April 2022 Founder Showcase Pre-Seed Startup Pitch + Networking Event, powered by Dell for Startups

Hey everybody, welcome to the Founders Showcase. My name is Jonathan Gritchen, co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute. We have an amazing event lined up for you today. Over 1,500 people registered to this event, many of whom are already here now, many of whom have probably already been connecting in the networking portion of this event beforehand. Uh, these 1,500 people, over 60 countries are in attendance today. All right, one of the biggest benefits, if you want to call it a benefit, a side result or whatever, of, of all of the turmoil that we've gone through over these last couple of years— let's look at the glass half full, right— is that, uh, the startup ecosystem now really is truly global. We have people in the Founder Institute with co-founders they've never met before in other countries, right? What all of this means is that you can make meaningful connections with people from all over the globe. And that really is one of the biggest goals that we have for you here today. So if you are in the chat, let us know where you're joining from. Okay, usually with these events, I'm in Colorado in the United States right now. So right now it is 11:00 AM for me. Usually these events bring in people, obviously we have the Western Hemisphere, but we usually get a ton of people also from Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and some brave soldiers as well from some places across Asia and Australia. So just looking at the chat here as well, it looks like, yeah, we have an amazing audience. And I'm asking you all now to tell us where you're joining in from because the point of these events is interaction and connections, okay? So please don't be shy at any time try to connect with other people, right? You can do it here in the chat, and once we're done with all of the keynotes and presentations, you'll have another opportunity to network in that networking lounge as well. So as I said, it's international. We actually have 7 amazing companies that are going to be presenting for you today from Munich, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, Indianapolis, Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, in no specific order. And Freddy from Hong Kong, for you in particular. Thank you for staying up late to join us. And similarly, we have a rockstar investor panel joining us from Africa, Montreal, Barcelona, and Texas. Okay, so let's get started. And let me just quickly tell you what the agenda of this event is going to be. So first, I am going to host a fireside chat with our keynote speaker, who I'll invite on stage in a moment. Second, we will then bring on this investor panel who's going to give you some context and ask questions to 7 very fast-growing pre-seed startups from the Founder Institute portfolio across the world. And then finally, we're going to bring you all back in to that networking lounge where you can meet other people. And some of you were probably in there already, but if you haven't been in there, it's— think of it as a virtual conference where you can jump to different video conferencing tables All of them have different names and themes. And then you can also click a, you know, kind of randomly match me with somebody else chat roulette style feature on the top as well, if you just kind of want to be randomly matched to somebody else. And the last thing that I'll say here as well is that this event is supported by an amazing sponsor and an amazing partner of ours, Dell Technologies and their Dell for Startups program. They have over 500 dedicated IT professionals. Their only job is to help startups scale their businesses. All right, so Lucas, who's the head of Dell for Startups, is here on the event today. You'll be able to meet him in the Dell for Startups table. You can also learn more about Dell for Startups at dell.com/founderinstitute, and, uh, and he'll be on the panel later today as well. Okay, so with all that being said, I'd like to invite our keynote speaker onto the stage right now, and we will kick things off and get things started. And I'm already seeing an amazing amount of engagement in the chat, which is awesome. So thank you all for doing that. And I'd like to say that just quickly, a little PSA, public service announcement. Originally, the keynote speaker for today was going to be David Cohen, who is a co-founder, board member, and former CEO of Techstars. David had an emergency, so, and not to get into specifics, but it's a very legitimate and serious emergency. But we could not ask for any better of a replacement. I mean, literally, we have another David. And I say that not that it's a lesser David, right? Another David. Another founder of Techstars, another board member of Techstars, and another former CEO of Techstars, David Brown. So welcome, David.

Thank you, Jonathan. You know, David Cohen and I have been friends and co-founders for almost 35 years now, so we're basically interchangeable at this point.

Yeah, as you mentioned, we have the same shtick.

We have the same shtick, exactly right.

So David, just quickly to get into a little bit about your background. So you were the Techstars CEO, co-CEO for about 7 years or so, right? And you, I know you guys brought in a new CEO last year, that's correct?

Yep, that's exactly right. David and I, along with Brad Feld and Jared Polis, founded Techstars, um, gosh, I think it's almost 15 years ago now. And I stepped down as CEO about a year ago. We brought in Mael Gebe, who's, uh, who's, uh, fantastic in running the business. And David and I remain on the board but don't have operational roles.

And I'd love to hear, just as the co-founders of Techstars, um, you know, I think what a lot of entrepreneurs don't get is that, you know, accelerators and, uh, even funds, right, are sort of startups in the beginning, right? So I'd love to just kind of hear where, um, the inception point of Techstars and how it gets started, just kind of that typical startup story that I think a lot of people won't attribute to an organization like Techstars that at this point now is so big and ubiquitous and has done amazing things.

You know, I spoke actually at my daughter's middle school years ago, and she had a teacher that wanted to teach students about how to create a business. And I asked the students how many, of them thought, uh, that, uh, the big companies that they knew of, that they had heard of, were startup once, right? What percentage? And it was funny to hear them, you know, say very few or none or half or whatever. And of course, every company was a startup once, right? No matter how big, right? Dell was a startup, um, and Techstars was a startup. And, you know, the, the origin story of Techstars was David and I had been co-founders on a number of different businesses. We'd met in 1991, so, you know, almost, you know, over 30 years ago now, and, uh, and created a bunch of businesses and had some success and had some failure. And we're trying to figure out a way to pay it forward and help other entrepreneurs, uh, you know, both by giving them some advice but also by helping them, uh, learn how not to hit all the same landmines that we had hit, something that we had neglected to do in our startup career, right? We had made every mistake the book. And it took us a while to realize, you know, some of, some of these, some of these mistakes are avoidable. And mentorship is great. And so we got together in 2006 was the idea. And David gets credit for, for having the idea and came up with this idea that maybe, you know, maybe we could create a business that was to help to pay it forward to help other entrepreneurs be successful. We had been angel investors for a while, we had joined an angel group that we weren't too happy with. And a lot of what Techstars was in the beginning was fixing what we saw as broken. Um, and the word accelerator, you know, didn't even exist then. And it was just— it was a 100% experiment. It was summer of 2007. We put up a website, we invented some people to, you know, we, we invited people to apply. We had no any— no idea if anybody would actually come. Um, but we said, we'll give you a little funding, we'll surround you with community members to give you advice. Um, we won't charge you, which the angel group did at the time to pitch. In fact, we'll invest in you, and we'll, you know, our business model will be we'll participate in your success only if you're successful. And, uh, we'll make it a 3-month program and have an event at the end. We didn't use the word demo day. We didn't say we'd have mentors. We didn't use the word accelerator. All those things had to be invented. Those words had to be invented later. Um, and we thought we'd try it out for 3 months in the summer of 2007, ironically, as a way to Our previous businesses, you know, we traveled the world and had to fly everywhere. And we both had young families and we want to stay close to home. And we wanted to, you know, do something in Boulder, Colorado, and not have to travel so much. Who knew, right, that it was going to become this, you know, global organization? It certainly wasn't the idea at the beginning. It was a couple, couple of guys doing a startup and trying to figure it out, not making any salary and trying to find a bargain basement place to rent out some space and through smoke and mirrors, convince people that we knew what we were doing to come to the accelerator. And we had some early success. You know, we had some early exits come out of that first program. And one thing led to another and allowed Techstars to grow and expand to 50 different accelerators today.

