LMArena Goes Startup, AI App Wars Begin, Scott Bair’s Design Playbook | E2114

All these AI companies, these models, they're building increasingly sophisticated models, but there's no product like, what do they sell you? What is like the thing everybody wants to have that you need AI for? And I think we're now starting to see the answer. It's like, well, those companies don't even necessarily have to build that stuff. They just wait for companies to build an application layer on top of their models and then scoop up the best ones. And I mean, I think that's inevitably what's going to start happening.

People have been talking about where will the value accrue in the current AI rush? Will it accrue at the model layer, the anthropics, the openais, or at the application layer one step above now, earlier.

On the device layer?

No, that's a pretty good point, actually.

Don't forget Windows, don't forget Android, and don't forget macOS or iOS. I think we could see some of those platforms just run the table.

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Hey everybody. Welcome back to this week in Startups. I'm Jason Calcanis, your host. You probably know me from all in Podcast or this Week in Startups or my social media or as an angel investor with me, of course again today. Alex Wilhelm, you know him from TechCrunch and Crunchbase and Mattermark and of course his award winning newsletter, Cautious Optimism on Substack. Go ahead and pay him the hundi. Let's make him independent as a media producer. And Lon Harris, you know him from. Well, yeah, he used to be on Screen Junkies, a bunch of other things. And now the editorial director here at Launch, helping me with all of our projects as we move back to an in office culture. Largely. I think we're going to be literally a majority in person starting next week when our two sales executives in New York report to an office. Like a little office share. Oh, yeah, and then we'll have, I think nine people here. So that's 11 of 20. So we will literally have had that. Well, I just, I realized I have a theory about the work from home thing, which I shared on Twitter the other day. I think work from home people, on average, I'm talking about averages here, folks. I don't get bent out of shape. If you're a high performer like Alex. I think the, the atrophy rate is about 1% in productivity and culture per month drops off. So, you know, if you work from home for a year or two during COVID you might be 10, 20, 30% less effective than the culture, you know, atrophy. But if you, if you spend four years, man, it gets a little weird. And it has been delightful to be back in office, I have to say. We had like a meeting on Monday and a meeting in an office with people is just invigorating line. I don't know how you felt about it.

I do, I feel the same way. I mean, post Covid, I got, I got a phone call the first week of March 2020 that was like he, we're taking a little breather. We're not going to come and we're going to see. Let's just see how this all plays out. And I literally never went back to a job after that until a few weeks ago when I started to come in here. I just, all my work was remote for five years. And, and look, I'm a, I'm a self motivated, productive guy. I wasn't like hanging out watching TV all day. I was still doing work. But you can't help but feel it. It becomes further and further away. You watch your career and, and all the stuff you were most excited about doing and it's a distant short. You watch yourself continually going out to sea. And I feel like it is impossible to fully connect with a project unless at least some of the time you are in real life mixing it up with your actual coworkers, having discussions, working on things in person. Like.

Sure, Emil.

Yeah, I didn't always feel that way. Like Covid and the pandemic really taught me that. I learned that me doing it for five years on my own.

I also like the separation. You probably have this issue, Alex, where when does my workday begin and end? And when I'm home, which I'm, I'll probably be home one day a week, you know, ongoing, or maybe not, I don't know, maybe two. Who knows? I'm right now, in three days in the office when you leave the office and I do my little 30 minute drive home, I kind of decompress. I kind of get ready to see the kids and have the dinner and it just separates it. And when I get in the car and I'm on my way to work, same thing, I'm kind of preparing, okay, what do I got to get done? And then I do my nice 8 solid, 9 solid hours. Get it done. Turn it off.

I love that. One thing I've struggled with, frankly, as a work from home person is the fact that my commute is going across my backyard. Just what you said. And so I finished the workday, poof. I go inside and then it just immediately chaos. Like there's babies screaming, there's, you know, what things going on. And so when we had one child, I literally had a 30 minute commute period after work when I was allowed to just go lay face down on a bed and then get up again. Now that we have two, that's gone. So, yeah, it's, it's a separate physical.

Space with the, with the backyard. Like imagine you're in the same home with two kids, et cetera. I just think it's very hard. I think it's also burning people out. I've noticed, like there's the work from home. People are perpetually exhausted. Perpetually. Exhaustion is like a really a real thing. All right, we have a full docket to get to here this week in startups.com docket. If you ever want to see the docket we're working on, we come to you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. Here. Let's get started. What do we got in the dock?

So the thing that Lon and I are most excited about today is the fact that LM arena is going to be a startup and not just a website that does cool things. But Jason, I think we really love to see founders kind of come out of universities, spin off from research projects and build cool things. I mean, OpenAI did start as a research project. So there's some, you know, history here to this process. And the company has no idea how it's going to make money. They said that straight up.

They're like, we maybe just start by explaining what LM arena is. If people haven't heard of LM arena, as in like a place where sports takes place.

Jason, as always, pulling me back to remind folks what I'm talking about. So LM arena is a place that has hosted a very popular leaderboard for which AI models are considered by the community to be the best and instead of just using predefined tests to run models through and get numbers out, it has a cool arena feature where you put in a prompt and then it gives you two competing results and not telling you which model is which, you have to pick which one's best. So it kind of gives you the Pepsi Coke blind test for AI models and creates a leaderboard that has, I think, a lot of play in how people think about who's leading the AI game. Jason Bloomberg says that it gets over a million visitors a month. I've played with it, I use it quite a lot in my own research. I've participated in the arena system and it's just great to have a way to show people, hey, this is what people actually think is good without having to brand on it. So to see that company, which has been pretty open, pretty useful, become a company, I think is genius.

