Quick Pitch 2018 Part 2

Welcome back. I'm Neal Bloom and this is the Tacos and Tech podcast. Let's jump right into part two of our coverage of Quick Pitch 2018. All right, next up, our high energy CEO from DOO WOP Peer to peer marketplace for shared experiences.

Ray Lizzo in West San Diego launched and found is this little scrappy startup that's about to throw down. The name's Doo Wop. A place where you try new things, book an experience. You'll see what I mean. We have loads of fun activities for you to try. Pay online, but meet in person. You'll soon see why whatever it is you love to do, we can find you the people who want to do that too. So go meet neighbors or strangers or make some friends. Ad hoc experience is not where this ends. See, Doo Wop is meant to be perfect and we're here to get you off your screen. So when you're hunched at your desk and you're chasing the green, take a deep breath. You know what I mean? Life's all about doing what you love. So let's start by designing what you do. Because when you do wop, you love and you share what you do. We believe you should get paid for it too. That's why Justin gets paid to sailboats and Tanu gets paid to bake cakes. So go paint with Matt or learn physics with Joe or name your price and share your passion when you offer your own. My name is Ray Lietzow and I run Doo Wop, the platform where you do with other people. I was a captain in the Marine Corps and now I've created a two sided marketplace where you buy and sell, but instead of selling things, you don't sell services. You sell the next economy experiences. And the market is hungry. Right now. We have people trying to buy the things that will give them the next social media story or the next place to connect offline and in person. But either way, experience spending is growing exponentially. And 1,300 people here in San Diego have joined the trusted community at Doo Wop to connect over the things they love to do. And they're doing it by meeting the gig economy. We know that the economy is transforming and that people are getting paid to offer services. But what I'm here to say and what the Doop team is promoting is that the future is not about doing things for other people. It's about doing it with them. And by taking 20% and doubling every quarter, we're growing to make this not a company in San Diego, but rather a global phenomenon. So here's where you come in. The next time you're kicking it alone or you find yourself playing on your phone, go to doo wop.com, find that thing to do in San Diego. We'll do wop with you too.

My first question is, was Ashok your coach? Move over, Ashok.

Next time.

I was curious, could you talk a.

Little bit how you're differentiating yourself from Airbnb's experience platform or meetup?

For sure. So Airbnb experiences is very similar for the seller side, which is why our customer education for attracting sellers has actually become a lot easier since they launched. But on the buyer side, we're local, which means that we're typically ad hoc, non recurrent, and we promote more casual experiences than you would get on a travel site. So. So things like, hey, come to my garage and make a rocking chair or have s', mores, which you wouldn't do on Airbnb.

When you're building a two sided marketplace, you need to sort of build two sides of the wall at the same time. Right.

How do you go about people finding out that you exist and using the platform?

So the seller side has really grown through personal referrals. Once we get one, they invite one or two more, and so it kind of grows through that. Right now we're really focused on the buyer side and it's about tapping into a personality as opposed a specific activity you're looking for. So social media influencing and a little bit of SEO for people that are looking to try something new. You mentioned in your presentation that you want to be the trusted site.

Are you doing background checks on people who are on both the sell and buy side?

There's a five layer verification system and we've mirrored what the top peer to peer platforms do. So bilateral reviews as well as a flagging system. And then ultimately we have a core team of ambassadors, which is what we've been working very hard on this last six months, where people are actually trained to go vet these experiences as well in person.

Hey, Ray, it looks like people are looking to have an experience. They're also looking to meet people to do that experience with, correct?

Yes.

So could you tell me where the value is out of those two pieces? I mean, is it meeting the people or is it having the experience or what do you think is the weighting on that?

So if I can take a step back, Actually, we see ourselves a lot like ebay. And so one of the most important things we can do is not tell you why you're selling something, because what we found is that when people are given at least 10 options, they pick for themselves whether they want to meet friends or they're trying to find an activity. That said, we have found three categories and we figured out which one is more about friends and which one is more about trying something. And so we cater the marketing to those different channels.

If someone connects in experience with friends, why wouldn't they churn out of your business and just go hang out with those people after that?

We get asked that a lot. So number one, our average customer is trying something new. You come to us every weekend to try a new experience. But number two, the seller side, they want more referrals and they want more reviews. And so it kind of breeds loyalty.

Thank you. And we are back at Quick Pitch backstage with Ray, straight off the stage. Give us a hot take. How are you feeling right now?

Woo hoo. A lot of energy. It was okay. Spoke too fast. There's always tweaks. I can think of like 10 things I would change, but it's over, it's over, it's over.

It's a great story about the pitch because you were the winner of Founder Fight Night at Startup Week. It was yes. Which gave you an immediate, I think, semifinalist round at Quick Pitch.

Forwarded to the top 20. And then we still had to compete to get in.

And here you are. I mean, you made it to the final night. How are you feeling about that whole progression? Good.

You know, it's been a long road, so it's been fun because we've been growing the team and we've doubled every quarter. So it's been a lot of growth since then anyways. So it's kind of nice to kind of keep talking to people at different milestones.

Yeah. Get to show traction. That's for sure.

Indeed.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's probably the best part.

That is the best part. How is it feeling out there in front of a lot of San Diego?

Yeah, I love that, actually. It was good. It's fun to see the community come out, especially because we all have very different companies and you kind of think about it. I've been in the audience so many times now just learning about startups and so far it hasn't gotten old.

That's awesome. So what's on your mind for next? I mean, tonight is finally, you know, the pitch is done.

Right.

What do you go and wake up and do tomorrow?

