My First Million: MFM Demo Day: 5 Startups Pitch Sam & Shaan and Raise $1.7M

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell.

And they break down why these pitches were winners or losers.

And each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

So here's the situation.

So this is recording.

So this is going to go live on our podcast feed.

So the people listening on the podcast, there's you and then there's people who are live right

now.

I think over a thousand people live.

So we're on this thing called Stonks.com.

I guess I got to do a disclosure.

I'm an investor.

Sean, are you an investor?

No.

All right.

Fan.

Fan.

So Stonks.com, we were friends with them.

They asked us to do this and it was actually, we say no to everything, but this was a cool

idea.

So basically five startups are going to pitch us and we're going to maybe invest, but

very likely tear them apart and also compliment them.

We're going to make like some good content out of this, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Great.

I'm down and we don't know much about these startups ahead of time.

So it's all going to be kind of fresh.

And there's a comment section.

Do you see the comment section, Sean?

Like where people are chatting?

Yeah.

So if like, if there's any good questions and also on the spot, they can invest, right?

Like they can put in money.

Yeah.

So like if they see something, I don't think they can like, they're not literally going

to fund the company right there, but they're going to say like, I'm interested.

Let's talk.

And honestly, that's probably what I'm going to do.

I'd never like on these things, I can't like, I've seen these things and someone's

like, I'm in for a hundred thousand dollars and they say they're like right on the spot.

I'm not that impulsive.

Are you?

Yeah.

I'm that impulsive and it's also more dramatic.

So I'm a sucker for the drama.

I'll do it.

All right.

Well, at least one of us will.

And then you, if you go to the chat of this video thing, you'll see the order of people

that they're going to go and we're going to talk to one person.

I think they get two minutes and then we get eight minutes to talk to them.

And then it's going to say like, time's up.

Move to the next one.

Does that make sense?

This is pretty sick.

Let's do this.

All right.

We have John Hancock from Stonks is like our assistant here.

He's going to be feeding us startup.

So John, do you want to bring the first one up?

John, is that a real name?

I don't think so.

Hey guys.

What's up to Roosh?

How's it going?

Thanks so much for the time.

Okay.

Take it away.

Awesome.

My name is Dharush from the founder and CEO of 5x.

I've been fortunate enough to spend my career in the data space from being the first data

engineer at Salesforce to most recently running data for WeWork supporting thousands of employees.

Over the last few years, I've been super interested in the modern data stack.

It's estimated that over 77% of companies in the next 10 years in some way, shape or

form are going to use the modern data stack.

The problem is that there's a big disconnect in what vendors are selling today and what

customers need.

Over 90% of customers are investing in data to get a business ROI, yet the vendors are

really focused on selling individual categories.

What this means is that customers have to have expertise, they need to sign multiple

contracts, they need to stitch this together, all of this is taking away from actually getting

business output.

5x is the first end-to-end data platform, which is focused on business output.

So we license and integrate with the different vendors in the space, and as an end result,

we can provide customers with an end-to-end platform depending on their use cases, industry

size, budget.

On top of this, we also have a services model where we can give companies access to high

quality engineers who are pre-trained on the stack.

Today, we interview hundreds of engineers fully automated, and we get to hide the top

0.1%.

End result, customers can implement end-to-end data strategies in weeks instead of spending

time signing all these contracts for less than a year old million dollar run rate on

a POC with zero marketing, and we're super excited that we are going to be profitable

by the end of this month.

All right.

Good stuff.

Sam, so what does this business do?

That's what I'm trying to, I was trying to interrupt you earlier, but I think I saw I

was muted.

Can you kind of dumb this down for me for a little bit?

I'm looking at you, so let me, for the listeners, all right.

So the website is 5x.co.

Right now, you are raising $300,000 at a $25 million dollar valuation.

You got to a million dollars in ARR in less than a year.

I don't know what POC means.

When I see POC of people of color, that's what I thought about, what's the point of

context?

Okay.

So like some companies are telling you that they're going to pay you up to a million

dollars, right, or collectively, or they actually have?

They actually are paying us monthly.

Dude, you got a million dollars in a proof of concept.

That sounds pretty sick to me.

Okay.

But I'm going to be honest, I don't know what the hell you do.

Can you explain to me?

I've never worked at a big company before, so I'm kind of like a big dumb idiot.

It's not just for big companies.

Think of, you know, if you want to get value from data, fundamentally, you need two things.

You need infrastructure, you need tools, infrastructure, you might have heard of Tableau or Snowflake,

and the second thing you need is people.

Now the way the infrastructure is working today is every vendor is really focused on

one small part of the stack.

So if you want to do something like analytics, you need to go sign four or five different

vendors, sign these upfront contracts, and stitch this together yourself.

Now if an industry is going to become mainstream, then you can't really expect 90% of customers

who don't care about it.

When you say words like vendors, it's still hard for me to understand.

Give me a very specific example.

Use this format.

Yeah.

Use a format that's like X company had Y problem.

They tried Z, but the problem with Z is this, so then we came in and we do it differently

instead.

Sure.

So X company, you know, wants to figure out where the customers are coming from.

Fill it in.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Use one of our customers.

Bank Novo wants to figure out where the customers are coming from.

How do they personalize their app?

How do they save costs and, you know, optimize their sort of cash flow?

They now don't know where to go.

They can go by a single reporting tool like Tableau, but the end-to-end data strategy

is a lot more comprehensive.

There's a lot more than just having a dashboarding tool.

Instead of having to hire multiple engineers, instead of having to go sign all of these

different tools and vendors, they come to 5X.

5X instantly gives them an end-to-end platform, which has got all of these vendors.

They license these vendors and can give customers an end-to-end platform.

On top of this, if Bank Novo doesn't have the resources to figure out how to go use

it, they can add engineers on our side who are pre-trained on the platform.

End result, they're getting business output in weeks, whereas if they try to go do this

themselves, it would be 12 times slower and 6 times more expensive.

All right.

That's way better.

And one question.

How on earth did you get people to spend a million dollars with you on a proof of concept?

Because this sounds like a very hard thing to sell, and a million dollars is a lot of

money.

And is it actually like they're going to pay you a certain amount of money every single

year?

Yeah.

So, at the moment, in the next two months, our self-service platform will be live.

So anyone will be able to go to 5X, enter the credit card for a few hundred bucks a

month, you'll have the platform.

So early-stage companies can do this by spending very little money.

What we do today, because the self-service platform isn't ready, we combine a semi-automated

platform plus a services model.

So you get engineers, plus you get the platform.

So our average order value at this point is about 10K a month.

Multiply that by about 10, 15 customers, we're at a million dollar plus run rate.

Which basically means you're doing it by hand from now, and then you're raising money so

you can automate it all.

Correct.

It's semi-automated already.

It would take a consultant about three or four months just to give you that platform.

They would go build it, and they would start from scratch.

We do it in less than one day today, semi-automated.

And where are these customers coming from?

So let's dig into this one million of ARR.

So you said you got 10K per customer, roughly 10, 15K, and roughly 10 customers that are

paying you monthly right now.

So you got 100K a month, roughly in revenue.

Where do these customers come from?

Is this inbound, outbound?

Do you have a growth strategy?

Do you have a strategy that would just lead you to the next three million also?

Sure.

At the moment, we've done zero marketing.

We've really been focused on the platform.

We have been producing content on My LinkedIn, on YouTube, mainly getting customers by word

of mouth and by that.

So really, the last eight months were really on using this as a proof of concept.

This is not just a technology problem.

You have to convince all of the vendors in the space to give you API access to provision

them, integrate with them, build for them.

So it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem where you need customers, and at the

same time, you need to show these vendors that they actually is traction, and we become

an added sales channel for them.

Okay.

What else, Sean?

I guess I'll just give you a little bit of feedback on the pitch itself.

So a couple of things.

Your house or wherever you at, super nice.

Almost distractingly nice.

I kind of like my founders to be a little more scrappy than that.

Just going to put that out there.

Where are you?

I'm in Bali.

Oh, he's in Bali, man.

It's probably not the most expensive place.

Yeah.

Fair enough.

I think you tried to get the most information into the pitch, whereas I think you kind of

want to slow down, and you need to just work on that first 30 seconds to figure out the

thing that I was confused about, Sam was confused about.

Most of the chat, if you look on Stonks, was confused about, which was, I don't really

know what this does.

When you say end to end, that makes sense to you because you're knee deep in it.

But for us, we've never heard of 5X before.

So we're like end to end what?

Yeah.

So all of the words were quite generic, so like vendors, blah, blah, blah, and so what

you want to do is basically just be able to paint a picture.

So did you ever work at a company that had this problem, or if you've ever been the marketing

manager at a company, you know that you spend almost six months getting your analytics platform

and then integrating it, and then you have to get your CRM and then integrate it.

Then you have to do this and then integrate it.

And so it takes months just to get set up with the things you need to be able to see

your business.

And every business has the same problem.

So what we do is we go to that person and we say, hey, use us and you get XYZ, right?

Benefits out of this.

And people are choosing it because of this.

We got a million dollars in ARR already as a, you know, during our pilot just, you know,

in a couple of weeks or whatever it is.

Now I'm kind of more engaged.

What awesome, here, and look, this is actually quite easy.

What year did you join WeWork?

Even in the chat said, this guy made a bunch of money off the WeWork IPO.

And then I just went to your website and it said you worked at WeWork.

So I don't know what the truth is.

I joined in, I think, or 2017, I did not make money off the IPO.

That's okay.

That's irrelevant.

I mean, that would have been sick if you were.

It looks like you did it because you're in that nice house.

But I guess what I was trying to get at is I would do exactly what Sean said, but I would

use the WeWork story.

So we were at, when I worked at WeWork, because you were the head of data, it looked like

at WeWork or something like, like something like pretty, that you led data for WeWork,

your bios.

