get the latest for you. Right. And does the stream end? It does end, because it can run out of info and say, well, that's all there is on the topic. Let's move on to the next thing. And so I think it's just like.
- [39:14]
A
How we think about information so in early usage. And I know it's only been a couple of weeks, so I'm really asking an unfair question here, but when people use Hux, let's say in the morning, what's the average session length? Is it five minutes? Is it two hours? I have no idea how long they're sticking around.
- [39:29]
E
I mean, I feel really good that I know the answer, but. But the, the average. So the average daily is about 15 minutes. So the average Hux user listens for 15 minutes.
- [39:39]
A
That is a quarter of an hour. So it's a quarter of 25, like 1% of their day.
- [39:45]
E
Wow, that's great math. But yeah, I think I'm pretty tired.
- [39:49]
A
So that could be wrong, but I think that's right.
- [39:51]
E
That's not bad. That's not bad. And we discovered that most people listen to a combination of their daily brief, which usually happens in the morning, and then later on in the day they do a little bit of exploration into like a topic that they care about, which to me is like super cool because you imagine you start Your day with this. But then later on when you have downtime, you're like, I don't know. I want to hear about the history of Porcelain. Like, totally random thing I did yesterday, but it was amazing.
- [40:15]
A
I mean, I, too, like to read Wikipedia late at night, so. Yeah, I'm with you. My wife was. Caught me looking at, like, the list of largest ships by gross tonnage, and she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, important research. You don't know.
- [40:27]
E
Exactly.
- [40:27]
A
Don't judge me. So what I'm trying to figure out there is just. And I do not mean this in a mean way, but. But what it is, it's almost like an AM radio station for your mornings. It's almost like a podcast for your interest. It's almost like an AI chat buddy. But it does seem to kind of meld all of those together into, like, my personal, chatty research assistant, maybe.
- [40:52]
E
Yeah. I mean, it's so funny that you mentioned this, because this is the thing that even when we were building Notebook, this was true. Right. The executives would come to me, they would say, well, what is it? What is this thing? And I'd be like, you know, I don't know, but I'm sure we'll find out if we keep going long enough. And that was not a sufficient answer at any point in time, really.
- [41:12]
A
The Google execs didn't appreciate it.
- [41:13]
D
Appreciate that?
- [41:14]
E
I don't think anybody does, but I.
- [41:17]
B
Think only I do.
- [41:18]
E
But it is, I think, one of the things that when you are building something new, like, I could give you an answer. Like, I have a real answer, which is like. I think it's.
- [41:25]
A
I like where you're going with that.
- [41:27]
E
Yeah. I think in reality, when new things are being invented, we don't really have the words for them. I think we try our best so that somebody will hear it, and then they will try it and they'll be like, oh, okay, I kind of get it. Right. But in real life, I think it's exactly what you're describing. Like, when you first try it, you're like, oh, I don't know what that is, but I kind of like it. And I think that's the type of thing you should be building. It's cool. It's weird.
- [41:50]
A
Yeah. Pushing the boundaries means you're outside of normal definitions or normal taxonomies. You can't be the Uber for ramp if you're doing something actually new.
- [41:58]
E
Exactly. Exactly.
- [41:59]
A
We've all watched YC Demo Day. You know what I'm talking about. Okay. So there are some competing offerings out there. There are voice AI tools, and I haven't actually gotten to play with this yet, but I know that OpenAI put out ChatGPT Pulse. So where does Hux fit into the competitive landscape? And how are you worried at all that OpenAI might kind of come along and step on you?
- [42:21]
E
I mean, I think that's probably one of the things that could keep me up at night. And not just OpenAI. I think OpenAI, Google, Apple. Perplexity, right? Anybody who's like big and is looking to turn the page on AI. And I think this is because more and more people are saying it right. The next wave of AI is personalization and it's proactivity. And I think that Pulse is one example of a product that is trying to do that for the user. And so I think about it two ways. I think on one hand that's super exciting because they have a tremendous user base. It will certainly help me validate whether or not people really want that. And on the other hand, I also think about it as how different can we make our product? Not out of principle, I don't want to be different for the sake of it, but it's, it is interesting to think about what things could we learn that OpenAI is not learning. And so I think about it very simply. I try not to lose any sleep about it and just keep going.
