Avoiding buzzwords and marketing-speak (feat. Thomas McInerney) | E2236

So I look for technical founders with domain expertise generally pretty young. They have a point of view about something that they know that they understand. And normally it's a bit different.

0:00

Red flags, top two or three that it's not the right investment for Thomas.

0:11

Buzzwords, you know, SaaS enabled, da da da. When people start using buzzwords, I get, you know, very turned off. I want it in simple English because you're taking too much from the outside world and those trends are sort of like fashion, they change daily. And so I think being able to reduce your idea into like a real simple concept that's not using a lot of buzzwords is good.

0:16

Let's talk about other red flags. Too high of a valuation.

0:40

Valuation in the sense that you just not to be greedy about equity but rather to be focused on getting the right people on board.

0:44

This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com twist then promote it to get access to LinkedIn jobs. New AI assistant deal founders ship faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com twist to learn more. Lemon IO Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon IO twist. All right everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis and we are here in Japan for our Founder University. As I explained on the last episode, when I'm on the road like this, launching Founder University and we now have it on three continents in three cities. The United States occurring in San Francisco and Austin. We have it in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh and now we have it here in in Tokyo. That's enough work. We're not going to launch three more cities because I got a family to raise and I've got a portfolio with hundreds of investments in it. We're really excited about the program. If you want to learn more about the program specifically here in Tokyo, go to Tokyo Launch co and you can apply for the next one we're going to do probably in the summer or in the fall. And if you want to learn more about Founder University, which is a pre accelerator, it's a program you come to for 10, 12 weeks where we work with founders to, to just go over all the tactics and strategy around building a company, especially in year zero, about half the companies who come to the program are not yet incorporated. They're just projects, they're MVPs, they're business plans, they're vibe coded little prototypes and we love that because that's where founders could use a lot of help in learning how to pitch their product, how to go to market. And today we're gonna talk all about that with a good friend of mine who is making his third appearance on the program. I can't believe it. Thomas. Today, Thomas McInerney is an angel investor extraordinaire, and he now actually lives here in Tokyo, Correct?

0:56

Yep. I mean, maybe the most livable city in the world, don't you think?

2:53

The cleanest, best food, safest. Everything is fantastic here. I love it.

2:58

I mean, you see six year olds walking to school by themselves. It's unbelievable.

3:03

My nine year old daughters, my twins, were absolutely flabbergasted about that. And I saw all these kids walking to school with their backpacks.

3:06

So cute.

3:14

So cute. And everybody has the same backpack.

3:15

Yeah.

3:17

So then I worked backwards with some of my founders here. I said, where do we get those backpacks, Peter? I asked some grok and chatgpt. Where do you get them? I figured out where you get them, and I went and I bought my daughters these with all the stickers, and now they bring them to their school with them.

3:17

That's awesome.

3:30

Yeah.

3:31

They're special backpacks. They're very nice. They're not just unbelievable. Yeah.

3:31

All right, so let's get started here. You've been an angel investor. Well, let me ask you before you do that.

3:35

What?

3:40

Why did you move to Tokyo?

3:40

I, like, you lived in California for a long time. About 25 years. During the pandemic. I lived in LA. I was in Santa Monica. Conditions got pretty rough there, as you know. It was pretty frustrating. A lot of people moved during the pandemic to various places. And we moved to London and we lived in Chelsea. We evaluated three cities. Tokyo, Miami, and London. We chose London and we were there for about three years. And then they changed the tax policy in a big way on us. They got rid of non dom, which is kind of. They used to not tax worldwide income. So anyway, we. And we love Tokyo to begin with. My wife's Japanese, so it was a good excuse to come here. We've been here about a year now.

3:41

And you're not the only one. I won't say who else is here, but we had a lunch when I was here in the fall, and I was just delighted to have a dozen of you show up for lunch with me. And it's all these incredible founders and entrepreneurs here. Why do you think entrepreneurs and founders, especially successful ones, wind up here in Tokyo?

4:20

I think if you were from a pure Lifestyle standpoint, Japan, like we. We kind of covered a minute ago, is so hard to beat. It's clean, it's safe, it's cosmopolitan. You can be anywhere. And generally one flight, certainly one stop in, you know, anywhere to anywhere in the world. It's got skiing, it's got culture, it's got incredible food, you know, more Michelin stars in Paris and on and on and on. So I think it's one of the most livable cities. I think the tech ecosystem's new, you know, vis a vis Bay Area and other places that are more developed. But there's a lot of interest at the government level. And, you know, we're having dinner with some of those people and Jetro is sponsoring this event. So I think the government's backing and, you know, putting capital and effort into supporting tech. So I think it's a great time to be here.

4:41

Yeah, it's a fantastic time to be here. So let's get into. Even before you were an angel investor in incredible companies notion. Segment, man. Both of those companies. Fantastic. And then even some that were very promising early but then had some challenges. Bird and Clubhouse come to mind. And you started doing some late stage. You got SpaceX in there, Uber yum yum, OpenAI, anthropic and perplexity. So you have really run the table. Total number of investments you've done, probably.

5:27

About 130 or so.

5:54

130. And you and I started about the same time, right? Like 10, 12 years ago.

5:56

That's right.

5:59

What was it like 10 years ago in the United States when you and I started angel investing? And then how has it changed in the last decade?

5:59

So definitely, and it might be more than 10 years. My first deal I saw, which is. Which is the one that haunts me to this day, was Airbnb. My. My lawyer incorporated them, a guy named Michael Blum. And I started like two and a half before they went to YC. So that. That was probably. It's like 2009, maybe, something like that. Anyway, you know, when I did Segment, for example, it was Y Combinator was itself brand new. There were like 30, you know, metal chairs that were folding chairs. And Paul Graham, we'd all open them up and Paul Graham was running it. And I did segment at a $5 million valuation. So YC deals were priced that way so much cheaper. There were fewer of us back then. As you know, we were trying to.

6:06

Build syndicates before syndicates existed.

6:50

Exactly.

6:52

Just so we could get 10 people to give 25 or 50k each just to Give the founder enough money to get to a proper seed round and be ready for a venture capitalist.

6:53

Exactly. And you did the Sequoia Scout program. I think that was the first VC scout program. It was so that, you know, all of it was getting built, all of it was new. And that was to me, a super fun time to be in the Bay Area.

7:03

It was awesome. And there weren't as many startups and the people who were choosing to do startups were of incredibly high caliber and you had to be a bit resilient and a bit of a maniac to do it.

7:14

Yeah, yeah, I think there was, you know, now it's actually, you know, prestigious or sort of, you know, understood. But back then it, there was a lot of authenticity just because it was a smaller universe of people, people that were really in it and doing it because that's what, you know, they didn't know anything else. Now, you know, everybody, you know, after Facebook and you know, social network movie. Exactly. It's, it's, you know, it's high status in a way. It's high status thing. You know, it's almost like being in the movie business or something. Something.