So that sounds impressive.

It doesn't matter if it is, but it sounds like it.

And so I would use the story of like, I led data at WeWork when we were this size and

I grew the company to this size.

And a problem that we consistently had was blank, blank, blank.

And we solved it by hiring tons of people and it was still like riddled with airs.

And talking to other people in this data world, I noticed they all had the same problem.

And so to bootstrap this company and get it up the ground, I hired a couple of friends

and we actually have been doing this by hand and we convinced X, Y, and Z to give us some

money and slowly or quickly we've actually automated a lot of it.

And we've automated by doing X, Y, and Z.

So now all these companies who want to get this thing done, they can actually use us

and instead of hiring 30 people, they just use, have one person use this bit of software

and it saves them X amount of money and X amount of time.

You know what I mean?

Like, by the way, I'm just totally riffing.

I don't know any of this is true.

No, that was great.

But you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Totally.

But now if we should just get to the product, I think it sounds neat and it looks like my

good friend Ankur invested and he's actually quite impressive as he knows his shit.

I think it's a cool company.

Yeah.

I would definitely, just based off your traction alone, I would want to learn more because

I'm like, okay, you know, a good pitch is not necessarily a good business, but good

traction is usually a good business.

And so you actually have good traction at a bad pitch.

That's okay.

So I would want to learn more and dig in to understand how much of this is a service

and consulting business versus is this going to be software and this is going to be automated

because it sounds like you've actually found a problem that people care about.

We'll see how durable that is and then we can go from there.

So thanks for coming on, man.

I think for both of us, it seems like the answer is we'd actually want to learn a little

bit more and look at the deck before we go too far.

Amazing.

Thank you.

You're awesome.

Thanks for being brave in doing this.

So Sean, on the Stonks platform, it says he's got $75,000 of interest.

I do agree this potentially is more of a services play, but we actually just talked about that

company worldwide technology and that sounds just like it, doesn't it?

Yeah.

There's several companies that are like this.

There's a lot of SaaS companies that have either a consulting thing that's how they

get it embedded or it's just an ongoing revenue stream and it actually can get quite substantial.

So I don't think that's a complete...

No, I didn't mean that as a diss.

I kind of said it as like, is this just a consulting company?

Because if it was just a consulting company, I would not do it, but yeah, I was just so

confused for half the time.

I didn't really get to think about the business, to be honest.

I was trying to figure out what the heck it does.

Yeah.

That was a little bit of an error.

Hopefully, he'll fix that.

But this type of business, I think it'd be sick to own.

I don't know if you...

I don't know why you'd want to raise money if you got a million dollars and just selling.

By the way, the simple test here is just say the first 30 to 60 seconds of your pitch to

somebody and then be like to a friend and just be like, hey, can you play that back

to me?

So based on what I said, what does my company do?

What you want to know is, do they get it?

First of all, you have to get it and then are you interested in it?

Does this sound compelling?

And if you don't get it, it's not compelling.

Don't move forward.

Don't go to the rest of the pitch and you need a friend or you need random people who

are going to do that.

That you use was good because you added the team and credibility.

It's like, well, when I was leading data for WeWork, all the shenanigans were going on.

But in my little corner of the world, we actually had this big problem that we had to deal with.

And that's where I realized that every company has this issue, that blank and blank blank.

And it's like, oh, yeah, that's a good format generically for a pitch.

Yeah, I agree.

All right.

John Hancock, do you want to send us the next one?

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All right, Kenny, you got it.

Hey, guys, thanks for having me on the show.

So I am Kenny.

I'm one of the co-founders of Backer Eye.

And we've built the world's first online marketplace for group airfare.

And the problem that we set out to solve is that group airfare, flights of 10 or more

people traveling together, it's sold offline.

So what does this mean?

Say that you are organizing an eighth grade school trip and you're flying 50 people from

San Francisco to Orlando.

If you want to shop for quotes, you actually have to call the airlines group desk over

the phone.

And once you get something that you like, well, the offline nature of groups doesn't

end there.

So it is really important to note that group airfare is unlike booking a normal ticket.

So it actually takes place in five unique stages.

And that's from shopping to deposit to final payment, submitting names list.

And before Backer Eye, all of that happened over the phone.

So we thought in 2022, this is insane that a world with so much money in it operates

totally offline.

So we created what's like a B2B Expedia-like marketplace for shopping for flights of 10

or more people.

In terms of traction, we did launch Backer Eye in October of 2021.

We have really strong growth, great unit economics, and we're actually profitable.

As a business model, we make between 10 and 15% margin on flights.

And from January to April, we've done $4.2 million worth of total sales.

We take about $1,700 in revenue per group and have 40 corporate customers that are using

the platform today.

And one of the most exciting things that happen as a result of the pandemic is we got a ton

of inbound from corporate meeting and team offsites that are looking to book group airfare.

It's our fastest growing customer segment.

And it's caused us to build out a bunch of tools to meet the needs of meeting planners.

And you're probably asking, why is this the team to bring group airfare from analog to

digital?

Well, we have really deep domain expertise in group travel.

Our CEO, Eric, previously sold a tour operator business where he kind of learned the ropes

of the business.

And then our team internally from the service side to the tech side, we have a lot of deep

expertise in travel tech.

And we think that we have a shot to be both the storefront and the underlying operating

system for group airfare.

So we'd love to answer any questions that you have about our business.

Are we live?

Can you hear us?

Dude, the top comment is actually pretty funny, which is says, fly together and groupflights.com

is available.

Go by the domain.

Go by the domain.

Get on that one.

You got the Stonks chat, Adam's Value here.

They're the real value on investor.

I love this.

Also, I like how you just looked out the street and was like, ma, go by the domain.

Ma the meatloaf.

Yeah, because Baccarat, I thought you were like a Chinese gambling website when you first

came on.

I thought this was Baccarat.

Well, based on your last podcast, that wouldn't be a bad idea, too.

That's crazy.

Fair enough.

Let me ask a clarifying question on the pitch.

You said that you get 10% to 15%.

And I think your chart said, did your chart say 100,000 a month in bookings?

Or did it?

Well, I forget.

Well, you said 4 million.

Can you pull up the traction slide again?

Yeah, it was like 4 million between January and April.

Does that mean that between January and April, you did 4 million?

That's GMB, correct?

We did, yeah, exactly.

So we've sold 4.2 million dollars worth of group airfare, and we're averaging about

$150,000 a month in revenue.

And that's the revenue that like, it's real revenue.

And how old's the business?

So we started in 2018, we survived the pandemic just barely.

And then probably like half of our clients kind of didn't make the pandemic.

So it's kind of like a fresh restart for us.

Prior to us launching flight shopping, we were just a trip management platform for tour

operators.

So like if someone did like a lot of student travel, sending people to like DC and Orlando,

they would use our trip management platform just the way to stay organized and make sure

that they don't miss deposits and final balances.

And then we had a lot of time to ourselves during the pandemic.

So we made flight shopping because it was our number one request.

People don't want to call the airlines for quotes.

And then how many people work there?

We have 11 now.

Cool.

Got it.

Okay.

Okay.

So maybe in each of these same women we do like, first I kind of like clarifying questions

slash like reaction to the business and then maybe some pitch feedback at the end of like

how to get that better.

But like, okay, so reactions to the business and clarifying questions.

So you are trying to do group travel for corporate and you said something at the beginning which

was like, it's insane that there isn't really a good solution for something with this much

money in it.

I didn't catch.

Did you say how much is spent booking group travel every year?

Yeah.

So I didn't.

It's about $130 billion worth of just total group spend.

And that equates to about 5% of an airlines revenue.

So floating around about 225 million passengers fly as part of a group pre pandemic.

Okay.

Cool.

So that kind of airline revenue is done via these groups and that's all kind of the over

the phone or some like some other old school method at the current currently.

Exactly.

Yep.

Okay.

Cool.

And then what's the why now?

Because people have been doing like travel startups forever like, you know, booking.com

price sign.

These were, I think booking.com price sign came out like in 1995 or something crazy like

that.

Yeah.

And so why has nobody tackled this part of it?

Because I've seen travel startups in every angle up, but what, is there anything that's

unlocked now or you're just, you finally had the great idea?

What's going on here?

No.

So not finally have the great idea.

We do have some people that are competitors that sell a SaaS solution to airlines that

allow airlines to make like a white label version of what we do.

The why now is before the pandemic, Lufthansa, American Airlines, United is rumored to be

working on it.

They want to go digital for their groups and they've actually instituted a private white

label.

And so we see it happening in the same way that like single tickets came online.

We think groups will come online.

So the airlines are already starting to do the underlying tech and we think that's amazing.

And we want to be basically that second shelf that they sell their group airfare in.

How are you getting the customers now because isn't travel like the hardest, like when I

think of like hardcore customer acquisition people, I think of like online gambling.

I think of gaming and then like travel.

Yeah.

Like that seems like the most cut one of the most cutthroat industries to get customers

because I think the guys who started Reddit started Hitmonk and it didn't work out because

they just couldn't get, it wasn't nearly as big as Reddit.

How are you getting those customers?

Yeah.

So currently right now about 99% of our business is B2B.

So we get customers really in two core ways.

One, we have a referral program.

So we are a preferred partner for like meeting planners and tour operators in the student

travel space.

And if you refer us business, we give you like $5 per ticket book.

That has been enough to send us so much business that we have to like hire and raise money.

Then the second way is kind of old school like industry events are still really popular.

Just meeting with meeting planners and tour operators and then something that we'll try

to get better with in time is like SEO.

There's not a lot of competition for like the keywords group airfare.

Before the pandemic, we got it down to like 72 cents a click.

But admittedly, since we just survived and we didn't have the capital to run a bunch

of marketing experiments, we're not doing any paid at the moment.

And then until now, you got a bunch of savages in the chat that are all going to start beating

you up.