- [43:17]
A
So one thing I've heard from a lot of founders that are building anything consumer facing that is distributed through the App Store is that it's just super hard to break through. I'm curious what you guys have done to try to. Apart from I saw your coverage in TechCrunch and so forth and coming on the show. But like, how are you breaking through to the mass market on the App Store? Because it's fine to evangelize to us in the tech world, but we're already all dweebs who love to try things.
- [43:40]
E
Yeah, Well, I do think of it sequentially, which is, hey, if you can win some of the early adopter audience and you can really understand what's resonating with these people, I think what that allows us to do is to lower the bar more and more and more and more. Right. Because I think that's what early adopters are really great at, is really saying, hey, this was great for this reason and it was really terrible for this reason. And that helps us think about, well, for the every next user that uses it, how do we make it easier for that person? And ultimately, if the product is good. I think it will just spread. Right. Like, we all know normies. And so imagine as we meet these people in our lives, we're like, hey, have you heard of Hux yet? Have you tried Hux yet? And I think that if you can accomplish that organically, then I think you think about, okay, how do I break through and amplify it?
- [44:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. Actually, when you put it that way, My spouse, who is not a technology first person, she's in the medical world, I could see her actually using this on her commutes because she does like to listen to podcasts here and there, and often she runs out of episodes of the shows that she likes to commute to. And she's also, I mean, she's got more advanced degrees than I do, so she's very smart. And so probably tickling her brain would be a great way to spend her time in the drive. So, yeah, I can see it spreading that way. But is word of mouth enough? Is that enough in 2025 or is that.
- [44:53]
E
I mean, that to me, it's a great question, but I think it also speaks to where we're at. And I experienced this on Notebook Alam, which was like, especially at Google, where I feel like the urge to pour money on something is like, right there's there. I certainly could. You know, you just like go and you say, I need marketing budget. That's the thing I need. But I think you need to have a lot of discipline in the super, super early days because it's easy to sort of artificially grow your product. But I think the question is why would you. I think that ultimately you do need to put some gasoline behind it when you feel like you're onto something. But I think you need to have a lot of conviction about what that loop looks like before you do it. And so for me, I think definitely need to spend money. But for us, not yet.
- [45:38]
A
Totally. So then I guess what are the signals that you are looking for to confirm to you in the next, I don't know, 2, 3, 4 quarters that you have reached sufficient product market fit that you do want to put marketing behind it, maybe raise more capital and so forth?
- [45:53]
E
I mean, to me, the only thing I really care about is retention. I think of all the metrics that I look at, I only really look at retention. Everything else is sort of a supporting metric that explains it or the lack thereof.
- [46:05]
B
Sure.
- [46:06]
E
And I think once you have retention, you organically have the next thing, which is you start to have organic growth, which is every new user you onboard creates Whatever, two new users. And so I think you just want to make sure you have both of those things and hopefully it doesn't take us 2, 3/4 to get there. Hopefully. Let's.
- [46:24]
A
I was trying to give you a lot, a lot of room to experiment and play. And I mean, I mean, I mean 2/4 in AI time is like 5 years in the SaaS era. So it's a fair point, It's a fair point. What's going to come next in the app? Because I know that I can talk to it, I know that it can read my email on my calendar. What other data might you bring into play? And then does it ever start to ping me without me going into it to say I would like my, my personal live briefing now?
- [46:50]
E
Yeah, I actually feel like that's a, that's a bit of a read into our roadmap. And so there's a couple of things that we're going to start doing. I think one is just applying overall polish on the experience because we've hit this interesting milestone where we have really good retention now.
- [47:05]
A
But people, Is that a 30 day number? 60 days? That a daily usage? How do you guys measure that?
- [47:09]
E
I look at it at the daily, weekly and monthly retention periods. But the funny part is we're now at a point where the people are sticking around but they're angry. You know when people write to you every day and they're like, hey, what's the deal? Did you fix this yet? It starts to feel quite different, right? Where you're like, wow, these people are the loyal core users. We better start fixing some of this stuff. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is exactly what you described, which is, okay, now that we've had an opportunity to really understand sort of the timeliness that people expect from this type of data, now we can start doing notifications in a not so annoying way way.
