$100K Veteran Pitch Competition featuring Jason Calacanis

Hello everyone and welcome to the $100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition. My name is Ryan Micheletti and I'm, uh, head of global operations for the Founder Institute, uh, the largest pre-seed startup accelerator in the world. And I'm also a co-founder and general partner at the Veteran Fund, which is a VC firm that invests in veteran-led dual-use startups. Today we have an incredible panel of veteran founders and investors, including our celebrity guest judge, Jason Calacanis, the world's greatest moderator of the All On podcast and one of the top angel investors in the industry. We had nearly 1,000 people register for this event today, and over 200 founders applied to pitch. The competition was fierce. There were a ton of incredibly talented founders that applied, but we had to finalize 3 people to pitch today. Who will win, uh, well, one winner receive a $100,000 investment from the Veteran Fund. Because we have a large international audience, please make sure you say hello in the chat and tell us where you're tuning in from. Here's the quick agenda. So in a moment, Jason and I will have a quick fireside chat, then we'll introduce the other judges, uh, we'll kick off the competition. While the judges meet to select a winner after the competition, we'll have our previous winner, Clark Yuan from Stitch3D, join us to give a brief update about his company, and then we'll announce the winner live at this event. And then for those of you who want to stick around, meet with fellow veteran entrepreneurs, investors, and mentors, we'll host an optional networking session on Airmeet after the event. So we'll share that link towards the end of this. Without further ado, it's my honor to welcome a man who needs no introduction for anyone in startups, the legendary Jason Calcanis. Jason, thank you for joining us today. How are things on your end?

Well, I'm here at the ranch and life is pretty great. You guys know what I do for a living. I do 4 podcasts a week, 1 episode of All In and 3 episodes of This Week in Startups. I've done 200 All Ins and 2,000 This Week in Startups. And then every year, 20,000 people apply for funding from our fund, which is called Launch. And it's at launch.co. And we have 3 programs, direct investing in seed rounds, and then Founder University, a pre-accelerator, the Punch Accelerator, which is akin to, let's call it, uh, Y Combinator or Techstars, where we put $125K into companies, uh, for 7%, as is the standard. And every year we make 100 new bets on companies. I have 21 people in that company, uh, and it is an incredibly fun profession, and I am so glad to do it. And entrepreneurship is a great way to spread democracy. I know that keeping us safe And protecting democracy, uh, with a lot of the vets here, uh, comes in the form of putting your life on the line and going to all kinds of places to ensure that democracy holds. Not an easy task in today's world. And, um, there's another way to spread democracy, and that's through building products and services that humanity loves and that solve big problems. So you got carrots and sticks, and I'm glad To see that we have some people who are experiencing both and doing both of these incredible professions, starting products and starting companies that spread democracy through products and services, soft power. And then, hey, sometimes we need to send in the serious performers to do some serious work in defense. And so I am very thankful to be here and thankful for all of your service. It's just a great privilege that we don't have to go and mix it up and we can just stay home on our ranches in our cities while you all go out there and fight some messy, messy skirmishes in all kinds of different fields of operation that we don't have to suffer through or risk our lives at. So again, it's just very heartfelt. Thank you to everybody.

Yeah, well, your support really does mean a lot. You know, we say that the two most patriotic things you can do is serve your country and start a business. And, you know, for many people here, they're doing both. So thank you to everyone in the audience. And I don't— I think, you know, the greatest weapon we have is really our economy and our ability to innovate. And so we need to foster more of that if we want to protect our country. Maybe let's start at the beginning, Jason. I mean, you grew up in the '80s in Brooklyn, you know, to a working-class family. You had to flex your adversity muscle to launch your first startup. I mean, can you share a little bit more about your origin story, What was that like spark or the moment that led you to building your first company?

Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I was involved in all kinds of shenanigans as a youth in Brooklyn. I won't get into too many of those, but I did start some businesses that might have been on the, on the edge of being legal. I think the statute of limitations is well over now, but putting that aside, I grew up during the dial-up dot-com era in the '80s where bulletin board systems were first starting to emerge. And I quickly learned that I could be a busboy or a waiter at my dad's restaurant, or I could do programming and build databases and build networks. And that made more money. And, you know, that's how I paid my way through school. And while I was at Fordham from 1988 to 1993 at going to school at night. I was going to be a police officer, but I got accepted to Fordham at the last minute. It was my dream school. So I went at night, during the day I worked, and then I got a psychology degree and I was working in computer science as well. And, uh, I was going to go into the FBI actually, and I wanted to be a profiler and do forensics and computer crime. And, uh, I met, I started playing on this thing called BitNet. At Fordham, which was a bunch of computers that had been tied together and then connected to the military, uh, with something called ARPANET. Those two things became, uh, the internet, and they started to let commercial people onto it right around 1990. And then this web browser came out, and people started moving from Usenet and Gopher and FileNet and all these other send commands over to this World Wide Web. And I got so lucky to be there at the right time, and I started a magazine called Cyber Surfer about multimedia and dial-up services. Then I started Silicon Alley Reporter, which was about the internet in New York City, a print magazine. And I just got really good at doing media stuff, created a blogging company, sold that to AOL. Um, and then I became a scout for Sequoia Capital and, uh, made 7 investments. And in the first 7 or 8, I think I hit 3 unicorns, Uber, Thumbtack, and Datastack. So I, I did quite well. Um, and, uh, that became post money, you know, at a certain point because of these investments and had to, you know, figure out, hey, what should I do with my life? What's some good purpose here? And raising my family here on the ranch and trying to get some skiing in and investing in 100 companies a year and hosting these podcasts and discussions, important discussions, seemed like something incredibly joyful. Something I was good at and something the world needed. So I put those things together. There's a Japanese philosophy, um, that you may or may not have heard of, but it's a couple of circles like Venn diagram, uh, ikigai. Yeah, people said it right there. Um, and ikigai basically is what will the world pay for, what are you good at. Um, yeah, and it's just a bunch of circles and there's all kinds of—

let's dive Let's dive into that for a sec because, you know, you've worked with a lot of these unicorn founders and, you know, our, our thesis at the Veteran Fund is that when you take someone who's been through the greatest leadership academy in the world, the US military, they have these abilities, you know, and tendencies towards being really great leaders, being very resilient and having this like mission-driven purpose. Um, and when you combine that with deep domain expertise and technical expertise, we think that that's a good combination for a super founder. But what are some of the things that you've seen And what are things you look for in founders that you invest in?

