Stanford Students Pitch Us Their Startups | $3500 Prize Money (#449)

Shaan Puri

Alright, we're back! We had a little technical difficulty. We accidentally let the kids from Sanford Community College in. Now we have the real Stanford here. Their computers work, their internet's good, and 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 Firehounsel, as I call him. Your nickname is "Fire" because last time you came in with absolute fire. We almost couldn't tame you while you were on the podcast. But go ahead, give us the intro for this.

Bobby Housel

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. It's called **Entrepreneur Power Hour**. We're changing how college founders meet and how angel investors meet these college founders. We're changing the game entirely. We have Anant here, who's our community lead over at Stanford. Things are moving! We launched a syndicate, and we're hyped. But today, we're moving away from Michigan and we're meeting the Stanford killers. So, I'm excited to pass it over to Anant. He's going to get us rolling and introduce this back.

Shaan Puri

Bobby, I love you! I got a question for you. Is it true what they say about the "Post My First Million" bump? Like, for college kids, you know? Are you getting kisses on the cheek around campus? Do you get free lunch in the cafeteria? What's it like? What was life like right after?

Bobby Housel

the cheek

Shaan Puri

of your life

Bobby Housel

My girlfriend was starting to get jealous. She's like, "Who, who, who? Who's this? The female founders are coming out of nowhere."

Sam Parr

coming up and taking a look yeah okay

Shaan Puri

We need the Conor McGregor clip where he goes, "It's red panty night when you sign to fight me. You call home, you call your wife, you say, 'Conor McGregor made us first baby, break out the red panties.' That's what happens when my first million comes to your college campus, baby. We've done it! Sam and Sean come into our campus, we've done it. Bring out the red solo cups, baby, we've done it!"

Bobby Housel

either the angel ambassadors or the female founders I don't know who to worry about more

Shaan Puri

alright so let's get started go ahead go ahead let's kick it off

Ananth Veluvali

cheers thanks so much seems like we're putting this business podcast we're gonna enjoy this podcast

Michael Yan

nice yeah I mean we

Ananth Veluvali

Got a great group of Stanford founders over here. Bobby's an absolute killer; love that man dearly. I hope that you're going to love the founders we have. We've got a great community we're building out. So, if you're interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to me. I don't want to spend too much time reintroducing, so I'll introduce our first guy, Tom—Tommy P, as I like to call him. He's a hardware dude and actually the old head of the group. He's a master's student doing a lot of cool stuff, but I don't want to steal Tommy's thunder, so I'll let him take things from here.

Sam Parr

how old is old

Ananth Veluvali

I'll let tom answer that because I actually have no idea how old but 20 + yeah he's gonna

Shaan Puri

be he's gonna be 22 24 you guys

Bobby Housel

oh great boys

Shaan Puri

that is old

Bobby Housel

you're a real great boys my friend

Tom Pritsky

I know, I know. Well, thanks! And yeah, thanks for the intro, Anant. I'm super pumped to be here. Should we dive right into the pitch?

Sam Parr

yeah the 5 minutes

Ananth Veluvali

or 2

Shaan Puri

I think we have wait wait what's the timing on these so I

Bobby Housel

think we did 2 minutes

Shaan Puri

last time

Bobby Housel

somewhere like 3 or 5

Shaan Puri

3 bobby saying

Sam Parr

let's do 3

Shaan Puri

Alright, here’s the deal. You got 3 minutes. We’re not going to interrupt you, but after that, we can just jump in at any time and interrupt you. Okay, so let’s do it.

Tom Pritsky

okay keep that in mind cool so okay

Sam Parr

so

Tom Pritsky

Hi, Tom here. We're building wearable subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, essentially taking your Netflix or YouTube captions and putting them in heads-up displays. Hearing loss is a massive issue. I mean, you should be pre-med, so I guess you have a few med stats at your disposal. That's what I'm going to do. It affects close to half a billion people. It's twice as common as cancer or diabetes, and it's growing. By 2050, 1 in 10 people will have a disabling hearing loss. It is also comorbid with a lot of things, including dementia. People with hearing loss are 3 to 5 times more likely to develop dementia. Despite everything I just said, hearing solutions today are horrible. They're really expensive—ranging from $2,000 to $8,000—often out of pocket for hearing aids because insurance, like Medicare, doesn't cover them. The biggest killer for me, though, is that 75% of people who could actually use hearing aids use absolutely nothing. If you talk to anyone who has a hearing loss and has tried hearing aids, what they'll probably tell you is, "Hey, I bought it, put it in my ear, hated it, put it on the shelf, and never used it again." Now, there's a really cool medical reason why people hate hearing aids more than glasses, but we don't actually have time for that. What we do know about the deaf and hard of hearing community, like myself, is that we love captions. And what's not to love? They're really cost-effective and incredibly accurate. Sorry.

Sam Parr

keep going I I like it keep going

Tom Pritsky

Incredibly accurate and intuitive, people know what captions are and how to use them. In fact, deaf and 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 deaf or hard of hearing person. Make sure to enunciate so they hear you! But yeah, pro tip: we knew that captions were incredibly valuable, but we needed a way to get them off your devices and into the real world where you needed them for conversations. We looked at all the AR players, tried a whole bunch of AR headsets to bring those captions into your field of view. We made this really fancy chart and 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 the campus except for me. There are a lot of reasons why AR adoption has been so poor, but the fundamental trade-off in our thesis is this trade-off of fully immersive content versus true wearability. 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 life and a form factor you actually want to put on your head. Now, in to immediately...

Sam Parr

describe the product what it looks like for the listener because a lot of people aren't watching oh yeah

Tom Pritsky

For sure! It's a wearable device. I actually have a demo video I'd love to play after; it just shows what it looks like on the inside really quick. It's a lightweight AR product designed in a retrofit manner, meaning it attaches to your glasses. A lot of your users are older individuals who 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 deaf and hard of hearing. It has an all-day battery life and is incredibly light. People tell us they don't notice when they're wearing it. You look through it and see subtitles and text floating in your field of view, and you can position it anywhere you want. Is that helpful?

Shaan Puri

To clarify, I don't know if I'm too sci-fi 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.

Sam Parr

It basically just looks for the listener. It looks like Google Glass, but it turns any set of eyeglasses into a Google Glass-looking device. So, sorry, go ahead.

Shaan Puri

and you're you're at the end of your time here so so let's wrap the pitch

Tom Pritsky

Yeah, exactly. So, that's the product. That's where we're building. Users love it! We have over 700 preorders, completely inbound from awards we won. We won the **Indian Presidential Gold Medal** for social good, and we also won the health category of Stanford's largest startup competition. Additionally, we have tremendous inbound interest from cinema halls and B2B [business-to-business] partners. They're all required to provide these accommodations. We recently signed an NDA with 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 deregulated this year, which is crazy! You no longer have to go to a doctor or an audiologist to get them; you can buy them over the counter. So, our product can be right there, right next to hearing aids at Best Buy. This is the first time ever that this is possible. Finally, the last thing I want to hit is, you know, we built a really cool product, but the immediate question is: "Hey, why can't someone else build this?" You have Fitbit and 30 other versions of Fitbit. Consumer hardware is inherently commodifiable. The thing is, our revenues do not come from our hardware sales; they come from the recurring subscription revenues that we get on this product. That scales really heavily. I can talk more about that, but I just want to wrap it up. We're running a pilot trial at Stanford this quarter. If you want, I can connect you to them, and you can try out this product. That's also a picture of me in the corner meeting the President of India for this work.

Shaan Puri

By the way, here's a picture of me with Drake. Alright, so that's a great way to end a pitch. So, two questions: How does it actually do the live transcription? Is this software you guys are writing? Are you using some open-source tools? Are you using AI? What are you doing?