I know.

They already bought the domain fly together before you could get it.

So explain what are the terms of the raise?

So you're raising how much at what valuation?

Yeah.

So we would like to raise $1.5 million at a $15 million cap.

Great.

And so for somebody listening to the podcast, there's people who listen to the podcast that

don't, they're not part of like the angel investing scene.

How does it come, are you just $15 million?

Wait, but you said you're doing 150,000 a month in revenue.

So is it some revenue multiple?

Just explain, where's this 15 million magic number come from for you?

Yeah.

So we have our customers book pretty far out.

So like our average customer books, nine months out.

So through the end of the year, we should make about $1.5, $1.6 million in revenue.

And so we just took that top line number and times it by 10 to kind of be safe.

No, there's been crazy stuff happening, but we want to be set up for success and fair.

So we just times it by 10.

And then what is the like, what's actually happening under the hood?

So you didn't show like a demo or search engine or how somebody actually does this.

Is there, are there APIs?

Are you just like calling the airline yourself under the hood?

Like what's, what's actually happening?

Yeah.

So under the hood, we are connected to with two, are you familiar with like travel technology?

No.

Okay.

So really high level.

I know that where our time is running out.

So we're connected to two GDS is called Saber and Amadeus.

That's how we get the flight content.

And then we had to build some stuff on top to make sure that groups work because there's

limitations of the legacy system, but I think our time is up and that could be a whole podcast.

Let me ask one, let me ask one more question.

This is something that I love asking everyone that I invest in, which is like five, 10,

15 years down the line.

How does this, how big, how much revenue are you going to be making?

And how am I going to get my money back?

Yeah.

I think that we can be both the store, the, the storefront and the underlying pipes for

groups.

So, uh, if you were thinking about getting like a ride, you would open the Uber app.

If you were thinking about booking flights of 10 or more, I think that you come to backright.com.

But how do I, so how big do you think the business will get and what's going to happen?

Someone's going to buy you for a billion dollars, someone's going to buy you for a hundred million

dollars.

You're going to go public.

What do you think will happen?

Yeah.

There's a, there's a really, a really clear path for us that we get to like 50 million

dollars in revenue in the next like five to six years.

And beyond that, I'm not totally sure, but I, the path to 50 is pretty clear.

That's a good answer.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's a great answer.

Uh, in general, fantastic pitch actually.

The thing I was saying before, gotta be clear, gotta be compelling in the first minute.

You were extremely clear, extremely compelling.

I think it's pretty, pretty clear you know your stuff, uh, as you were asked questions

about it, you had good, honest answers.

You didn't oversell, but you, um, you got to the point on, on, on each one of those questions.

So I think it really strong, really strong pitch, uh, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah.

I would, I would, I'd love to learn more.

Awesome.

That was a good one.

Yeah, it was very, it was very, very, very, very clear.

One thing that wasn't clear, which is like, uh, how big is this pro, I mean, I don't know

anything about group flights.

And it turns out, so he said it's like, it, it's a hundred billion dollars worth of tickets

booked a year as group flight.

Is that what he said?

130 billion of group spend, which is 5% of all airline revenues.

What he said.

Yeah.

He buried the lead on that one a little bit.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So like, you know, that question we asked, that's got to go to the front of his presentation,

which is like, um, you know, booking group travel sucks.

And by the way, this sounds like it might just be this fringe thing, but there's over

130 billion a year going through, uh, group, group travel.

And today that's all done still on the phone, which is crazy.

Cause most of all other ticketing, 90 other, 80% of the other ticketing is just done online

now.

That's going to happen for group travel and we're going to make it happen.

Right.

I would have been like, uh, all right.

So group travel is defined as 10 or more tickets.

Guess how much revenue is booked per year doing that?

Yeah.

Guess how much revenue is it?

Is a nice one.

A, confidence.

B, makes the other person insecure.

C, they're almost always going to guess wrong when you have a really high number.

Uh, cause they just don't have the right frame and you say 128 billion, that's 5% of all tickets

are booked that way.

And guess how they book it.

They have to call the airline and book it all like manually.

It's a pain in the butt.

Like that's how I would have done it, but he did, he did really good.

And I would put a screenshot of the, uh, website like this is a, you know, if I go to like

whatever, Delta or I go to Expedia, like, look, all the, there's a million buttons on

the screen.

There's not one.

If you want to find the group button, go to help, go to phone up.

This is where you go for that.

This is where 130 billion flows through.

Right.

Like I really emphasize that problem.

And then I'd show my screen, which is like a Google search engine that's like, here's

how it works on fly together.

You just go here.

You just say how many people where you're going and then we take care of the rest.

We do a bunch of crazy stuff under the hood to make that automated.

Um, and it's working.

We have, you know, we've done 4 million and booking so far that translated into $150,000

a month of revenue for us.

So we're on a X million, a $2 million run rate.

And by the end of the year, blah, blah, blah.

Dude, I agree with everything.

One thing that, what it bothers, there's two things that when startups, when I'm talking

to them, that bothers me.

One is when they use ARR and it's not actually annually recurring revenue.

And they're like, well, it means, um, at annual run rate.

I'm like, dog, come on.

You know, like none of us like use that word that way.

And the second thing is when they say revenue, but it's GMV, which stands for gross merchandise

volume.

So it's like, if you're eBay, you sell technically like, let's say a hundred billion worth of

stuff, but eBay only captures 5% of that, you know, I'm making that up.

But like I, I need, it's so confusing me when they say that I wrote this note during the

thing, right?

Like I have this little whiteboard here I'm writing on, I wrote revenue presented weirdly

because he wrote 4.2 million in sales, but it was like, that's an aggregate over five

months.

Then he wrote like, uh, we take 1.7 per customer.

It's like, dude, just say how much revenue you have, like make that the first one.

We do this much per month or per year.

That's our current run rate.

And that's, that's not GMV.

That's what we take home in terms of GMV.

We've done this much, right?

Like that would be a big improvement over, uh, over the traction side, but very, very

cool company though.

You want to do another one?

Mr. Hancock.

Oh yeah.

Hello.

What's up?

All good.

And thanks for doing that.

It's actually pretty fascinating.

So my name is Oren.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Munch.

And I'm accompanied by Peter and my co-founder in CTO.

We both have some, I have too many years of experience in business and tech leadership

roles.

And we've been building Munch for the past few months, getting out of a validation phase

and into our MVP and initial traction.

So what is Munch?

Think about your favorite YouTuber, apart from yourselves.

Let's say this person has one million subscribers on YouTube.

Now what if I tell you that chances are that this person has almost all of other content

professionals has only one to two successful distribution platforms?

I mean, this is mostly the case in almost all cases.

This is because it takes a lot of time, money, professional know-how to succeed on each and

every social platform.

It's actually pretty different to be successful on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube.

There are totally different platforms and different audiences.

Due to that, most of them don't even try to put it in that effort and kind of give up,

even though it can grow their revenue streams and their monetization potential in quite

reasonable numbers.

So we are a team of bidders, dreamers and content creators on a mission to build the

first platform that we serve as a home for content professionals.

There are no other platforms currently serving as a home, as a place that content professional

can do everything from creating their new content based on data-driven processes, repurposing

the content for different types of platforms, doing research on what's the next content

they want to create and actually distributed on all platforms and monetize.

The current creation market is currently estimated at around $65 billion with an annual growth

rate of 15%.

This means that it will get to $114 billion by 2026 and combined with the creator economy,

we're talking about $200 billion market, rather big market.

And we are currently raising $500,000 on top of the $900,000 that we already raised.

We have $250,000 already committed and we're looking for $250,000 more.

The idea is to take this money and use it to boost our dev team and create the first

version of the product by this November, increase attraction and start testing different pricing

levels with their initial paying customers.

So we're looking so for some new partners that can actually teach us a bit more about

the media business.

Okay.

First of all, let me say, the people who are not English speaking and pitch, fucking awesome.

I cannot imagine how hard that.

It's not easy.

It's not easy.

I could tell it wasn't easy.

You did pretty good, but golly, that seems like a rough thing to have to learn how to

do.

Congratulations.

I think that's cool.

We can barely speak when it's our native language.

So, you know, respect for that.

Okay.

Now I could be mean.

That was a horrible pitch though.

I respect the attempt, but the actual structure of the pitch was just not great.

And like, you know, in the chat here on Stonks, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being that was

super clear and compelling, one being I was cloudy and not compelling, give it a score

one to 10.

I'm curious what it was for you guys.

One being low, not clear compelling, 10 being very, very clear, compelling type it in the

chat.

Like they're on like a 15 second delay, by the way, so it's going to start coming in.

So I'm seeing an eight and then two, two, three, two, one, three, one, two, one, two,

one, one, one, one.

Okay.

So your job, Oren, is to get that two into an eight, right?

Because like right now I can barely even give you kind of feedback on the business itself.

Like I went to your website, I went to getmunch.com and it looks like basically what you're doing

is a creator spends a ton of time, let's say making a video or a long form post.

They're kind of drained by the end of that.

And so they posted on the one platform they posted on YouTube, you take that content,

you turn it into clips, you put it on TikTok, you take that content, you turn it into tweets,

you basically repurpose the content, you chop it up and repurpose it so they can get more

juice out of the content they made.

Is that right?

This is the penetration product.

This is what we currently do.

We currently have online.

We can actually, if you want to see an example, I allowed myself to take one of your episodes.

Do you like to see that?

Can you see that?

Yes.

Okay.

So let's take, for example, this episode.

Okay.

It was from April 6th.

I kind of played around with it.

And what you have here is our system in choosing between three to five the most engaging parts

of the original video.

What do you mean by engaging?

We do analysis both on scenes and visuals and any different types of audio effects as

well as analyze using AI, the actual spoken words in the video in order to understand

what would be the best clips that can fit into let's say a one minute TikTok or a three

minute TikTok or a one minute Instagram reel.