That's great. And that story is extremely common. And I mean, that is just— it's A lot of the companies that are around literally, right, for more than a decade, the companies that have an impact are the ones that usually it's not a bunch of founders, you know, looking at a risk board trying to take over the world. It's literally, it's one step at a time. It's a grind just trying to help customers and growing organically, right? And it's so many of the things that you just said is also how Founder Institute has grown and also just how I've seen so many other of our best portfolio companies grow as well, where it's just you take what's ahead of you, the opportunities present themselves if you help people, right? And you just go from there.

And I think this applies to all of you listening in, right? I mean, a lot of people say, wow, you had a lot of vision for what this would become. And the honest story is, you know, just what you were saying, Jonathan, we were stumbling around in the dark with a blindfold on early on with our hands out trying to figure out, you know, if we could find product market fit. And that's exactly what every startup that is successful was doing in the early days, they didn't really know the exact path. They didn't look at a risk board. They didn't have a 100-page business plan.

And trying to figure out, I'll also say trying to figure out that exact path is such a waste of time.

Right?

It's almost, yeah. And I imagine you have a book called No Vision, All Drive: What I Learned from My First Company. So I would, one of the interesting things that I saw as one of the comments about the book is that it's, It's not so much about company building. It was more about like kind of the journey and the relationships, right?

Totally. And startups are about rapidly iterating, trying different things, see what works, do more of what works. If it doesn't work, call it, try something different. Doing that every single day until you find your path, until you find your way.

Yeah, uh, for reference, like, at Founder Institute, we hired for our first cohort, which by the way launched about 6 weeks after we incorporated the business, we hired— this was back in 2009— the most expensive video crew, right? Because we thought, oh, we're gonna sell like premium videos on YouTube or something, right? And then people just started calling to say, hey, can we bring Founder Institute to our city? We're like, uh, sure, I guess, right? And then, yeah, you just, you follow those organic opportunities, solve a problem for a customer. Those opportunities can— will just start to present themselves, right? The universe will tell you where to go. Exactly. Um, all right, so I'm going to, uh, transition here a little bit into just, just some of the other stuff that Techstars is doing. But I will say, for anybody in the chat, we do want to sprinkle as many of your questions into here as possible. So please don't be shy, throw them into the chat. We have a team of people from FYI who will be feeding some of these questions to me. So please don't be shy. Okay, so we talked a little bit about where, how Techstars started, and I wanna talk a little bit about where you guys are going. It's something that probably a lot of people have seen, and to be honest, Techstars has been a leader in the space for a very long time. You guys have been running a lot of very impact-focused accelerators, but you announced something just, I don't know, was it 2 or 3 weeks ago, with JP Morgan, to essentially run, you know, and as I said, you run a lot of individual accelerators for impact, but this is something like 40 accelerators you're going to be running specifically targeted at kind of closing this opportunity gap of entrepreneurs to help them launch their businesses. I'd love to just hear in your words kind of what that opportunity is and how you would describe that to people and, you know, how it's different from how you guys have attacked this in the past.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's much more deliberate and it's much bigger scale. And so what we, uh, what we did was, uh, we partnered with JP Morgan to where they spoke to their clients, their wealthy clients, and said, who's interested in making really great investments, um, in specifically Black and brown founders in various cities around the United States. And so let's take the, let's take the model, the Techstars model that already works, um, cohorts of 10, 3-month program, you know, $120,000 investment, etc., and let's provide it, uh, to a group of underrepresented and underestimated founders, um, that have really great businesses, um, and, and, and do it in a way that provides a network and access to, to those that may not otherwise have had the ability or opportunity to do that. And I think it's one of the great things that came out of COVID You were mentioning it a bit in terms of the Founder Institute conferences such as this one. The same has been true for Techstars in many ways, in that we're able to provide programs to individuals who may not be able to fly to Boulder, Colorado for 3 months and spend, you know, quit their jobs and, um, you know, just work on their business full-time. And so I, I, I think it's a really, really great initiative. It's been in the works for well over a year, um, and to see it finally come to fruition is extremely exciting, um, because honestly, because of the scale right? We can do a little here, we can do a little there, but, you know, to have JP Morgan and, and, and their resources behind the fundraising that it took to make this happen is, uh, hopefully just a really great opportunity, um, for, uh, Black and brown founders across the country.

