#4 - Dad Dies, Now The Work Starts

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Welcome to the 4th episode of the Tech Optimist podcast. We have 2 portfolio company interviews for you today. One is working in the area of home medical testing. The other is trying to help families working through the settling of an estate. Enjoy the show. We have 3 blocks for you today. In block 1, we meet our portfolio company, Cyfox. They're innovating in the area of home medical testing, something we're going to see a lot more of as we move into a more customized, remote, AI-driven healthcare system. In block 2, I talked to the founder of Alex, a company working in the area of estate execution. If any of you, like I have, have had to work through the settling of estate, you know how time-consuming, disorganized, and expensive it is. It's an area where innovation can really help, and Alex is trying to do it. Finally, in block 3, we end the show with a segment where I chat with a young VC in the business and we talk about things going on in their career and in the industry. Today we're talking a little bit about AI. As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized financial advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode. Okay, let's get into block 1. Here's the company Cyfox. Michael, it's nice to meet you. Um, Cyfox is, uh, AV portfolio company, and, uh, why don't you just introduce yourself and introduce your company and what you guys do?

Sure. Um, so my background's originally in, uh, in Chemistry, materials, biology, kind of that nexus. But for the past, I don't know, say 6 or 7 years now, I've been working in what's called silicon photonics. So silicon photonics is using semiconductor technology, but instead of controlling electrons, you're controlling photons. So working with light. This call we're having actually is going through multiple photonic chips because there are fibers connecting data centers and Eventually, you have to convert the light into electricity because computers use electrons. So all of those conversions are being done on photonic chips, and that's really what's enabled kind of the connectivity we have today. So the way that the internet's been scaled. So we use that technology to do blood testing. The reason that makes sense is that if you go into a central lab like Quest or LabCorp, if you open up the tools that they're using, They're full of optics. So that's lasers, lenses, you know, detectors, and so on. And so that what we're doing is basically miniaturizing all the optics that go into one type of blood testing tool called like an immunoassay analyzer. We're taking that tool and turning it into something that can be used in the home. And so that's kind of the main thrust of the company. We're already in the market with something that's a little bit less innovative. It's a mail-in test where you put your blood on a small card that separates the cells from the serum, and that card is preserved in a desiccant bag and shipped to a central lab where we do, you know, provide 17 different biomarkers from that one card. And we were able to put something on the market that's very dominant in terms of like cost versus performance. So you have to get like 6 6 test kits from our competitor in order to equal 1. So, you have to stab your finger 6 times to get the same results. And so, that's been really interesting. We've been doing that for about the last year and a half, and it's grown a lot. We have thousands and thousands of people using it every month. And we've already saved— we know at least 2 lives that we've more or less saved with things that we found, but we don't know every— we don't know the medical history of you know, what's happening to people after they take the test. But we have at least 2 that have been documented in, you know, basically Trustpilot reviews. But, uh, it's, it's been, it's been really interesting. And where, uh, you know, the goal of the company is really to put a device in every home. Uh, and that's—

So this is more of just kind of an interim step. You generate some revenue, you debug the technology. Walk me through kind of the strategy of How you came about this?

Yeah, I mean, it's the development cycles in medical device are very long. So if we weren't in a, you know, such a regulated space, we would've already launched to the home. The technology, so, you know, already a year and a half ago, we could do demos at conferences and so on where we would prick someone's finger and give a result right away. Like basically with a, this is the kind of engineering units that we already had a year and a half ago.

He's holding up, for the listeners, he's holding up something about the size of a shoebox, maybe a little—

No, even smaller. I can— so this is my phone here. So basically, it's a little bit larger.

It's a little bit larger. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a little bit larger than a phone, but basically already very low cost, you know, a couple hundred dollars range, even in low volume. So the problem is that if you're— when you make a medical device, they often kind of get stuck the way they are. So you want that first version as opposed to pretty much every other product, you know, where you just launch and see how the customers like it. And so with the medical device, you have to— you don't get to iterate that much. The first version has to be very strong. So we decided not to compromise and to kind of focus on developing the market with something that could be launched quickly. And the reason mail-in testing can be launched quickly is that it's regulated in a completely different way. So, it's regulated by— this is maybe boring, but it's regulated by something called CLIA and you have a lab director in the lab. And, it's kind of like the lab director acts as a miniature FDA. It's totally different.

And, there are lots of— Super smart way to go. You've seen almost the opposite example with some of the— I won't name the company, but they launched a wearable. And, You know, it's not really ready for prime time, but it takes a lot of money. And then all of a sudden you get kind of bad reviews.

And

yeah, everything in software sucks when you first launch it too. It's just you get to iterate

very, very quickly,

very quickly. And so this is— it seems like this is a really clever way to kind of stay on the innovation rapid iteration cycle. provide value to people while you continue to refine hardware and software, right? So, really smart. I commend you for that.

This is— I was just digging around. This is what the kind of the V1. So, we're now deep into building basically V2, but this is what the V1 looked like. So, you have a chip here that's got 15 different sensors on it that do immunoassays. And so, you can do in theory up to 15 proteins and hormones. And then, uh, you know, there's some, some fluidics and, and so on. So this plugs into the— this plugs into the reader like this. Yeah.