Yeah, that's a, um, that is a great question. We have a system now, uh, at our firm and I've trained up about a dozen people to execute on the system because we have so many people applying for funding, right? So we needed to build a repeatable process for sorting through them. So for our firm, and we are pre-seed and seed. Uh, we're not a Series A firm. We're not a Series B firm. We're certainly not a late-stage firm. We have programs for people who haven't even incorporated yet, like Founder University, and then we have our accelerator. So at that stage, um, we look for 13 different qualities. I'll give you some of them. We like, uh, multiple co-founders on a team. Why do you want multiple co-founders? Because if you want to go far, you go together. If you want to go fast, you go alone. We find that teams perform better. Those companies make it to Series A at a much higher rate. So I think the ideal number is 3, but we're okay with 2 or 4. 5 seems like too many, 1 too few. So the right number is 2, 3, or 4. If you have 2 or 3 or 4 co-founders, that's a really good sign that whoever started the thing has the ability to get other people to come on the mission. Okay, great. Then next, we like builder founders. What's a builder founder? It's somebody with an actual skill in the world other than coming up with ideas. And the building skills at the current time are being a developer, a coder, being a designer, UX person, somebody who can actually build the wireframes, do the design, product user interface, all that kind of great stuff. And then After that, you could have growth hackers. We like those, like people who actually can use code, data to grow a product. Those three are our three. There are other things that are cool, product managers, salespeople, but we find there are a lot of those in the world. And sometimes a generalist is okay for the early days of a company. Oftentimes the generalists either become the CEO. And they lead people and it turns out their skill is usually selling or recruiting talent, um, or operations. But generally speaking, we like builder founders. Why do we like builder founders? Kind of like the multiple things we've seen historically that the builder founders find product market fit faster and then they wind up getting future funding. So you're going to see a theme in these, which is we look at the statistics of how many of our companies pull through and then what are the qualities they have and we want companies that will pull through with the venture capital community because if they don't pull through, it means we wasted a bet. Okay. Product, uh, product founders, multiple co-founders, product velocity. What is product velocity? It means every time we look at the product, you've added a new feature or you've gotten rid of a feature or you refine the main feature of the product and there's some cadence to the product getting better and better and better. If you look at a company like Twitter, Product didn't change largely for years. They got some new management in there, changed infrequently. Then the current proprietor is incredibly good at pushing to get many, many more features out there and test new things and, and try different ideas. Why is that important? Well, you always have a limited amount of capital and resources at a startup, and if your team, a small team, can perform at a high level and they can build well, they're gonna be able to go further. So I don't know the, the, the military, um, uh, enough to understand the difference between the different units, et cetera. But I think when we look at startups, it might be like having a really tight platoon, Green Berets, Navy SEALs, et cetera. I mean, without all the danger. And so we're looking for that team that can really do well. There are other things on the, um, that are just more historical, like has this team worked together before? So if the team's worked together before, that means they can finish each other's sentences and we don't have to worry about them breaking up as much and they're just going to hit the ground running. Second, if they've worked together before, is have they raised venture capital before and have they had an exit before? So there's, there's 6 qualities that will give you an idea of what we look for.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And, you know, we see a lot of— I've heard you talk a lot about that even yesterday. Yesterday, I was delighted to see Nelson was on This Week in Startups, who's building the underwater unmanned vehicles. I think, you know, how do you feel about the current resurgence of American dynamism, the national security and defense tech categories? What's your overall like feeling about that?

I think it's fantastic. And, you know, I've been on the record for a long time saying I think it's disgusting when like people at some of these larger companies were refusing to support the military, specifically Google had a group of lunatics who were more than willing to collect the dividends of freedom and democracy, but were unwilling to like provide services, even like rudimentary ones, to the military. Um, now they have the right, I guess, and I don't think anybody's against peace, and I'm certainly not a warmonger, but I do think it was quite hypocritical to, to want to get the spoils of democracy and not support it. Um, the fact that so many venture capitalists see a market in servicing the government, making weapons, making support systems, etc. Um, that's fantastic. And I think it's, you know, really it has to do with SpaceX and what Elon did. He basically took all the arrows. He was the first guy up the hill. And now it's really easy because there's a large number of venture capitalists. There's a large number of employees who know how to interface with the government, know how to, you know, work with the procurement complex and the military-industrial complex and compete. But, you know, Elon had to sue basically to be able to compete for the post-space shuttle, you know, payload business. And, uh, that took years and a lot of risk. And, um, you know, now it's a lot easier because we're sitting here in 2024 with Doge and, you know, everybody agreeing like, hey, we should be able to make weapons and upgrade them quickly and have them not cost $500,000 for an unmanned underwater vehicle, uh, these UUVs that the company was working on yesterday that you're mentioning. Yeah, at Rhode Island, and they can make them for $75,000 a pop instead of $500,000. Well, that's a pretty considerable savings, obviously. Uh, you know, when you can save over 80%, that's pretty awesome. And that means you can make more of them, and we have a little more competition, and we get away from this cost-plus nonsense, which which just incentivizes people to make more expensive things and less of them, as opposed to making more of them at a less expensive and a more dynamic price. So it's absolutely awesome. And, you know, if you, you look at our adversary, uh, in China, they are moving very quickly. They have top-down, they have a top-down approach, right? So they can put a gun to a bunch of people's heads. They, you know, get into this factory slash concentration camp and make these weapons as fast as you can. 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, we'll let you sleep 1 day a week. And that's literally what's happening over there. Uh, now we can't do that here, thank God. But you would think they have an advantage. It turns out, you know, you, you, you can only put your foot on the neck of a human so long before they fight back. And you can only get so much productivity out of somebody on their knees. Now you get somebody, you get a bunch of teams here in America competing, a bunch of capital allocators placing bets. And you put them up against an authoritarian regime, we're going to win every time. It's going to be messy, it's going to be competitive, it's going to be, you know, people who maybe rub you the wrong way or throw some elbows now and again. But democracy plus capitalism beats authoritarianism and, and, um, torture any day of the week. It's just, it's going to be hard in the short term. They might be able to build some more systems faster in the short term, but we're going to beat them long term.

100%, couldn't agree more with that. Thank you for sharing. I think just in the interest of time, I feel like we could chat for a couple hours here, but let's go ahead and get started with the pitch competition. I'm going to go ahead and bring up Brendan and Mike. And in the interim, Jason, like, what are some things that we can do to be helpful for you? Like, do you have advice for any of the veteran founders in our community? Wow.