It's a super important thing to benchmark these and create a little bit of a competitive environment. AB testing. I like your analogy. Coke versus Pepsi, side by side. Over time, people might be able to understand the characteristics of some of these. And it'll also be harder because a big part of the future of AI, especially like sort of chat, the current version that Everybody experiences, the ChatGPT version is memory. So understanding what you've done in the past, it's kind of like Google searches. You used to be able to do a Google search compared to a Yahoo search and we did this at Mahalo back in the day and see if we can make a better result. But then when the results become personalized and it knows, Google knows where you are, they know what websites you've been to, they might favor specific websites and say, oh, you know, you like to read the New York Times. I'll move the New York Times up a little bit. So that will change it. You know, there will be data on the back end here that the language models will be willing to pay for. So if they give top level data, they'll be able to, you know, to the public, okay, fine. But if you get in the back end, say, hey here, how things are trending and maybe you could even pay for custom research. So this could be, you know, very quickly, a $10 million a year business. If you get the language model, companies or corporations to pay you for data, 50,000 a year, 100,000 a year if they found it valuable. I don't know if they will find it valuable enough. So I'm curious what the actual business model will be over time.

Yeah. So back in the Day we used to say, you know, social companies, you know, Snap when it was small, Twitter when it was small, they'll sort it out later on, get to scale and then figure out the monetization. And in some cases that really did work. Snap is public X is still doing billions of year in revenue and so forth. But in the AI game, Jason, I think you nailed it. I think if you have scale, you can create enough data exhaust to generate value without even having to go the ad supported route that social media companies did. So I can see a lot of ways for this company to monetize. I just love that they said, hey, we have a cool thing. Clearly we have product market fit for what we've built thus far. How can we take it to the next level and how can we make it more useful? So they have redesigned their site. I played with that this morning. It's fine. It's a good redesign. I think it works pretty well. But to go the corporate route I think is very fun. My question is, who will invest in them?

Any venture capitalist will take a bet on this because it's AI. They'll get some data from it. Sometimes VCs will make a bet on a company that has growth and has interesting data because it could inform their other investments over time. And this one seems to have a pretty clear path to cover their expenses. Like, what could it cost to run this? This advertisement is paid by Fidelity Private Shares. All right, founders, we all know cap tables, due diligence and of course managing investors is a huge headache. But there's a very simple solution for you. Today we're talking with Kristin Kraft, an old friend of mine, and she works at Fidelity Private Shares, a new group over at Fidelity. You've heard of Fidelity before and they have a mission to help startups simplify equity management. They're going to save you money. They're going to give you better service. Welcome to the program, Kristen. Thank you so much, Jason. It's great to see you again. Yeah, great to see you as well. Maybe just from a product perspective, what are you trying to accomplish with the product? So, Jason, we are super excited about our cap table management and data room platform. We want to make it super simple for founders and startup operators to manage all sort of ownership and equity in the company and essentially prepare to raise. We want to make sure that everybody goes into these fundraising conversations well prepared, they're ready to share their cap table and that they're ready to go through due diligence as they're trying to close their round. So From a product perspective, that is where we're laser focused and that product is really well built, really strong attention to detail in the way that Fidelity is known and beloved for. So if you want an all in one equity management platform, Fidelity Private Shares, they've got you covered. Visit fidelity privateshares.com that's one word, no spaces, no dashes. Fidelity private shares.com and hey mentioned this week in Startups they'll give you 20% off your first year subscription. Once again, fidelity privateshares.com and tell them that you heard about it here on this week in Startups. So I think there is a pretty easy, you know, break even. I think the problem here is is there 100 million in revenue business. But you don't have to answer that lawn immediately. As a company if you're triangulating and you're following energy, this sounds a little loopy doopy but if you know there's something happening in a, in a certain area, there's energy there, there's people, they're engaging, you can go to that area and increase the engagement, learn. And all an angel investor or a seed fund has to know is we're putting in $1 million at a $10 million valuation. We know this can get to a million to 10 million in revenue. So if it gets to that level we have some sort of backstop on our investment. Now if you were going to put in $10 million you would need to be much more thoughtful about okay, if we're giving these guys gals 10 million bucks for I don't know, 15% of the company and it's a 50, 60, $70 million valuation and you have to 10 extra money. Now you've got a bigger bogey. You got to get to 500 million in valuation for the company, 750 million to get a return for your investors. That's reasonable and you want to see more evidence of a sustainable and what would call in the venture land the quality of the revenue and the durability of the revenue a lot of people are sampling. So when you look at like a face swap company or you look at lovable AI, very cool. You look at, you know, ChatGPT, Sora, any of these AI companies people will sample, they'll spend 20 bucks on them like they did, you know, maybe they, they hear a show on Peacock. Well I gotta listen, watch this. 1923 or 28 or whatever it is, you know. Yeah, Paramount plus so that's whatever it is.

The Yellowstone Spinozer on Paramount plus folks.

Oh okay. Like so am I going to come out and then do I keep my Paramount plus? So that would be the question. With a higher investment amount. And this is like the beauty of capitalism in the United States. And the venture industrial complex has built a milestone based investing process. You know people like our founder university, well we offer people their first 25k check at a million dollar valuation. If they're doing like a project and they want to incorporate because they want to see if the project, you know, like a side hustle can become something. Then you have accelerators, Y combinator ourselves, tech stars, 125k. Okay, taking a, that's five times as much money. Okay, then a seed fund, 250, 500k, maybe a million. That maybe would be a pre seed fund, a seed fund, maybe 500k check, a million dollar check and series A funds. But each step along that way you have to have answered some questions here. You don't really need to answer too much to make a seed investment.

Here's my question though, Jason. Does this company need to go the traditional venture capital route? We've seen a lot of AI startups grow very, very quickly accreting revenue. Yes, there are some questions about durability, but cash in the door much faster and at a higher level than we've seen in prior generations of startups, especially SaaS. So for Elamarina, which is now going to be its own company, why not just raise $2 million from their community? They have a lot of very wealthy users, I'm sure. So just equity, crowdfund it, sort out the business model and then maybe raise traditional venture capital.