Tom Pritsky

Yeah, so we're currently using third-party automated speech recognition services. We're source agnostic, meaning we support three: Google, Microsoft, and IBM. Their automated systems restream the captions and display them here. We are also able to handle subtitle files. If you walk into a movie theater, you can load the subtitle file and display it. Another feature is called card interpreting, where a person types, and then you can stream the captions to your device. We're moving towards a long device model that's Wi-Fi agnostic and can work anywhere. As these models improve, they get better and decrease in latency, like Whisper.

Sam Parr

Two questions. **Question number 1:** You're in luck! I am a soon-to-be hearing aid wearer, and Sean has someone in his life who wears one too. I have a hearing loss, so I'm actually in the process of getting one now. The biggest issue with my hearing loss is not when I'm 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 all sounds like one thing to me, so I constantly have to lean in. I want to know more about that. **Question number 2:** The whole dementia thing. I learned a bit about it, and from my understanding, the reason why people with hearing loss can develop dementia is that that part of their brain isn't working. So, they partially get a little funky, I think that's what it is. How does this actually solve that if I'm still not hearing? I'm just reading.

Tom Pritsky

Yeah, okay, super good question. Let me hit the first one first. So, regarding hearing loss, the biggest complaint from people who actually use their hearing aids is high noise settings. I hate bars and I hate clubs as a result. Well, actually, everyone has a hard time hearing, but I have a much worse time. What we're building here is adding a directional microphone so you can isolate the speaker of interest. We're targeting both through the model, right? The ASR model for voice reduction through software and also hardware by pointing a directional microphone at the speaker of interest. That may be able to improve the situation a bit, but it is an inherent challenge. Now, to address your other question about dementia: yes, the part of the brain isn't being stimulated. But there's another thing, which is the social withdrawal that you experience. As a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, if you have hearing loss, you hate going out. It's really hard, and sounds sound weird. So, you lose the quality of your social interactions, and that withdrawal, along with the lack of stimulation, really triggers dementia. A host of other issues, like depression, are also very comorbid with hearing loss.

Sam Parr

and wouldn't this thing be more embarrassing to wear than a thing in my ear that no one could see

Shaan Puri

exactly because like

Sam Parr

You know, I don't know, man. You take those glasses off, and I might want to hook up with you more than without them.

Tom Pritsky

that's that's an honor but so

Shaan Puri

yeah

Tom Pritsky

you know on our website we say you can use this on dates so you can use it on dates but our

Sam Parr

it won't it it won't work but you could use it

Tom Pritsky

you could try yeah you moved off topic

Sam Parr

a bit but so yeah let them do the pod my friend

Tom Pritsky

Our goal is to integrate it fully into the glycolysis. This is an early version of the form factor. It was built on exclusively grant-based funding that we've received from the U.S. State Department and the Government of India. However, we're moving to an integrated form factor in your glasses. We also built it in a retrofitted way, meaning mounting, because most of our deaf and hard-of-hearing users already have glasses. We want it to work with their existing solution.

Shaan Puri

I agree as possible as you

Tom Pritsky

can get oh sorry

Shaan Puri

I'm gonna give you my I'll give you my reaction to

Sam Parr

this

Shaan Puri

Right, so I think you did a great job on your pitch, especially at the beginning in the problem section. You did a fantastic job outlining that it's a problem, and it's a bigger problem than you think. It has all these knock-on effects, so you nailed the problem part. On the solution part, you're clearly a smart guy, and you are building something that's cool and useful. However, I don't think it's realistic for two reasons. Number one, like Sam said, I think that the thing looks a little dorky, and people are going to have an aversion to wearing it right now. You're like, "Well, this is V1. This is the equivalent of the big giant cell phones that we used to have before we got the cool, sleek ones." I believe you, but you're in an arms race against Google, Facebook, Apple, and all these companies that basically everybody wants to build AR glasses.

Tom Pritsky

yeah

Shaan Puri

It's like the hottest thing outside of AI is AR glasses. Whoever gets AR glasses will have the new phone. You can put the screen on your eyes, and so they're all going to invest $1,000,000,000 in making the most lightweight glasses that have a computer in them, basically. You're going to be trying to slim down your form factor using grant funding and all that stuff. Apple, Google, and Facebook are going to be doing this with everything they've got, and they're likely to get there first in terms of having the lightweight form factor. Captions might just be a feature or an app on top of their product, and I think you're going to waste a ton of money trying to get the hardware to work when you're not going to be the one who makes hardware for the masses to wear as smart glasses. The big companies are going to do it, so I think that's the problem. Now, the one thing you mentioned that I want to call out is hearing aids. Hearing aids have been deregulated this year, so for the first time ever, you can sell them without 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 want to build because it sounds like you're trying to do good in the world by changing it and helping people, you know, that good stuff. But there's somebody out there who's going to say, "Oh cool, DDC hearing aids are going to do that now." That's now more possible than it was before because you don't need the telemedicine component in between. I think that's actually the real business opportunity out of all the things you said. I think you're on the right path, but I don't think you're going to be the one to do it. I think the big companies are going to make the glasses, and then the captions are going to be a feature on top of those.

Tom Pritsky

100% could I hit that. Real quick, yeah, so I completely agree with you. Facebook is spending $10 to $15 billion a year right now on their AR product. You know, Apple wants to come out with AR glasses, hopefully in 2024. We want them to validate the AR market. We are... the thing is, you know, let's say Facebook for example, they're building an AR headset that...

Shaan Puri

They're not gonna validate it. They're gonna own it. They're not gonna validate it for you to go own; they're gonna own it.

Tom Pritsky

100%. But they need an immersive AR headset to run what is the metaverse. They want to build a headset that can support their existing platform. Mark's, I mean, Zuckerberg's vision is, you know, the metaverse—this immersive reality that cannot run on transcribed glass. As a result, it cannot run on this lightweight form factor with all-day battery wearability setup. So, we can much more quickly build a wearable product because we're focused on captions and critical information for the deaf and hard of hearing. That is, you know, the core focus of our product: building for wearability and form factor right now for a core use case of people who clearly need it, not that broader vision of multiverse content.

Shaan Puri

That has happened to me. Companies like Snapchat want to do it. They just want to put a camera on there to snap a photo. Yeah, right? That's the only use case they care about right now.

Michael Yan

yeah

Shaan Puri

Google wants to put your notifications, your text messages, and your email on it, right? So everybody's got a different vision, and it's not just Facebook who's trying to do this. We're trying to build a whole multiverse or metaverse, or whatever the hell [it's called].

Tom Pritsky

yeah

Shaan Puri

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 into some version of a phone, maybe a lightweight version first. So, I don't buy that. And for that reason, even though I think you're a good intention and you're a smart guy, I don't think this is an investable product. What do you think, Sam?

Sam Parr

I agree, but I do want to give you kudos because I think creating something hardware-related is ballsy. I think it's awesome that you're going this route as it is now. No, I don't think it's the way it is, but I have a feeling that if you keep going down this route, you're going to find a better solution soon. I actually think you should continue to pursue it. You've come up with some interesting technology. I also like the fact that there's an inflection here, which is that hearing aids are now...

Bobby Housel

yeah deregulated are deregulated

Sam Parr

I think that those are always good inflections when you could pounce on those things. However, I don't know if this is the right solution. It is interesting technology that I think is actually going to be used for something else.

Michael Yan

cool

Bobby Housel

yeah

Sam Parr

And this is coming from a half-deaf guy, so... I would not want to use this as it is now. But 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.

Shaan Puri

cool right on alright thanks tom thanks so much

Tom Pritsky

yeah thank you guys

Shaan Puri

best of luck

Sam Parr

Our next one is going to start with the big D: democratizing. Oh no! Whenever I see the big D, I'm curious. So, what do we got?