Yeah. I mean, I have advice. Sure. Um, I think as I said earlier, if you want to go far, you know, go together. Uh, I think teaming up with each other, if, you know, 2 or 3 solo founders are having a hard time, and if you bring a squad together, you're going to go a little bit further. Um, we always like to meet founders, uh, you know, just applying at launch.co/apply, launch.co/apply. Um, we meet with 1 out of 5 people who apply. So if my team doesn't meet with you, they'll tell you why it might be out of scope for us and we don't want to waste your time, but we do these introductory meetings and stay at it. And we only invest in 1 out of 200 companies that apply, but we do like to stay in touch with founders because, man, I can't tell you the number of times I've met with a founder. Somebody on the team says, man, that person was weird, or that idea was dumb. And I stopped them and I say, no negative comments. What if they figure it out? What if we're the ones who are wrong? And so keep that in mind. Venture capitalists and investors are irrelevant in the arc of history. Entrepreneurs are what matter. Keep grinding, ignore the hate, ignore the negativity. Uh, I've seen so many people pull rabbits out of hats multiple times. I've seen so many people figure it out that I train all the young guns who work for me. And I tell them, you know, we're not important. The entrepreneurs are important and never underestimate anyone. And by the way, if you choose to be a founder, almost universally, these are crazy risk takers who come up with crazy ideas. And most of the ideas don't work, but when they do work, man, they're like deep, deep out of the money, like calls that in these crazy non-consensus ideas. So just because you don't understand the idea, young investor, means nothing. It in fact means if you don't understand it, that you should get curious. And so I, the only reason I say this is I spent most of my life as an entrepreneur and a small amount of it as an investor. And I find the entrepreneurs over-index on what investors say. You have permission from me officially to ignore what venture capitalists say and pursue your vision. And if anybody has any questions you on this, you can have them call me and let them know that I gave you that permission. Um, the, the, uh, the, these venture capitalists also have very weird motivations in a lot of cases. So some of these VCs, you know, they might be young VCs who've never, um, gotten a return for their investors. So they're just living with that fear that they're a fraud and they're not good at what they do. And by the way, it's a very weird profession. You only find out if you're good at it in year 7, 8, 9, or 10, as any VC you talk to will let you know. And a lot of times they just make a bunch of money, uh, you know, on a nice cushy salary and go to Coachella both weekends and Italy and skiing and all this other nonsense. And they, they work half as hard as the entrepreneurs and they want twice as much credit. You gotta really not over-index on what they say. Now, if you find Bill Gurley or, you know, some legendary investor who's been through it and they've seen it all, or they were previously an entrepreneur and they give you some advice, yeah, take notes. But you just take those notes, put them in a book, think about them. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. None of these conversations are ever wasted, but just don't over-index them on them is my best advice. People sometimes over-index on what people who have money say. And I can tell you, I've made like 3 or 4, you know, big buckets of cash, you know, in my career. And every time I make one, magically my IQ goes up like 20 points, and everybody thinks I'm like this genius. And like the week before I couldn't get a meeting, and the week after people are like, oh my God, I mean, you're at the stage. And I'm like, same guy as last year and you wouldn't take a meeting with me. I remember all these fuckers too, by the way, who, when I was a nobody, I got all their names on the list. And man, I tell them when I meet them and they're like, hey, can we meet? I gotta ask you about this. And I tell them first thing in the meeting, I was like, hey, but you don't remember this, but, uh, I tried to meet with you about 4 or 5 years ago. You blew me off. And they're like, ah, I'm so sorry about that. I'm like, no problem. I just wanna let you know that I could have really used your help back then. Uh, let's start the discussion. And I just put it right on the table so they know that I don't forget. Now I'm not gonna hold the grudge, but you're— I say this all for— don't over-index on what investors say. Please don't do that. Don't get knocked off your game. Okay. I'm sorry. I just really want— it really pisses me off sometimes when people over-index on this.

No, it's great advice, right? I mean, you could listen to the wrong advice and kill the company. So at the end of the day, these founders are the leaders who are, you know, have the vision or doing the hard work. So it's our job to support them. Well, speaking of investors, I would love to introduce the other folks on the investor panel today. We've got Brendan Aronson from Context VC and Mike Shcherbakov from the Veteran Fund. Brendan, welcome. We had to call an audible last minute because Tim got delayed on his flight, but super happy you're here. Do you want to do a quick intro?

Yeah, I'm pumped to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for putting this on, Ryan. Mike, you guys are like— your tireless efforts are much appreciated. I want to say Happy Veterans Day. Happy belated Marine Corps birthday as well to the Devil Dogs in the group. 249 glorious years of our Corps' history. My name is Brendan. I served in the United States Marine Corps. If you couldn't tell, I got an MBA at Wharton. I'm a founder of a company called The Military Veteran, which, apart from having exceptionally catchy branding, helps venture and private equity-backed companies hire veterans into leadership roles. So if any of your guys' companies are hiring, check out themilvet.org. We'd love to be of service. I also work as an investor at Context Ventures, which is a seed and pre-seed fund that invests in military veteran entrepreneurs. We're industry agnostic, and we also host the Military Veteran Startup Conference in San Francisco. It's coming up February 5th and 6th. So check out milvetstartups.com and contextvc.com if you guys are raising capital.

Yeah, the MVS is an incredible event. Strongly recommend anyone who is a veteran venture capitalist or founder to attend that event in San Francisco. Mike, welcome back, man. How are you? You want to do a quick intro?

Yeah, happy to be here. Nice that we even got a little hurrah out of J-Cal there. So I also, to continue with the Marine thread, served active duty for 5 years, did my undergrad, and then spent 10 years as a founder-operator and had some wins in the health and wellness space. Which allowed me to transition to the investor side of things. I angel invested for about 5, 6 years, making sure that I was good at allocating my own capital before I ever took anyone else's. And then it was 3 years ago that myself, Ryan Micheletti, our other 2 partners, Justin Nohama, Lisa Song Sutton, the 4 of us came together and we had what I would consider successful careers up until that point. And we really decided if we're going to put our time, energy, and capital to work doing something, what do we care about most? And we came up with this tagline of advancing America through venture capital. And so here we are 3 years later as a firm. We oversubscribed Fund 1. We're in a heavy deployment cycle. We have 16 companies, including Baton, who was just on J-Cal's podcast yesterday. We have space companies, cybersecurity, defense, fintech, future of work. These are all investments that matter, investments that are all advancing America, that all have a military veteran or military spouse on the leadership team. So that's, that's our core thesis. And a little bit about the firm. We do pre-seed and seed. $500K checks is probably our sweet spot. And we're again in a heavy deployment cycle looking for 10 more great companies to invest in. So this is what I go to bed thinking about. This is what I wake up thinking about. This is my life's work. And I know all of our partners feel the same way. So, J.C., grateful to have you here. Brendan, thank you for being here and excited to hear the 3 finalists. Again, I want to say With over 200 applicants, it was hard to narrow it down to 3, but we're excited to hear the pitches and pick one winner that's going to be receiving a $100,000 investment from the Veteran Fund today. So, and thanks for everyone in the audience for being here with us today.