So the idea is that you, as a creator, can get your original video chopped up into, like

you said, into a few clips and then turn from landscape to portrait.

So we can publish it directly to the other platform.

So this is, I am human optimization.

Sean, have you ever heard of Jelly Smack?

I'm shocked, Orin.

You didn't talk about them.

You've heard of Jelly Smack, right?

I was waiting for you to raise the name.

Yeah.

We heard about Jelly Smack.

We love Jelly Smack, we love what they're doing, and we love the fact that they're doing all

the market education for us talking to content creators about content repurposing and the

fact that you can be successful equally on all platforms.

But Jelly Smack, and again, we really admire what they're doing.

Oh, come on, Orin.

We really admire what they're doing, but they've been around for six and a half years

and they have 500 customers and 2,000 employees.

Consumer labor is not really high-tech, new kind of what we're looking for.

Using the NLP and computer vision, we can do what Jelly Smack does fully automatic on

a self-service basis and fully scalable.

This is a whole new level of content management.

And just to be clear, we're starting with content repurposing, the idea is that we distribute

the content for the content creator on their behalf on all platforms so we can take back

the analytics that we get from the platforms and then create kind of a cockpit in which

the content creator sees everything that is going on and can understand what exactly

they need to focus on, where is their niche, what is the topic they need to talk more about,

and kind of progress along the lines that every content piece can become 30 to 50 different

types of content pieces that create more data that you can then analyze and then create

the whole feedback loop, so yeah, this is the idea.

I have a question, quick, but what's stopping this?

To me, maybe there's a world where this kind of becomes like the buffer, buffer.com started

just by, like you would schedule tweets to go out and then everyone kind of offered

that same thing and that feature became somewhat of a commodity.

Is there a world where this thing that you've built becomes a commodity and you actually

have to offer more stuff, like for example, I don't actually know if this is true because

I don't entirely know how they work, but it seems like Jelly Smack, one of the ways they

make money is they actually don't charge the creator, but they put ads on the creator's

videos and they take a cut and so it's like the technology that they're offering is just

like a feature and the real value is that they are giving the creators more revenue

by giving them an ad split and it's always a big money maker, yeah.

Yeah, so is there a world where this technology really just becomes a commodity and you've

got to offer other stuff in order to keep people on?

Yeah, so the idea is actually like dropshippers have Shopify and marketers have HubSpot, content

creators will have Munch and the idea behind that is that currently there's no platform

like that, there's a lot of vacuum in this space and currently this vacuum is being filled

by hundreds of thousands of freelancers on Fiverr, AppRock and little to medium agencies.

So this is something that people already consume, but either they're paying premium money for

their services or they're giving up like between and these are real numbers, 30 to 50 percent

of the revenue that has been generated by the agencies.

So yeah, the idea is that it's going to be the central platform for content creators,

the central copy that they can use and in terms of the business model, if this is what

you're asking, so we have like two options and we're currently, we're still pre-seed,

we're still playing around, experimenting with the business models, we can do both things,

we can charge a premium fee for the premium features and there's a lot of things that

we can charge for like, you know, taking your podcast and creating Twitter threads for the

next month and that we can do this in the right time or we can just use this inventory

that is being created via Munch and integrate brands into it and do brandies and get money

from brands and pay the creators.

So we're still not sure which business model will win when we experiment with both in the

next few months, but yeah, it's like, it looks like a huge potential.

So I would not be interested in investing in this business for a couple reasons, but

I would say like, you know, the main, the main two is like, I feel like it's going to

be based on how difficult it was to get us interested in the business.

I think you're going to, creators are super busy, a thousand opportunities coming at them

at all times and it seems like you're going to have to really punch through the noise

in order to be able to get there and I don't really have confidence you're going to be

able to do that.

That's kind of the first piece.

The second is like, anytime somebody's using AI, I'm like, oh, okay, you know, I got to

see it to believe it.

Now, what I will say is your pitch with the slides was putting me to sleep, but the pitch

where you showed my face, I'm like, oh, wait, this is me?

Great.

You know, so, so I would, I would definitely lead with the demo, and that's not just for

us because we create content.

A lot of people create content, a lot of investors do, but even if it wasn't us, hey, this is

a popular podcast, blah, blah, blah.

So here it is.

It's the one hour thing.

Not everybody's going to watch it.

Maybe they pay, you know, editors and social media people, thousands of dollars a month

to go find good clips, cut them out, post them on TikTok, post them on whatever, because

they know they're leaving so much growth on the table if they don't do it.

But with Munch, they'd either be able to do it themselves or they can hand this tool to

their person so they can make 10 times more clips, you know, and not have to hire as many

people.

And so then you're explaining, you know, like your demo was the most impressive part of

your thing where you're like, look, long video, push a button.

I got a properly formatted clip option and I have, you know, 10 of these that I could

choose from and we're trying to do this all automatically, right?

So, so I think that you can, you can make your thing more compelling if you kind of

like work on how you explain it versus like, it was all intellectual, it was all theory-based,

whereas you want it to be story-based, right?

So instead of saying, you know, content creators, you know, have complexity when it comes to

managing multiple platforms, that's intellectual, you want to make it a story, which is like,

here's these guys, they do this stuff, they record this three-hour thing, the last thing

they want to do is this or, hey, for your podcast, right now we have a $5,000 clip contest

running.

It's like, you're paying $5,000 just for somebody to cut clips of your, of your video into,

it is TikTok.

What if I told you that I had a tool that would do that automatically for you and your producer

could just go do this, you know, in 10 minutes after their thing, they don't have to re-watch

the video.

They don't have to do blank, blank, blank.

They don't have to resize it.

They don't have to export it.

We've done all of that for you.

And the best part is, you know, blank, and so I think you can make this a lot more compelling,

but as it is right now, I would not be interested in the business.

Well, thanks for the feedback.

For that reason, I'm out.

Do we do the Shark Tank thing?

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, thanks for the feedback and regarding customer acquisition, actually, this is exactly

what we're doing.

We're creating, creatively, the videos for them and then we send them via an email marketing

machine that currently has like a 4% to 5% conversion rate and the database of 800,000

content creators on YouTube.

And we're using influencer marketing because it turns out, after talking with more than

100 content creators, the way that they learn about new tools and new platforms is by watching

bigger influencers.

So we're using influencers in order to get to more customers.

It's kind of neat because we just got to 2,000 users in less than two months.

So yeah, it's kind of starting to grow.

Cool.

Sam, anything else on your side?

The same question that I asked the other folks, and I don't know why you guys aren't

doing it, but paint the picture of like, how's this going to make me wealthier?

You know, like, get down to like my primal, like my primal desire here of like, I'm giving

you money.

So how big is this going to get and how do you sell or go public and I get paid more

than what I gave you?

You know, like paint that picture for me.

Yeah.

So once we have 5,000 users, paying users, we're going to hit the $1 million ARR, it's

an actual ARR because it's a recurring revenue once you charge them on the monthly basis.

And there is a serious virality and symptom in the area of content creation.

It's kind of a PLG because once you create content with Munch, we have our logo and some

mentioned to Munch on the content.

The idea is that other creators are watching and getting into the game.

So it's going to be a very, very quick growth in terms of sizes, current market is $65 billion.

It's going to grow aggressively in the next few years.

So you know, Sky is the limit.

It's going to be a unicorn.

It's going to be a big company.

And this is what we're aiming for.

Good.

I appreciate you.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you.

See you.

We're in fight.

Sean, man, like what I was saying to him about the English thing, dude, it is, if you don't

speaking, if you have an accent, you're at such a logistic, like just in terms of logistics

and understanding everything, you're at such a disadvantage for these things.

It's a really, really hard thing to overcome.

And it's, I mean, it's cool that people overcome it, but holy moly, I would not want to be

in that position.

It's tough.

Right?

It is really hard.

And, and you know, I feel like that's why I think the, the deck and the story I think

need to be kind of like crafted well, so that that can be the kind of like universal language

that you're working with as you, as you go through this.

I like as an investor, and even just like when I'm ever trying to stress out anything,

I have to work extra hard to be like, okay, this person, well, like a lot of times we're

investing, sometimes we're investing just on charm, like, all right, this person is charming

enough that I feel as though they're, they can convince other customers to buy or, or

they can convince employees to join their company.

You know, that's like kind of like that Adam, we work guy thing.

And then there's other times where I'm like, okay, but like, what's the idea here?

And is the idea good?

And I have to kind of challenge myself to be like, to like look beyond where they currently

are because of maybe like a lack of just hard to understand, man, that makes a difference.

And I have to like overcome that a little bit.

Yeah.

And I would say some of my best investments have come from very charismatic CEOs and some

of my absolute worst investments have come from charismatic CEOs.

It cuts both ways on that side.

Totally.

Absolutely.

By the way, I can't get into stocks.

It's like dead for me.

So I don't know.

I had to refresh it as well.

And everyone in the chat is saying they had to refresh it too.

Yeah.

When I refresh, don't let me in.

But all right.

Either way.

That's okay.

I don't need that open.

We want to do another one.

I think one more or two more, one more.

There's Allison, Nickelpass.

All right.

Or Zaza.

Sorry.

I don't know who's presenting.

All right.

That's me.

Okay, guys.

How are you?

You guys can see my screen?

I think they can.

All right.

Okay.

What's going on?

Name is Zaza, CEO and co-founder of Nickelpass.

Before this, I was the head of international expansion at Huffington Post.

After that, I was groomed to be the CRO where I discovered we were not profitable.

We were the largest news site in the world outside of China.

And I didn't know, before it took the job, that we actually hadn't found a way to monetize

the 200 million people coming to our website globally.

I'm Allison Pao, CEO and co-founder.

Part of this, I was actually a banker for about 10 years.