- [47:45]
A
So essentially prove that you're, that you're delivering what people want and then if you send it to them, they won't be annoyed. Unlike, for example, the Uber Eats team, by the way, Uber Eats Team back the off.
- [47:56]
E
Uber Eats sends me a notification like every hour and I'm like, guys, I'm not that hungry, dude.
- [48:01]
A
Sometimes I order dinner on UberEats. Guilty. And then like an hour later it's like, hey, did you know KFC has 10 for one? And I'm like, I can't move right now. I'm full.
- [48:11]
E
I'm glad that it's not just me. I was starting to feel a Little sensitive. I was like, no, I do not need a bogo on wings. Like, I'm about to go to bed.
- [48:18]
A
Or my favorite is, as a recovering alcoholic, they're like, hey, hey, hey. Alcohol delivery, 21 plus 50% off. And I'm like, guys, you do know I don't want to go back to rehab.
- [48:26]
E
It's rough.
- [48:27]
A
Jesus, where were we? Oh, right. Okay. So thinking about the company, I know you guys raised 4.6 million conviction, genius ventures. Dylan, who I like, and Jeff Dean from Google. Solid set of folks, good amount of money, lots of Runway to experiment, I presume. How long does that capital last, you guys?
- [48:45]
E
Well, we still have, as my investors call it, pretty much all of it. So I think, you know, as we start to turn the wheel on maybe more complicated things we want to do, maybe we'll eat more of this. This capital. But, yeah, I mean, the way that I think about fundraising is really just as a function of, like, do you know how to deploy it? Right. Do you have a plan for how to deploy it? And so I think that will coincide with sort of the next phase of, like, once I feel like we've squarely got a loop, we've got great retention, that's when we'll do it. We'll raise more money.
- [49:16]
A
All right, one last question for you, which is about the underlying models that power Hux. I couldn't find anything about this, so I'm curious, what technology are you using? You better say Gemini or your shares will invest. And. And also through your time in Notebook LM and through into Huxley, how quickly have the models that you've leaned on to power the underlying intelligence improved? Because from where I sit, they seem to be improving pretty quickly. But I'm curious, in a more real world application, if that holds up.
- [49:45]
E
I really appreciate this question, and it's a keen eye. In terms of how we never talk about the models that we use. The main reason is because we probably use most of them. Most of the commercial models, we've discovered that they're really great at individual workflows in the app, but not all. So not one of them is great at all of the workflows that we run. And that, to me, sort of speaks to your next question, which was, are the models really getting better? And I think the answer is yes, but they're sort of not kind of uniformly getting better across all the things that we do. So one big thing we do in the app, for example, is writing content and trying to write really good, engaging, interesting content that humans are Willing to listen to. I don't think even humans have figured that out. And so it's quite funny to try to be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go get a machine to do this. But it's really quite difficult. And we spent a very long time trying to do that across all the things. And what we discovered was we kind of have this sort of hodgepodge approach. And so I would just say that the models are getting really good, but it still requires a lot of engineering.
- [50:53]
A
Okay, well, there's also an implied point in which you still have most of the capital that you raised and you're using a bunch of models from different providers and you haven't torched all of your money, which implies that not only are the models getting better in certain places, but they're actually cost effective to run as a group. Do you guys ever make model selections based on cost or is it currently more predicated on quality as you see it?
- [51:16]
E
So right now we over index on quality like super, super strongly. We almost, I would say, like the top two things we index on are quality and latency because of the. Of the live component. Right. And so those are the two things. But cost is real, especially as we, you know, have higher and higher retention. The cost goes up and up and up. And we were like, okay, now we have to try to optimize this and make it a little cheaper.
- [51:38]
A
All right, actually, I'm going to squeeze in one more here. How long until I can pay for Hucks? Or are you going to charge me in a different way?
- [51:45]
E
Right, We've thought about it. I think there's definitely a subscription model that we could probably deploy in the very near future. I really would like to hold out for something that allows it to be free, like better ads for everyone. That's not annoying. I would really like to, because I think we have a really, really good foundation for that.
- [52:04]
A
Okay, one request then. If you do go the advertising route, please allow me to give you money and not listen to insurance advertisements.