We are raising money. I've got a team that I want to bring on full time. We got to make it happen and we're going to need some funds.

Awesome. All right. I mean, it's a great chance to be in front of a lot of people. So, you know, the phone banks are open. Everyone can hit your phone.

I am legally not soliciting investor funds. Disclaimer.

Yeah. All right. Thanks so much. Congrats again.

Yes. And for the listeners. Can I talk about the jacket? Thanks to Neil, because I'm currently wearing a red jacket that doesn't really fit me, but I did take it off of him before I went on stage. So many thanks.

We do what we do to make people look good. Thanks, Ray.

All right, have a good one. Thanks.

So next we have the Atlas Marketplace with Elle Hempen. It's an online community for city officials. Hi, I'm Elle, and tonight I'm going to talk to you about cities. Why they can be so screwed up and what we're doing to fix them. This is a real quote from one of our city partners. Anytime she wants to do something new in a city, she'll scroll through Pinterest, cross her fingers for luck, and literally cold call other cities. Pinterest is not a great tool for cities to use. Not only is it great for, it's great for finding pumpkin spice latte recipes, it's not great for finding flood monitors, for finding software to streamline permitting, or for finding solar pavement. That unbelievably inefficient process is how cities right now are currently deciding how to spend 57 trillion of your taxpayer dollars. If we can make that process 5% more efficient, we can save cities $200 billion each year. Let me repeat, making city learning 5% more efficient will save your taxpayer dollars 200 billion each year. Pinterest is the wrong tool for cities. We built the exact right tool. The Atlas is an online community that cities use for free to learn, share, and connect more easily. The Atlas is the only place where city officials are actually excited to engage and learn online. That's why in the last six months, over 50 companies have paid us to participate, too. Our team has spent 10 years helping cities and companies connect to solve problems. We understand how cities make decisions. We're helping them make better decisions, quicker at scale. Last month, 2,000 city officials used the Atlas to source new solutions and new partners. We're generating revenue. We're ready to scale. And now we want your help to make thousands of cities safer, smarter, and more sustainable. Thanks.

What is your business model?

So companies pay a fee like they would to exhibit at a conference, and they get out of that targeted marketing, lead generation and sales intelligence.

So, Elle, I like this opportunity. It's unsexy, but it's a really important problem to be solved. It's oftentimes the last type of problems get looked at. Sales cycle is a huge problem. Selling to governments. Comment on the sales cycle. What's your customer acquisition costs? And then what is an exit strategy for a company like this that's serving governments?

Absolutely. So to be clear, we don't sell to cities. It's free for cities to use. So our customer acquisition on the city side is zero. Although we're investing in a content marketing and SEO strategy to grow our user side, because obviously the more cities, the more value that it creates for everybody in the platform. On the company side, that's where we generate our revenue, our sales cycle, we're working through it, but it's about three weeks to four weeks right now. And our customer acquisition costs, it's all been direct sales, so we haven't done any advertising yet. And we're growing pretty quickly in terms of exit. There's a number of companies that are currently working in the federal intelligence market that recognize that they want to move down into local government intelligence. It's totally different beast. It's a very diffuse set of governments you have to track. And so a lot of those companies, we've already started conversations about basically eventually getting bought up to reshape the way that intelligence for government is really done.

Are you familiar with a company called Planet Bids?

Yes.

So they dominate this space. How do you work with them? Bidding and low cost and tax dollars are pervasive. And yours is not driven by a bidding model, correct?

Absolutely. So they play in procurement. So they're really focused on streamlining the distribution and response to an RFP or a competitive procurement. We're further upstream. So by the time an RFP comes out, if a company hasn't already built a relationship, done the education necessary, they may not have an opportunity to even respond effectively. And so what we do is help companies do that upfront work, gain mind share, and really engage with their customers early to inform the development of the RFPs. And for a company like Planet Bids, we see a huge partnership opportunity to be able to partner with them and our community of local government officials to not only help solve the transparency and education problem, but then also streamline the procurement side as well. Thanks, Ellen.

Elle just finished her pitch. How are you feeling?

Feeling good.

Yeah.

It was a crowd out there, and I get most nervous talking in front of my team about our business. So we're wearing these Bright orange shirts and I saw them immediately and it made me really nervous. So hopefully I made him proud.

That's awesome. No, you did great. Congrats on finishing that. Thank you. What was it like going through the kind of leading up to this? Were you getting anxious? Were you practicing a lot or.

I was practicing a lot. I got a lot of really great feedback from my mentors. I was fortunate to have two. So lots of great feedback, but ultimately it kind of came down to. And the best advice I got was like, you know how to tell your story best, so figure out what you want to say and then just like get used to saying it a lot. And so I practiced quite a bit and tried to absorb as much feedback as I could and, you know, hopefully it came out and showed on the stage.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, congrats on that.

Thank you.

And what does tomorrow look like for the Atlas?

Back to work.

Yeah. What are you guys up to?

We are doing a whole bunch of work right now. We're totally rebuilding our platform from the ground up. We built the current product that we're selling and lots of people are using on PowerPoint and then we had an outsourced team build it. So we've got a great team internal now that's totally rebuilding everything. So we're spending a lot of time on that and then continuing to focus on growing our user base. So a lot of organic growth on the city side and then a great sales team that's really growing the revenue.

That's awesome. So Govtech is. Govtech. Is there a scene in San Diego on Govtech or not too much?

Not too much. It's. It's growing across the country. Not huge here in San Diego, but we're trying to make a mark. There's the cool thing about San Diego is there's a couple of companies that are more mission oriented in a lot of ways and we kind of align ourselves with that because we started this to solve a problem for cities and then figured out a way to monetize and scale. So we love that San Diego's really making a mark on that sort of mission oriented, social impact type of companies and we'd love to continue to see that and be a part of that as it grows.