Sure. Showing some revenue, putting some numbers on the board to show that the community will take money out of their pocket if they have a monthly, a million monthly visitors. We I don't know if that's unique. I'm going to guess it's unique. So it's not visits, it's monthly visitors. Like that's important. That's not a hundred thousand people coming 10 times, it's a million unique people coming X number of times. How about you just put a chart and you show, you tell everybody who's doing a query there that all your queries are available in vip. And if you have slash vip, you can watch the live feed. So you have the river concept that Dave Weiner came up with. The creator of, the creator of RSS came up with a concept of a news river. You can see that Techmeme has techmeme.com river. The idea was to put slash river on any website and just see the information flowing by. If you had a notion instance, notion.comriver would be the idea. Do a river and then charge $100 a month for it. Or a thousand dollars a year, or $500 a year. Come up with like a pretty good deal and show you can get a hundred or five hundred people to pay for that feedback.

Right?

And then anybody who's using the site just has a thing. Hey, all searches are available to our subscribers. That would be a great way to start a simple revenue experiment. And we call that a revenue experiment. It's not necessarily the final product.

I think long, this would be a good time to bring up the fact that we have an update to the story we talked about on Wednesday, sticking close to AI revenue. We talked at the end of the Wednesday show, Jason and I, that OpenAI is considering buying Windsurf, the company previously known as Codeium. We had him back on the show towards the end of last year. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. But Jason, as It turns out, OpenAI first went over and talked to Cursor, which is the product built by any sphere, but people just call it Cursor, which is a company that we've discussed on the show, grew from 100 million ARR to 200 million ARR in something like a quarter or three months earlier this year. And it seems that that deal just never really came together. So my hypothesis here, as we think about, you know, why would they go to Cursor first? Well, market leader. And then why Windsurf? Well, it's cheaper and smaller. But it's interesting that they are kind of seemingly agnostic about which one of these companies they pick up. My thought there is that this is all about the data these companies generate. If you want to build the best AI models for anything involving development work, you want to have a stream, a feed, a river perhaps of information coming in on usage. So I can kind of see why they're flexible on which one they buy. Also, Jason, it's going to be a lot cheaper to buy Windsurf then Cursor. What do you think?

You know, I guess there's a couple of different ways to look at this. They probably did a study of the space and they said it's worth buying either the number one, number two or number three player. So let's open up discussions with those folks and we'll just sequentially go through them. When a market is emerging and you're a lead player like ChatGPT and OpenAI is, you have Something you could offer them, which is, hey, you might be number two or number three with our audience. If we bundle you in, we can dump another 10 to 100 million users into your product, and you'll be the number one product, and you'll have more access to data, and you'll have more access to servers. So the number one player might want to be, hey, you know what? We should stay independent because, you know, why would we sell if we can, you know, take on. And when we're the category leader and the VCs will be like, you're the category leader, there's no way you should sell now. If the reason to sell a company like Cursor would be, it stops growing, the founders don't want to run it anymore. They want to cash out, you know, and they're pushing the issue. And then it would be up to the VCs to say to the Cursor founders, okay, I know you want to sell. How about we give you $100 million in liquidity each for the three founders? You could sell your shares, we'll buy them. You know, which is what typically happens in these situations. They're stock rich, cash poor. The founders make an economic decision, and in the old days, the economic decision was often to sell. So when Instagram sold, Sequoia had just put in money at like, I think, a $500 million valuation, and they sold for a billion. And Sequoia was extremely upset that they did this right, that Kevin Systrom sold. They really wanted him to go for the gold, and I think they doubled their money in 90 days was the story they put the money in. Zuckerberg was like, oh, my God, Sequoia is in this thing. We got to buy it before it goes there. So they just said, we'll double it. Very hard to walk away from $1 billion sale. But if they had, they would have a $250 billion asset right now. They should have gone for the gold. They were actually the competitor to the viable competitor, Facebook. So Facebook made the right trade there. And what is Sam buying here? He's going to buy a team that's motivated and focused on this product that can hit the ground running. He's buying a customer base and then maybe you know, to an extent, a brand Founders. Every time you miss a phone call, you miss an opportunity, and your customers are not going to wait. If they're calling you on the phone, that means they really want your product, your service, or to work for your company or to invest in your company with open phone, you're never going to miss those important calls or lose track of who you need to follow up with. It is the number one business phone system and it's built for entrepreneurs like us. AI powered call transcripts and summaries make life so easy. I'm so glad they added that feature. You know what's been discussed, you know what to do next. And they have automated messages so you make sure that no customer is left hanging. And it's trusted by over 50,000 businesses. This company is growing like a weed. I wish I had invested in OpenPhone. Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com twist. That's O P E N P-H-O-N-E.com twist for 20% off for six months. What they would call intangible value. So those are the three things you're typically buying. I would suspect here it's the team and the customer base, you know, giving them a nice head start. And he doesn't have to take people on other ChatGPT products and say, hey, focus on just developers. They're already over there. So which is what Zuckerberg and Google did. Google had a product, Google Video. They were pushing pretty hard. Oh yeah. Trying to get people to start uploading video. People forget there was a video tab and you could upload videos to Google.

Their hearts, bless their hearts.

It was never good. It was so bad.

They also did Google. Right. They wanted to have a social network so they kind of integrated Google plus and they tried both of those things.

Wave too.

Google Wave was an incredible product.

They should never have cancelled.

I liked Google Wave.

Yeah. I want to note here to the things that OpenAI is buying because this, this I screen shows, I think why there's another element here. So here is a case study from anthropic, an Arch OpenAI rival, discussing how cool it is that Codium's windsurf IDE their developer tool use Claude. Well, if you're open AI and you would love to, I don't know, take away some revenue from your smaller competitor, I can also see that fitting into the overall strategic.