Ananth Veluvali

yeah from gandalf the grey we go to frodo the young so is the freshman

Michael Yan

of the group

Ananth Veluvali

He's an absolute killer. One of my close friends, he's got a pretty sick startup. So, I'll leave the rest to him. Sohom, it's all yours, bro.

Shaan Puri

sohom come come democratize us

Soham Govande

what's up sharks my name is sohom I'm the founder of admit yogi we're on a mission to democratize college admissions using the power of big data and artificial intelligence but before I can tell you a little bit more about the business I first kinda wanna start with a personal story about myself I went to high school in one of the largest public high schools across america down in good old round rock texas my class had over a 1000 students including myself and although our counselors were incredibly hardworking and supportive they were also massively under resourced so when it came time to apply to college we were always at a disadvantage compared to these far wealthier privileged students who could shell out literally 1,000 of dollars to these private college consultants and this is a nationwide problem you see today if you want to get into one of these elite schools you'll need insider strategies but for the longest time they've been maintained and gatekept by this mafia of $6,000 $6,000 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 friend applications reading through some of their essays extracurriculars and awards was really meaningful to me because I got to see how they told their stories so in turn I could learn how I wanted to tell my own now with ahmed yogi I want to ensure that everyone from rural texas to the bustling big apple can experience that same feeling of magic we've built this platform this database of over 5,000 real applications that were accepted to elite universities like harvard stanford and mit and these applications are the real deal we're talking essays awards extracurriculars sat scores gpa you name it the whole damn edge a lot sharks we're feasting and we are a startup in 2023 so we'd be remiss without mentioning ai though we use an ai powered algorithm to match high schoolers with students at their dream schools who are successful let's say there is an indian student in texas he wants to study computer science at stanford university he can read through my applications which I spent 100 of hours working on for literally the price of a cup of coffee and what's really cool is as we start to kind of stockpile this massive data moat we can start to use artificial intelligence to extract really high level amazing insights that demystify 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

Shaan Puri

So, um... I got a question. Yeah, can you skip to the two parts about the business? I want to know: 1. How this makes money 2. Are you raising money? If so, how much are you raising and what's your valuation? Absolutely. Let me know those two things.

Soham Govande

So, we started this business in September of 2022 with **$0** of outside funding. We're on track to finish our first year with **$130,000** of revenue. Currently, we have **$85** in the bank, and we're growing at **100%**.

Sam Parr

Wow, congratulations! Thank you. So, you started this in... your full fiscal year for 2023 was $180,000.

Soham Govande

oh around yeah no this 180 by the end of 2023

Sam Parr

oh okay alright alright I got you

Soham Govande

Mhmm, yeah. So, from September 2022 to August 2023, we'll have made **$130,000** in revenue. What's really exciting is we've actually helped over **11,000** high schoolers with their college applications. We think that impact is enormously meaningful, coming from a team of students who all went...

Michael Yan

to public high schools

Shaan Puri

so so what do you charge how do you make money on this

Soham Govande

Yeah, so college students upload their applications on our database, and high schoolers pay to unlock them. So if I'm a high schooler, then I'm paying for every person's application that I'm reading. We call it "Lowe's profiles," which include multiple applications, essays, awards, and activities.

Shaan Puri

Gotcha. And so, you charge how much to unlock one application?

Soham Govande

so it ranges between $5.10 per application

Sam Parr

and why are the college kids uploading their thing

Soham Govande

That's a great question. 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. It takes literally 30 seconds for a college student to upload everything from their extracurriculars, their essays, to their activities lists. We have over 5,000 applications on our service, and a lot of these are coming from schools across the country.

Sam Parr

wow and how did you get the the customers how did you get the people to hear about this

Soham Govande

We think that distribution is really important in 2023. So we have a TikTok of over 61,000 followers, all organic, and 30,000,000 organic social impressions. We think that really marketing to Gen Z is super important today because there's not a single college consultancy out there that can really say that they can access 61,000 minds of 17-18 year olds at any given instant.

Sam Parr

So I'm shocked... like we haven't made a joke about the upsell if you're applying to Harvard. Like, to tell you not to be an Asian person? Why haven't we made this joke yet? Why has this not [come up]?

Shaan Puri

we're we're off our game so are you raising money right now

Soham Govande

At the moment, we're not raising. We've never had a need to raise since we've always been profitable since day one. However, in the future, we are open to a coin.

Shaan Puri

I really wanna invest more now god

Sam Parr

yes you

Bobby Housel

did it great pitch

Sam Parr

Perfect answer! Yes, that was the perfect answer. Awesome job, awesome progress so far. This is very, very cool.

Shaan Puri

By the way, I was going to shout this product out in the next podcast anyway. I saw you on Twitter, and I saw Admit Yogi on Twitter. I was like, "Oh, it's 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 work." So yeah, whatever, who cares?

Sam Parr

put it

Shaan Puri

In the database, they now have this database of college admissions essays, along with the stats and resumes, and all that good stuff. I thought that was really smart. I was going to bring this up anyhow. It's funny that you're here. I gotta give you props on two things. Number one, you did two things really well in your pitch. I want to call out the first: you said at the beginning, "Before I tell you... yeah, I'm the founder of AdmitYogi, here's what we do." Then you went on to say, "Before I tell you about the business, I gotta tell you a personal story as to why I came up with this idea in the first place." That's a great way to do a pitch. Once you have somebody's attention, like if you're in a meeting and they can't really leave, that's a great way to start a pitch. It shows your founder fit with the problem, but also, people just want to hear a story. You get them from going into kind of this transactional analysis mode to storytelling mode. I think that was really, really well done. Then, the fact that you actually have traction is the second good part of your pitch. This is not just a theory; this is something that you actually have in motion now. Sam, give me your take: would you invest in this? Why or why not?

Sam Parr

Would I invest if I were to learn... If you're taking this as a serious company, I mean, you're only what, 19 or 20 years old? You're a 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 $5, that's like... meh. I don't love that. I think it's really hard to build a big business on $5, so I would want to know about what your average revenue per user is. But I think that you are a very investable person, so I definitely am interested.

Soham Govande

I totally... yeah, can I ask a question on that a little bit? Yeah, yeah. So, our average customer spend right now is **$130**. People pay to unlock these profiles in bulk, anywhere from 1 to 50 profiles at once. On average, people want to unlock **26 profiles** of someone at the dream school. All three of us are really committed to this, so we're actually considering taking a leave of absence to drop out and work on this full time instead.

Shaan Puri

How many students are applying? Like, how big is the customer base for this? How many students are applying to college, or let's say, in the serious cohort where they'd be willing to pay for something like this? How many students is that per year?

Michael Yan

yeah

Soham Govande

So, in America, there are 2,200,000 students who are applying to college every single year. However, if you narrow that down to the most elite colleges, then you have around 400,000 to 500,000 students entering this market every year.

Shaan Puri

And so how does this get huge, given what you just said? Right, so let's say it's 500,000, and let's say even 20% of that market was to use something like this. So 100,000 customers, that would be like, you know, the absolute... like you guys are dominating the market at that, right? Like so what's that, $5,000,000?

Soham Govande

absolutely that's a great question and that's something we've actually thought about a lot at admob

Shaan Puri

So, but sorry, just to do the math. If 100,000 people did it, you said they spent about $100,000,000 each. That'd be $10,000,000 in revenue if that was the case.

Soham Govande

right so currently

Sam Parr

And we're going to define "big" as like $50,000,000 in revenue. We'll say that's the threshold of when things get really interesting.

Soham Govande

Sure, yeah. So currently, the college admissions market is around **$10 billion**. But that's just spending coming out of the top 1% of Americans. We think that by providing more affordable services, we can reach the other 99%. Not only can we capture that massive initial market, but we can also create a new one entirely and be the biggest player in that space.