Yeah, thank you, Mike. Let's go ahead and kick this thing off. So here are the ground rules. Each founder will have 4 minutes max to pitch their company, and then the judges will have 5 minutes to ask questions. Then we're going to move on to the next pitch. After each of the 3 founders have pitched, the judges will convene backstage. We're going to pick a winner and announce them at the end of this event. So our first pitch of today is Kevin Damoa, CEO of Glide. Kevin, thank you for joining us today and congrats on being one of the 3 finalists.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Ryan. Jason, pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much for the permission. It's, as you know, it's tough being a founder and, you know, I believe in what we're doing and I'm ready to rock it today as well.

All right, let's hit it. So go ahead and share your screen and get started whenever you're ready.

Awesome. Can everyone see my screen yet?

Yep, you're good to go.

Awesome. So I'm Kevin Namoah, founder and CEO of Glide Technologies. Our mission is to revolutionize the logistics industry by creating effortless, efficient transportation solutions. With over 23 years of experience as a logistician and vehicle design engineer, I've witnessed firsthand the chronic inefficiencies plaguing the logistics sector. Outdated equipment, labor shortages, fragmented processes are costing U.S. industries over $2 trillion annually. These aren't just abstract numbers, though. They represent real delays, skyrocketing operational costs, compromised safety, and add a significant environmental impact. At Glide, we developed the Glider, a next-generation road-to-rail vehicle designed to seamlessly move containers from road to rail with little to no modification of the apparatus that we move, that we use. Our patented technology eliminates unnecessary steps in the logistics chain, directly addressing the inefficiencies that plagued our logistics supply chains within the U.S. today. We're not just improving logistics, we're transforming it into a sustainable, efficient powerhouse. In just 18 months, we've turned this mission into measurable progress. We secured a $250,000 PO from Taylor Transport, which is a— who are a leading logistics company out of Vancouver, and obtained over $70 million in LOIs from ports, railroads, and commercial manufacturers that believe in what we're looking to build. With our gliders, our benefits are we have the ability to be cheaper, we're faster, we're more reliable, and the thing that stands out the most, we have a lot of emissions abatement. We're looking at 92% emissions abatement. If you take an example of the Port of Long Beach moving 70,000 TEUs or 20-foot containers every day, we're removing 2,088 metric tons of CO2 out of their operation. And it just doesn't stop with containers. We're able to move any road-based cart or any rail-based container with little to no modifications. So that means commercial side, we're looking at dual use by deploying in theater. I spent 2 tours in Iraq, 1 in Afghanistan, so I know for a fact we can use this with military railhead because I personally had the experience railhead myself. Our product suite is simple. We have really, really cool technology as you've seen our gliders, but it's nothing without our software. And then on the top it off, we have our LMS upskilling, sorry, upskilling software with the ability to actually train our future workers of America. We have all these labor shortages and what these folks are missing is real generational wealth, the ability to actually go in, look at future-facing jobs, take ASVAB-equivalent tests, and then perform in these next-level jobs in order to shore up some of the issues that we're seeing at the ports from a labor perspective. Perspective. Our business model is simple. We're mobility as a service. We are owner-operators. We charge a nominal fee per month, $300,000 per year, and then we charge a shipping fee, which is the lowest in the industry has ever seen. The fee that we charge is 50 cents per ton-mile. Well, let's say we move a container 10 miles down the road, a 20-foot container weighing 40,000 pounds, we charge that customer $150. To move it. And folks are like, oh man, that is so small. But for us, it is the cost that things should be so that eggs don't cost $15 to $20. With that revenue model, we're able to make $150 per movement. And with that, one glider can generate $15 million per year. Our market opportunity is humongous. Within the world, there's 4,600 ports that can take advantage of this, which is a trillion-dollar opportunity. Within America, if we just look at ports and railroads, there's 360 ports and railroads or more railroads we can take advantage of, and that's a multi-billion-dollar opportunity there. If we expand out to other industries, we're looking at a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity. We do have a first mover advantage. We are the only company in the world that is moving items or increments via road and rail. The rest of our competitors are either road-based solution or a rail-based solution. We're looking to merge both of them. And this couldn't be possible without my team. We're a team of experts that worked at SpaceX. Matt Mueller, my COO and co-founder, him and I worked at SpaceX for a couple of years together. He ran manufacturing. I stood up the flight module logistics department and was the chief design engineer for all the ship and apparatus. And then our CTO, Tony Petroberg, worked with him at Romeo Power. Big shout out to everybody at Romeo Power of past. Him and I worked together there. He has a major background in aerospace and defense, Airbus, Sikorsky, just to name a few. Mike Murray and Rami support us from an advisory perspective, and they ensure that, you know, all of our harebrained crazy ideas can actually fit within the construct that we're looking to apply them to. We're currently raising a pre-seed fund of $2 million via SAFE note. That will give us 18 months of runway, and with that 18 months of runway, we'll be able to achieve $5.6 million in revenue. What we'll do if we win today is take that $100,000 and apply it to our alpha prototype that we're looking to deploy for tailored transport with their $250,000 PO. And before I go, I want to end with a quote. From General Eisenhower. He stated, "You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics," right? So logistics is extremely important. Next time you go to go ship it, don't ship it, just glide it. Join us as we look to change the way we move here in America and eventually globally. Thank you.

Awesome, Kevin, thank you so much. You can go ahead and unshare your screen, and then we'll jump into some Q&A. And then for the founders in the audience, if you have questions or comments or ways ways you can help Kevin, go ahead and put it in the chat. And when we're done with this part, Kevin can go in and answer it. So J-Cal, do you want to start off with a question or comment?

