Why J-Cal Invested to 200K in a former Employee | E2249

And we met, started to work for me, crushed it for me for five, six years. Then he said, I want to do my own company, boss. I said, okay, get the hell out of here. And I gave him $200,000 to leave. This is what it is. I can't fire people. I give them 200k to leave to start a company. And you know, for background, why did I invest? Well, we thought, precious smart, he's going to figure it out. He's great at building product. He can, you know, build products on the cheap. He's not going to spend a lot of money, but he's going to get product velocity. So we have a founder we trust who has product velocity, who has great product chops, who has world class design. That was enough for us to make the bet, frankly. And we also had seen Tonebase, a musical app. Steezy, a dance app, Usician, another music app, but not classical like Tone Base and of course Calm and Fitbot. We had seen five different health apps do really well. We thought, hey, this could work.

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Foreign.

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0:58

All right everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. Presh Dinesh Kumar worked for me for many years. How did I meet Presh? Preesh was a fan of this very podcast and he emailed me when he was in college, I think he was 18 years old. And he said, hey, I want to come work for you. I said, okay, that's nice. And then he said, oh, no, no, serious, I'm serious, I'm serious. And he wouldn't stop emailing me. So I said, what are your skills? And then I looked and he was great at doing social media. I said, okay, kid, come to California, you work for me now. Come to The Blade Runner 2049 screening. And we met, started to work for me. Crushed it for me for five, six years. Then he said, I want to do my own company, boss. I said, okay, get the hell out of here. And I Gave him? I don't know. What did I give you? 250.

1:45

200.

2:27

I gave him $200,000 to leave. This is what it is. I can't fire people. I give him 200k to leave. To start a company. Press. I want you to tell everybody all about the company and the amazing progress you've made. There's a lot of lessons here for founders, so either show me or tell me a little bit about your company.

2:27

Yeah, I'll do a quick explainer and then I have a demo. Our newest product that would love to show you as a product guy yourself. So yeah, I run the wellness company. We build health and wellness apps, iPhone, apps, all on iOS in the Apple ecosystem right now. And they all do niche things. So we have three apps, three, four apps that we built and launched last year. One of them is called Go Polar. It's a app to track your cold plunge and your sauna sessions. Very niche, but a niche passionate community. And then we have a sun app called Sunseek that tracks your vitamin D and also your morning light exposure for mood and circadian health. And then we have a posture app which uses your iPhone, camera and processes. Use some AI to process what your posture is and gives you a report and gives you some workouts that are chirophysio backed to help correct any imbalances you have. Those are the three main apps that we launched. And then now we're working on a new product called Tempo. And that's where I think the bigger vision of the wellness company happens.

2:44

And you know, for background, why did I invest? Well, we thought precious Smart. He's going to figure it out. He's great at building product. He can, you know, build products on the cheap. He's not going to spend a lot of money, but he's going to get product velocity. So we have a founder we trust who has product velocity, who has great product chops, who have has world class design. That was enough for us to make the bet, frankly. And we also had seen Tone Base, a musical app, Steezy, a dance app, Usician, another music app, but not classical like Tonebase and of course Calm and Fitbot. We had seen five different health apps do really well or education apps and brilliant.org six. So we had had six winners in this space or six really high quality companies. You know, remains to be seen how big of the wins they are. Calm, obviously a huge one. Brilliant, a huge one. Fitbot, a huge one. You know, it's a really tough space to be in. Education and apps but we thought, hey, this could work. So, presh, show us your latest product, please. And remember, most people in the audience are listening, not watching. But for the audience members who are just listening, this is one of the chances. You have to go to YouTube.com and visit this week in Startups and click subscribe and put the alert bell on. For anybody who's watching this, you can take a picture of these QR codes and go directly to YouTube to sign up.

3:46

What you're seeing here is the Tempo dashboard. And so Tempo as a product, brings in all your wearable and health data and your labs and puts it into one place as a centralized location. That's level one.

5:05

So those products would be Whoop Aura on one side, eight Sleep, and on the other side would be Superpower Function Health or Function, I think it's called. Or even if you just got your blood work done from a doctor.