I encourage anybody, uh, to, to check it out. It's a big— I can't imagine a sales cycle or a partnership cycle with JP Morgan is fast. So yeah, I'm sure it was not an easy, easy thing to pull together, but I encourage anybody to check it out. And just, just as a side note, so, um, people know, uh, Founder Institute graduates go into all types of accelerators or angels or whatever around the world. And, and obviously we are in a lot of countries, so there's a lot of local accelerators, right? Techstars is one of the few that are, that are in, um, in a lot of cities around the world and consistently since day one, and this is feedback that I've given since probably 2010, the feedback coming back from our founders that go through Techstars has always been the most positive of other accelerators. So we've always loved what Techstars does. And yeah, the companies that come through our program that then go through yours have always had the best things to say. So Check out what they're doing. Yeah, I mean, check out what they're doing with JP Morgan, but even additionally, just check out what they're doing everywhere else. So now I want to transition a little bit, all right, and into what I would call venture trends. And it was funny, even just the last couple of days, you start to see some of this news come out, right? I mean, I think in the last day or two, it's been this company Fast. right, uh, laying off a lot of people. The last, uh, 18, 24 months, whatever you want to quantify it, has been, uh, somewhat ironically, uh, you know, one of the frothiest periods, uh, for startups. I mean, what, what are the biggest macro shifts that you are seeing now, and kind of where do you think the market is going, uh, just for, for venture capital and, and startups in general, uh, in the short term?

Well, look, I, um, you know, let me start by saying, because I know the audience is early-stage startups and, you know, that is 100% my sweet spot, there's nothing to worry about, right? Really great companies and really great entrepreneurs will always do well. And so while the macro trends might be there's a bit of a contraction and maybe there's a little less capital available, or maybe valuations will have been a bit too frothy and will come down. That doesn't mean that it's a bad time to create a startup. I think it's the other way around. Look, I, you know, my most recent startup, Techstars, we started in 2007, right before the financial crisis. It was—

we started 2009.

Yeah, you started in the middle of it, right? And, you know, here we are. Are. It is a great opportunity sometimes when times are tough to get things right and be ahead of the pack and be the one, be the company that, uh, that investors want to invest in because you're simply out-executing everybody else. Um, the, the flip side of that, and you mentioned Fast, Fast is a good example. We shouldn't expect, right, that you can lose money hand over fist and that, you know, investors will always be there and ready to you know, pour in another billion dollars or billion valuation, whatever they were looking for, and then cut that in half, and then still nobody was interested. You know, I, I don't have any inside baseball other than what I read on Fast, but, you know, I, I, I think it might be a little bit presumptuous to lose that much money and expect that investors will just always be there to bail you out. And I wouldn't recommend doing that no matter how frothy valuations are, how much capital is available in the market. It's just not a smart way to run your business, right? So, you know, look, I— macro trends don't appear to be heading towards higher valuations and more capital available, but my advice is heads down, execute, run a great business. You'll, you know, you'll— you guys are smart, you're inventive, you're hardworking, you'll do great.

No, and I love this too, right? Because it's— let's dive into that a little bit. Um, the stuff that gets press, right, is in the later stage market, right? The big money. Yeah, that's what's going to get the press. And this is not— there's going to be so many of these stories coming out, right? This is just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. Um, and a lot of it, uh, is things that could have been foreseen last year, right? When a company raises money at a certain valuation, they raise this much money. And again, we're not talking about companies, uh, pre-seed and seed, right? Companies at the, the larger end of the spectrum, they are going to be raising money at massive valuations. And those massive valuations come with massive expectations. And those massive expectations mean that they have to spend a ton of money, uh, to reach the growth metrics that they are promising to their investors. So it looks like David, uh, cut out here, but I can continue to talk about this. Just, we're at a point in the market where there is going to be a lot of news about, uh, startup failures, okay? And a lot of these startup failures are ones that are not necessarily— number one is today what David was saying is that they're not necessarily going to impact the lower end of the market, and that is the seed and pre-seed founders. Uh, but number two, it is just— it's kind of the nature of the game, right? When you're talking tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, they're going to be people that over-speculate and do these kinds of things. And that over-speculation will lead to massive amount of burn which will lead to some of the startup failures that we'll see coming along the pipe. Hey, David.

Hey, so sorry about that. Bad time for my computer to decide to crap out.

Yeah, so I was just talking about how a lot of the valuations and rounds that were raised last year, right, create these expectations for enormous growth. And the press is always going to talk about these the big money, right? But for the founders— and there's a lot of angel investors on this, this, uh, this conference as well who are focused, like Founder Institute, on the pre-seed and very early stages, right? For them, we're a little bit insulated from this stuff because, yeah, like you said, it's, it's times of, of change, times of, of disruption, if you want to call it, right? Is when, uh, entrepreneurs that just execute quickly cheaply, efficiently are the ones that can kind of come to the top, right?

Couldn't agree more. And, you know, I would say, like, it's always interesting to read the news, but, you know, you're right, right? The, the news is about the outliers, um, and the big crashes or the sensational stories or the huge valuations. Um, and, and none of us should, you know, as early-stage founders, none of us should be overly influenced by big investors pushing us to go in a direction, or even small investors, right, pushing us to go in a direction that doesn't feel comfortable. In the end, it's your business, and you owe it to your investors to be honest with them in the direction that you want to take it, and then go execute in that direction. If they're putting pressure on you to, you know, spend like crazy and doesn't feel right to you, I give you permission to push back. Because I think the odds of your success are much higher if you do.

Yeah. So I know in— you've talked a lot about, like, the concept of humility for entrepreneurs, right? And I actually think this is, like, super prescient now because a lot of entrepreneurs were raising rounds at crazy valuations. And again, this is at the top level of the market, this is what people are going to be reading about in the media. Like, how, how can an entrepreneur who is, you know, either going to their first round of funding or their second round of funding, or, you know, how can they— how do you think they can practice humility in a way that is going to, you know, help them build something sustainable as a business?

Yeah, I've talked about this a number of times. In fact, um, I think there's an online talk that I gave in Montreal at Startup Fest that's gotten a bunch of views about sort of the importance of balancing self-confidence, right? As entrepreneurs, we need self-confidence. If you, if you don't have self-confidence, you can't get the funding and you can't inspire people to follow you, but at the same time not be arrogant. Right, that, that if you're arrogant, it rarely works as a CEO. I mean, you know, I never knew Steve Jobs, but by all accounts, right, he certainly had a bit of that in him and pushed people really hard. And there was a cult of Steve, and everybody followed him anyway. But, but that approach rarely works. So if you can balance being self-confident without being arrogant, that equals humility, right? That equals the right formula, I believe, to be able to sort of have a vision, inspire people to, you know, charge the hill with you without being a jerk about it. And you'll attract, you'll attract better employees, you'll have more fun, you'll sleep better at night. Your significant other will stay with you. All kinds of good things happen when you figure out that, that, that balance. But it's not easy. And, you know, I have a longer story than we have time for here on how I learned that. It took me, it took me until my 30s until I really sort of internally figured out how to get that balance right for me.