Wow, I mean, it's obviously a great idea. And I don't know enough about the space or how they currently do this. So I guess my question is, how do they currently move shipping containers? So, and I guess, what's the difference between your solution and those solutions? I get that it's electric. I'm wondering how it's currently done.

Yeah, no, that's great question, Dick. So, how it's currently done is there's 5 pieces of equipment that is used. So there's the road-based truck, then a crane or a forklift, and then a train where they take a container, pick it up, and then place it onto the railroad track, and that goes down to a transload facility where on the other side you have that process in reverse. So you have the crane or forklift and then the road-based vehicle as well. What we do is we essentially take all of that out. You place a container onto our glider. It takes 15 minutes for us to enter the track and get on and then get off. The current process is 2 to 3 hours. The capital upfront cost is about $5 million for that operation alone on both sides. and it's about $1.5 million to operate it annually, whereas with our gliders, if we sold it, it would be $600,000 capital and about $132,000 in operational costs.

Fantastic.

Awesome. Kevin, just in the interest of time, because we only have J-Cal for an hour, we're going to move on to the next pitch, but we'll deliberate on the back end here.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you for joining. Our next pitch is Herbert Dwyer, CEO of Empec. Herb, do you want to go ahead and do a quick intro on your side?

Yeah, I'd be happy to. Thank you very much, Ryan and team, for having me here. I'm deeply honored to be surrounded by so many fellow veterans and veteran entrepreneurs. You know, I saw a comment, I think on LinkedIn, somebody said that what a good group of people to GSD, and that is it. That's what veterans do, right? We GSD all day long. Oh, well, anyways, thanks for having me here, and I will— yeah, go ahead and get rocking. Every day, 1.2 billion electronic parts get installed across the globe. This includes our nation's critical infrastructure, such as airplanes, nuclear power plants, heating and cooling systems, communication networks, and more. Every day, 1.2 billion electronic parts should be inspected. Teams of people tediously inspect equipment and parts and do everything they can to ensure there's not one counterfeit part amongst them. But why do counterfeits pass through? Because inspecting and analyzing equipment and parts takes expertise, a distributed workforce, and many times expensive laboratory facilities and research. None of these are scalable solutions. So what happens when, when a counterfeit part or malicious part passes through? Well, Hezbollah learned the consequences the hard way, and unfortunately, so did the U.S. Air Force when counterfeit parts killed one of their own, First Lieutenant David Schmitz. There's got to be a better way. Hi, my name is Herbert Dwyer. I'm a Marine veteran, NPECC co-founder, and former NSA task operator. I've also conducted over 300 critical infrastructure audits and made it my life's work to make our world safer and more efficient by connecting the equipment professionals know with the information they need for faster, more effective decision-making. And it's not just the lurking counterfeit and malicious parts in our critical infrastructure we should be concerned about. It's also the antiquated and energy inefficient equipment and faulty systems that are weak links in our nation's critical infrastructure. I've assembled the best team I could find, which represents 7 exits and $500 million returned to investors. This team includes our CTO, James Crouch, who was handpicked in 2008 by Steve Jobs to stand up the Apple App Store. So imagine being able to take a picture and get insights and accurate data on complex objects in a fraction of the time it takes using traditional methods. That's exactly what MPEK does, setting up the world's largest equipment and part repository as well. We have generated unique IP and are seeking 5 patents. The core of our platform is the ability to connect images of real-world objects with information you need to make critical decisions. Our competition typically includes individual substitutes being stacked that lack really specialization and cohesiveness to equal the power of MPEK because MPEK solution combines cutting-edge computer vision, applied intelligence, and extensive datasets to transform the way our customers capture and analyze data. MPEG's go-to-market plan is working. We've already closed paying customers and partnerships with some of the largest industrial leaders worldwide to include the US DOE, Canada, Johnson Controls, Siemens, and many others, plus a sizable contract with the Pentagon. This has led to a 300% growth this year alone. We've achieved $1.4 million in TTM revenue. We gained access to almost a million users worldwide through exclusive software agreements. and now our global customers are requiring their vendors to use MPEG for all data capture from their vendors. Our initial TAM is over $20 billion annually and has the potential to grow as we move down our product roadmap. We just launched a $4 million round and have 40% already soft circled with an additional opportunity in $4 million in one-to-one matching federal federal money. This means that this round is actually an $8 million round, but only $4 million we're seeking from investors. We'll be using these funds to greatly increase scale, sales, marketing, and additional capability. This round will also get us to $5 million in ARR in 18 months post-close. Thank you very much, and Semper Fi to all you Marines out there.

Awesome, Herbert. Thank you so much. You can go ahead and unshare your screen again, just in the interest of time. Let's, uh, let's focus it on Jason. Jason, do you have any feedback or questions for Herb?

Uh, it's a great pitch. I would start with the product demo and then the ideal customer profile. So, uh, I was able to fill those in with my imagination. Um, nobody cares about patents in the VC space. Um, that's generally not how people win. Uh, so I would just show the product and maybe the pain point. I, I saw somebody mentioned, um, Amazon, and, and they care about, uh, counterfeits. It turns out actually they kind of want to turn a blind eye to them, in my experience, so that they can make more money. Clearly, like, enterprise, uh, customers and the government want to make sure they're not using, um, counterfeit parts. I was just thinking about aviation has a big problem with this, right? Which you probably know, Herbert. So I think showing a customer here and letting the customer speak is a really good idea. Hey, meet Jason. He works at United. United has 1,200 planes. They have to order and replace parts for each plane on average, you know, 150 times in the life of that plane over the years. 150 times, 1,200 planes, 200,000 parts will be ordered. And they have to make sure that they don't get counterfeit parts. Why? Counterfeit parts break and can cause damage to the planes. And tragically, a plane could fall out of the sky, their biggest nightmare. So how do you know you're not getting counterfeit parts when they're made sometimes in the same region factory as the real parts? We have a solution. Let me show you how it works. You put on these glasses and you look at the part, you flip it over. You automatically say what you think the part is. It goes up to our central database and we create a report. We catalog it, put it into your inventory system, and we will find out if it's counterfeit. We'll tell you what it is. You confirm it, blah, blah, blah. And you actually show like that demo. And here's an example of a part that's fake. Can you tell the difference? We can. Well, how do we tell the difference? If you look here, the colorization on the edges of this, you know, gasket, are a little bit off. We know that because we have in our database counterfeit parts that have been reported, and we are currently building this database. This is a little bit of AI and, uh, you know, a lot of scrubbing of the data. That pitch will then, you know, sort of, you don't have to tell us how important this is. You're showing it. So one of the rules I have when I train founders is show, don't tell. And so here you told us a lot about how important this is. That's fine. but the elite, elite way to demo a product is to show it in action. And it doesn't have to be like, um, everything. So that's part of the challenge with your product is it makes a venture capitalist a little scared that there's not an ideal customer. There's not a lot at stake. What I did just off the top of my head was I just dreamed of who's got a lot at stake here. Amazon, somebody buys a fake purse, nobody gets hurt. Some big company loses a little bit of money. Plane falls out of the sky, 200 people die. United is, uh, you know, got a serious situation on their hands, as do the families of the deceased. So I just picked where the stakes are highest. If I were to ask you in a very tight question here, tell me the top 2, number 1, number 2 ideal customers for your product.