5:17

Yeah, show you exactly what that looks like. But you basically ingest all this data and you can get it very easily through Apple Health, for example. So Apple Health, or you do a upload, a lab test, et cetera. But we give you a score. And so you have this, let's say we call it the Health Span score. And the health Span score is derived of these four pillars that we classified so cardiorespiratory, metabolic recovery, sleep and lifestyle behavior. And this is all reference to your age and sex. And so everyone's score is going to be different based on who they are. And we know that because they go through the onboarding. But you can see the metrics that matter is what we call it. So metrics that matter for cardio respiratory that we can get from wearable devices ends up being your zone, two minutes, your VO2, your resting HR. And then from there we give it a score. All kind of referenced to the latest science and science back research. Right. And so that's the kind of Health Span score concept, pull from your wearable data. But really we want the app to be useful, not just the dashboard and not just information. Right. And so that's where protocols come in. And protocols is the main core of the app. So protocols are designed to help you achieve your goal. And so what does that look like in the app? So right now we have this protocol section. You can select a generalized protocol. These are templated, but they still use.

5:31

So I see one of them is General Health Span. Health Span is, hey, when you get older, how healthy are you in your 60s, 70s and 80s? I was skiing this morning with a 76 year old woman and two 74 year old men. I shouldn't say I was skiing, I was on the lift with them, I didn't ski with them. But health span is really what it's all about. We don't know that we're going to get people to live to 150, but we know that if they live to 80. What if you could ski to 80 years old today, in the year of our Lord 2026, I'm seeing people skiing in their 70s. My goal, ski in my 80s. Keep going.

6:50

Pressure. Yes. My goal, like run in my 80s. So same, same idea, quality of life, Right. So general health span. If I were to click this protocol, it's going to go through and it knows my health data and it knows my labs, uh, it even knows, you know, what I eat, which we'll get into. But through that, it's gonna give me a list of protocols that is gonna just tell me what I want or what to do based on the outcome that I want. And so the app knows right now I wanna live and I wanna run till I'm 80. Um, so naturally it's gonna tend to having good cardiorespiratory, having good muscles to be, to be able to, you know, support the activities that I wanna do. And so it's gonna give me this list of items to, to basically checklist. And so that's what you see on screen here. So I have a spend 15 minutes outdoors. So if I, I can tap into that and I can see why, you know, why this matters to me and for my protocol essentially. Um, but I can go and add different protocols. So the interesting thing here is like do physio mobility stretches that you see here. So I had a shoulder injury, I went to my physiotherapist, he gave me. And how it works is they just tell you what to do and assume that you do it. And most people forget after a week and go back with very little progress. Right. So where this gets interesting is like, okay, yes, I can go and enter this in and add it to my protocol and it's going to go and keep track of that over time.

7:29

And this is, compliance is such an important issue when it comes to health. Can you consistently do this work? Can you consistently sleep well? Can you consistently get to the same bedtime? Can you consistently stop drinking caffeine after 12pm Whatever it happens to be that you're focused on? Yeah, this is great.

8:47

Exactly. And, and to that point there's just a research study that went out and it was like essentially talking about spending a couple minutes doing the more intentional eating, more intentional, like five minutes of extra sleep, going outside in the morning, very small things. But doing that consistently over time, that ends up adding years to your life and quality years. Right. So very simple things. But just doing them tends to be like.

9:07

And this is kind of gamified. So if I went out and I did my five minutes of sun exposure in the morning, I don't know if 10 or 5 is the, the goal, but I do that every morning. I try to go out with the dogs on the ranch. You know, just take my coffee outside instead of having it inside. Very simple. I'll sit on the porch or I'll go walk up, take a walk around the ranch. You know, get a thousand, two thousand steps in, have my coffee and walk the dogs and get my sun exposure. And then I just take my shirt off to increase my sun exposure because he. And you know, it's not a pleasant sight at this point, but it's better than it was two years ago, I'll tell you that.

9:34

Getting.

10:07

Getting there. Getting there. So how much does this cost and what's the business here?

10:07

Yeah, so right now it's consumer subscription. That's how we do all of wraps. There's another angle that we're. We will explore over time, which ends up being like, okay, if we facilitate a lab test, for example, you see here, I've got my labs and this is a couple of years old, but I can import that in here. We don't have this feature yet, but take a test. So that's an interesting angle where maybe we partner with a function, a superpower, etc. And just direct. Get a test order to them.

10:12

Yeah, I think they all have affiliate programs. So if you just put in there, these are our approved partners or our preferred partners. And you just have to be clear, you know, that you're getting a commission in some cases and just list your preferred ones and say, hey, these are the ones that we think are pretty good. That's a great way to be in there. Any family dynamics or group dynamics here to make it more motivating? I'm in a group on Whoop with a team of friends. We were back in the day, we were in Fitbot groups. Those all made the app more sticky. So what do you think?