Shaan Puri

I think that sounds good. That sounds good because it's democratizing. But in reality, what's going to happen is you're actually just going to try to take that same 1%. The 1% care the most, have the most money, and are the most obsessed. Maybe you expand that to like, you know, the 1% to 9% of the most competitive, willing to pay type of customers. It's actually never the other 99% that you get to be your customer because the other 99% just don't have the problem in the same way or don't have the budget in the same way. So, you know, it's very hard to capture that customer versus the person that's taking test prep, hiring a college consultant, and really stressing about what colleges they're going to go to. They're the ones who are willing to pay for a new solution too.

Soham Govande

That's really interesting. That's actually the initial hypothesis that we had as well: that we were going to target these 1 percenters who are traditionally paying for college consulting services in the first place. However, with this most recent round of early decision or regular decision applications that came out just two weeks ago, we received floods—like hundreds of emails in our inbox—from these students who were traditionally underserved. We're talking about Annie from rural Mississippi, a first-generation college applicant who never knew about traditional consultants. I mean, they were too expensive for her, but Yogi wasn't. So, we initially thought that hypothesis too, but as we started serving our customers and really collecting the data on this, we realized that that actually wasn't the case.

Sam Parr

What happens when Harvard's like, "Oh man, we're getting all these robots"? Or, you know, and then the universal college application (I forget what it's called)... Can they ban you? Can they pull API access? Can it work that way?

Soham Govande

So, we integrate with the Common Application, which is agnostic to universities. 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 it from this national standard.

Shaan Puri

right I think what sam's saying is if could the common app shut off your access

Sam Parr

yes that's what I'm asking

Soham Govande

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 5 extra minutes to onboard a new application on our service. But fundamentally, high school or college students own this data. They have permission to upload it to whatever platforms they want, including Adbit Yogi. And we have a...

Sam Parr

Date... so, here's why you kind of make me all hot and bothered. Number one: typically, people are usually really good at getting traffic to their website, so marketing or getting hype and things like that. A lot of times, the people who are great at that aren't amazing at creating products. Conversely, many people who are amazing at creating products struggle with marketing and getting eyeballs. I've been toying around with your website right now. It looks cool, appealing, and well done. You're saying that you've got all these customers early on. I think that is very, very attractive from a founder's perspective. I find you really fascinating. I’m not convinced that it could be a huge thing, but I am convinced that you could find upsells that could potentially make it big. If I were in your position, I wouldn't raise money. I think that by the time you're 30 years old, you could be worth $100 million because you own a business that makes $30 or $40 million, which you could potentially sell for $100 million or something by the age of 28. Just the fact that you've pulled off the marketplace aspect... because you've already kind of cracked that code, I find that to be incredibly impressive. Mhmm.

Soham Govande

thank you so much

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I really like this. The one thing I would do is I kind of feel like you're using the last business model instead of the next business model. So, I think if somebody came to me today with this, trying to solve the problem of how to help people apply to colleges in a way that helps them be more successful, I would say, "Oh, fantastic! This should feel like ChatGPT." Basically, I should be able to go to some bot that's going to help me with my application. It should assist with my essay, write my essay, or edit my essay. It should also help with the information I put on my application, showing me how to structure it better or present it better. It should learn from successful applications. So, it should take a dataset of successful and unsuccessful applications and then just do it for me. Versus a marketplace where I need to go pick and choose, like, "Okay, Jasmine got into Stanford. Should I pay $10 to unlock her essay?" Okay, then I unlock it. Now I need to look at her essay and compare in my mind how to make my essay more like hers. No, no, no, no! I'll pay you $99 just to help me get into college. Right? Like, give me a 2x shot at getting into my dream school because you have a ChatGPT that's trained on successful college applications. It will write my essay, structure my application, and even do the application. Just let me click submit and go to all these schools. That's what I think the solution looks like if I consider how someone is going to do this in the next three years.

Soham Govande

Yeah, Sean, it's really funny that you mentioned that because actually, that's the exact vision that we had for Advant Yogi. We actually tweeted an MVP of this ChatGPT-like chatbot that can answer any question about college admissions. It's fine-tuned with this proprietary dataset. We built this massive dataset of college applications, and we actually tweeted an MVP about it a couple of 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, $100.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, because you know the college application process... First, you gotta figure out: 1. What schools should I even apply to? 2. Where do I want to go? And then there's the chat back and forth about: "Well, where do you want to go?" "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 then, "Okay, can you help me get in?" And then you're comparing to like, "How much does the college consultant cost?"

Soham Govande

mhmm college consultants charge $6,000 on average

Shaan Puri

Cool, so you say instead of $6,000, pay $99 once and get into your dream school. That's the pitch. Now, I think that is really, really compelling. So if you were doing that, I would invest because I think that is a very, very big idea.

Sam Parr

Mhmm, we should go to the next one, but dude, this is wildly impressive. I saw Sean, but what you're saying reminds me... I saw this tweet. This lady was like: > "It just warmed my heart today that people were doing things in the old-school way. I was on a train and I saw 2 kids copying each other's homework in their notebooks, and it just brought me back to better times before kids were using ChatGPT to plagiarize one another." Mhmm.

Zein

and

Sam Parr

So... I don't know if that would... I don't... Yeah, I think that's like weird to see how kids are going to be doing that in the future. But brother, you're impressive. Congratulations! Don't raise money, by the way. Just own the whole thing.

Bobby Housel

before you go can you remind everyone just how how old are you there are some speculations

Soham Govande

I'm 19 years old wow

Sam Parr

you're ahead of the game you are ahead

Shaan Puri

You should take your leave of absence from the game, but you should just stay right next to the campus. Recruit smart kids to come work for you for free, basically, while you're building a company and they go to class every day.

Sam Parr

you should 100% bail by the way you should 100% bail

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah if you need help talking to your mom I'll I'll call her and help you out

Soham Govande

appreciate that sean

Bobby Housel

thank you cool

Shaan Puri

alright see you alright who's next

Ananth Veluvali

So next up, we have Zane and Matthew. I like to call them the "Two Twin Towers." They're absolute menaces, the bone-out candid. You'd love them, so let them take it away.

Sam Parr

just a bunch of beauties

Shaan Puri

american gladiator or shark tank it's a blazer and blazer

Sam Parr

blazer what a bunch of beauts let's get them up here

Shaan Puri

Oh yeah, Twin Towers. We get them; he wasn't lying. Okay, cool. 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. 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.

Zein

sounds good sounds good let's do it I'm zane

Matthew

And 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 get in touch with their mental health.

Shaan Puri

Alright, but pause there. I didn't understand any of that. So, what is generative AI to help me get in touch with my mental health vlogs? What does that mean? Give me an example.

Matthew

So essentially, we ask users to record their daily highs and daily lows. Then, they respond to a thoughtful question, which we source from psychologists and therapists. They can choose which of these videos they want to share with friends. From these videos, we perform topic detection and sentiment analysis to present patterns to users, helping them get in touch with their mental health. So, more specifically...

Zein

so you vlog and we give you insights into what's going on in your life and help you make sense

Shaan Puri

okay so like an almost like an ai therapist

Zein

exactly it's like soft soft therapy yeah like to

Soham Govande

call it

Shaan Puri

Soft therapy, okay? Love it! None of that hard therapy Sam's been doing for the last few years. Yeah.

