Untapped Ventures Investor Summit 2022 recording

Welcome. I'm Manveer, one of the venture analysts here at Untapped Ventures. I want to thank you all for joining us today. Welcome to our investor summit and we have a good group of folks gathered here today in person and a few more trickling in. And a good amount of folks on Zoom as well. A solid mix of folks between our Fund 1 investors. Thank you for coming. Some institutional LP, some fund to funds folks and some corporate VCs as well. We like them too. They're okay. We have something for each of you and I'm confident you'll love today's event. Just some housekeeping rules as we get started. And this is more catered to our Zoom folks. This is a hybrid meeting and this is a zoom meeting, not a webinar. So please keep your camera on and please keep muted. We get some background noise, we will, we will mute you. This meeting is being recorded and if you would like a recording afterwards, just let us know and we'll get that to you. Now we have one rule during our event which is engagement. So we'll be running a few different polls throughout the event and we would, we request 100% participation. So hopefully you will do that or else, or else I'll be probably asking you to do that. So just to test that as we get started, we would love for our virtual folks to introduce themselves in the chat with their name and their location. And one of our awesome teammates, Barbie, is going to kick that off for you guys. So Barbie is going to be doing that right now. Now moving on, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce George Van Darrien, the general partner of our venture fund and CEO of our venture studio. George's personal life mission is to help people self actualize to achieve their untapped potential. And he is manifesting that life's purpose through our work here at Untapped. George graduated from the USC Marshall School of Business with a focus on entrepreneurship. He went on to be the President and CEO of AMI, a company he grew 10x to then successfully sell to a strategic buyer for a multimillion dollar exit in 2018. He then went on to launch Untapped Ventures in 2020, which is a venture fund and a venture studio in combination. And as we present more and more, you'll understand the unique benefit of that compared to just having a traditional fund. George lives in L. A with his beautiful wife Miriam and his three cute little boys. Let's welcome George.

Thank you very much. All right, awesome. We are here. We're doing this. So this is our first time. We've done a lot of cool events. This is our first time doing a hybrid one, so pretty excited about that. Let me just get my cell phone to fit somewhere here. All right, so let's go ahead and get cranking so we have a great event in store for everybody. And as Manveer mentioned, there is the most important founders that I could ever talk about. These guys gotta start with my future founders. That's Gia right there, George iii, Grayson and Gianni and I should move this cursor out of the way. And for diversity, we are planning hopefully for a future female founder as well. Gianna. We'll see. Is my wife still here? There she is. She actually helped with the catering and the drinks. Is that good? You guys enjoying the food and drinks? Yeah. All right, great. So anyway, let's get the party started. So, you know, it's been an interesting journey. This was Topia was my last investment. This was a metaverse play. I invested at Pre Seed and then Alexis Ohanian and Kevin Durant and Bonfire ventures, one of LA's top VC funds, came in and followed on at Seed. And that was my last angel investment before I launched Untapped Ventures. And it's been a wild ride since then, but it's been pretty exciting. So for today, my intentions are to share kind of what we've been up to. We love to build out loud. If you follow us on our blogs or our social, you know, pretty transparent. That's kind of our style. So I want to update you guys on our progress. You'll get to hear from four of our founders. Three of them are here in person today and one is joining from Miami. So I think that'll be fun to do a meet and greet. We'll share our future plans. We got some exciting things in store for 2023 and then I would love to in the process inspire you, let you have fun, educate you and get your feedback on some things that we're thinking about. So this is basically our agenda. It's kind of tapped by. Untapped is one of our drinks. We have spicy startup. We have unicorn dreams. These guys are not going anywhere. But want to make sure our Zoom friends and I don't see the total count. I know we had over 250 register, so I'm sure there's a lot of you. I can't see you on my screen, but hello to all of you and welcome. So speaking about the audience, we have different types of people here today, so I have a tough job. So we have our Fund 1 investors who are obviously here to find out about our latest investments and meet the founders. So I want to thank you guys. We have Zarek and Scott here. I want to especially acknowledge you guys. We have a number of our investors that are on the zoom as well and especially the ones that were there from the beginning. I want to especially acknowledge you guys to, you know, it was just an idea and you guys believed in me and that helped get it launched. So I thank you, I honor you and I will always credit you for catapulting me into this business. We also have a lot of angel investors, just people that have maybe been doing investments into startups directly. And I want you to listen for the Fund 1 opportunity. It's a really interesting opportunity and that window's closing soon as we're going to be talking about Fund 2 today. And for the institutionals, I think you'll be most interested in our plans for Fund 2. We're really taking what we learn and doubling down with that. And then for the entrepreneurs in the house that have made their money building and selling a company or even just building a company, you might be interested in the studio. And we're going to talk about the studio fund that we're launching. And then as much as we tried to keep this investor, only our founders and fellow VCs and like Deal Flow partners wanted to get in. Many of them are on the zoom. So welcome to all of you guys as well and happy to talk about anything that catches your eye. So with that I see a lot of familiar faces but a lot of people are new. And so let me take a moment to introduce myself and untapped Ventures and let me start off with this interesting statement here and take a moment to grab some water and let's ponder this thought about Life is becoming more complex, isn't it? I mean there's just more compared to 200 years ago, 100 years ago, there is more stress and suffering. Just trying to keep up with today's fast pace of, you know, fast paced technological advancements, competition for our attention and you know, a lot of the conventional solutions are ineffective. And we see the kinds of problems this is causing just in general across the board for lots of segments of our population. And at the same time on the other end of the spectrum we're seeing just how, with the help of science, just how untapped human potential is. So there's on one side both this crisis and on the other side this opportunity. And that's my basic investing, personal investing thesis is how do we invest in venture scale companies that help people live their best self. How do we help humanity reach its untapped potential? And that's really where kind of the Untapped ventures name came from. People think it's untapped startups or untapped founders or untapped markets. And yes, there is that double, triple, quadruple entendre, but it really started with the untapped human potential. And so with that we developed our six best self pillars. The mind, the body, the soul, people in relationships, work and money and growth. And we focus on that and kind of, that's the lens that we use when we look at companies. And what we wanted to do was look at exciting innovation that's really happening in the Web3 and the emerging tech sector. So between the metaverse, Web3AI and some of the other emerging areas, how are these emerging technologies going to help humanity the next 10, 20 years as we change and as we evolve as a species? So that's kind of what we've been up to. And so we have this really well thought out. I won't go through all this, but we look at kind of from each area, what are the problem spaces, what are the startups? And we really like web3 as a space. And I'll talk more about that, how we're focusing our efforts more and more on web 3. Need a place to put this water. I have a clicker too. I forgot. Okay, but look, as I look around the room, there's, there's people here that have made a lot more investments than I have. You know, I'm just getting started. This is the top of the first inning. I'm playing the long game here. You know, we have a plan. You know, it's a 30 year mission over those 30 years to help a billion people achieve breakthroughs. And that's loosely defined, but in some way help them, you know, move their life forward. And that's going to mean raising a number of funds and raising lots of dollars and making lots of investments. But I think we can do that. And, and part of the reason, if you're wondering, okay, so starting to get to here is why. But where does this come from? Part of it is fueled by this man. This is my father. And he passed away when I was a baby. So I grew up an only child without a dad. And although I was pretty smart, I had straight A's and basically like skipped a couple grades and like finished usc at age 20. Like, I always felt that I wasn't good enough no matter what Happened. Luckily, I got into personal development early in life, and I'm a big Tony Robbins guy, and I see Burgundy's nodding her head. Any other Tony Robbins? Yes, a number of you guys. Awesome. So I'm always working on myself. Last month, I was at Dr. Joe Dispenza's advanced retreat. Any other Joe Dispenza fans? Burgundy? No. Nobody else. A couple people. That was an awesome experience. And, yeah. So, like, I know if I'm not careful, my mind could really go down slippery slopes. So what I did when I was at Date with destiny in 2018, after I sold my company, I had. This is the vision board that you do when you're at Date With Destiny. And I still live. This is from December 2018, so it's now almost four years old. But this is exactly what I use. And you see that the purpose of my life is to inspire transformation. So we live the best version of ourselves with health, happiness, and prosperity. That's what I want to focus on personally. And then untapped just kind of manifested from that. I didn't want to do it how Tony Robbins does with books and live conferences. I wanted to do it with building and investing in venture scale companies because that's. I felt that I could have bigger reach, faster that way, and that was just more my style. Right. To each their own. So. So to sum it up, just to kind of like, round out a little bit about the. The. The origin story, we want to be the best in the world at helping founders at the earliest stages, the ones that are tackling important human potential issues. And you'll hear from a number of them today, think through their ideas, how to validate them, and support them in their journey. And we could talk later about what that support looks like. So just switching gears here. I know that was, like, you know kind of a little bit about my story, but let's go back to untapped. So we're pretty active. If you've been to our events, we had our fun launch party in the Metaverse. We do events like this. We do other investor trainings. We had our party at 8360. The Peter, the Amanda's Group Group. Excuse me. And Clicker wants to work sometimes, but not every time. But none of this would be possible without our amazing team. So you guys have been meeting some of them here already today. The rest are in our zoom. So we've quickly, in the last two years, built that pretty awesome team from all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of experiences and all united around the same Goal. One of the other things as a firm that we've already built, which I think is an interesting secret sauce, is we have a really strong kind of venture analyst program, an internship program that's super valuable. And you could see we're getting super smart people, super talented people that are coming from amazing companies like Twitter and you know, Amazon and, and you know, bank of America and Meta that want to come work out on tap and get that VC experience. So we're off to a good start, I think. I was gonna get into this later, but I guess since it's here, just so you know, you'll hear me talk about fund and studio quite a bit. So we have the venture fund and a venture studio. It's a dual entity model. So this is kind of on our fun side and then this is on our venture studio side. The venture studio is like a startup that builds startups. Right. So think of that like an incubating co founder or now we call it an institutional co founder. So think of idealab in Pasadena. So that's, that's what we do on that side. Okay, good. Anush, how did I do on time? That felt like it was, I don't know what, when we started. Right on time. Okay, great. All right, so hopefully that gives you guys a solid background on me. Let's go ahead and transition and hear from Anji. Angie's based in Miami, so Shanta is going to go ahead and get him set up. He's part of our Fund One portfolio. He's the CEO and co founder of Fint. He's also a graduate of Y Combinator Winter 22 cohort. As you guys know, Y Combinator is like the Harvard of startups. So really excited to be invested with Anjay and Fent and I want to go ahead and ask him to present. So I'm going to stop my share and.

