What Actually Gets a Startup Funded Now | a16z & Google Ventures

Awesome. We are so excited to have you both here. We have a room full of builders, founders, designers, dreamers, and probably a few people secretly coding during this panel. So I wanna start with a thing everyone here is wondering. What's something in a pitch deck that immediately makes you lean in? What creates the moment where you stop scanning and start believing in the vision?

Oh, I mean, I think there's a lot of different things that can get you to start to believe. Obviously, real proof is there. We were just chatting a moment ago about like what it's like to play with a product for the first time. And I think that's, that's the thing that really makes you believe, I think, is when you're using something and you feel like you're seeing the future. You know, probably the first time anyone of you like got into Waymo or had that type of experience, you know, you can say, okay, things aren't going back. Um, so, you know, that may or may not happen in a deck, but I feel like it's usually when you feel that from a product that this is just the way the world is going to work going forward. And then I think you're, you, you are very much leaned in from that moment on.

Love it. Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. I think also just like founders, when they talk about something that they love and have a very clear, not only vision, but just the way that they sort of explain why the product needs to exist, like this is compelling, not just for investors, but for building your team. And so there's not like, obviously obviously one ingredient for which this is, you know, true. But just any special founder just like understands their vision, knows how to communicate it well, can really create that magnetism around the vision. And, you know, this is like where we're all kind of here to hear a great story, but not just because it's a good story, but because there is a product to be built.

I love that. Yes, storytelling really is everything. And we're kind of now in a moment where someone without an engineering degree or even VC backing or Silicon Valley background can build and ship a real product in an extremely short amount of time. If AI has overall lowered the barrier to building, which barrier do you feel like it has quietly raised for builders?

Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, the, the thing that has really changed, like you said, is there's been this democratization. Um, so now you're not just competing against the few people in Silicon Valley who can get access to, you know, a little bit of compute or some top engineering talent. Like, now that might be anyone. Everyone in the world with an idea. So, you know, every time there's, there's this kind of, you know, horizontal expansion, competition rises. And so the bar for what people expect as both consumers and enterprises continues to rise. You know, I think, you know, one of the big consequences of AI is that people will not tolerate kind of bad software anymore. Like it's very easy to create good software. So if you're just solving a need, but the software is terrible, Um, nobody cares, right? It's like the bar just keeps getting, uh, continues to rise. So I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing for founders because I think if you're starting now, you're going to, you know, that you have to create a good, good, good product to compete in this market. Um, but I do think it raises the bar for what's, what's acceptable.

Well, yeah, maybe it's just like building on that because I was recently, you know, a founder, 8 years building something, Vibe Coding Games, and I just feel like The thing that we were seeing internally, and then also what makes it both an exciting and a terrifying time to build, is that the next model release might kind of eat up a huge part of your, you know, roadmap, stack, etc. But like, the way that it both, you know, raises and lowers the bar is that just being, you know, good technically is not enough. Just being a good designer is not enough. Or, you know, just like having an idea is oftentimes not enough. It's just like you have to kind of be you know, you're most empowered if you're just like stretching a role beyond what the traditional role is. And that's because you can use AI better than other people. And so right now, like if you're, you know, at the top and you're automating better and you're kind of like stretching across these different roles, you are able to kind of pull away in that delta against like the next best. So it's sort of like it rewards just like going deeper into being a better user of these frontier models. But yeah, it's definitely a tough time to build, but I feel like what's exciting is that no longer is there like a technical kind of gateway of just like, okay, you have to be this good of an engineer to try to build something. Like, you can, you know, you can get better, but like so many more people who have good ideas can now try to build, and that's the best way that you can gain experience and get better.

Wow, that's powerful. I guess as we go wide, choosing to go deep is kind of that differentiator. So then we're going to get even more controversial. What's the belief that you hold about AI investing right now that you feel like your peers at other top funds might disagree with?

Or would you go first on that one?