Michael Yan

alright carry on yeah and before we jump in we'd like to tell you a little bit

Zein

About the problem and what we were facing: both of us grew up seriously struggling with mental health. I grew up in Thailand and Uzbekistan and didn't have access to traditional therapy and resources. Matthew grew up in San Diego and did proactively seek out those resources. Now, I tried a couple of things, and the thing that worked best for me was journaling. But the problem with journaling was that it took 3 or 4 times to start. It's a hell of a hard habit to get to stick. So we started ideating around Tannen with the idea of making journaling more accessible and engaging to users. The problem is a lot bigger than us, though. Last year, 40% of college students experienced depression, and most of them didn't actively seek out help. Our vision for the future of consumer mental health is that there are products that don't seem to come off as mental health products but have a strong mental health-focused backend component.

Matthew

Yeah, so like I was mentioning at the beginning, what does that actually look like at Candid? Users record videos like they would maybe on another type of social media, specifically highs, lows, and reflective questions. They can share these videos with friends, and then we use simple AI techniques to present patterns to users.

Zein

So, we do three things for them. First, we transcribe the videos. Second, we extract emotions. And third, we extract topics. The first thing we do is identify patterns in people's lives. For example, let's say you're stressed about the college internship search. We play that back for you and help you observe and come to your own conclusions about it. The second thing we do is allow you to smart search through your memories. You can search for emotions and topics associated with the event you're trying to look at. Finally, the last thing we do is build a generative AI visual for you every week. This visual represents what your week looked like emotionally, and it features a specific color scheme that is built and tailored to you.

Shaan Puri

yep and so is this an idea you have cost do you have users where where are you guys at with

Michael Yan

this

Matthew

So right now, we're in TestFlight. We have about 50 users. We just closed our pre-seed round and we're in development mode right now. We'll be launching on the App Store in 2 to 3 weeks, and we'll be focusing specifically on Stanford to really get that product market fit.

Michael Yan

and we have a

Shaan Puri

lot of how much

Sam Parr

are you gonna

Shaan Puri

get customers

Matthew

say again

Shaan Puri

how are you gonna get customers

Zein

Right, so we're going to launch at Stanford in the next month. That's going to be a hard launch, and we're going to use all sorts of distribution strategies.

Sam Parr

and how much did you raise that you said you raised the seed round or something like that yeah

Matthew

we raised

Michael Yan

it pretty

Matthew

much above half a $1,000,000

Sam Parr

wow from who

Matthew

A variety of VCs in the Silicon Valley area reach out to OVO, Z Fellows, and Starnex.

Shaan Puri

yeah okay

Soham Govande

mgsr mgsr ventures

Shaan Puri

And so, you're going to launch that at Stanford. Cool! You can kind of brute force that because you're there. You have friends, you're on campus, that sort of thing. What happens after that? How do you get this to like 10,000 users or 100,000 users?

Matthew

Yeah, absolutely. So, we really do, at first, want to take a very controlled approach. We're going to go campus to campus. We're starting at Stanford, like Zane said. We're going to really lock in the method that works the best. Then, we're going to pick a few similar universities, like Harvard, Caltech, and maybe some universities in Los Angeles, and take that same approach. After that, we'll grow from there.

Zein

So, we're looking at high-stress environments, and we really don't want massive rapid growth. We don't want half a million users tomorrow because we really want to test, especially the ethics behind this. We want to ensure that this is something that's scalable and that we're not doing any active harm to users. Alright?

Shaan Puri

Alright, so Sam, let's pause the pitch here. I want to get your reaction to an idea like this. How do you think about this, either as an entrepreneur or an investor? What do you think?

Sam Parr

As an investor, I don't understand how it's the same thing as before. When you just do the math, getting to venture-sized scale companies, which I don't know what that is—$50 million or $100 million in revenue, something like that—or a nine-figure exit, it's very, very, very, very hard when you're only making $100 or something like that a year per customer. It's just a math problem. It's very challenging to do that, particularly when it's like an 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 $500,000. If this dies next year, then it's like no big deal. You're young, you did something amazing, and you're going to have another swing. So, from your perspective, I think this is the greatest thing ever. From an investor's perspective, it doesn't tickle my fancy, maybe because I don't see the math on how it becomes profitable.

Shaan Puri

has

Michael Yan

an app

Shaan Puri

She called it "Rooted," and it's basically focused on panic attacks. It's a similar space here. What she found was that she didn't raise any money because she's not claiming this is going to be a $1,000,000,000 company. However, it was a problem she had, and she wanted a solution for it. She knew that other people also have this problem with panic attacks. It was too niche for a huge outcome, but because she built the company in a way that suited the size of that market, she's going to be really, really successful with it. Right? She's got 7...

Sam Parr

years of revenue she boots her up to herself

Shaan Puri

she's the only employee it's profitable and it serves that issue she acquires

Sam Parr

Most of it, she can get. She has 2,000,000 users, by the way. It could be a $10,000,000 a year business with 4 or 5 people.

Shaan Puri

Right, and so she is getting growth through basically being the top-ranked search result for "panic attacks" in the app store. She had a strategy around ASO, which is like SEO but for app store optimization, to be the top-ranked term here. When I hear this idea, I think, first, good for you for even doing entrepreneurship at this age. That's the first thing. Second, good for you for chasing a problem that matters with cool new tech. You're going to learn a bunch about this problem and a bunch about this tech. Good for you, like Sam said, for raising some money. So, you know, you're going to 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 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. I think a lot of these solutions look really good in PowerPoint, but when they go into 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 about people getting hearing aids. They get annoyed with them, or the battery dies, and they don't plug it back in, right? Then it sits on the shelf. Adherence is a really big problem.

Sam Parr

they'd rather get dementia than charge their their

Shaan Puri

Their... as far as the... yeah, they just put the battery out. And so your customers go for typically like the low-friction solutions. I think the challenge here is that you have built something that doesn't really tap into human behavior the right way. Meaning, you're saying, "Do the right thing; it'll help you." Unfortunately, people just don't do the right thing and help themselves. I would love to see you guys slim the product down into something that is simple, easier, a little bit more addictive to do, and has some variable reward that's worth the work that you put in. If you've ever read this book, go read *Hooked* by Nir Eyal. Have you guys ever heard of that book?

Zein

yeah I've read it actually it's it's a great book

Shaan Puri

It's about habit formation. It's a great book. I would basically say, how can we make this a more habit-forming product? Because right now, I would suspect that the work you're asking them to do, which is basically to proactively go on video and share what's on their mind, is going to 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.

Zein

I think simplicity is at

Tom Pritsky

at the crux of what

Zein

We're trying to do... I definitely think, you know, we need to distill 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 here is that our generation is the first generation that's super comfortable just getting in front of the cameras and, you know, spewing their truth.

Michael Yan

and that's what we're really

Bobby Housel

trying to do

Shaan Puri

You should make it detect based on what they're posting on social media. That way, there's no extra work. If they're already vlogging or posting stories about stuff, I wonder if you could read that and give them some insights. That would hook them to pour out more, maybe after that, because then you'd have a zero-work solution potentially. I don't know the exact solution; I just know that I have made this mistake. The reason I'm saying this is that I have made this mistake before. I put in a PowerPoint deck what would be an awesome product, and I didn't let reality into the room. When I let reality in, it was clear that users aren't going to do all that work at the beginning. So, they're never going to get the benefits. That's a challenge I've had in the past, and I suspect this reminds me of mistakes I've made before.

Sam Parr

man I made are you guys dropping out what are you gonna do once you got your 500 k

Zein

yes so we're actually taking the leave of absence right now we're having full time on product

Sam Parr

Smart! This is amazing, man. Like, look, my belief is that this is not going to work as you guys have it set up. I think that’s still a massive win for you. My big takeaway is that we say this a bunch: there are levels to this game of building stuff that makes money and products that people like. You guys are, just from this conversation, very clearly at the top of the top. You know, luck is still going to play a role, and you could still mess all this up. But just the fact that you are where you are now, even though Sean said he’s not a fan and I said the same thing, we’re fans of you. You’re going to win; it’s just a matter of whether it’s going to be this one, the next one, or the one after that. But this is really amazing what you’re doing.