So that's awesome. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a significant amount of companies that have that. I mean, you nailed it right there. We were very impact driven, mission driven, very passionate about what we're doing here. That's for sure.

I love it. I'm glad to be a part of it.

Yeah. Well, congrats again. Thanks so much, Al.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Thanks. All right, next up we've got Neuralase Medical, a non opioid alternative for managing chronic pain. And the CEO Shiv Shukla.

Imagine your life if a feather like touch felt like a blowtorch. Even worse, imagine if the pain never stopped and physicians told you nothing could be done. That is the daily experience of 4.3 million patients with chronic nerve pain. Seven years ago, Sergeant Stephen Carman took a shotgun to his calf because his nerve pain was so bad. That day I committed myself to finding a solution. My name is Shiv Shukla. I'm the CEO and president of Neuralase Medical where we've developed Axon therapy to treat chronic nerve pain. Axon is a device that's non invasive and delivers targeted magnetic pulses to alleviate chronic nerve pain. And in just 15 minutes, patients experience 33% pain relief. And by the first month they're down 80%. 80% in one month. Keep in mind, these are patients that never felt any pain relief. From any other selection solutions, we've already treated 150 patients with over 5,000 treatment sessions. And our clinical data has statistical significance and shows Axon therapy works. So we've patented our therapy and we're only 12 months away from FDA 510k clearance. Now we're excited to launch in 2020 into pain clinics and VA hospitals where I helped invent this therapy. And with our recurring treatment revenue model, patients need 16 treatments in a year at $275 per treatment, where Neuralase makes $175 and pain clinics and hospitals make $100. And we've only raised $1.1 million to get this far. Now we're raising our series A to get through FDA 510 clearance. And more importantly, we made headway into four other chronic pain indications and we're exploring four more, increasing our total addressable market to $17 billion. And more importantly, with Axon, patients are able to rapidly transition off of opioids, allowing us to make a huge dent in the opioid epidemic. I'm grateful to be leading a team of business savvy missionaries who are committed to improving the lives of patients with chronic nerve pain. So today, join us and vote for a pain free future. Thank.

You. Is it just nerve pain that you're.

Targeting or neuropathic pain? There's other types of pain that your.

Device can target as well?

Yeah, that's a good question. We're targeting traumatic injury induced nerve pain. Chemotherapy and diabetic neuropathy. At that point, the FDA is gonna give us clearance for all neuropathic pain peripherally.

Can you talk about the research and IP behind the treatments?

Yes. So we filed a patent in 2012. This is out of research from UCSD and the VA. The VA and UCSD owner a patent. I'm one of the inventors. I have exclusive license. And so the research, initially we did a five patient case series. Then we did a 20 patient randomized controlled trial which is very rare in pain because we have a sham that has statistical significance to p less than 0.05. Took that to the FDA, they said we don't need any more clinical data. And so we stopped there to conserve our resources and build our device. But we're doing a multi site study now in the VA in Long Beach. Coming up.

How much are you raising.

In your next round of funding?

We're raising 2 million to get us through FDA approval.

What's the cost of the device are you incurring? Do you have the cost of the device for the company or is that coming from the university that owns the patent?

No, we're building it at an engineering firm in San Diego. It's cost $75,000, but we have financing. So we placed the device with a low barrier to entry.

And in the clinical trials, has there been any indication that there ultimately will be a fall off in effectiveness of the treatment?

Actually the opposite. So the patients that we followed for three years are now only coming back once every three months versus our first year, which is once every four to six weeks. And so it's sustainable. And they're off their opioids and medications and crazy clinical procedures. But patients become more sensitive to our therapy. So we have to decrease our amplitude, basically.

And what's the buy in been from physicians?

So we're forming our kol. We're already in the clinic in Encinitas and we've treated 25 patients there. And we have about every physician in San Diego who's a pain specialist.

Referring to us.

Scripps is about to do a study and KOLs across the nation are very interested in our therapy.

So is the idea to build clinics.

And run the clinics or to sell a device?

Going forward, we're replacing our devices in clinics and allowing patients to go to the clinic, but we're not building clinics.

All right, thank you. And we are back and backstage at Quick Pitch 2018 with the man of the nights, Ashok Kamal. Thanks so much. Neil Bloom, my SD Tech bro. Yep. Attach the hip Good to see you. It's been like a few days. It feels like forever with me. Right? Yeah. This is great. This is such a fun night. The energy. Quick Pitch, baby. Quick pitch 2018. We're doing it. The energy backstage is electric. Pre and post. It's been awesome. What do you think's different about this year's Quick Pitch? Cause you've been to many. Yeah, yeah. And I've seen them converge into one. Right. What's really cool is that piece is the collaboration. Like, there's so many players now here, all for one night. Right. So that's kind of cool that it actually is the local, the recent San Diego story. I agree. Yeah. And I think that's part of. You and I sit on the Startup San Diego board together. You're the chairman of the board, and I think a lot of our work is being that social fabric and bringing together groups like TCA and SDVG and now Cox into the fold and. And all of the other partners that are making this happen. So I think it's indicative of the broader San Diego ecosystem, which is both coming together and growing.

Yep.