I feel like there might be, you know, it's hard to have something that's just like one, you know, specific source of alpha. I feel like, you know, obviously for myself, just having been a founder more recently, I just think that I have to lean on that experience in terms of like how much things are changing and how fast. Like, just for instance, I think in the last— and probably a lot of the people here maybe feel this way, but like the whole, you know, between Claude 4.7 and Codex like 5.5, which could have happened the first quarter, the amount of work that one engineer product person can do has just— I mean, I don't know, like is 10x even— it doesn't even hold meaning anymore. But the feeling was that for one reason or another, we had to kind of like, uh, make our team smaller, but we also felt like we, because of that, we were able to, um, kind of hold ourselves to, force ourselves to be more, um, effective and more productive. And because we were dogfooding these like AI tools so much, we had to build a coding product, right? So if you're building a coding product, you're sort of sitting at the frontier, forcing yourself to also use all of the best coding products. And so I just feel like that firsthand chaos experience of like how fast things are changing and how much like you are adopting these coding agents to take up more and more of these like junior engineering roles. Just that, that experience makes me pay attention to just, hey, you know, what does a startup even look like? Is it necessary that you have to build a 50-person, 100-person org? Does it, you know, like these are more fundamental questions. What does a design role, uh, look like, um, now versus like what a, like do people need to even be engineering managers or are you just like managing a fleet of agents? Like how How fast do you ship? Like, do you even have like one week? You know, so these things, um, kind of inform, and I think Erik Nordlander and I both do infra investing. So it kind of informs like what are the dev tools that should exist? What are the product design tools that should exist? Um, and, uh, yeah, anyways, so these are the things that are top of mind. I, and I think people will have different experiences based on their firsthand building.

Well, yeah, no, I, I, I completely agree with all of that. I think the other thing that is I don't know if this is controversial or maybe it just doesn't seem evident, is I do think that talent will remain a big bottleneck, especially for the best startups. You know, there's been a lot of talk again about like a lot of junior roles being eliminated and everything else. And I think that part of this is because, you know, for many companies, I think they're thinking about how to achieve the same vision with, you know, the resources of like their existing talent base plus Claude or Codex or whatever else. And I think what's going to happen is you're going to see the best companies, their kind of ambition is going to increase 10x. And so they will still need, you know, as much talent as we've seen traditionally, you know, maybe on a, you know, kind of like total headcount level. But then, you know, the way that's organized would be very, very different. So I still think that talent is going to be a bottleneck, especially for, you know, the best engineers, the best designers, things like that. I think it'll just sort of manifest itself in a very different way because again, our expectations will continue to rise as the ability to build better and better products becomes easier and easier.

That's really exciting to hear. You know, now FlutterFlow has 3.5 million builders in over 200 countries, or at least IP addresses. So as we mentioned earlier, we don't really need to be in Silicon Valley anymore. More to build the next big product. How do you feel it's changing from the VC side? Do you feel like American investors are ready to fund these founders all over the world?

I mean, I think we— I mean, you can maybe speak for your portfolio as well. I feel like one, you know, great success story is that FlutterFlow is distributed too, right? Um, and I was lucky enough to be an angel investor like all the way back. Um, I think it's 2020. It's just been forever, uh, now. Um, so, you know, Abel and Alex had the vision back then. And it's— I think the proof is always kind of in the pudding. And the fact that, like, is there traction? Did you build something that people love? And what's more true now is that the barriers to entry to actually building, even though there's maybe a harder time for junior engineers to, like, enter companies, or junior, you know, product people enter companies, but they can build their own thing. And then once that thing actually takes off, then that can be global. And so I think that's where, you know, there's a bit of, like, a pro and a con. Whether You know, we're funding companies, uh, we're focusing on companies once they're at the growth stage. We do find that there is a benefit to being still in the Bay Area.

Right.

I think it would be a disservice to say that that's not true. And that's just because there's a bit of a, um, it's not just where the capital is, it's where the talent is. It's where you surround yourself with other people who are maybe equally as ambitious in their vision. So I think you can start globally, but maybe at a certain scale it would be more advantageous to still be in the Bay Area.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, I just recall one of my earlier meetings with FlutterFlow. I remember seeing like a map of the world and the fact that there were like paying users in just about every country that, you know, legally we could accept money from, which I thought was so exciting. Um, and it just, it just speaks to the fact that, you know, people want to innovate all over the globe. So I think that's really exciting and that democratization is going to spawn, you know, startups in every ecosystem you can imagine. So I think that the fact that innovation can happen everywhere, anywhere, like in some ways the ideas of Silicon Valley, like they live on the internet. They don't necessarily only live in, you know, the whatever, 50 miles in each direction from where we are right now. You know, that being said, I totally agree there. You know, I'm based in New York. I'm out here all the time. Like there is something very, very special that's going on in the Bay Area that is 100% unique. Um, and I think that, you know, again, to sit here and tell you that that doesn't matter, I mean, I would be, I'd be lying. So, so I do think that at a certain point, you know, the, the really goes back to like the human talent and capital that's here is so unique that getting some access to that is important. Um, even if it's not 100% of your company, but it's just like you have some connectivity to it. I do think that, that, that's going to matter, but I don't think, I don't think it's zero-sum, you know, I think that there can be lots and lots of really interesting startups, you know, all over this country, all over the globe. But again, sometimes, you know, some of those barriers are just going to be harder in different geographies.

