Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186

I think that's like people don't appreciate is like the amount of space you want in transportation is adversely proportional to how long it takes. Like if you're on a boat going across an ocean, you have a suite and it is a hotel room on a boat, right? If you had a literal transporter beam, you don't sit down. So, you know, and everything else is kind of somewhere in the middle.

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Thanks for having me.

Alex, you were last on Twist. I think it was September of 2024. So thanks for coming back. But the most important thing is since we last spoke to you, you and your test flight, test plane, I should say, broke the sound barrier. So I know it's a couple months back, but tell us about how that went down and if the test met all of your company's expectations.

It was really just an epic day. And you know, one for me personally that I'd worked for for more than. So we broke the sound barrier above the Mojave Desert in the same hallowed airspace that Chuck Yeager did for the very first time.

What was the year on that Chuck Yeager flight? Cause I think that numbers.

1947. October 12, 1947. It's been a minute, so to speak.

It's been a minute.

And there were two really important things with that test flight. Really three. One is it was the first time it had been done outside of a government or military. It was also the first time that we flew a supersonic jet made out of airliner ready technology. And last but not least, although we didn't announce it that day, we also cracked sonic boom.

Yes, we're going to talk about that in just a minute. But tell me about the airline ready technology and what that means and why it matters. Because I think a lot of folks listening to this startup fans, but a little bit less into the weeds of the aerospace industry.

Yeah, well, we of course had a supersonic passenger plane before, it's called Concorde, first flew in 1969, the same year as the moon landing. And isn't it interesting? 1969, we can go to the moon. 1969, we can break the sound barrier as passengers. 2025, we can't do either of those things. We actually went backwards, which is a whole other thing we can talk about. But we're going to fix that. And today, half a century after Concorde, we don't just have the technology for passengers to fly supersonic. We have the technology for them to do it in a way that's going to be far more economical. Which was the big problem at Concorde. It was a $20,000 ticket for a seat you might think came out of the back of a Southwest jet. With overture version 1, which is the scaled up version of our XB1 airplane. It will be more like flying business class. So think round trip across the Atlantic, three and a half hours each way, $5,000 round trip, which is not yet for everybody. But a lot of people already pay that or more in business class today.

Absolutely. So if you're already paying that much, you can take a faster plane with according to you, a similar level of comfort once we get Overture built.

That's right. I mean, it'll be a really nice seat, much nicer than was on Concorde. The one thing it won't do is go fully flat because in a three and a half hour flight, you sleep in a much better bed than you'd have on any airplane at your home before you have to leave. So you want a nice size seat, it'll be something nicer than what you'd find in domestic first class and at twice the speed of any other jet today.

It's kind of funny when you put it like that, because when the A380, the Airbus super giant jet, was being put together and put out back in the day, bit of a boondoggle in retrospect, but there were talks of like having showers on board and bars on board, but that's only because you're stuck there for so long. How much comfort do you need if you're going to get there as fast as you possibly can? So I like to hear that.

I think that's thing people don't appreciate is like, like the amount of space you want in transportation is inversely proportional to how long it takes. Like if you're on a boat going across an ocean, you have a suite and it is a hotel room on a boat. Right. If you had a literal Transporter beam. You don't sit down. So, you know, and everything else is kind of somewhere in the middle.

I've done a whole lot of flights from Newark to Providence and Newark to Boston. And they put you up in these tiny little planes that are made out of like a sardine can, but who cares, because you're only on it for 45 minutes. Right. So it's a really fair point. And I'm looking forward to see how people's behaviors change, because once I can go to San Francisco in. What will it take me on on Overture? Three, three and a half hours?

I think about three and a half hours. You can. You can leave the East coast at 9am and land at S. At 9:30am SF time. It's going to be incredible. But I think you touched on something that's really important there that most people overlook. Most people think speed is about time savings. It's not. Speed is about what you choose to do, what you. What you just can't do. Like, most trips on jets are trips that would not have been taken, period, on slower airplanes. And if we go back and look at the history of the jet age, we can actually see that just the same way most trips taken on Uber would not have been taken on a taxi.

Right before it grew the TAM as we sit here on the show, it made the PI larger.

Yeah. Things that make things much faster or radically reduce friction tend to be TAM growing innovations. They tend to be platform innovations. You know, the iPhone was a platform innovation. It enabled things like Uber and Airbnb. And I think that we're to find that supersonic, just like the jet is a platform innovation.

A question about that, because we often think about faster travel as making the world smaller in terms of going across the Atlantic to your earlier point or my discussion of flying back and forth between the east and West Coasts. But, you know, once you have Overture, your upcoming supersonic jet out in the market in quantity, am I going to be able to take this from, you know, Boston to New York City? Like, can I do. Will it work for shorter range flights that can then become even shorter in terms of time?

Supersonic makes sense. The longer the route. Right. Like you. You wouldn't get into it. It'd be pretty funny to get a supersonic across the street. Right. So the, the longer the route, the bigger the speed up. Boston, New York. I think that the look for vertical takeoff and landing is the innovation there because it's going to let you go from neighborhood to neighborhood. Supersonic. I think about the shortest Routes that really make sense are west coast to Hawaii. And those are going to be incredible because if you look at the time difference and the flight times, you'll actually be able to board the flight at 5 o' clock in San Francisco and be on the beach in Maui with a cocktail at sunset in, you know, in Hawaii. It's going to be absolutely phenomenal.

Break that down for me in miles, though. So the shortest reasonable flight length for a supersonic passenger jet is in miles. What's kind of the minimum there?

There's no sort of one cutoff. Right. But I think there's a tipping point somewhere around 1500 miles where, where the speed ups are big enough that it starts to make a real difference for passengers.

Okay, well, that's, that's great for me because I'm just hoping that in the future I'm never taking a jet at any length of time that isn't supersonic. So I've, I have really big hopes for what you're building.

