Stanford Students Pitch Us Their Startups For $3500 In Prize Money

yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days on on alright we're back difficulty we accidentally let the kids from sam community college and and now we got the real stanford in their computers work their internet's good they use google chrome those other guys were on you know using android or something like that but we're ready to get started first a word from bobby fire as i call them your nickname is fire because the last time you came in with with absolute fire we almost couldn't tame you as you were on the podcast but but go ahead give us the intro out for this hey what's up i'm back the guy from the michigan episode we built our entrepreneurship community from michigan to stanford since we saw you last that's called entrepreneur par hour we're changing our college founders meet we're changing out angel investors meet these college founders for changing the game entirely we got a na steer he's our community to lead over at stanford things are moving we launched the syndicate we're hyped but today we're moving away from michigan and we're meeting the stanford killers and so i'm hyped you know passover over to not he's gonna get us rolling and and attributes bobby well you bobby i got a question for you is it true what they say about the post my first million bump like kids like you know are you getting kisses on the cheek around campus are you do to get free lunch in the cafeteria what's what was life that i mean life my girlfriend was starting to get jealous she's like who who who's this the female founder coming out of nowhere coming out and say yeah okay we need the we do the conor mcgregor clip before he goes it's red panty night when you sign to fight me you call home you call your wife he's saying conor mcgregor rate made us down maybe break out the red panties that's that's what happens when when when my first million comes to your college campus baby we've done it sam sean pick come to our campus we done it bring out the red solo cups baby we done it i the joined investors of the female founders i don't know who to worry about more alright so let's get started go ahead go ahead let's kick it off well cheers thanks so much it seems like we're put in this business podcast and the enjoy r podcast nice yeah i mean we got a great group of stanford founders over here bobby's an absolute killer love that man dearly and i hope that you're gonna love the founders we have got a great community we're building it out so you're interested in learning more you know feel free to reach out to me i don't wanna spend too much time so i'll introduce our first guy tom tommy pee i like to call him he's a hardware dude he's actually the old head of the group he's actually a master student doing a lot of cool stuff but i don't wanna steal tommy thunder so i'll kinda let him take things from here how old is old i'll let tom answer that because i actually have no idea how old but twenty what he's gonna be he's gonna be twenty two twenty four you guys great is yeah a real gray bless my friend i know i know well thanks and yeah thanks for the intro ana super pumped to be here should we dive right into the pitch or yeah the five minutes or two i think we have wait what's the timing on these i think we did two minutes last time somewhere like three five three bobby saying let's do three three alright here here's the deal you you you got got three minutes you got one where we're not gonna interrupt to you but after that we could just jump in it any time and interrupt you after that okay so let's let's do it okay keep that mind cool so okay so high tom here transcribe transcribed glass and we're building wearable subtitles for the death part of hearing essentially taking your netflix or youtube captions and putting them heads up hearing loss is the massive issue i a you should be prem med so i guess few med stats at you all day and that's what i'm gonna do it affects close to half of opioid people it's twice as commas cancer diabetes and it's growing by twenty fifty one in ten people will have a disabling hearing loss it also como morbid with a lot of things including dementia through three to five times for likely to get the dementia if you have hearing loss despite everything i just said during solution today are affordable they're really expensive two to eight thousand dollars often out of pocket for hearing aids because entrants like medicare doesn't cover them the biggest killer thing for me though is that seventy five percent of people who could actually use hearing aids use absolutely nothing if you talk to anyone who has a hearing loss who's tried to hearing it but they'll probably tell you is hey i bought it put in my ear hated it put on the shelf never used it gap now there's a really cool medical reason why you know people hate hearing aids more than glasses but we don't actually have time for that so what we do know about the deaf part of hearing people like myself is that we love caption and what's not to love they're really you know cost effective incredibly active oh sorry keep going i i like it keep going incredibly accurate and you know intuitive people know what captured are they know how to use them in fact i've hard of hearing people love captions so much that we actually sued netflix and now netflix has to caption all of their content so if you're watching your foreign film with captions you know thank your local death part of hearing person you know make sure to en so they you're you but yeah crow tip we knew that captions were incredibly valuable but we needed a way to get them on your devices and into the real world where you needed them for conversations and we looked at all the ar players we you know tried a whole bunch of ar headsets to bring those captions into your field of view we made this really fancy chart and we realized one thing people don't actually use ar glasses today no one uses them no one's wearing them in this room i don't see them around them the campus except me there's a lot of reasons why ar adoption had been show shitty but the fundamental trade off in our opinion in our thesis is this trade off of fully immersive content versus true wear ability at transcribe glass we're focused on just critical information like text and captions as a result we built the lightest ar product with all day battery light and a form factor you actually wanna put on your head now into video and describe this describe the product what it looks like for the listener because a lot of people aren't watching oh yeah for sure so it's a wearable device i actually have a demo video i'd love to play it after it just shows what it looks like through the insights really quick but it's a lightweight error product it's designed in a retrofit manner meaning it's attaches pure glasses a lot of your users are older with you already use glasses so it can fit onto any glasses and work straight out of the box you have numerous features like focus adjustment that are catered to the depth part of hearing and it has an all day battery life and it's incredibly light people us they don't notice when they're wearing it you look through it and you see subtitles text floating in your field of view and you can position it anywhere you want is that is that helpful to to clarify i i don't know if i'm too sci here or if this is your product but i'm talking to you and it would be transcribing what i'm saying right there for your eyes right so it's just live transcription of anything you're hearing it basically just looks for for the listener it looks basically like google glass but it turns any set of eyeglasses into a google glass looking device so so sorry go ahead and you're you're at the end of your time so rhett let's wrap the pitch yeah yeah yeah exactly so yeah that's that's the product that's where we're rebuilding users love it we have over seven hundred pre orders completely inbound from awards we won we want you know for social good indian presidential gold medal you won the health category stanford largest startup up competition we also have a tremendous inbound interest from cinema halls and b b they're all required to provide these accommodations and we recently signed an nda was one of the largest media companies as a way to put captions into your field of view now is also a great time to do this hearing aids have been der regulated this year which is crazy you you'd no longer have to go to a doctor to get them an audio you can buy them over the counter so our product can be right there right next to hearing aids at best buy first time ever that this is possible and finally last thing i wanna hit is you know we built a really cool product but the immediate thing is like hey why can't someone else built this you know you have fitbit and you have thirty other versions of big hardware especially consumer hardware is inherently comm the thing is what we've done is our revenues do not come from our hardware sale they come from the recurring subscription revenues that we get on this product and you know that scale is really heavily so i can talk more about that but just wanna wrap it up we're running a pilot trial at stanford this quarter officially if you want i can connect you to them and you can trial this product that's also a picture of my in the corner meeting the president of india for this word by the way here's a picture of me with drake alright so it's that's a great way to end up it so you two questions how does it actually do the live transcription is this software you guys are writing or are you using some open source tools that using ai what are you doing yeah so we're right now using third party as automated speech recognition service it we're source agnostic meaning right now we support three google microsoft ibm they're automated system that you know rest stream the captions and display them here we are also able to do subtitle files if you walk into a movie theater you can load the subtitle file and display it or another thing called card interpreting