Yeah.

So this could have been— we could have commercialized this, but it— but basically we decided to go with the male intestine. It's been, it's been working very well. It's a strategy that hasn't really been used yet. There's a— the opposite happened to one company. So there's a company called, called Q Health that launched to the home with a COVID test. I think they spent like half a billion dollars scaling up manufacturing and so on. And then they ended up launching mail-in testing afterwards.

Yeah.

Because the difficulty of adding more things to that, to that box they launched to the home was very high.

Yep.

And, uh, they needed to have more products, you know, and so they launched mail-in testing afterwards. And obviously at that point it's very hard to innovate when you're so large and so on. So, so that's been our strategy. We'll see how it works out. You know, it hasn't been It's pretty unconventional in medical device, so we'll see how it goes.

No, I think it's smart though. It's worth a shot. So, where are you in just kind of the fundraising side of the story and kind of the scale of your business right now with people and amount of money you've raised?

So, yeah, I didn't mention this at the beginning. It's probably an important detail. So, I'm the co-founder of the company and chief product officer, so I'm not the CEO. So, I actually, early on, I was much more involved in fundraising. Now, Just because of how much is going on, I'm trying to stay out of it a little bit because there's otherwise, you know, because now we have a product in the market and it's— that's taking up a lot of the bandwidth I had that would go into, you know, helping with fundraising. But my co-founder, Diedrich, is kind of leading that and he's the CEO. But we, you know, went through Y Combinator in 2020.

Yeah.

And then, which was extremely helpful. So I would, you know, recommend it to anybody pretty much, even though we were probably, I mean, really maybe the first chip company There was maybe one other one or something, but it's— they really did not have experience with semiconductor companies, but that didn't really matter. So they were still extremely helpful. We did Y Combinator and then we raised— I mean, the story of it was that we raised some money, like a couple million, and then that kind of triggered Khosla to come in. And so Khosla ended up leading the round and we got to about $6 million that way in our seed round. Wow. And that got us through to having a really, you know, really baked engineering units like what I showed and so on. And then we raised, it ended up adding up to about $30 million with Intel, Khosla, and then they followed on again and so on. And actually your fund as well, Alumni Ventures. So we raised about a total of $30 million.

And that was 2023?

Yeah, the $20 million of that was closed in 2023. Yeah.

Right.

Or '19, I think.

Excellent. And give us just more context and kind of where, what do you view as kind of big trends and tailwinds to the work you guys are doing?

So I think, you know, it's, if you want to be successful in a hype cycle, you really want to be working like 5 years in advance of the hype cycle. So for example, you know, if you want to be doing AI, it would have been ideal to be doing it 5 years ago, right? Yeah. Right. So I think in some ways we're in that kind of position. So I think this home healthcare thing had like a moment during COVID but it wasn't, that was like a proof of concept, I would say. So there wasn't a lot of telemedicine grew, I think, 40-fold during COVID Yep. So it broke a lot of like assumptions about what was possible or not. But because one of the reasons is there's just not good technology. So, including home blood testing, you need blood testing for 70% of medical decisions or some type of diagnostic. And, it's usually blood testing at least is involved. So, it's very difficult to actually do telemedicine and not have the person come in to do it effectively.

No, it's like you go in for the blood work, then you do it. It's incredibly inefficient compared to if we all had one of these units, we can get Even the instructions downloaded, you could do the testing. It could, it could eliminate, I don't know, 50% of trips to your physician or even if you just go to an independent lab. So yeah, I, yes. So I experience, yeah,

absolutely. And, and I think a lot of us had this epiphany, you know, if you didn't deal with the, the system that much before COVID like during COVID it was really clear. Very early on that, oh man, you know, so that was kind of our thinking that within 10 years, this type of device will be, you know, in many homes, if not all. And so we're kind of halfway through that. So, you know, the company's been around about 4 and a half years. So I think the trend is there. 6 out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. Yeah. And it's not, you know, there's no way to like Turn back the clock to be in some kind of state where, you know, people are very healthy. Like maybe, you know, you look at Europe, like there's some countries which are very walkable and, you know, the food is really high quality. So like, it's that, that doesn't, is not easy to do, but we do know that if you do, you know, frequent blood testing and a bunch, you know, a bunch of other things, a lot of them are actually not expensive. They just, they probably can be solved with software. And I think AI is actually gonna make that a lot easier. So if you look at what, like, what makes up like the highest quality medicine you can buy, A lot of it is information, checking on the person, improving the, you know, kind of like tuning what they're doing. But the thing you can't replace with software is actually collecting real data on the human being. So like, even if you—

Yeah.