7:28

So it's low status. When you and I started, if you said you were an entrepreneur, especially in Los Angeles or even in the Bay Area, people were like, ah, why would you do that? Sounds painful.

7:59

You're.

8:11

You're a misfit, right?

8:11

Well, yeah, certainly in the Bay Area, I think that it was cool, but it was, it was hard. You know, there weren't the rails, they hadn't been built out, the ycs, you know, it was much harder to raise money.

8:12

Angelists, syndicates, even angels.

8:24

Exactly.

8:27

When I, when I started Open Angel Forum, I think I got to maybe a dozen people, two dozen people in the major cities. But it was hard because there just weren't that many of them.

8:27

No, no, exactly. You know, our friend Naval, our mutual friend, you know, he got angellist going, which kind of created a little bit of a good ecosystem for investors to connect and like you say, cobble together enough, half a million, a million dollars to sort of start a company.

8:37

And at that time we were very coveted as early stage investors. It was like, I really appreciate you when so much money came into the system and yc, in some ways a victim of their own success because so many people want to go there with status that it became a bit of a competition to see. And I got to be, you know, judicious here with my comments, but I think the posture changed from, wow, these angels really are angels in that sense. They're putting their money on the line. They know it's a 90% chance they get nothing back to, hey, how can we manipulate a, a bunch of dentists and high net worth individuals to come to a demo day? Create scarcity. And it became very pushy and gamed a little bit.

8:52

Yeah, yeah. And even venture itself, the VC started pushing into earlier and earlier as well. So it became definitely for us now I think money, being an investor is a commodity. So you definitely have to provide more than just money. You really have to, which is, you know, what you're doing here. You have to, you know, help the founders really fundamentally. You have to build a reputation over time. There's a lot, you know, you have to do and it's competitive.

9:31

What do you think? On our best days, angels, those first couple of checks, the first 10 investors before a proper seed fund comes in, what do we do really well and, and why were we coveted? Still coveted. But what do we aspire to do in those that year zero. That year one.

9:56

Yeah. Well, number one, don't get in the way, you know, don't be a pain in the ass, which is just sometimes, you know, underrated. Hopefully you give some bonafitis, you know, and you give some credibility when someone's starting out as, as all of you know, the hardest thing to do is you're young, you're not well known, you don't have any traction. So you're trying to just develop a reputation and get, get people to pay attention to what you're doing. So part of it is, hey, Jason's an investor in my company. Oh, Jason. Oh, Jake.

10:14

Keller Thomas is also in. And now Saka's in and came in.

10:44

Boom, boom, boom.

10:48

And that momentum is, in a way, it's kind of like building consensus.

10:49

Yeah.

10:54

And it's a filtering mechanism.

10:54

Right.

10:56

And when you look at VCs, they're so busy, they have to put so many large chunks of work together that they really do appreciate sometimes they don't always show it and they try to. The bad ones try to run over the angels and maybe take away their rights or, you know, whatever it happens to be. We got some good war stories there we'll get into. But they appreciate that filtering mechanism.

10:57

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even me, when I look at my inbox, I'm looking for a reason to delete an email. You know, every email I'm thinking, how can I delete this? Because that's one less thing I have to deal with.

11:18

Yes.

11:29

And so even you know, cold intros, it's so much better to get a warm intro, which your early checks can provide because that filtering mechanism is strong. And so the curation piece, which is what you're saying, you know, as curators say, hey, we, we met this guy or girl, we like them, we think they're good, we think this is an interesting space. And so take a look.

11:29

All right, when we get back from this quick commercial break, a little pause for the cause and we do cover our sponsors here at this Week in Startups, I want you to take me through your rubric, your heuristics, your rule set for companies that you absolutely have to invest in and then also your turn offs, things that are red flags that you will never invest in. When we get back on this week in Startups. Building out your team is one of the most crucial things. You have to get right in your startup. And finding the right developers is particularly important. But now there's Lemon IO. They're going to save you time, money and headaches by doing all the time consuming legwork for you. They've got an experienced lineup of pre vetted developers working for competitive rates. Just 1% of applicants are accepted into Lemon's elite program. And they're not just out there finding this great talent, they're also working with you to integrate these new members into your team. Plus, if it's not a good fit, hey, and sometimes things don't work out, Lemon will hook you up with a new developer asap. I've seen startups go from just pretty good to amazing after filling out their teams with developers. From Lemon IO, go to Lemon IO Twist and find your perfect developer or technical team in 48 hours or less. Plus Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. That's Lemon IO twist. L e m o n I o twist. All right, we're back at this Week in Startups here live in Tokyo. Excellent. We have about 50 founders in the room representing 30 companies here. Most of them are first time founders. When we meet with these companies, we like to assess what they need help with, number one. Number two is almost, well, top three, how do I raise money? How do I get you to give me a check? Number two, how do I find a co founder? Although if they're here, we've already sorted for that. And then typically the third thing is how do I get my customers, how do I go to market? Let's start with how you look at and evaluate an early stage startup. One that either is about to put their product into the Market or the product's been in market for, let's say, under 100 days, you don't have meaningful data to review.

11:50

It's all about the founder, as you know. And so I try to take a very close look. And that's been what I've been good at. And my secret sauce. These markets change super rapidly. When I hear guys like David Sachs or, you know, is it Thomas Tungs, the guy that writes.

14:10

Yeah, Tungsen, yeah.

14:24

You know, that has these. These guys are really smart about an ecosystem. Those SaaS has just changed, but it's continuously changing. So my strength was not mapping out that topology. It was rather kind of human profiling and looking at a founder and saying, hey, is this the person that's going to get it all the way across the finish line? So I look for technical founders with domain expertise, generally pretty young. They have a point of view about something that they know, that they understand. And normally it's a bit different. I'll give you an example. I did radiant Nuclear. I went to see the founder a couple days ago and El Segundo, he told me, I actually didn't realize I was his first check. So, you know, they just raising 350 million right now. Tim Draper at close to $2 billion. When I did a nuclear company, this was, you know, I can't remember, maybe six years ago. Nuclear was not in vogue. I mean, nuclear was dead. It was dead. It was.

14:25

That would be a fool's errand because we hadn't built one.

15:22

Yeah.

15:25

Since I don't know, 70 or 73.

15:26

Exactly.

15:28

We had, we have a couple of plants where we might consider building one. But after Fukushima, after Three Mile island and after Chernobyl, after those three.

15:29

Yes.

15:37

This fear of like, oh my God, this is terrible. So you then, I am guessing had to figure out why this would be different.

15:38

Yes.

15:46

Why was it different?

15:47

So the founder, Doug, I had always been drawn to deep tech companies. So super technical founders, you know, segment was three MIT dropouts and another guy. So I liked. I've had a propensity to bet on technical founders. This guy had worked directly for Elon on some projects at SpaceX, had been there a long time, super bright guy. And he ended up raising. I remember this series A from Andreessen and Union Square. And I was shocked because I was like, no, nobody was. They weren't doing those kinds of things back then. They were doing more sassy software kind of stuff. So in my case and in the founder's case, you have to be different.