But part of what you just said too, it's less about— it's a lot about the progress, right? It's a lot about just— it's not exactly— I mean, I think a lot of that internal confidence with— and but not being a prick about it, right? Can come from like, okay, yeah, maybe I'm not I'm, you know, at this level right now, but I came from this level to this level in the last month, right? And we're guiding people through this journey. So I know you've also talked a little bit about just how, you know, it's not about what metric you are now, right? Especially when we're talking about early-stage companies, it's just about the progress that you're making over time, whether it's a month-to-month period, quarter-to-quarter, year-over-year. Right. And I've always used that as a very inspirational message to people because it's not— look, I don't care if you might have 10 customers now, right? But if you have 30 next month, that's huge, right? So I mean, what—

yeah, yeah.

So yeah, yeah.

What advice would you have to founders just to— again, there's so much press and, and so much noise about people doing this. Oh, you should be raising a billion dollars, you should be doing this, right? So many of the people that are on, uh, this, uh, conference today are either investors in companies that are just getting started, or they are founders in companies that are just getting started. Their metrics are going to be so low, right? Um, but I, I know you've talked a lot about just like, it's not about the metric, it's about the growth. Right? So what, what pieces of advice would you give to them? Um, maybe some of them that you had to learn the hard way as well, right?

So in Techstars, we have 6 criteria to get in. Uh, it's sort of almost a half joke, right? Because it's team, team, team, market progress, idea. And, uh, usually when I tell that story, it's because the point I'm making is the team matters so much that it takes the first 3 slots. But let me, let me just talk briefly about the fifth point because, um, because that's what you're getting at. It used to be team, team, team, market, traction idea, but we changed it very early on to be team, team, team, market, progress idea. And what does that mean, right? If, if you have 100 paying customers, that sounds like traction, right? But if you've been at it for 10 years and they're each paying you $10 a year That's not so great, right? So progress— uh, conversely, let me give a different example. Let's say you have a sort of rudimentary website and a barely functioning prototype. Of those two companies, right, the one that has 100 paying customers or the one that has the rudimentary prototype, on the face of it, you'd say the first one is a better investment. But, but what it's not taking into account when you look at traction, which is a moment in time, what it's not taking into account is progress, which is how long did it take you to get there. So the company that has the 100 paying customers that's taken 10 years to get there versus the second company that has a rudimentary website and a half-working prototype that only started a month ago, like, I would invest in that second one all day long. Right? And so it's really not about where you are. It's where you are compared to where you are a month ago, 3 months ago, 6 months ago, a year ago. Right? That's— that is progress. And so when we accept companies into Techstars, we're looking for progress, right? It's not you need a million in revenue. It's not that you need a certain number of, you know, paying customers. It's did you get shit done in the last few months?

Right?

Or are you just sitting around saying you, you want to do something, but you're not actually doing it? So it's really a measure of ability to execute.

Right.

And that, that's great. Because yeah, that term traction, right? It creates so much friction, I feel like, because it's always a different thing. But this, it's just progress is it doesn't forget about traction, right? It's whatever you are, I got something done, whatever it is, right?

I hired—

I, I found a co-founder. Awesome, you got something done. Um, traction matters more at the later stages when you're at Series A and certainly Series B and you haven't been able to identify some metrics and hit them. Then yes, like, you're, you're gonna struggle. You're not quite ready for that stage yet. Traction matters. But in the early— some It's much more about progress.

So many more variables at that stage, less data. So it's just, what did you get done? How are you able to push the business forward? We like to call it FSO people at FI, figure shit out people. Figure shit out. Yeah.

GST, get shit done. Same thing.

There you go. All right, so we have a couple minutes left here. I do want to sprinkle in some questions. From the audience. So this might be a tough question for you, David. So I just want to line that up. Okay. Jeroen is asking, and hopefully I pronounced that correctly, who is your greatest example of humility? So I guess I could paraphrase that and say, you know, of the many founders that you've worked with over the years, Is there one that you think, uh, you know, displayed that and, and in such a way where, you know, that, that it really helped lead to their success or something that you stood out?

You know, look, I always hate saying the most, the best, whatever, you know.

They're one example.

3,000 companies have been through Techstars. I love them all. Um, but I'll give you, I'll give you one that definitely jumps to mind, and that's Isaac Saldana from SendGrid. Isaac was the founding CEO. SendGrid, you know, as you may know, ultimately went through Techstars early on, became the first accelerator graduate of any accelerator ever to IPO.

And then we are a customer, by the way.

You're a customer? Yeah, who isn't, right? I mean, 50% of the world's emails. And, you know, ultimately sold to, um, Twilio for I think $3 billion, right? Incredible success story. Um, but, but Isaac, um, and his co-founders, you know, when they, when they came in and they wanted to join Techstars, it was just the three of them. All they wanted to do was solve a problem. They were engineers that they saw in the world, which was, you know, there was no good solution for the when I click on forgot password, it always goes to spam. And every company they worked at as engineers, they were working with the email protocols, CAN-SPAM, whatever it was, you know, to prevent that from happening. And they said, as you know, it's really, really annoying as a, as a customer if my forgot password or whatever email goes into spam. And it's really annoying as a developer to have to constantly update this in every application that exists. We'll just do it for everybody. They wanted to solve the problem. And humility, like, make it— growing a big business, uh, you know, making a lot of money, charging customers a lot of money— these were not concepts that, you know, I might even say that they even understood, right? They were just on earth, clearly on earth, to solve this email problem. And, uh, you know, you asked about humility. Um, humility became They had like 4 H's as their core value. Honest, humble, honest, humble, and a couple of other H's, right? But humility actually made it into their core values and they lived it every single day. And I think it's such a great story because they were just delightful human beings and that you can run a company that way and be that successful, I think is an inspiration for all of us.

Now it is, it is a great story and it's a great service too, I will say. And I think again, it's just focusing on solving a problem for a customer and letting the other things fall into place naturally.