Yeah, can you hear me? Okay? Yeah, I get some thumb up. Thank you. So I'm the one that needs to have a lot of energy here so people on zoom don't drop. Right. That's all on me.

Good.

So can you see my screen? I think you do. Yes. Okay.

Yes. Perfect. We don't see you here. Onjit. Give me one second. Okay.

You see the screen?

Where did the little window for the little speaker window?

The speaker window?

Yeah.

Like the. These speakers or the little camera?

The camera. Guess we're gonna have to find them manually. Angie, can you talk again?

Yeah. Hello. Hello. Hello, everybody.

Right.

I guess we're gonna have to find them manually. Anjie can you talk again?

Yeah. Hello, hello, hello, everybody.

No, no, no.

There was like the little speaker thing that was here.

Exit, exit, full screen. And then do it now to the right.

Okay, There you go. Thank you. All right.

So like I said, this.

Is our first time doing the hybrid, so thank you for. Oh, no. But if he talks now, it'll go to him. Angie, can you try talking?

Yes.

Hello?

Okay, it's me. I see me.

Okay, cool.

I can get started. So hello, everybody. Yeah, I'm Onji, co founder of fint. So, yeah, I'll give you a little bit of background on what we're building at fint and we'll leave some time for any questions you have. So first thing about me is that I'm originally from France, My family is originally from Tunisia. And I've been sending money to Tunisia for the past 18 years. So half of my life, I'm 36 today, and I've come to realize a lot of things about money, remittance in general. So what you need to know is about $1.2 trillion will be sent through remittance. So service. You might know leaders like Western Union, remitly and so on. And they are in the world, about 3.5 billion people who are either underbanked, so no bank service at all, or sorry, unbanked, no service at all, or under bank, which means they have an account but they never use it, basically. And what we see with remittance especially, it's very outdated process. So you still get this paper receipt. It's very expensive as well. You don't have any budgeting capabilities, any budgeting.

Tools.

Right? So you're sending money when someone needs it. There is no savings. So basically it's money comes in, money goes out.

Right?

Money comes the first of the month and is being spent in the first week on food supplies, medical bills. And of course it creates a big financial literacy, especially in market with high currency inflation. So people just get their local money, they spend it instead of understanding how to save, how to better spend, or how to, for example, use other collateral such as USD, for example. So what we want to do with FINT is a very big, big mission vision. Like again, it's coming from 18 years of sending money to my family. It's to give everyone in the world access to financial services and through someone they trust. And the trust is very important. We believe there is a lack of trust, especially in developing countries for bank for just our countries, our west world. So there is a lot of trust. But these people still trust us their family abroad. So we want to build that trust within the app. And so Fin today is helping Jasperine families to bank together. So here I am in the US and I can extend my access to financial services that I have here in the US to my family abroad. So that's what FINT is about today to do. So we use a mix of crypto and traditional fintech. But tomorrow FINT want to enable what we call the family cfo. So you can think of lending loan between individual, you can think of bill pay. So directly pay bills from here in the US to anywhere in the world saving accounts. I talked about this and crypto because we also big believers in crypto as a collateral, as an asset to grow wealth in a cross border way. So just a final point on where we are going in this vision. So we're calling it remittance banking. It's basically if you think of remittance history, right there is traditional remittance, there is a generation with first web, first money transfer companies and there is this remittance banking kind of new generation. It's a big market so where you add all financial services you can think of on top of the remittance corridors. So we believe this market will be huge and that's one of the reason why we go after about FINT as a company. So we launched a private beta in earlier Q1 this year in just 6 states of the US so our customer needs to be based in the US even though their family can be based abroad obviously. And we are launching our public beta by end of the year, most likely just before Christmas. So so far we raised about 3.5 million with Y Combinator and other larger firms. And of course the focus today is on tap. So just a quick note on that. Like I've met Jordan the team back when we were during Y Combinator. So super interesting that they reached out before demo day because during demo day there is a ton of interest and it's really hard to. At least the market in Q1 was very hard for companies. So we had like 200 inbound interest from VCs and angels, et cetera. So it was really hard to meet people after demo day. But luckily NTAP met with us earlier and also I really like their pragmatic approach. I think there is a big as you can see alignment you saw on Untapped focus is about web3 crypto, fintech but also family and people basically. So we had this kind of alignment and yeah, untapped has been very helpful so far. I think it's a smaller firm compared to some of the other VC we have, obviously, but more hands on. And we have this. For example, we have this on Thursday, this coming Thursday, we have these CEO meetings with other portfolio companies. And that's super helpful to help share our biggest issues, what we think about, and how we can help each other. So that's it for me. I hope it was clear. Let me know if you have any question. Okay.