- [52:12]
E
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. I think we will do it as.
- [52:14]
A
Long as I have the option to opt out of State Farm and Allstate telling me that I should swap my car insurance. We're good folks. If you're listening to this and want to check it out, it's huxe.com Risa, thank you so much and congrats on leaving Mountain View and going off on your own.
- [52:30]
E
Amazing. Thank you, Alex. Thanks for having me.
- [52:34]
A
So today, taking part in our ongoing Gamma Pitch Deck competition is our Dear friend, it's Vasif Dharabali. He is a chess grandmaster and he's building something called Chess Ever. And it's actually. I got to look at the deck, Jason. Pretty freaking awesome. So Vasif, are you here?
- [52:52]
D
I'm happy to be in the show. I have been watching you guys and first time to be here. Nice feeling.
- [52:59]
B
All right, so you have your deck. You built a beautiful deck using Gamma. Visit Gamma app and let's hear a quick pitch from Chess ever. And remember, most people are listening. So Vasif, if you can describe what you're seeing, that'd be great.
- [53:15]
D
All right, so I am showing the my pitch at the beginning. This is my app, Chess Ever. Our motto is follow chess better. I am a chess grandmaster and I think in the pitch, yeah, whatever is on the pitch, I should say something about that. It will be clear whoever listens.
- [53:36]
B
Okay, keep going.
- [53:38]
D
Hello everyone. I'm Grandmaster Vasif Durarbaili. If you are not deep in chess, Grandmaster is the highest title. In other words, I have beaten a lot of people Today I'm here to talk about Chess Ever, a platform redefining the online chess experience. Chess is a 1500 years old game, but the way people experience it has changed dramatically since the pandemic and Queen's Gambit. Millions of new players who have never touched a physical chessboard play and follow chess entirely online. The global chess market is booming. It was $3.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $7.6 billion by 2032. Nearly 11% annual growth rate. Here's the problem. Since pursuing the big market is enticing, every major player does it. This means series players, about 70,000 worldwide are underserved. They are a small but very influential group. That's the weak link and our opportunity. They need complete event coverage with no missing tournaments, pro analysis tools, searchable archives and more. Chasava solves this. We are building a pro grade broadcasting platform designed for series players without entering too deep into chess. Let me illustrate simple flow of our beta app. So in this video I am searching for the latest event where my country participated. I typed the event name, open it and my countrymen are already auto pinned at the top. I can swipe between their games to see what they did. This is the core function, simple and effective. I can do the same for any player and instantly find their games. Interestingly, what I am showing in our beta app either cannot be done or is very hard to do in the established apps. Our MVP Release is in Q4, Chasever will outperform current platforms in event coverage and pro tools. Our AI features will come soon. Our vision does not end with serious players. It starts with them, where they show up. Casual players follow. We add AI that makes broadcast truly engaging blunder prediction, position aware pools, instant highlights. From there we build it brick by brick into content, community and education. With over 350 early signups, including world number five Anishkiri and having four grandmasters and three masters as our early investors, we are proving that demand is real. As a Grandmaster, I know my audience firsthand. My co founder Henning, an AI specialist, brings our vision to life with his technical expertise. Together with our team, we are building the platform the chess world has been waiting for. Starting with serious players and growing from there. We are chess Ever follow chess better. Thank you.
- [56:34]
B
Okay, the pitch Here is that Chess.com, which is an incredible app which I use and everybody I know uses and people rave about being able to get matches really quick and being able to get trained. All the amateurs I know absolutely love it. I was literally over the weekend with in a group of CEOs and VCs and people were raving about paying for it, using it and getting their scores up. But it turns out the experts, the grandmasters like yourself, they want something more than what Chess.com provides. Do I have the pitch correct?
- [57:14]
D
Yes, you do. So Chesscom is a huge company and they are very successful one, but they focus on everything, especially for casual players and their main product is playzone. So here we are bringing a different angle that chess players were looking for. It is like over the board games. When we play serious players, it is getting broadcasted and you want to follow those broadcasts and Chesscom platform.
- [57:44]
B
So the number one thing missing from Chess.com for the top 1% of the audience for experts is that they don't do commentary on live chess matches in a way that a Grandmaster would want to receive it. Am I correct?