Exactly, exactly.

So I, I do have a last question here for you, all right? And this is the last question that I like to, to ask, uh, all the speakers that come on to our events, and it's a question that we ask all the mentors at the Founder Institute as well, because a lot of what we do is trying to share knowledge from one kind of generation of entrepreneurs to the next, right? Unfortunately, one of the best ways to— and one of the only ways to learn things are the hard way, right? But I'm sure there are a lot of lessons you've learned the hard way. What is one of those lessons that you've learned the hard way that you find yourself sharing the most often with the new entrepreneurs that you work with, um, that honestly, just because of human nature, maybe they won't listen to, but, but you wish that they would?

Um, I can't decide, so I'm going to squeeze in two. Um, you know, one is make sure that you love what you're doing, right? If you're just doing it because you think you can make a lot of money but you don't really care about your product or about your service. It's really, really hard when— all startups have ups and downs, and in those down days, um, it, it's so much easier to get out of bed in the morning and solve the problem that you have if you say, I can't fail at this because the world really needs what I do. And it doesn't have to be, you know, solving global peace or solving climate change. It can be about keeping email out of spam, but But if you're— when you're passionate about it, it, it's so much easier to overcome those inevitable lulls. That's thing one. Thing two is it took me a long time to really understand the value of a really strong network. Now, all of you are part of Founder Institute, all of you are participating in this community, so you probably have that figured out much better than I ever did. But my first startup, I was heads down in my business and I was trying to figure stuff out And it's not necessarily arrogance that I thought that I had all the answers, but I just felt like I didn't have time to go to stuff, right? Like I had too much work to do. And it wasn't until I had a network that I realized, oh my God, there's so much value in having a trusted resource that I can just pick up the phone or have a Zoom or have a cup of coffee and say, I got this problem, you know, I need help. And so building up that network takes time and it it, it's done one person at a time. And just making sure that you invest a little bit of time each week in figuring out who your next mentor is going to be or your next mentee is going to be, so that week by week, year by year, you continue to grow that network and have people to help you and have your back is just more valuable than I can describe.

Awesome.

For everybody here, I reckon write that down. These are amazing insights, David, with starting companies back then when we didn't have a lot of the benefits that we do now, these communities and startup community wasn't a term back then, right? But all right, well, David, thank you so much for joining us today. This was amazing. For everybody else on here, check out his book, No Vision, All Drive. David Brown, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, this is amazing. All right, well, thank you so much, David. Um, and, uh, we are now going to move on to the second part of the Founder Showcase, and for that, I am going to invite on my esteemed colleague Martín Martínez, uh, who is going to be shepherding you all along for the second half of this show, uh, where, uh, now we're going to go in to get into the startups themselves. Okay, we're going to bring on some amazing investors onto the stage and you're going to hear from 7 really fast-growing pre-seed startups from the FI portfolio from all across the globe. All right, thank you everybody. And I hand it off to my more handsome and better horticultural background colleague here, Trying to stay on brand, John.

Just trying to stay on brand.

Martín. Oh yeah, with the FI. I have this, this FI leaf, you know, I mean, I guess the second.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Again, I just take a page from you, John. Hope that was fantastic conversation. Thank you, David, over at Techstars. Thank you, John, for leading that discussion. So yeah, we'll let you get back into and fade out into the sunset. Thank you for helping us with leading that keynote. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the second half of the Founders Showcase. We always love to kick it off with a great speaker. My name is Martín Martínez. I serve as the executive director for the Texas programs of Founder Institute, currently in Dallas, Houston, and here in Austin where I'm based out of the capital city. We got a great showcase lined up for you. As John mentioned, we have 7 founders from all around the world. They're going to be presenting their pre-seed stage companies to you, our fantastic audience. And I've been looking at the crowd, we're cracking way over 550 attendees, and I've been just kind of watching the chat. We got people from all around the world. I've seen Vienna, India, Brazil, Israel. Just give me— give us all a shout of where you're coming from, ladies and gentlemen. I want to see— again, Canada, we got a whole bunch of people from Canada. We got a few presenting from Canada as well. Germany, Kazakhstan, global community right here. This is where it always happens. We do this once a quarter. I love this event. It's so much fun. So here's the ground rules of what the showcase is going to be for the duration of this event. We're going to be running for the next hour and 15 minutes, so we're going to be moving pretty quickly. Um, as I mentioned, 7 founders from all around the world. Um, some are, are currently postgraduates from the FI FI Core community. And we've also selected and selected a couple of founders outside of the FI Core program graduate group because we want to highlight some amazing people that, that are also engaging with this community. We love, love, love being able to showcase people from all around the world, and this is your chance to do that too. But before we get into it, I definitely want to give a big shout out to our friends at Dell Technologies, Dell startups. Quick thing about Dell before we dive into that, you know, Dell is our presenting partner for this Founder Showcase for the spring. Their Dell for Startups program has over 500 it advisors available to help provide consultation, product services, and discounts to help scale your startup, whether you're just getting off the ground or you're already starting to get a little bit traction, maybe a little bit of funding, but you need to get to that next step. Dell is there for you. So no matter where your startup is in its journey, their solutions are designed to help quickly integrate into your technology for your organization so you can focus on what matters the most: growing your startup, saving you time, and focusing on building products that are going to shape the future for your community, for the problems you're trying to solve. So please, we'll drop some links in the chat. If you want to get in touch with them directly, head on over to Dell— or startups@dell.com or visit dell.com/founderinstitute for exclusive discounts dedicated to all of you here in the Founder Institute community. We also have some representatives from Dell, the head for Dell for Startups programs will be joining us here on the panel shortly. We got a networking table when we wrap up that you can go sit down. If you want to get in touch with them directly, definitely, excuse me, drop down at that table and speak with somebody over at Dell to see what they can do to help you. So thank you again, Dell, for being our amazing presenting partner for the Founder Showcase today. So let's get into it. Here's the breakdown, everybody. Uh, we got, we got 7 pitches, as I mentioned. Each of them are going to be roughly 3, 3 and a half minutes in length. Uh, we are going to bring these, uh, these founders up to the live stage to answer some Q&A with our panel of investors. So let's get to meet them. Um, we'll start bringing them up. Our amazing production team behind the scenes It's going to start bubbling them up. They're going to show up over here on this side. And then if you want to just react, hit these little— that little emoji button over here. They just shifted me over a little bit. Hit that. Y'all already doing a really good job with that. Give me some hearts, give me some claps, all that fun stuff. So our first, first, our first judge on this panel, um, very well-known friend, colleague in the, uh, FI community, Sergio Escobar, coming from Canada out of Montreal. Sergio, how you doing, my man?