Yeah, that's focus. That's a great insight. Sure. If they were, it would be like if, I don't know, you were spending a lot of money, your YouTube, you're spending a bunch of money on AWB and Azure, buys YouTube and moves the storage and the transport all the way over there. Yeah, you could be winning that deal too. The bigger picture is M and A is back and ChatGPT has some big chip stack and they're willing to use it to buy other competitors. Where's Xai? Where's Claude? Where's Google? Google can't buy stuff. They've got so much antitrust that you know they're going to constantly be in antitrust land. So buying is like why are we going to buy stuff that's just going to put more heat and microscope on our company? That's the challenge. That's why Google should probably spin out a couple of assets.

XAI is interesting because they have that hundred billion dollar roughly valuation after the XXAI combination and they have pretty much a murderer's row of financial backers behind the two companies that are now joined.

And what if you put it with Tesla? What if the next shoe to drop. I don't have inside information. XAI becomes part of Tesla. Now you've got a public currency and you have three different businesses living the five different businesses living under one roof. You've got the language model, you've got the social network, you've got Optimus, the Robot, you have EVs, electric vehicles, you have battery and solar, I'll put those together, energy and then you have full self driving. So you got like arguably six businesses all with AI as the fundamental foundation to them. Now Tesla can go out and start buying things because they have a public currency already. If you take OpenAI's money in the form of their stock, it's illiquid. So you're kind of trapped. And the people with public currency and then if, I don't know if Tesla, yeah, Tesla should be under a trillion dollars right now.

It's 756.

They're just, you know, when you hit the trillion dollar mark, I think regulators are rightfully wary of how powerful the company is. When you're under a trillion think they might be like okay yeah, that's a mid sized company as crazy as it sounds. So I think we'll see a lot of these pickups also. You know, these are high valuation companies. You could see investors getting skittish that hey, maybe Cursor could get wiped out if Microsoft decides Copilot's free, you know, or if XAI or Apple or Google decides to put a product out there and undercut them and include it and bundle it inside of Microsoft Office, Google Office. The bundling of AI is inevitable and I think consumer AI will be a free product. I don't believe consumers are going to pay for it. I think it's going to be a largely free product in the next year or two.

I think this is interesting too, going back, as I so often do, to the early sort of AI skepticism, and that's still raging on places like Blue Sky. One of the things you heard all the time, or still do in some cases, is like, well, but all these AI companies, these models, they're building increasingly sophisticated models, but there's no product. Like, what do they sell you? What is like, the thing everybody wants to have that you need AI for? And I think we're now starting to see the answer. It's like, well, those companies don't even necessarily have to build that stuff. They just wait for companies to build an application layer on top of their models and then scoop up the best ones. And, I mean, I think that's inevitably what's going to start happening.

And it's super good for startups because people have been talking about where will the value accrue in the current AI rush? Will it accrue at the model layer, the anthropics, the open eyes, or at the application layer one step above now.

Earlier on the device layer?

No, that's a pretty good point, actually.

Platform layer. Don't forget Windows, don't forget Android, and don't forget macOS or iOS. I think we could see some of those platforms just run the table.

All right, next up, Jason, we have something that we thought you were going to love. Here is a tweet from a couple of friends who built a very cheap 3D printed drone that could calculate its coordinates not using GPS, but instead they were using a camera plus Google Maps, a very cool hack. And the story here is these three guys did this and then went their separate ways. It was a hackathon. Their tweet went insanely viral. They decided to instead build a company. I mean, then they went through, Sorry, you're a bit late. Then they went through yc, then they raised the money. And so now these three guys are building a company called Theseus, which just raised 4.3 million.

Okay, so the drone is 500 bucks. It navigates without having an Internet connection.

It still needs to have Internet because it's using its own system to do that, but it's not using the Global positioning System. And the issue here is that GPS systems, and there are several around the world, are in war zones, just 100% jam. They said that within 100 kilometers of the front line in Ukraine, GPS just doesn't work.

It still has an Internet connection on it somehow, like a 5G connection or something.

That's my guess.

Okay, so it's got some Internet connection on it and then it uses the visual field and correlates that what a satellite image. It correlates that as its navigation. It has. I mean it would be even better if the thing, if you knew it was going to operate in a certain theater, Ukraine, you know, into Russia, you could have all of those maps across many different data providers on a thumb drive on an Arduino. If it's visually able to make its best guess as to where it is from its starting point and visually from the air, wow. It would be totally independent of any Internet connection. So that actually is super interesting. And I think those are the things that a lot of the legality around using robots in warfare. I forgot what the law is, but there were some laws around this that had emerged. Just like there's chemical warfare rules, I think there were rules about autonomy and robots. You can be certain that many countries have the capability to send a robot out without an Internet connection and just be able to identify a person of a certain ethnicity, a certain clothing type, you know, a uniform, and just murder them and eliminate them. So that's the really scary dangerous part is the Robocop sort of nature of what's coming. What kind of mistakes could be made? Right.

The UN Office for Disarmament affairs calls these laws lethal autonomous weapons systems, but does note that there's not really one hard definition for them and not a lot of I think strong legal rules, unlike with say mustard glass or chlorine gas as we learned in World War I. I'll just say that we've talked so much on the show about the importance of drones in future warfare. We also talked about electronic warfare, anti drone jamming and so forth. Well, here is the way around that, Jason. Towards a more drone heavy future. It does actually make me sleep a little better at night because there was concern that if there's ever a hot war between China and the US that all the GPS and similar satellites would just get yoinked from orbit by various methods.