Awesome. Thank you, Angie. We probably have time for just one question. Anybody here in the live audience want to ask Angie something? So the question is about micro loans. Angie Burgundy is asking, like, are you guys looking into microloans in developing nations? Is that something you're interested in doing?

Yeah, definitely. This is a great question. Microloans is definitely something we're looking at, and in a way that is a bit different. We call it Send now, pay later. Basically, it's a person based here in the US that do the microloan and extend it to the person abroad. So the risk is very limited because the person basically in the US with their income, their credit score from here, from the US Statement, basically extend the microloans to the person in the receiving country. So that's how we look at microloans. And definitely it's a generating revenue opportunity for us.

Okay, awesome. Just a comment. I love the way he described the problem. It's very simple. It's really, truly great. Great. One of our investors loves how you describe the problem and how you guys are approaching it. Yeah. There's a number of us here that's. That still send money offshore and that your problem space resonates with. And I'm sure that applies to people on the Zoom line as well. So maybe for the next presentation, we'll. We can take a question from Zoom, but I'll need somebody from my team to moderate that and just slack it to me because we can't see the Zoom chat and. All right, so thank you so much, Angie. Hopefully we're good on audio, video, and I'm gonna go ahead and continue, so. All right, so that was a good way to get started. The first founder. Right. How was Angie? You guys liked Angie's? Yeah, so we're pretty proud of that. Like you said. I mean, we. We. It's hard to get into YC deals. There's a big rush when they get to demo day, and we got in before demo day. So that was, like, one of a number of things that we've been building and validating as we're kind of building Our emerging manager venture portfolio. So let's take a look at what we've done here in the last two years since I launched Untapped. You guys remember my three sons. The youngest one was Gianni and He was born June 2020. That's when we, I launched Untapped, literally out of the hospital. On the day he was born is when we kind of launched our first like announcement of untap. So it's been a little over two years and one of the first things that we did was we were contracted by the city of Burbank, actually here locally to run our accelerator with them as our sponsoring partner. This is a picture from the cohort. You might see Ryan down there. He was in that. And he's going to speak in just a few minutes. But what happened is we were raising a $10 million fund, we got caught in the accelerator and you can't do both. You can't be fundraising and running the accelerator at the same time. So we finished the accelerator and Ryan raised three and a half million within two months. And we hadn't closed our fund and we didn't get to invest. So that was a big miss. A huge, huge miss. A big lesson learned. And so what we did was in order to not miss out on any more opportunities, we switched gears. We said, look, let's just kind of take what we have. Let's, let's, let's just like launch a small million dollar proof of concept fund just to get some points on the board and prove a few things. Number one, that, you know, let's invest in 12 deals. Let's prove that we can get access to good deals on the venture studio side. Number two, let's prove that we could build good ventures through the studio and that number three, let's prove that doing both is synergistic. That if we're out there teaching and educating and working with founders and being value add, that we don't need to force them into one box or the other. And that naturally either it makes more sense to invest in someone, it makes more sense to help them through the accelerator. In some cases it makes sense to be a co founder and, and, and run it through the studio. So that's what we set out to validate and I think we've kind of done that. So we've made 11 investments so far, including two that nobody knows about. We're going to be announcing here for the first time today, four of them you're going to be hearing from. So I'm not going to talk too much about them but I do want to mention the others. So one of them is Ryan and he's going to be coming up right after this segment. Like I said, he raised from some of the who's who in VCs three and a half million coming right out of our pre seed accelerator and I'm excited for you guys to hear what he has to say. The other kind of superstar from our accelerator was Billion Minds and they raised about a million dollars within five months of graduating from our accelerator with a tento capital in the Midwest as their lead. And this time we didn't miss out because that was now December and we had our fund in place and we invest. So they actually were our first investment in the fund. Next we invested in Hexact and they're crushing it there. Stepan, just let me know. Their 2022 revenues year to date are over 800,000 and they have over 100,000 platform users and 6,200 paid users. So pretty good for early stage startup. The next investment we made, some of you guys may be familiar with this, others are not. So I'll just share. So Future Loop this is founded by Peter Diamandis And Eben Pagan, two of the world's top 100 like famous business influencers. Evan Pagan is a multi best selling author and of course Peter Diamandis is the founder ofxprize and abundance360. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty active in a key in a number of key entrepreneurial communities including A360 and EO and we'll talk about that in a second. Fint you just heard from Angie. Meta intro, you're going to hear from Lacy. Lacy's here. She just raised five and a half million on Republic, one of the largest, that platform's largest raises. And I'm not saying like back in February when we were in the crypto summer, now when we're quote unquote in the crypto winter, she just raised five and a half million. So quite a feat. And we're going to hear from her at the end so you're not going to want to go anywhere. Zoom people. I told you that. And then another exciting one is Blue Cubit couple of super smart guys, PhD, kind of matt math geeks. They believe they've cracked the kind of the Monte Carlo simulation faster than anything out there and they're working on commercializing that with large corporates. Very exciting. They have a team here, they have a team in Armenia and they're doing some amazing work. They're technically still in stealth mode. So I can't talk a lot about what they're up to. But that was one, that was our most recent investment. Am I talking too fast? Do I need to slow down or is my taste good? Okay, and then let's, you know, let's, let's. I'm happy and proud and excited to announce our two latest investments. So one of them is OpenStock. So OpenStock is founded by a couple of fellow EO members. So Daniel Dubois runs the EO Angels group. He had us exit to Airbnb a couple years ago. Alex Simpson is also another EO member. I think Alex is also an advisor with Ryan. You guys know each other in any case. So they launched OpenStock, which is basically about helping any employees of venture backed startups be able to not secondaries and sell their stock, but actually be able to take a loan against it. And so in a matter of a few months, they've already hit up and talked to over 300 unicorns and they've gotten 12 orders and have access to 12 deal rooms. And the thing that makes this unique is that it's employee benefit, they're positioning it as an employee benefit, especially as the window to going public and IPOs and exits has gotten longer for a lot of unicorns. This is an interesting new offering for unicorn employers to offer their employees to get them to stick around. So super excited about OpenStock and the team there. And then the last but not least, another EO member, we just pulled the trigger on this one. And the founder, Anna Redmond is here in the audience today. This is Brav, she's sitting right over there. So those of you that are here could say hi to her. Anna is tackling a very male dominated industry, these private security and bringing some really exciting cool tech to change the whole kind of bodyguard security guard experience. So initially kind of when we ideated, we talked a lot about B2C but we also see a lot of opportunity in B2B where landlords and property managers just want like a really cool security company with cool guards and cool tech that they could have access to. And that's what Anna's building. So super excited about that. We invested along with Alpha Edison, which is one of another one of LA's top VCs. So, so very excited about those two investments. All right, can I get the Zoom audience to like do like some cheers and stuff and some emoticons, some like celebration. All right, thank you, Zarek. All right. Yes, thank you, thank you. Sometimes my fast pace doesn't allow For. For a lot of that, but there you go. Thank you. Thank you. We'll drink to that. Okay, so we're not done with Fund 1, but let me kind of share what we've learned. I think a couple key things is, like, it's definitely not a case of in the early stage. Put some money in and we're done. We're not one of the big funds where we're too busy, and that's all we're doing. For us, it's all about putting money into the best deals and then providing as much value as we can and supporting them in the journey. So I think that, like, what we learned was that it's interesting, like, Anna is sitting here. This is, you know, she's Harvard educated, she's an EO member. This is not her first or second company. So, interestingly, neither is Ryan, neither is Lacy, neither is Alex. So I didn't set out to kind of focus on serial entrepreneurs generally based here in LA with, like, use cases around Web3. But that's kind of one of the things that definitely emerged and a little bit of a fintech flare. So that's part of what's been emerging here. It's been interesting. So I feel like we're validating the three assumptions. I mean, obviously it's way too early to talk about dpi, right? You know, generally, as a fund investor, the biggest thing you ask a manager is what's been your dpi, how much capital have you returned? And we're just too early to even have that conversation. We've just made our investments in the last few months, but like Meta Intro, you know, we. We invested at a much lower valuation than what she raised at two months later. So we already have a 3.2x markup on. On meta intro. On Bitcoin, we have a 5x markup. So in the next year, as everybody starts their next raises in a healthier environment, the markups will come, the. The future rounds will come, the exits will come, the IPOs will come. I'm confident about that. I think what could be measured now is trajectory, right? Who. Who is George? What's his. Why? What is he up to? What's his team? How do they make decisions? Who are the founders? And, you know, I think that's what we could really focus on. So, you know, it's gonna. We're gonna. We're. I'm gonna talk in a minute about Fund two. And until then, we have Fund one. It's a really nice portfolio, if you're interested in that. We have our final close on December 9th. If I was a fund investor, I would invest in it. That's all I'll say about that. And why don't we move on? And without further ado, I want to invite up Ryan. He. I wanted him to share about Arrow and talk a little bit about your experience at our inaugural accelerator. It was Cohort 1 of our accelerator, and it's not often that you get two that raise, you know, million plus in your first cohort within a few months. So we're pretty proud of that accomplishment. But let Ryan come up and share a little bit about his experience. Well, let's welcome up Ryan.