Hello, Martin. Nice to meet you, everyone. Also a global citizen, you know, born in South America, educated in France, in Europe, and now Canadian for the last 28 years. So delighted to, to join this event with all of you.

Yeah, true journey, man. And again, just a little bit about yourself too. You're the CEO, Managing Director of BCF Ventures. Um, you also manage La Lotte Ventures, and of course You know, you're the man that helps us run everything that's going on for FI in Montreal. Anything else you might want to share with the audience?

Yes, as you said, I'm the local director for Founder Institute in Montreal. I've been doing that since 2014. We have accelerated over 70 companies through the Montreal incubator, and right now we're approaching a billion-dollar evaluation with all the portfolio companies. So it has been a terrific experience. So thanks to Founder Institute, I became an angel investor. And after becoming an angel investor, and of course, making some money after that, I joined a corporation to launch a corporate venture capital fund that was 4 years ago called BCF Ventures. So it's a Canadian corporate fund that we invest mainly in B2B SaaS companies across US, Canada, and Israel, open to checking other, to other markets. As per the corporate VC fund, we decided last year to open a second fund on behalf of a family office that it's a limited partner in our fund. So we're managing two funds, La Lotte Ventures, which is the— we're using the CVC as a service model, a lot of SaaS, you know. So La Lotte Ventures invests in sports, media, and entertainment across Europe, North, South America, es, it, um, open to Czechonation.

Awesome. And yeah, maybe there's a little Techstars connection here on top of that too. We are a big family on that end. I know you do work very closely with that community up in Montreal. Awesome. Uh, all right on. Thank you again, Sergio. Can't wait for you to bring that feedback. You're always so good at it.

Love—

wanna— really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. About these founders coming up here shortly. Our next investor judge for the panel is actually— is here. I met him in Houston a month ago. We had a bunch of events going on. He's actually out in South Africa right now, so I appreciate you sticking with us this evening. Bade Aluko, managing partner over at White Hibiscus Capital and also entrepreneur-in-residence for our Founder Institute Abuja chapter. Chapter. Bari, how you doing?

Nice to be here, Martin. It's a pleasure again to be part of this event. Like you said, I was in Houston with you guys a couple of weeks ago. And it was actually my first in-person event after the COVID story. So it was really good to be able to come out and and talk to people. Yeah.

Oh, it was, man, it was great. We actually got to sit on panel together too. So now we're on the virtual one and we're able to do this from all around the world. So this is, again, this is what we love to do, uh, and I have a lot of fun doing it. So anything else you want to share with the audience before we move on and introduce—

well, uh, probably that, uh, we in Africa are extremely very happy that there's still quite a lot of, uh, momentum in the startup ecosystem. Uh, it's a great thing now to see young entrepreneurs, uh, in Africa who are thinking about creating something rather than going to join the company. The traditional thing in Africa is where you, when you finish college, you're going to join, you're going to join a blue chip company. But today guys are looking to what problem can they solve and how can they create company. So I think it's a great time to be, to be a founder or to be in the ecosystem generally. In Africa, and we're looking forward to having more unicorns coming out of Africa.

No, that's fantastic. Yeah, there's some amazing things coming out of Africa, the whole continent right now. It's inspiring to watch, and I think the generation ahead's got a lot of really interesting things that are going to develop in the region. So thank you for being one of the drivers, uh, of bringing innovation and, and an amazing, amazing development. To the community in Africa. So thank you again for joining us, Bade. Let's keep moving. Our next investor judge, I actually got to meet her at South by Southwest at the EU House. She just kind of ran up to me. It was amazing. Maria Massa, how are you?

Hi, Martin.

Good.

How are you?

I'm doing fantastic.

Thank you for joining us. Where are you calling from right now? You're in Spain?

I am in Houston today.

Oh, okay.

You're in Houston.

Fantastic.

Cool.

I need to visit back over there again. Maybe Bade can come in. We can all hang out. So Maria is the founder and CEO of the Business Angel Minority Association, or BAMMA. But anything else you want to tell us a little bit more about your background experience, kind of what brings you here today? Sure.

Thank you. First of all, thank you for inviting us. Thank you for the key speaker. It was a great conversation, and I am honored to be sharing this panel with the judges and looking forward to hear from these 7 startups and to learn from them as well. So background information: BAMA is the Business Angel Minority Association. We are an association of investors from business angels to VCs that invest on diverse startups. We define diverse with ethnicity startups or ethnicity entrepreneurs and women. We invest in pre-seed and seed stage and we invest across industry. We invest in edtech, medtech, energy transition, um, consumer goods, and fintech. We invest in the States, but my other side, it's European. So I am originally from Barcelona. Bama invests across the States, but I invest in Europe as well with a women's forest team and with We Rock Capital. Both of them are associations of women, women investors that we invest in other women entrepreneurs. And Women for STEAM, we focus on STEAM leaders. And We Rock Capital, we invest in women across the industry. And on top of that, I am part of Portfolia because you can see that investing in women, it's my passion. And Portfolia, it's a VC, um, a VC fund from here, from the States, that based on Palo Alto invests across the States in different funds, from fintech and immigrants, agriculture, everything.

No, awesome. Thank you again for joining us, Marie. It's so lovely to have you with us, and I think you're going to really love a lot of these, uh, these founders are going to be coming up and presenting here shortly. So yeah, let's, let's take your seat on the panel too. Last Last but not least, I wanna bring up our partner from Dell, great friend, also got to hang out with him at South by South. We had an amazing event together showcasing some amazing Founder Institute Austin graduates on the live stage. First time in 2 years I've seen somebody even hold a clicker, Lucas Childelpino. As I mentioned earlier before, head of Dell for startups at Dell Technologies. Originally from Argentina, where you've launched several businesses and ventures, some in the coffee industry and then also bringing to the US. But one thing I didn't realize, you were a professional rally race car driver for 7 years?