Absolutely. You know, as investors, I think there's kind of a misconception sometimes that you just invest once and it's no touch and it's completely passive. A lot of times with investors, you grow with the company and One question that I had was, you know, you've seen companies that have had incredible successes. You've also seen companies that didn't quite make it. Have you recognized any failure patterns, any kind of commonalities between those that haven't really been as successful?

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of reasons that companies can, can go off the rails, you know, and we probably don't have enough time to kind of COVID all of them on the panel. But I think, you know, I'll give you one example and I won't say the name of the company, but I, I I had a founder that came to me probably like right before COVID like kind of early 2020, and was telling me foundation models are important, like every enterprise is going to be using them, you know, like we have to figure out like how to do embeddings and all this sort of stuff. And I was like, okay, you know, that, that, that was like a pretty controversial take. Um, and, and so you can imagine like if you were that right about LLMs, wow, you know, that early on, You should be like a billion-dollar company now, right? Unfortunately, that company no longer exists. And so part of the reason I think that even with all that kind of amazing foresight, it didn't work out was they didn't really figure out the right business model for it. In some ways, like the first couple of years, but like pre-ChatGPT were really hard. Nobody wanted to talk to them about foundation models. And then once that kind of happened, they didn't have it. They didn't have a chance to commercialize enough on the things that they'd built and the things that they built were different enough from kind of the ways things were evolving with OpenAI and the other sort of leaders in the space that it was really hard. So sometimes like being early can be a reason that you fail. But I think, you know, my main lesson there was even if you're right in all these other ways, if you don't figure out a way to commercialize and get that feedback from the market, like, hey, what we're building is making money, people like it enough to, you know, give us their hard-earned cash to use it, whether that's an enterprise or a consumer. Um, without that cycle, it just becomes very, very hard to figure out whether you're going to have a sustaining business.

Yeah.

Um, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like from another dimension, just building company is really hard, right? And so I spent 8 years building Rosebud, happily still running. Um, and so the fact that it took 8 years, I think most people start a company thinking it's going to take less time than it ends up doing. And so I feel like the, at least one very general but common, uh, failure point is you just get tired of it. Like people quit. And, you know, and if you quit, you won't be able to get the reps and you won't be able to actually iterate until you hit the right business model. You make something work, you make something that people love because you're just very rarely— just building a business is hard. Very rarely will you get it right the first time. Like I went through Y Combinator and through that I've just seen people pivot at least like, you know, several times during, during the batch. And that's just not unusual. The thing is, it's like when you know, a product hits reality, you're going to realize it just doesn't work. You might have to launch many times. So I think the thing that, you know, you really try to get a good maybe feel for then on the investing side is like, is this person actually, you know, whether they are really dedicated to solving something in the space or they are just really passionate to like, you know, start something within this vision, whatever the reason is, will it endure? And then you try to evaluate that, especially when now capital is just so plentiful. And I know it kind of sounds silly to say, but like, because, you know, maybe raising money is still hard, but also there's a lot of capital. And so people might start building company for the wrong reasons. And if it's the wrong reason in the sense that they might give up too easily, then they're not gonna be successful. And that's kind of a waste of their time and, you know, maybe not the best way that they can learn as well. So, yeah.