Yeah.

Let's go back a little bit to the demonstrator plane, the XB1. You guys went supersonic. It has been passing tests. I've been tracking your progress over on the blog. What is left to, to test to prove out and to learn from that demonstrator aircraft. So that way you guys can take all of that and then build the final product.

XP1 is 100% mission accomplished. We did a total of 13 flights.

Yeah.

We hit every single performance metric we wanted to hit, including having a demonstrated it can reliably fly supersonic with no boom. We actually broke the sound barrier six times. Each time the microphones were on, nobody heard any booms.

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I'm gonna pull up an image from your guys site because I think it shows how this works. So to have no boom, you have to be, according to my understanding of this image here, just to fly above a certain cutoff altitude and then that somehow refracts or reflects sound back up. So talk to folks about what we see here, Blake.

Yeah, so if you believe what was written about boom before, wow, boom, the sonic boom was this like, very difficult to solve thing. Require, like unusually shaped airplanes that like, spread out the energy or like, create cancellation waves. All this, like, crazy technology. Guess what? You can solve it with software.

Software.

I'd love to hear that.

So, yeah, our solution to sonic boom is really two things. It is a software algorithm that computes the required flight trajectory. And by the way, it does it with ray tracing. This is algorithms out of computer graphics.

Yeah. Ray tracing is how you track sunlight's refraction inside of games to provide a more lifelike and almost immersive gaming experience.

You can ray trace like light paths, and that's how you can like, create a Pixar movie or a great video game, or you can ray trace sound waves and you can. You can track how they propagate in the atmosphere. So we sort of use reverse ray tracing to calculate what the flight trajectory we need. And I'll come back and like, why that works. And then you need a powertrain that can actually go fly it, which is why it's a big deal. We're building our own powertrain off the shelf. Powertrains can't do this. But. But the essence of it really is software. In fact, we. We could create an iPhone app that you could give to a fighter pilot that would enable them to fly their fighter jet in a boomless fashion. So let me break down how that really works.

It's.

It is refraction. So what's that? So I think as kids, we probably all saw that little science experiment where you drop a straw in a glass of water and the straw looks broken. Why? It's because the light bends when it goes through water. In fact, anything that's a wave bends when it goes through a front where the propagation speed of the wave changes. So the speed of light is not the same as water as it is in air. And by the way, the speed of sounds. A wave. Right. Sonic booms are waves, and the speed of sound varies with temperature, and temperature is not the same everywhere. In the atmosphere, it's cold up high, and it's warm down low. And so, just the same way light waves bend towards where the speed of light is lower, sound waves bend towards where the speed of sound is lower, which is up high, which means the boom comes off the airplane. And if you control the angle of that boom and you fly at a sufficiently high altitude, the boom makes a gigantic U turn in the sky, and it never touches the ground. And it's that simple.

Okay. Okay. In your little hand gesture there, you were pointing down as you passed the speed of sound. As someone who flies, I don't want to be pointed at the ground as I'm accelerating. How far do you have to tip the nose of the plane down to pull off this. This trick?

It works totally level. The angle at which the boom comes off the airplane is a function of speed.

Right.

At Mach 1, most of the energy is propagated forward. The faster you're going, the more the energy points downward. And the refractive power of the atmosphere varies with the strength of the temperature gradient. So the. The stronger the temperature gradient in the atmosphere, the more the boom can be pointed downward and the faster, faster you can fly. Right. So what you do is you take a look at, you know, reasonably good weather data about one level, what, one hour old weather data is good enough to make this work really well. And you can compute a maximum, maximum quiet speed, and then you would just fly at the maximum quiet speed, and that the speed, speed controls the angle of the boom, not the trajectory of the airplane.

Ah, okay. That's where I got it wrong. Okay. So essentially, all you need is up to date weather information. We have a lot of satellites in the sky, not that hard to get. And then each plane's flight plan would be then predicated on current atmospheric conditions. So that way they can set the right minimum boomless speed, which would still be over Mach 1 in this example.

That's right. Yeah. And on a good day, you can go Mach 1.3, you know, one point, which is. That's nearly twice as fast as today's airplanes. On. On a bad day, you can go 1.05, and on a typical day, it's about 1.15. So that's. And. But you got to remember, like, a 737 flies at 0.75, which is unacceptably slow.

Everybody, by the way.

Yes. I mean, I believe every speed is unacceptably slow.

Amen.

We should just keep making everything faster. What this means is with no sonic boom, you can go 50% faster than a 737. What that means in practice is leave New York at 9, be in San Francisco at 9:30. It's going to be awesome.

Yeah. Because that way I can actually fly out to SF for lunch and fly back. I mean that would eventually bankrupt me probably.

So actually it's fascinating. So London to New York will be 3 and a half hours and Mach 1.7, then slightly slower over land. New York to San Francisco will also be 3.5 hours. But if you look at the time differences work in various parts of this thing. You could basically have breakfast in London, fly to New York, have breakfast in New York, fly to San Francisco, have breakfast again. And in fact, if you just keep flying west, you can just keep having breakfast.

Well, you know, I think that's going to set off some new really annoying influencer. TikToks. That's overdrive to this guy. But you said that you've done all the testing you need to do on the demonstrator aircraft. I know you guys are working on Symphony, which is your in house turbo fan, that you're building the power unit for the future jet. But talk to me about what's coming up next. Clearly breaking the sound barrier. Huge news. But I'm curious the next two or three milestones, right?

Yeah. So XP1 is mission accomplished. It's back on the ground in Denver where we built it and sadly it'll never fly again.

What?

Why not?