Yes, back then, Martin. Good to see you again. Back then when I was like young and fit, you know, and the good times.

Oh man, we're gonna have to go check out an F1 race at some point. At some point in the fall. Let's do that. We have that. Yeah. Now, anything else about Dell for Startups or yourself you want to share for the audience before we get into the—

Yeah, so we are, we're a program dedicated to help early-stage startups scale up with their technology. We have resources to help entrepreneurs get into the next stage and plan their growth in terms of technology. From free seed units to free IT consultation to a bunch of resources that will help entrepreneurs save their cash in early stage so they can really get to the next level in terms of technology. If anyone wants to learn more, dell.com/startups, or they can reach out to us at startups@dell.com.

Awesome.

Yeah, we'll be dropping those links in the chat. Of course, we do have a virtual table for you, Lucas. So immediately call if you want to pop in there for a couple minutes or bring some of the reps to come sit at that table. You know, we always hang out here forever in the virtual networking session right after the event. So hope y'all can stick around a little bit and learn more directly with the Dell team about how they might be able to help you today. So thank you again to our panelists, Maria, Sergio, Bade, and Lucas. Let's get into it, ladies and gentlemen. Are you excited? I know I am. So, uh, we got 7 pitches. As I mentioned, uh, each of them are going to be presenting for roughly 3, 3 and a half minutes. We're going to have them here on the live stage. Each of our investor judges are going to be able to provide a little bit of feedback, ask some questions if we do have time. We're only going to spend about 3 to 5 minutes on the Q&A section, uh, so that we can get through everybody in the next hour. But if you do have some questions, some really great ones, I'll be popping them up My team will be bringing it up here and we'll be able to surface those too. So the first presenter is actually coming out of Munich, Germany. Founder, CEO Rachel Dowling of Equal Assert. So let's get that pitch going and then we'll bring her up to the stage immediately following.

My name is Rachel and I'm the CEO of Equal Assert. We make equal time. An AI-powered DEI software for virtual meetings. I studied at Stanford and Oxford, and I was the VP of Product at TrustU. Kim is our CTO, and she's an inclusive design expert and full-stack developer. And Maria is an NLP, machine learning, and emotion detection expert. The problem that we're solving is that virtual meetings are not inclusive. Women are not heard, and they're often talked over. This contributes to the gender equity problem that we see in leadership around the world. It also costs companies a huge amount in employee turnover. So our solution is a virtual meeting plugin that nudges participants to lead more inclusive and equitable meetings. Data is available for meeting participants to see afterward, and leaders can see trends in the whole company over time. This is what our tool looks like when you're inside of a meeting. You can see your own speaking time, as well as everyone else's, and see it grouped by gender. So you can see interruptions and other, and monologues that are happening. We're going to be releasing emotion detection soon as well. We're excited that we grew 4x of our users in February. We have also closed $170K in angel investments, and we have our first paying customers. We also have great reviews from all of our users. We have a B2B SaaS business model with a freemium onboarding, and we're growing through product-led growth as well as sales and re— The global DEI and employee engagement market is over $1 billion, and we aim to get 10% of the market share by 2030, accounting to $1.1 million annual revenue. We're starting with SMB and scale-up customers. We are alone in providing DEI within virtual meeting space, and we provide automated coaching here, so we extend the efficacy of anti-bias training programs by more than 500%. We also provide novel insights on daily company culture, and it requires no setup and no training to start using. Building off all of our momentum, we are now raising $850K. We also have a goal to have a diverse cap table with 50% coming from women or underrepresented investors. So please reach out to me if you would like to be a part of our mission. We'd love to have you on board. Thank you very much.

Awesome. Rachel, how you doing? Let's bring you up on stage. Good evening. You coming out of Germany right now?

Hi, yes, I'm in Munich.

All right, on. I hope it's not too late. Yeah, let's, uh, let's kick it over to our panel. I know we're still trying to get everybody back up here, um, it looks like one of them I'm having some connectivity issues. Just do a quick refresh and you'll be able to pop back in real quick. But let's kick it over to our first couple panelists, uh, or whoever wants to start off, um, you just feel free to unmute, dive right in. We got about 5 minutes on the feedback piece. So let's try to keep the responses quick as well, Rachel, so we can get as many questions in for you.

Okay.

So who wants to kick it off first?

I can start.

Oh, go ahead.

Go ahead.

I'll let you.

Hey, Rachel, nice to meet you and love the presentation. What's your revenue model? And what's your cost per customer and cost of acquisition?

Yeah, so the revenue model, we're doing a subscription. So we basically pay or we charge companies per employee count, basically. So the larger the company, the larger the subscription cost. We are still price testing, to be very honest with you. We're sort of at the early stage where we're just now going to be, uh, we've just got our first 2 paying customers, so we don't really know yet exactly what the market will bear and exactly the right price point. But, um, something similar or akin to, um, uh, like other SaaS products that are out there. Um, it is an add-on, um, into a virtual meeting software, so onto Zoom or Google Meets. Um, in the future we hope to do MS Teams, um, as well. And then the cost per acquisition, we're also still testing that, but it looks like it's around $5 when we've done some testing for, from like LinkedIn ads. I don't think that paid marketing is really the first way that we're gonna go with this. To be very honest, we'll probably do more of like a content marketing acquisition and inbound sales conversion approach because it's more cost effective, but We— that's kind of where we're targeting, really, the HR leaders, business leaders, or diversity and inclusion leaders.

Thank you.

Okay. Richard, nice to meet you. Thanks for your presentation. Quite— I like the flow. There's an area where I couldn't get much from the presentation, and that is your competitive advantage. And your competitors, right? So firstly, maybe you want to ask, answer this question. Are you a meeting platform or are you a meeting plugin?