Thank you so much. And now that I think probably everyone in this room wants to know what's up and coming, what's coming next, what's the sort of under-the-radar trend that you think will define the next wave of startups?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know about under the radar, but I think that, you know, one of the trends that, you know, a lot of people should pay attention to is that, I mean, you know, the sort of the most you're ever going to pay for a token is whatever you're paying today for like that, for like a level of intelligence. So I think that, that the fact that intelligence is just going to go through this amazing, you know, like disinflation, right? Like we're going to have open source models. We're going to have other releases from the big labs. We're going to have, you know, bigger data centers, more power, all these things. Like we just need to plan for this like crazy level of abundance. And I think that again, it goes back to raising your ambition. So I feel like if you're sitting there and you're a founder today, it's like You know, most founders are always dreaming big, but you have a chance to dream really, really big because there are all these kind of secular trends that are going to really fuel what's possible. And so I think that, you know, you can't— if you don't shoot for the moon, you know, you're never going to make it. I mean, it's a sort of classic, you know, kind of quote. And I feel like the next, you know, as we were just saying, the sort of big shifts in models, even just this year has caused so much change. I think we're just going to be in that mode for a long time.. And so, you know, trying to, to think about what that exponential ride feels like, um, I think it'll put you in a really amazing place.

Yeah, it's so hard to gain intuition for exponential. So every time we experience it, we're like, okay, just, but remember that feeling of surprise whenever a model release comes. Um, and I guess, yeah, just feel empowered to work in small teams. I feel like, you know, it doesn't mean that large teams can't work well or won't exist, but the fact that like the form, I think the form factor of of a person or two person, you know, a single— under one hand you can count number of persons who can do a really big impactful project. That's going to increase. And I think that's— that should be a very kind of inspiring, um, trend to follow because you don't need to wait for funding to build something. You can just kind of try to build it and then validate, and then from that, you know, will come like other investments and opportunities.

Well, That's so good. I hope this talk even just inspires more builders to actually shoot for the moon. We're actually now going to— we've asked builders from all around the world to submit their own apps that they've built using FlutterFlow, and we're really excited to show you some of these pitches today. So we're starting out with Les Amis. It's AI-native infrastructure for IRL connection, and they're starting with curated friendships for ambitious women in major cities.

I build AI products at Google AI before it became cool, and before that I launched importing business from China, which brought me $100,000 even before I graduated.

I was at PayPal, launched 4 global products across machine learning, trust and safety, and Alexa. I also made into Forbes' 30 Under 30 list this year. I was a speaker at the main stages of Dev Summit and IAPay, as well as corporates like Google, N26, and SMT. I started to work when I was 12, speak 4 languages, and mentored over 300 women in their careers. But despite having it all career-wise at PayPal, I felt the loneliest that I have ever been. Solo house, expensive restaurant for $2,000, meetup, only weirdos, bumble the fuck up, swiping her friends felt wrong. And I saw so many women having the same problem as I and looking for the solution but failing.

And that became our wedge, curated friendships for women in major cities.

Activities.

We made, uh, we, we match small groups together and then we send them to curated activities, and afterwards we help them continue building their social graph. We also get feedback after each event, so every time our social graph is becoming stronger.

And it is working. $1.5 million IRR, growing 3x year over year with only $250K raised, uh, over 80% of paying users stay over 3 months, and we're live in 12 cities across US and Europe.

And we're winning because: 1, we built AI products even before LLM was launched. 2, we're super capital efficient. We, we reached $1.5 million ARR just off the back of $250K raised. And 3, we have taste and culture, which are prerequisites for building in consumer.

And our approach is different. The product is not the event, it's a social graph that made after. And that's why our retention rate over 6 months is over 50%. That is the highest in the category.

Amazing. Very cool. So, so yes. Any feedback, anything you'd like to push back on, any questions?

I mean, I always love it when people are solving problems that they face themselves. I think, you know, talking about proof in the pudding, it seems like they actually have people paying for it, which is always— because it's hard to know, you know, how well matching works without actually seeing if they have users. Um, I'm not a consumer investor, so I mean, this is— these are probably the metrics I would look for. Um, it looks like they're passionate about it and actually have paying users. That's usually quite hard. Yes. Yeah.

I'm also not a consumer investor, so I have the same disclaimers, but I, you know, I, yeah, I love that. Um, they're being efficient. Obviously it looks like the app is working. I think that there is a big trend about just kind of more IRL, uh, activities and connectivity. And obviously, you know, who doesn't want more friends? So I, I think, I think the thesis makes sense. You know, probably the questions are just how does it stack up against, you know, other apps and frankly, and just like the real world, right? Like why does, why do people go to an app versus just, you know, whatever other, you know, joining some sports league or whatever they might want to do to, to meet new people. But, but, but yeah, I'm, I'm interested in learning more.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, we're, we're definitely in the season where people are kind of yearning for that in real life connection. So that's awesome. Well, we're going to go on to our next founder. So this is CounselDirectAI. It's AI-powered career guidance, helping to simplify complex career choices into clear, personalized pathways for students grades 8 through 12.