Shaan Puri

I saw before the thing of like, "I can't wait to see your second company or your third company." Because, you know, I had my sushi restaurant as my first thing. Sam had his thing as his first thing, like...

Sam Parr

your first business is like saying guys you guys are doing like you guys are way way better

Shaan Puri

Just generative... generative hot dogs. Heat and sand would generate them. And so, hold on.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I put them in the bun on my hand and I handed them. They were very generative.

Shaan Puri

Artificially intelligent to eat them... 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. Alright, it sounds more provolone-y too. If anybody at Steak ever wants to take a leave of excellence and come work with me for a year, come do that. You can email me at sean@seanpuri.com.

Sam Parr

how old are you guys

Zein

we're both 21

Sam Parr

wow well congratulations on your success and thanks for doing this

Matthew

thank you guys

Bobby Housel

thanks sean

Michael Yan

good to meet you

Shaan Puri

awesome guys

Zein

I can't find this client info

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. It shares its data across every application, so every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. **HubSpot: Grow Better.**

Sam Parr

next up what do we got simplify

Shaan Puri

how how many more do we have by the way

Ananth Veluvali

last one last one

Shaan Puri

last one certainly good to

Zein

be the least

Ananth Veluvali

we got michael mikey mike michael the mikester so many different names for this guy

Zein

he's a great dude

Ananth Veluvali

and yeah he'll close us out strong

Shaan Puri

Dude, that's what I miss about college. I used to have so many nicknames. Like, they used to call me "the Blender" because somebody thought my last name was "Puree." So one guy was like, "Yeah, his last name is Puree," right? And they're like, "Like the blender setting?" So they called me Blender for like a year.

Sam Parr

that's pretty good I'll I'll I'll start calling you that michael what do you got

Michael Yan

Hey Sam, hey Sean. I'm Michael, one of the co-founders of Simplify. We're building a career platform for Gen Z. What's the URL? Simplify.jobs.

Sam Parr

because I know you aren't sitting on that dotcom that'd be that'd be a massive deal

Michael Yan

card's got his b right now we're gonna we're gonna get it here soon I promise yeah

Sam Parr

I bet you will if if you

Michael Yan

Were you to apply to a job today, you'd quickly realize how frustrating and broken the process is. It's super disorganized; jobs are scattered across dozens of different job sites. So when you're applying, you're going on 15 different sites. It's super repetitive. Today, career counselors recommend that candidates submit around 100 job applications to just get one offer. It's also super noisy. Existing platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed make it hard to actually find relevant positions among the millions of different openings out there. As a student at Stanford, we've experienced this pain firsthand. During my time in college, I applied to actually more than 200 jobs across 15 different job sites. When I came to school, I grew up in a small town in West Virginia. My parents didn't work in tech, and I had no idea how to find my first job. After trying all these platforms, we realized that the existing solutions out there really didn't work. I actually met my first co-founders when we were applying for jobs together. That is actually kind of nerdy, even for Stanford standards. But I think that's why we decided to build Simplify. When we designed this platform, we really wanted to put the candidate experience first. So you can kind of think of us like the common...

Shaan Puri

By the way, I gotta stop you. I'm looking at your thing... You have 100,000+ users that are using your Chrome extension and 3,000,000 applications, and you haven't said any of that yet!

Michael Yan

Well, it's not... it's on the section on the slide right here. So, but yes, oh, go for it. Yeah, I gotta give.

Shaan Puri

you credit but I gotta say also you're bury you buried the lead dude you're killing it

Sam Parr

that lead bro

Shaan Puri

you're killing it and

Michael Yan

congratulations for killing it

Sam Parr

pull up pull up their site and put it in similar web while while he's talking

Shaan Puri

yeah I'm I'm there alright

Sam Parr

go ahead sorry I'm oh yeah

Michael Yan

No, for sure. We've definitely got some super exciting traction. You can think of us like the common application for jobs. So, I think AdmitYogi talked about applying to college; it's the same process. You come to our website, fill out this 5-minute application, and you can apply to basically any job on the internet in one click. We've got a browser extension that helps us do that. In the last roughly year and a half since we launched, we've gotten more than 5,000,000 applications submitted through our extension, which has saved users over 70,000 hours of time. We've also got a centralized dashboard instead of having to use 20 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 format. This way, you can stay organized throughout the process. Finally, with all of this information, we built a machine learning model that is able to recommend jobs based on where you're applying and also based on the profile you filled out with us. So, instead of scrolling endlessly on sites like LinkedIn, we'll actually deliver you jobs in a Tinder-like interface where you can swipe yes or no and apply to those jobs in one click.

Sam Parr

do and you and you apply to them when you swipe right

Michael Yan

So, no. We redirect you to their career page, and our browser extension will autofill the information. So, it's effectively two clicks.

Sam Parr

okay that's awesome

Michael Yan

But yeah, so since launching in October of 2021, we've grown to over **150,000 users**. I think the most exciting part of all of this is that we actually spent **$0** in paid marketing. In **2022**, we had more than **4,000,000 applications** submitted, and we've already hit **1,000,000** in the first **4 months of 2023**. Most of our growth has actually been organic. I think we've built a pretty exciting product that really puts candidates first. We see a lot of mentions on **Reddit**, **Discord**, and **GitHub**. We've also been able to build a community around supporting people who may be first-time job seekers. We write a newsletter that goes out to **90,000 subscribers**, giving general advice.

Sam Parr

what

Michael Yan

On how to find your first job, I've also been able to find quite an audience on LinkedIn by posting just free career resources, resume templates, and lists of opportunities. I've garnered around 60,000 followers in the last [time period]. Are you a student?

Shaan Puri

or are you like 28 years old and just snuck in the old stage contest

Michael Yan

I actually turned 23 a couple of weeks ago, so I think I might be the oldest in the room, or the second oldest. I'm a senior right now.

Sam Parr

but yeah and what's what's the how do you make money

Michael Yan

Right, so we monetize in a traditional B2B sense, where we charge companies for the ability to source through candidates and post jobs. I think what's super exciting about us is that through this common application, we've actually generated a super in-depth profile on candidates. This means we have basically more information than you would get on a traditional job application or on a site like LinkedIn. So that way, as a company, if I want to say, "Hey, I want specifically people at Stanford who were in their Society of Women Engineers club, who studied Computer Science for 2 years, and have 2 years of Python experience," this is all information that we have in a structured format. We can target your job listings to that, and alongside that, you can source through these candidates on our platform.

Shaan Puri

So, wait a second. Companies pay you to post the job 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 want to apply... You go to a career page, you just click submit. So where are they seeing the job? Where's that other side?

Michael Yan

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So, it's twofold. Actually, within our extension, when you click submit, we'll pop up relevant jobs. Basically, we're able to kind of have a medium for jobs to candidates no matter what site they're on. So, even if you're on LinkedIn and you apply to a job, this post-submission little model pops up and it will recommend you similar jobs. Companies have a chance to advertise there. Wow! In addition to that, our matching algorithm is kind of like the core part of the business as well. Through the matches, candidates are specifying exactly what companies they're looking for: startups, Series A companies, companies that are founded by women, companies that are in specific spaces. This gives us a very targeted audience to show jobs to. I think in the last month or so, we've had over 800,000 jobs shown just within the matches.

Sam Parr

Check this out: if you go to their site, you go to simplify.jobs, scroll all the way to the bottom. They have this thing that says "Check out some of our popular job lists," 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 "Moonshots," and when you go to Moonshots, it says "Leading Web3, crypto, and blockchain startups: The Moonshot List of 2022." So you can apply to some of these moonshots. Dude, this is fascinating. Congratulations!