15:48

Right.

16:28

If you're one of a hundred entering some crowded space, like you know, say LLMs now or you know, autumn, you know, AI coding or something. It's going to be super, super hard. So you have to be weird, you have to be different.

16:28

And there has to be some thesis of why you're going to disrupt a space where there's some number of incumbents.

16:41

Exactly. Yeah.

16:48

Let's unpack. Double click on the individual technical. What else? When you're talking to the individual, they have deep technical. You said young. It is a young man's game. A young person's game. To use non gender specific language, it's a young person's game. I think most people agree you have to do a lot of sacrificing. Although the returns for second and third time founders are really good too. But we do see that sort of dichotomy. Either it's Mark Pincus on his third startup or Elon on his third, third or fourth, or it's somebody right out of college or just dropped out.

16:49

Right, exactly.

17:20

But unpack more of the, if you can put your finger on it, the personality type. Not that we want people here at Founder University to be inauthentic. Yeah, but I'm just curious what you've learned.

17:21

I found that they're humble. They, but, but smart. So they, they're, they're listening, they're not defensive when they're, if you ask them hard questions like why this, why that, there's no defensiveness, or even, even if you say I don't think this will work for this reason, they don't take it personally. They kind of process what you're saying and then sort of, you know, have a counterpoint. So you have to have this kind of crazy confidence to bet on yourself and think you're going to disrupt an industry. At the same time, you have to have a certain humility to take feedback and respond to the universe when it's telling you something's not going right.

17:32

This is super interesting. I think I call it internally at our firm, like, is it enjoyable to volley, to play tennis, to play ping pong, pickleball, whatever it is with the founder. A founder, when you ask them a tough question, hey, there's seven other LLMs and now there's 15 open source projects. How are you going to cut through the noise Now? Some of them might just be like, well, we'll be better. And you're like, okay, can you explain to me how. And if the person is just filibustering or it's not credible and they're not asking you questions and it's not that productive discussion. You're like, wow, I wonder how this person is going to hire people, find partners or raise money from a series A firm. They need to have that humility to engage that discussion, but also that confidence of we're going to figure that out.

18:06

Exactly. Marc Andreessen talks about this, the idea maze. I really love this idea that when you're. And Mark looks for this and he's a better investor than I am, he looks for a founder who, you know, they say they're so far into the idea maze. So when you talk about an idea that their idea with them, you can see that they've tried this, they've tried that, they've thought about it this way, they've thought about it that way. They are so deep in it that when they're talking to you, it becomes immediately clear or should be clear that they don't have all the answers, but they know what they know.

18:51

Well, it's such a great metaphor because if you think about it like the maze from the Shining or any of those kind of mazes, like the hedge mazes or the ones made of hay, if you were to just while they're talking, it's almost like you see it being drawn.

19:26

Yeah.

19:39

And you are pulled up to the three quarter view and you look down on the maze.

19:40

Yes.

19:43

And you're like, oh, I see. Yes. Dead end, dead end. The mouse is looking for the cheese. Oh yeah. You figured out 2/3 of it, a third of it.

19:44

Right.

19:51

You're ahead of everybody else.

19:51

And they'll take you through that. A good founder will take you through that. Even Doug with Radian. I'm certainly not a nuclear expert, I'm a generalist. But I started asking questions and it became clear, you know, well, the neutrons will hit this, this thing and do this and do this and then this will happen. And then the design of his reactor, there are small kind of rice sized pellets surrounded by carbon and so that they can't go critical. And he broke all those pieces down for me in a way that was understandable. That's another thing about Elon that I think he's probably the best in the world that is taking really complicated things like rockets or you know, self driving cars or whatever. It is the physics of a battery in cars and breaking that down in a way that is super understandable and straightforward to anyone.

19:53

We've got a brand new sponsor this week and it's another amazing startup whose product we actually use every day here at launch. If you need to hire, manage, pay or equip team members anywhere around the world, you need Deal D E E L. They're going to take care of all the annoying HR tasks you don't have time for like payroll compliance, visas and onboarding so you can stay focused on your business. And Deal scales up with you from the first hire on. So there's never any need to switch platforms or transition into a new system. With Deal, you can set up payroll for any country in just minutes and get all the complicated visas and paperwork settled right away, allowing your business to grow without borders. That's why more 37,000 startups and fast moving companies are already using deal to accelerate their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting geel.com/that'S-E-E-L.com/ it's really interesting when you started saying that, just dovetailing with the maze. I remember sitting there with him when he lived in, when we both lived in Los Angeles and we were, you know, had some of the first roadsters and we were talking about batteries and consumer behavior.

20:41

Yeah.

21:54

And was like, okay, this thing is gonna can do like 180 theoretically, but I'm getting more like 90 miles. That's fine. Cause I'm driving to Culver City from Brentwood and you're going to, you know, elsa going to SpaceX. But like how is this going to work out? And he said, well we have this idea of you're going to be able to drive when you're going cross country and there'll be superchargers and we're going to have these ones that go much faster. Then we're going to have the ability for you to go in, undo all the screws, the battery will drop out, move over and we'll slide it up.

21:55

Yep.

22:28

And it'll be one of those two. And then we're gonna have these at your office and we're gonna subsidize people to make it a destination. So having a charger will get you those customers who have the $150,000 car.

22:28

Yep.

22:39

You're a hotel, you're gonna love that. And like all of a sudden as I'm saying this. Yeah, this is. How old is the roadster? 2013 or 14 maybe.

22:39

We'll have to look it up.

22:49

It was incredibly early. Yeah, it was 2006 when I got mine. Oh my God, it's been 20 years.

22:50

I had roadster number 633. Which, which do you know your car number? At all.

22:56

Or 16.

23:00

Wow. Okay.

23:01

But we were some of the first. And that car was dangerous and fun and exhilarating and crazy. But he was going through the idea maze and I saw a similar thing with SpaceX. People don't know. But before SpaceX, his idea was he wanted to back up the biosphere. So he's always been, think about, not Fermi's paradox, but there's another. I remember at some point he said, how do you think the world ends? And I said, meteor or pandemic? He's like, oh, that's exactly what I think. Number one and number two. And, you know, then I was like, yeah. Or nuclear holocaust. He's like, yeah, that's number three. We were going through this idea of just how does the world end? And his idea was to build like the movie silent running, great 1970s fiction film with Bruce Dern, to put giant biospheres and send everything up there, like those seed banks, but put it all up in space. And he's like, he went to see.

23:03

The Russians to buy a rocket.

23:54

To buy a rocket to do it. Or buy carriage on the rocket. And then he realized, oh my God, maybe I should just build the rocket. So biosphere to rocket. And then Starlink. Yeah, you know, it's very interesting.