It'd be the aeronautics industry and the automobile industry because they're the ones that they treat safety the highest. And they're also the ones that have the biggest problem right now with counterfeit parts globally.

Perfect. That would've made this presentation from a, what I'll give a 6.5 to a 9.5, because now the venture capitalist doesn't have to imagine your product at work. You as the entrepreneur have told us, I'm sure you're all thinking of Dozens, if not hundreds of applications for this technology. I'm gonna tell you about the two that we're gonna spend the first 10 years of this company on. These two have the most counterfeit parts and the most at stake, and they're willing to spend a lot of money on our product, and they are begging us to do it. We did a customer discovery call with Ford and we did a customer discovery call with United. Let me tell you what they said. Here's how they currently do it. Here's how they're gonna do it in the future. Boom. That would just take this from being like, you know, a year one company to like a year two company. Right. And so it just, and it also builds your credibility. Uh, but great job, great idea, boring business that is super important, that will print money. And so I often joke with my team, like, you know, everybody wants to make a photo sharing app, but it doesn't, there's not a lot at stake, you know, then there are these like incredibly boring and critically important businesses that print money. So I don't know if this is gonna, you know, uh, I, I don't know if most people would succeed doing this, but I get the sense that you will because you know this problem, you know how acute it is and you know what's at stake. So just Herbert, I think this is like another example of like what I call internally at our firm founder product fit. Like I can tell from the way you talk that you actually really care about this and you want to see this succeed. And that for me is like, you know what? Herbert's not gonna quit in year 6. He's gonna be more excited in year 6 than he is in day 6 or day 600. And man, so many times people are just like, they wanna do something super sexy and, you know, whatever. And I just, I just know that it's not gonna work in all likelihood. And it's, they're gonna wake up on day 200 and it's gonna be hard. And they're gonna be like, you know what, fuck this, I'm out. And that's quitting founders is our biggest problem. I don't, I don't know about the other investors on the panel, but man, we have founders quit because they get bored. Forward, and, or they just don't see significance in it. So great job, really interesting business. Um, first two businesses, two for two, we're doing great here.

Thank you, Jason, for all the great feedback, much appreciated.

Yeah, Herbert, thanks so much, man. Um, we're gonna go ahead to our last pitch of the day, which is, uh, Aerofuse. So Ryan, great to see you again. Rama, thanks for jumping on here. Um, how are you two today?

Doing well.

Thanks for having us. I appreciate the time, Jason, and the team today. I just want to say real quick, Herb, David was a good friend of mine, and so that hit home for me. So you might hear it in my voice as I switch gears to pitching Aerofuse. So happy to be here, and we're ready to rock when you guys are.

Great. Go ahead and share your screen.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Can you see that? Okay.

Yep, we can see it. Just throw it in presenter mode and you're good to go. Okay, go ahead.

All right.

Hello, I'm Ryan Weed, the CEO of Aerofuse. Ever since I was a kid, I was driven by two passions: a deep desire to understand the universe and an obsession with building impossibly cool technology you see in science fiction. This led me to a PhD in physics, uh, and to become a test pilot, uh, in the Air Force, uh, flying missions from Edwards Air Force Base and Area 51, places steeped in aerospace technology myth. But after a decade of flying military aircraft, I became aware, acutely aware of how much jet fuel humanity was burning, uh, over 100 billion gallons per year. I realize that current solutions won't get us to net zero. Sustainable aviation fuel is 3 times the price of jet fuel, and batteries or hydrogens will be limited to smaller aircraft. This isn't just an environmental challenge, it's a national security imperative. Our military aircraft are constrained by limited range and the constant need for refueling, making them vulnerable, vulnerable to attack and logistics challenges. Having started the DOD's first fusion propulsion program while at Defense Innovation Unit, I knew fusion was no longer decades away. Fusion combines atoms in a reaction that generates energetic charged particles. Fusion powers the sun, and fusion fuels have 10 million times the energy density of fossil fuels. Although 50 companies are building fusion, no one has figured out a way to efficiently extract thermal energy. The current solid diverter approach is limited because running 100 million degree fusion plasmas into any solid material tends to destroy that solid. To unlock this incredible energy source for propulsion, we needed a lightweight, high efficiency beam window array to directly extract high energy ions from fusion systems into a working fluid or gas. This is the beam window array approach that is the heart of Aerofuse technology. Not only will this beam window enable fusion propulsion in aviation, where we plan to displace billions of dollars in annual jet fuel spend, but it also unlocks valuable opportunities that are closer to realization. Our beam window array can significantly enhance production yield for medical isotopes for cancer imaging and treatment. Currently a $5 billion market. Our Bemondo arrays can essentially increase isotope production processes by a factor of 4 to 5, making them more cost effective and reliable. We're getting traction in each of our core markets. We signed an MOU with Shine Technologies to collaborate on increasing medical isotope yields. We've signed a million-dollar contract for a directed energy application. And on the defense propulsion side, we've won two Air Force contracts worth half a million dollars. And on the commercial propulsion side, we've signed an LOA with Nautilus to pursue a fusion-powered cargo aircraft. We have the team to get this done. I'm a physicist and former Air Force test pilot with 20 years of experience in advanced nuclear propulsion. Rama brings 18 years of experience commercializing frontier technologies in aviation and other complex markets. We've assembled an advisory panel with leading experts in plasma fusion, aerospace engineering, and defense technology. Join us to unlock the power of fusion. And to create a future where we can explore the skies without harming our planet and where life-saving medical isotopes are more readily available.

Thank you. Awesome.