Well, it was mission accomplished. There's no point. We're onto the, we're onto the scaling up the engine and scanning the rest of the airplane. It's going to stay in the lobby of our new headquarters where it will be there to inspire employees. My rule is the most amazing thing we've ever built will always be in the lobby because it will remind every person coming to work that this company is a company that builds amazing things that people said you couldn't do. The plan is to put XB1 probably in the National Aerospace Museum once it's been displaced by like an XB2. And one thing we did is after the final flight, the entire team that worked on it signed the airplane. And so if we think back to history, everyone knows that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Some people know that he did it on the bell x1. And if you say, who built that airplane? The answers are actually incredibly difficult to find.

Oh, lost to history.

They're basically lost to history. And yet. Yeah. So everyone's going to remember that Geppetto was the second coming of. Right. Geppetto was the first pilot to break the sound barrier on a privately developed aircraft.

Blake's referring to Boom. Chief test pilot Tristan Geppetto. Brandenburg. Geppetto is his call sign, I guess.

Call sign, yes.

Yeah.

Call sign, yes. Just 50 people worked on this airplane, so it was easy for them all to sign it. And when it's. When it's in a museum, you know, I want them to be able to take their kids and their grandkids and point and say, I built that and you can see my name on it.

I love that. Okay. But moving past the lobby, talk to me about the future and give me some time bounds here. Like, are we talking about big stuff in the next quarter, next four quarters?

Right now. Right now, big stuff. So what's going on is first we're scaling up the powertrain, and then we're scaling up the airframe. And so literally as we speak, we are building the First Symphony. It's what we call the engine, the first Symphony. And we're building it largely not only designing this in house, building most of the parts ourselves. So the First Symphony engine is in manufacturing right now. The turbine blades have been made making the rotor discs. They're in machining. The tie bolts are coming off the lathe. Like hardware is getting made right now. But 80% of that engine is in the manufacturing process. It's going to run early next year. And this will be the first purpose built engine for supersonic commercial flight. Concorde had adapted military engines. No one's ever done a civil supersonic engine before. This is the first one. And boomless cruise would not be possible without this powertrain that we're making. People say only three companies can build jet engines. It's not true. We're doing it faster and better than it's ever been done before.

A question on that. Is it harder to build the engine or the airframe when you think about your upcoming future passenger supersonic jet?

I guess we'll find out once we're done with both and we can compare. But I think the airplane integrated system is harder than the engine. But engines aren't easy.

I'm impressed that you're managing to build symphony by yourself because I was also told that it's only a couple of companies and it's very, very hard and you can't do this. Don't try it at home, essentially. And you are so was everyone just trying to scare you off?

Yes. I mean, jet engines are a triopoly, right? Airplanes are a duopoly. Boeing and Airbus engines are a triopoly. Rolls, ge, Pratt and Whitney. If you are a duopoly or a triopoly, what do you tell everybody else? Your thing is impossible and nobody else can do it. Right.

And you also need more DoD contracts, please.

Yeah, that's right. You need all kinds of subsidies. By the way, the irony is just the same way Boeing and Airbus don't do new airplanes, right? Like neither Boeing nor Airbus has launched an all new airplane since 2004.

Yep.

Right.

The 737 is going to be beaten to death as a dead horse until I think I stopped flying.

Yeah, that's right. I mean it's insane. Like, you know, people are like, oh man, this year's iPhone looks too much like last year's iPhone. Apple can't innovate. Can you imagine 21 years with no new products, right? That's actually aviation. It is dead. There is nothing happening. It is stasis.

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And the same thing is true in the jet engine world. Like by the way, when you don't do something for 20 years, you don't know how to do it anymore. And so the irony of like nobody can build jet engines, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The big guys aren't doing it either. There is very little, you know, there's a little bit more new engine development than new airplane development. But mostly there's nothing. And so the, the whole, the whole industry has been the mindset of developing new products is hard, so let's do it less often, right? And we have the exact opposite mindset. Like long cycles beget long cycle, short cycles beget short cycles. If it hurts, then you do it, do it repeatedly until it doesn't hurt anymore. I think it's really true. And so we are investing a lot in reducing the cost of iteration and reducing the cost of making new things. So there's a substack I read on this a few weeks ago called move fast and don't break safety critical things. And it's about our fundamental approach here, which is all about making hardware development look more like agile software development. And there are two key things that go into that. Number one is embedding software engineers with hardware teams. There is a lot of rote engineering that happens in the hardware world that is readily automatable if you put a smart, curious software engineer sitting next to the hardware engineer. So we have a push button airplane design suite we call make boom. And literally if you update one part of the airplane, you press a button that redesigns the rest of the airplane automatically. So, so we, we make it, we make change easy. This is the important thing, right?

So therefore you can do more of it.

That's right. Like, oh, we want to change the diameter of something in a traditional world, like, oh no, that's a whole bunch of rework and everything else has to change. No, we automate the rework, which makes change inexpensive. So that number, number one on that is software. Number two is vertical integration of hardware. And the if you are. I've come to believe the most important thing in measuring hardware productivity is something we call slacker index. And slacker index is how long it takes to get something divided by how long it takes to make it. So if I go get a 3D printed turbine blade out of the traditional aerospace supply chain, it takes six months and it costs a million dollars. For $2 million, I can buy the machine and print the blade in 24 hours.

There you go.

And by the way, the material for the blade is like a few hundred dollars. It's like basically zero. So if you can get hardware built quickly and you use processes like 3D printing, so you can change the design and software and in data and you have ability to iterate designs through automated code, then you can iterate really fast. And if you can do that, then you can actually build new engines rapidly. You can build new Airplanes rapidly. Like, it took us a long time to do XP1 because we didn't know this yet. We didn't have any of the tools. I look backwards at XP1. We could have done it in a half and half the time or less, probably with half the cost or less. By the way, it was already 10 times cheaper than anybody else has ever done a supersonic chat.