So this. Not that.

Okay.

Okay.

Hello.

I will balance looking into the screen and up here, but nice to meet everyone, and thanks for listening in to a little bit about Arrow today.

Just.

I feel like no matter where you are, there's always a tech issue with all tech companies tech this. It's either zoom or meets. Okay, I'll just use the computer.

I'll just use the computer then. Okay, cool. Okay.

All right. Hello, everyone. Ryan Deitch, CEO and founder of Arrow. As George mentioned, I was part of the first accelerator cohort. So I'll start by just sharing our story of how we got there, a little bit about what our experience was like, and then really what we're trying to do and the vision for the company. So it was in early 2021 that I started to come up with an idea, really looking at how broken the credit system is in the United States. At the time, I had just had my first idea. I had met George and the MD at the time of the accelerator, and they brought me in as one of the cohorts to start help validating the idea out quite a bit. And at the time, we through a Lean Stack program, super helpful for anyone starting businesses and trying to validate concepts. But it essentially tries to put you through the process and the principles of how do you make sure this is a business that's really worth building? And how much validation can you do for as lean and cheap as possible? And I had been toying with a handful of ideas around the credit space, and there's one line that stood out to me that I hope will be a important part of both my trajectory as well as others. But it says, love the problem, not the solution, and I was looking at a handful of problems. And as I started going through the research process, interviewing consumers all over the country, what I found is how deep this problem really is. The research really opened up a lot, finding lots of fear and anxiety for consumers all over the country. We were looking at thin file new to credit and subprime individuals. And people are afraid, afraid to overspend spend, afraid of the debt trap. They don't trust financial service companies. Everyone's out to get me. We kept hearing they're just trying to find ways to get my money. And when we looked at it, these weren't interviews, these were therapy sessions. People opening up emotionally, sharing things they don't talk about, asking for advice. And so we stepped back and as part of this process, we were through the accelerator, recording interviews, sharing some of this with colleagues, going through this Lean Stack experience, trying to document everything down. And when I pulled away from all of this, what I realized is the missing piece here is really financial literacy. You know, you heard Angie mention it earlier, but illiteracy is spread across the globe and in the US it's not taught in schools, it's not mandated. And as I looked and heard the stories, you know, people are making uninformed decisions because they don't know the basics. These are good people. They don't want to default, they don't want to be in this situation. But a lot of times when you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can only look so far ahead. It's hard to plan six months when you're struggling and worried about what's going to happen next month or on the other side. Maybe you're not in the system, maybe you're a college student, you don't really know what to do and you don't know who to trust. I don't know how many people know this, but this is unfortunately a story for many, many college students. I get my first credit card, I rack up my first thousand dollar debt. I realize a month later I have to pay it back and I start accruing interest and my credit score gets it. So there's lots of different themes around. What do I know? What can I know, what should I know? And so we took a step back and said we've got some major systemic problems in the credit system. First, a lot of the people we're looking at can't get fair access. They can find some form of access, but it's usually high interest rates, high fees. It doesn't really help solve the deeper problems. And so we went out to tackle how can we treat anyone in the country, no matter what, your background is the same as we'll call it a prime customer. And we solve for that by creating a new underwriting formula that Essentially looks past someone's FICO score, looks at whether they have any income in a handful of factors. And we created a model where we could approve anyone for a credit line that no one else could approve in the country. And that's how it begins, is first, we want to open up the doors so that anyone can get access. We then want to make sure that that's truly fair. And so we're anchoring at interest rates that are considerably less than any other provider out there. Because what we're really doing and what we're really seeking is trying to provide people opportunity and the tools that set them up to be successful. And so what we've created is a behavior engine. The first thing we ask someone to do when they get accepted for our credit line is set a financial goal. And if you do that, we increase your credit line. The next thing we ask is to complete some activities, learning about the basics of how credit works, how credit cards work, how the importance of credit scores, spending savings, and as you go through this financial literacy program that we've developed and I'm not updating the slides as I go here, sorry everyone, but I will quickly catch up with where we just were. The clicker was dropped down, the mouse is. Mouse is off, but so don't. Don't need the slides. But as people go through this experience. The clicker was dropped down, the mouse is a mouse is off, but so don't, don't need the slides. But as people go through this experience and quick, quick snag on the side. Here we go. The idea is, is that we're providing real opportunity and skill development. We and quick, quick snag on the side. Here we go. The idea is, is we are launch credit card. So this is our first product. Why? Because we can. We're providing real opportunity and skill development. We can both help people build credit by reporting their payments to the bureaus. Credit cards allow, from a business perspective, interchange revenue that allows us to discount some of our interests and other things in a handful of ways. And most importantly, from a consumer behavior perspective, psychologically, once you transfer someone money in many of the cash advance and other models out there, that's their money, doesn't matter where it came from, doesn't matter how you pay it back. Psychologically, that's in my account, that's mine on a credit card. However, not only can we practice the true principles of revolving credit, but we can utilize our launching a credit card. So this is our first product. Why? Because we can both help people build credit by Reporting their payments to the bureaus. Credit lies this shared pool of money as the incentive to go through our literacy program. And so what we've created is essentially a new system that trials allow, from a business perspective, interchange revenue that allows us to tie behavioral science education and behavioral change directly to a financial product. What are we really doing behind the scenes? We are developing better borrowers. There is really no credit companies, credit products and lenders out there that are trying to focus on consumer behavior before they focus on the economics of their interest in credit product. And the reason why is because you learn a lot about people very quickly. What will they do if you give them opportunity and you give them the tools? Most companies in the industry are trying to predict what you'll do based on your past count, some of our interests and other things in a handful of ways. And most important importantly, from a consumer. When you look at this type of consumer, there's a lot of circumstantial and disadvantaged data. How do you know what someone can do when every month or two they're struggling and they can't get those opportunities? And so it's very easy to make judgments here. We try to judge in real time data and what I say is it's about 20% content, 80%. Behavioral science literacy provides a foundation for people to build upon to try to help break some of the systemic cycles and barriers that stop you from growing. But behavioral science and actions and actually getting people to implement that, that's how you really start to form behavior change. And so what we're really doing is capturing a very unique data set about individuals that people don't have data about so that we can build the arrow score. And the hope is, is that the Aero score can either compete or complement the FICO score at some point to show that for the next stage of products for auto, for insurance, for mortgage, for others. We have behavioral data on consumers that want to pay back, that are great people but just can't get the chance. So they deserve to get a more preferable interest rate and a more preferable loan. And that is what we are truly doing behind the scenes, is developing hopefully a competitive model to fico. This will allow us to expand the credit box for other lenders so that there is both a direct to consumer business just as much as There is a B2B business down the line. You know, where we're really after is trying to change and disrupt a different credit path for people. This is a brand new concept. It has never been tried or proven before. We have spent Quite a while now, building our infrastructure. As George mentioned, we raised around coming out of the accelerator, and we raised another round a few months ago to really get this off the ground. And I am happy to tell you all about it, happy to answer some questions, and looking forward to meeting different people throughout the rest of the day.