Yeah. Thank you for the pitch, Jason. Let's go ahead and turn it to you.

Oh, well, wow. It's a bit above my pay grade. I would have to bring in the Sultan of Science and some other folks to help me understand this. But I guess the question is, how far away is this from commercialization?

Right. So we plan to commercialize our beam window array in the medical isotope market next year. So we don't have to wait around for—

Explain to me what that is.

So that's, that's a system that can allow energetic charged particles from an accelerator to transit into a gas target, which increases the production of medical isotopes. The current way to do it is limited in the amount of ions you can pass through.

Who's the customer for that product?

Hospitals, mainly people.

And what are they using it for?

They're using it for medical cancer diagnostic scans. So it's used— there's about— Rama, correct me if I'm wrong— several hundred thousand imaging scans every year with these medical isotopes. And there's a supply constraint. Because we can no longer buy them from these reactors in Russia. And so there's a very clear demand. Our technology is able to increase the yield pretty significantly in these accelerator-based systems today.

Got it. So this is, I think, in this pitch, we went across many different uses for your technology. And I think Maybe some timeline here is— would be really good and improve the pitch. Now, I know you have a short amount of time, 2 or 3 minutes, but, um, so would you be selling this to hospitals or to some other vendor who sells into hospitals? Is it B2B2C?

Um, there's a company we've partnered with, um, called Shine Technologies, who's positioned to take the majority of the medical isotope market in the U.S. Um, they've gotten the, the radiological licenses and site licenses to produce these isotopes, which takes about a decade. Um, so we're not going to go down that path alone. We would be a supplier to, uh, that medical isotope company, Shine.

Got it. And you mentioned you had a— I don't know if it was an LOI or something with one of these companies. What was the term you used?

Yeah, on the, on the, uh, LOI with Nautilus, uh, that's to explore integrating fusion propulsion on their blended wing body cargo drone. They plan to bring—

is there any money involved in that?

Or, uh, if, if our plan is to go after government contracts together. Um, and so yeah, there could, there could be, could be.

Okay. So, you know, this is always the challenge with, you know, deep tech is you need deep tech investors. A friend of mine, Steve Jurvetson, does this. I don't know if you know him. Uh, he's been on the pod, but he's great. And so, yeah, you got to think about, uh, folks like Steve Jurvetson, et cetera, uh, who might be able to invest in something like this with a, 15-year window, you know, 20-year window, because sometimes it takes a little while for these kind of startups to get going. But really cool, awesome concept. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Thanks.

Yeah. Congrats.

Well, all right, Rama, Ryan, thanks for joining. I think the judges are going to go deliberate and pick a winner and then you'll be back to announce them. So go ahead and jump to that other Zoom room and then we'll, we'll go from there.

I'm going to mute myself here, but you'll watch me talk to the other judges.

Perfect. That sounds good. All right. So while we burn some time here, I'm excited to welcome back Clark Yuan, our first pitch competition winner, CEO of Stitch3D. Clark, you just were the top 5 at TechCrunch, their pitch battlefield. Do you want to share a little bit? I think you've got your pitch, but I think what you're building is really interesting. So why don't you go ahead and share your screen, walk through Stitch3D, and then we can, if there's questions from the audience, we can address them.

Sure, yeah, happy to do that. And thanks for having me back here, Ryan. Really great to be able to support this competition. It's always great to see these founders. I'll just go ahead and share my screen here. Okay, so I think what I'll do is I'll just give the same pitch that I gave at TechCrunch. Which, you know, talks about what we're building, why we're building it, and who it's for. Just at a very high-level overview, what Stitch3D is, it's a cloud data management platform that lets you view and share 3D point clouds. And for those that are not familiar, point clouds is kind of the foundational structure for any 3D files. It's just a lot of different pixels and points that together, aggregated together, makes a 3D model. So I'll go ahead and just give the presentation, the same one I gave to TechCrunch. And then happy to take any questions afterwards.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. I think some people are saying that your volume's low. I think they should maybe just try to turn it up. I can hear you fine, but yeah, go ahead. I don't know if there's a way to adjust your mic, but yeah, we can go ahead and get started with the pitch.

Is this better volume?

Very. Yeah, there we go. You're ready.

Okay, great. So, hello again, everyone. My name is Clark, and I'm the founder and CEO of Stitch3D. For the last 2 years, my team and I have been building a cloud-native platform that makes it possible for anyone to view and share 3D data right on the web. But first, let me just tell you a quick story before I get into the product. So 10 years ago, when I was still in the Army as an intelligence officer and deployed to Afghanistan, we were using this really cool technology called LiDAR for 3D laser scanning. Now LiDAR data, for those who have worked with this device before, gives you really great information about things like the slope of a mountain road or the crater volume metrics from a roadside bomb. And only there was one really big problem, and that problem was data accessibility. You see, the way that we were sharing LiDAR data in-country was literally we would send out runners with backpacks of hard drives just to get the LiDAR data to that one analyst who had the magical LiDAR software already downloaded to their computer. And then only that analyst would be able to actually see the 3D model. I'd end up just looking at a screenshot on a PowerPoint So there's always a lot of friction in terms of working with 3D files despite the awesome data and intelligence they can gather from it. And this problem is not unique to the military. Here's Erlich Bachmann from the 2014 Disrupt putting it nicely.

I don't think we can hear the— video from that.

Yeah.

Okay. Basically what he's saying is like it's 132 gigabytes uncompressed for those of you who have seen the show. And Erlich Bachmann goes, a bleeping 3D file? Are you bleeping kidding me? You can't like, well, can we even handle that? And then Richard goes, you know, we'll find out. So, you know, also kind of jokes aside, you know, that was 10 years ago and believe it or not, people today are still shipping hard drives when it comes to sharing 3D files. And this is because 3D data is just really complex. You know, not only are we talking about file sizes that can range from a few megabytes to a terabyte or more, but there are also a lot of different types of point cloud formats out there, so interoperability is a real pain. And by the way, like, your Google Drives and Dropboxes of the world, they can't view any of these files. So it's become pretty clear that even though LiDAR hardware technology is now more accessible and cheaper than ever before, a lot of this value is locked up because of a broken digital infrastructure The non-engineers of the world who don't have the LiDAR software downloaded to a computer simply can't view the files. And we believe pretty strongly that if this industry is to take off, the point cloud data processing has to go to a cloud environment. And the US military is investing behind this next big, you know, visual compute revolution. The Air Force has funded us with 6 R&D contracts through SBIRs to go re-engineer cloud infrastructure and make 3D file sharing available for the military, but not just for the military, but for industry at large. So let me just show you very quickly what we built with that money. Okay, so what you're seeing here is the CoreSearch3D platform, and the secret sauce is we've re-engineered the backend so the upload pipeline can handle point cloud files of any type or size, but we've locked all that complexity behind a very simple UI. So basically what you're seeing here is just something that's going to be familiar to most people. It's just essentially a Dropbox UI. I think my computer may— my browser may have frozen here.