where you can you know a person types and then you can stream the captions to your device we're moving towards a long device model that's wi f agnostic and can work anywhere as these models and get better and decrease in latency things like whisper two questions question point number one you're in luck i am a student to be hearing aid wearer and sean has someone in his life wears one too i have a hearing loss so i'm i'm actually in the process of getting one now okay the biggest thing with my hearing aid or why i have a hearing my hearing loss is not watching tv it's when i'm out in public i can't hear the difference between you talking to me and the background noise of the restaurant it's it all sounds like one thing to me so i constantly have to lean in so i wanna know about that and number two the whole dementia thing i learned about that and i don't i i remember reading a little bit about it but but from my understanding dementia the reason why it's you why hearing people who have hearing loss gets dementia is because that part of their brain isn't working and so they like part partially get a little funky i think that's what it is how does this actually solve that if i'm still not using life if i'm not hearing i'm just reading yeah okay super good question let me hit the first one first so yeah hearing loss the biggest complaint was people who actually use their hearing aids is high noise settings i hate bars and i hate clubs as a result of the well actually everyone has a hard time hearing but i have a much worse time hearing what we're building here is adding directional microphone so you can isolate the speaker of interest so we're targeting both through the model write the as model voice reductions through software and also hardware pointing directional micron phones at the speaker of interest that may be able to improve the situation a bit but it is a it is an inherent challenge right the other the other of other point was dementia yes the the part of the brain isn't being stimulated but the there another thing is just the social withdrawal that you get you just as a deaf hard hearing person if you have hearing loss you hate going out it's really hard and sounds sound weird so you you lose the quality of your social interactions and that was withdrawal the lack of stimulation that really triggers dementia and a host of other depression as well as actually very como morbid as well with hearing loss and would this thing be more more embarrassing to wear than nothing in my ear that no one could see except like like you like like i don't know man you take those glasses off i might wanna hook up with you more than without that that's so that's an honor but so yeah yeah know on our website we say you can use this on dates so you can use on dates but are it won't it it it won't work but you could use it you could try you yeah off a bit but so yeah like be the pod of my friend our our goal our goal is to integrate it fully into the like oasis you know we this is an early version of the form factor was built on you know exclusively grant based funding that we've got in by the state department government of india but we're moving to an integrated form factor in your glasses we also built it in a retro way meaning mounting because most of our depth people part of hearing users actually you already have glasses we wanted to work with their existing solution i agree i'm gonna give you can get oh sorry i'm gonna give you my i'll give you my reaction to today correct so i think you did a great job on your pitch especially at the beginning the problem section you did a fantastic job you outlined it's a problem it's a bigger problem than you think and it has all these knock on affect so you'd nailed the problem part on the solution part you're clearly a smart guy and you are building something that's cool and useful but i don't think it's realistic for two reasons number one like sam said i think that the thing looks a little do and people are gonna have an aversion to wearing it right now right so you're like well this is v one this is the this is the equivalent of the big giant cell phones that we used to have before we got the cool like sleek ones and i believe you but you're in an arms race against google facebook apple all all these companies that basically everybody wants to build ar glasses yeah it's like the hottest thing outside of ai is ar glasses and whoever gets ar glasses that's the new phone you could put the screen on your eyes and so they're all gonna put billions of dollars in making the most lightweight glasses that have a computer in them basically and so you're gonna be trying to slim down your form factor using grant funding and all the stuff and apple and google and facebook are gonna be doing this with everything that they've got and they're gonna get their first most likely as to having the the the lightweight form factor and at that point captions might just be a feature or an app on top of their thing and so you're gonna waste a ton of money i think doing trying to get the hardware to work when you're not gonna be the one who makes hardware for the masses to wear under their their their as as like smart glasses the big companies gonna do so i think i that's the problem now the one that you said and that i'm just gonna call out which is that you said hearing aids hearing aids have been der regulated this year so for the first time ever you can sell them without you know going through a doctor that was the big light bulb moment for me oh there's a business opportunity here it may not be the thing you wanna build because you're like sounds like you're trying to do good in the world by like changing the world and you know helping people blah blah blah you know that good stuff but there's somebody else there gonna be like oh cool d hearing aids gonna do that now like you know that that's now more possible than it was before because i don't need the telemedicine component in between and so i think that's actually the real business opportunity out of all the things you said and i think you're on the right path but i don't think you're gonna be the one to do it i think the big companies are gonna make the glasses and then the captions are gonna be a feature on top of those hundred percent could i hit that point real quick yeah so i completely agree with you a facebook is spending ten to fifteen billion a year right now on their ar product you know all of the apple wants to come out was ar glasses hopefully in twenty twenty four we want them to validate the ar market we're are not and the thing is was you know let's say facebook for example they're building an ar headset they're they're not gonna validate it they're gonna own it they're gonna own they're gonna gonna validate it for you to go own they're gonna own it hundred percent but they need an immersive ar headset to run what is the meta they want to build a headset that can support their existing platform mark's i mean z vision is you know the meta this immersive reality that cannot run on transcribe glass and as a result that cannot run on this lightweight waveform factor all day battery like wear setup up so we can much more quickly build a wearable product because we're focused on captions and critical information for the death hard of hearing that that is you know the the core focus of our product it's building for wear and form factor right now for a core use case of people who clearly need it not that broader vision of multi multi content gotcha but because other companies sir snapchat wants to snapchat doing it they just wanna put a camera on their just snap a photo yeah right that's the only use case they care about right now yeah google wants to put your notifications in your text messages in your email on it right you know so so everybody's got a different vision and so it's not just facebook you're trying to do this we try to build a whole multi or meta whatever the hell yeah it's like you know everybody's trying to make the thing that consumers will buy that turns their glasses into a phone basically yep and to some version of a phone maybe a lightweight version first and so i i don't buy that and yeah so for that reason for that reason even though i i think you're your good intention and you had you're a smart guy i don't think this is an invest product what do you think sam i agree but i do wanna give you kudos because i think you creating something hardware related is balls and i think it's awesome that you're you're going this route as it is now no i i don't think it's it's the way it is but i have a feeling that if you keep going down this route you're gonna find a better solution soon and i actually think you should continue to pursue it but you're gonna find a you you've come up with some interesting technology i also like the fact that there's like an inflection here which is that hearing aids are now yeah der regulated are der regulated and i think that those are always good inflection when you could pounce on those things but i don't know if this is the right solution but it is interesting technology that i think is actually gonna be used for something else cool yeah and this is coming from a half deaf guy so like i would not wanna use this as it is now but i i think it's a cool problem you're trying to solve and i think it's cool technology i just don't think they're aligned cool right on alright thanks tom thanks so much yeah thank you guys best of luck our next one is gonna start with the big d democrat oh right i would whenever i see whatever i see the big d i i'm curious so what do we got yeah from gandalf the gray we got a photo of the young so home is the fresh into the group he's an absolute killer one of my close friends he's got a pretty sick start so i'll i'll leave the rest to him so home saw yours bro so come come democrat us with some sharks my name is so i'm the founder i'm yogi we're on a mission to democrat college admissions using the power of big data and artificial intelligence but i didn't tell you a little bit more about