23:56

Like, unbelievable, unbelievable. And you don't know all the. Even someone like Elon, who's super bright and wrote, writes out the master plan. You don't know all the answers, but as you move down the road, you, your headlights shine that much further and you can, and then you can start to work on the next set of problems. So you're sort of like keeping this mental kind of North Star. And then, you know, okay, but there's a storm, so we're gonna have to take down the sails. We're gonna have to. So you're, you're kind of continuously adjusting and, and responding while ideally having some big vision, which he's done. And then he, he did also a super good job connecting his employees, motivating them with you know, even like, you know, I make the screw for the fin that gets the rocket into space so that we can put, you know, mankind on Mars. But all, you know, even if you're working on a screw at SpaceX, you're. It rolls up to the mission. You understand how what you do connects to that big vision at Tesla.

24:06

It was to, you know, make sustainable energy. In addition to the electric cars. The electric cars were the way that the battery packs, the solar, all of that would manifest itself eventually. And then fsd. Sort of became his obsession as well.

25:10

Yeah.

25:26

So you're looking for those founders and I'm assuming also a level of work ethic resiliency where that mission kind of drives you to wake up every day. And you know, when you do that 12 or 14 hour day and you do it for 100 days in a row and nothing goes right, you don't quit.

25:26

Yeah, it's very hard. It's very hard. I mean, you gotta love this business, you know, and we were talking about Elon. We talk, you know, people talk about Steve Jobs. I worked at Apple in the 90s, when he'd come back. You know, you study the greats, right? If you're in this business, you look at you, you know, it's like studying a football player or a soccer player, a tennis player. You know, you watch hours of footage, you hit, you know, hundreds of balls or kick thousands of balls. You know, you're just. Every day you're, you're in it. Eventually, over time, you, you make progress.

25:43

Okay, red flags, top two or three. That it's not the right investment for Thomas.

26:12

Buzzwords, you know, SAS enabled. Da da da. When people start using buzzwords, I get, you know, very turned off. I want it in simple English, you know, because, because I, I think that, that, that you're, you're taking too much from the outside world. And those trends are sort of like, you know, fashion. They change daily. And so I think being able to reduce your idea into like a real simple concept that's not using a lot of buzzwords is, is good.

26:17

And let's talk about other red flags. Too high of a valuation. I don't know.

26:45

Yeah, valuation in the sense that you just not, not to be greedy about equity, but rather to be focused on getting the right people on board. And once if you do that, everything takes care of itself. If you make something big, whether you own 10, 20, or 30%, it won't matter.

26:51

I think especially in the first company.

27:06

Yeah, yeah. This is a secret that I, I normally don't share, but I will for you since. Yeah, good opportunity. I take people out to like typically a lunch or breakfast, sometimes dinner. And then I see, you know, are they kind to the, to the staff? Are they kind to the waiters? What kind of human being am I dealing with? Just they're little tells, like that little poker tells that you, that you look for.

27:08

Yeah, that's a great one. The ability to also hire and inspire. That's a really important one for me.

27:29

Key, key, how do you suss that.

27:34

Out, you know, when I asked to meet the team or, hey, let's have my team meet the team and just, hey, why are you here? What did you do before this? If you look at the pedigree and how they found the person and hey, how did you meet Jason? Or how did you meet Elon? And it's like, I emailed him, you know, if you were to ask Travis, and we had somebody who worked for Travis at both Uber and show yesterday spoke, he worked at him at Uber doing recruiting and at cloud kitchens. And I said, well, how did you wind up meeting him? And he's like, I emailed him, you know, I gave him some ideas. And then when he was doing cloud kitchens, I emailed him again and he responded. And how you meet the person. I remember talking with us back to Elon and, and just some other folks. They typically, it's really weird, but through social media and through their network, they just meet smart people and they really are good at assessing that. And then they're also really good. I remember we were. Elon was struggling with who was going to be the CEO of Tesla when he started investing in the company, and then he had to fire a bunch of people. I said, oh, you seem like you have a lot of doubt about. Yeah, I got a lot of doubt. And I said, yeah, what are you going to do? And he's like, I've been struggling with that. And he said, but at the end of the day, if there's any doubt, there's no doubt. And that was like opened my brain up. And he had heard it from somebody else in Silicon Valley. But when you have these doubts about somebody on the team. Yeah, as a founder, you're 100% right. There's never a chance where you're like, this person's not the right person. I need to get rid of them. It's only, how quickly do you do it?

27:37

Yeah, yeah, it's hard. It's hard to do that. But it's better to fire early because you're setting your culture right. So when you have the, the early founders and bad people in the culture will be rejected. Almost like an immune system in the body where if someone is not the right fit, they will be. So it's super key to get that DNA set early.

28:59

I also think about that when I asked them another like, secret tell kind of thing is when they, I asked them, tell me about your first three customers and they're like, well, you know, we have, we do. We sell into the, you know, the military and we sell into this, I'm like, yeah, okay, tell me the top three companies. The one you land, your first, the second one, the third one, how'd you get them? And sometimes we'll get that during the due diligence process, but a lot of times they're like, yeah, the first two are my friends from college, are my fraternity brothers, and they did it for me as a favor. But the third one I reached out to through LinkedIn, and then they didn't respond, so I cold emailed them. And then I met the next three at a trade show. I'm at what trade show? They're like, oh, yeah, there's a trade show for lawyers in Milwaukee. I went out to it, and I couldn't afford a booth, but I just intercepted people at coffee and I introduced myself and I got three customers there. And you're like, holy cow. This person is like, you know those dogs that hunt for truffles in Italy? You ever go on one of those truffle hunts?

29:21

Yeah, yeah.

30:10

It's wild to watch these dogs. They just, all of a sudden, they just run away, and then they're just pointing and scraping at the bottom of a tree, and then there's five truffles there. They're like those truffle hunters.

30:11

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because that. That understanding your customer is super key because it rolls into the product, right?

30:20

You.

30:26

You've gotta be. You have a tight loop between what your customer, how your customer is using the product, and how the product is evolving.

30:26

When we get back from this quick break, I want to ask you, what should founders do with that first 250k, 500k in year one of their startup? When we get back on this week in startups, You know, I hear from founders venting all the time about how tough it is to hire great people. Well, let me tell you what the biggest game changer for our hiring process at launch has been the LinkedIn Jobs AI assistant. It's like having an amazing recruiting manager. We've been growing our team over the past year, and we filled multiple, multiple positions in weeks, not months, with this new AI Assistant, which makes it so easy to post a new position without filling out a huge form with a thousand steps. And it filters applicants based on the customized criteria that I set for the role, so only the best matches get surfaced, and I'm not stuck scanning through a million resumes. But that's not all. It also shows Your post to 25 optimal candidates every day, so you can actually invite the most qualified people to apply for Your position. So hire right the first time. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com twist then promote it and get access to LinkedIn jobs. New AI assistant. That's LinkedIn.com twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. All right, we're back here live in Tokyo for Founder University. Let's talk a little bit about what should the founders hear. Let's say they're successful in raising that 250k, they've got it deployed. They get into an accelerator, they get another 250k, whatever it happens to be 125k. What are you trying to accomplish in those first 12 months?