You see that here tonight. Every metric for Quick Pitch, from the number of applications we had, which was double last year, which was the record before, to the amount of cash prize, which is 50% up from last year, which was the record before, to the audience, which were absolutely packed at Qualcomm. There's people, I think, in the bathroom, you know, just listening through the walls, you know, on every KPI, if you will. We're up and to the right for Quick Pitch. And again, I think that's what's happening in San Diego more broadly. That's awesome. The other story of the night, which is the San Diego story, also is how diverse the businesses are that are pitching for so long. We love to talk about, oh, the biotech scene here, but not the tech scene. Tonight, everything's on showcase. Right. We got bio, we got tech, and then we have in betweens. Right. We've got this neural ace, which is kind of an in between. We've got cannabinoids here. You know, like, that is. We need to just lean in and own that. We are a bio and tech community that owns both. Absolutely. And, you know, that's one aspect of the diversity that's important also. The judges are 50, 50 gender diverse. The companies are also 50, 50 gender diverse. And that wasn't necessarily by design. Of course. We want to embrace the diversity in the community because San Diego is a diverse community. It turned out, you know that way to have that exact split. But that's really important too. And I think it's something that, you know, we're really trying to focus on. I know. You know, Neil, you and I, we're both investors in Backstage Studio. You know, Arlen was our keynote speaker for Startup Week. And I think that's another characteristic that's emerging. When people talk about what makes the San Diego startup community different. We talk about being scrappy, we talk about, we talk about having a lot of verticals from genomics to enterprise SaaS. And I think it's also great to see how we're embracing the whole community. That's really reflected here tonight too. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for stopping in and we're gonna keep going at it. Thanks, Ashok. Thank you, Neil. Congrats on a great night. Tacos in tech, baby. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, man.

So next we have Yembo. We had Sid Mohan.

It's a.

Computer vision technology for managing moving.

Hi guys, I'm Sid, co founder and CEO of Yimbo. Yimbo enables a stress free relocation experience. Over 40 million Americans move each year and their experience is uniformly terrible. If you're engaging a moving service, chances are you're gonna get ripped off. That's not uncommon. The moving services are consistently rated in the worst 10 industries by the Better Business Bureau. Even if you find a reputable service, the process is filled with stress. It takes weeks to sort out your move, throw out or discard your old furniture, sell your furniture, buy new furniture, transfer Internet, and so on. The entire process is super fragmented. Yambo is changing this broken process. We have built a revolutionary product using AI and computer vision that defragments the moving experience. And here's how it works. If you're moving, you take a quick video of your home just like that. Our AI watches the video and creates an inventory list in real time. And you are presented with a beautiful user interface to manage your move. You can pick and choose what items are moving and get quotes from trusted moving companies for the same inventory so you won't get ripped off. For items that are not moving, you can call a junk removal service right from within the same UI or sell it. You can even transfer your Internet and it's pretty awesome and consumers love it. In the last three months, we moved over 1,000 families using Yambo. We are generating healthy revenue and growing organically. And it's a huge market that's waiting to be disrupted. Moving is a stressful time and consumers are hyperspenders during relocation even if they are thrifty otherwise. So it doesn't make sense to drive them through a complicated and painful process when they're willing to spend a lot of money. By creating the world's first single stop platform to manage all of your needs during relocation, we are poised to disrupt this industry. We are extremely proud of our team of eight. Four of them are former Qualcomm engineers with background in machine learning and AI and experts in the moving industry. Thank you so much.

I like this deal. Sid. Congratulations. You got a neat business going. There's a big universe of acquirers for a business like this, which I always like. Tell me about how accurate the AI is. I mean, how well is this working? What problems are you facing and are you going to really be able to deliver a reliable experience without a lot of human review?

So we are about 80% accurate. And we've also, as part of our AI development pipeline, have a technology called Continuous Learning Incorporated where as new videos are coming in and as our reviewers are making corrections, it automatically improves the AI. So we've seen it improve from 60% to 80% since the beginning of the year and we're continuously improving.

So there's a human review now every time.

That is a human review. But we also have a consumer facing process where if you're confident enough, we have the shopping cart experience that I showed that consumers can make corrections as well.

What is the revenue model?

So we have two revenue models. So we sell business products to moving companies. So it's a SaaS business where they pay per estimate. So every time a customer records a video, so we get paid on a per video basis. So it's like a Verizon data plan. The more they use it, the more they pay. The second aspect of our business model is we want to monetize end consumers. So consumers, when they move on an average, spend $10,000 as part of everything that they do for moving. So we monetize both ends. We've turned down only the mover side of the monetization. Right now we want to get enough movers in our network so we can build the marketplace.

And how are you actually reaching the.

Movers and also the people moving?

So our sales process is primarily moving conferences right now. In fact, there is one going on right now. Half my team is in a sales conference and we won the best technology award at the American Moving and Storage Association. We have a list of 45 people that signed up for access that we are working on integrating and scaling this product.

You're not providing insurance to the goods, right? Because if you have valuables, it's difficult.

To see from the AI, what kind.

Of what brand is it, et cetera. Comment on that.

So we are not doing that yet, but we are also annotating our videos that are coming with the actual brand information. So we are able to tell attributes of the various products, whether it's wooden furniture, metal, also on brands and so on.

How much money have you raised so far?

We've raised close to a million dollars.

All right, thank you. Sid, you just came off. How are you feeling?

Pretty awesome. It was incredible to be in front of so many people with the judges. I just got a rush of energy when I walked in.

Yeah, that's awes.

I think I did well. Obviously I can always improve, but I guess it went as well as I hoped it would have gone.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, congrats on that. Thank you. Take us a little bit through the pre work and the practice that you did. I mean, were you up every night pitching in front of a mirror? Like what was it like?