- [58:02]
D
Yes, you are overall correct, but not commentary. But they don't have tools for serious players.
- [58:08]
B
Okay, so there's the commentary on live events and the coverage of live events is one aspect that Chestnut come do. But tools for experts are different. What is the tool? Just describe it to us in plain English as non grandmasters. What are they trying to get out of their tool that you don't get out of the Chess.com tools.
- [58:29]
D
So for instance, even a simple function that I showed I cannot just enter chess.com and search name of a player and find their games and easily Go.
- [58:38]
B
Okay, so the archive of important games is one. Got it.
- [58:42]
D
So their engine tools are basic and I'm talking about the broadcasting function. So let's make a distinguishment. And also we are entering through app. So there is a website and there is app. So app I am talking about the app part. So you cannot easily analyze and save and go between the game. So chess players are like professionals or serious players. They will go one game and after another we added for instance swiping function. We are going to make it okay.
- [59:15]
B
So where your pitch breaks down is that you set it up really great but you don't explain for the layperson, the investor who might want to invest in the company. There are three things missing from Chess.com let me show you what they are. You need to slow down during that part. One, the archive of important matches. They simply are not optimizing for these legendary matches. That's what I'm looking for as a grandmaster. I want to look at every time Magnus Carlsen has played this opening. I want to sort by those openings and then I want to take notes on them and I want to watch all of them in secession. And I want that database to be available to me and really easy. This would be the equivalent of the elite poker players wanting to see all the hands with the opponents they might face in their next cash tournament where they're cash game or in a giant 100k tournament at the World Series of Poker. Great. Now we've established that number two, when they're doing a live broadcast, they're broadcasting to the lowest common denominator. What we want to see is the experts who are not explaining things for the average chess player. We want to have broadcasting tools and commentary that's really elite level. So this is where the, the pitch could be greatly, greatly improved. You're talking about like all types of different features but you have to step back and big picture. It's big picture and eventually all the people who are, we want to build this into a community. We believe that they will pay not just a hundred dollars a year, we believe they'll pay $500 a year. Is that true? Will these folks pay more money than the average Chess.com person or are they cheaper?
- [61:04]
D
Thank you for the feedback. So I, I think one of the goals we are going, we are trying is not to have a much higher than CSCO price monthly fee. And yeah, the mainly you have a good point that we are going to target serious players and we will offer them tools that are not offered right now. Additionally we are going to add. Since my co founder is AI specialist and currently you cannot find AI in any broadcasting. We are going to make also very engaging. But our goal is not charge very high fees. No, it's not. So our goal is simple. We will make our free version is better than anyone else and our premium version will be better. This is basically freemium model that we are building.
- [61:52]
B
So the challenge with this then becomes if Chess.com is making 100 million a year, you're going to take the top 10% of the market and make 10 million a year. If you're going to raise venture capital, that's a challenge because you've basically said we want less customers, at least to start and then we're going to go to the other customers. I think you should. I think you're onto something with getting the elite people. I wonder if there is a way, once you have the elite people hanging out here, to figure out a way. So just think this through for a second. I was talking about a company called Tonebase. We have that we've invested in and we've invested in the company four times. I think we're so enamored by it. Pull up Tonebase. Alex, this is a really good corollary for you. Tonebase is not for people looking to learn to play guitar or piano. That's another one called Yousician. We are investors in Yousician as well. One of them is for it's like Chess.com and one of them is like Chess ever. And as you can see here, learn from the world's best musicians. And so if we scroll down here or actually just pick an instrument and let's see who pick the most interesting. Yeah, guitar or piano. Yeah, sure. Now let's go down here and see who they have. I wonder if they'll show you the actual. Yeah, here we go. So if you look here, they now have very famous people from legendary pianists. And I think you could scroll to the right and see more of them and you can go to training with them. If you click on one of those and you did Claire de Lune, you pick the right one. Now they've made these. So they've made Masterclass Vasif, as you can see. And this for the person who is a serious musician has never existed before. This is what you're building. I wonder if you could say here are the greats and here are their classes. And then you could split where like live classes or tutoring. Once you have all them on it, instead of trying to make 100 bucks, you could let them in for free. And you have to be approved to be part of the community. And the way you get approved is you apply. And the way you apply is you have to play three games and you have to beat at least one of the people who are in the community already. Now it's like, it's hard to get into. You have to be invited or each Grandmaster can invite two players. You build this community and then if people like myself want to come, I can buy my daughters a chess lesson. If they really got into it with Magnus or whoever the great one is. What do you think of this idea of win the elite, the top 10% of the audience, and then bring everybody else in to have access to the elite. That's.