30:33

Well, don't blow it. That's first thing. Burn rate is interesting. You would be shocked. The number of companies that I've been an investor in that have gone wrong from overspending. It is crazy. And even one I have now where it was going to do an acquisition. It was a big company, had raised hundreds of millions. The partner on the deal had a medical problem, a serious medical problem, dropped out. They had already signed to make the acquisition. So I seen every permutation of companies running out of money. So I know it sounds like obvious or pedestrian, but really do not run out of money. You know, and it's pretty rare where I thought, oh, these founders are too cheap, you know, get crappy furniture, get a crappy office.

32:18

Frugality matter.

33:05

Frugality matters. Frugality matters.

33:06

The way I've said it internally is we're looking for founders who get a dollar of value from a nickel, not founders who get a dollar of value from a hundred dollar bill.

33:08

One hundred percent.

33:17

And yeah, when you get that money in the bank, sometimes you just do stupid things. I had one founder who hired a PR firm because people had told him and I said, how much paying the PR firm? I said $35,000. And he had raised like 2 million. And I'm like, okay, yeah, you got to stop that. We don't need that much press. And it's like not important. And he's like, oh, I signed an 18 month agreement. I'm like, okay, I'm going to call them and read them the riot act. And I got them to settle, to get it out of that.

33:18

To get them out.

33:38

Yeah, but it was pretty brutal. Have you seen a company with a lot of money in the bank go out of business?

33:38

Yeah. Time and time again, right?

33:44

No, no. Company with a lot of money.

33:47

Oh, right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. That, that is your. That is your oxygen. I mean that is like you're in an airplane. That is your gas. You know, you run out of gas, the plane is going down. You cannot run out of gas. You cannot spend your money, you know, to, to the end. And you. And you cannot. Investors, they'll string you along. They'll. Who knows, you know, you can. I've also seen real misconceptions between where the founder thinks they are in a fundraise and where they actually are.

33:48

How do they go from saying, okay, I'm. I'm about to close this million dollar seed round.

34:17

Yeah.

34:23

And you know, you're not even close.

34:23

Yeah.

34:26

What do you. How do you advise them that, like, yeah, you, you may want to cut half the staff or get everybody to reduce their salaries and take your three months of Runway to nine.

34:27

Yeah.

34:36

So you have more time to close this. Because I don't think you're going to close it.

34:36

You're not going to make it. That's very hard. It's very hard. But they got to do it. You just make the tough decisions. Ideally, you don't get your burn up that, you know, you're always thinking, like, how many months left do I have here? How many. You know, I've got 24 months of Runway. We call Runway. Right. 12 months of Runway. And where am I gonna. What. What am I gonna accomplish in that time? So Runway is super key. Money in the bank is super key. And then the milestones you're gonna hit, you know, where you think, okay, I'm gonna. Because you're also looking. I mean, look, once you reach product market fit, there are all kinds of guys show up on your door to help you and give you money. Right. I mean, not only just, you know, investors, but also, you know, employees. Right. If you, if you have a product market fit kind of company, things get a lot easier. But that, that initial, you're drilling for oil, you're wildcatting. You're sort of land manning. You need to drill as many holes as possible to figure it out.

34:39

Running out of money is just brutal.

35:35

So unfun.

35:38

I tell folks who are like, oh, my God, I've got this one person, they've committed, and I'm like, okay, can I see the term sheet? Oh, we don't have the term sheet, but they gave me a verbal. I'm like, okay, anything that's not a signed term sheet is a no. So ask them, say, listen, you know, I've got some other investors. We talked about some broad terms. Would you like to send us a term sheet or should I send you the term sheet.

35:39

Yeah.

35:59

And just be a forcing function. And then if they don't send you a term sheet when they say they're going to, they're out.

35:59

Yeah.

36:06

And proceed as such.

36:06

Right.

36:08

And you, you have to, I mean, in a way it's like ball control or pot control in a poker game. You have to control that process. What is a great fundraising process for a company that doesn't have a hockey stick?

36:08

And find out what they need to get to that term sheet. Like, okay, I need X data or I want to talk to these three customers or what, what is it they need to get there and ask them really. Because they'll share that normally, unless they're being really cagey or just keeping, you know, being. I think a good investor will be super candid about A, if they're in or not like you say, but you got to kind of really put them, you know, put their feet to the fire and then B, if they're almost there or not quite there, what they need to get across.

36:20

How do you say that to them?

36:49

Say, what do you need to get to a. Yes here? What do you need to like sign the term sheet? Yeah, you know, what, what do you need to see from me? And that makes your job a lot easier because a lot of the challenges is like communicating what your value is. And people have different things. I want to, you know, you may want to see something different at Founder University than I do.

36:50

And some people might not do reference checks and not even do due diligence. And you're like, okay, well what's the hold up here? Like, yeah, and that's where forcing them to get it in and get that term sheet in and sign it and you know, tell them the timeline that you're doing this on.

37:08

For example, let's say I was raising money, you know, Jason, you said you were going to do, you're interested in about a 200k check size, is that right? You know, you need to take notes even in the meeting and say, okay, and then what's the time frame in terms of closing this? You need 30 days. What's your process like? Well, Tom, we need to look at, you know, we need to speak to three customers, we need to look at your code, we need to da, da, da. So that your investors will generally, and your customers too, they'll tell you what they need.

37:23

It's up to you. If you ask the issue, if you ask and they think maybe some first time founders are like, wow, I don't want to push Them, you actually. They want to be pushed. They want to get this decision made. And sometimes they're just busy. They have a life, these investors. Maybe they, you know, are dealing with other issues in their personal life or in their firm.

37:48

Exactly.

38:08

There could be dynamics going on you're not aware of and pushing that issue. What do you wish you Knew now with 100 investments you didn't know then?

38:08

I wish I had been more aggressive. I think I'd taken more risk. For example, Airbnb. I overthought it, you know, it was a second angel deal I'd seen, so I should have just done it. And I was even. Didn't even know how to do the docs back then. And, you know, should I get my lawyer or should they. This is even pre. Safe notes. Safes had just been kind of.

38:17

It was back in the convertible note.

38:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was early and so take more risk. Be more of an optimist. You know, I think that's something Marc Andreessen is super, super good at. He's still good at it. I heard that they raised, you know, such big funds. People were like, you're going to have to return like, $600 billion or something to, you know, or, you know, you're going to have to have $600 billion of outcomes or something. You know, they did it easily. They cleared it. So be an optimist, I think, you know, even AI was quite bullish on AI, but I should have bet bigger into the AI trend.

38:35

Are you conservative by nature or are you cynical? Have you been burned? Why were you not as aggressive, do you think? Was it fear?