the business i first kinda wanna start with a personal story about i went to high school in one of the largest public high school across america down in good old round rock tyson my class at over a thousand students including myself and although our counselors were incredibly hardworking and supportive there were also massively under resourced so when it came time to apply a college we were always at a disadvantage compared to these far wealthier privileged students took could coachella out literally thousands of dollars for these private college consultants and this is a nationwide problem you see today if you wanna get into one of these elite schools you'll need insider strategies but for the longest time they've been maintained and gate capped by this mafia of six thousand dollar six thousand dollar college consultants now when i was applying to college one of the strategies that i found the most useful was getting to read through some of my older brand applications reading are their essays extra extracurricular and awards was really meaningful to me because i gotta see how they told their stories to in turn i could learn how i wanted to tell my mayo now with i'm a yogi i wanna ensure that everyone from rural texas to the bo and big apple can experience that same feeling of match with this platform this database of over five thousand real application that were accepted tu universities like harvard stanford and mit and these applications are the real deal we're talking essays awards extra extracurricular is sat scores gpa the whole dam at sharks were feast and we are a startup up in twenty twenty three so we'd be remiss without mentioning ai saw we use an ai powered algorithm to match high schoolers with students either dream schools who are successful let's say there is an indian student in texas he wants to study computer sides at stanford he can read through my applications which i spent hundreds of hours working on for literally the price of a cup of come and what's really cool is as we start to kind of stockpile of this massive data mode we can start to use artificial intelligence to extract really high level amazing insights that d it by the admissions process turning it from this confusing black box into a precise science and then we can always become this digital private consultant giving high schoolers personalized instantaneous and affordable recommendations so my i got a question yeah how can you skip to the two parts throughout the business so i wanna know how this makes money and i wanna know are you if you're raising money how how much are you raising and and what's your valuation i'm absolutely know those two things so we started this business in september of twenty twenty two with zero dollars outside funding we're on track to finish our first year with a hundred thirty thousand dollars of revenue currently eighty five in the bank oh we're going congratulations thank you so you started this in nova november so you the the two thousand twenty three your full fiscal year was a hundred and eighty grand oh around hundred hundred eighty by the end of twenty twenty three oh okay alright alright i got you mh yeah so from september twenty twenty two to august twenty twenty three we'll have made a hundred thirty thousand dollars in revenue and what's really exciting is we've actually helped over eleven thousand high schoolers with their college applications and we think that that impact is enormously meaningful coming from a team of students who all went to public high schools so so what what do you charge how do you make money on this yeah so college upload their applications on our database and high schoolers pay to unlock in so if i'm a high school then i'm paying for every person's application that i'm reading and we cut lowe's profiles which include multiple applications essays awards activities gotcha and so you charge how much to unlock one s one on application so it ranges between five and ten dollars per application and why are the college kids uploading their thing that's a great question so we pay college students to upload their applications onto our service we've actually built out this direct integration with the common application platform which is the largest national platform for applying to college and it takes literally thirty seconds for a college student to upload everything from their extra extracurricular their essays to their activities lists and we have over five thousand applications on our service and a lot of these are coming from school to across the wow and how'd did you get the the customers how'd did you get the people here about this we think that distribution is really important in twenty twenty three so we have a tiktok of over sixty one thousand followers all organic and thirty million organic social impressions we think that really marketing the gen z is super important today because there's on a single college consultancy out there they can really say that they can access sixty one thousand mines of seventeen a eighteen eighteen year olds at any given so i'm shocked like we haven't made a joke about like is the upsell if you're playing to harvard like to tell you not to be an asian person like has that have well why haven't we made like this joke yet why is this sound we're we're off our game so are you raising money right now at the moment we're not raising we we're we've never had an to race since we've always been profitable since day one but in the future we are open to a exploring i certainly wanna invest more now got yes did it great perfect answer yes that was the perfect answer awesome job awesome progress so far this is very very cool but by the way i was gonna pass this product out next podcast anyways i saw you on twitter and i saw i saw admin admit yogi on twitter and i was like was a great idea they're getting college students once you don't need your essay anymore they're paying you a little bit for it you already did all the hard works so yeah whatever exactly in the database and now they have this database of of college like admissions essays and like the the the stats and the resumes and all that good stuff so i thought that was really smart i was gonna bring this up anyhow that's it's funny that you're that you're here i gotta give you props on two things number one you did two things really good in your pitch i wanna call out the first is you said at the beginning of you you know before i tell yeah you know i'm the founder of admiral yogi here's what we do and then you before tell you about the business i gotta tell you your personal story as to like you know why i came up with this idea in the first place and that's a great way to do a pitch once you have somebody's attention like if you're in the meeting and they they can't really leave that's a great way to to to start a pitch because it it shows your you know founder fit with the problem but also people just wanna hear a story so you you get them from going into kind of this transactional like analysis mode to storytelling mode and so i think that was really really well done and and then the fact that you actually have traction is the the second good part of your pitch like this is not a theory this is something that you actually have in motion now sam give me your take of would you invest in this why or why not would i invest if i were to learn like if you're taking this as a serious company i mean you're only what are you nineteen or twenty years old like you're your freshman you've only been working on it for a year or less than a year you've got great traction i think the fact that you're only charging five dollars that's like a i don't love that i think it's really hard to build a biz big business on five dollars so i would i won't i would wanna know about what your average revenue per user is but i think that you are a very invest person so i definitely am interested i quoted yeah you make question on that a little bit yeah yeah so our average customer's spend right now is a hundred thirty dollars so people pay to unlock these profiles in bulk anywhere from one to fifty profiles at once and people on average wanna to unlock twenty six profile of someone at the dream school and all us are really committed to this so we're actually considering taking a leave of absence to dropout out work on this full time and sec how many students are applying like how big is the customer base for how many students are applying to college or let's say you know yeah and like kind of this the serious callers where they'd be willing to pay you know for for something like how many students is how is that per year yeah so in america there's two point two million students who are applying to college every single year but if you just narrow that to maybe the most elite colleges then you have around four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand students every single year they're coming into this market and so how does this get huge given given that what you just said right so let's say it's five hundred thousand and let's say even twenty percent of that market was to use something like this so a hundred thousand dollars or sorry a hundred thousand customers that would be like you know the absolute like you guys are dominating the market at that point like so what's that five million absolutely that's a great question and that's something we've actually thought about a lot at avid y so but sorry just to do the math if a hundred thousand people did you said about they spent about a hundred bucks each that'd would be ten million dollars in revenue if if that was in case right so currently yeah and we're gonna we're gonna define big as like fifty million in revenue we'll say that's like the threshold of like things get really interesting sure yeah so currently the college admissions market is around ten billion dollars but that's just spending coming out of the top for one percent of americans we think that by providing more affordable services we can reach the other ninety nine percent and not only capture that massive