Good job, Ryan.

All right, my team is queuing up.

A question from Zoom, but any questions from here while we're curious?

The name error.

Yeah. So I will say for anyone naming businesses, we went through a thousand names. This took months. Actually, we had a different name when I entered the accelerator. We ended up choosing this because arrow has lots of connotations to it around a pointed journey, a trajectory. You could use bow and arrow. You can use the signs of an arrow that point up that are, as we all know, the green arrow for stocks and everything alike. But it's really about a journey ahead that has. You know, it's not always easy. You know, a bow and arrow goes up before it goes down to land, et cetera. And ours is the same. You know, our model is this is not a true lending product where you're just given money. You were required to engage with us. And in case that wasn't clear, this isn't an optional financial literacy program. We are really a behavior engine that is using credit as how we get that behavioral data and that behavioral change.

Thank you so much, Ryan.

Okay, cool.

Thanks, everyone.

All right, I promise on the next one. I'm just trying to manage time here because I know there's a speaker that sometimes goes over, and his name is George, so. All right, let's see if we could kick this clicker back on, because at least it gives me a little bit of movement. All right, so, yeah, and Ryan's being, like, really modest. So the way I describe it is they, you know, they. They give you some classes, they give you a quiz, they give you some money, you pay the money back, they give you some more lessons, another quiz, they give you more money. And, you know, for some people that maybe are here today, that may not be as relevant, but there's a lot of people that are needing this, both the education and the money. And so he's, like, literally creating a whole new category in finance, and I think it's really exciting. So thank you, Ryan. So let's. Let's transition. So what we're going to do is we're gonna. I'm gonna kind of split up Fun two a little bit. I'm gonna do about five minutes, and then we'll Go to a break and then we'll come back and we'll do another five minutes and with fun too. So this is all future, looking forward looking. These are our plans. We're not raising so we can talk about it. We're really in the design stage and my whole purpose of this segment is to share what we're thinking about so that anybody that really feels excited and inclined can talk to me afterwards and we can talk about, you know, what this could potentially look like. So let me tell you what happened. So in the last 90 days we got accepted into Sutton Capital's fund accelerator. So through that and through my network, we started meeting with a lot of LPs, a lot of fund of funds, family offices and we started to learn a few things. Number one is they're like, okay George, you know, we like your emerging tech for best self, but you're kind of like a generalist, like you're kind of doing all these technologies and all these best self, we'd like you to focus a little bit. And I was like, okay, point taken. And so like we're kind of narrowing that down to web three, right? A little bit more focus on web three and things. Number one is they're like, okay George, you know, we like your emerging tech well being and startups in la as I mentioned earlier. So that's how we're tackling the focus learning. And again, my style is really transparent. Right. So I want to share where we're at in our journey. And then they also said, we like your venture studio, which we haven't talked about yet. We're going to talk about that after the break. But for a lot of institutionals, it's outside the box, right? Funding the operating expenses to build ventures is not what fund the funds typically have an allocation for. It breaks some fun terms to have significant costs towards venture creation. It just doesn't fit a lot of boxes. And so they said, we like what you're doing, we like the deals out of there. But just, just take that out. If you, if you want your fund to still invest in, in your venture studio, spin out, that's great, but we don't want to be funding those operations. So taking those two primary learnings, we're now planning to launch in Q1, a $25 million venture fund two and a $5 million studio fund one. So the studio fund one, the purpose of that will be to build 10 ventures over the next three years. And the 5 million will go towards both the operating expenses and the building costs. The venture costs and then the fund will have proprietary access to those deals. So basically we're splitting it out but the fund still has proprietary access as kind of the first right of refusal, if you will, on those deals. So with that said, let's talk about Fund 2. So the current thesis subject to change is that it's a 25 million dollar fund in LA to invest in Web3 and well being pre seed startups leveraging our untapped method to add massive value. And we'll talk about what that means in a second. But really we're just kind of doubling down on, on all the things that I mentioned to you a couple minutes ago. So now that my clicker is working I can move around a little bit. So we'll have three main deal types. We'll have our direct deals which is like Angie at Fint as well as like Lacy at Meta, Intro Studio Deals which is Alex at fitcoin and Accelerator which is like Ryan and Billion Minds. And then we'll be able to follow on with the 25 million. We'll have enough money, right? The million dollars was never enough to get too far. It was just enough to get started. You can't do a lot with that. Now we'll be able to write bigger checks as we had here, right? So we'll be able to make proper 5 year investing 40 investments, larger check sizes and we'll be able to get larger deal ownership based on coming in early and adding massive value. So those are the deal types, the focus. I'm gonna fly through it. I think in hindsight when I did the final run through this morning, I was like, I think we have a little too much content. I'm gonna lighten it up. So I know some people freak out when people skip slides, but I'm gonna skip some slides. So if anybody wants me to talk through this later one on one, I'm happy to. But there's a powerful case for Web3 and why we're focusing on Web3 and the fact that a lot of the kind of the pump and dump and the charlatans and the stuff that didn't have utility and didn't have use case are all gone. And now there's real utility that's going to be left and be invested in not by everybody, but certainly by us. So as you could see, if you look at our investments in Fins, Meta, Intro, fitcoin, you'll see that that's the common thread and that's what we're focused on within web3. So happy to talk more about that well being. I think it's another great angle to look at it, you know, narrowing things down from kind of best self a little bit vague, you know, not everybody gets that like what you do. Personal development. Well, yeah, but that's just one of our pillars. So maybe rebranding a little bit more towards well being, same concept. And that's a huge market, right? 1.5 trillion and growing. LA is definitely the home of well being. Right. So people care most about their health and wellness in this city. So as we're looking to win home based, that's a pretty big one. So Web three is the second or third pocket, I would say maybe next to Dubai and Miami. You have LA for Web three, you have wellbeing and then you have la. So that's kind of like the three concentric circles that's developing as far as our focus going forward. And so let me cover sourcing and then we'll go to a break. So. So on the sourcing side, we have our Fund 1 portfolio, right. So once we launch the Fund 2, we'll be able to invest in our Fund 1 companies, our studio deals, the accelerator and then some other. Right, the programs. We get paid to run certain programs like City of Burbank, we're not doing the accelerator with them anymore, but they're paying us to do essentially an entrepreneurship program and we expect to get deals from that. We have other kind of paying corporate clients and then our overall network. So we're gonna strengthen the ones we have in place and kind of build out some of the others. So we have kind of different pockets of network. And again, I'm going to fly through this because this isn't meant to be a fun 2 pitch, but just to let you know what we have in mind. And I think one of the big announcements is that we're going to be opening a physical space in la. So we're really excited about that. We want to create a big presence. We want to have a accelerator, venture studio, whatever space you want to call it. And that's going to be part of our strategy to really win home base. We'll run a couple of our accelerator cohorts per year. We're already talking to a number of government agencies and landlords that I think would love to have us in our space and we'd love to be in their space and it'll be cost effective and all of that. I can't share too much right now, but expect definitely for us to open a space in la and then that's going to Be open. We can do our events there. Although I know this space is super cool, but imagine a space like this, that's ours. And then we could just do events like this all the time. We could have startups, we could have investors, we could have our are founders that are building people coming and going. And like I have a clear vision for that and excited to do that if that. If you want to be part of that in any way, let me know because we're looking to find the best fit and kind of a place to anchor, anchor down and call home. So, okay, I, I mentioned let's dive deeper in some of our key networks. So I'm a Trojan. I know Doug is a Trojan. Any other Trojans in the house? One more Trojan over there. All right, so you know, obviously USC. So I think the stat here is it produces 0.6 unicorn founders per 1,000 MBA students, which is higher than NYU, UCLA, Dartmouth and University of Chicago. I think we're like right behind Stanford and Berkeley, something like that. So. Oh, Ryan, Ryan, you didn't raise your hand. You're a Trojan too? Yeah, yeah. Fight on. So, you know, we're gonna build the relationships with the other schools as well. There's ucla, Caltech. If you haven't figured out by now, I'm Armenian. There's some amazing