39:05

Well, yeah, you know, when it's your own money I haven't dealt with. I haven't. Generally, I've done a few SPVs, but generally I bet my own cash, which is different to most. You know, when I was starting, I thought, I need to learn. But there was. That was such a good time. Right? And I bet five years from now, ten years from now, we're going to look back and we're going to say, this was such a good time.

39:13

Right?

39:33

You know, we might say, like, this was such a good time in Tokyo. Brand new, the ecosystem was just developing. You remember, Jetro is holding events and our hills.

39:34

And, you know, optimism is key.

39:44

Optimism is important.

39:46

There's this great expression that they tell drivers, you know, in race cars, look at the track, not the wall.

39:47

Yeah, yeah.

39:54

Because you look at the wall, you drive into the wall.

39:55

That's right.

39:57

You follow the track. And I was Teaching my daughters how to ski through trees. And they love it. It's her favorite thing to do, is ski through trees.

39:58

Yeah.

40:04

Mom's not as excited about it as we all are. They said, well, how do you not hit the trees? I said, don't look at the trees, look at the space between the trees.

40:04

Yeah. Look at your line.

40:12

Find your line.

40:13

Yep.

40:14

And what you want to do is when we start out, we're just going to stop and all three of us are. Four of us are going to stand there and you're going to tell me what your line is. You're going to point to it with your pole and draw it for me. Think about it and think about it, Visualize. And how many turns is it? You're like, well, I'm going to make like a couple of turns. Nope. One turn here, one turn there, and then you're going to go straight and you're going to pick up a little speed on that straight one. But the speed's okay. Yeah, but you're not going to look at the trees. You're going to look at that space. What do they call it? The negative space or something between the trees. Yep. These girls can ski through trees like you wouldn't believe. And I think that's in some ways what we all do as investors and founders, which is like you make this big, long list.

40:15

Yeah.

40:52

These are all the things that will go wrong in a nuclear startup.

40:52

Right.

40:54

What could go right? What's on that list? That list is like two things.

40:55

Yeah.

40:59

Three things. The list of what could go wrong is 300.

41:00

Yeah.

41:02

If you over optimize on that, you will talk yourself out of every decision.

41:03

Yeah. I think now just to your point, it's a super, super point. Like the founders, what we noticed in companies was a founder versus a non founder is the mind of a non founder goes first to the risk, first to why it's not going to work, first to what can break or first. Whereas a founder sees that opportunity and then they're like, okay, these challenges are risks and I can manage them or I can deal with them, but they first go to the the opportunity versus going to the risk.

41:06

What if you could. What if small modular nuclear reactors worked? What would that look like?

41:34

Yeah, exactly. And then if you stay around, the longer you're alive and this is back to burn rate, the more chance you have to get lucky. I mean, now for radiant, there's such energy demand due to AI.

41:39

Right.

41:52

There's no way Doug predicted that, but he knew that energy was important and the demand was compounding. And so now he's in a super lucky place. There's no. You can punch a pull.

41:52

Yes.

42:02

In. In a new, new way that he couldn't have even guessed.

42:02

But it is a really interesting thing that happens. You have something like Covid. And if you're Airbnb.

42:05

Yeah.

42:11

You just totally get your ass kicked, and you have to figure out how to survive if you're Door dash.

42:11

Yeah.

42:16

All of a sudden, everybody's like, hockey stick. Like, how do I get food to my house during quarantine or instacart.

42:16

Yep.

42:23

And people are like, I'll take the 15 minutes to figure out how this works.

42:23

Exactly.

42:28

And staying alive to do that is the key.

42:29

Yeah, Yeah. A friend of mine, a guy, Adam Ross, you may know, a super guy, has an expression. It's like, if you hang around long enough in Silicon Valley, you get hit by the money truck.

42:32

Absolutely.

42:42

And so, you know, hopefully you're looking.

42:42

At me in a very targeted way.

42:45

Both of us. Yeah.

42:48

Well, I mean, even for investors, that is key. It's so key as investors to get lucky. And if you make a certain number of bets and you don't give up, you will eventually get lucky. It's just somewhere around the 20th or 30th investment, I find something breaks for an angel, for a seed fund. But you have to. Talking about our business, if you only do five investments, man, it's hard. How long did you know before you got the sense you were good at this?

42:50

Actually, the one thing about Airbnb was every time I go to the airport, they'd be on the COVID of something, some magazine, the guys. And that was like, why did. You can only lose one extra money. You learn this later as an investor. But you. You. You know, if you miss out on a thousand X or ten thousand X, and maybe the case of Airbnb, that kind of said, hey, you know, I was like, wow, I had miscalibrated my risk. You know, this is so key.

43:18

The human brain has a very hard time understanding the concept of a thousand X. It's just so exponential, and it doesn't exist anywhere else in finance. When you get your credit card bill, if you don't pay it and they charge you 2% that month or 30% that year, you're okay. And then if you buy a stock and it goes 5x and you went 500% in five years, you're like, oh, my God, this is incredible.

43:43

Right?

44:06

And when I talk to people and they talk about the Uber or the Robinhood, investment. I'm like, yeah, 1000-7000X and growing. And I still haven't sold any shares of Robinhood. And I paired my Uber position early to Masayosi San. I'd say shares to buy. We all did, but I haven't sold any since. I'm like, wow, that is a very bizarre thing to have a 7,000x or a thousandx.

44:06

And all the compounding, the doubling at the end. I mean one doubling at the end is worth all the multiples up until that point. So Buffett was extremely good at understanding compounding. You're right. It's not like in the physical world the delta between how much we weigh may be 20% or 30% or 10%. It's hard to think in these orders of magnitude where, you know, the startup world and the tech world and certain things don't run that way. They run in like exponents and they run in a different kind of math.

44:25

If you were in a poker game and there were nine people in it and they each put $10,000 in and you somehow figured out how to take everybody's money in a cash game, you would make nine times 90,000.

44:55

Exactly.

45:05

Now imagine a poker game where you put the 10,000 in and you made 1,000 times it. And you're like, how is that even possible? It's 100 other poker tables worth of players.

45:06

10 million? Yeah.

45:14

No more. I think it's 100 million. Right. So a thousand thousand would be 1 million. No, it's 10 million. You're right. So it's like how did I put 10,000 down and make 10 million? It doesn't make any logical sense.

45:15

Yeah, exactly.

45:25

Pretty amazing business.

45:26

Yeah.

45:27

Thomas, I asked if you would be so kind as to take very raw pitches.

45:28

Okay.

45:31

From these year zero companies, Thomas and I will do a couple of pitches and we'll just give some candid feedback. Sure.

45:32

Sounds great.