And our way of sharing news and information on the team was to have my EA printout article,

leave it on the center conference table and say, please read.

And that's certainly not a way of sharing news and information that scales when you're

working on remote teams, distributed teams, and asynchronous teams.

So Nickelpass really solves for all of that.

And awesome.

I'll just jump in.

One of the things that we've come up with is what we call cocktail party pitch.

When we're at a party, people are like, what does Nickelpass do?

And what we say is, you know how you get an article from a friend shared with you and

you get that pop-up that says, pay for the full site?

Well, we invented a product where you never see that again.

And the way our business works is we sell it to enterprises, which allows them to get

up to 70% off of retail, and we customize the pass based on what each department and

team and user needs to be successful.

So here's the Nickelpass.

I'm in front of a business insider paywall.

I click a button.

Oops.

I don't think.

There we go.

Okay.

There we go.

Through the paywall.

So I hit a paywall.

I go to my Nickelpass, which is a Chrome extension, click on business insider, and that's it.

I never see a paywall again.

So it looks like we're having a little bit of who's sharing what, but you guys saw the

product, a couple of things about the business.

So because of our background, the chairman of the company is the former head of strategy

at CNN.

We've been able to collect a network of over 200 publications, including the LA Times,

CrunchBasePro, Time Magazine, and we always like to point out that beer business daily

is on here for a reason.

If I'm an enterprise, we work with Anheuser-Busch.

They don't need just the New York Times.

They also need beer business daily, which tells them about how the craft beer market

is doing in the Pacific Northwest.

In terms of the business, we've booked over a million in revenue.

So that's a million of hard revenue, 1.2 of bookings.

Some of the companies we work with include Anheuser-Busch has mentioned, Visa, and also

Publisus and Havas, which are respectively the number one and number two marketing and

PR agencies in the world.

In terms of why people come to us, if you wanted to get these subscriptions yourself,

be our guest.

It costs you over $1,000 a year just for five different sites.

Obviously, that's not going to scale if you're an enterprise.

And some of the other problems in the space and the reason we've been able to get some

attraction meeting months, number two, there is no tech-enabled way to buy group subscriptions.

So if you wanted 10 licenses from the New York Times today, you're essentially filling

out a form.

And then number three, now three out of every four new sites require a subscription or have

a paywall.

When we started the business, now a little over three years ago, that number was at 30%.

So about one in three sites.

So we'll stop there.

This is awesome.

This is awesome.

Awesome.

So we can just recap because I think some people are having trouble in the stocks platforms.

They might have missed the beginning of the pitch.

But basically what you did is I work at a company.

I go try to click some article to read some important news story that somebody co-worker

sent me.

I get hit with a paywall.

Hey, man, what did it say?

I don't have a business insider subscription.

And our company, which is, let's pretend we work at Google, oh, Google uses Nickel Pass

so I can just use the Chrome extension and bypass the paywall because Google has paid

for a multi-seat license to business insider.

So business insider is getting this huge bulk subscription by, they'll give it at a discount.

Google wants its employees to be able to read news and employees don't have to pay for

it out of pocket.

That's what happens.

That's exactly it.

And I'll add some other things.

Publishers right now convert less than 1% of the people that come to their website to

pay for the full subscription.

So it's a win-win for everyone where they're basically getting all of these people that

they would be monetizing at cents on the dollar per year from advertising.

But do you, if Google buys 20 seats, do they only get business insider or do they also

get all the other publications you had listed there?

And if the second one, how do you figure out which publisher gets paid what money?

Right.

Yeah.

So we have over 200 publishers in our network.

We add more every day.

We create bespoke packages.

So we have an initial package that you pick six out of 10 publications, it includes business

insider and many others, and that's $23.95 a user a month for that package.

After that, we'll upsell from there and we work with customers to design custom packages

based on the industry you're in and the role you're in in your industry.

So if you work at a big bank and you're in marketing and PR, you're going to need a very

different set of publications than someone who's at the comms team at Google.

But we'll be able to work with you to customize that.

And a lot of that you're now able to do on your own on our administrative panel.

But then how does, let's just use round numbers, let's say it's $30 a month, and you have two

publications, does business insider get $10, New York Times get $10, and you guys get $10?

So what we do is we work with the publishers to either take rate cards they have or create

ones from scratch.

And so that way in the custom package, the publisher is always made whole.

So in your example, it all depends on the number of seats that Google signs up with.

So if they sign up with 10 people or 1,000 people, the price may go from $10 a month,

which is a 20% discount off of retail to $2 a month, which is much more off of retail.

And then we bundle that and then charge an administrative fee on top of that.

And that's the bespoke package.

What's the fee percent?

So right now, gross margins anywhere from 44% to 55%, and that's a combination of not

only the seat fee, but we integrate with Okta, Microsoft Active Directory.

So it's really single sign-on for new publications, and we basically handle all of them for both

the enterprise and the publisher.

That's amazing.

So let's talk about the traction.

Okay, so you showed a bunch of publications that you guys have gotten to agree with this.

How many companies are paying for this?

I don't know if I missed that part or it wasn't in there.

Yeah.

Yep.

So we have over 125 companies who we currently work with, and we're adding more every day,

both smaller companies as well as large enterprises.

And what does that mean for revenue for you guys?

Yep.

So we're at $1.2 million ARR, and we're on track to be $3 million by the end of the year.

We're raising at a $15 million valuation, and that's $3 million as in net revenue.

And you get, or is that $3 million as in you, there's $3 million for the bundle, and you

take 45% or 50% of it.

Correct.

That's right.

Yep.

The second one.

Correct.

So more like $1.5 million, is that in real, in net revenue, is that right?

In net revenue, yes, $1.5.

And okay, great.

And how do you onboard customers?

So what do you do to go get the next 25, 50 customers?

What happens?

Well, I think one of the things that we're really excited about is the 120 companies

we have, they have over 400,000 employees.

So what we've found is that it's much easier to upsell within an organization once you

land them.

So what we're seeing is that our gross trajectory, if we go from the 1% to the 3%, that's how

you get to the 3.

And that's why I'm only focusing on two segments right now, marketing and PR and the consumer

finance.

That doesn't count telco, doesn't count some of the tech companies you mentioned, it doesn't

count international, which is actually my background for the post.

Gotcha.

So you're just going to expand within the companies you're already in to get to 3 million

gross.

Okay, but how do you get more customers from here?

What is the strategy?

Is it outbound?

Is it inbound?

Is it some real program?

What do you do?

Yep.

So we primarily have a cold outbound marketing strategy.

So we do a lot of lead gen and then we do some organic social, organic social.

And now this is a cost to companies at a time when a lot of companies are cutting costs,

right?

So today, they're just not paying for this and employees are just not getting the benefit

or they're paying employees pay out of pocket.

If I do this and I have 1% of my employees doing this, all of a sudden I've added a,

I don't know what your average volume is, but let's say 10 grand a year, what is the

average cost to a company?

So that's grown when we first started.

It was roughly the 7 to 10 grand a year.

Now what we're seeing is 50K and that having opportunity to grow.

And here's the thing, people see it from two lenses.

So there's the cost savings and they look at our cost and they're like, well, it's better

than everyone buying it at retail and then expensing it back to the company.

So that's one thing.

And the second thing is in a time like this, if you miss a critical piece of news in your

industry, the opportunity cost for that is much higher.

And so you're going to feel some type of way for not paying the 50 bucks per person per

seat because you're like, oh, I was trying to like basically refine the cost.

We like to say what we're going after is the budget people used to use on soda machines

because this is one of those.

Oh, I think you lost out there.

But yes, this is an expense that people actually already have.

They just don't realize it.

Frequently, it's being put on personal cards and then expensed back to the company.

So the other thing that we're doing is actually giving finance and procurement a single line

on them.

So they really understand how much they're spending on news and information and data,

which for the 40 million professional services workers in the U.S. is extremely important

to know.

Okay.

Great.

I also feel like there's probably some strategy where you go to Anheuser-Busch and once they

have their one percent of people and you go to every other beer company out there and

you say, Anheuser-Busch does this so that their employees can read your journal daily

and this and that, would you guys be interested?

I think within industries, you could sort of play off each other a little bit.

Exactly.

And we've seen that social proof model work extremely well with marketing and PR firms

and with financial services firms.

Alison, how big is this going to get?

You know, what are you going to get to 100 million in recurring revenue?

What's going to happen?

Yeah, without a doubt.

So we see ourselves as really the next version of cable and how we access news, content and

information digitally is going to change drastically from how it works today.

And Nickel Pass is going to be the single stop solution for that.

What, how many employees?

Let me ask that same question a little bit differently because Sam likes to hear kind

of how big is the dream.

I like to hear a little bit differently, which is, what would I need to believe for this

to be at 100 million in revenue?

Meaning how many companies, how do you work your way to 100 million in revenue?

Yeah.

So our goal has always been to get everyone access to quality news and information.

And by everyone, we don't just mean professional services workers.

We also mean individuals.

And there's a certain price point that individuals can pay for access to quality news and information.

So we're exploring what that is.

But I think it's extremely important to note that over the past five years, we've understood

it.

And I think the general public.

Could you give me the math?

So like this many companies paying this much a month is 100 million in revenue.

And then I need to know, is that a believable number of companies?

That's like, you know, out of the total universe.

So how many companies would you need to be paying you for you to be at that point?

Yeah.

So we need to be at about 10,000 companies based on our initial math.

So 10,000 companies and you think that those will, you know, right now you're at whatever

25.

You think by the end of the year you can get to maybe 40 or 50, something like that.

Oh, no, no.

So we're at 150 right now.

Sorry.

You're at 150.

We're, you know, well beyond that initial group.

And what are you guys going to have to do to go from 150 to 10,000 companies?

What will actually need to happen?

Yeah.

So it's too pronged.