The physical, you know, you have to get the blood test results, you have to get, you know, in some cases scans and so on. So I think that's going to work really well with the trend of being able to automate away a lot of kind of information processing. while bringing to the home the cumbersome process of collecting blood data. But it's— I think that trend is going on. I mean, everything in healthcare is slow, but I think at some point, just because, you know, 20% of GDP is being spent on healthcare and we get— we have such, you know, it's hard to tell, is it because people are sick or are people sick because it's so broken? Like, I don't know, you know, which— where the root cause is. Yeah. But I think that's something we can make a dent in. And the trend has to be in the direction of fixing this. At some, you know, we can't go from spending 20% of GDP to spending 80% of GDP, right? So it has to, I think it has to be reversed. And that's something that hopefully we can make an impact on and also capture some of that value. Yeah.

And I think, and I think we're also over the next 10 years going to be, you know, I think people are going to take more responsibility for their own healthcare. And I also think it's going to be more Really, the current system is largely wait till you get sick and are broken and then we'll fix you. And, I do think that there is a longer-term trend toward if you can manage your numbers and you can manage your weight and you are on top of these tests, it can prevent a far more expensive reactive—

Mm-hmm.

form of healthcare. And just, you know, it's like even, you know, there's, there's a lot of people greatly improving their outcomes with GLP-1 drugs, right? And getting, you know, losing weight and getting healthier. But they all want numbers like, how is this affecting my cholesterol? How is this affecting my ApoB? How is this, you know, et cetera? Yeah. And it's like, you know, oh, I, If I could get those numbers reasonably and more frequently, it would just be more information for someone to stay healthier longer, which is a huge ROI.

Yeah, I think, I mean, one of the things we're doing is launching health programs on top of, uh, the blood testing that we already offer. And, uh, we teamed up with, uh, you know, a couple of people that, one of them was actually a, a customer of ours. So he is an MD PhD that was using Cyfox for a year. to track his own blood results. But we recently launched a heart health program in beta. So now we have, you know, 5,000, 100 people in it. And the idea is, okay, you know, drugs have their place, right? So like statins have their place, ezetimibe, which is another lipid medication. And, you know, maybe GLP-1s do as well, like, although we're not involved in that yet. But a lot of the time, you know, people don't wanna stay on drugs their whole life if they don't have to. Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, drugs can help you get to a point and you can— this is measurable also, which is interesting. Like, for example, if you're taking statins, you want to take the minimum effective dose to get you to a lipid level that's healthy, right? And you can also get— your lipids can be too low. So, it's something where you really want to tune it. And also, you know, you want to avoid side effects, right? So, it's really the lowest minimum, you know, minimum effective dose.

The dose is the poison, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It could take 500 years kind of thing.

Yeah. And right now, the way dosage is done is on a population level, right? So, it's like, you know, you On average, you know, we'll throw this at you and see what happens in a year. But basically, if it's low cost to do it in a precision way, I mean, that's what obviously, you know, somebody that's paying $100K, $200K for precision medicine per year, or like concierge medicine, they're not doing that, right? So it's really, can we scale this to, to a lot of people? And it's 2 parts. It's automating a lot of the kind of like effort that the physician has to make. You still want physicians in the loop, but it's automating a lot of the things that they're doing manually now so they can just You know, scale up. And the other thing is to get the measurements more frequently so you can just adjust, you know, at low cost, right? So you can make adjustments. But I think the idea of getting people on drug— I mean, this is just early, like we're still discussing this— but getting people onto a drug that can help them, like a GLP-1 or a statin, and then actually helping them get off of it is kind of the— and that's something—

Bring down the baby at the very smallest dose.

Exactly, exactly.

Where they are. Yeah.

And that's, that's the, that's probably the future of a lot of these types of interventions, which otherwise, you know, start making less and less sense if you just stretch them. Like, you know, is it okay to take a GLP-1 for 30 years? Like, we don't even know.

Yeah.

Right. So it's that, that's kind of our thinking. And it's, that's early, but it's something where we think there's a lot of promise in, you know, combining frequent testing with, with this type of taper and optimization of medicine.

Great. Any asks for our audience, Michael? How can they help?

Well, you can try if you're, if you're interested in optimizing your, basically your longevity, but it's kind of a little, it's more focused specifically on heart health and lipids and also cardio, like metabolic markers, like insulin, fasting insulin. If you're interested in that, you can try, uh, getting into the beta that we're doing for heart health. And today, if you join today, Basically Phil, who's the MD PhD working on this, it becomes your, you know, I mean, it's, he's not, there's no doctor patient relationship, but he's looking at your data for an hour. Yeah. Probably when you take a test before you get it.

It's smart people looking at it.

Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's, I think that's like a cool, a cool thing you can do if, if you're curious about it or if, if like you haven't, for example, never measured your ApoB and you wanna get it measured and see like where, where you're at and, and so on. So I think that's, that's a great way to kind of like try Cyfox and also how much—

Can you do that at your website? If people go to your website, is there a site? Yeah.

It's partially hidden. So we, because when we send people to the site, you know, we try—

We'll get it in the show notes.