I'd love to hear that, but essentially, hindsight's always 20 20, but you're taking those learnings and applying them forward. So before we talk about capital needs, what's the loose timeline for when overshare your supersonic jet will land at one of your airline customers? Is that 2027, 2028. I'm trying to get my, my personal calendar in shape here.

29 is the target. Could be 30.

29.

Okay, 30, 29 to 30 ready for passengers. We'll start building the first one next year. You'll see it roll off the line in 27. Our goal is to fly it in 28 and be ready for passengers in 29. And it's probably a little bit sporty on the timeline. I like aggressive timelines, so it's possible that I'll slip, but I don't think it'll slip by more than like a year or two.

Okay, but all of that work, all of that work ahead of you still. The fact that you're doing manufacturing in house, you're doing it vertically, you're building your own engines, da da da is not cheap. And so I have been talking to so many founders in the last especially 18 months who are building AI companies which can be very expensive to build or doing infra. But mostly they're using third party models. And it's just a lot of AI software, man. And everyone's just throwing money at it, which is cool. Why not, you know, huzzah. But you guys are doing something that takes so much longer to reach revenue and is so much more difficult. How do you set the company up in such a way that you can still attract capital when everyone's eyes are so squarely focused on tokens and LLMs right now?

There's a few different things that kind of come to mind here. First off, the notion that hardware companies are more capital intensive is not supported by the data. It's mythology. So if you go look at how much venture capital was consumed by the famous asset light businesses like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, I think Airbnb and Uber consumed more than $10 billion of venture. And then if you look at the supposedly capital intensive businesses like SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, they consumed much less venture. So the notion that this consumes more capital is just not true. The thing that is different is how much do you spend before you get your very first revenue dollar. And so what we've learned on the Internet is it's hard to tell from a product pitch whether the product is going to have product market fit. So just go build a prototype, ship it and find out whether people want what you built.

Right?

Guess what? I can't build a supersonic airliner in order to find out if anybody wants one. So hardware companies, they need two things. One is they need a way of demonstrating product market fit short of shipping the product. And so pre orders, pre orders are that playbook. By the way, this has been done before. It's called Kickstarter. Yes, and effectively we did Kickstarter for supersonic aviation. We have orders with deposits from United and American, you know, vouch not just that supersonic flight sounds cool, but if we could only deliver them the product that we've just discussed, they would want it in quantity. We have five and a half years of demand from United, American and Japan Airlines in the order book.

The last thing I saw from you guys was that you had 130 overture orders and pre orders. Is that number going to, are you going to try to extend that number before 2029 or are you happy with what you have now?

We actually stopped selling the airplane. We have so much demand, it's like not worth selling. I mean like great. Lufthansa, British Airways, they ordered Overture in addition to United, American and Japan Airlines. It doesn't make a difference because it's.

So far out in the future because your manufacturing capacity is already Pre sold through 2034.

Every, every airline is going to need this, right? Like, like when you can get across the pond in three and a half hours in United, no one's going to fly BA anymore, right? So guess what? BA is going to have to go order this. And so that's inevitable. 100% of my focus is on delivering this, not on like, you know, checking more boxes in the order book. It doesn't matter if, if you, if we deliver this, every airline's buying it, full stop. So, so that the, the size of the order book beyond five and a half years really just doesn't matter. Like if it was only if it was the fact that, that we have two north, two North American airlines and one Asian airline, I think that seals the deal.

Yeah, but to your point, to show Investors that what you're building does have product market fit without being able to ship some prototype software program. You have, you know, firm orders and everyone wants it. So that probably gives confidence.

That's right, that gives confidence. So, so that's the thing. One, if you want to go ship a product that's capital intensive to build and takes a while, you have to demonstrate that people want very specifically exactly what you're building.

Right.

And it can't be hand wavy conceptual, it has to be at the level of specs. Right. Because like a supersonic airliner, there are infinite numbers of potential supersonic airplanes. They could be a private jet, they could be an airliner, they could be a small airliner or a big airliner. They can have more range or less range. More seats or less seats. More fuel economy. Less fuel economy. There are a zillion choices that go into what the product is. Exactly. And you have to demonstrate that the exact choices that you're making are the ones that customers really want. And so that's where United stands behind us. They want the 4000 nautical mile 62 seat supersonic airliner designed with business class economics and the cabin layout that we've put in this airplane. Right. That's product market fit. It's not woohoo. Supersonic. Right.

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Concorde is a down the middle example and you can build a supersonic airplane with no product market fit. Let's not do that again.

Amen to that. So because you've Shown product market fit. And I would say really de risk the technology quite a lot through your test flights, through breaking the sound barrier, through the boomless work that you've done, will you have access to the capital you need to get us all the way through to when United gets delivered?

Yeah. So there's a second thing that's really helpful, which is finding your Starlink. What is that? So the way Elon financed development of the Falcon 9, then the reusable Falcon 9 was through building an ISP in space. I think a lot of people did not know how to think about the launch business. A lot of investors didn't, but they understood an Internet business and it was Starlink that made the rest of it financeable. And of course, Starlink you could spin out, it could IPO on its own and be a multi hundred billion dollar company on its own, independent of the launch business. So it's really useful to have a Starlink.

So what is your star league?

Well, I can't tell you yet, but I can tell you we found it.

You found it?

We found it. We found our Starlink. So there is.

When are you going to tell me what it is? How long do I have to wait?

Blake, there is a shipping product that ships before the supersonic airliner that we have over a billion dollars in orders for.

I'm going to have to have you back on the show, aren't I?

Yeah. So I can't tell you what it is, but it's based on the same technology, but it's much faster to scale in revenue, and I spent a decade looking for that and saying no to a lot of things that are shiny objects. And then we found it earlier this year, and it's really exciting. And it is the Starlink of supersonic flight.

Is it a software product or a hardware product?

It is a hardware product for which the world is desperate for.