Armenian founders. There's Service titan, Glendale. They just raised the $200 million Series G at 9.5 billion dollar valuation and filed to go IPO this year, although they held off when the market changed. There's disco a couple blocks away from them. These are all like friends of mine. These are all in my network. And I think if I had started a year or two earlier, these would all be in our portfolio. But there's the next generation that's coming. And I know that the Armenian founder thing may not mean something to some of you, but if you look at my hustle and grit over the last two years, just take that cookie cutter and that's like who I'm investing in, right? The service titan guys, the disco guys, and then the others that are like them. That's a big part. And I think four out of our current portfolio happens to be that we're not biasing towards that, but it just have a strong network. Alex is Armenian. We have some others as well. So we're definitely going to leverage that. So we talked a little bit. So in venture fund, right, for those of you that there's like three main steps, right? There's how you source, how you select, and then how you Steward, that's the framework we like to use. So how are you going to get the deal? How are you going to make sure you pick the right deal and then how are you going to add value? So we touched on the first two. Let's talk about the third one. So stewarding, I think this is the one that really sets us apart. So we want to be one of the most value adding investors on the cap table, on that early cap table. And we've now developed a number of benefits as you could see. We know how to throw events, we do different things. We have a visionary circle of potential customers. But the one I want to talk about that we're really. So it's basically a roundtable with CEOs with all the our portfolio company CEOs that I lead and think of it like a EO or YPO or Strategic Coach or Vistage Group for venture backed founders. And nothing like that, believe it or not, really exists. And so you know, the, the purpose is all the things you see on the slide. But honestly what it's really about is this is my, this is my EO forum. And this is from Cabo 2009. And this is the year that Doug, who was in our forum, Doug sitting right there, didn't come and he always regretted it. He should have been standing right here. The what? You don't want to know what happens in forum stays in forum. But there we are again. Ipo, right? You have that with your forum. Anybody else in eo? Ypo. Anna. Anna's in eo of course. So like, like the EO and YPO have really mastered this forum format. And I was in it for over 13 years. I also did other Mastermind groups and I just love the Mastermind format. So part of what sets us apart is I'm bringing that into our portfolio CEOs and then once we really master that, maybe even to perspectives, right? Like kind of like as a funnel. But we'll talk about that maybe for fun three, but for now we've got that down for fun. One, it seems to be going good. You know, it's still relatively new, but we're off to a good start. You know, a couple of the founders shared some quotes and all that and Lacy's part of it, Alex is part of it. You guys can kind of ask them about it. I had to start a little light with them. But we're gonna, we're gonna go hardcore soon. So we're gonna create it something that they'll have their own version of. These pictures and I don't need to be in it. I, I audible back. I did some Tom Brady action there or maybe some Peyton Manning. So, okay, so who's familiar with the venture studio model at least here? Raise hands. Yes, some of you guys are. All right, so, and I'm going to explain this again in the same framework that you guys have heard me talk about, which is kind of how we do every meeting. A lot of our like ev, like when we work with founders, it's what do we say we're going to do, what happened and what do we learn and what are we going to do? Super simple learning oriented process and that's, it's all built around speed of execution and speed of learning. How quickly can we learn what we need to learn to do the next thing. So in that regard with the studio, our whole goal was can we actually build venture scale companies through the studio kind of coming out of nowhere? It meant I needed to create a team, I needed to have a process and a playbook and I need to create not just one but two companies to show that it's replicable. So we did, we built our untapped method. It's our untapped venture building system. As Ryan mentioned, we took the Lean Stack system which kind of, you know, if you talk about the Ash, Maria kind of created the whole, wrote the book on running Lean scaling Lean, created the Lean business model Canvas, created Lean Stack. We're one of a handful of accelerators worldwide that use it. We took his framework and customized it and built on top of it. And that's basically what you have. So he kind of like built it and tested it on thousands of startups worldwide and now we've customized it fit to fit us. So we have world class playbooks, we have the tools and that's what we use in our venture studio. So because we build, you know what I say is like we're not like a lot of VCs that are just the horse pickers, right? They sit in the stands, they pick the horse and they wait to see which horse wins. We're a gladiator. We're on the field building and going through the stresses right where I'm co founders with Alex, I'm co founders on teamfulness and executive chairman and we're actually going through the highs and lows, ups and downs, twists and turns of venture buildings. So that makes us more valuable obviously to our founders because we relate more and we go through their same problems. And also being a VC makes us gives us better insight on what's happening in the market. And that was the point I made earlier. I don't think I was clear that you know that, that the fact that we do both is synergistic. Right. So the fact that we're a VC and a studio, synergistic. So let's take a look at our two studio ventures which are part of the Fundone portfolio. One of them is Bitcoin, which is an exciting move to earn project. I won't steal any of Alex's thunder, so I'll let him talk about that. And then the other one is Teamfulness, which is the world's only guided business meditation app that allows individuals and teams to solve scenario based everyday business issues like brainstorming, problem solving, strategic planning and icebreakers using specific kind of guided meditations for each use case. So as an example, Bitcoin was founder led. It was Alex's idea. We partnered up and he'll share that story. Team Fullness was an internal idea. We've also worked with corporates. We've had a couple corporate collaborations. One of them was great. We have the CEO's glowing testimonial on our website. And then the other one was Scott, I hope I can mention everything was going good and then he had to go sell his company to a Fortune 500. So then you know, we kind of had to switch gears a little bit. So. So we're off to a good start there. I think we could innovate different ways. And the design is basically like I said earlier, we're going to do this 5 million dollar studio fund. We're going to build 10 ventures over the next three years. That's basically a million and a half for both operating expenses and the actual formation creation legal and the initial marketing and product build enough to kind of get to that pre seed stage. At which point our Fund 2 is now sitting there waiting for it to meet our criteria like I showed in the, in the methodology so that the fund too can invest. Right. So, so it needs to hit the first stage gate for the fund to invest and then the second stage gate for the fund to make a follow on investment. So we have all of that pretty well defined and so that's what we're doing with that. I'm not going to get into all of the details about economics, but I just want to share that. I mean part of what makes venture studios really attractive is the economics. So our general spirit is equal. It's, it's equity with our co founders and the result of it is by the time we've raised seed, the studio still owns about 10 to 30% equity and the fund who's now invested owns 10%. So if you just run the numbers on that, whether you're sitting with us on the studio side or on the fun side, a billion dollar exit, if we just use that for, for conversation's sake, that returns the Studio 10X and it returns the Fund 2X. Just one of our studio ventures. Why? Because we started off with a lot more equity than a traditional VC that's getting a lot less. So if you look at the stats, this is the GSSN Global Startup Studio Network report that came out a couple years ago that surveyed all the studios and it was the first time that we had something like this together. And it shows that studios build and get ventures from zero to seed in 10.7 months versus 36 traditionally. I just remembered I also have have a laser pointer so I can use that too to point sometimes. Total TVPI of 5.8 versus 1.57. And what you know, what you care about the Most, which is IRR of 53% versus 21 or even 30%. Best in class. So again, why is that happening? Because we start with more equity, we have less losses. Right. Because venture studios are built using a process. It's not having the same first time founder mistakes and you have faster exits. So that's the trifecta. Why faster exits? Because again, as you could see, it's built right. You have less of the windy roads, there's shortcut, there's somebody like a George that is helping save the time that's gonna that it could go in a straight line or a less squiggly line faster. So when you put those three things together, you get outsized returns. Initially it was designed to be in fun 2, but like I said with the feedback of our a number of institutionals, we decided to pull that out. So you have, there you have it. The 25 million dollar fund two what's happening here and the $5 million studio one. My Google Slides is going crazy one second. It's been going pretty smooth so far. So one demo bomb is not a bad thing. Okay, all right, all right. So with that I want to invite up Alex Tima, my co founder and the CEO of Bitcoin. He could share a little bit more about Bitcoin and about our collaboration at the studio. The clicker is working, right? Yeah. Okay.