Yeah, I'll provide the link, but basically in the menu bar, there's a section called Blueprints and then Heart Health. So that's one way. And then of course, yeah, I think just one thing is, you know, the company which we're very careful about hiring, And that's a really big pillar of what we're doing because it's just so interdisciplinary and you need amazing people across a lot of different areas. So I think just referring great people to us that are either engineers that want to work on a, you know, kind of like transformational product like this, or business people, product people that are really passionate about actually doing something new in healthcare. I think there's not that many people like that that really are like nerdy about it, right? It's not just a,

Yeah.

They think it's good business, but they're actually interested in it on like a personal level. We always try to find people like that for the product team and the business team. And so I think that referring people like that to SciFox just so they can check it out, try it, see if they're interested and maybe come work for us. I think that that's the most valuable given, you know, the audience. Yeah, excellent.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And final question, what's your kind of favorite personal productivity hack? How do you—

So when I used to, I used to do Chinese manufacturing at some point. So I had, I was building factories in China and kind of like another, and one in America for my, when my first startup was acquired at the acquirer, that's what I was doing. And I found that if you book a flight to China, like 2 weeks in advance, basically the next 2 weeks are extremely productive. So the hack is like cut off, you know, you basically create an artificial, extremely imposing deadline. where you have to literally leave and then things move faster. That's the only thing. I don't have any like dates. I'm not very efficient on a day-to-day basis, you know, but if I do that, it tends to—

But artists are still dead— I mean, deadlines work. Deadlines work.

Yeah.

I mean, deadlines absolutely work. And if you have to kind of play the psychological— I mean, we're human beings. This is the software we run our lives with is between our ears and And if you can mentally create a deadline, I think that absolutely is a good hack. I mean, it's, you know, I was talking to somebody who was literally moving so they could kind of clean out their junk. Yes, exactly. And, you know, that is another kind of a forced constraint. And humans rise to the occasion time and time again when we put constraints on them. each other or ourselves. So, Michael, it was really great to meet you, talk to you. Keep up the good work. Super exciting company. And again, thanks for letting us be involved. And, um, to our audience, help them out, buy their products, send good people their way. All right.

Yeah. Thank you very much, Mike.

Have a good one. See ya.

Yeah.

Hey everyone, I'd love to take a moment to tell you a bit about Alumni Ventures and our Foundation Fund. AV offers smart, simple, and accessible venture portfolios. We built our firm to serve the needs of individual investors, and we've raised over $1.3 billion from a community of more than 10,000 investors. PitchBook ranked AV the most active VC in the United States in both 2022 and 2023, and CB Insights ranked AV a top 20 performing VC for 2024. So where might investors start? Some of the people we talk to are interested in our Foundation Fund, one of our broadest and most diversified offerings. This fund taps into our substantial investment engine, offering investors a robust and diversified venture portfolio with deals sourced from many of our investing teams and with renowned lead investors such as these. The Foundation Fund portfolio is spread across stage, sector, geography, and lead investor to help ensure a diversified and balanced mix in your portfolio. For an investor new to Alumni Ventures, it could be a great place to start. Ready to learn more? Visit us at av.vc. Here's segment 2 in our conversation with Alex. This entrepreneurial company is tackling estate execution. Let's learn more. All right, so Tech Optimist Podcast, we're talking to one of our portfolio companies today. Alexandra, why don't you, um, introduce yourself and your company?

Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. I'm Alexandra Maisor. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Alex.

And give me the, you know, what's the, what's the business do? Kind of what's your elevator pitch, Alexandra?

Yeah. So at Alex, we're the first and only automated wealth transfer solution. And we have created a platform to simplify the estate settlement process.

So let's talk a little bit about kind of that pain point. This is estate planning something people should do. They don't often do it. Demographically, I assume we're looking at a huge wave of boomers now entering that part of their journey. And yeah, you're trying to make it simpler and cheaper, I assume.

So yeah, only one-third of all people who could do estate settlement in this country do it. And, you know, when I landed on this space, which I'll tell you about in a moment, I felt like I want to get everyone to do estate planning. But the reality is, is that number really isn't going to change because people have a hard time planning in this country, making difficult decisions. And so I wanted to help families when the moment came. when someone you love passes away. And so we decided to focus in on estate settlement. And unfortunately, it was through a personal experience. Right. A very dear family friend of ours passed away and very good friends with her children and just offered to help. I'm not an attorney, never had to settle an estate. To be quite candid, the family friend, she was a stay-at-home mother. Her husband had served our country, was an elevator technician. simple, good people, lived in the same house since the '80s. My family friend, we uncovered a will. So she had a paper map that took us on this digital scavenger hunt. Yeah. Which is really interesting because the process of settling Carol, my family friend's estate, took me 900 hours and 18 months, which is the average amount of time it takes families in this country to settle an estate. That's a full-time job no American's ever been trained for. You don't know what you have ahead. Unfortunately, it's one of those things you don't know till you're in it.

Yeah. So this is more on the estate settlement.

Settlement. That's right.