Huh. Okay, well, I'm going to chew on that. When you do announce it, Blake, will you come back on the show and tell us about it?

Absolutely. Or you can come to the reveal. It'll be fun.

Where will the reveal take place?

TPD probably it'll be at our factory in Denver.

That's a short fledge for me. So I will come out if my children will grant me the time to do so.

If only every flight were as short as the flight from SF to Denver.

It's amazing how much more I could do if I wasn't constantly dealing with slow, annoying planes that are apparently from 2004. Blake, I'm supposed To be impartial and a journalist. But I'm stoked for Boom man. I'm a big believer in the company and so continued success in the meantime. And apparently I'll talk to you sometime between next week and a year from now. We'll have to find out.

Sounds good, Alex. Appreciate you. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Bye.

Bye.

All right, next up on our pitch competition is Mircha from confi. Am I pronouncing the name correctly? C O, N F Y. Confi.

I usually say confi, but whatever you call it, confi.

Okay, confi. Got it. This is the problem when we misspell names, but you got the nice confi tech domain name. We love a tech. And I can see here that you're optimizing data for better business at events. And I'm really excited to hear your pitch. I'll give you the 3, 2, 1. Are you ready?

I am ready.

3, 2, go.

Hi, Mircea from confi here. And confi is AI for events. You can think of as kind of like an intelligent data layer for the trillion dollar business events market. So meet John and Hannah. John is attending an industry event where he needs to meet sales prospects to fulfill his quota. And Hannah organizes that event, aiming to deliver ROI and keep her attendees happy. But all John gets on his event app is a static guest list. Thousands of names. No way to search for the right people. He doesn't know who he should meet or why. And Hannah can't easily capture attendee goals or prove ROI to exhibitors because events are fundamentally data risks rich, but usually insights poor. Enter confi. Our web app helps guests articulate goals before the event. We then enrich the guest list with public and proprietary signals, including our own data set of tens of thousands of attendees already on confi. Today. John runs AI searches like Find Me fintech Investors or Find MCP Engineers. And he finds relevant prospects. He connects with them instantly. And at the same time, Hannah boosts engagement and sponsor roi, justifying higher ticket and sponsorship price. Our go to market is a real game changer. We use a permissionless approach that engages attendees directly without requiring organizer buy in. And this has fueled a consistent 227% month over month growth and a 24% cold email conversion rate. In the past four months alone, we've added 36,000 new attendees on confi. We are live on Luma, where we plan to charge attendees a $20 subscription for unlimited ad access across all events. But the much larger opportunity here is conferences. Because There are over 200 million conference tickets sold worldwide annually and at $30 per attendee, that's a $6 billion market. More importantly, exhibitors and sponsors spend six to seven figures per conference. And Kanfi's proprietary intent data will enable us to charge pricing of above $10,000 per exhibitor per event, which in itself is a $10 billion opportunity. We are Techstars backed founders with deep domain authority. We've delivered paid event software to 100 plus companies. I drive growth and my co founder is a full stack and DevOps engineer building our platform end to end. We are now working to unlock self scraping which is our next viral loop. This will let us automatically ingest data and service events that we can't yet access. With our model projecting $10 million in ARR within 18 months of realization. That's confi and you should add it to your next event.

All right, great pitch. I didn't like the tagline at the beginning. I'm going to talk to you about that. So let's go back to the first slide because it's always great to go through these. But I do love the problem you've stated. Everybody now has apps for their event. Right. That's like now become kind of a standard. The all in Summit has an app. I went to the CO2 conference, there was an app and in these apps you get a directory. But the directory is the two complaints I have with this app software. And there's one big app company, I forgot the name of it. What's the big 800 pound gorilla that does these event apps?

Now the oldest one that is really well known is Cvent, but that's not the only one by far.

Yeah. What's the next most prominent one?

Funnily enough, based on company size, I would say Bizzabo is really big. But more recently I see more people using Brella and other things like that. Swapcard is another one out of Europe.

Yeah. So these platforms tend to be expensive and they're not great. And the problem is you get that app and you're like, okay, there's now a list alphabetical of all these people. Like, how am I supposed to use this? Are people even on the app? It's just a disaster. And so it is a real problem. And it would be really nice if there was an algorithm inside of these that could help you sort through them. So what you're saying is as an attendee or as a sponsor, we're going to give you some tools, some weapons. We're an arms dealer, we're going to give you some weapons. So that you can do this independent of the platform. So whether you get a CSV file from the planners that has all the attendees or you have to scrape it by going to the website, we're going to help you figure this out. Get them into your CRM or your AI based CRM and we're going to do AI matchmaking. So you're saying, hey, we're not going to rip out the existing software, not going to try to displace them. We're just going to make a tool that people are willing to pay for, whether you're an attendee or a sponsor that helps you get maximum value and do AI on those specific data sets.

Correct.

Do I understand the product?

You understand it perfectly. You're missing a few steps in there. Things that we can do better. But, but that's the, that's the basic problem.

I got it. Yeah. So I think showing the apps of these other ones and you know, just slowing down there to explain the problem. This is a salesperson, they go to this event and they see this. So this slide is great. So they now have. And this could be like you could scroll through this and show the app and how meaningless it is with a video. So videos are more convincing than pictures, pictures are more convincing than text. So each time you replace one of those objects with the next most convincing object, your pitch is going to be received even better. So here John logs into the app he works and he's looking for attorneys who are at this event who work in specifically litigation. This event has 10,000 attorneys. He needs to find the litigators. Boom. And here we go. So here you have this video and now this is your app here.

This is us.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think explaining the go to market works two different ways. One, you can use existing data sets that you scrape, ingest, et cetera, or we're building APIs into those. Are any of these people letting you build an API into them or do they just see you as competitive?

You mean the apps providers?

Yeah, like cvent, whatever.