- [64:34]
D
So when I, I mean, our goal is just the beginning. It is, it's our beach head. But at the, at some point we will enter the market for education, that which you are talking about, to have access to elite players that they can. So right now we have other platforms on the market that sells some stuff that amateurs want to have access, even talk to them, et cetera. Yeah, that's in our roadmap at some point. But as a beginning, it is easier to start where there is no competition. So that's my goal with this broadcasting feature, is that there is almost no competition because no one builds for serious players. And I love your.
- [65:22]
B
Yeah, I love that you're going after the high end. I think you haven't figured out what the killer app is yet. And that'll take a little time. So you're in the phase we call triangulation and finding product market fit. So when you're triangulating this and trying to get to product market fit, it's good to try a couple of different things and see which one actually clicks. One of the things I noticed when I just typed into producer Claude Claude AI how what do grandmasters want to know when they are watching grandmasters play live? One of the things it said is they want to understand their tactical strategies, et cetera, their emotional control, all that kind of stuff. But one of the things that said is they want to guess the next move and compare their move to what the Grandmasters were doing. Here's an interesting idea. If you watched it on time delay and the live person, instead of watching them play this, you know, 10 minute match, I don't know what's the. What is the average match where Magnus plays? What is the time that they typically play Magnus?
- [66:30]
D
Magnus recently is against the classical control, which is a gold Standard in chess, we play five, six hours. Basically.
- [66:41]
B
Perfect.
- [66:42]
D
Classical one.
- [66:43]
B
Okay, so he likes the speed chess classical. It's a five hour match. But let's say it is a five hour match, I think. Or if it's. Even if it's a 15. Pausing the telecast and then allowing the community to talk about, like if you had five people and the five people each gave what the next move should be, what they, what they would play and what they believe Magnus will play. And then they lock it in and then you actually play the hand and you see if there's consensus. There is a version of this, which is when you're watching poker commentary, they'll be like, well, this is obvious. There's two choices here. One is they could slow play this hand. They've already got the nuts. The other one is they could put a small bet out, but that might look suspicious. So I think what you want to put out here is a, you know, 50% of the pot bet and hope the other person raises, then you can call. And now it's going to maximize whatever. I love that idea of being able to watch a group of experts and then reveal it. So I'm thinking like a TV producer here to make it even more exciting and unique in the world. This has been amazing. Alex, what are your thoughts here? You've seen this great pitch and you got this great founder, lots of energy.
- [67:55]
A
Yeah.
- [67:55]
B
You have anything that would be an interesting question for him or a note about, you know, given your startup experience, that would be.
- [68:03]
A
Well, I was curious about the overall market's growth because one of the earliest slides in the pitch deck was how much chess is going to grow by 2032. My question though is if we're focusing very much on the top end, the 1%, the grandmasters like yourself, how much does the aggregate growth in the chess market matter to chess ever's success?
- [68:25]
D
That's overall showing the interest growth and it will matter eventually. When we are targeting the bigger group casual players at the beginning, it doesn't matter as a stage one, our group for, for us, it doesn't matter right now.
- [68:42]
A
Okay. And then the other thing that I wanted to just throw at you. Jason's making a lot of poker analogies. He and I are both big fans of card games. Have you ever seen, I can't believe I'm going to say this, have you ever seen Hustler Casino Live? It's a poker live stream. You might want to take a look at it because they've managed to take poker, which is sometimes a slow and boring game to watch and turn it into an absolute circus by bringing some of the world's best players and throwing them at one another and they've really made something that's streamable, watchable and enjoyable. So given the focus that you have on observability and so forth, you might want to take a page out of that kind of proven book.