45:37

Hi everyone, my name is Hiroshi Takeuchi. I'm a founder and CEO of satedomist. We offer AI native cross border commerce platform for Sachet exporters. So here's a customer, Mai. She's the first Ms. Sachay and she's the owner of Sachet export business. She has some problems. One of them declining Sachet breweries due to the decrease of domestic consumption. In order to improve that, she needs to enhance export capability. However, it's a lot of paperwork and then it includes documentation and language barriers. This is why we have a solution such in a mist, she uploads the product documentation to the cloud and then embarking Part validation check is executed and once it's done she creates the content on top of that then publish and then sell it to the importers. Then once purchase has been placed she can ship the documentation to the country selected and then she can trace in orders what's going on the order as you can see the operation is quite complex and have industry specific requirements. This is why Sachet Emiss is a very unique position compared to other marketplaces. And then GTM strategy to brand as an alternative wine and then brand into Dubai and selling us and then create a new segment aged sake as new asset class business model is get transaction fee from the importer's payment to the exporters. No initial, no license cost. Then we have some government subsidy in the past and then we identify customer right now then we are looking for the importer now opportunity. One segment is vertical right now but we have a playbook we can extend to the other legislative commerce in the trade. We have a team here, myself and a tech lead in Masami we have spent open source in the past in 10 years. Then we have a GTM advisor Katsu with this team we are going to promote Japanese culture and spread to the world. Thank you for listening.

45:37

What are your first thoughts?

47:31

Key, key point you showed in near the end sake is not a big enough vertical of investors. Especially the later stage guys like the Series A Bs they're going to look for huge tam. They all care about tam. And so I like the idea of starting with a vertical, you understand, like sake. And then there's you know, Indians importing, you know, a certain type of curry to, you know, to Japan or to Dubai or So I like the idea of this going beyond the sake vertical into many, many verticals. And it's really about exporting from one country to another any kind of product. And you know, it sounds like the regulatory piece is the hard piece certainly for alcohol, but probably any kind of really probably anything Nowadays there's a lot of paperwork. So to make this a really big business. If you're good at doing that, I think it's a really good idea.

47:32

I do.

48:22

And this was exactly what I was thinking. And we both kind of looked at each other when you showed the other verticals because I was thinking, wow, this is so niche and it's a declining market. There was a time when the newspapers were declining and everybody was building tools to help newspapers stop declining. And anybody who is inventor was like, you can't stop that. So you're essentially selling into the Titanic that you want to sell ice cream on the Titanic. And it's like, yeah, that Titanic's going down, there's not another voyage. And you tie yourself to it and it goes down. So you presented as your first market, a market in decline. And we're thinking, yeah, people stop drinking. People are on Ozempic. Like, you want to find a beach where the tide's coming in, not going out. So this pitch had all these signals of no, no, no, no. And that at the end it had the s, oh, he's going to do it for these other verticals. But the name also, then you're trapped in the name. So I want you and I'm going to give you permission to think big. You have my permission. So you're now allowed to do it.

48:23

Yes, yes.

49:24

Ditto on the name. Yeah, I was thinking that you could have this name and then do other names, but I think try to make more of a general name. And this is maybe all super clear in your head, but for investors, they need to know this is super big right from the start.

49:24

And you did explain the problem really well too, so we can fix this. You said, hey, look at all this paperwork you have to fill out. And it's very regulated, a lot of paperwork. This is a great side the problem slide. And what I would say is, hey, we have a big problem. When you do import and export, there are regulations and there are regulations. In Japan, we have a lot of rules. Sake. In order just to sell sake to another country, you have to fill out how many forms?

49:37

More than tens.

50:08

You have to fill out over 10 forms just to sell sake to another country and in that country to import it to Korea. How many forms on the other side do you have to fill out? So what we're doing is we're taking this old process and we're going to use AI and our company trade AI is going to make it incredibly fast and easy and reduce the error rate. And take it from costing $50,000 in paperwork down to $50 in paperwork, from 50 days of work to five hours of work, and we're going to do it across. We've identified 150 verticals in Japan and sake is a declining one. But the consumer electronics is a bigger one. Chips is an even bigger one. We're going to take every form, every antiquated. And we're not putting it into the large language models, we're putting it into an open source model that we control. And this is something that ChatGPT or Claude or GROK or Gemini, they won't Even have these forms. We're going to have these proprietary forms. And by the way, the forms change every 18 months on average. Now it's like, whoa, okay, there's a big problem and AI is perfect for this problem. So you have the kernel of such a great idea and you have the passion for it. We just have to flip the entire presentation. We can fix it.

50:09

Okay, thank you very much.

51:32

Okay, well done. Anything else you want to add, Thomas? No.

51:33

It's great. Exactly that. Yeah. And especially for small business, right? I mean, God, that's like almost makes it. You go from being I can't do this to I have all these new markets. So it opens up the tam for small businesses in a way that they didn't have before. Awesome.

51:36

Hi adjacent. Hi Tom. Hi everyone. I'm founder of Homey World. Homey World is Ielts social network. So here's the problem. Meeting the people in the real world, it became so hard, as you know. So to solve this problem, we build home. Here's a demo. So we. Here's Maria. Meet Maria. She just moved to Japan and she was head of IT company. She looking for the event and the people on the event. So she feared who's coming. So she feels she is interesting because of same interest and same occupations. So that is why she decided to join and chat to meet her. Not only that, our AI understand her and recommend who to meet others and who others and why recommended by AI. So I want to connect to her as well. So AI create personality message for both parties to attract each other. This is not just idea. This we have already launched this already launched. So this is our business model. This is omakase freelance subscriptions. Our AI matches people like every week if you pay. So these are attractions of ours. So our collaborative is building AI native trust network on a map. That is why I believe we can expand other categories. Imagine the world wherever you are, where you live. Our AI you have AI understand you very well and connect you the people and match you the events and stay places. Something like that. So this is our team, this is also our investors. One of them is like legendary consumer app founders before Facebook. And one of them is board and also co founder of Pokemon Go. I have asked questions before I leave. What can AI neighborly place in the 20 years, 30 years later? I believe real human connection in the real world. We empower real human connection in the real world. That's why we should exist for the world. Thank you very much. This is a homie Thomas.

51:50

We saw a very good looking design I love good design, but what comes to mind?

53:51

I'd want to know your background a little more. You kind of shot past that, but just obviously you've gotten some good people like the co founder of Pokemon Go. You must have some pretty good industry experience. Definitely hit on that when you're doing the presentation. I know you don't have a lot of time, but what's your background?

53:57

I have been managing startup in Japan for seven years in the past and that is like homestay matching platform. I know how trust network happens and how people connect. So that's my background.

54:12

Okay.

54:26

And I also do hosting more than 100 guest travelers in my home as well.

54:27

That's perfect because it ties into what you're doing. It kind of demonstrates that how you know about this space and why this is your idea. You know why you chose this idea because you you know a lot about it.

54:31

Covid hit 19 hit. I feel only at the time for two years traveling around the world. But when I get most enjoyable experience, I always meet the matchmakers to connect with people and something like that. So when I back to home, I start hosting my guests at my home. So they everyone looking for not place but people. So when I introduce people or bar, they feel like amazing. So if you say if you experience in the seamless way by the app or something, that would be next level. So I thought that was impossible because you know, a lot of work, hard work and you know, no business model. But when I see ChatGPT launch, oh my God, that became possible because that is my story.