We typically don't even work with the app providers at this point. We would love to in the future and would love to build integrations, but at the moment we're just serving the attendees directly.

Yeah. The matchmaking piece of this AI matchmaking for events in and of itself is really interesting. So I wonder if going after your Go to market is to find the attendees and get them to use this or go to the event providers and get them to do it. What's the go to market attendees and.

That'S where we're really smart. I have to be a little careful about what I divulge in a public setting, but we have to be. This is part of our special SaaS. But we are really smart about this stuff.

And.

And what we can do is beyond actually just grabbing the list of people and matching it with the right people, we are also interviewing and encouraging all the other attendees as well, to share their goals. You see, if you think about it from an incentive perspective, when you get a request to fulfill a survey or something, there is nothing. Or to fill out the survey, there's nothing incenting you to actually do it. But in this case, if you tell me what they're looking for, I will find people for you. And that helps us actually gather a lot of proprietary data which can be resold to the organizers, to sponsors, to other attendees like this. And so we're not just aggregating existing data, we're generating our own. And that's one of the big things that other players in this space have not figured out, how to actually get people to respond. And when we decide to cover an event, we don't just find information about the people and the customers that we're working with, we find information and we generate new information about everyone, or at least the people that want to use us.

Yeah, so that's great. This concept of lead, enrichment, it exists. We have a company, LeadIQ, we're investors in, and there's many companies that do similar things where you give an email address, a URL, a domain name, or just a first and last name in a city, and it will go and try find a Twitter, an Instagram, a LinkedIn, a blog, an X.com account, whatever it is. And lead enrichment is also very powerful. I think you're off to the races. I think you'll know you'll have made it when the event people start to get upset about your existence or you actually are a competitor to some of these other services. And I think there's an opportunity to just make a matchmaking platform and have an API. I wonder if. Are you building all this technology with an API in mind or no?

In the future? Yes, absolutely. And we already have a list of all the events that are covered. Some of them are accessible publicly, others are not. And you can go right now on our website, and I'm not sure if you can still see my screen, if this is okay for me to share, but it's literally, you are able to go on our website right now and choose from a few hundred events that we've powered in the past. And the ones with the green rectangle around them are the free ones and the other ones are paid. And you can go at any one of these events and put in your goals and the types of people that they're trying to meet and you can find people specifically at that event that you are in right now. And of course eventually we're building tools that will enable you to look for things universally. But there are some data sharing concerns there that need to be addressed carefully in the future. So for the moment it's very much event by event based. But imagine in the future, if you know what everybody's trying to accomplish, why not use this as a tool to find more attendees for your event? Why not use this as a tool to create your own events if you would like the potential of this data to be reacted, utilized and to be monetized in different ways, I think is almost infinite.

Yeah, I think you have a lot of great ideas, a lot of data and then building this into an elegant, seamless product is the last piece of the puzzle here. I think you're on the way and it seems like you're getting some early signs of product market fit. So I think you're going to be successful here. I love the idea of like there being an API for this or a white labeled service. For example, you know, at the all in Summit we had 3,500 people there. I'm not sure what event software they used or if it even has this type of features, but we run bird of a feather dinners and that kind of stuff. It would be great to have a white label service where we can just pay $1,000 a month or 10,000 a year, whatever it is, 5,000 a year to put everybody in and then have them just do that matching or some AI matching service. It's really clever what you're building and you got great potential.

So why are we not doing it? Let's do it. Let's get the online summit on board. It was in la. I live like close to where the last one happened.

I think you also have to adjust. My last thing is your design is mid, like maybe a 5 out of 10, a 6 out of 10 in terms of like UX UI, the pitch deck itself. One thing is people do judge books by their cover design matters. So I would think about investing a little bit in getting the design from what I would say is a 5 out of 10 to maybe a 7 and then struggle again for a couple of months, try to get it to an Eight and a half and then a year later maybe you can get it to a nine and a half. If you look at the journey that Uber went on or Facebook or et cetera, a lot of them were janky apps at first or they were also mid five or sixes out of ten and they just invested over time and they built that muscle. You've obviously got the data muscle in this organization. I'd love to see you add the designing UX muscle to it now.

Next.

Great job and I wish you continued success with it. Thanks again to.

Thank you so much.

Confi and Mircha. It's C O N F Y and what's your domain name so we can give you a shout out. Tech. Another a great crossover there. Tech domains. I love those. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye. All right, next on our pitch competition is Bijan from the Drive AI. How are you doing, Bijan?

Good, how are you?

I'm great and I'm really excited to see your pitch built in Gamma app. Let's start. I'll give you the big countdown. Are you ready?

Yep.

Three, two, go.

Hi, I'm Vigan, founder of the Drive AI, the world's first ascentic workspace. Mitken. He works as a VP of venture and community at Edmonton Unlimited. And his reality is his files are spread across different shared Google Drives and tools and he spends hours searching, organizing and sharing files. Each event that his team runs generates hundreds of documents. For his new event, he's working with 10 companies. Here is what it looks like. Ken opens up Google Drive, clicks new folder 10 times, writes name of the companies, adds people, fixes permission, and uploads same templates into each of these 10 folders manually. It's tedious, repetitive, and by the time he's done, an hour is already gone and the real work has not even started. Now imagine what if Ken could simply say, create folders for all of these 10 companies that I'm working with, invite their team members and upload the templates and it just does that within few seconds. Oh, Kit has missed the files. Why don't you ask the Drive AI to just organize it by its content and it just automatically organizes it neatly within the nested folder structure. Too bored to type it out, just drag and drop it. And then the Drive AI automatically organizes it within the neat folder structure. And that is what we are creating. The Drive AI, the world's first agentic workspace where all file operations can be done using natural language or even voice. It's the only drive that you'll ever need. I started working on the Drive AI as a note taking app for students and scaled it to 20,000 users. And here's something that I discovered. Very insightful. One in three user queries are actionable queries. That means users naturally ask the drive AI to do things and not just expect to get answers back. Right now we are focused on enterprise and we already have four LOIs from companies and we are starting our paid pilot with one company starting this month at $500 per workspace per month. Starting with consulting, engineering and accounting firms. We only need 2000 of these companies to reach dual million ARR. A very very tiny fraction of $96 billion market. Previously I've built superhuman level tiny checkers, Alpha Zero Ascent and have extensive AI and reinforcement research experience from this year's Turing award winning institution. Right now we are raising $2 million precede round to scale up our research infrastructure and go to market strategy. Easy to onboard those 2,000 companies to get to 12 million ARR. See, the Drive AI is here to end the era of static dumb file storage. Google Drive Box, Dropbox, you name it. They are all file cabinets at this point of time. What we are building is the only workspace that thinks and acts alongside you. The drive AI. The only drive that you'll ever need. Thank you.