10:38

Groups I think are huge for accountability and just consistency. Right. And so we will add groups as well and more so like intimate. So groups of four to five. In our other app, for example, like go polar. Just throw it up here. Since I Have it. We added a small community piece, right, and that really ended up being groups of like three, two to five people, which were just families.

11:10

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11:37

It's a great question, great insight. And that's I think where the product actually evolves into. Right now there's many people working on like the dashboard, the information that ends up being commoditized. I think where the interesting piece is, when you can bring that URL to IRL connection. And so that's, that's exactly the plan for the roadmap is we know your health intimately. Or Tempo knows your health intimately and can bring you into the real, real world with, like facilitating or, or, or even booking for you, like a cold plunge sauna session at the end of the week, knowing your recovery metrics.

13:26

There's a franchise company that is doing this cold plunge. I know there's one near us. Well, there's a couple of them in Austin and you just pay 25 bucks to go use the cold plugs, the sauna, the shower or whatever. And there's all these health clubs. So I think, you know, respectfully, as you know, hopefully I've been a good mentor to you. You've got this incredible foundation. You've got a great, great roadmap, and I want to just give you permission to even think bigger. I wonder if there's a way to, you know, even get this real world component going. You know, I wonder if, you know, I opened the app one day and said, hey, you. You know the density, right? So you know where people are. And if Austin is like, maybe if you got really focused on Austin and you said, hey, on Sunday we're doing run club and we're going to jump after the run club in the, you know, Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, whatever it is, whatever cold plunge, meet us at this point for the walk around the lake, run, jog, and then we're going to go here. It could be kind of a movement and being paying 50 bucks or $100 a year or 10 bucks a month to be part of a community, man, that value is unbelievable. Right? So I'm giving you permission to kind of explore that or just think about that. Connecting it to the real world.

13:57

Connecting the real world. I think that ends up being like the real moat of the health and wellness business.

15:15

Think about the cities where the most healthy people are. Like, what cities do people does go polar and everything have the most users.

15:21

Right now, it's. Austin is definitely one Salt Lake as well. New York, a lot of like European countries actually, for go polar specifically, just because obviously hot and cold activities.

15:28

Got it. Okay, So I think Austin's the winner there. All right, listen, great job. It's. You're off to a great start. Things I love about founders for people who are listening, you know, after doing 600 investments, you start to get some signaling. Number one, are they competent and how is competent? If you were an angel investor, how do you determine competence? The quickest way to determine competence is look at product velocity, to look at the quality of the product, to look at the reviews of the product. So is the product improving On a consistent basis. That's called Product Velocity. Inside of our venture firm Launch and our syndicate, the syndicate.com. so we love to see Product Velocity. One of the other 14 categories we have is world class design. World class design is an accident. When you look at Presh, he's got Product Velocity, he's got world class design. Then you want somebody who is a serial founder, has had an exit before. Presh isn't that, but he has worked for me, so he's got a good pedigree. Then you also want a founder who has got a particular obsession with the product, the service, et cetera. So if you were to look at somebody like Elon Musk, he's obviously been obsessed with space since he was a kid. And electric cars, he talked about them a lot in college. So there was a mission there. If you find a missionary founder who is also a product founder who can ship product with Velocity and win a design award, that is a lethal combination in my mind. They just have to, you know, keep grinding and then they figure something out. So all these different apps you've created, fantastic. They're interesting funnels, but Tempo is obviously the winner and you're probably going to need to say, hey, let's get super focused on Tempo and let's put 90% and have that relentless focus and get a flywheel going there. What's the flywheel? You also need to have founders who have that quality of knowing how to acquire customers, knowing how to do marketing. I feel you know how to acquire customers really well. I think your marketing is strong, so there's a, there's room for improvement in both of those, but you're very solid in both those. I would give you like a rating of a 7 or 8, not a 9 or 10. So there's like a really good opportunity for you to add to your skill set the ability to get press and the ability to do marketing and go to market. Is my assessment of you correct?

15:38

Yeah, I agree with. The assessment's good. Just no sevens.