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One more data point on this company before we move on. I went and pulled just the YC historical list of companies they've invested in and in the last couple of batches since winter. 24 Jason. 43 Known drone companies in that list. That's quite a lot. And I think that's probably indicative of venture interest in general. I'm just interested to see what happens to all those bets in a trade war environment when there's an effective trade embargo on China, which was the source for quite a lot of drone parts and similar technologies. So it's going to be interesting to see how Theseus and other companies like it survive, thrive in the changing world. It's, as we learned on Wednesday, a tough time out there.

Okay, let's keep going.

All right, so we're calling this segment Tips from the Trenches. We've got, you know, founders, experts, insiders giving you very specific, granular, helpful advice, instructions, tips about various sort of topics facing the startup founder today. So we had the other day at Founder University, we had Scott Baer, the director of strategy for Lunor. I think I'm saying that correctly. He, he gave us a amazing presentation about the basics of branding and, and design for new founders and so I've got little summaries. The first segment here, the difference between your brand and the concept of branding. So let's take a look at that first clip.

The two definitions I like to use to break this apart is brand, which is someone's gut feeling about your company or service. It's what they say it is influenced by multiple experiences over time. Whereas branding is the unending act of perception, design. And so like Jason was saying, design is really, really important. And I, you could have the most beautifully designed, whatever product, webpage, anything, and if it's misaligned with your target audience, it's gonna fall flat. And so being able to be perceived correctly by your target audience is critical. And so that's where branding should constantly be. A double sided conversation of you're speaking something, you're seeing how it's being responded to and you're adjusting. Now the two most important words that I like to go back to with branding are differentiation and consistency. So you gotta find out what is that angle that we have that's different from everybody else and then how do we go double down on that? And you have to say the same thing over and over and over because even launch does that. So launch. If they started going into a completely different direction then they start muddying the waters and it's confusing where you have to say the same thing over and over to where like liquid death, fire to say liquid death. You know what they do because they've been saying the same thing for a while.

If you were to, you know, put Nike in here, you know, just do it. Iconic brand. But they do branding constantly. I am constantly seeing different Nike, you know, sub brands, Nike running, Nike yoga, Nike basketball, Nike loungewear. They're constantly building on the brand promise, which is to just do it, to just get out there and work out. And it manifests itself in different ways. I, I, what I like about this is repeating yourself over and over again. People assume that people understand what you do here at this Week in Startups, right? We cover the news and technology and how to build companies, right? Like over and over again we have to tell people like, hey, when you listen to the show, we're going to talk about what's happening in technology and then we're going to talk about building startups. That's it. And Founder Fridays. Four founders by founders. I keep saying that over and over again. Four founders by founders. Founder University. Start a company. That's it. Just start a company with two or three of your friends. Start a company with two or three of your friends start a company with two or three of your friends. And the reason we keep saying two or three of your friends is because we. We like to invest in teams. We don't like to invest in solo founders. So we're trying to tell people, hey, get two or three of your friends and build a startup, and we'll help teach you how to do that. So this is super important to start thinking about early on.

I mean, I noticed this a lot when we started doing the inside streaming newsletter. I felt like I was talking about it constantly, to the point that everybody's gonna get tired of following me on social media. Because every day I'm like, hey, I got a newsletter, Jacob. I talked about this in my newsletter. And when I would actually talk to other people, every time, they would be like, you have a newsletter? Why don't you ever talk about it? Why haven't I heard anything about this? And I'm out there. I felt like I was doing it every day. So you're too close. Whatever you're working on, you're too close to it. Talk about it more than you are, because people still don't know. That would be my advice.

And Twitter. When you live in the Twitterverse, you assume that you're reaching everybody. The Twitterverse is like 15% of society. That's why you have to master Facebook, Reddit. There's other places online people hang out. And then there's the real world, man. So many startups never go operate in the real world and touch grass. I think touching grass with your brand, super important. When I started Silicon Alley Reporter, I used to wear a Silicon Alley Reporter T shirt every day of my life. Literally every day of my life. I had a Silicon Valley reporter thing. And they'd say, what's that? What's Silicon Valley Reporter? And I gave the T shirts out constantly. So think about branding. I think really getting into the real world is so crucial. The real world activation startups never do these, but there's a place where all the lawyers are going to. There's a place that all the accountants go. I don't. I don't necessarily know where that is. I don't know what conference it is. I don't know what bar it is.

Yeah, I don't want to go to the accountants thing, but I'm sure it exists.

Maybe not for me, but there is a place where accountants right now are talking about accounting stuff. It's up to you to go find those people, and you just have to ask them when you do your customer interviews. Where they hang out.

Let's move on. Part two. So this Scott presents four different questions that he thinks founders should ask themselves in order to really dig into understanding what they're offering is what their brand is, and how they should be communicating with the public. Let's take a look at that clip.

So first, why are you motivated to build this company? And I would recommend everybody answer these questions and I will, I'll share this slide deck afterwards. But this one will go back to when you're tired, when you have that second job, when, when you don't want to do it, when you cannot find product market fit. Why are you motivated to keep building? And next, what does Apple E Ever after look like for your customers using your product? This is my favorite one, and it's because it's a vision that is so clear that people can see it. My favorite example of this is Microsoft's old vision statement, which is a computer on every desktop and in every home. And what that gave is the engineers to understand, well, I know how big my desk is and we have to fit that entire component that big. So you give, you give constraints, which is really good, and you have to be able to give that really clear picture. Here I'm using an example of, you know, Elon Musk always talking about going to Mars. They've created renderings of what that could look like. So it's a very clear scene of what that actually looks like and we can build towards that. So as your vision statement, next is your mission. So vision and mission often get confused for each other. I found the mission is the how. So how are you going to make this vision become a reality? So this is more, a little more tactical. So we are going to do this, make this vision become real by and then filling in the blank of those pieces. These are also really helpful frameworks for your team to just get aligned. If you have multiple people that are building, it's helpful to go back to your North Star of what you're actually trying to accomplish, your values. So what actions are rewarded or disciplined are typically what I found that values work best. And you know, I don't know if anybody's ever been in a corporate environment where they have the values on the wall and it's like integrity or all these things. And then you're like, I just saw that person steal and nobody did anything about it. And that shows you that it didn't really mean anything. And so for me, if, for one of our values is be a great partner. And so that means I've said, here's the value. And for me, my promise is I will respond within X amount of time. Or if I realize that we're going to be late, I'm going to be the first one to speak up.