initial market but also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space i think that sounds good that that sounds good because it's democrat but in reality what's gonna happen is you're actually just gonna try to take that same one percent because the one percent care the most have the most money are the most obsessed and maybe you expand that to like you know the one to nine percent of of the most competitive you know willing to pay type of customers and it's actually never the the the other ninety nine percent that that you get to be your customer because the other ninety ninety percent just don't have the problem in the same way or don't have the budget in the same way and so you know it's it's very hard to capture that customer versus the person that's taking test prep that's hiring college consultant that's you know you know really really stressing about what colleges they're gonna go into they're the ones we're willing to pay for a new solution too that's that's really interesting that's actually the initial hypothesis that we had as well that we're gonna target these one percent who are traditionally paying for college consulting services in this the first place but actually with this most recent round of early or regular decision applications that came out just two weeks ago received floods like hundreds of emails in our inbox from these students who were traditionally underserved like we're talking an annie from rural mississippi first generation college applicant never knew about traditional consultants i mean they were too expensive for her but i'm in yogi wasn't so right we initially thought that hypothesis too but as we started serving our customers really collecting the date on this we realized that that actually wasn't the case what happened harvard like your like oh man we're getting all these robots your or you know and then the the universal college application i forget what it's called like can they ban you like can they pull api access can that can it work that way so we integrate with the common application which is agnostic to university so let's say the harvard university admissions department doesn't like us for whatever reason we're not sourcing any kind of data from them we're sourcing you from this national of national standard right i think what sam i'm saying is it could the common app shut off your access yes that's what why i'm asking okay if the common application wanted to they could theoretically turn off api access but again college students can still upload their applications manually so it might take five extra minutes to onboard a new application on our service but fundamentally high or college students own this data so they're and the they have permission to upload it to whatever platforms they want including avid yoga and we you on the day so here's why here here's why you kinda make me all hot and bothered number one well typically people are usually really good at getting traffic to their website so marketing or getting like hype and things like that and a lot of times the people who are great at that aren't amazing at creating products and a lot of times the people who are amazing at creating products suck at marketing and like getting eyeballs i'm at i'm i've been toy around your website right now it looks cool it looks appealing it looks well done and you're saying that you've got all these customers early on i think that that is like very very very attractive like from a founder perspective so i think you're really fascinating the there is like i i'm not convinced that it could be a huge thing but i am convinced that you could find up upsell that could potentially make it big i think if i'm in your position i wouldn't raise money and i think that by the time you're thirty years old you can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars because you own a business that makes thirty or forty million bucks that potentially you could sell for a hundred million dollars or something by the age of twenty eight or something like that but like just the fact that you've pulled off the the because it's a marketplace a a bit because you've already kinda cracked that code i find that to be incredibly impressive mh thank you so much yeah i i really like this the one thing i would do is i kinda feel like you're using the last business model instead of the next business model so i think what like if somebody came to me today with this trying to solve this problem of how can i help people apply to colleges in a way that helps them be more successful i would say oh fantastic this should feel like chat gp so basically i should basically be able to go to go to some bot that's gonna basically set help me with my application or my essay write my essay or edit my essay with my my application the you know the information i put on my application how to structure it better or or present it better bay and it should learn off of the successful applications so it should take a dataset set of successful and unsuccessful applications and then it should just do it for me versus a marketplace where i need to go pick and choose okay jasmine got into stand for a i pay ten dollars to unlock her essay okay and then i unlock it now i need to look at her essay and i need to compare in my mind how to make her essay how my my my essay more like her essay no no i'll pay you ninety nine bucks just help me get into college mh right like give me you give me a two x shot at getting into my dream school because you have a chat gp that's trained on successful college applications and it will write your essay and structure your your application and even do the application and just let you click submit and go to all these schools that's what i think the like if i think about how how somebody gonna do this in the next three years that's what the solution looks like sean it's really funny that you mentioned that because actually that's the exact vision that we had for out yogi we actually tweeted an mvp of this chat e like chatbot it can answer any question about college admissions and it's like fine tuned dom this proprietary dataset we've built this massive data of college applications and we actually tweeted an mvp valid couple months ago but we really think that with big data and artificial intelligence especially with generative ai we can provide students with these hybrid personalized specific recommendations for literally like you said a hundred bucks yeah because you know the college application process first you gotta figure out what school should i even apply to where do i wanna go and the chat back and forth about like well what do wanna it's like well what do you care about do you care about weather do you care about being near home what do you care about oh cool then we recommend these schools and okay can you help me get in and and then you're comparing to like how much does the college consultant cost mh polish consultants charge is six thousand dollars on average cool so you say instead of six thousand dollars pay ninety nine bucks once and get into your dream school and like that's the pitch that now that that that i think is is really really compelling so if you were doing that i would invest because i think that is a very very big idea we should we should go to the next one but dude this is wildly impressive i saw a sean but what you're saying reminds me i saw this tweet this lady was like it just warned my heart today that people were doing things in the old school way i was on a train and i saw two kids copying each other's homework in their notebooks and it just brought me back to better times the four kids were using chad gp three to to to pla dry one another it's like like i don't know if that would i don't yeah i i think that that's like weirdest to hear how kids are gonna be doing that in the future but brother you're impressive congratulations don't raise money by the way just own the whole thing before you go can you mind everyone just how old argue you there were some speculation in nineteen years old wow you're ahead of the game you are of the game you should take leave up absence but you should just stay right next to the campus and just recruit smart kids to come work for you for free basically while you're while you're building a company while they go to class every day you should one hundred percent bail by the way you should one hundred percent bail yeah yeah yeah if you need help talking to your mom i'll i'll i'll call her and help you out appreciate that sean thank you cool alright see you alright who's next so next up we got zane and matthew would i'd like to call them the two twin towers they're absolute menace the bone out candid they're a good level so let them take it away there's a bunch of beauty american gladiator or shark tank blazer and blazer bla what a bunch of attributes let's get them up here oh the get of we wasn't lying okay cool and we gotta go a little bit faster because i think we're taking a little too long on each one of these so let's try to hit the points just here's what you gotta do say what you're doing say why you're doing it tell us if you have any traction on it and then tell us if you want money or where you're at with the business sounds good sounds good let's do it i'm zane i'm matthew so we're building candid at candid we apply generative ai to blog based social videos with the goal of helping users getting touch with their mental health alright pause there i didn't understand any of that so what it's generative ai to help you get in touch with my mental health through vlogs what what would that what does that i look like so essentially we ask users to record daily highs daily lows and then respond to a thoughtful question which we source from psychologists and therapists then they can choose which of any of these videos they wanna share with brands and from these these videos we do topic detection sentiment analysis to present patterns to users to help them get in touch with them mental a health so more specifically see you vlog and we give you insights