17:59

So I think you got to get it, make this into a movement. Right? Make it into a movement. I think if you look at function, health or whoop, aura, ate, sleep, they all became kind of movements. Those people have a very evangelistic, won't shut up about it. Kind of like vegans or vegetarians. Brian Johnson, you got to get a little bit missionary here. And I think that comes through building communities. I don't think you have to be as out there as Brian Johnson, but I do think building up groups of people who really are passionate about Tempo and I think the social aspects of Tempo are will the big win will be a lot of people going after a long tail of niches here. From cold plunges to, you know, heartbeats, hrv. This can just be tons of competition, sleep, data, whatever. But being the place that pulls together the community and the advice and compliance and those dynamics could be really, really interesting. Great job, Presh. Where can people learn more?

18:02

The wellness company has all of our apps. So the wellness company or just search up Tempo healthspan and will appear on Google.

18:58

All right, thanks for coming on Twist. You've heard me talk many times about Luma AI. They're the innovators leading the charge toward multimodal AGI. They just picked up $9 million in their series C funding in November. There are so many text to video models and platforms out there and many of them can churn out a nice looking clip. But Luma's Dream Machine product offers something truly unique. It's an all in one creative platform, helping you to brainstorm your ideas, turn them into images and then generating eye popping detail 1080p videos which you can edit and tweak using natural language, all without switching platforms. And that's the key, the ability to refine these and make them better. That is what the future is. The future is being able to improve your AI generated images. And today we're excited to announce the Luma Dream Brief competition. Just create a commercial for a fictional product on Luma, submit it to the Cannes Festival of Creativity, and if your ad goes on to win the gold, you will get $1,000,000. To enter the competition, go to lumadreambrief.com and to try the Dream Machine for free, go to lumalabs AI Twist. That's lumalabs AI Lum Twist. All right, next up, we've got a founder, Alex.

19:06

We do. Please welcome Peter Satale to the show. He is the co founder over at Sorcerer. It's a company that helps source, price and arrange delivery for material, products and inputs, all using the power of AI to ensure that everyone gets the best price. But Jason, what's really interesting here is that they're not just helping you connect to someone else. In fact, they want to become your supplier. Peter, where the hell did you get the idea for this? I love it.

20:28

Yeah, well, thank you first off for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it and I came with the idea when I was actually running an import business back in 2020. And so my co founder and I both ran Import, export, trading firms. And so we saw firsthand how laborious the whole process is. And so we said there has to be a way to make this more efficient. And so that's how we came up with the idea.

20:51

So how does it work? Or you could show us, you could do a demo, but show us how it works and why it's important.

21:14

Yeah, so I'll give you a quick run through. So in terms of a lot of the manual processes within procurement, there's purchase order aspects and other manual processes. And so at Source, what we're doing is we're automating all that processes. And so today if we look at a lot of the workflow automation tools all focus on reducing labor costs. But if you look at, for, for larger scale distributors. So a lot of the ones that we work with, they're doing a significant amount of volume, but their procurement team's only about 2.5 to 5 million a year on spend. And so if you're spending 5 to $10 million a year on your procurement team, they're spending tens of billions of dollars on spend. And so at Sourcer, what we're focused on is actually reducing the cost of goods sold and be able to do that more effectively. And so we have a end to end process. So let's say for example, you're interested in importing metal rebar. We'll go in and find every single factor in the world that produces steel rebar. And so our agents do the full back and forth negotiation, background checks on the factories as well as also comparing real time.

21:18

And these are AI agents, just to be clear, not human agents.

22:21

Yes, yeah, so AI agents. And so this process, if you're, let's say a construction company, I mean to do this entire process end to end in real time would just be impossible. And so for us being able to do in real time getting up to date pricing and comparing the freight and tariffs, it gives them the most competitive advantage and directly impacting their bottom line. And so it goes all the way until delivery for, for our end customers.

22:24

Does the agent sourcing go and do like an 11 labs call to the person and say I'm an agent from sorcery and you know, I want to, you know, get this. Or does it from sorcerer, Sorry, how does it actually mechanically do that? Does it, do you already have the rebar or is it like human in the loop for now and then over time it's going to learn. Do these people have websites? Is there a directory of them? Are you building that directory? Take us behind the scenes as to how the magic happens with that, you know, getting the quotes. Sure.