Well, it so turns out that we are in the middle of onboarding a few new customers, so that takes priority. Although I'd love to win the 50k offers prize. So wrote the pitch a few weeks back and through the process of mentors that were assigned, like have been iterating over it, practiced with the team and got some good feedback. So did a bunch of dry runs last night. So it's been like a long process where I've just sort of been practicing and iterating over the pitch.

Awesome. All right, so the pitch is over. You wake up tomorrow. What are you personally doing with the company starting tomorrow?

Well, nothing changes. We have some really excited customers. We are also onboarding new customers. So we just need to execute right now and grow our pipeline and get this out to as many people as possible.

That's awesome. Well, thanks so much. Congrats again. Thanks, Sid.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks. All right, two companies left. Next up is Evasys, which is an esports social gaming app and Justin Weisberg is the CEO.

A lot of people here. Hi, my name is Justin Weisberg and I'm the co founder of Avasys. Avasys is the world's first cross platform social network for video games. There's been nothing like us before, period. So before we get started here, who here has heard of the video game Fortnite? Awesome. So for those of you who don't know, Fortnite is the world's fastest growing game. It makes $300 million per month. It's available on PC, mobile and console. And there's over 78 million monthly active users. And guess what ladies and gentlemen, it's not the only game doing this. There's over 20 plus games in the marketplace that have the same success Fortnite does. Why? Because it's about social, it's about hanging out online, it's about doing crazy dances, it's about self expression, it's about buying astronaut suits and hanging out with people where you can have experiences both virtually and in real life. It's not about the game anymore. That's why people don't play games because of the game they play, because they want to socialize. So what does that mean to us gamers?

Boom.

Large events. 20 to 50,000 people showing up. 360 million people tuning in worldwide for a large event. 2.2 billion gamers will play for 10 hours this week. It's $140 billion market double digit CAGR growth and it's not stopping. So what are we doing at Avasys? We're creating a place for them to socialize. A place to hang out where you can watch, chat and hang out virtually. And it's available cross platform so you can hang out in real life. If I'm on PC, I can hang out with my friends on mobile and vice versa. And how do we monetize these experiences both virtually and in real life? Ads, subscriptions, game sales and those fun little dances that you kind of see on Fortnite. So why us? We have a world class team over 15 to 20 years plus of experience launching digital game stores, IPs like Candy Crush. And we've had successful acquisitions to Facebook and Nvidia. I would love for you to join us on this journey as we are the first marketplace for games as well as social network. Thank you. Hello judges.

What is an app that you would.

Purchase off of the app Store or how would you distribute your your product?

So we'll start with the first thing. So distribution is, it's a free product. The big thing in games is free to play. So think of like Skype where you basically have an app that you can download for free. And the way we monetize those users is basically virtually within the application. So today we're available on PC, Mac and iOS and later will be available on web as well as Android in the next few months.

What's your target market, age group?

I love it. So here's a fun little fact. The average age for games is actually 32. It's 52% male, 48% female. We're actually, most of us are college educated. It's 45,000 to 54,000 for annual income and people are spending over $500 a year on video games. So the way we're going to launch the product is starting with the colleges. Think of Facebook model. Each of these colleges have clubs that are anywhere between 50 to 2,000 members that actually host their own virtual and live events. And so we'll start with those, ramp up and by the time Q1 comes around, we'll launch with actually some of our game publisher partners. So think of game studios where we can be able to actually help them create a better experience.

What are the virtual goods that generate the revenue?

So think of like buying a pair of shoes. So in some games, for example, a pair of shoes could be worth anywhere from $0.05 up to $45,000. And so we'll partner up with the games companies. Once we have the users there for them, it will allow them to create that marketplace where gamers essentially can purchase those goods. And then what we're also thinking too is think of very much kind of like an ebay for games because some of these digital goods actually have limited lifetime value. And so if I'm a gamer that has a special rare good, that value goes up. And so we can be able to monetize that experience as well through a third party marketplace.

Why is this just not simply a feature added into game the game market?

That's a very great question. The reason is because game developers are worried about making games. The second answer to that as well is they're 20 year old companies. Activision, EA, all these guys, it's all about the walled garden. When you look at the millennial audience like me and the Gen Zers, all we care about is having content that's accessible across every device and platform and always being integrated into those experiences. So when you look at apps like YouTube that have incredibly strong retention with those age groups, there's no games product that does that. Ours will be able to create that type of value for the. Can you give us a sense for your key metrics? Key metrics.

So as of today.

Excuse me, as of today, we've launched to 13 schools. We're doing a closed rollout, which is very common in the games industry. And as of right now, we have gamers using it from an hour to 15 hours a day. And the crazy thing is that they're actually using it for stuff outside of games. They're watching anime movies together, some of them are watching kind of sports Games, they're listening to music. So they'll go from playing a game session to watching a movie to back to playing a game. So it's about being able to get in touch with that virtual environment.

Thank you. Great.

Thank you so much.

So excited to have you here. Give us a little intro.

I'm excited to be here. My name's Justin. I'm a former professional video gamer. Was top 50 for games like CoD and WoW back in the day. And I just feel super blessed and honored to be here. It's a team effort and teamwork and you know what, the guys really executed. And my job is just to pitch, so the real stuff goes over to my team. So Marco, Lila and the rest of them.

So nice. Good shout out. How was the pitch? Tell us what it felt like to be on the stage.

Oh, it was fun. No holds bargain. I mean, you have all these very successful companies over here. I mean, most of them are B2B. I think there's like, a few consumers sprinkled. But I mean, gaming, when you think about it, it's probably out of most of these people's wheelhouse. And I was. I mean, in regards to the Fortnite comment that I made, I was actually happy that a lot of people actually heard of, like, Fortnite, obviously, probably because they're kids and grandkids, but I just had fun with it. Yes, you got it. You got to do what you got to do.