Hello. As developers, you all know better than anyone that the best products are built to solve real painful problems at scale. 250 million students in India, a broken career guidance system, and zero scalable data-driven infrastructure to fix it. That's the problem I'm trying to solve today. Career counseling in India is manual, inconsistent, and expensive. One counselor, hundreds of students, no data, no personalization. The existing solutions are either generic quiz-based tools with no real intelligence behind them, or expensive offline career consultants that only a fraction of students can access. The gap is growing, and nobody has built the right system yet. My name is Ashut Sareeka, and I have been using FlutterFlow since the past year. Currently, I am the co-founder and CTO at Counseledirect.ai, an AI-powered college and career counseling solution built to help guide students from grade 8 to grade 12. As a 20-year-old college student, I didn't just identify the problem, I lived it, and then I built the solution. Under the hood, we are running psychometric assessment engines that analyze student personality traits, aptitude patterns, and interest clusters. That data feeds into an AI recommendation layer that generates personalized career pathways, stream suggestions, course options, and college matches tailored to the student's budget, interests, and personality type. On the institutional side, schools get a dedicated admin panel which will offer data about assessment completion rates, student progress, grade-wise career trends, and much more. This is to help schools provide the best career guidance to all their students. Here's what excites me from a pure engineering standpoint. Psychometric data is incredibly valuable. As our student base grows, we are building one of the most comprehensive datasets on student career interests, personality profiles, and outcome decisions in India. That's a moat. That's the kind of proprietary data layer that makes the AI smarter with every student that uses the platform. Our distribution model is targeting school partnerships. One school deal onboards hundreds of students instantly. We are already in active conversations with schools in Mumbai, And the admin panel we have built is specifically designed to make adoption seamless for institutions. The capital we will get from this conference will go into scaling school partnerships, deepening the AI recommendation engine and making it faster to improve the experience for our users, collecting deeper college parameters such as application deadlines, scholarships, housing, campus quality, and growing the engineering team. We are building an app and the data infrastructure needed to support it and improve career decision-making for students. Let's build it together. Thank you.

Yeah.

Any feedback?

Yeah, I love that he's, you know, using the power of AI to kind of democratize this access to counselors. I think it's really interesting in that, you know, they were clearly— these students were underserved and there was a way to bring them something more personalized. I think you're seeing this with a lot of, you know, other fields, right? Where like, you know, lawyers are very expensive. So can you do an AI lawyer that's, you know, available to everyone? And like school counselors is another great application. I love that he thinks that there's a potential data moat here based on the outcomes. Um, maybe only the last piece, it's like, it's funny to think about a career counseling for 8th graders, but I guess that's the thing. So, um, you No, I, uh, it's, it's, it's super interesting. I think like a great, again, great use case for AI and FlutterFlow.

Yeah. I also like that he was thinking about distribution, the scale of this, uh, right? He's like, okay, I'm going to distribute through schools. And then there's a problem that counselors already cost a certain amount. And so I don't think you said specifically how much money they're making. Maybe they're pre, uh, monetization, but at least, you know, the problem already is something that people pay for. And so seems like there should be, um, some signal there. Um, but yeah, I like the scale of this one, uh, uh, more because he's really thinking about how, how this can address more people, more schools with a solution.

Absolutely. We talked about the importance of human talent, and hopefully apps like Console DirectAI will actually bring more human talent to the surface. And the last one is called Huri App. I love that. It's the US branch of a Turkish app. It's a discount marketplace that helps restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and FMCG brands monetize high surplus inventory and off-peak capacity.