22:50

So first of all, there's a couple of different main marketplace platforms that are available. Like there's Alibaba, Made in China, India Mart. And so we're able to pull a lot of information from, from those and be able to correspond directly on those platforms. But even on top of that, we're going in and finding export records. And so there's export records that are publicly available from China or Vietnam. And so we can go ahead and see every single exporter from China, for example. And so what that does is that we're able to aggregate our own proprietary database of all the different, for example, in this case, steel mills in the world. But in terms of the communication process, the way that we're structuring today is that we're going in on email, WeChat, WhatsApp, and be able to do that correspondence all through AI agents. And so the way that I look at it, longer term for the business is if we're able to get this in real time, we can consistently get all these factories to bid against each other. And so if you're doing hundreds of millions of dollars, even if you can help them save 5 and 10%, and we have a customer of ours that does about 250 million a year in spending, would be consistently helping them save about 10% on their cost on aluminum. And so on a grand scale of things, we have a lot of potential people to solve what the customers actually care about, which is reduction of their, of their spend.

23:17

Are you pooling demand here to make this, make this happen, to get these discounts? Because just, you know, Peter, if I'm a company spending, you know, a quarter billion dollars a year on aluminum, I would presume that I'm already getting a pretty darn good price.

24:36

Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of things on that end, the way that we look at it and our focus on the, the mid, the mid market, 250 million, that's our largest, largest customers. But for some of the ones that we're working with that are smaller, like 50 to 100 million a year in spend, they're probably only doing on a quarterly order for, let's say, steel rebar, about 10 million. And so if you can go in and aggregate that demand right away, it does create about, just, just by that alone, about 10% in savings. But for us running this whole a bid process, that's where we get that additional aspect of savings. And so for super, Super Large, of course. Right. If there's like a $30 billion a year spend, then it doesn't really allow us to have as much opportunity there. But for mid market, which is what we're focused on, we're able to actually create those savings.

24:47

All right, cool. Keep going. Thank you.

25:32

So the way that we, we operate this business, which is different than the standard AI agents workflow, is that what we do is we take a cut of the transaction. And so usually how it works is we give our customers 2/3 of the savings and then we're able to get one third of the savings. And so we're able to go in and keep that consistent revenue. One other aspect that we've seen in this business is for those who have tried it in the past, if you reveal the factory name, then more than likely they'll circumvent and go direct. And so we keep everything done as a blind escrow marketplace. There's other areas that we look into in terms of offering other aspects with insurance and credit terms for our customers. But I think what's very interesting in particular, because our main focus is on metals and commodities is that if in real time we're going in and talking to every single steel mill in the world, for example, or other types of commodities, this data is very valuable for hedge funds because we're getting directly up to date to the stores. And so we'll understand very quickly what's happening with freight and everything like that. And so I think that's an area that's also very exciting for us on expansion for the business.

25:33

So you got to go through Speedrun, I see, and you've got some purchase commitments. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the status of the startup.

26:42

So right now we're sitting about 500,000 in GMV and we hope to bring that up to about 10 mil a month in GMV by end of the year.

26:50

When you say sitting on, what does that mean?

26:56

So we have purchase orders for 500,000 in orders, and then we're right now already placed orders with, with the factory, and then now they're already starting productions.

26:58

So those are real customers, real purchase orders. Not letters of intent, not, or as we call them here at our firm, letters of nothing. This is, this is real GMV that's going to be executed in the next 30 days, 60 days. What's your vision here?

27:08

Well, right now there's China New Year right now, so there's going to be a little bit of a waiting period, but It'd be about 60 to 90 days when that's realized. That's how that works.

27:24

Yeah. I'm always aware of Lunar New Year, because when I go skiing in Japan, you want to avoid that week because everybody who's off in China just invades Niseko. And it's chaotic. It's just like, it's kind of like ski week up here in Tahoe. All right, so you got a great pipeline, got a lot of commitments, and you went through Speedrun. How is Speedrun? We've had a number of our companies go through Speedrun that we invested in from founding University accelerator. What was it like? What did you learn there?

27:34

Yeah, it was great. I mean, the resources that Andreessen Horowitz provides is just top notch. I mean, they're going in and they have full service on the marketing team that they have. So anything PR related, they handle. They also go in and they have a full service talent recruiting team. So they pull from across their entire ecosystem. And so we have a couple engineers that we're sending offers to that we got connected through the a16z talent network. And then working directly with the partners was a really strong experience. And working with people like Andrew Chen, who wrote the book with aspects on marketplaces and things like with Uber and things like that. Yeah.