Yeah, for sure. And you bring that energy, so it's great. I mean, maybe it comes from the space you're in. Okay, so the pitch is done now. Feel a big weight off your chest?

Not really, no. I think the game never stops when you're always out there. And for me, I mean, look, I feel honored to be here at the pitch. I think the biggest thing is getting to meet a lot of these entrepreneurs who are very successful who are chosen as the top 10. Learn from them, but also too at the same time interact with the audience members and really kind of understand, okay, do I have to educate the market? Is the market starting to learn about games? Maybe there's also people who are in essentially the market as well as maybe the audience that may could help us on this journey as we build this business. So for me, it was. It's. It's more about kind of meeting these new people and then seeing where these next steps kind of lead for both me and my team as well. Because at the end, again, kind of like what I said in the video, it's about the mutual journey for everybody.

Yeah, yeah, totally get that. Did you get questions from the judges that, you know, you could tell they were thinking about the gaming industry or did they have experience in the gaming industry or were they thrown off a little bit?

No, it seemed like a lot of them have heard of games, which was really nice and the questions were kind of a little bit predictable in a way. But those are good questions to have just because the game space is always moving at target and in the games world it's called flavor of the week when you make games. But luckily we're kind of a third party asset for gamers, which is a little bit easier to kind of pitch and talk about. It's not so abstract as like, okay, if I'm building a game, like how many users do we think we're going to get? What is that demographic? The great thing is our product can actually really touch a lot of different people. So it was really great to see kind of the laughs on some of the judges face when I answer the questions. So I'm sure they have kids that play games a lot. So it was really nice to see kind of the interactions between me, the entrepreneur and them, the judges.

Yeah, that's awesome. Tell us a little about the gaming community that you know of, the startup gaming community. I mean, do you know of a San Diego in your Orange county guy in la? Take us through a little bit, Just like a cross section of the ecosystem.

So when you think of games as a whole, most people, even from a global perspective, think of video games being the birthplace, really Southern California. Like when you really think about it, you have Activision Blizzard in Irvine, you have Activision and Riot Games up in la, but also too, you have some very successful companies down here. Whether people might not know the company name, they know the games for sure. So like you have companies like Psyonix, which is an incredibly successful games company, which does a game called Rocket League, which that's another big hit. Just like Fortnite. Yeah, exactly. So it's really awesome to see that the games industry, when you think about it, there's really kind of three parts of it. There's making games for game developers and publishers who sell them. There's the esports teams and the influencers who actually are the personalities for these games a lot of the time. And then there's kind of the more infrastructural type play, which is like us more of a software as a service, kind of building the backbone for people to communicate and that kind of stuff. So it's really awesome that all three of those intersections are actually here, both in San Diego, Louisiana and Santa Monica as well as Irvine area. So I'm very excited and blessed to be in this area. It's kind of a little bit of luck in that way.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, thanks so much Justin for being here. Congrats again.

No, thank you, sir.

We'll get you back on the podcast in a little bit and hear a little bit of an update.

Awesome.

Thank you. Take care.

So next up we have Galley Solutions with Benji Kultai. It's a SaaS platform for improving large scale food operations workflow.

One third of all food produced is wasted. That's 1.3 billion tons of food thrown out every year. The main reason for this waste is complex yet inefficient kitchen operations. Kitchens over purchase because they're not sure how much food they need. Items get lost or spoil in inventory. Most multi million dollar food organizations run on little to no technology, using brittle spreadsheets at best in an attempt to wrangle these complex tasks. Galli is an intuitive software platform aimed at optimizing every aspect of the food operation. This leads to increased efficiency and product quality while decreasing waste. As an example, Galley automatically scales recipes and generates purchase orders to ensure exactly the right amount of product is purchased, mitigating a huge source of waste and labor. We're uniquely positioned to offer this solution because I spent two years as an embedded software engineer at a large complex food organization called sprig, which raised $57 million in VC funding. Sprig's heavy funding attracted industry experts like the executive chef at Google and the head of food production at Emirates Airlines who I collaborated closely with to build a system that led to 30% waste and cost reduction. These experts begged me to make the solution publicly available. And when Sprig shut down in 2017, I began rebuilding from scratch. The $4 trillion food industry already spends $2 billion on demand focused software like reservation management and point of sale systems. The estimated market for the kitchen operations software is orders of magnitude larger, estimated at about $10 billion. We already have a beta customer beta product paying customers and strong industry connections to penetrate this multi trillion dollar industry. Thanks so much.

Hey Benji. Who enters the data into the system?

Yeah, so the chefs are acting and entering data into the system.

And when are they doing that?

It's an upfront process and we also offer as a service helping with that data entry as well. We found actually that part of that data entry has actually helped them clean up their data as well. Because they've never had to really think through what is my recipe and actually write it down. So even that is a great value add process for the organizations.

How much of the waste is a function of mispredicting demand versus over procurement?

That's a great question. And I think it depends on the organization. So in some organizations where it's not so much of a prediction, like a catering company where they have a specific order, you know, they're not really missing on the prediction. In other organizations, like maybe restaurants, that's definitely a source of voice as well.

So which part of the problem are you mostly addressing?

We actually address both because we can capture, hey, how much did you miss your prediction? And we can surface, you know, hey, your sales were actually this, you planned for this. Maybe next time you should tone it back a little bit and you can, we can give that data capture there as well. So we attack both sides.