It's not letting me refresh.

Sorry about that. So the UI is very similar to Dropbox, and we designed it that way specifically because we want this platform to be useful to the non-engineers So if you go to your shared folder or somebody shared a file with you, you can see it, you can search, sort, filter, basically everything you'd expect from a data management platform. But unlike a Dropbox or Google Drive where you can't actually see the 3D files, there's no preview here, I can pull up a 39GB file or something as small as a 13MB file and you'll be seeing the viewer right away. Now the cool thing about this viewer is we've actually added an aspect of interoperability to the, the viewer. So the first thing I'll do is I will share the public link out here to the group chat.

And, and when you do that, Clark, because I know Jake has got to go, I think we're ready to announce where— can you just show that what you're about to show and then like tell us one thing that the audience, the audience can do to help you in Stitch 3D?

Yeah, I mean, so the point is you can now access this data either from your phone, from your laptop, and it just brings 3D visualization to the edge. And so you can make a lot of decisions when you have that data available right on your phone or as when you're on the go. Um, right now we're currently, uh, we're getting close to closing up our $2.5 million seed round. Um, so my ask for the audience is if you know any folks that are in the surveying, construction, architecture industry, pretty much anyone who, who is an engineer that might be working with LiDAR and spatial data, we'd love to chat.

Amazing. Clark, thank you so much.

Of course.

And if anyone has questions for Clark, Clark, why don't you put your contact info in the chat? It's always great to see people say, you know, I really need this tech. So it's a good sign. Yeah. If anyone wants to contact Clark, he'll go ahead and share the information here. It looks like we have a winner. Mike, do you guys have an announcement for us?

Yes. So first, Clark, great to see you here. Congratulations on being the first winner of our first ever veteran pitch competition. It was amazing to see you as a finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt. So congratulations on all the great work that you and the Stitch3D team are doing. You're a perfect example of the type of founder and company that we invest in. So thank you for continuing to kind of carry that torch. So we had— we deliberated behind the scenes. And what I want to start out by saying is that the reality is all 3 companies and not just the 3 finalists, but all 200+ companies that applied for funding are exceptional. These are all incredible American heroes that are building companies that matter. And so I just want to commend every single applicant. And just because we selected one winner today that's going to be receiving the $100,000 investment, that does not mean that the others will not be receiving an investment from the Veteran Fund. In fact, as we move into this heavy deployment cycle, we are investing in 10 more companies at the Veteran Fund over the next 12 months. So we are looking for great companies. We'll dive into each one of the applicants. And if you are interested applying for funding, just go to veteran.fund/startup if you want to put your application in. And yeah, congratulations again to everyone. So with that said, we are honored to invite the winner of the 2024 $100,000 Veteran Pitch Competition.

Drum roll, please.

Herbert Dwyer and Empec.

Herbert, congratulations.

Thank you. Oh, this is, uh, oh wow, a little overwhelmed right now, but, uh, well, thank you. I'm just deeply honored. The two just incredible entrepreneurs and, uh, yeah, solutions they brought to the market. And, uh, wow, thank you all. And, uh, and Jason, thank you for all the gold you, uh, bestowed upon me.

I'll have another surprise for you, Herbert. I would love to have you and Mike on This Week in Startups next week to celebrate and share your story with everybody. And I don't know the terms of this round. I haven't diligence the company, so I can't snap invest alongside Mike, but I'm going to have you meet with our team. And if things check out and it's at a reasonable valuation, I think I want a piece of the action. So I might be coming in on this round myself.

Let's—

if that's okay with you.

Wow, thank you.

This is okay.

Yeah, I was—

when I was in Napa with Jason earlier this year, he made a deal with everyone in the room. He says, whenever you come across a great deal, I want you to think of one word: Jason.

Well, no, it's so frustrating in my life, Mike, because people are like, oh my God, J. Cal, I was at your event, I met this company, I invested, it was like the unicorn, I made like 300 times my money. And I'm like, never thought to include me. They're like, I didn't wanna bother you. I'm like, do you know what my job is? It's to invest in startups. Like, it's not a, that's like, you know, asking like, yeah, anyway, of course I'm interested. So I really appreciate you including me in this. You are so gracious to do that. And look forward, Mike, and Herbert to having you on the pod next week. We'll do like a little 20-minute thing at the top of the pod. So my team, Maddie, will be in touch and then we'll start the process of having you meet my team, Herbert. And I hope this isn't like some insane valuation. It's reasonable. And I can slip a little bet in here on this company because I think you're onto something and we have got a great team and a great accelerator. And so if anybody would like to apply, it's launch.co/apply, or you can email me jason@calicanis.com. For life. So as long as I'm around, I'll be investing in startups, and you can email me anytime.

Jason, thank you. It's extremely generous. Appreciate your support. Thanks for coming in today.

Always. Yeah, you do this once a year, or—

Yeah, yeah, once a year. We'll see you next year.

See you next year. Yeah, cheers.

All right, right on.

In Austin.

When, um, so yeah, so, you know, Herbert, congratulations. We're gonna go ahead and start the networking session. Um, so for those of you who want to stick around and maybe meet some people that you're chatting with in the We're going to transition this party over to Airmeet, and that way you can meet and do a quick video chat. I'm going to put the link here in the chat, and feel free to jump over to that. You know, before we begin that, I'd like to extend my sincerest gratitude. I mean, Brendan, thanks for coming. Mike, Herbert, congrats, and congrats to the other finalists as well. I mean, they've got some incredible companies that we're interested in looking at. So as we know, entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging things anyone can undertake.

Big.

And so I respect anyone who chooses to step into that arena. Everyone who registered today will receive a video recording in the next 48 hours, and we're going to announce the winner on social media tomorrow. So make sure you follow the Veteran Fund and Founder Institute, Context Ventures, and the Military Veteran, and we'll see everyone next year. Thanks, everyone.