Shaan Puri

and so what's the revenue like so far

Michael Yan

Yeah, so we're actually still pre-revenue right now. We're really focused on building out the consumer side of things. I think when we set out to do this, we just really wanted to focus and make sure that the consumer side was fleshed out before we turned on the jets on the monetization side. I will say, the way the product works now is we built these scrapers that pick up jobs, kind of like Sam mentioned, of all these different opportunities on the internet. We put them into playlists, almost, so you can browse them like Spotify. For example, if you want to work with a unicorn, here are some jobs at these specific companies. Basically, through that, we've actually been able to funnel a lot of candidates into their existing jobs. In the last couple of months, more than 50 companies have reached out to us via email. We recently put up a form that allows us to collect inbound from companies where they say they've actually hired somebody that discovered their company on Simplifying. So, very soon, I think we're fleshing out the recruiter side of things, allowing you to have a self-serve model where you can post jobs for a month and garner interest.

Shaan Puri

and I

Michael Yan

think that's how

Shaan Puri

many you said a 150,000 people use it how many people have gotten a job from it

Michael Yan

Right, so that's something that we're in the process of figuring out. Through our CRM, we can see how many people are in the interview process. People generally use that to track where they are, just to keep organized for themselves. But once they...

Sam Parr

how many interviews

Michael Yan

I think we... I don't have the number off the top of my head, but that's something I could definitely pull up for you. What I want to say about it is, give me an estimate. I think around **30%** have reported some movement in their job search process. Whether that's an interview or they've been rejected, I think that's something that we're...

Sam Parr

like 50,000 people have gotten a job interview because of you ish

Michael Yan

I would say around that, yeah, because I think capital-ish, 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 people ask, "Am I gonna get a job if I use Simplify?" I think the goal is just to make it easy. Whether or not you get an interview is still up to you. That's kind of why we're investing in the newsletter—to help people actually learn the career aspects. So we kind of want to see ourselves as like Credit Karma for jobs. We can give you advice like, "Hey, you should learn these skills." If you're applying to like 20 jobs and still haven't gotten an interview, I think that's kind of what we're looking for.

Shaan Puri

Explain how. Give me the kind of two-line explanation: how does this get huge? How does this become a massive company? What would be your best pitch for that?

Michael Yan

Yeah, great question. I think the vision that we have is to be in every single person's browser. We have a 90% retention rate on our extension, which is generally the case for most browser extensions. People install them, kind of forget about them, and they only really pop up when they're relevant. So, I think the goal is to make this universal. Everybody that's applying to jobs wants to save time, so let's live in everybody's browser extension. This gives us oversight on where people are applying, and through that, I think we have a huge wedge in the recruiting space. The future of recruiting, I believe, is going to be all data-driven. As an employer, you want to know, "Hey, I want to target people that are applying to my competitors." I want to target people that are interested in software. Current platforms have very minimal visibility on where people are actually applying and what jobs they're interested in. For example, on LinkedIn, I've been recommended many jobs as an electrician or a plumber, so I don't really think they know what I'm interested in. I think through our browser extension, we're able to collect the data and make the process of finding a job much more personalized. I believe that through this, companies are going to 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 connections.

Sam Parr

did you have you raised money

Michael Yan

Yeah, so we actually just closed a seed round. It's the first time we're announcing it. A couple of weeks ago, it was a $2,000,000 round led by Kraft.

Sam Parr

Oh wow, okay. Well, yeah, I don't know what the hell you're doing here, but that sounds awesome, dude.

Shaan Puri

You're so... listen to the... where, where, where was my email? Yeah, how did I not see this? This is... now I'm upset. You left me.

Sam Parr

upset michael

Shaan Puri

this is let

Sam Parr

Let me read the team bio: - **Michael**: He's a designer, LinkedIn creator with 30,000,000 views and 60,000 followers. - **Rashil**: He's the CTO, an engineer and product architect who scaled products to over 1,000,000 users. - **Ethan**: He's the CPO, who runs a career newsletter with 90,000 subscribers. Are those all accurate? Because that's a very impressive trio.

Shaan Puri

are they all students too

Michael Yan

Yeah, we're... well, actually, interestingly, we've all dropped out. But recently, Ethan and I came back to live on campus because we both are on near full scholarships at Stanford. So, we basically get free housing here. We take a couple of classes and get free housing. It's a great gig! But we've been full-time on this for the last year and a half. Rochelle, by the way, lives in San Francisco.

Shaan Puri

I like that you said "dropped out" versus "leave of absence." "Leave of absence" is, you know, one foot in, one foot out. "Dropped out" is committed. It's the old pig versus chicken breakfast analogy. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. You're the pig; you guys are committed. I like that.

Sam Parr

and you raised this $2,000,000 round can you say the valuation

Michael Yan

yeah so we raised it at 20 post oh fuck really

Shaan Puri

yeah good job they're yc they're yc it's definitely

Michael Yan

a tough market but I think it's also an inflection. For us where when the markets are rougher

Sam Parr

wait wait wait you said tough market as in you think that's too low

Michael Yan

No, in terms of raising today, I think it's pretty difficult. We had a little bit of a harder time, but I think we definitely benefited in the sense that we've seen a lot of growth. It's really tough to find a job these days, so I think job seekers are more willing to give new startups a chance. We've been able to capitalize on that. When people install something, they generally don't uninstall it, and people seem to love the product. So, I think we're super excited.

Shaan Puri

About the thing, this is great! I love the product. I want to invest. I really like your approach here. I do think, you know, when I asked the question of how can this be big, you've had the kind of like the, what I'll call, the vision answer.

Sam Parr

which is like

Shaan Puri

What if everybody used this? Then it would be big. There's another way to think about that, which is a bold, bottoms-up approach. It says, "You know, we think for every customer, we're going to generate this much revenue." So, with 100,000 people, or 200,000 people, or even 1,000,000 people using this extension, we think we would be generating $100,000,000 a year. Right? That would be... you know, so there's usually a formula that says: **X users times Y value per user equals Z revenue.** So, you know, you want to have that for you guys. I know you're, quote unquote, "pre-revenue," so maybe you don't know exactly how much a user is going to be worth, but it would be good to have a guess. So that's kind of my only constructive feedback. Everything else was music to my ears, so well done.

Sam Parr

Definitely, and I love these businesses. I think the guy's name is Ian Siegel. I think that's the guy who started ZipRecruiter, if I remember correctly. ZipRecruiter was like... they had the largest Series A at the time, like 5 years ago. Ever. It was like a $60,000,000 Series A because they bootstrapped 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?

Bobby Housel

I forget

Sam Parr

His name is Fred Wilson. He has this awesome blog post where he mentions that they were seed investors in Indeed. He describes it as the greatest business model of all time because it's basically like Google AdWords. You know, it's a paid performance type of thing. It's one of the greatest businesses I've ever seen. I love these types of businesses because they're perfectly aligned. The pay-for-performance model is perfectly aligned; 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. Overall, I think this is awesome.

Michael Yan

Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. I think we're still working out the business model right now. We're trying a subscription-based thing, but I'm definitely open to trying new things. So, yeah, I would love to hear back from you.

Shaan Puri

Here's what Fred Wilson said: "People, you know, one of the first great investments we made at USV was in the summer of 2005 in Indeed." He talks about how the founders were great, the team was great, blah blah blah. He says, "They have a product that's used by 80 million people worldwide every month, and they have a business model like Google. It's the best on the internet: revenues, profits, customer satisfaction, shareholder value. They've built a fortress, and I'm happy to have a seat in the front row." So that's pretty cool. Well, listen, this has been awesome. Thank you for coming up. I think we have to announce the winner. The winner is going to get $35,100 for today's pitch competition.