Who is your target audience as far as target market? Who are you trying to sell to?

Yeah, so we're starting with large commissary kitchens, so big catering companies, corporate food providers, university food providers, folks that are building a lot of meals per day. And then we will probably open up into the broader markets like restaurant groups and small, smaller restaurants as well.

And how do they value the savings that they would, you know, how do they kind of value that?

I think one way is number of man hours saved. So they might have right now one purchaser per location. With a tool like galley, you have push button purchasing. So that essentially eliminates your dynamic cost, turns it into a fixed cost, and you can now have one purchaser who maybe spends 10 minutes figuring out what to purchase rather than n number of purchasers who are spending hours per week figuring this out.

Do you replace these guys ERP or you plug into their erp.

We become their erp. Most of these guys, believe it or not, do not have an erp. They sort of really are running on spreadsheets and pencil and paper at the moment.

Backstage here with Benji. Just finished his pitch. Benji, welcome. How are you feeling?

Relieved. It was intense.

Yeah. Take us through a little bit, the prep work that went into it.

Yeah, I mean, it started with just trying to throw together sort of a draft, a first attempt at what it would be and show it to the coaches and hear their thoughts, which ended up shaking things up quite a bit. Did another revision, did the dry run, had it shaken up again and, you know, just iterating. Right. It's just like software. You gotta iterate, you gotta come up with A shitty first draft and take it from there. Like, you know, take what works, take feedback. And it was overall, I think ended up being really great process of feedback and iterating on, I think what ended up being the best pitch we could have given.

That's awesome. Yeah. Well, you're pretty new to town here in San Diego, so love that initial emotional feeling of being in front of, quite frankly, most of the tech community. Yeah. What was that feeling like?

Definitely sort of surreal. I mean, I have you to thank for introducing me into that competition and that idea and looking back it was like, whoa, that was actually a pretty big event as sort of like, hey, what's the first thing that I should sort of do as a new guy in tech here? So yeah, it was just super fortunate and grateful to have made it that far and to have had that opportunity and I think it'll be a great, you know, deep end dive into the community here and I think it's already led to great things. So really excited to see what else unfolds from it.

Awesome. So just lastly, pitch is over. Focus more on the bigger company as a whole. What's tomorrow look like? What do you focus on?

We just got to put our heads down and execute. We're wrapping up a little round of funding that'll hopefully give us about a year of worry free. Heads down, let's get shit done. We're building out our team a little bit more and then it's just, you know, go, go, go time. Let's build all the features that we have on tap.

Awesome. Well, congrats Benji. Thanks so much.

Yeah, awesome.

Thank you. So on stage now, the organizers are graciously giving a donation to a local nonprofit named wit, which stands for Whatever it Takes, which teaches teens about entrepreneurship. Listen in to our quick chat. We have Jody from wit. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So we're so excited to learn a little bit about WIT and hear about your guys involvement in the night. Tell us a little bit about wit. Well, we were just so thankful that we were awarded a scholarship for one of our teens. We're a social enterprise nonprofit that empowers teens to become social entrepreneurs.

And we just couldn't be more thrilled to be a part of this organization.

Because our teens often have to do the same thing that these professionals did tonight and pitch to investors to launch their own businesses. Yeah, that's awesome. I actually have a really funny story about one of your students where I was at the Makers Fair a few weeks ago and and we took over Bellwell park, and it's all about kind of the maker community. Oh, awesome. And a student came, a high school student, and he pitched me on the spot and said, I'm in wit right now. And it was super cool. He's like a 10th grader.

What's his name?

Oh, it's escaped me. Well, okay, you can tell me later. Yeah, but still, that's fantastic.

Yeah, it's like that kind of empowerment, and there's so much to draw from.

These kind of events that can pass.

On to our future generations, so we're.

So happy to be a part of this. Awesome. And you guys are housed downtown. Downtown works, right?

Yeah, downtown works.

We also run wit out of New York City. Okay. So we hop out of Google headquarters there, which is really great. Awesome. Well, we're so excited to have you guys in the hearing community. You are filling the top of the funnel of creating a whole new great generation of entrepreneurs. We're so honored to do it. And thanks so much, Jodi. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you. Good night. So the judges are now deliberating, and I got to sit down with some of the organizers, who finally had a few minutes off. This was months in the making, and it was great to get their initial feelings. Let's listen in. And we are backstage with Jared from Cox Business. How was the. Give us a hot take quickly. What do you feel about the night? The night was amazing. So I have to say, we go to a lot of different pitch events, and there's almost always one that just completely bombs. And I have to tell you, tonight, every single one of them was spot on and did a fantastic job, and we didn't have to cut anybody off either, which almost never happened. So the pitchers were prepared. Great content. The judges had a tough time tonight, I can tell you that. Yeah. Something special about this event is all the people have been talking about tonight is kind of the collaboration and the community, and that is the story of tonight, because Cox runs their own pitch series. Get started. Correct. Yep. And you even had one here, your first one last year, and decided to. To come in and play with San Diego Venture Group and tca. That's kind of the San Diego story in general. Right? I mean, this collaboration, you know, it's been. It's been unique because we do pitch competitions all across the country, and I think we recognize very quickly, you know, last year being our first one, that there's so much more to be gained by partnering than there is by trying to go at it alone. And really, our intention you know, in creating a pitch competition is to really help the startup ecosystem in San Diego. And what we found by having our own pitch competition was that there already is one. And rather than trying to start it and help it, let's just join them and make it even bigger. And so that's what we've done, which is really cool. Yeah, it was a huge night. I mean, the whole community was out there. You know, it's pretty fun. What was it like being out in the audience? It was, it was a little intense at times, but like I said, the pictures were so good. And when I think about, you know, coming together and being able to offer, you know, $75,000, you know, no strings attached. Here you go, $75,000 for your companies, there's nothing like it. And it's very unique and very exciting. Yeah. And super impactful. Yeah, well, and we were at a sold out audience too, which, you know, there was standing room. Well, there wasn't even standing room, I don't think so. We actually had to turn some people away, which is incredible. So I'm just really excited about not only what's happening tonight, but what's going to happen in the future for sure. It's really incredible. A lot of momentum and apparently got to go up that CA prize then, huh? I think that's, that's probably an order. Awesome. Well, Jared, congrats. Thanks again for being part of this. Hey, thank you, Neil. Good to see you. Can you believe it, Victoria, that we are. Here we are. We've finished the night.