This is Ayşe Sezer Genshtas. I'm the founder of Captain Captain and co-founder of HurryUp, the smart discount app for everyday savings. HurryUp is the US establishment and Captain Captain is a Turkish establishment. What we do as HurryUp is we bring together real-time happy hour deals and surplus food discounts into a single platform in the mobile application where users can save instantly and businesses can thrive. We tried to solve 3 different problems. The first one was the businesses. They were struggling with unsold inventory, which is the surplus food, and they were facing low customer traffic outside peak hours. And the second one was the users. Almost 30% of households are facing financial hardship, so they're looking for more affordable options. The third one is environment and economy. Food waste is a $1 trillion global problem, and food inflation, inflation continues to rise almost every single day. So how did we solve it with HurryUp mobile application? We do real discounts from retail prices with takeaway or dine-in consumption model so that businesses can actually optimize their inventory management. They can generate income from their surplus food and they can apply HPR concept. And in the near future, we want to, we will implement one-day shipping model for the FMCG products, food products. Contracts. And the user and business profile is in the same application to easily manage everything that they want to for the businesses. So we launched in Türkiye. So the early launch data shows that it has a potential and we spend only $8,000 for ads and we got around more than 15,000 users and we have around 300 daily active users, 500 contracted businesses in one of the biggest cities in Turkey, Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir. And we have a customer acquisition cost of almost half a dollar. So what we plan, we plan to make a shipment solution for FMCG with Amazon's shipment partner because we saw that the problem is not only in Horeca, it is also in food producers as well. And we're going to expand to other industries such as cosmetics and pharmacy in a long-term, uh, plan. And we're gonna do a business-only platform for wholesale because we saw that this problem does not only belong to the, um, consumers only, but for the businesses as well. And we have co-established our company in the US as Haryap LLC, and the beta is ready. So we wanna start as soon as possible in New York. We did some great partnerships with the, uh, capital cities, Turkish Turkey's capital city council. And we did some great partnership with Kolyga, Amazon's shipment partner, Multinet, a food card for people to use, and they have around 90,000 businesses on board. And we had some partnerships with Chevko, uh, which is a sustainability company. For the business model, we actually are completely free for the users. But we're going to add some additional benefits with the loyalty program. And for the businesses, we only get 7% commission from the order amount. And we're going to get some marketing revenues from the places in the application, from the banners, from the map, and etc. So no upfront fees or fixed fees. And in the US market, we have around 116 billion serviceable obtainable market. And in Türkiye, well, we have 1.6 billion serviceable obtainable market.

It.

For the first year, we're going to get around $1,160,000 commission revenue, and the second year we're going to have $1.1 million, and the third year we're going to get $3.1 million commission revenue. We have the financials ready. So we do everything in-house from technical side to marketing, the business development to everything. And we have a great advisory board, and those are the co-founders of the US establishment. Adip Hüksa has a startup called Beltways and it has around $250 million valuation. And Ayberk is the board member of one of the biggest food producers in Türkiye. And in Türkiye, we have also some advisors as well from technology centers. And we have an advisor from Microsoft Azure AI. Bleed. And when we look at the competitor analysis, we see that we are actually quite a match, and we are actually bootstrapped. We were, but we have been granted like almost $40,000 from Turkish government, and we have applied for some of the startup programs, and it actually equals to almost $200,000. And we're going to use our investment to marketing, sales, and technical, and the biggest side will be marketing. So thank you for listening to me. Yeah.

Open for feedback.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think, um, I mean, it's, it's definitely solving a real problem. I think there's a lot of, you know, interesting businesses that have been built around expiring inventory. Obviously food is a very real-time one, you know, in most cases. Uh, and I agree, you know, there's a lot of people that are looking for discounts. And if you can sort of create a real-time marketplace there, it's, it's very powerful. Um, I, I think again, that the biggest challenge here is just like, there are some really, really big incumbents in terms of like, you know, delivery and pickup orders for food. And, um, you know, you just have to figure out like, why, why are people going to come to your app versus others when they have like really, really strong network effects? But I think the idea is great in the fact that they have traction in Turkey shows that it's, it's, it's working. Um, and, and so it'll be interesting to see how it, how it performs in the US.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much your very similar thinking there. I mean, maybe as an added thing, I mean, it's good that they're ambitious. They want to expand to the US and they have, you know, some things that they've already done that can maybe transfer well, but just like at such an early stage, maybe in the company, just thinking about how to balance that in a new location with such a heavy heavy logistical business. I feel like it's great that it's solving a real but very hard problem. So when software starts touching the real world, um, it, it, um, you know, it's good that she has a team and sort of the experienced advisors, um, but just kind of, you know, being wary of like how to even manage that in two locations, two countries, not, not even, you know, just like a one city or, you know, two cities type of situation.