Sam Parr

I'm gonna message you sean who who up my winner is and then you could yeah go ahead and ask bobby what you want

Shaan Puri

Well, I was going to say, how do we settle on $35,100? It's a very specific number here. Maybe Barshop, you might have an opinion on this. That's like one souped-up MacBook Pro or something.

Sam Parr

Do you have Bobby? Like, so you have a syndicate now. It would be very wise if you just gave $20,000 to every single person who's presented on... yeah, so that's what.

Bobby Housel

We're working on something, and Sean, you said something interesting: "Why did I not hear about this startup?" What we've learned is that angel investors are having a hard time finding the top college startups. It takes a ton of time to build these communities, like we have at Stanford and Michigan. So right now, we're trying to prove the model with a syndicate and help support startups, like you saw today and like the ones you saw on the Michigan show. But in the long run, we hope to do something just like you mentioned, sir.

Sam Parr

how old are you bobby are you in college still

Bobby Housel

yeah I'm 22 I'm a junior at university of michigan and so

Sam Parr

so what happens in 2 years when you're when you're out

Bobby Housel

We're going to change the world of college entrepreneurship forever. We started by building communities for founders, and now we're bringing in angel investors into the mix. We think that the way college entrepreneurship is fostered by institutes, centers, and clubs at schools is ineffective. Additionally, we believe that the VC funds targeting college entrepreneurs are just looking for poached deal flow. We have a better way of doing it: by building the best communities and then intelligently bringing in amazing angels like you guys to make them a lot more interesting.

Sam Parr

Alright, well, congratulations! You're onto something. Sean and I have selected the winner. I don't angel invest a ton, not nearly as much as Sean... but so, the winner on this one, I would love if you guys would accept me. I would put a very small amount, like $5,000 or $10,000, if you'd allow it. But I don't know about you, Sean. I don't know if you're in that same boat, but we both... we both are aligned on who we think won this one.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think you know what the best pitch is? Who wins the pitch competition? It's the person who can have a clear pitch that's compelling, that gets you excited, 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 extracurricular activity?" Damn, that's not what I wanted.

Sam Parr

To do like those fishing guys, you know? Remember the guys who had the... not the fishing, the boating company? We loved it, and they were like, "Yeah, but you know, we're in college." It's like, well, I don't want to give you money then.

Shaan Puri

By the way, I invested in those guys, and they are going for it. They are pretty committed to it. But 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 out of school. It's like they'll just get sucked back in by society to the safe path.

Sam Parr

And by the way, a lot of times they should go out there and get laid and do whatever they want. But if you're going to 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; I want you to give me more money back.

Tom Pritsky

you know

Sam Parr

what I mean

Shaan Puri

like we have simple investment philosophies

Sam Parr

Yeah, like when you say, "Well, you know, but I learned a lot," it's like, "Yeah, I don't care. I don't care what you learned. I care about me and my money."

Shaan Puri

Learning is great, but it is second to earning. Earning is always better than learning; it's the fallback, right? Anyways, the business that we both selected is simply... I think you could probably tell from our excitement during the pitch that it solves a real problem.

Sam Parr

simplify bro

Shaan Puri

Oh, sorry! Simplify.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, and you seem the most committed that this is like happening and there's no way out. So, congratulations! You have done it!

Michael Yan

Thank you guys so much! I'm a huge fan of the podcast. And yeah, simplify... I think we really gotta get that URL for sure.

Sam Parr

you're never gonna get it you're never gonna get it

Shaan Puri

what do you with this $35100 michael

Sam Parr

it's a great question I think model service

Michael Yan

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'm a huge fan of the podcast. One of the hardest things for us is getting [our product] in the hands of more college students. Our users have been super helpful in 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 want to invest this in: - Our social media - On-the-ground referral programs These are all things that would help us really take us to the next level in terms of user growth.

Sam Parr

You can either get a little bit of LinkedIn promotion or an Eight Sleep mattress. The answer is very obvious to me, frankly.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is 291 days of Chipotle. So, that's a lot of fuel that we're giving you for...

Sam Parr

that is

Shaan Puri

for for you to go forward

Sam Parr

I get the mattress

Shaan Puri

Think of us every day at lunch. This lunch was brought to you by *My First Million*. Every single day, as you build this company for 291 days, and at the end of that, you're on your own.

Sam Parr

Sean, let's do a wrap-up here about these whole things. I mean, we've only done it 2 or 3 times. I leave these things energized; I also leave these things intimidated. So... every single person we've had on this, even if we've given them a hard time, is incredibly impressive. Would you say so?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I mean, I just remember where I was at that time. You know, we're not even in the same room. I don't know where I was, but just putting yourself in this position to be doing things like this can make a pretty big impact. This is actually how I became an entrepreneur. I did a pitch competition my senior year, second semester. I had never even thought about business before that. I did a pitch competition and ended up winning $25,000. It changed the direction of my life. You know, I literally wouldn't have been an entrepreneur had that not happened. And the idea was bad; my pitch was bad. If I go back and look at it...

Sam Parr

it it was just a was it 25 4 what was it for

Shaan Puri

sushi the chipotle for sushi idea

Sam Parr

dude those those those investors were horrible how did they well

Shaan Puri

The... there were two things going for us. One, we had the most swag of anyone at the pitch competition. We gave the best pitch. I brought in the Duke basketball players as a cameo during the pitch. They threw out T-shirts to the crowd, so we won extra money from the fans and stuff like that. But also, one of the judges was worth like $20 to $50 million or something like that. He did it because he owned 50 Applebee's. He was like, "Oh, the restaurant industry is a great industry to be in," whereas 99% of the population would have said that's a terrible idea. But this guy had made his living off of Applebee's, so we had one judge in the bag from that.

Sam Parr

Oh man, that's... that competition was really bad if you won, because these are so much better. This guy just raised money at a $20,000,000 valuation from, like, you know, a top 20 venture capital [firm]. I mean, it's... it's so much better than when you and I were doing this type of stuff.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, totally. By the way, the funny thing is we won the competition, and then they also paid for one MBA student to work for us as an intern. They paid his salary, and we were younger than this guy. This guy had worked for like 7 years of real-world experience before then, and so he was taking direction from these 21-year-old idiots. And we were like, "Do..."

Sam Parr

you know how to roll a sushi roll

Shaan Puri

We were just like, "Yeah, can you build us an Excel model?" And he just... and then he would build it. We'd be like, "Yeah, but you know, this doesn't look very good. Can you just make it better?" We just had this guy work on an Excel model for like 5 months. He must have been like, "This is the worst experience of my life."

Sam Parr

Well, congratulations, guys! You're amazing. Bobby, good job organizing these guys. And I forget the other guy's name... Who's the BMC over there? But good job! Yeah, what was your name? Anand? Anand, good job! You know, that energy that you have is really great for setting these guys up. The training stuff is really hard. And like, dude, I don't know if you guys have ever done high school sports, but when you're lifting weights and trying to bench press a ton of weight, and you have your team around you who's like, "Get it! Get it!"... On that, like, when you guys are trying to max your bench or squat or whatever, that actually helps. Then you're kind of doing the same thing. So kudos to you! It does actually help psyching these guys up. So, congratulations to everyone!

Bobby Housel

Thank you guys so much. Sean, I'll just close with this: you mentioned that going into the second semester of senior year pretty much changed your future. You guys are changing these kids' futures. After the Michigan episode, the amount of people that reached out to us and like uploaded saying, "Hit these people up, hit me up," was incredible. We’re going to put their websites and emails in the description. You guys are changing these kids' lives too, so we’re damn great!

Shaan Puri

Not necessarily for the better, but we're changing them for sure. Lives are changing; we don't know which way it's going, though.

Sam Parr

I think that's the pod