I think setting a culture is another way to say that. Last one is, you know, like, how do we accomplish the mission? What are the characteristics here? You know, I think you guys would agree on a podcast like this. I'm like, details matter. I always say details matter to people. You do, details matter. I've been saying that for my entire career. And the reason I think details matter and effort and hard work matter. These things. You can be very proud of what you've produced, whether it succeeds or it fails, if you have craftsmanship and you really focus on those details. We've worked on the details for this very podcast that you're watching. Details around wardrobe, details around sound, details around lighting. And if you work on details, one of the things I found, just as a culture is then when you take on a new project or you're doing some new effort, everybody just brings that mentality, what details matter in this? How do we make it better? And they're empowered to think, hmm, we have this new idea, we're executing it. How do we make it just a little bit better in 10 different ways? If you make 10 aspects of a product 10% better, it's twice as good. I'm doing that right now with the Founder University. I became personally engaged in it, and I'm looking at every detail because if the leader doesn't do that, then everybody else just does what we did last time. That's what we always do. I'm always trying to break people out of, well, that's the way we do it here. And say, well, how can it just be a little bit better and bring that attitude to everything? So we were doing, as a silly, stupid example, when we do Founder University, on Thursdays, we have breakout sessions, and they were randomly breaking people out into rooms using this cool feature on Zoom where you can just create breakout rooms. How many people per breakout room? You break it out. And I was like, that's interesting. It's random, it's exciting, it's easy. You just press a button. And then I was like, you know what? I don't have my team engaged with the founding university teams. So how about we do this? Everybody does a pod of 30 of the companies in the program, and every Thursday you meet with your pod so you get some consistency, you build some relationships. That's actually better for Founder and they have one person at our firm who they build a relationship with as opposed to like a thin relationship with three or four people at the firm. We did it last night in this new format I came up with and I think this is cohort 10 or 11. 10, 10. And I mean it was dramatic, the feedback and how much better it was. Yeah. Last night Lon, you did one of the pods.

Yeah, no, I ran, I ran a pod. I was very worried people were going to be like lan, I'm migrating my cloud infrastructure. I have some API questions. But that did not happen, thankfully. It was great. It was great. And I think the founders really did appreciate just not even the me of it, but just having a smaller group. Like they got to know one another by name, they got to sort of talk about one another's companies specifically. A lot of them had been sort of, they were going through sort of similar parts of the process and could relate to one another on that level. And they're conversations you couldn't have possibly had in a big room with 150 people that you need that breakout room of 10 to 12. And then people can sort of, it's a little more interpersonal. So yeah, I thought it worked great.

You know what this reminds me of? The incrementally improving your outputting your work and your project. Reminds me of that Marc Andreessen clip you had the other day, Lon, when he was talking about Steve Jobs and his approach to work and that. What was the quote like he only would tolerate first class work. Right? Yeah, you'd be shooting high.

Yeah. If you're not, if you weren't like a first class producer or something. Like if you weren't like really giving it 100% every day. He just wasn't, he wasn't interested in having non high performers around and he.

Executed on that pretty well. Any other, any notes from these questions that stood out to you gentlemen? One of the questions I, I really.

Like that Scott was focused on like, I like the phrase happily ever after. I think so often the focus is on that one interaction. I want to like sell you the thing. I want you to use the app or download the app even. Like I feel like I, I've worked for a lot of companies where that's the, the thing. It's like we just want people to download the app and we want those numbers to go up and then we're fine. And I like the focus on. We don't just want you to download it, we don't just want you to Try it. We want it to work. And then it has in some way. In some way, right? In some way it has improved your life even incrementally. And now you have.

You're in a new situation for each of you. Do it for this week in startup, what should the outcome, what should heavily happily ever after be after people watch this episode? Alex.

Okay, I think happily ever after for viewers of this big in startups is an increasing percentage of the viewership. Starting companies.

Great. Awesome. I like it. What do you got?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's what I was going to say is overall, our goal is to give you a lot more confidence. Whatever you're. If you're working for a startup, if you're starting a company, if you're investing in a company, to feel like you've learned something from this community, you have that extra confidence that. I've listened to these guys, I've heard all of these examples. I can do this myself.

Well, I just did vision. You just did mission per the framework that was described in that. True.

We did.

Yeah. I love the outcome that people after they watch this are more informed. They will make better decisions. Right. In their personal life and their professional life and even a little entertained along the way. Well, they had some enjoyment after it. They say, hey, that was kind of fun. I like a little fun in it, you know. You know, I like those guys at camaraderie. So I like, I like this concept of laugh and learn, laugh and learn. So Lon, I want, I want to get more cold opens and funny bits going on here on the show as well. We need you surprise me with some bits. I get some bits going to get that creative juices. But I also like the three of us and the team to have fun doing it. I'm always trying to, you know, if you can have fun and combined with that, you're doing great work. I like that, like a little levity while you're doing your best work. I think, you know, one of the things Steve Jobs did is, and you know, I knew Steve and people who worked for him and I'd met him a bunch of times, there's a lot of like projection that goes into a larger than life personality. But the truth was he hired really well. So if you were there, you were qualified to do the job. Now, did you do your best work or not? At any given moment, that's when he would let you know if he thought this was your best work. And I always took a note on that. I will tell people just very. You Know, matter of factly, this isn't great work. This is okay work. This is good work. It's not really great work. Let's go a little faster, you know, and, and then I'll compare to them, especially in the day of AI. By the way, your work product is something that AI would have produced. You need to look at what AI can do today and maybe do it a little better. And so that candidness with a little bit of fun, you know, and hey, let's try to just do a little better each day at whatever we do. I find that is more exciting for me to come to work. Anyway, this is a great framework. It's a great talk. Scott, I just want to personally thank you for doing it. I'd like to have Scott come on the podcast and he does a really fun thing where he. I people, I call it Savage, My startup, where people tell me their startup idea and I just give him like brutally candid. I kind of do that privately now in small groups because founders like it, but some people find it a little disturbing. But he does a really good thing where he kind of looks at people's web pages and tries to improve them in real time and talks about what he likes about them, what he doesn't. I think a live clinic like that where we line up 10 audience members, they show their product, or we just pick 10 and we said, what do you think? How would you improve these? And we just picked 10 high profile ones.