Absolutely. Can we give all three founders a huge round of applause? Because putting your work out into the world takes a lot of courage. Building is so vulnerable and so is pitching, but every great company has to kind of start from there. Uh, we're, we could only really ask so many questions from up here, so we're going to actually open up time for questions from Um, you guys, I believe we're passing a mic around. Amazing. Yeah, so if you have a question, just raise your hand and then we will come to you.

Hello, David Andrés from 2ZERO from Barcelona, Spain.

I wanted to ask you, what are the red flags that whenever you see in a project, those are red flags for clearly not to invest? I'm saying that because we're building now in Barcelona a Shark Tank, Shark Tank Spice Edition, and this is something that many people are asking for. Now, what are the red flags that when you see them in a project, it's a clear no-go?

Red flags? Red flags, I guess there's so many ways a startup can go wrong, so it probably is not particular, you know, to this case, but, you know, product that doesn't have any users, but they've been, you know, or like no validation. I think that's probably the biggest red flag. Having it just, you know, even if you have a good idea or you are sort of the ideal ICP for your own product, you have to go out there and like kind of talk to other people. So that would be the main thing I'm looking for.

Yeah, I'll piggyback on that. I think in the earliest stages it's about this kind of learning flywheel. Like everything, every action you do with the business should be helping you de-risk something or, you know, learn something about your user base or customer base. And like, if you can build that flywheel early, you're going to, you know, you're going to reach some level of success. And I think usually if we see something that is early stage, but they just haven't quite right, you know, have manifested that setup, um, it, it, it usually causes us to lean away. Um, I have a question specifically for Consumer. Um, what signals to you that a founder is building something real and authentic that can work for their customers and get traction? Um, in growing or complicated markets, or if they are just chasing the kind of latest it thing, but don't actually have a real cogent idea that their users would be able to exponentially grow with. Yeah, again, I'll answer this as a non-consumer investor, but I think, I think the good news about the state of the world today is you know, a lot of that execution risk is kind of gone because of tools like FlutterFlow. You can build things, you at least build a prototype relatively quickly. So the proof is in the feedback, right? It's, you know, all the sort of growth metrics I don't need to kind of repeat here, but even at a small scale, if you can show that people love the product, they come back to it, they share it,, you know, they're even potentially willing to pay for it, even if there is no commercial side of it yet. I think all of that kind of sparks interest. And then, you know, based on, you know, the size of the market and the type of consumer, you know, you can get into more detail there, but there should be, you know, again, even at the earliest stages, you want to see some signs of life of like, this thing can really grow.

Um, yeah, totally agree with that. I feel like, again, not a consumer investor, thing that's like really hard in consumers to solve for distribution early. So if a founder has to have a story about how they're going to, not just like, you know, after they solve for the problem of like, okay, this is something that maybe one person or a few people love, how does it grow? Because it can't just be, I just spend money and then, you know, buy ads. Um, that can only take you so far depending on the business model. Sometimes this business model doesn't even allow you to buy ads. And so just, you know, I think every good consumer company has a really clear vision of how, where growth comes from and where that viral loop comes from. And that's actually what makes, I think, building consumer products really fun. 'cause you get to kind of engineer that. But yeah, it's not just about the polished app, it's like actually having a really good mechanism for growth, at least thinking about it from day one.

Thank you. Hi. Oh, wow, that was loud. Hi, so my name is Jacob. I'm CEO of Kaleo. We're a distributed design team. We develop apps.

And so I've been working remotely for like 7 years.

I actually flew in from Providence, Rhode Island. I'm not from San Francisco. My last company wanted me to move here and I just didn't want to. So I looked for something new. Now I'm at Kaleo. And I guess what I'm saying is like, there's a lot of pressure around people in tech to move to Silicon Valley, to just be here for other, any of the, I don't really understand the real reason apart from This is just where a lot of the big tech companies are. So I guess back to kind of that main thing is like with AI democratizing everything and making everyone capable of building things, I guess what is the real criteria apart from, um, just being here and, you know, access to capital and personal connections, um, that makes someone worth investing in?