It's that we have to increase our penetration rate on the existing companies from 1% to 3%.

And that number is even achievable up to the 5 or 10% range.

And then we have to increase our penetration in the specific sectors from currently 0.01%

to closer to 1% in each sector.

So financial services, marketing, and PR, and then universities and associations as

well.

Gotcha.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks.

I think we might be up.

I had one more.

Have you raised any money so far and from who?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we've raised about 5 million so far that our last round was led by River Park Ventures.

So the seamless food ordering company co-founders because they took the same B2B model to get

to a B2C model.

And we have a number of other institutionals as well, 68 capital rain ventures.

Damn.

You raised 5 million at a $15 million valuation?

No.

Smaller valuation in the past.

So this new round is $15 million pre-money.

So you gave up a lot of the company.

Yeah.

How are you going to stay motivated?

You got a...

Yeah.

So I understood.

So we are reworking the cap table as we speak because basically we pivoted the company from

a blockchain micropayments.

And so that's total over the pivot.

That's a...

By the way, respect for pivoting away from blockchain.

That sort of shows me that you're a clear and independent thinker that didn't just like,

oh, here's the trend.

We are a Web3 company for micropayments.

You can get to Lightning and it's like, what do our customers actually want?

And in this case, you found out what they actually wanted, which was not that or something

else.

Yeah.

Customers hated it.

Publishers loved it, but it wasn't selling to anyone as a recurring revenue, right?

And we could have raised it a much higher valuation, but we chose to pivot.

I think your product is awesome.

It sounds like your cap table is shitty to be blunt.

I would love to hear a little bit more about how you...

I don't want to hear about it now, but how you're going to get out of that situation.

I think it's, hopefully it's fixable because this product sounds pretty sick.

We got to ask, people are asking, what does Nickel pass?

What is this name?

Why are you named after Nickel?

News used to cost to Nickel.

So that's why.

Okay.

All right.

Great.

And now it costs $23 per person per month.

$23 a month.

Yep.

Congratulations.

This is sick.

This is sick.

Thank you.

I think your pitch was awesome.

I said what I thought about the cap table.

The product's badass.

One little thing between you and your co-founder, you guys should figure out who's going to

answer questions and which types of questions.

So you automatically know when to defer because it's a little bit of a signal when you're

doing a pitch and like both are kind of like, me and Sam, because we talk over each other

a little bit.

It's okay to podcast or roam, but as a company, you kind of need to know, okay, technical

questions this person's going to answer, growth questions this person's going to answer.

Or this one person is going to answer everything.

And then they're going to say, you know, Alice, why don't you talk about that?

She knows it's better than anybody.

And so you'll be able to kind of defer a little bit better in that sense, but really good

job overall with the pitch.

That's my only kind of like pitch feedback for you.

Great.

Thank you guys.

Sick company.

God damn, man.

That cap table really fucks things up for her.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's okay though.

I think it's recoverable or, you know, like some people, like, you know, how are you going

to stay motivated?

They're motivated, you know, whether the number, whether they own 50% or 35%, they sort of

feel the same about it.

It's their baby.

And also they can be motivated by the regret of getting away so much of their company in

the first place.

That's crazy to me.

I am friends with this guy who sold his company for a billion dollars and he, 990 million.

And he walked away with $3 million because he had, it was five of them, either or four

of them.

And then they raised all this money and he walked away with $3 million on a billion dollar

value sale.

Isn't that crazy?

I can't.

I don't understand how you get motivated when you're not going to get paid.

Yeah.

Well, some people, some people motivated by the mission.

Some people don't do the math.

Some people are like, well, fuck, I'm stuck now.

I made that mistake and now I guess I got to live with that.

I guess I got to eat that one.

By the way, shout out to her.

We don't do public math, but we sure as hell make founders do public math when they pitch

us because you got to be able to answer that question.

In fact, I don't even care what the, like some people think that when I ask that question,

how do you get to a hundred million or how do you get to 10 million ARR?

I'm like judging whether, I'm judging whether that thing sounds feasible or not.

And that's part of it.

But the bigger part of it is, does this seem like the first time they've done this math

or have they done this before?

Because if they haven't done it before, I'm like, oh, this person is not actually thinking

of plotting how to like take over and like how to build this into something big.

They're just kind of like buried their head in product and like they may not have.

If they haven't thought of it up till now, they're probably not going to be thinking

about that in the future.

In this case, I thought that she, she had an answer.

I haven't done the math to go check if that answer was like, you know, bullshit or real.

But she had at least thought about, we need 10,000 companies at our current, you know,

pricing and scale to be at that, you know, that revenue mark.

Well, and I, and I think people like think it's a trick question towards like, how does

this get big or how are you going to exit?

And they'll say like this bullshit of like, well, we're not thinking about an exit.

It's like, dude, come on, just like this, like, talk real and like a good answer is

like, well, the worst case scenario is, I think we'll get the 5 million in this many

years and someone's going to buy us for $50 million and you'll get a two or three X return.

I think that's like a likely worst case scenario, best case scenario.

I actually think we have a clear path to 75 million and we're going to figure out as we

go.

And I think these possible doors might open up and then we could either go public, which

I would love to go public or we can sell for this much money or we just own the company

forever and we grow into this.

I think that answer works on you because you invest your own money for most venture capitalists

and investing in other people's money.

They don't care about the two to three X.

I know, but I'm saying the downside protection, it's like to them, it's either a zero or

a huge and so you're better off focusing most of the energy on the, how this ends up huge

and you might just say, you might say things like, so you don't have to say, oh man, I

can't wait to sell this for a billion dollars.

But I think you could say like, like we had a buddy Ramon who was telling us about this.

He's like, look, right now I have, you know, I don't know what it was like a hundred thousand,

you know, like pet owners who have bought from me and I know their name, their address,

their dog's name, their dog's breed, their dog's age, I know everything about them.

He goes, and he named like the big, you know, Chewy doesn't know any of that because they

sell on store shelves.

But I have the largest database of this.

I think that asset's going to be worth a lot of money to one of these companies and

I think that, you know, that's beyond just the sales that we're already doing.

And so you can kind of say your downside protection that we're building a valuable asset.

That's kind of what I mean.

I'm just saying that like just it's okay to show weakness and it's okay to show uncertainty,

but at the same time, you also want to have like a, yeah, but I think this could happen

and here's how.

What the flight booking guy said is also perfect, which is you don't have to say there's going

to be a billion dollar company and you're just going to autopilot like a, you know, venture

capital robot.

Like, you know, what he could say is basically, you know, he's like, you know, I don't know

what the, I don't know where the ceiling of this is because nobody's ever done this before,

but there's a clear path to 75 million and we're going to get there and we're going to

look up and figure out what's next.

And I think that's a totally honest, but also exciting version of that answer, which is

to say like, look, we don't know how high this thing can fly, but I know there's a clear

path to this.

I'm just laser focused 50 million an hour before I go to bed, I kiss my daughter good

night and I say 50 million in ARR.

And when I wake up and I'm brushing my teeth, I say 50 million ARR because I know that that's

what's in front of us.

And like, I can't sleep because it's so obvious that there's a step by step path to go get

there.

So you can say some bullshit like that and people get like, people start to believe that

you believe that that's your certainty that there's a clear path to that makes them certain

there's a clear path to it.

Badass.

Let's do the last one.

What's up, Colton?

Take it away.

Hey.

Hi.

I'm Colton Woodard, founder of Lil Ducky's Pool Company.

I'm a pool industry expert with a knack for sourcing companies that may not know they

want to sell and creating acquisition plan.

Started out with my own pool maintenance business from zero clients.

Now I make about 18,000 monthly recurring revenue all in under three years.

My father-in-law owns a large pool resurfacing company in Orlando, Florida, and found our

first private acquisition deal from a friend who was feeling like he was ready to retire.

Instead of just letting his business dissolve, we negotiated a purchase at about a multiple

of, you know, four months of the monthly gross revenue.

Currently we've secured two upcoming purchase contracts in the South Florida pool construction

sector with another in negotiation for quarter four.

We are projecting 10.3 million in gross for our 2023 sales with a yearly increase of

13% as we streamline the processes and add in modern tech.

We're working to build a portfolio of pool construction companies in South Florida and

gain a majority of the market share and then add in pool cleaning and maintenance on these

accounts for additional monthly recurring revenue.

Ideally, we'd like to secure locations in all of South Florida within the next five

years with four owner operators in place who know the industry, know the business, how

to utilize specific contractors.

We're looking to take over the industry and build an empire like real estate.

Now is the hottest time to invest in South Florida pool construction.

Six, so let me, is this basically like a PE play where you're buying baby boomers, businesses

who put pools into people's backyards?

In a simple, in a simple explanation, kind of, yeah, I mean, it's a little harder than

that because, you know, South Florida, you dig 54 inches, you hit water, so if you don't

know what you're doing, you could really muck it up, but yeah, so we know the industry,

we know the pool, we know pool construction, so we can find people that already retire

and instead of letting their business just go to the wind and the other guys pick it

all up.

We can utilize different contractors that specialize in, you know, form and steel excavation.

Take his company and he subcontracts out to the plumbing guys and the tile guys, the screen

enclosure guys, and he's spending so much money on paying subcontractors, whatever they

need to charge because he's got to hire him because he can't do it himself.

So we buy these individual companies that can complement each other, bring everything

in house, and we can get our permits done faster, reduce our wait times and increase

profits and turn over more projects year over year.

So that's why we're looking at 13% increase on our productivity.

So just multiple choice and answer, your company does what?

Do you, A, sell software, B, buy existing pool companies, C, invest in pool companies,

or D, other?

Which one of those four things do you do?

B, we buy pool companies, mergers and acquisitions, yeah.

You're rolling up pool companies and you're rolling them up and you are not buying them

for less or anything like that, you buy them at some fair value, but you are better operating

because you do what?