Yeah, I think that the cool thing about what he does too is that he goes in totally cold, which is not an experience. Like a lot of the time when you're showing somebody your website, you've already kind of set it up for them. Like, okay, so here's what we're trying to do. It's a marketplace, preamble, right? And he goes in and he's just pulling it up and just in real time trying to figure out, what do you do? What are you selling me? Based only on your website. And it is a novel approach and I think, I think a lot of the people watching learned a lot from that because sometimes he would show up and he'd be like, I don't know what this is. Like, I. That's something having to do with AI. It's something having to do with, you know, call centers. But I don't know what you're selling.

Do you know the, the start date of founder university cohort 11 yet? Do we have that date?

I don't know, but let me look it up.

Yeah, Founder University is the website where you can apply.

It says Summer 2025 is all I see.

So it'll probably start in August or something. Or July. Right now it's April. Yeah. So we're going to have this as part of the innovation, like a week in person. We're going to run people through like a very intense program. You have to take a week off, come to that. Or you can do the virtual and kind of self paced thing. But if you want to be part of the next found university, which will have 100 teams in person working really hard for a week, which would be two or 300 people, it's going to be quite exciting. I might limit it to 50, but I'd like y' all to consider coming. You need to have two or three people on your team who are all builders or capable of building stuff and you want to have product velocity. Those are the tips for getting into founder University. Okay, and we have one more design clip or are we.

Well, we got two more if you want to watch them both. Or we can pick one. All right, so part three. This was Scott's approach to understanding logos in terms of logo design. Ideal aspects of your logo. And he also talks. I thought this was really fascinating. A little bit about color theory and how to pick the right color for your logo.

Oh, I love color theory.

Yeah, this was really fascinating to me. Let's take a look. Alex, if we have that pulled up.

Here'S a quick comparison. I did a search on I think Fiverr or 99designs for best logos. This was on the left side and then on the right side you'll see maybe a few companies that you recognize there is a framework for this. So on the left side there's. I find that a lot of founders I work with when we're doing logo design, they want to fit everything that all the meaning of their company into a single mark, which is very challenging to do and I'd actually argue is not usually the best decision to do anyway. And on the right side is more. Your logo should be more of an identifier versus an explanation. And you'll. You'll find that you're able to get much smaller. And in a world where 50 or 50 half of all Internet browsing is done on mobile devices, having some sort of icon or symbol is critical nowadays. So there needs to be some sort of element there. Then also you'll see colors. I would stick to one, maybe two for your brand to be known as.

Absolutely.

When I say what is the color of target? Nearly like everybody Would know. It's actually. Tell me what is target's color?

Red.

Everybody was yelling, what about Chase Bank?

Blue. Blue, Safe, Stable. What about.

How about. Anyway, we can keep going. But you get it really quick. And so when you see it, your. Your brain reads color much faster than it reads words. And so you're giving a feeling to somebody right away.

Yep.

There's one of these brands I want to talk about that he talks about.

Is we want to make sure it scales. So again, it has to go down to like or whatever. Our favicon is 35 pixels high to your logo is usually a good idea to start with. And then being able to scale out now, what about color? So quick crash course on color is your color does mean a lot. So the color red will actually increase your heart rate when you see it, whereas blue is on the other end of the spectrum. Will cool, will slow you down, and it brings a sense of calmness and builds trustability. Like, yeah, it's always blue.

Banking is blue.

And health. Yeah, he says healthcare too.

Hospital.

Something like that.

Orange is energy. Orange is playful. I love orange and blue. That's why the launch logo is always orange. And blue is our colors.

Purple is the one that's really fascinating to me because you would think Taco Bell would be like a red like that. Like purple is.

It's an odd quirky. That's odd and quirky in my mind. That's why yahoo used it, etc. It's a quirky color. Green is nature organic.

Like Whole Foods being green. Yes.

Yellow. I don't understand who uses yellow. Yellow is a very weird color.

McDonald's, they've got on their Hertz Rent a Car is yellow.

Host.

I don't like those brands by.

Yeah, I don't like them either.

Yeah, you just mentioned brands and logos I don't like. So he makes. These are like little blocking and tackling tactics that you really got to get right. And you know, people like to do a logo in one. When people think about logo construction, they think about it in one medium. I'm looking at my webpage, I'm looking at my bottle of beer. And what he's explaining here is that real logo architecture and design is thinking about it holistically across all possible mediums. So when I do logo design, and I've done really good ones in the.

Past.

The Mahalo logo was award winning. The inside logo was award winning. The launch logo was award winning. Just people really love those. And the guy I use for Mahalo, which was the one I was most proud of Jonathan Hicks, I believe is his name. And this is like one of the most talented logo designers. And he charged, you know, this is 15, 20 years ago. He charged. Yeah. There's the Mahalo logo. It was stunning. And that was a variation on it. There were other ones without the beta in it, but he made this beautiful Plumera that we could use. The mahalo was, you know, Hawaiian, playful, and, man, it worked everywhere. Jonathan Hicks. And then that's when we added learn anything to it. When we had some educational content.

Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

We debated learn everything or learn anything. And we were just way ahead of our time. And we thought about using AI to a machine, learning to try to accomplish some of the tests. But it didn't work.

It wasn't.

So I just wasn't ready for our time. Yeah, it wasn't ready. So Mahalo today would have been pretty amazing. Putting it aside, I liked to get a mug, a business card, stationary, a website, a mobile website, an app, log icon, the favicon, which is a little tag. And if you try to. If you saw that Plumera in any of those locations without the word mahalo, it was very evocative. You would think Mahalo. And I did the same thing with inside, which was lowercase, with brackets. And the inside logo with brackets on either side is. The brackets are what in an editorial context, as you know, Alex, your editor might put in there, and you know, the editor, like, literally in the New York Times, if you see brackets or some of these publications, the editor's notes would go in the brackets. So I was like, okay, that's a real insider pull. Put the brackets on either side, make it lowercase. Kind of like typewritery, old school, like, gritty editor. You're inside, you know, with an insider. And I love the movie the Insider. So having some thoughtful things about it, why you're building it, what you want to evoke. I want it with Mahalo to evoke a playful warmth place, feminine and masculine, you know, all at the same time. So I just love it.

Gave us a theme, too. We played around a lot with the Hawaiian tropical theme. Like when we did Mahalo Daily, it had that sort of like, tiki torch opening and.

Yeah. So much fun. Yeah, yeah. Scott Bayer and the name of his firm again, he's got a design firm. We'll put it in the show notes. If he. If you need a designer, he's great.

He's director of strategy for L U N O U R. Lunor.

Lunor. And so if you Have a really great talk. You want to give to our founders and you really want to spend time with them and donate a couple of hours of your time to our founders of Founding University or the accelerator will blow you up here and hopefully get you a couple of customers if you, if you really work hard.

Yeah, he was great. He did do that in real time. He pulled up a lot of our founder you companies and he just like, you know, ripped them apart, but in a, in a constructive and fun way. And people loved it. They were lining up to send him their websites. They were, they were like, like roast me. So here's, here's our final segment with him. It's just some great, some principles for designing great looking websites, apps and products.

All right, let's go.

So first is start what feels like too much white space. On the left side you'll see that everything is equally spaced. Where on the right side you'll see that it's grouped. People scan in general and so you want to make your product scannable. And also you'll see there's space in between. And what's helpful about this is it's the way we talk. So I will say something, a pause, take a breath and then move on to the next thing. Your product should also feel like that and then simplify where possible. So on the left side it might be a little small. I can see everybody squinting. So I might need to increase this. It says name and it puts her name, job title, puts her job title. Where if you're in the product every single day, you can see on the right side it just has her name, her title, her email.

So yeah, if you go through your.

Product again, make it less is more. Make everything that go. Try to reduce as many, as much reading as possible in anything that you build. Next is prioritize values. On the left side, if I were to say what do you see first? Most everybody says heart rate. Or on the right side you see the 82 bpm, which is really what you want to see. If a nurse is looking over at a unit, I want to save her a quarter of a second just by getting her what she needs the fastest.

This is so important is, yeah, clear primary action.

Every time I've asked this, what's the thing? The first thing you see is this big red delete button. We're on the right side. It says publish. Here's a massive principle I have in product design which is make your product more sticky and valuable. So I never want to visually promote something that deteriorates my product and so you'll see there's different button states here on the right side. And we'll get into actually the next one, which is a filled primary, a secondary kind of faded background. And then the delete is this link style. So it's really subdued. So as I go through anybody's product or when I design products, I really like to have one primary filled button on the page. Just because I almost want you to, like, change everything on your text to a different language and for you to try to figure out what to click because the primary buttons are so clear.

I like it.

That guy's absolutely fantastic. Also, I want him to, like, narrate to me at night because I feel like his voice is very calming.

Yeah, it's a soothing talk. Yeah, I agree.

These are just great, simple design principles that you probably wouldn't have been exposed to naturally. And he presents them in a very concise way. So thanks again to our friend Scott. If you would like to come to Founder University. Founder University. And what I'd like to do, Lon, is if you could deputize somebody on the team to redo the Founder University website. That would be fun too. As a project internally, we maybe take his advice on it. The thing I really love is never ending scrolling pages on mobile. I noticed some people, course people, you know, people who do courses, they do it so here, like, turn your startup idea into a reality. Apply now. Learn more.

Yeah, I feel like he would say that text under, turn your startup into a reality too. Too much, too small.

Way too much.

Yeah, I feel like that would be the Scott take on that.

Yeah. And what we should do is you should scroll up and then get those details. We Invest, you know, 125%, you know, 25K investment for.

Right.

Shorter, clearer, punchier.

Punchier. Yeah.

So lots of work to do here. And again, we're looking at the desktop. We always want to look at mobile first because about 70% of people experience your website on mobile.

I do feel like color. We're doing good. He said, like, black and white is very, like, respectable, like, you know, conservative, like trustworthy, like Apple is, you know, black and white. And I feel like we're doing the.

Energy and black and white, you know, night mode. All right, this has been another episode of this weekend. Startups follow x.com Lons L O N S x.com Alex I'm x.com Jason. I'm also instagram.com Jason and you can follow the show. Just type in. This week in startups is typically twi startups and go ahead and post a comment or like some of the shorts we're doing. We're trying to wake up those we have it this week in startups clip channel on YouTube if you can go follow it. That would be helpful if you're an og. And Founder Fridays is for founders by founders. Founder Fridays Tech tech from the tech domains which are really cool. Domain name Founder Fridays where you get together with a pod of six other founders and every first Friday of the month you get together and you share learnings together. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye bye.