Every time I do these presentations we're in a fitness app and it's calorie based so I always check my heart rate and it's way higher than my resting. But anyway, we'll jump into this real quick. Hello everybody, I'm Alex Tima. I'm the co founder and CEO of fitcoin. Hello everybody on Zoom. I'm going to talk to you about how we're using wearable technology to incentivize and motivate fitness communities using web3nfts and cryptocurrency. A little bit about myself. I've been in the fitness and wellness industry. Over the last 15 years I owned and operated Gym Hybrid Wellness in Los Angeles. And throughout that time I've worked with all types of clients from my members to my YouTube audience, celebrities, influencers, even some rock stars. What I've come to totally fine. What I've come to realize throughout all this time is that in reality everybody's the same. Even you in this room when it comes to fitness and wellness, you face the same challenges. It's my job working with all these different clients is to make fitness fun, gamify it and make sure we solve for these problems that everybody's facing. And I sure you guys have faced this too. How do you stay motivated? How do you stay engaged? How do you make sure you're consistent and you're compliant? And above all, how do I provide you with some value beyond your health and wellness? Well, the solution I created is Fitcoin, which is a Web3 project that allows users, everybody with the wearable tracker to connect, earn cryptocurrency and NFTs as they burn calories in a immersive proof of work or I like to say proof of workout fitness role playing game. We call this Burn to Earn. Nobody's doing it. It's unique to us and think of it as a Pokemon go for fitness communities. So with this idea, through my social network and my connections, I found George and it happened. Their, their thesis fits with what we're doing. This is a fitness application. This is about your best self. It is about motivating people to find their best self and rewarding them for doing so. So we ended up partnering with George. We went through the lean stack. Like mentioned, George believed in the idea. More importantly for me, honestly, George believed in me, which was a big deal. So he really helped take an idea and turn it into a company. From the formation to the fundraising to the team that I have now around me. And he mentioned he's a co founder and he's really helped me fall into the CE role that I am in now which is really helping move forward the most Important thing for me too with Untapped is the network that it's created.

For me.

It's something I didn't have access to on my own. CEO Mastermind, everyone talked about it. It's such a great tool for me to understand what everybody else is going to relate with them and move forward with our project. And most recently I was able to attend the Fitness Technology Summit which is an invite only event of top C level executives of major fitness brands in the country where fitcoin participated in a pitch contest and we won. It was amazing. That was thanks to untapped connections and just from that event we were able to get some partnership interests and some investment interests on a national level in the fitness industry. About fitcoin. It was really amazing. So currently we have an MVP which is running on Web two with a thriving Discord community and we're expecting to launch our product in Q1 of next year. I made a quick demo I'm going to go through really quickly and go through some of the gamification and the incentivizing that we're planning to do. First user will download the app, create their profile, connect their tracker. So immediately as a passive function of the app, everybody with the tracker who burns calories, who is everybody in the world, starts earning Bitcoin for their daily calorie burn. Now that Bitcoin can be converted into Ethereum or into Usdt or well earn to earn, right? So the more you burn, the more you earn. Totally passive. You can play or you can participate in quests and challenges. The quests and challenges, they're applied in the real world. You need Bitcoin to play, Users participate, they play and then top 25 gets rewarded. NFTs give away NFTs to our user base. This is something nobody else is doing. There's a reason for that I'll be glad to explain if anybody wants to see me 101 those NFTs act as boosts and bonuses within the application and as the app progresses you'll be able to fully customize these NFTs. Again, very unique to our product. We also have very unique subscription model that we have been testing in the Web2 application MVP which we have also validated. As far as what's next, we are talking to potential corporate partners and sponsors in health and wellness ranging from fitness to insurance, State Farm being one example. The goal is to have multiple partners in tech, lifestyle, fitness, nutrition, insurance, everything related to wellness, allowing our users to transact and create user generated fitness wellness experiences using fitcoins so that provides some utility for fitcoin that nobody is using. Eventually transitioning all of this into the Metaverse future goals. And since the Fitness Technology Summit, we have had some further interest in the project. So we've decided to extend our fundraise which will help us with the solid go to market strategy, get some significant traction and raise a big seed round this time next year here. So if burn to earn and fitcoin is something anybody is interested in, please feel free to reach out to George or you can ping me directly. My email is on the screen.

Thank you, guys.

All right, questions?

Yeah, so any questions from the Zoom audience? See, Beth is saying there aren't any questions there yet. Any questions from here? Yes.

Is there like most category because those.

That are already great, but for those.

That feel like there's a barrier to.

Learning.

The most improved. Yeah, so the, one of the, one of the big things for me when it comes to fitness is leveling playing field. So the reward system is based on randomization. It's just a matter of getting people to participate so everybody can get access to rewards and we're not rewarding first place all the time, which kind of alienates everybody else. That's one way. The second way is what I mentioned in the future is where we let users create their own experiences. And that's kind of long, long story. We go into like decentralization and you bring something like that to attention with the community, the community comes together and creates that to make sure it meets everybody's needs.

Thank you, Alex. Let's do it.

Thank you guys.