into what's going on in your life and help you make sense okay so like an almost like an ai therapist exactly it's like soft some therapy yeah like call soft therapy okay love it none of that hard therapy sam been doing for less years yeah alright keep carry on yeah and before we jump in we'd like to tell you a little bit about the problem and and and what we were facing so both of us grow seriously struggling with mental health i grew up in thailand in and didn't have access to traditional therapy and traditional resources and matthew grew up in san diego and did practically seek out those resources now i tried a couple of things and the thing that worked best for me was journal but the problem in drilling was that it took three or four times to start it's a hell of a hard habit to to get to stick so when we started around ten it was with the idea of making drilling were accessible and more engaging to users the problem is a lot bigger than us though last year or forty percent of students were in college experience depression and most of them didn't go actively see here out how our vision for the future of consumer mental a health is that they're products that don't seem and come off as mental health product but i was back in component that strong mental health focus yeah so like i was mentioning at the beginning what does that actually look like a candidate uses record videos like they would maybe on a on another type of social media specifically highs lows and reflective questions they can share these videos with brands and then we use a simple ai techniques to present paladins to users so we do three things for you right we transcribe the videos we extract the emotions we extract topics and we use three things the first is we identify patterns in people's lives so let's say you're stressed about the college insurance search right and we we play that back for you and help you observe and help you come to your own conclusions about that the second thing we do is we allow you to smart search through your memories so you can search for emotions and topics associated with the event you're trying to look at right and then the last thing we do is we build this or for you every week which is a generative ai visual for what you're for you what you're a week look like emotionally k and it's a color scheme built and tailored to you yeah so is this an idea do you have custody of users where where you guys at right so right now we're in test flight we have about fifty users we just closed our pre seed we're in dev and in development mode right now we'll be launching on the apps we're in two to three weeks and we'll be focusing specifically on stanford to really get that product market how are you gonna get customers right so we're gonna launch at stanford in the next in the next month and that's gonna be a hard launch and we're gonna use all sorts of distribution strategies they're and how much did you raise that you said you raised the seed round or something like that i'm pretty above half a million dollars wow from who all a variety of these cs in in the silicon valley area reach yeah who o z fellows start x yeah okay gs and and so you you're gonna launch that at stanford cool and you can kinda brute force that because you're there you got friends you're you're on campus that sort of thing what happens after that how do you get this to like ten thousand users or a hundred thousand users yeah absolutely so we really do at first wanna take a very controlled approach so we're gonna go cut campus to campus we're starting at stanford like z said we're gonna really lock in the method that works the best and then we're gonna pick a few similar universities like harvard cal tech maybe seen some universities in in los angeles and take that same approach and then grow from there so we're looking at high stress environments and we really don't want like massive rapid growth we don't want half a million users tomorrow because we really want test especially the ethics behind this and ensuring that this is something that's scalable and like we're not doing any active harm to users alright and say alright so sam let's let's pause the pitch picture here and i wanna get your reaction to to ideas say an idea like this how do you think about this either as an entrepreneur or an investor what do you what do you think as an investor i i i don't understand how it's the same thing as before like when you just do the math getting to size scale companies which i don't know what that is fifty or hundred million in revenue something like that or a nine figure exit it's very very very very very hard when you're only making a hundred dollars or something like that a year per customer it just you just it's a very it's a it's just a math problem it's very challenging to do that particularly when it's like a a social ish app so as an investor i don't think it's awesome as someone working on it i think you guys are in the best case scenario because you have five hundred thousand dollars and if this dies next next year then it's like no big deal you're young you did something amazing and you're gonna have another swing so from your perspective i think this is the greatest thing ever from an investors perspective i'm not it it doesn't it doesn't tickle my fancy maybe because i don't see the math on how it becomes huge do you agree we have a friend who has an app she called rooted and it's basically around panic attacks set similar space here and what she found was she didn't raise any money because she's not saying this is gonna be a billion dollar company but it was problem she had and she wanted a solution for it and she knew that and other people have this problem around panic attacks and it was too niche for like a a huge outcome but because she built the company in a way that suited how big that market is she's gonna be really really successful with right she's got seven she's the revenue she boots herself she's the only employee it's profitable and it serves that issue she acquire most of our she has two million users by the way and and it it could it could be a ten million dollar year business with four or five people right and so she and she got she's getting the growth through basically being the top ranked search for if you search for panic attacks like in the app store so she she had a strategy around as right like i see like app store optimization to be to be the top right term here and so what i hear this idea i think these guys you know first good for you for for even doing entrepreneurship at this age that's the first thing second good for you for chasing like a problem that that matters with you know cool new tech text so you're gonna learn a bunch about this problem you're gonna learn a bunch about this tech good for you like sam said for raising some money so you know you're gonna have the ability to take a shot at this if it doesn't work no harm done you just got your first lessons under your belt and you'll you'll you'll go on to have your second company third company fourth company and one of those will succeed the thing i don't like about this is that it's a lot of work and what you know i think a lot of these solutions look really good in powerpoint but when they go when they go to the real world people will simply not do the work to help themselves it's like the guy who's you know the very first pitch is like people get hearing aids and then they get annoyed with them or the battery dies and they don't plug it back in right and then it's sits on the shelf like adherence is a really big problem they'd rather get dementia than charged they're they're yeah battery out and and that's and so your know customers go for for typically like the the low friction solutions and so i think what's the the challenge here is that you have built something that doesn't really tap into human behavior in the right way i meaning you're saying do the right thing it'll help you and unfortunately people just don't do the right thing and help themselves and so i would love to see you guys slim the product down into something that is simple easier a little more addictive to do and has some variable reward that's like you know worth the the work that you put in if you've ever read this book go go read hooked by near il have you guys ever heard of that yeah i've read it actually it's it's a great book about habit formation it's a great book and i would basically say how can we make this a more habit forming product because right now i would suspect that the work that you're asking them to do which is basically proactively go on video and share what's on their mind is gonna be way too much friction for the average person like you know so i think you gotta find something that's simpler if you want people to actually use it i think simplicity is at at the crux or try to do i definitely think know we needed to steal it even more but really what we're trying to get at here is tapping into people's existing habit cycles of vlogging i think the inflection point here is that our generation is the first generation this like super comfortable with getting in front of the songs and just like you know spewing their shit talking their truth right and that's what we really trying to you should make detect you should make it detect off of what they're posting on social media then so there's no extra work if if they're already vlogging or if they're already posting stories about stuff i wonder if you could read that and give them some insights and then that would hook them to to pour out more maybe after that because then you'd have a zero work solution potentially like i i don't know the exact solution i just know that i have made this mistake the reason i'm saying this is i have made this mistake i put in a powerpoint deck what would be an awesome product and i didn't let reality into the room and the re and when i let reality in the room it was yeah users aren't gonna do all that work at the beginning so so they're never gonna get the benefits and that's that's a challenge i've had in the