- [69:18]
D
Thank you for the video, by the way. I want to add that what Jason said, the idea of guessing, it's called Guess the Move and we do want to have that. We want. So right now I. That's one of the things that. It comes also from my frustration that our broadcasts are quite basic and not enough entertainment for me. Like, you know, guess the Move compete with others. There is pool. So I passed very fast. So we want to have a like a. Imagine the two grandmasters playing and there will be a blunder alert. We are going to predict blunders are coming and ask the community like what is the chance of the blunder? This kind of stuff we are going to try to make gamifying. It is going to come. It is on our roadmap and yeah, we will. We will follow some ideas that you talked about.
- [70:09]
B
I have one, I have one suggestion. When you do this, just hire the Botez Sisters. Botez Sisters came to all in Summit, played the four of us. They smashed us. Although I think she ran.
- [70:20]
D
I think. I think they.
- [70:21]
B
Yeah, well, she ran out of time playing because she played on a clock versus four of us. I think I was the first out and the video's out there, but people love that. So I think there's another one here which is celebrities. You know, the schmoes versus the pros is also very exciting. And I just played in the NBC heads up telecast as one of the celebrities. That's how hard up they are for celebrities, I guess to play in these things now. But I was one of the top five celebrities there. I guess maybe I'm a micro celebrity in podcast land and amongst poker people. Maybe. But I think you just hired the Botez Sisters. You do a deal with them. I know them. They're awesome. They're entertaining, they're spicy, they get into it. They're just great youtubers. So I would try to find those type of folks to build this. You did a great job. You went to Founder University. You went to our Foundry University.
- [71:11]
D
Yes, I am learning and it was a great opportunity. I have already learned quite a lot and still learning.
- [71:18]
B
When did you go? Are you in the current class or you're in F10. You're in the current class F11. Fantastic. Who's Pod are you in? Whose pot are you in?
- [71:25]
D
Maddie. Maddie's.
- [71:27]
B
Oh, Maddie's awesome. Maddie's in the HQ and she is running the syndicate for me, just so you know. So we have our syndicate. I think if you can get this tightened up into like one really great device that you can ride to sustainability, which would be 500k a year in revenue, $1,000 a day in revenue. If you can get to that sort of level. Coming to our accelerator and then we could help you with the pitch to really try to get VCs to understand it. And the reason we started Founder University, Alex, is because we meet founders like Vasiv all the time. They know the market, they know what people want, but they have to get product market fit, they have to build a team, they've got to get their first couple of customers and they also have to understand how to pitch VCs to bring them along. And that's where you're at. That's where we can be super helpful. Where are you based?
- [72:18]
D
Vasif, Illinois.
- [72:20]
B
Illinois, yes. Fantastic. I think you got something here. Tell me about your team. Is are you a solo founder, you got co founders?
- [72:27]
D
I have my co founder, Henning. He's an AI specialist and chess enthusiast actually it sounded to me like he came during the pandemic boom. He learned chess. So that's another great things that it brought like actually another developer who also watched the Queen's Gambit and got into chess.
- [72:45]
B
So amazing.
- [72:46]
D
That helped us to build the team actually without.
- [72:48]
B
So I want you to. I have another tip for you here since we're going deep. If you pull up fitbod for me, Alex, the fitbod team, I want to show you a picture of the fitbod team retreat, which I don't know, it was in Austin and I'm trying to find a picture of it if they actually had a fitba, if they actually posted it. Maybe one of the founders posted it to their. One of the fitbod founders posted pictures of it to their social media. Anyway, going through them, the fitbod team and it's. I think it's fitbod app. Let me find their. Yeah, fitbod me. This reminds me of you. This is another elite group that went after the top 1%. Do you see my screen?
- [73:39]
D
Yes, I do.