A, you have different expertise in house, B, you have better software, C, you have economies

of scale, what is the advantage you have?

A and B, so we know the business, we do it well, and we implement modern technology.

So 3D modeling designs for the pools, so we can email to customer, we don't got to go

to their house with a pen and paper and show them how it's done.

So we can just email it over and then also, since COVID hit, permitting has been horrible,

it slowed down a lot.

Now we can do digital permitting where we can be on video chat with the county that

we're working with, and they can be right on the phone, we can show them step by step

and get the phases approved without having to wait for time on their schedule for them

to come to the site.

So the result is you guys build pools for faster and cheaper, how much faster and how

much cheaper?

We build them faster, we don't build them cheaper, how much faster?

It depends on the county, each county is going to be a little bit different, but if you don't

have to wait on the subcontractors to get you on their schedule or not show up and reschedule

on you, it's going to be at least 20% faster.

10% faster, okay, great.

And up till now, you've bought how many pool companies?

So right now, we have our own, we own two, but we have two purchase contracts signed

in agreement, and we have one in negotiation that we're looking to get another round of

funding for.

And then explain when you buy a business like this, you know, it has this much in EBITDA,

typically it's been in business for 10 years or whatever, and you're buying it at some

multiple and you're financing it how?

Well, the first two, we sold our houses.

Okay.

What are you going to do for the next two?

We're looking to raise capital and then we're also going to make a plan using the signed

contracts, usually you're two years out, you know, two years booked out with these contracts

for the pool companies that we're buying.

So not only we're buying the company, we're buying the crew, we're having the owner stay

on for two years as a consultant while we put a project manager in place for him to

train, and then we're getting all of those contracts and they get paid in phases.

So we use some of the working capital to put aside into another fund to use to purchase

more businesses as we as we roll out all the locations we need between, like I said, form

and steal, excavation, shot, crete, tile, marsite, plaster guys, we're going to buy

all the specialty contractors and roll them all into one company.

So Sean and I is one of our best investments ever.

We, I think we both invested at the same time into a business, Sean is still there?

Yeah.

We both invest, we invested into this business that started by our friend, Sieva called Endure

Ventures and his whole premise was to buy businesses that baby boomers who want to retire

and their kids don't want to take it over, basically.

That's exactly what's going on.

And Sam Zell, Sam Zell is the guy who basically created the REIT.

He owned Schwinn bikes, he owned the Tribune, he owned a bunch of stuff.

Rich guy, he owned Waste Management, I think.

Anyway, he said recently in a podcast that he is making more money off of buying businesses

from baby boomers who don't want to pass their companies onto the kids than he has ever made

in real estate.

And so that's just for the proof that this is actually quite interesting.

And I think Sieva actually bought a pool business, didn't he, Sean?

Yeah, yeah.

Dolphin pools.

It's in Arizona.

Yeah.

And they're killing it.

I would argue that that's probably the path you should go and for these pitches, you should

entirely pitch it that way.

Another way that you could maybe pitch is the guy who started, I was going to bring

this up on the podcast, Sean, but the guy who started We Upwork, have you heard of Upwork?

It's like the outsourcing tech company.

He started this new company called, I actually don't know how he's, E-R-G-E-O-N.

And it's a fence contractor and installation and repair business.

And he just raised like $40 million for it and he bootstrapped it to like 400 employees.

Do you see this, Sean?

No.

I've never seen that.

That's crazy.

Dude, it just got relaunched, or it just got released like two days ago on TechCrunch.

He was like, they're like, we wanted to keep this in the DL, but basically we bootstrapped

this into a monster business and we just raised financing for it and had a huge valuation

because getting someone to build a fence is the pain in the ass.

Well, we just went and just like, so what they did is they used a little bit of technology

and they made the process easier and better.

What Sieva's doing is he's just saying, no one wants these businesses, we're going to

buy them for cheap and we're just going to install a manager and let it run.

So anyway, I think if I was you, I would go one of those two routes and I would go all

in on one of those two routes.

I imagine seeing that your website, I went to it, it looks like it's built on Wix.

Technology is not going to be where you're going to play.

It's going to be the PE route.

But the problem is, is you don't actually seem entirely bought in on that route.

So that's like my fairly critical feedback.

Do you think I hit the nail on the head there, Sean?

If I can interject, I think that, yeah, that's pretty accurate.

It's a little bit more difficult.

These guys, they are retiring, but they also, it's very difficult to get into this industry.

You have to have four years of experience and then go in front of a board, the DPBR, to

even get approved to have the license to do it.

So it's not like millennials or Gen Z can just, hey, I'm going to start a pool construction

company today.

We're going to have to go work for somebody for four years to get that experience to even

do it.

So it's, it's really not super turnkey.

So there's not a lot of competition for the PE to go out and scoop them up.

You know, we're, we're poised and ready to strike.

Okay.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

I would say, I'm just going to give you some pitch feedback because I think your pitch

was confusing and therefore hard to raise money, which is what we're here to do, right?

So number one, like you had a slide up there that had a bunch of texts, but then you talked

a bunch and you weren't talking exactly, you weren't just saying the points on the slide.

You were telling a story, which was good.

It's good to tell a story, but if you're going to tell a story, just put like a picture

on the screen.

So it's like, you know, this is, you know, this is my pool company.

We've been doing this.

This business spits off this much cash and we're, you know, we're not alone.

There's 400 of these just in the Florida area where, you know, where I'm from and I've bought

two more of these and these are great businesses to buy.

In fact, I sold my house to buy these because they're such a better investment than my home.

And you know, this first one we bought, we bought it for this much.

It's already paid itself off in two years and blah, blah, blah.

The second one, blah, blah, same thing.

And for each one of these, we have a playbook of how to buy it, grow it and like improve

it from where it was.

We improve each of these businesses by over 25% within the first year.

Okay.

Great.

So we're going to keep doing this.

We have a plan that is working, you know, but I don't have any more houses to sell.

It's time for me to go raise some money.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to raise $5 million.

I'm going to go buy $20 million worth of pool companies and we're going to start rolling

these up.

You've probably seen these rollups get pretty big.

This rollup in the dental space got this big, this rollup in the pool space got this big

in a different state.

You know, Sam Zell, the guy who invented the REIT is doing, doing these rollup.

The guy who started the help work is now doing this with fencing companies.

This is a strategy that works.

Now the problem is most people don't have what I have.

They don't have 15 years of pool construction experience.

So even if they wanted to do this, they wouldn't really know where to start.

They wouldn't know the nuances of permitting.

And I can say a bunch of words you're not going to understand, but that those are kind

of 15 years of hard-won lessons.

And so today I'm coming here to, I'm going to raise this, I'm going to build a billion

dollar pool rollup company.

And like you got to say that category of your company, the size of the product, all of that,

I think would be like, I don't know if you heard that in the chat, I know it's not having

some problems right now.

But on the side of the chat, go one to 10.

Where was my pitch on a scale of one to 10 of clear and compelling?

Because that's where you need to get this to, because I think you actually have a really

good idea.

I don't, I don't think we need a smart investor like you, Sean, because man, you said it perfectly.

Yeah, but he didn't want to do the work.

He wants you to do the work.

Yeah.

I want you to be the one who says like, you know, I want to invest in people who figure

these things out.

And if you need me for help, honestly, it's usually a bad sign for my investment.

Like I want to be helping a rocket that's already going and not like pushing something

that's at a standstill.

And so, well, you know, you know the investment industry and you know the rollups and you

know the comparables.

I'm out here doing the hard work managing the crews.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

And so I think take that and basically say, okay, the problem was I wasn't clear on what

type of investment vehicle this is.

This is a rollup.

Second, I got to weave my story, just a bit of my story, which is that I'm, I got tons

of experience doing this.

I've already started my rollup.

This is not just an idea that's pie in the sky.

I already got the first two under my belt.

I did those myself, bootstrapped and they're working.

And now I just got to sell you how we're going to go from two to 20 doing this.

And that when we have 20, it's going to be worth this much because I can just do some

math, say 20 times.

Each one is worth $10 million.

Now I got a $200 million rollup.

If we, if we could pull this off, right?

Beautifully said.

The other thing is you didn't say anything about debt.

Are you taking on debt for doing this?

You said you're kind of raising money to buy the next ones.

Why aren't you using debt?

We haven't taken any loans.

We thought about it.

We thought about doing SBA, but I mean, it just made more sense to seller finance.

So what we, we actually did was we negotiated like a 10% down with seller financing over

five years of the balloon payment and it's so cheap.

We can just scoop it up.

Dude, why didn't you say that?

That's a, that's a great point.

I'm buying these for 10%.

I don't know.

I'm like giving you, I'm giving away my secrets over the internet to thousands of people

and now millions of your podcast listeners.

So here you go.

They're going to do it now.

Bro, no one's going to use it.

It's not a secret.

It's not a secret.

In fact, you kind of made it look like you don't know what debt is because you didn't

say anything, but now we've revealed the truth.

Okay, great.

Honestly, again, I think you actually have a very good business idea presented slightly

differently.

That'd be, you know, I think it could be very investment worthy, especially right now.

You know, you see stocks going down, you see crypto going down.

These private companies are raising a huge valuations with like, you know, software

and a dream.

Whereas you're like, actually I buy successful profitable companies and I'm just a better

operator than the mom and pop.

And I'm going to aggregate these because like, I just have a playbook that I can just keep

rolling out.

I buy these for 10% down.

So that means, you know, my cash on cash return after, you know, 15 months looks like this.

And so you have a very, very strong pitch and you just got to like, you know, put it

all together.

Yeah.

After 30 years of doing something, they're going to be real tired.

You know, they don't want to, they don't want to push the needle.

They don't want to make it bigger.

They have a paycheck coming in, salary, they're taking care of so.

Right.

There was a guy.