Thank you, Alex. All right, so it's 2:46, so we're gonna have to go fast. I'm gonna have to go fast because I don't want to take any time from Lacy. You guys are definitely going to want to hear from Lacey. So. All right, let's, you know, let's address a little bit about what's going on in the market. Right. So on the outset it could sound like, well, you know, valuations are down and the number of deals are down and all of that is true. But that's to be expected in VC and in web 3. We talked about that. So, you know, I'd love to share a little bit about my perspective and the on top perspective. Just so, you know, kind of like where, where we're coming from. So I think these valuations, they obviously hurt. Late stage. If you're a series B, series C vc, this is hurting. You know, you, you invested at crazy valuations. But for early stage it's not something that's a big issue. We're getting things that basically, so there's where is it? And I don't know why my screen's being cut off, but I'll just hit these points really quick. They seem like they're down, but they're still high compared to prior years. There's a lot of dry powder. The main thing that from my perspective that's gone away that I couldn't compete with was the irrational exuberance, right? Like just people paying crazy prices. There was pre seed rounds at $120 million valuations. Like that doesn't make sense. How can a pre seed be 120 million dollar valuation for web3people? VCs were just making silly decisions and now that it comes back to rational good business building, it's to our advantage because as you could tell by my style, like that's how I operate. So the other thing is people worry about low prices, but from our standpoint, you know, as an investor, buy low, sell high, right? Like I won't say blood in the streets, but it's a good time, it's a good time to be a vc. Things have shifted back to our favorite and then I think our validation oriented approach, which you heard Ryan and Alex and stuff talk about, this is where it really shines because what matters now is building real businesses that solve real problems. And that's what, that's, that's what we excel at. So on top of that, I'll skip through some of these things. There's like the projection is that yes, 2021 was record highs, but in 2027 we're going to be much higher as it comes to vc. And then if we look at the Web three side of things, if you go back to my March Web3 investor training that I did, I predict that exactly this would happen. 99 of everything would be wiped out. OpenSea's trading volume went down to close to nothing. Right. For those of you guys that follow that. And it was because like a lot of it was just the hype, it was all about the speculation, it was all about the, the tokens. And that's not what we are. We're not some, you know, pump and dump. We're not selling the tokens, we're not buying. We're not a crypto fund. You're not putting money in us to go figure out the dodge coin or one of these new coins to buy. We're investing in legitimate Web three startups that are solving problems like Meta, Intro and You're going to hear about that in a second. Or fitcoin or fint. They just happen to be leveraging this third generation of the web. So with that said, I have more slides. I'm happy to talk about it. You know, I'm not worried about what's happening. I think this is perfect for us. And I think somebody that could add to this conversation being that she's tackling disrupting LinkedIn and PDF resumes with a proof of work Web3 wallet and a female founder. Lacey Kehlani from MetaIntro.

I definitely need a much updated headshot because I don't look like that anymore. All right, so hi everyone, my name is Lacey and I'm the co founder of Meta Intro and I also don't have purple hair that was a designer. So a little bit about me which I think is super important to lay as a foundation prior to going or prior to going into what we're building. My background is in hiring also in my family everybody's an entrepreneur, so it was never an option to go work a 9 to 5. So my parents were very disappointed when I said I'm going to go work in hr. And at some point my mom said, you should probably go to business school and tinker on your first idea. So during my career in hr, I interviewed and hired most literally thousands of people in the media and entertainment space. And while I was in business school, I called my mom and said I think I have an idea. And that led to my first startup which was a labor marketplace in the media and entertainment space. Venture backed, eventually sold sale process was super painful if any of you have not successfully exited. And during that time a lot of my founder friends were moving into the Web3 space and I said, well, I can't go work a 9 to 5, so what do I do next? And when I was going through the sale process, I thought a lot about what my startup at the time couldn't solve for what was something that time and time again there was like nothing that I could do to whether reduce the time to hire or fill the top of the funnel with candidates. So companies like LinkedIn indeed do a great job of filling filling the top of the funnel with candidates. Companies like Fiverr and Upwork do an excellent job at reducing the time to hire. However, with Web3Tech, you can reduce the time to hire in a significantly faster way than companies in Web2 just because of the tech. And as a hiring manager, imagine looking at a candidate's PDF resume and knowing for 100% fact that everything that candidate says on their resume is true. That would allow you to reduce the time to hire in a significantly faster way. Instead of sitting on an interview and saying, tell me about your last job, you can focus on things that are more important to especially let's say an early stage company, which is what are your hobbies, what do you like to do? Let me get to know you on a personal level. And so that was kind of the foundation for Meta Intro. Brad, high level overview. He was my co founder at my last startup as well. He was a first hire at Work Market, which was acquired by adp. Second startup went through the Comcast techstars accelerator. Third startup was with me and fourth startup was also with me. He has a background in building labor marketplaces and has dabbled in so many web3 blockchain projects, you'd have to ask him about it. So when I went back to the drawing board and said, brad, what if we built an indisputable, indisputable resume? He said, lacy, you know, go to the whiteboard, tell me what you want to build. So I eventually, long story, I made sure I was going through crypto Twitter one day saw Alexis Ohanian tweeted something that said MVC is the new MVP. And building in Web3 for anybody that's building in Web3 knows that building a community first is the most important thing that you could do. And so that was the launch of Meta Intro, which at the time was a discord community for web3jobs. Around that time I met George. I was speaking on a panel about the state of hiring in web 3. And because of my discord, I knew, even given at the time, knew a lot about the hiring market, what kind of jobs were being posted and eventually landed on building the actual product, which is meta intro. So Metaintro is a professional resume wallet for Web3. It's a multi chain custodial wallet that holds proof of employment, proof of skill, proof of education, all the things that you put in your resume and interacts as a browser extension with job applications. So when you're on a lever, a workday, maybe one day, LinkedIn, instead of uploading your PDF resume, you'd interact with your Meta Intro wallet. And adjacent to the product, we now today run the largest discord for web3jobs. There's over 4,000 web3jobs posted in my community a month, ranging from technical to non technical opportunities. So if there's anybody that could talk to the state of Web3 hiring, it's probably me. And George has alluded To a few times. We just closed our round. We raised 5.6 backed by near blockchain, AAVE, some other great web3 investors and untapped. So it's been a crazy few months building some love on Twitter. A lot of people follow us, call us like Twitter influencers, all that good stuff. But today what we're building like a. Adjacent to the community online, adjacent to the product. Personally, I'm building my network, my network of other founders and yes, a lot of my friends are founders, whether that's Web2 or Web3. But it's not like we all sit down once a month and say what are you working on? How can I help you? What problems are you facing today? And with George and untapped, that was a massive seller for me. If you've been a founder, you know being a founder is really lonely and especially on top of it, if you're in Web3, you're most likely sitting in a room by yourself all day talking to Internet stores, strangers. So having a community while it is online, online right now, I'm sure it will be in person. Having a community of great venture backed founders to talk to, even if it's for an hour a month to kind of keep, keep accountable or keep everybody accountable, share updates, to share struggles, hurdles to share successes with. That's a value add that, I mean it's, it makes him on my cap table worth it. So on top of the check. So thank you. I had other stuff here on the state of web3 hiring but I can go into that if anybody wants to talk to me about that offline. So.

If you guys have any questions for Lacy, she's here. I just want to be respectful of time. Some people are, it's east coast at 6pm we had a new investor join from Hong Kong and he was waking up at 4am to to be on the call. So people have been on. So I want to do try to land the plane on time. So we're gonna do the Q A. Just take a few questions especially from Zoom, my team. Like if you guys could cue that up now please for everybody here, we'll have two hours where we can drink and eat and talk and do questions. So I'm not going to take any questions from you. I'm going to take questions from, from the Zoom participants. We do have a survey. So Barbie from our team, Barbara should be dropping the link. For those of you that are here, if you can scan this QR code, it's just a simple like five question kind of survey. Let us know how this was again. This was our first time doing. This was kind of a hybrid event. It was quite a lot of work and definitely a lot of stress for me, but it feels like it went well. I don't know. You guys could say it in the rating if what the rating was. And as you guys. Did you guys get that? You need that again? Is it working? Yeah. Okay, anybody else here? Okay, if you're on Zoom, I don't think you need to use your phone. You could just. Barbie's dropping the chat in the link. And with that said. So while you guys are filling that out, I'm pleased to announce that our plans are for the next investor summit to be in person only. No, no. Live stream at on the heels of a360 my friend Peter's conference at the Terranea Resort on March 23rd. So excited about that. At that time, I think we'll bring all of our Fund 1, Fund 2, and studio investors hopefully will have launched two new funds by then, by the end of the quarter. And we can have kind of our first. Our next meeting there. And of course, if you want to and start those conversations, give me feedback or the studio.