- [73:39]
B
Passive. So like tonebase, fitbod which also went to our accelerator, just like tonebase went to our accelerator. We have, you know, some great expertise and Affinity for what you're doing. Fitbod is for people who are really into weightlifting and people who want to design their workouts and then see their progress. And they used AI machine learning previously five years ago, and they started saying, this company's on a tear, they're making lots of money. Just like Chess.com. they're very similar to Chess.com in that way. 15 million downloads, 120 million logged. You need to meet the founders of these two companies, Tonebase and Fitbod, because you're doing what they did, which is they said, this is not. Tone base is not for people who want to learn how to play Dylan songs on guitar or just play Brown Eyed Girl. And fitbot is not for people who just want to have great biceps. It's for people who are really into it. But the lesson vessip was one you've innately learned, which is when you hire people, hire people who have the skills you need, great developer, great marketer, whatever, but also have passion for the topic. So if you made a four quadrant chart and one of them was how qualified they are at their job and the other one was how passionate they are about the topic. If you can find somebody who's a 10 of 10 developer and who is obsessed with chess, you don't have to motivate that person to to do great things. That's why when we hire people here at the launch fund, we need people who are obsessed with entrepreneurship and technology and startups. Then I don't have to tell them, hey, you should work 50, 60 hours a week and make this your career. They're like, I want this as my career. I love startups. So when you meet somebody like Maddie, she's obsessed with entrepreneurship, she's obsessed with startups. I don't have to push her. I have to keep up with somebody like Maddie. I have to keep up with somebody like Lucas or Oliver or Marcus on my team because they're so passionate about it. That's a key key, you know, hidden skill you'll have. All right, great job. So a lot of show today. We did a lot of show. We did too much show.
- [75:39]
A
We've been talking for some time. It is true.
- [75:41]
B
I love doing too much show. Vasiv, congratulations. Enjoy your time in the Founder University. If anybody wants to come to Founder University. Founder University. If we do a good job, the only thing I'm going to ask of you, Vasif, is two things. One, you write us a testimonial and two, you tell us what we could do better. Do we have a deal?
- [76:00]
D
Yes, you do. And using the opportunity I would like to thank you. I was listening your all in podcast at the beginning for several years I believe and you keep advertising the twist and then I was like let me give a shot for twist and I listen and then I was like okay, founder university, I should try and since I joined I have already it exceeded my expectations and I think everyone who is trying to learn business and creating a startup should try to apply, that's for sure. And I think yeah you overall I don't have much to give a feedback I am really enjoying And Maddie also, I think she was a some she did some volleyball in Universal.
- [76:52]
B
She is, she is very competitive and.
- [76:54]
D
This is also great.
- [76:55]
B
Yeah, Shukran. I'll give you the thank you in Arabic. Shukran Sushi.
- [77:02]
D
Yeah, Shukran.
- [77:03]
E
Yeah.
- [77:04]
D
We have some similarities in my language from Arabic.
- [77:08]
B
Oh, what's your language? Where are you from?
- [77:10]
D
It is. I'm from Azerbaijan originally and our language is. It's Azerbaijan. It is in Turkish language group. Yeah, but we got a lot of words from.
- [77:20]
B
I'm your great cousin. I, I, this is the thing. I'm so ashamed that I never learned a second language, Alex. That I've decided I'm going to try to learn the two hardest, Arabic and Japanese. That's my goal.
- [77:33]
A
Oh, oh my God.
- [77:34]
B
For the next five years.
- [77:36]
A
Five years out of zero, baby. You're going to be at that for a minute.
- [77:39]
B
If I could just speak conversationally those two languages, I would be so proud of myself.
- [77:44]
A
You'd never come home. You would just live in north of Japan skiing year round. I never see you again.
- [77:48]
C
Look at this.
- [77:49]
A
You would see me equally.
- [77:50]
B
I gotta pay for the. You know it's expensive to ski. Cat.
- [77:53]
A
Skiing is not expensive.
- [77:54]
B
It's 1200 a day. I need to do some ad reads.
- [77:57]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [77:57]
B
In order to afford it.
- [77:59]
A
Speaking of which, if you're feeling inspired, head to Gamma app and start working on an idea of your own.
- [78:05]
B
And we're going to give away thanks to our friends at Gamma who have the best presentation software I've ever seen. People love it, they're going crazy for it. Beautiful, beautiful presentations and it's so fast to make a gorgeous one. You're going to be like Steve Jobs on a nicotine pouch or two if you use Gamma app. Gamma app, I love it. And they gave us $25,000 to invest in one of the great companies. So you Asif, you're in the running for a 25k check. From your boy Jcal. Thanks to our friends at Gamma App.
- [78:40]
D
Keep working to have chance. Thanks a lot for listening to me.
- [78:43]
B
It was a great appreciate you pitching us and yeah, you're doing great. Keep going.