The estate planning side. So, you know, they're in it, they have the need, and it's either 900 hours and a year or So how is your tool going to help that? And again, my understanding is you're pretty early stage. What stage are you in kind of your journey

here? So we raised our seed financing about a year ago now. Initialized was our lead, and of course American Family Alumni Ventures, the DGreen team, which I know is like where you started, is on our cap table as well. Look, we're in a really good place where we have paying customers, we've settled the estates. Um, you know, we're busy cranking through our distribution channels now. Um, we've done some automations, which is really tremendous. And, you know, just kind of going back to estate settlement for a second, because I think this is one of those spaces, to be quite honest, people don't actually understand what it is because you don't really think about it until unfortunately you have to deal with it. And, you know, one of the first and most important things is figuring out what's in the estate. Most people know the net worth of Elon Musk and Bill Gates more than their own parents.

Right.

Like, that's— that was a surprising finding for us. And for us, we help at Alex, we help anyone with a trust, a will, or nothing. By the way, folks who have nothing has nothing to do with any sort of demographic situation. It is actually the majority of America. In fact, folks who might have a trust or a will will often find that it is outdated. And again, it's just a paper map. Doesn't do the heavy lift. Doesn't wait on the phone with the banks for you. Doesn't return your Comcast cable box. It doesn't notify all the credit bureaus. It doesn't do the administrative work. In fact, when I was doing the work for Carol, I did what a lot of people would do, which is call an attorney, pay them about $30K. You're not really quite sure why. 2 months go by. I call the attorney. I'm like, what are you doing? And he's like, well, what do you want me to do? I said, I don't know. Wait on the phone with Bank of America and let's get Carol's bank account. And he says, so you want me to wait on the phone for 5 hours and charge the family $650 an hour? And that was like this huge insight that right now the unit economics don't work for these point solutions and advisors.

Yeah.

To be able to do the administrative work. So at Alyx, we're automating all the administrative part of it. But here's the thing, it's the most human moment anyone's gonna ever go through in their life, and it's not an insignificant moment. That's important. And so for us, we sort of use a mind and machine philosophy where you will always have a human in the loop, and we're powering up the human, making them like a superhero by automating and using AI.

Yeah, so high-tech, high-touch. Today, what's the mix, and what do you eventually see that mix being as far as the human helping people personally through this, um, Tough time, um, versus the automations, the AI, the tools, the software that can just administratively just make it much lower friction. Where are you today and where do you want to get to?

Yeah, that's a great question. Let me sort of answer it by saying, when I first started with my co-founder Hugh Tammasia, we had this great idea. I want there to be a magical button you press and poof, the estates transfer. But you know what we found really early on when we actually started serving families— and I say families and not customers because we do end up serving the entire family is that they want a human in the loop. Now, this is really important, not through the entire 12 to 18 month journey, but at that first point of contact, they need to know someone is on their side. And so what we've been doing while we've settled estates, so we have a care team that has highly trained empathetic folks, it has a CPA, trust administrators, lawyers, et cetera. And now that we've been settling estates, for a while, we've been sort of automating the things that we now know are taking a lot longer. If you think about chapter 1 in estate settlement, I talked about discovery. Most people don't know what they don't know. I sort of say this tongue-in-cheek, but, you know, how can we transfer what we don't know exists? Like, that's really important. Yeah. And so we've actually, for almost every single family we've served, I think actually every single one, we have found something. What, 'cause what we realize is we're giving families peace of mind and certainty in a time where they don't have it. And so we've sort of automated that, what I call discovery, into all the different interwebs, which has been incredible. The second sort of part of it is all the form filling. Yeah. Like, you would be surprised, all the financial, government, I mean, you name it. People have checking, savings, retirement. I mean, just think about your own, right? And they all ask for the same information, but in a different way. And if you spell one thing wrong, name wrong, address wrong, something, it will set you back in an estate settlement process months. And so the ability to sort of have the machine come in and sort of make sure that what we're doing is efficient and correct. And, you know, I want to talk about the distribution for executors and heirs. Sure. Because what people don't realize, they think, they sort of think like, you know, oh, dad made me, the executor. But do you know that that's a fiduciary and legal responsibility? And people don't realize what a huge responsibility that is. And so when these distributions start to come in, there are all these questions. By the way, this is not an insignificant amount of money to get. And there's not a party hat moment, Mike, where on this date everything dad or mom left for you arrives. They kind of arrive in different places, the distribution. And you'll be surprised to know that One— this shocked me— one out of 3 people who receive an inheritance in this country has a negative balance in just 2 years. And that's where I think there's this interesting opportunity where to think about this gap in the value chain, right? I mean, we talk about this great wealth transfer, $84 trillion about to exchange hands from the boomer and silent generation to Gen X and millennials.

Mind-boggling how big that is.

Right?

I don't think people talk enough about it, but it's something that I think people have a hard time. The boomers, of which I'm right at the edge, have done an enormously good job at accumulating wealth. But when they pass on, that's moving on to the next generation for sure. It's an enormous amount of wealth. Yeah.

And here's the thing, Mike, when people talk about this great wealth transfer, you hear wealth planners, you hear people about how you inherit this windfall you'll get, but how are you going to get it?

Right.