past and i suspect this reminds me of of mistakes i've made in the past man i you good are you guys dropping out what are you gonna do once you had your five hundred k yeah so we're actually taking the leave of absence right now worth full time on product smart this is amazing man like look my my my my belief is that this is not gonna work as you guys have it set up i think that that's still a massive win for you and my like big takeaway is like you we we say this a bunch of others like levels to this game of like building stuff that makes money and products that people like you guys are like just this conversation you're very clearly at the top of the top like you know lux still gonna play a role and you could still fuck all this up but just the fact that you are where you are now even though sean said he's out a fan and i said it the same thing we're fans of you and you're gonna win it's just a matter of it's is it gonna be this one or the next one or the next one but this is really amazing this is classic thing of like i can't wait to see your second company in your third company because you know i had my sushi restaurant as my first thing sam had his thing it's his first thing like i like sam guys you guys are doing like you guys are way way better yes generative generative hot dogs he'd sandwich would generate them and dogs yeah i put them in the bun on my hand and i handed them they're were very general be artificially intelligent to eat them the the other thing i would say is you should stop calling it a leave of absence and just start calling it a leave of excellence people like that shit right it sounds more providing too if anybody else wants to take a leave of excellence to come work with me for for a year come do that you can email me shot at sean for dot com how old are you guys we're both twenty one wow well congratulations on your success and thanks for doing this thanks you guys thanks let meet see awesome guys next up what do we got simplify how how many more do we have by the way last one last one last what's are least we got michael mike mike michael the mic here so many different names for this guy be great dude and yeah you'll close this out strong dude that's what i miss about college i used to have so many nickname like what used to call me the blender because somebody thought my last they thought my last name was puree and so one guy was like last name puree right and they're like like the blender setting so the call lender for like a year that's pretty good i'll i'll i'll start calling you that michael what do you got hey sam hey sean michael and one of the c founders of simplify we're building a career platform for gen z what's the url on a simplify dot jobs because i know you're sitting on that dot com no card's got his b right now we're gonna we're gonna get it here soon promise yeah i bet you will if you were apply to a job today you'd quickly realize how frustrating and broken the processes at super disorganized jobs are scattered across dozens of different job sites when you're applying you're you're going on fifteen different sites it's super repetitive today career counselors recommend that candidates submit around a hundred job applications to just get one offer it's also super noisy so existing platforms like linkedin and indeed make it super hard to actually find relevant positions among the millions of different openings out there and you know as a student at stanford we've experienced this paved firsthand so during my time in college i applied to actually more than two hundred jobs across fifteen different job sites when i came to school i grew up in small town in west virginia parents didn't work in tech actually had no idea how to find my first jobs and you know after trying all these platforms we realized that the existing solutions out there really didn't work so actually i actually met my first my c founders when we were applying the job together so that it's actually kind of nerdy even for standard stanford standards but i think that's why we decided to build simplify so when we designed a platform we really wanted to put the candidate experience first so you can kind of think of us like the on out by the way by the way i gotta stop you i'm looking at your thing your you have a hundred thousand plus users that are using your chrome extension in three million applications and you haven't said to any of that yet was on it's not protection on its squad right here so but yes oh go get it i gotta give you credit but i gotta say also you're bear you buried the lead your that libra you're killing it and sean for killing pull up pull up their site and put it in similar web while while he's talking yeah i'm i'm there alright go ahead so him oh yeah no for sure that we've we definitely got some super exciting traction so i think you can think of us like the common application for jobs so i think ami yogi talked about the wine college same process you come to our website fill out this five minute application that you can apply to basically any job on the internet and one click we've got a browser extension that helps us do that so in the last roughly a year and a half and we launched we've gotten more than five million applications submitted through our extension which has saved like users over seventy thousand hours of time we've also got a centralized dashboard instead of like twenty different platforms so no matter what site you're applying on we'll keep track of your applications on simplify in a kind of crm type of thing so you can stay organized throughout the process and finally with all of this information we built this machine learning model that is able to recommend you jobs based on where you're applying and also based on the profile you that you filled out with us instead of scrolling endlessly on sites like linkedin we'll actually deliver you jobs in like a tinder like interface where we can swipe yes or now and apply to those jobs and one click do and you and you apply to them when you swipe right so no you you we we redirect you to the career page and our browser extension will autofill fill the information so it's effectively two clicks okay yeah it's awesome but yeah so we so in the last since launching in october of twenty twenty one we've grown over a hundred fifty thousand users i think the most exciting part of all of this is we actually spent zero dollars in paid marketing so more than four million applications submitted in twenty twenty two who's hit a million already in the first four months of twenty twenty three most our growth has actually been organic i think we've built a pretty exciting product that really puts candidates first so we see a lot of mentions on reddit discord github we've also been able to build a community around supporting people who maybe first time job seekers so we write a newsletter that goes out to ninety thousand subscribers giving general advice what done how to find your first jobs i've also been able to find quite an audience on linkedin by posting just free career resources resume templates list of opportunities of garnered around sixty thousand followers in the last are you a student or are you like twenty eight years old and just snuck i should tried twenty three couple weeks ago so i think i might be the oldest in the room but second oldest i'm a i'm a senior right now but yeah and what's what's the how do you make money right so we monetize in a traditional like b b sense where we charge companies the ability to source through candidates and post jobs i think what's super exciting about us is through this common application we've actually generated super in endeavor profile on candidates so basically more information that you get on a traditional job application or on a site like linkedin so that way as a company if i wanna say hey i want specifically people at stanford that were in their society of you know women engineers club that applied you know that studied cs for two years and have two years of python experience this is all information that we have in a structured format and can target your job listings too and you know alongside that you can source through these candidates on our platform so what wait a second so companies pay to post the job to that you will show to the audience where do they post that where does that happen because you're saying it's a chrome extension and right when you're just using chrome you're browsing the internet or you you wanna apply to you you go to a a career page you just click submit so where are they seeing the job where's that that other side yeah a fantastic the question so it's twofold full so actually within our extension when you click submit will actually pop up relevant jobs so basically we're able to kind of have a medium to four jobs candidates no matter what site they're on so even if they're linkedin you apply it with jobs this that post submission little model pops up and it'll will recommend you similar jobs and companies have a chance to advertise there in addition to that our matching algorithm is kind of like the core part of the business as well where through the matches like tenants are specifying exactly what companies that they're looking for startups series a companies you know companies that are founded by women companies that are in specific spaces so that gives us a very targeted audience to show jobs too i think in the last month or so i think we've about over eight hundred thousand jobs show just within the matches on so check this out if you go to their site you go to simplify dot jobs scroll all the way at the bottom they have this thing that says check out some of our popular jobless list and they have things that say top summer internships internships at unicorns best remote internships software roles at top yc companies they have this really cool thing that says moonshot and you go to moonshot that says leading web three crypto and block chain startups moon the moonshot list of two thousand twenty two and so you can apply to some of these moonshot dude this is fascinating