So right now for the listeners, Colton, he's sitting in front of a bookshelf.

That's empty.

And someone just says, Peter Teal's zero to one is not his bookshelf.

And for that reason, I'm out.

This is where all of my trophies are going to go for, for all the wins we're about to

have.

Oh, lean startups, not on his bookshelf.

For that reason, I'm out.

Yeah, dude, you seem to be spending too much time actually building your business.

I need somebody who's way more into reading about business.

Yeah, you don't seem like you do yoga.

I'm out.

You're on a gamer chair.

You're not like on a treadmill desk.

I'm out.

You eat carbs.

I'm out.

Yeah.

That's hilarious.

Thanks, dude.

Thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much.

All right.

I asked, I don't know if Ali is going to pop up.

The guy started stocks, but that was, that was fun.

Um, some, I think some people need some work on their pitch.

Not as much work on their business, but work on just like saying what the fuck they do.

So let's go most interested to least interested.

Let's rank the companies based on that.

I'll kind of remind you what they were.

So there was 5x.

That was the first business that pitched, which was doing something that we could barely

understand, but at a million dollars of ARR commitments, um, you know, for his kind of

like marketing stack that he was, or you know, this is like vendor stack that he was putting

in a box.

Then we had like fly together, which wasn't their name.

It was like Bakari or something like that group booking on travel.

Uh, third one we had was, uh, or him who was doing much, I think, uh, which was taking

creators content and letting you chop it up into bits and letting them re making it easy

for them to repost using AI and some software.

Then we had, uh, the last guy was duckies and before that we had nickel pass that I

didn't miss anyone, uh, I did miss someone or no, no, I don't think you miss someone.

I think my ranking from most to least, from the ones I would want to invest into the least,

I would actually put nickel and fly together.

Maybe nickel first, but the fly together Bakari, I would put that they would trade for one

or two in the middle would be 5x and then, uh, tied for the bottom ones would be, uh,

the jelly smack competitor and duckies.

Okay.

All right.

I like it.

Mine would be fly together.

Number one.

I thought that, uh, he seemed great and the business seemed, you know, pretty straightforward

and had momentum and, you know, I'd need to go look at the competition.

Like, is it really as backwards and he's kind of the only real one doing this as, as it

made it sound?

But I liked the sound of that one.

Um, I actually think that duckies is probably the second or first best investment, uh, but

I'm not sure I would want to invest in Colton just because, you know, he seemed like, I

think I'd want to hang out with him, but I'm not sure I'd want to invest in him because

I feel like I'd just be frustrated because he speaks a different language than me.

He speaks like digging holes in the ground and building pools and like, I speak like

frameworks.

And it's like, you know, Hey, Colton, I like you.

Just change the way you look for me, please.

Yeah.

Just like, just talked entirely different for me.

Will you?

If I invested in it, I'd be like, look, we're allowed to hang out, but we'll never be allowed

to talk about the business.

And like in 20 years, just mail me a giant check and just in between, I need to pretend

it's gone.

Uh, so, so that's, by the way, I'm Colton, I'm messing with you.

Um, also, I love the name of that little duckies.

That's a great cool name.

Uh, I do nickel pass three and then the other two are probably wouldn't invest in.

So those are kind of like four and five.

Um, all right, Ali, you're here.

The crowd has beaten you up because Stonks was crashing.

Is it because we're too popular, are we just too popular?

Is that what happened?

Or is this something?

And this is Ali Mois, the founder of Stonks.

Yes.

Thanks for having me guys.

Great, great show.

Loved the real talk.

Honestly, I think it's, it's the best real talk we've had on Stonks.

Uh, and, and, uh, you know, the comments show it.

Um, yeah.

So you guys crashed Stonks, you, you, this, this is one of our biggest events.

Um, uh, and we were also in the middle of like a code migration.

So there were more issues at this event than the last like 50 events put together.

So the screen crashed a few times, but a page refresh, it fixed it, uh, but it, it will

be a lot more stable going forward.

So thank you for hanging in there.

And I could attest that.

So people don't know this.

Me and you, we used to compete at our previous startups.

So you built stream labs.

We were building B, but we're both trying to build tools for live streamers on Twitch.

And so I've seen you execute from, uh, you know, at first afar that we became friends

kind of towards the end, um, but like you're good.

And, uh, when you decided to do something, uh, you guys pull, you know, you guys are

scrappy and you pull it off.

And, uh, actually when we were competing against each other, I had asked, I told, uh, Michael

Birch, who was the founder of, of the original Bebo and he was our investor, I said, yeah,

there's this company stream labs out there and he was like, who's behind it?

And I told him your name.

He goes, I know these guys, you used to have some company called peanut something and he's

like, Oh, these guys, these guys are like, you know, they always just find, like, like,

the thing that people want.

And he was basically described as very scrappy entrepreneurs who will just like kind of

like you'll never die and you'll like kind of just keep iterating until you find this

like hook that people want.

And then you'll like go for it, uh, we'll go for it with like full force.

Is that an accurate?

Thank you.

Thank you.

You are, you're too kind, Sean.

I have a lot of respect for what you did as well.

Amazing products.

Uh, and you guys kicked their ass for what it's worth.

I feel like the, uh, in the end we were competing with you guys, but it really, you guys kicked

our ass.

Oh, no, it's, uh, it's great.

I mean, um, uh, have a lot of respect for, for, for you and, uh, you know, what you,

what you've done in, uh, Birch as well.

Um, but, uh, amazing, amazing event today, guys, it's just our, our team has been loving

it.

The chat's been loving it.

I think Sam asked, um, everyone should be doing it again.

Seems like it seems like the chat is, uh, really into it.

Yes.

Dude.

So on the podcast yesterday, we talked about this company called steak and they're like

an online crypto gambling website.

And they basically give Drake a certain amount of money, like $10 million a month in order

to gain 20 million dollars a month in order to gamble on the website.

And he tweets about it and people come and watch him gamble and they give him free house

money to play with in order to attract more users.

So we'll take this as a gambling, this is a gambling website.

It's called steak.com.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

It's really effective for that company.

Is this a hint?

Do we need to set up like house money for you guys?

Like exactly.

Okay.

Yes.

I think that you give us each like 10 or 20 grand to invest in different startups.

And by the way, we will invest random ass influencers in also, so we'll go get, you

know, we'll get Jake Paul in here.

We'll just go get a bunch of like other famous people to be our friend of the house and just

give us a house budget to go invest in startups.

You know, this is, this is actually not a half joke, half idea, but this is actually

not a terrible idea.

This is.

Oh, so we have.

Don't, don't, don't, don't assume smiling means a joke.

I am not joking.

I'd be dead serious.

We should do this.

So, so the way we could do it is we, we, we have a small fund.

It's called the best of stocks fund.

And we do write checks into interesting startups, particularly high traction or, or great co-investors.

Um, similar to what you guys look for.

So what we could do is for your next event, we could each give you, um, one, one check.

So you pick your one favorite startup out of the five or so that pitch at your next

event and, and we'll write that.

Yeah.

But I want, uh, we, we want stakes in it, bro.

Oh, okay.

So that's, that's a little more work.

I have to figure it out.

Let me get back to you.

Maybe we can give you some carry on that or yeah, that'd be fine.

Okay.

That'd be cool.

All right.

So, um, also people will need to know that Ali Mois is not the same as Mois Ali.

The other guest on our podcast all the time.

Did I call him Mois Ali?

No, no, no.

You said it right.

But people in the chat are like, wait, is this the deodorant guy?

It's like, no, there's, there's Mois Ali.

That's the deodorant guy.

There's Ali Mois.

That's the stocks guy.

So I'm not an investing guy, not the deodorant guy.

You got to be sick of that.

I have to assume.

Uh, you know, it's fine.

It's, it's more followers for both of us.

People, we, we confuse all our followers.

It's great.

That's amazing.

Okay.

And also we've been doing this bookshelf meme this whole time.

Get us a book off the shelf there, something that has helped you've sold a company for

over a hundred million dollars, I believe.

And so, so you read books and you've had success.

Go give us a book off that shelf there that you will recommend to the crowd.

Something that you think has helped you.

I think.

Bring it over.

Go grab the book.

Okay.

Okay.

Dude, he's got a nice house.

Does he live in San Francisco?

That was actually my test to just see if he's wearing only underwear on a lot on a, on Zooms.

And no, he, he passed.

He's wearing, wearing shorts.

If you ask me to get up right now, you might be, you know, this, this stream might, might

be rated PG 13 at least.

Are you wearing on only underwear right now?

I'm wearing my jambies, which are, which are, are more than underwear.

Okay.

So this, this is what I'm reading right now.

It's, it's a dense read, but huge, huge fan.

So it looks like I've actually bought this as well.

So it's a compilation of a night from 1964, I think up until 2010 or I forget the year

of every single one of Warren Buffett's annual letters.

And what you'll notice, I actually analyze this, his words per sentence actually gets

shorter and shorter each year.

And I would argue that's because he's becoming a better writer.

And what's really interesting about that book is he explains like really complicated topics

like Geico car insurance and incredibly easy to understand ways.

So I think that's a good book to read.

That's cool.

Connor in the chat goes, he picked the heaviest book he has, power move.

I agree.

Absolute alpha move of you just now to go pull a, a, a, you know, 36 pound book off the

shelf.

I appreciate that.

All right, well, Ollie, thanks for helping tell your boy, John Hancock and the rest of

the team.

Thanks for making this happen.

This was awesome.

Sean, I think, I guess we'll do this again.

This was, this was pretty good.

I think we had a little kinks workout, but it's pretty good.

Yeah.

Let us know.

Tweet at us.

If you're, if you're here live or if you're listening to the pod, tweet at us if you,

if you want us to do more of these or, or, you know, if this should be a one time thing.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on a road.

Let's travel.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on a road.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.