People don't talk about that. And we're really the only solution that helps make that process streamlined and holistic. If you ask an attorney, a CPA, your neighbor, like, how do you settle an estate? You're going to get a variety of answers. But at Alex, we sort of widen the aperture. It's for all the things that come after you lose someone that you love. And that's really important. We don't just do a sliver of the work, we do all the work. And, you know, when I started this, like, everyone would, you know, first of all, it's important to know we all agree now you don't need a CPA to do your taxes. TurboTax exists. You have an option to see a professional when needed. I look at estate settlement in the same way. So you could sort of view us as the TurboTax of estate settlement.

Yeah, no, I, um, so the next big milestone is raising your A round. What are kind of the 3 things that you think Alex needs to accomplish before you're, you know, ready to go out and raise that first institutional round?

Yeah, I think like, you know, we've had some really good headwinds. We've had some really good luck. We have a really good team. We've seen some really great signals. I think we're continuing to focus on creating a great experience for our customers. We already get really heartfelt messages from our customers where we've been able to settle their estates thus far. We're busy working on some more automations and just helping as many families as we can. So to be honest, it's more of everything we're already doing.

Yeah. What— our community is large and helpful. What's your ask?

You know, here's the thing. Truth be told, you don't know that you're going to need this till the moment comes. You really don't. And when you're in that moment, You know, it's a heightened state of emotion. And so oftentimes we do turn to our family and our friends. So if you have a friend or family or personally going through this, please refer them to Alex because really, it's, it's incredible how much people wish they had more time to just be with their family and grieve. But all these administrative things just are such a headache and are so burdensome to the entire family.

All right. So last question. How about a personal kind of productivity hack? What one thing do you do that you just have found really works for you?

You know, I think, you know, I have to say, being a parent has taught me a lot about being ruthlessly focused and prioritizing, which is an extremely great gift. And it's a productivity hack. And the other one that goes along with that is time blocking. I think there's something to be said about, you know, these 90 minutes, this is what you're focusing on. You can do the same thing with meetings. I like to do outward-facing meetings in a chunk of time, inward-facing meetings in another chunk of time. I think it helps reduce context switching, which can be really helpful.

No, I have observed mom CEOs very efficient and sensitive on you know, blocks of time, getting shit done, you know, having to be super productive because you just don't have a lot of, um, ability to waste time. So, um, something we can all learn from for sure. Well,

yeah, it's also kind of—

go ahead.

It's also kind of interesting that there's this show called Lessons in Chemistry. I don't know if anybody in the audience has watched it, but there's scene where this— the main character is a new mother and she goes to her neighbor's house exhausted. She hasn't slept. Her newborn's just a few weeks old. And her maternal neighbor says, you know, this is what mothering is. You think you can't, but you do it anyways. You think you can't, you just find a way. And honestly, that is the best lesson of being a startup founder or CEO, right? Like, you think you can't, but you find a way.

I mean, that's the common denominator of successful CEOs is just The ability to stick with it, grit, finding a way. So we wish you and Alex the best in your journey, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us today, Alexandra.

Thank you so much.

Nice to meet you. All right.

Thank you. Take care.

Bye-bye.

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And here is segment 3. In my conversation with a young VC this week, Naren and I talk about the future of AI. All right.

Well, Mike, great to see you again this week. Love to pick your brain on what's on your mind this week. And maybe we'll start with, you know, it's always important to touch on AI and the developments that are happening. But the last few weeks we've touched on current events and news, but I'd love to take a bird's-eye view of this AI revolution. There's a lot of gloom in the press about AI taking away jobs and what that means for the future. What do you think it means for our kids and the jobs of the future?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely thought-provoking to think about. You know, I think the conventional wisdom has been related to engineering, STEM. You know, there's— I think there's always been this Split in my world between people who have thought about going to college and getting educated because it is a means to a job. And one goes to college and develops knowledge and a skill to be, you know, fill in the blank, an accountant. An engineer, a doctor, a lawyer. And I think, you know, that I grew up in that. I went to a liberal arts school, Dartmouth College, and I was an engineering science major while I was at this liberal arts school. So, you know, I kind of really have always believed in kind of the power of liberal arts. You know, but I grew up in an era where that's what people would ask you. Where are you going to school? And, you know, basically, what are you going to be? Right? Like your job defined you. And, you know, and I think that has been, in some circles, I think gotten even stronger more recently. I think there's a lot of like, The only— college is a waste. The only, you know, you don't learn anything that's practical and you get all this debt. And the only jobs that matter are, you know, it's okay if you want to be a, you know, marine biologist, scientist, engineer. Those are still okay. But, you know, going to Harvard and being a religion major is kind of scoffed at. Um, and I have always believed one goes to college for a bunch of reasons. Um, there's some adulting, there's independence, there's experimentation with you know, who you want to be as a person. But I always felt it was the most important things to acquire is the ability to communicate and the ability to learn. And again, when I went to school, there was no internet, you know, there was no smartphones. There was, you know, the companies that are the largest and most powerful companies in the world didn't exist or were tiny. So I think it is very beyond kind of the networking and the friends and the credentialing. I think it can be very short-sighted to view the world that way.