Okay, well done. What's great about this is you have traction. We need to do a better job showing that traction and what it means. And let's go back to your first slide. Here we'll do a little some tips on presenting. So you said the Drive AI world's first agentic workspace. That's generally word salad. When you use buzzwords and you say oh, it's the first and it's agentic. It's kind of not as evocative or as powerful as just saying it in plain English. At the end you had a different tagline which was the only one you ever need or something to that effect. And then you had another tagline that you said before it. So I want you to work on just a really simple sentence that explains the value proposition to investors. Hey, we're the Drive AI. We're an AI first file management system, whatever it is, we're an AI first version of Dropbox or Box.com something so that people understand what you're doing. Now when you go to the next slide, this is an incredibly text heavy slide.

Okay.

So I'm going to give you a couple of just general tips because you nail it on the next slide on the Next slide, you show your product and you do a product demo. That's great. On this one you're trying to queue up an actual user. Now is this a real user or is this one you made up?

This is the real user, so you.

Should say that this is a real user. His name is Ken. He is Edmonton Unlimited. He's a vice president. And you just need to know two things about him. One, one, he currently is very frustrated with Box and Dropbox and Google Drive. And two, he wastes hours and hours and hours doing the following. Then show it. So this is a very simple rule of presenting, show, don't tell. Show, don't tell. So here you told us he creates 10 folders, he invites team members, he sets up permissions, and he upload templates. This should be a screen and you should say, and you can even put it on the left. You could just show it really quick. I'm speeding this up. But what you're seeing here is an hour of his day. And you speed it up. You show it in a minute while you're talking. So you definitely want to show that the 1 hour. Show the one hour of work really fast. Then you go to your next slide and you say, and here's how Ken does the same exact task today. He opens up our thing. He types the following command. You can go a little bit slower here. Instead of showing, I think he showed like maybe five or six different things here. Just show the one. Apples to apples. He did the same thing in how many minutes?

I don't know, Probably a few seconds.

Okay, so say that he did it in under a minute. So he went from an hour of work to under a minute. And this is what he said to us. And then you do boom, full screen. The quote from him, this incredible testimonial from your customer. I can't believe this doesn't exist. I would pay any amount for this, whatever his amazing quote is. And you just ask him, can you give us a Yelp like quote for our presentation deck when we go raise money? Then if we go to the next slide here, you do some more demos, the next slide and you maybe did maybe too many of them and maybe too fast. So I think slowing down and just showing like maybe one more. Here's another example. Whatever, let's go to the next one. This slide you probably don't need. If you type it out, it can do it. You kind of showed that already. So back to show don't tell. And then here, traction was very interesting, but again, very text heavy slide What I'd rather see you do here is show a cumulative user slide and an active user slide, something like that. A chart. So how many months has the product been out?

It's been almost 16 months at this point in time.

16. So I'd say here's our 16 month cumulative user chart and then here's our. And you can get rid of the B2B letters of intent, because people in our industry call them letters of nothing. I think it's much better to take the B2C folks. And are any of them paying yet or are they just all users, unpaid users?

No, we have some paid users.

Perfect. So I would get rid of the Lois because that lowers your credibility because you're like wasting time on getting people to give you a letter that they might use your product. We got 20,000 free users. How many paid you have 100, 1,000. And when do they turn on paid?

Right now just 13 paid users.

Perfect. And how many months have you been doing paid?

Probably last 12, 13 months.

Okay, fine. So it's a small number. So that's going to be an issue for folks of why did that convert now? Of those 20,000 users that sampled the product, how many use it every day? 200. How many daily active users?

Almost like 5%.

Okay, great. So you want to lead with like the most important numbers. You understand when you're talking to vc, they're going to double click on all of these. And so when they see vanity numbers versus real numbers, credibility can go down. It's much more credible to say we have 1000 daily users currently. Of those thousand, 13 have converted to paid and they're paying $50 a month. How much are they paying?

So for individuals, it's $20 a month.

$20 a month. And let me tell you about those thousand users. And then you go to the next thing. For the thousand users, they've uploaded 90,000 files and you show the number of files uploaded cumulatively. So what I did here is I just looked at all your stats and what founders do is they try to look for the biggest numbers and what investors do. They try to look for the most important numbers, the most accurate numbers that will let them understand the footprint of the business. So the cumulative files uploaded, if it was a cumulative chart, obviously it only goes up. But we could start to see slopes and we could start to see like how people are using it. And then if we talk about those 13 users, here's the 13 users who decided to give us their money. Boom. And you explained who they are, then you could also talk a little bit about how you're converting them. So you're doing a conversion where when you hit this many files it prompts you to convert. So you get your first 10,000 files and your first 5 gig for free. After that you have to pay. Is that the business model consumption and tier pricing on consumption.

Right. So we limit. So we have like three plans right now. Free, individual and enterprise. For free. We just give like 1 GB of free storage plus 5 AI queries per day.