27:59

Awesome. So PR and recruiting talent, two of the great functions over there. I remember Sequoia started with. They were like the first fund, I think, that had a dedicated recruiting team. And then doing PR and comms, you can get, get some good press. So I wonder how they do that with so many startups, though. They email like a hundred startups to TechCrunch a week. Did you experience that, Alex, when you were at, you know, various publications, did Andreessen's PR team reach out on behalf of a startup or they just coach them?

28:43

Jason, I'm not going to lie. As the world's worst reader of email, I, I, I can't answer that because I didn't read any of it.

29:12

Ah, got it. Yeah.

29:20

Jokes aside, I mean, venture firms often use individual partner relationships to reach out to journalists. So if Notable Capital does a major deal, then one of their partners might text me, for example. That might be a better way to go about that. So they essentially have the short circuit to the reporter, journalist, writer, content creator in question. And I think that's the real problem.

29:21

They can jump over the inbox. Yeah. Go directly to the journalist genius. Okay, Keep going on the deck. Yeah. Any more slides?

29:40

So one of the things that I think is with how AI agents continue to become more and more relevant and I think there's going to be longer term and this is why we did the business model like this, a lowering of the margin for a lot of these AI agent companies where they're going in and doing, I mean we've seen it already with stuff like sales development rep agents where it's just kind of a race to the bottom. And so the way that we look at it on the defensibility side of why would a customer go ahead and purchase from, from us is that by us doing the work. And so we have agents not only doing that supply side but we're also through export records finding other buyers of the same type of product product and so aggregate the demand and, and basically even if they went to the factory directly, we get a better price because of the volume that we're doing. And so that's what I would say is the main area that I, I see for us and how we're differentiated versus a lot of the, the competitors. And yeah, we just raised our seed round with a couple other very strong investors like Madrona Pioneer Fund and a couple other funds. And so right now our main focus is just continue to hire up on the engineering side and go full steam ahead on the wait list and expand from there.

29:47

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31:02

Peter, I have a question. When I think about an API, what they do is abstract away complexity from the person who needs the service. And it seems like what you guys have done is built a really great system to get people what they need quickly and hopefully at a discount. Do you guys handle tariffs as well? Because those can be really tricky and I'm curious if that's also abstracted away inside the product.

32:07

So with the whole tariff situation, there's been a huge surplus of demand. In particular, we have one of our customers who does metal imports of squeegees. So they do their car wash, distributor. It's an early, early scale pilot that we were able to help. But for them, the tariffs just went through the roof. And so their business would have completely collapsed if they were to get it from China. And so we were able to find them another option that was outside China and be able to do that process very, very quickly. And so being able to on a dime, be able to switch factories and be able to adjust is a huge advantage. And so especially right now with how volatile the whole situation is, having us for a lot of these companies as a resource and be able to consistently buy from us and we can just do the back end of swapping based on freight, based on tariffs is a huge advantage for our customers and it's been a huge driver of our growth up to this point.

32:28

That's a good place to double click on though. Just how has the tariff, I don't know. Chaos, insanity, changes, constant changes. How has that affected your ability to sort of build this business, if at all?

33:22

I think the main thing is that it's no longer China is the main game in town. And so everyone's now looking for outside factors, different locations and then historical people were thinking, okay, India is going to be the next frontier. But then there has been huge tariffs against India. And so I think the main thing that I would stress on this point here is that the whole global ecosystem is completely changing in real time. And so you need to have clear cuts, very quick systems in place. And so what I've seen on this end is like, so we're going in and every time there's a new tariff that's sitting out, we were able to scrape that directly and be able to instantly see if there's any customers that will be impacted by that. The one that we're currently our largest customer, they have over 7,000 SKUs of products. So they go in and consistently check the main website and stuff like that. It's just tough, right? Every single time there could be something new that comes up and you have to react very, very Quick, quickly. Because the people that react quicker, they're going to get the better price, Right? So let's say there's a huge new tariff from India now. Everyone's going to now look for another place nearby. And so speed is the name of the game for this.

33:39

So more fragmentation pushes people, or more regulatory changes, more tariff changes drives people to look for more resiliency in their supply chain, which increases fragmentation or geographic fragmentation, which then makes your software and your platform more valuable. Because if they just were like, hey, I've got two or three suppliers, it's rock solid. I don't really need to make changes. There'd be less need to have a software platform in some ways.