Yeah, the. Well, the year's flown by, but especially tonight. Can't believe it's October 24th already, but.

Yeah. Well, congratulations.

Thanks.

A lot of months in preparation.

Yes.

What's your quick reaction? How'd the night go for you?

I think it went well. I think the companies all did extremely well. I heard from the audience that they thought the companies this year were much further along and gave much better pitches. So that's great to hear. That's the aim of what we're doing.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, was there any besides the collaboration between the different organizations that are running their own pitches, all for one night? What else was, I don't know, by design for tonight?

I think as part of the shift for Tech Coast Angels to be a little young and hipper, obviously with Ashok taking the reins and Dean also making us much more entrepreneur friendly, I think we tried to have it a little fun and funkier and bring some of the cock spirit that they had with their pitch event to ours. To make it, I guess, hipper, for lack of a better word.

No, totally. Yeah. And it's attracting a whole new audience as well. I mean, we got the gaming community, want to be a part of it, and now the cannabis community. I think that's the San Diego story. I guess now at this point, huh?

Yeah, we're hitting all the fun trends and who knew that many 32 year old women were playing video games?

Yeah, right. No, it was great. Any other memorable moments of the evening?

Well, Mike is pretty excited about his early flub for people that didn't catch that, but other than that, No, I think, you know, off to a little tricky start with lots of people that came that we weren't expecting. So that's always the sign of a good event. It was good and bad.

The community I was in today on a slack group where people were asking to buy tickets off of people because they wanted to get it last minute. It's great. We can have a secondary market for Quick tickets.

Yeah. Next year. Well, I think hopefully next year we'll have some more room. But yeah, if you. I guess if you're scalping tickets to a Quick Pitch event, you've arrived.

Yeah. Well, congratulations again. Thanks, Victoria.

Thanks.

And we are wrapping up the night the year quick pitch 2018 came by and it was a great night with Mike Kren, San Diego Venture Group. Thanks for having me. Dude, you did it. Everybody did it. It wasn't just us. It takes a community. You're a big part of that community. Obviously, it's great that you guys are doing this podcast, so thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest overall arching story of this whole thing is three events coming into one. You know, having a huge audience and upping the quality, you know, bringing big spotlight to San Diego. Yeah, we're pretty proud of that. I mean, I spent a lot of time in the Valley and it's so different here. The community here is so wonderful. It's great. Everybody's very collegial, works together, all for the greater good. Very humble community and it's why we love San Diego. Yeah, it's awesome. So how much of tonight? You know, you've done quite a few pitch events that you've planned tonight. You're collaborating with others. So much of the design is around the night. How do you feel, you know, looking back? Huh? Things that are memorable? Well, other than my idiotic statement to get things out of the gate, I think it went pretty well. Yeah, no, it was Great. You know, 270 companies applied. The 10 finalist companies. I mean, the difference between the winner and. I hate to say the number 10, but the variable was minuscule. I mean, everybody was very close, and it was a heated competition. The judges deliberated for a long time. Just quality companies across the board. Yeah. And we added some entertainment this year. You know, some rapping, some music. How good were those guys? Ashok and company and Miguel. That was amazing. Yeah, it was fun. Gonna be hard to beat. Yeah. For next year. So. Yeah. So what goes on your mind for. Or do you not think about next year? For me, I'm not thinking about next year. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, Mike, congrats again. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you for all you guys do. Thank you. By now, the judges are ready to announce the three winners. Meanwhile, Yembo won the Audience Choice Award for the loudest audience screams. We now take you back to the stage to hear who won. All the companies here. You guys got to see 10 great companies. Yeah. Thank you. And they're all winners. I know that. The Venture Group, TCA, Cox. We're all committed to helping all 10 of them, regardless of who gets the cash tonight. So pretty exciting stuff.

Great. Now we're welcoming back all of our CEOs today for the fun audience vote.

Sorry about that. Thanks for coming out tonight. So we're here to announce the winners.

So in third place, we have Link's bio. Congratulations.

And I guess I should start by.

Saying you all did a really great job tonight.

We were really impressed with all of you, and picking three winners was incredibly hard.

And then picking amongst you was even harder. So then second place, we have Yimbo.

Money. And can we get a drum roll how to do that?

In first place, we have Neuralace.

Congrats, y'. All. Is that it? Yes. All right, thank you all. You are all awesome, wonderful people. Thank you for showing up.

Thank you to all our companies.

The party's still going outside.

Keep it going.

You guys go anywhere. We're taking some photos. Thank you. And that will do it for Quick Pitch 2018. Thanks again to Tech Coast Angels, San Diego Venture Group and Cox Business. Make sure to comment on how you think the finalists did in their pitches and we'll see you next time.