Perfect. So I think explaining that is more important than some of the vanity metrics. Right. Okay. And let's go to the next slide. Okay, so this is pretty good. You know, we're going to be business to business at some point and we think we can get to 2,000 people who are. And this is where like maybe having a Persona, the people who want our product are the top 5% of Drive users. They don't get this out of their current drives. And then there's going to be a question. Why don't you build a layer on top of Fox, Dropbox and Google Drive? What's the answer to that question? I'm curious.

1 well, I hear that question a lot. The answer that I like to give is we want to be one stop solution for all of your agentic tasks. So Google Drive would never, Never integrate, integrate OneDrive into its system. Right. Or even email services or any other existing services. And that's I think the value that we provide. We want to be one step for your all file organization task. So it doesn't matter whether you use Google Drive OneDrive.

What's interesting about that is you're thinking big, you want to be the full stack solution. I get that. But if you had a Chrome extension that did all this or you made a browser that did this or a wrapper or something like that, then you could have people try it on their existing ones and be able to run these tools on the existing ones and then let them port over if they want to. It's just something to consider because when Superhuman did their email product, they let people keep their Gmail address, their Google Docs and their Outlook and they just became like a layer on top of those, an interface. People said, oh my God, it's never going to work. You have to be full stack. And I kind of felt that way too. Turned out I was wrong. People just love the interface and they like having their Gmail interface available as a backup. So there is something to it. But you'll make that decision as you go. Let's go to the next slide.

Sure. I just want to quickly follow up on that if you want.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what we already have is Google Drive integration. So we can sync all of your files from Google Drive into the Drive AI.

Oh great.

So that you can still work on your Google Drive, but we still import and sync that file within the drive AI.

Got it. So if I create one on the Drive AI, it puts it in my Google Drive. If I create something new on Google Drive, it will sync over there. So you're a backup service as well, right? Yeah. So that's an interesting one too. If you were like, I need to have a backup. We invested in a company, backupify, I think. Yeah. And they let you log into your services like Twitter or Gmail or G Drive and they just use the APIs to back all your stuff, stuff up in case you lost your Gmail account. Because people would get their Gmail hacked and there's no recourse. It's not like you're a paid customer. If you have a Gmail account. And then here, this slide, you're a solo founder, is that right?

Right now? Yes.

Yeah. So solo founder is always a weakness in the eyes of venture capitalists because they have seen and they have pattern recognition that you got to go big. You need to have like, like you know, two or three co founders to kind of spread out the work. Did you have any other full time employees or is it just a one man show at the time?

We recently hired a full stack engineer.

Perfect. So I think here you could just put, I'm a solo founder, just own it. And this is our first engineer. Boom. And so you get that credit for having your founding engineer. You could call them and if they say, what's the difference of founding engineer? It's oh, he has, you know, X percent equity. Right. So when co founders, when solo founders don't have co founders, they can do, or I advise them to do the founding team. So founding engineer, founding salesperson, founding growth person. And you can just explain, you know, I didn't have a co founder on this one, but I did build a founding team. And these folks each have on average 4% equity if they stick around for five years. So then they feel like, oh, there is a little bit of a team here. If something happens to you, the company doesn't shut down. Which is their fear for early stage companies. When a company gets bigger, if you've got a solo founder, it's not the end of the world. But in the early days, people do have a Bias towards it. You did a great job. I think you're probably going for too much money. I think it's going to be hard to raise 2 million. I never want to tell a founder not to try. I think you should go to an accelerator first. Go to Y Combinator techstars launch. God, there's so many that could then help you find a co founder or maybe answer some of these questions around how do we convert more of the thousand to paid? And then I think going for a seed round and maybe trying to find an anchor seed fund who will put in 250 to a million. They would typically do 500k. They put in 500k and then you could pass the hat with other angel investors for 500k and then deploy that with a goal of I'm going to deploy a million dollars, I'm going to build the team out to five people and then we're going to get to 10,000 free users and 1,000 page users. And with 1,000 page users at 20k a month, we'll be close to break even whatever it is. And you can explain that use of funds going for 2 million at this point with a two employee team with not a lot of growth and a very small number of paid there, it could be easier for you. Have you raised venture before?

We did get a small check from launch from Founder University.

Yeah. So you got our check from Founder University. When you go on I would definitely go to. Which we like to do, we give this 25k check to try to get people started and help them incorporate. But you need to go to a next. I would go to a. I would try to go to an accelerator. Yeah. And keep things going. If you can add 10 page users a month, 20 paid users a month at this stage and then let's say you had 20amonth and you churn three or four people are going to look at the business and go oh okay, he's figuring out product, market fit and go to market. But the challenge for you will be you're so busy building the product that where's the time for fundraising going to come from? Where's the time to go to accelerator going to come from? Where's the time for your go to market strategy? Which is going to be hard. So I wish that the best with it. Great job and you're off to the races. And for background, for people who don't know, we have founder University, we do it three times a year here in the United States but anybody can go anywhere around the world and then we just launched our mena, which will be in Saudi starting in the first week of November. And you can find all that information at Founder University. And we give all of the folks who aren't incorporated yet or they're just a one or two person team, we give them the option every week, check a box. I would like a 25k check. I'd like 125k check. And we review the progress and we decide if there's, you know, if we can be helpful. And we think it's a good investment for our LPs and hopefully that 25k helps you get into an accelerator. That's my wish for you. So you get into Y Combinator or you get into our accelerator or Antler or any of these great ones. Techstars, the only Chat or Pear has a good one pair. VC has one over the summer. The only problem is you need a co founder really to get in. So a lot of these programs will not accept a solo founder. In my experience. They may not say that explicitly, but realistically they might not. So I wish you continued success and we'll see everybody next time on this Week in Startups. Bye bye.