54:42

Yeah. You know, consumer apps are incredibly hard until they're not. And it's very much about finding a behavioral loop that people become addicted to and that actually solves that problem for them. And I'm not convinced that you found it yet, but my friend started this company, meetup.com, we talked about it the last time I was here, Scott Heiferman. And what they eventually found was that there were people who were weird like you, who like to be hosts and like me, I like to host. And those people are called connectors and they are really good at matchmaking and building people. How it grows beyond your ability to do it and learning that loop that becomes viral and you have this viral coefficient is going to be so critical. And it looks like you're figuring that out and you just have to bring us along on that journey as investors. If it's for everybody to do anything. As investors were like, huh, what's the icp? What's the beachhead market, Is it book clubs, is it group dinners, is it hiking? And you showed so many pictures, so many different things. I think it'd be more effective to say, we know here in Japan there are three things that people are going to go crazy for. Everybody is looking for somebody to go on a day trip, get on a train and go to Kyoto or go on a hike. Everybody wants to be active and they're looking for somebody to play pickleball with or to go skiing with. So we're starting with those group activities. Ten people going skiing, getting on the train. And then everybody loves to cook or explore restaurants. So we're doing a bar hop and a, you know, going and eating street food. And here's the first one we did and this grew into 20 and now it's 250. And here are the people who run those groups. I'm very interested in who are the Airbnb hosts of this? Who are the people who will build this? The ebay sellers. And that to me would be the magic is if you know how to find the other weirdos. And people didn't. Everybody thought ebay was like people would just get rid of junk in their garage. They never anticipated that there would be people who would make it their full time job. That's something that now people can imagine because of Airbnb, because of being an Uber driver, because of, you know, all these weird monetizable hobbies, being a podcaster, being an influencer. So I'm very excited about your company. Your strength is design. And then go to market and explaining to us that the next piece for you will be that I believe that'll get investors to. This is for you to show us the growth journey and the top customers that the top verticals. Yeah, the go to market is. And you know, Zuckerberg had one. He's just like, I'm going to go after college campuses and dating and liking and just figuring out the relationship status. Now if you were to look at the Meta Corporation now it's not really about relationship status, is it? It's grown to be so many different things. And I try to think of another example like Snapchat. It was really about people having these friendship streets for ephemeral messaging and making the messages disappear. And it was like a private social network. There's all these different devices of who the initial group is that builds the foundation. MySpace was, I think, artistic people in LA who were trying to get, you know, was kind of pre influencer. It was like the original influencers. Paris Hilton had One.

55:36

Yeah, it was like self expression.

59:06

Self expression and then maybe trying to even make yourself famous. Yeah, it was like that sort of combination. Here's a very interesting one. Is there somebody who makes a living doing this in your system now or do you know of somebody who makes a living hosting events like this?

59:08

We hosting by ourselves right now. So we don't yet like hot.

59:24

I wonder if hiking would be an interesting one. I saw hiking in there. What do you think is the most.

59:28

Interesting too for me personally or like in the business?

59:32

Which two do you think you could get to grow and double every month?

59:35

I think we need to focus on the expat international and community and founder builder community in Japan, in Tokyo.

59:38

Expat community.

59:46

Expat community.

59:47

Perfect.

59:48

Yeah, that sounds like a great one.

59:48

I would appreciate it if you share the perspective. Like, should we. How should we handle the focusing point in the Tokyo or New York? Because if we focus on too much on Tokyo, that will not become global standards product. We need a social network. I think we need to create global standards.

59:50

It's fine to start here.

1:00:05

Yeah. And Tokyo is super in vogue. And it's also hard for foreigners to access Japan. You know, they don't speak the language. There are all these like secret spots. So I think you could take advantage of that also. I like that you really hit upon trust, you know, in order to meet someone in real life, I mean, especially for women, there has to be a trust component there. So I think that's definitely going to be part of your secret sauce is getting that right.

1:00:06

I want to build on Thomas's comments there. Trusted. Right now one of my theories of these kind of businesses and growth is I call it like hot embers, you know, like coal.

1:00:30

I don't know that fire.

1:00:44

Small. Small.

1:00:45

What do you call charcoal in Japanese?

1:00:46

Sumi.

1:00:48

So if I have a brick of sumi and I put it here, it's hot. When we're sitting here, we don't feel it. That's one person. Then you put five people and you put them next to each other. Now we're gonna feel, well, a little bit of heat. Then you put 10 people on. You have 15 coals. They start heating everything up. And we're gonna step back. Whoa, it's getting hot. Then you put another 15 on. Whoa, it gets really hot. It's raining. It burns the desk, it burns to the floor. And you have to just very quickly build, very slowly and methodically add that.

1:00:50

Coal to the fire.

1:01:22

And I think that would be very interesting for expats. So if there is a German. Germans in Japan and Americans in Japan and French people in Japan, that's really fascinating because then when I come here, I started a group with the people we had lunch with that time, and I was like, hey, I'm thinking about going skiing. Hey, I'm looking for a place to stay. Hey, I'm looking for this. And I popped up my own little one. And people started giving me good advice. And then people started giving me direct advice. Hey, this hotel is like a secret one. I didn't want to put in the group chat, but it's really, like, a little bit less expensive. And here's the person, man, if you can solve problems for people like that, that feels like a great place to start. And you want to start in your own backyard with something you know and you can be successful at and that you're going to enjoy doing. Expat sounds perfect.

1:01:23

Thank you very much.

1:02:04

Because there's expat bars here in Roppongi. Somebody took me to one. I think it might have been champagne only, but all the Americans were going to this one place in Roppongi that was a champagne bar. It was very weird. But there's a. Is there American expat. Are there American expat places here that.

1:02:04

Yeah, yeah.

1:02:22

Is it. Is it like a specific neighborhood or is it just specific spots?

1:02:23

Well, Pongi, but lots. Lots of spots.

1:02:28

Lots of spots where if you go there, you see the Americans. Is there equivalent for Germans and French? Yeah, yeah, that's. And where does that exist? How would I find that? Reddit. Maybe there's a subreddit or something. How would I ever be aware of it? Some you have to learn from a friend, right?

1:02:30

Well, especially if someone can take you, you know, and then bring you around. I think is. And this. You know, if you trust you met someone on this app and then you can trust that they're not gonna, you know, that they're like a nice person. It figures out mutual contacts or whatever.

1:02:44

Imagine the experience when you're. Whenever you come to find like place here, not only find stay so you can seamlessly group, spontaneously group to welcome you. Like this is the handle by AI so that, you know, I think. I believe we can change the way to. How do we connect people? So that's my, like, strong convictions about how we change the people connect.

1:02:57

All right, big round of applause for our presenters and for Thomas.

1:03:19