34:47

Yeah, that's correct, yes. But there's still the aspect there of the, of the group purchasing as well that I would add on that even if they were buying it from, let's say there was no tariff from China, we could still go in and help them get a better deal by going in and finding. And it's very difficult to do to find other buyers of the exact same type of spec and be able to aggregate all together. And so we're able to use AI agents to do that and accumulate all that data.

35:13

Peter, wouldn't you need a very large customer base though, to aggregate enough demand to really get the discount? Like, to me it sounds great, but you would need many people needing steel rebar at the same time, for example, to make that kind of function.

35:38

Let's say, for example, there's other types of products and so like metal squeegees, for for example, where, for, like our customer, for example, they do about 20 containers a year of, of metal squeegees. And so if we can go in and find another distributor that does, let's say, 20 themselves by us just doubling. If you go to a factory and say I'm going to double your volume, they'll, they'll drop the price 20 to 30% just by doubling it. And so if you could do this process, like if we went and got for that one product category, 100 containers a month, they would probably drop it 50%. And so you don't really need as much along those lines. And to be able to do this process, and we're an interesting time where we can actually go ahead and use AI to make this whole system, which is fundamentally, I would say, is the most broken industry, it's the most antiquated along those lines. And so we're a very unique situation right now to be able to go ahead and execute on this now you.

35:49

Guys are based in the Bay Area right now? Yeah.

36:42

Yes, in San Francisco. And then we went through Speedrun and SpeedRun was in LA. That was the thing. But they now brought it back to San Francisco.

36:44

Well, I think they were the idea for Speedruns that maybe they started with video games, I think, and then they were like, yeah, maybe do everything. LA was a little bit bigger for video games, but it's a. It seems like it's a great program. They seem to do a bespoke deal, Alex, like a little bit more money at a much higher, not much higher, but a higher valuation than say, Y Combinator, Texar or our accelerator. So it's like you have to be much more far along, which obviously, Peter, you are much further along. And so what impact is if at all these AI agents and these new platforms coming out? Openclaw, I'm sure you've played with or seen it. And how is that going to change how you run the startup, you know, this year and next year? In terms of developers, you said you got to hire more developers. Like, do you see a world in which, you know, you don't need developers anymore, you need less developers? There is a movement afoot of no humans writing code, no humans verifying code. It sounds crazy, but that is like a goal that some people have. So how do you think about that as a founder?

36:52

Yeah, so I think there's a couple ways to look at it. I think the main thing is that. Well, at least what I think is that the models and everything will continue to get better and better. And so I really think that for those that are trying to play the game where you charge a $50 monthly fee or something like that, and obviously there's. There's other different ways of pricing it, I think it's going to be a race to the bottom. And so that's why I think we have to look at it almost like all the prices across the board will just continue to collapse. And obviously, if this happens, and I know Jason, you've always talked about it on your podcast about the jobs. I mean, we've already seen huge amount of impact along the. Along the lines for people that are new grads trying to go and get new jobs. And on the engineering side, it's completely correct, right? I mean, for us, we don't need to hire 10, 20 engineers. We can work fine with a team of smaller team, about two to three. And so I think the main thing is that for what I've seen, at least for the tech startups, Here in the bay, is that still going to be hiring engineers, but you just don't need as many. And for those that are the top level, the salaries will go up. But what happens to the rest of the, you know, the engineers that maybe are not the super, super top level? And that's where I think it's going to be really severely negatively impacted. And we already seen it where there used to be huge amount of these software development consulting firms and now, I mean, the prices have dropped. And I have a person that I know that runs one of those firms, he said the business completely stalled out now and they can't charge as much. And so when we look at now software no longer being, I mean, we saw public markets with SaaS and things like that. It's, it's just impacting everything.

37:52

Yeah, very strange world we're moving to where adding developers isn't the goal. Just making the developers more focused and getting them the tools is the goal. This is counter to, I would say, startup's number one problem, Alex. But three or four years ago, which was we need more developers. That's our blocker. We need more developers. And now it's like we don't need more developers. So we're focusing on gotomarket, dredge, growth, whatever, pr, et cetera. Peter Great job. And I'm really fascinated by your business and can't wait to get more involved. I'll leave it at that. We have an angel syndicate. If any of you are accredited investors and want to join it, you can apply. You can't just join. You have to apply, you have to get approved. It's@the Syndicate.com. all right, nicely done, Peter. And where can people learn more? What's your website? What's your email?

39:29

Our website's sorcererai.com and my email is peterserai.com and thank you very much both of you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

40:17

Thanks for coming, Peter. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

40:24