Absolutely.

I think it, I actually think it is even more that case with AI. I think the ability to predict the future, it should— we should— you should be very humble about what professions, what careers are going to exist over the next 40 years. And, you know, I think to go to school to acquire specific knowledge, even something very prestigious today, like becoming a doctor, Do that because you love medicine and helping people. And for those fundamental reasons, not because it's the safe way to make a good living. Because at the end of the day, yes, there are soft skills, but a lot of medicine is one big database. And I think one can argue that a lot of that decision tree And the data that goes into it and the decision-making can be, will change pretty dramatically over the next 10 or 20 years. And again, I am in the camp of learn how to communicate, learn how to learn, learn how to interact with human beings. Study great paradigms of the world, whether those paradigms be, you know, the engine, you know, the scientific method, philosophical thought, you know, those things train your brain, but train your brain in a very flexible, malleable way. I don't know. I ranted for a long time there, Naren. What do you think?

Oh, I think I definitely agree with you. I feel like we're at an inflection point about thinking on what humans can do that AI cannot do or will not be able to do. And humans can feel and do perform critical thinking. And those are the skills that liberal arts teaches us. Mm-hmm. And I feel like there will be a resurgence in, as AI software engineers and AI doctors become better than human doctors, just because they have The ability to scrape through vast datasets and keep in touch with the latest research papers that are coming out every day. That's just impossible for a human to do every day while they're catering to patients as a doctor. So the things that AI cannot automate is sitting on the bedside next to a patient and, you know, improving their morale. And that sometimes can actually yield better patient results. And those are the kinds of things that AI cannot do. And I wonder if— and like you mentioned, communication as well, critical thinking— those are liberal arts majors I think will become more and more important. The other thing with regard to the future is that I think there is a bit of an optimistic angle going against what the press is saying about AI taking away jobs. I think that is a bit short-sighted. If you look at 120 years ago, 3 quarters of the world was farm laborers and half of the world lived in extreme poverty. Fast forward to now, poverty has declined significantly. It's less than 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty now, and only 1 in 20 people are farm laborers. And so the world has evolved. And if that were to use— if that were to be used as a case study, uh, you know, with AI, jobs will need to evolve, but eventually it will lead to a higher quality of life for humanity as a whole. Yeah, that's, that's something that I'm optimistic about.

Yeah, I mean, it's— this time is probably not different, right? You know, every technology that comes along Since, since the beginning of man has, in a narrow sense and in a short-term sense, been disruptive. But it has always led toward growth and new jobs and new opportunities and, you know, higher standards of living. Again, again, with the longer arc of time, You know, every 13-year-old in America today really lives better than the King of England in most objective measures, right? So, you know, I have trouble seeing where if you take not just AI, but the entire suite of technologies that One, you know, is going to say this is— this time it's different. And again, as a venture capitalist, I have heard that for 40 years, you know, in both good ways and bad ways about, oh, you know, becoming profitable as a business. Oh, that's been— that was true, old man, but it's different now. You know, okay, we'll see. But, you know, I think it's also true of like, you know, this new technology is going to be disruptive and jobs are going to change. And there are going to be some jobs that are going to be— there are going to be far fewer of them. But the story of history is that, you know, it creates new things that you can't even imagine yet. And hopefully moving more and more humanity up the hierarchy. Yeah. you know, kind of Maslow's hierarchy of work, right? That, you know, can we get rid of, you know, really boring blue-collar jobs or really dangerous blue-collar jobs, really backbreaking jobs? Same thing in white-collar. There's the equivalent of, you know, backbreaking white-collar jobs. And can we, can we have fewer of those? And can we move everybody up the food chain to do things that humans— and I think your question, Noreen, is really interesting. Like, what, what fundamentally will humans kind of in our kids' lifetime always do better? You know, and the thing I come back to is have relationships with other human beings. I mean, like you talked about bedside manner. Humans like other humans and being around and relating to them and joking and empathizing and supporting. And when we talk about how we're trying to design alumni ventures and customer service and account management, we spend a lot of time talking about liberating the lower-level jobs through automation and AI to free up time for our people to, you know, be with our customers in just kind of a more personal, human way. And I think, again, you want to develop those very human skills. I think those are here to stay. So yeah, that— And I That's one area. I just think humans like being with humans. I think we're social animals and the more we can free up ourselves to do more of that, I think that's a good thing.

Absolutely. And that's actually a good segue. You touched on venture and how that job will evolve. I'd love to bring us to the present and maybe a little bit the recent past. and talk about recent vintage venture funds. A lot of them have been trying to raise capital in the current macro environment and have been falling short of their targets. In the last 12 years, the number of VC firms have tripled.

Yeah.

And this is an existential threat for VC as— or those VC firms, because they may not have a differentiated access point for deals, and, uh, and that's why they're falling short. And as the asset class deployed a lot of dollars in 2021 at peak valuations, a lot of those companies are now crammed down, and, and that's the only feedback you have if you go out to raise. I'm curious what you think about, uh, the future of VC and, uh, how does secondaries potentially play into that?