congratulations and so what's the like so far yeah so we're actually still pre revenue right now really focused on building out the consumer of things i think when we set out to this we just really wanted to focus and make sure that the consumer side was flushed out before we turned on the jets on the monetization side i will say the kind of the way the product works now is we've built these scraper that pick up jobs and like i mentioned of all these different opportunities on the internet we put them into kinda like playlists almost so you can browse them almost like spotify so if you know you wanna work with the unicorn here's an example of jobs at these at these specific companies and basically through that we've actually been able to funnel a lot of candidates into their existing jobs so in the last couple months more than fifty companies have reached out to us via emails we've recently put up a form that is now allowing us to collect inbound from companies where they say they've actually hired somebody that discovered that plot their their company on simplifying so very soon i think we're flushing out the recruiter side of things allowing you to have a self serve model we can post jobs for nuance in garner and job and i think that's how many you said a hundred thousand people use it many people have gotten a job from it right so that's something that we're in the process of figuring out so through a crm we can see how many people are like in the interview process because people generally use that the track where they are just to keep organized for themselves but once how many interviews i think we i don't have the number on the top of my head but that's something i definitely up for you but what i say about just it get give me an ish i think around like thirty percent have reported like movement in their job search process so whether that's an interview whether that's they've gotten rejected oh i think that's something so we're like fifth fifty thousand people i've gotten a job interview because of you ish i would say around that yeah because i think cavalier we don't really contribute to helping you get an interview we just help you apply faster i think that's the thing a lot of you ask like or or am gonna get a job by you simple but i think the goal is just to make it easy to apply whether or not you get an interview is still up to you i'm that's kinda of why we're investing in the newsletter to help people kind of actually learn the career aspect so kinda wanna see ourselves as like credit karma for jobs so we can give you like hey you learn these skills if you're applying to like twenty jobs you still haven't gotten interviews i think that's kind of what we're looking for explain how give me the kinda like two line explanation how does this get huge so how does this become a massive company what would be your best pitch for that yeah great question i think the vision that we have is just a like be in every single person's browser then being in every single person's browser so we have a ninety percent retention rate on our extension which is basically generally the case for most browser extensions people install them kind of forget about them and they're only really pop up when they're relevant so i think the goal is to be able to make this universal everybody that's applying to jobs wants the same time live in everybody's bowser extension so we have oversight on where people are applying and through that i think this gives us like a huge wedge in the recruiting space the future recruiting i think is gonna be all data driven as an employee you wanna know like hey i wanna target people that are applying to my competitors i wanna target people that you know are interested in software and current platforms have very minimal visibility on where people are actually applying what jobs are actually interested in i think on linkedin i've been recommended many jobs as like an electrician or a plumber so i i don't really think that they know what i'm interested in i think through kind of art browser extension we're able to collect the data offs and make the process of trying to job much more like personalized and i think through that companies are gonna be signing up to recruit on our platform and to post jobs when they find out that their dollar on supply goes a lot farther in making did you have you raised money yeah so we actually just closed a seed runs first somewhere announcing yet a couple weeks ago it was a two million dollar round led by craft wow wow okay well i don't know what the hell you're doing here but that sounds awesome dude it says you're so listen to that too where where where was my email yeah i've got it and i can see this this is now i'm upset you left me to michael this let me read the let me read the team bio so there's michael here he's a designer a linkedin trader with thirty million views and sixty thousand followers rochelle is the cto he's an engineer and product architect who scaled products to over a million users and then there's ethan the cto who i guess he runs a career newsletter with ninety thousand subscribers are those all accurate because that's a very impressive trio all students too yeah we're well so actually we interestingly we've all dropped out but recently ethan came back to live on campus because we both are on near full scholarships at stanford so we basically get free housing here so take a couple of classes get free housing it's a great it's a great gig so but we then full time on list for the last year and a half and rochelle lives in by the way in san francisco i like that you said dropped out versus leave of absence leave of absence is is you know one foot in one foot out dropped out is committed right it's the the old pig versus chicken breakfast breakfast analogy the the chicken is involved but the pig is committed you you you're the pig you guys are committed i like that and you raised this two million dollar round can you say the valuation yeah so we raised out a twenty post oh fuck really yeah good job their yc their wise it's definitely tough market i think it's also an inflection point for us where when the markets are rough wait wait you said tough market as a you think that's too low no in terms of in general i think raising today is pretty difficult and i think we'd had a little bit of a harder time but i think we definitely benefited in the sense that we've gotten a lot of growth of really tough to find a job these days so i think jobs seekers are more willing to give like new startups ups the chance and i think we've been able to capitalize that when people install them why they generally don't uninstall and people you'll seem to like the product so i think we're super excited this is great i love the product i wanna invest really like your approach here i do think you know when i asked the question of how can this be big and you're you you had the kind of like what i'll call like the the vision answer which just like what if everybody what if everybody use this then it would be big there's another way to kinda think about that which is a bog bottoms up way which says you know we think on every customer we're gonna generate this much revenue so with a hundred thousand people or two hundred thousand people or a million people using this extension we think we would be generating a hundred million dollars a year right that would be you know so so there's usually a formula that says x users times y value per user equals z you know revenue and so you know you wanna have that for you guys i know you're you know pre revenue so you maybe you don't know exactly how much our user is gonna be worth but it'd be good to have a guess so that's kind of my only my only like constructive feedback everything else was was music to my ear so well done definitely and i love these i love these businesses i think the guy's name is ian seagull i think that's i started zip recruiter if i remember correctly zip recruiter was like it had the largest series a at the time like five years ago ever it was like a sixty million series a because they bootstrap the business to many many tens of millions in revenue and then what's the guy's name wilson what's his first name is it the guy who has wilson or union ventures in new york greg is fred wilson he has this awesome blog post and he's like we were seen investors of indeed and it's the greatest business model of all time because it's basically google adwords you know like people only it's like a pay performance type of thing and it's one of the greatest business i've bet businesses i've ever seen i love these types of businesses because they're perfectly aligned like the the what you pay for you the pay for performance is perfectly aligned all everyone's incentives are pretty aligned it would be even better if it was like paid per job placement but that's a little bit more challenging but so it's pretty nicely aligned i think this is awesome yeah i no super really appreciate that i think we're still working out the business model right now we're trying a subscription based thing but definitely open to to try new things so yeah we'd love to hear if feedback he here's what fred said he goes so people you know one of the the first grade investment we made at was in the summer of two thousand five in in for indeed and they talked about the founders were great the team is great blah he says they have a product that's used by eighty million people worldwide every month and they have a business model like google is the best on the internet revenues profits customer satisfaction shareholder value they've built a fortress and i'm happy to have a a seat in the front row so that's a that's that's pretty cool well listen this is this has been this been awesome thank you for coming up i think we have to announce the winner so the winner is gonna get thirty five hundred dollars for for today's pitch competition i'm gonna message you sean who who up my winner is and then you could yeah go ahead ask what you want well i was gonna say how do we settle on thirty five