I mean, just to be clear, I think like it's actually, I mean, my company was distributed too, you know, I was here, but like, because I started here and I've like lived here since grad school, but like I had engineers in Europe and, and, you know, like upstate New York, like not, and not anywhere where it would be traditionally regarded as, um, you know, you have to be, I think it just depends on, um, you know, I think it's definitely true that with AI, um, enabling more people to build, you don't have to be here to build stuff. Like that's, and you've experienced that as well. I just think that what we were sort of talking about is that a certain stage of a company, um, and this is not true of most companies, even most successful companies, but a certain stage of growth, like maybe if you're like a Cursor, you know, and something that where you're just like, or like the Frontier Labs, like you really probably need a nexus of talent that's on the order of hundreds, if not thousands of people. That's really hard to find, I think realistically anywhere else. Um, but I think it's definitely true. And as we see with the Flutter flow, company and communities that you have so many builders globally. And I think this AI makes that way easier than harder.

Yeah, I agree with all that. And by the way, I'm based in New York, so I'm off the pier. So I'm not, I'm not based here. And I, you know, I back, I back companies that are here in the Bay. I back companies all over the country and certainly lots in New York. So I, you know, I don't think you have to be here. I think just to maybe double-click on what you said, I do think it comes back to like human talent networks that I mean, like for better or worse, the strongest one is here. I think New York makes a great case as well. And so again, you can do, you can build great companies that are remote. Like we were even investing in remote companies before COVID and like we just sort of, you know, there's a certain playbook to doing that right. I think that if you want to have people together and you again, again, you hit a certain scale and you need to hire, you know, thousands of people, whatever, it becomes harder to do in some other geos. Not impossible, um, and, and so I think that's why you hear that, that draw. But, but I, I actually totally agree with you. I think that as technology improves and, you know, just the connectivity between people and teams and ideas and AI, all of these things come together, I think it actually really brightens the future for building any geography. Got a question here. Hi, my name is Sardor. I am founder of Boulder Apps. We've been one of the first users of FlutterFlow since 2021. I had a question about on behalf of all agencies, you guys are probably hearing this thesis a lot lately from like YC, Sequoia recently put out that they're investing in services now. At a SaaS multiple. And like that service as a software is the new model and that service companies can now scale same way as SaaS companies. I'm starting to buy into that vision as a service company. And we in fact are building our own agents, you know, to do the coding and on the backend. But what do you guys think? Like, is this the sentiment across all VCs and investors now, or is this, is there skepticism?

Them?

Yeah, I mean, I think comparing it to sort of static SaaS is an interesting thing. I think the idea of like one-size-fits-all software is kind of a— I think most people would agree it's kind of a dead concept, right? Like the future is software factories, intelligence baked in, you know, and again, comparing it to services, like really it's like you're, you're providing an outcome for your user or customer. Um, so I think that that's the way almost all software is going to work. Like there's going to be some human need, whether whether it's, you know, connections in real life or legal services or whatever that might be. And like your software will meet that need. And I think that the good news is like, that's, you know, that's probably the biggest market you can imagine. But I think comparing anything to like the way software worked in the past is probably, it's just not that helpful. So I think that like whenever you're building a new company or software company, you're going to be, you know, you're going to be going further along than you could have in the past. And part of that is because you can be so dynamic and customized and intelligent in a way that wasn't possible a few years ago. And a quick follow-up to that, can you define— you said software factories— is how is that different from agencies or white-labeling platforms? Is that something— I don't know that it's necessarily different. I think those are just different ways of meeting that need, right? In that, you know, you've you, you're not necessarily providing the exact same thing to 100 customers. You're providing like 100 custom solutions to 100 different people, if that makes sense. But using AI on the backend, is that— Absolutely.

Thank you.

That's all we have time for. All right. Amazing. So before we wrap, just wanna say this. So technology used to belong to people who had access, as we talked about access to capital, access to networks, access to technology. And what's happening now in times like this with companies like FlutterFlow is that building is really becoming accessible to anyone with an idea and the determination to bring it to life. Because somewhere in this audience right now is a founder who hasn't met their co-founder yet, and somewhere watching online is somebody building something after work tonight that could change an entire industry. And maybe, just maybe, the next iconic company starts with someone who decided that this was the moment to begin. So thank you all for being here. Thank you so much for your incredible answers, and enjoy the rest of FFDC.