Yeah, I think a couple things to unpack there, Naren. One is I think firms that were formed in kind of 2020 to 2023 are in trouble. I mean, if that's their first vintages in those time periods, I think they're facing a double whammy of probably deploying capital during kind of overpriced period of time. And the LPs that back them are probably overallocated into the asset class. And so, I think it's going to be very difficult for those vintage new funds. I think there'll be a a cleaning of the house like we have seen with some ventures. Only the best will survive and they will thrive. And so, it's a good time. It's a buyer's market for talent in the VC world for sure. I think the second point is, You know, the market for secondaries. And just to clarify that for some of our audience, this is when people come into a private company and buy stock from early investors or employees. And there's been a bunch of trends going on for a while now related to, you know, Fewer companies going public, many companies not wanting to be public given kind of the costs, the short-termism, just generally being, it's a pain in the ass to be a public company and to be a long-term thinker and developer. I think that takes a lot of fortitude with all those pressures. So, you know, and then there's been capital availability. So why do I have to go public? You know, with the exception of providing liquidity, you know, that's about the only solid argument anymore. And so, you know, capitalism loves opportunity. So, you know, I think we are on a long-term trend to make the marketplace, to provide liquidity to both investors and employees and allowing companies to stay private longer is going to continue to become more efficient. Today, it's not that efficient. It's only a handful of companies that have access You know, usually that's a pretty big discount that sellers have to pay. There has been large pools of capital accumulating over the past year or so to do this, but it's not an efficient marketplace yet at all. And I think we're going to see— we're going to see that market become more and more efficient. And again, I just think it's good. It provides more options, aligns incentives, I think. You know, great companies take a long time to build. And, you know, through history and tradition, you know, venture capital funds are kind of 5, 10 years long, you know, and sometimes the investment takes place in maybe year 3 or 4 of that. So, there's kind of a fuse that's fairly artificial to really begin to put a lot of pressure on management teams to have an exit. And companies aren't ready. The market isn't very attractive. We're also living in an environment where there's kind of increased regulatory scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. Yeah. So, if the public market— if the market's not there to go public and the M&A market is constricted, you know, again, you're kind of stuck. So, you know, again, I think there's going to be a lot of evolution, innovation taking place in that space over the next 5 or 10 years. I think that'll be good for the entrepreneurial economy. Um, you know, we'll see how it develops. Do you have any thoughts along those lines, Noreen?

No, absolutely. I think I agree with you that we're, we're in what seems to be a little bit of a blip where the secondary markets haven't really burgeoned into something big and IPOs and M&As are sort of blocked. But having secondaries sort of play a bigger role and have become another liquidity path, both for founders, which incentivizes them to start more companies, and for VC firms to continue backing founders, will be extremely important to the innovation economy in the US and around the world. I think it's because of IPOs and M&As existing as a liquidity path that people are incentivized to start companies and invest in companies. And providing secondaries as another avenue will be critical for innovation. And so I'm looking forward to it and I'm also bullish on it. We saw that Lexington Partners, for example, raised their fund that specializes in secondary stakes. They raised their largest ever fund of $28 billion and several other secondary-focused VC funds have emerged. to buy stakes from other VCs. So I think we're still in the early innings of this, and it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.

I mean, one of the ways that plays out too is we just move away from what I call the Big Bang exit, right? That it's like you, you form the company, you work hard, and there's a big event where kind of everybody cashes out and The company gets sold or you go public and it's viewed as kind of this finish line kind of thing. And I think it would be much healthier is that as companies reach kind of some level of maturity that founders, early investors are able to take chips off the table in small, reasonable amounts along the way. So instead of just nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, huge outcome, that it's, you know, you could have a founder, you know, sell 5% of their stake, you know, maybe at a Series B and, you know, and just achieve some of that. You know, it's almost like a release. valve of that pressure, which I think for the development of sustainable long-term businesses and to solve really hard technical problems that can take a really long time, you know, when I started in the business, oh, that was, you know, we want the founder living out of the back of their car. and eating ramen noodles for 10 years. And, you know, because the fact of the matter, and that was a lousy perspective. The fact of the matter is, you know, entrepreneurial teams and founders are motivated for things way beyond money. And it's actually them, you know, not having any resources or You know, having to live, you know, an hour from the office is really counterproductive. So, the ability to, again, encourage the ecosystem to be healthier, including founders and people maybe looking to, you know, leave a big company to join that startup where it's not, you know, this 10-year, maybe this will work out for me, but there's more— Yeah. Waypoints along the way that again are very reasonable, that everybody says, okay, this is progressing well, we're taking some chips off the table, the eco, and there's obviously willing buyers at that price. I think there's a little of that, but I think there's room for a lot more of it to take place. And again, as you point out, I think we're starting to see— the market working with these other, these other doors being closed off or much smaller, that entrepreneurial people are creating new solutions. So yeah, good discussion this week. Yeah, let's do it again next week, Naren. Hope you have a great weekend.

Sounds good. Likewise. Thanks a lot.

Excellent. Have a good one. Bye.

You too. Bye.

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