hundred it's a very specific number here and maybe bar shop you might have a have an opinion on this that's like one soup up macbook you know macbook pro or something do you have bobby like so you have a syndicate now like it would be very wise if you just gave twenty thousand dollars to every single person who's presented that's we're working on and sean you said something interesting which is like why did i not hear about this startup and there's what we've learned is that angel investors are having a damn hard time finding the top college startups it takes a ton of time to build these communities like we have at stanford in michigan and so right now we're trying to prove model with a syndicate and helping support startups like you saw today and like the ones you saw under the michigan show but the long run is hope to do something just like you mentioned there how old are you bobby how are you in college still yeah i'm twenty two i'm a junior at university of michigan and so what happens in two years when you're when you're out we're gonna gonna change the world to college entrepreneurship forever we start by building communities for founders and now we're bringing an angel investors into the mix we think that the way they college entrepreneurship is fostered by institute centers clubs at schools is bad we think that the vc funds that are targeting college entrepreneurs are just looking for proposed deal well we have a better way of doing it by building the vast communities and then intelligently bringing in dope angels like you guys to make them make a lot more interesting alright well congratulations you're on to something sean and i have selected the winner and i don't angel invest a ton not nearly as much as sean and out but so the winner on this one i would love if you guys would accept me i would put a very small like five or ten thousand dollars if you'd allow it but i don't know about you sean i don't know if you're you're in that same boat but we both we both are aligned on who we think won this one yeah i think you know what is the best pitch who wins the pitch competition it's the person who can have a clear pitch that's compelling that gets you excited and and they're committed i think that's the hardest thing with investing in college entrepreneurs you don't know if next semester they're back re enrolled in school it's like okay cool so now you're super part time on this like oh this is now an extra extracurricular activity damn that's not what i want like like those fishing guys you know remember the the guys who had the not the fishing with the the boating company we loved it and they were like yeah but you know we're in college is like i don't wanna give you money then but by the way i invested in those guys and they are going for it you so they're they they they are they're are pretty committed to it but i i think it is hard to know because you know it's just one extra risk factor that you don't have with somebody who's who's out of school is like that they'll just get sucked back in by society to like the safe path and so and by the way a lot of times they should like go out there and and get late and do whatever you want but if you're gonna get after it i want you to get after it like if i'm giving someone money it's like i don't care this isn't supposed to be cute like i want you to give me more money back you know what i like a simple investment philosophy yeah like when you say like well you know but i learned a lot it's like yeah i don't care i don't care what you learn i care about me and my money so learning the learning is great but it is second to earning earning is always after the learning it's the fall back right anyways we the business that we've both selected is simply i think you could probably tell from our excitement during the pitch you know solves a real problem f bro oh sorry simplified not jobs yes yes there he is michael from simplify you are the winner of the pitch competition you had the best pitch you have the most traction you seem the most committed that this is like happening and there's no there's no way out so congratulations you got you you you have done it if thank you guys so much huge fan of the podcast and yeah simplify i think it's we really gotta get that url for sure you're never gonna get it you're never gonna get it what we gonna do with this thirty five hundred dollars michael it's a great question i think model service hey if you guys want we can make that happen but i think what's most important for us is investing in our social channels i think you know huge fan of the podcast one of the hardest things for us is getting in the hands of war college students our users have been super helpful and kind of organically spreading it we don't even have referral rewards so they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts i think we wanna invest this and you know whether it's our social media whether it's in on the grounds kind of referral programs i think these are all things that would help us really take us to the next level in terms of you user growth you can either get a little bit of linkedin promotion or an eight sleep mattress the the answers is it's a very obvious to me frankly yeah this is two hundred and ninety one days of chipotle so that's a lot of fuel that we're giving you for that is for for you to go forward but you have a mattress think of us every day at lunch this be like this lunch was brought to you by my first million every single day as you build this company for two hundred ninety one days and at the end of that you're on your own sean let's do a wrap up here about like what about the these whole things i owe i mean we've only done it two or three times i leave these things energized i also leave these things intimidated so all every single person we've had on this even if we've like given them a hard time is incredibly impressive would you say would you say so yeah i mean i just remember where i was at that time and it's you know we're not even in the same room like i was don't where i was but so so just putting yourself in this position to be doing things like this can make a pretty big impact i i did this is actually how i became an entrepreneur did a pitch competition my senior year second semester senior year i never even thought about business before that i did a pitch competition i ended up winning twenty five grand and it changed the direction of my life like you i literally wouldn't have been an entrepreneur had that not happen and so an the idea was bad my pitch was bad if i go back and look was the what was the twenty five four what was this of sushi the chipotle for sushi idea dude those those those investors were horrible how did they well the there's and we had two things going for us one you know we had the the the most swag of anyone at the pitch competition so we we we gave the as you know pitch i brought the duke basketball players in as a cameo during the pitch they threw out t shirts to the crowd so we want extra money from the fans and stuff like that but also one of the judges he was worth like i don't know twenty fifty million dollars or something like that and he he did it because he owned fifty apple b's so he was like oh restaurant industry great industry to be in whereas ninety nine percent the population would have said that's a terrible idea but this guy had made is living off of apple vs and so you know we had we had one judge in the bag from that oh man that's a the that was the that competition was really bad if they if you want is that these are so much better this guy just raised money at a twenty million dollar valuation from like you know a top twenty venture capital i mean it's like pretty it's so much better than when you and i were doing this type of stuff yeah totally by the way the funny thing is we won the cup competition and then we also they also paid for one nba student to work for us as an intern so they paid his salary and we were like we were younger than this guy this guy had worked like seven years of like real world experience before then and so he was taking direction he's was twenty one year old idiots and we were like dude out of a role let's just role we're we're were just like yeah can you put us an excel model and he just and then he would build it and we'd be like yeah you know this doesn't very good can you just make it better and we just had this guy work on an excel model for like five months he must have been like this is the worst experience in my life he well congratulations guys you're you're amazing bobby good job organizing these guys and i forget your your the other guy's name who's the bmc over there but good job no yeah you what your name and know ana none good job you know that energy that you have it's it's it's really actually great for setting these guys up you know trading stuff is really hard and like dude i don't know if you guys have ever like done high school sports but like when you're lifting weights and like trying to bench press a ton of weight and you have your team around you who's like get it get it like on that fuck on that like when you guys are trying to max your bench or squad over that should actually help and you're kinda doing the same thing so kudos to you it it it does actually help psych these guys up so congratulations everyone thank you guys so much and sean i'll just close was like you mentioned that going on a pod second semester year senior like pretty much changed your future you guys are changing these kids features like after the michigan episode the amount of people that reached out to us and like close saying hit these people up hit me up bee how what you mentioned dot edu if these kids up we're gonna put them put the des script like their website three emails in the script in bali you guys are changing these kids lives too so we're damn or damn not necessarily for the better we're changing them for sure lives are changing we don't know which way it's going up i think that's the pod yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back