Yeah, so we are a meeting plugin. So we're not doing the full meeting software, just adding on in the app marketplace for Zoom. And it's a Chrome extension so that we work on Google Meets. In the future, MS Teams also has sort of an app marketplace, so we will be kind of adding on to those. And in terms of competitors, I went quickly over that slide because I thought the time limit was shorter, so my apologies. But basically, there are some D&I software tools which are looking at text, which are doing job description analysis. Those are Textio and Wittyworks. Those are a couple of them. And then in terms of anything within the meeting space, there really isn't anything that's targeting diversity and inclusion. There are some meeting tools which are doing basically note-taking or automated agenda, that type of thing, but they don't have a diversity and inclusion angle. So our competitive advantage is being really laser-focused on creating inclusive environments, and our advisory board and our expertise is really on creating inclusion through behavioral nudges and by basically kind of gently guiding underrepresented groups to have more leadership opportunity and also create more awareness among leaders, team managers, so they can create more inclusive teams.

Okay. All right. So sorry, quick follow-up question on that, because I remember in your revenue strategy, your revenue model, you didn't mention something like a free meal, free, a free service, right?

Okay.

Yes.

So, so my question then be, I assume your target audience are not end users, but corporate users, right? So why are you giving corporate users free service?

Yeah, so we, we want to give, it's sort of like a free, it's, you can think about it as sort of a free trial, but free access to try a limited feature set. So instead of limiting it on time, we limit it on the features. So to be very specific, we have sort of a, the idea is we give access within the meeting to your data. And then if you wanna save the data or you wanna see your data over time, the analysis over time, then that's when they would have to convert to a paid usage. But the free access is available for, you know, for basically testing within your meetings to see see if it's helpful. So that's, and that's where we hope to kind of grow the top of the funnel, you know, the free users to try it out. That could be also just team managers, people within the company who want to grow, get promoted. But honestly, it is right now mostly HR leaders and diversity and inclusion people who have buying power, actually.

Hello, Rachel. Well, congrats on everything you have done so far. This is a very interesting idea that touches more about the virtual emotional intelligence. So, you know, in the physical world, on the physical meetings, like the manager role had to, you know, assess the emotional intelligence in the team and watch out, you know, the ones who talk, the person, you know, who doesn't talk. And in the virtual world, I found that we just lost connection on that. So I found it really, really interesting. What's your background? Do you have a background as a kind of psychologist?

What's—

would you mind telling me more about your background?

Sure.

Thank you.

So I studied linguistics and philosophy at Stanford, and then I studied education at Oxford University, and then I worked in product and growth. So I was the former VP of product at Trusty, which is a natural language processing company. And before that, I was a growth PM, so doing B2C growth marketing and product development at Study.com in California.

That was a piece of information I think that would have changed your presentation because that's a great background that you have. I think that you still, on the B2B route, I think is terrific for multinationals that love it and HR, but the process is very long, you know, sales cycle is going to be 12 to 18 months. I think you have time to do the beta testing on the B2C side and given that you have an expertise in linguistics, you know, you can add some features and lots of consumers today, I could use it myself on the Zoom, but you know, to have more data, like, am I assertive? How much time I was talking, you know. So it's like, I think there is a lot of features that in the linguistic part that you can help not only people of diversity but pretty much everyone, because everyone wants to improve, you know, how you act, how you behave. So I think you have a terrific idea, you're up to something, and if you hit the B2C thing on the market side, you can have a virality if you do have these kind of features to help, you know, people become a better leader, better person, but whatever, during these virtual meetings, because they're going to stay forever.

Thank you.

Awesome. Last but not least, Maria, we got you back. We got you back.

Yeah, you got me back. So my question is more about the technical side than— and the— well, I'm first Rachel, I agree with my colleagues, a fantastic idea and a great presentation, even if I lost the connection at some point. More about, it's an add-on to one of the big platforms. So what is, you are very young in the States, but are you thinking already in this early exit strategy and what is stopping Zoom to develop these features once you are already there, right? So how are you protecting yourself?

Yeah, I always get this question, so it's a good one. The, the really gets back to the competitive analysis question also, because what we see Zoom and MS Teams, and we've talked to them actually too, like they're so, they have so much ground to cover as it is being a global meeting platform, they're not going to focus and have specific deep expertise expertise in inclusion and diversity, which is where we're really laser focused. So that is really our, you know, they have an app marketplace that we're gonna play into. I don't think that they are going to become a diversity inclusion leader before we would. In terms of the exit strategy, there's a number of, I mean, potential future wonderful exits, let's say, whether we go all the way to IPO or whether like another player in the virtual meeting space, or there are actually a lot of large HR companies like Workday or these other like HR management systems, UKG, that do have active M&A activities. So we actually are also working on becoming a partner with UKG. They have a big customer network that we could potentially share. Where they connect to the— we could gather demographic data kind of from those companies and facilitate the onboarding with that. So I don't know, I think there's a number of different ways. Right now we're really focused on building a valuable product, and I'm sure a great exit will be possible eventually.

Fantastic answer. Awesome. Thank you.

Right on. Thank you, Rachel. Be sure, ladies and gentlemen, to drop by Rachel's table. Immediately following the pitch. If you want to connect a little bit more, you have some more direct, uh, more questions directly to her and team, be sure to drop at the tables. Thank you for joining us, Rachel. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of your evening, and we'll see you at the networking lounge after that. We got 6 more of these to go, so we're gonna, we're gonna move quick, ladies and gentlemen. If you're having fun, let us know in the chat. Again, I was seeing everywhere else on the planet. We're going to move back stateside, Indianapolis. Indiana for our next presentation, Joe Bellavance, founder and CEO over at Slice. So let's take it to video.

And CEO of Slice. Most people want to know the X for Y metaphor immediately, so here's ours. Slice is Photoshop for writers. Now, when I say writers, I'm not talking about the J.K. Rowlings and Stephen Kings of the world. I am referring to people like you and me—knowledge workers who write content for others. Most people also want to know the big vision immediately. So here it is. Our goal is to become to business writers what Adobe is to designers. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to illustrate a gaping hole in the market, how we'll fill it, and why you should invest now. Software companies have created studios or workbenches for most professionals. Adobe, for example, has created a suite of products for graphic designers. Other professionals get great tools too. Programmers get Visual Studio. Traders get Bloomberg. Engineers get AutoCAD. But writers? We get a blank page. I mean, what the hell? Do you realize that the word processor was designed in 1979? It really hasn't changed very much since then. Neither has workflow. Individuals and teams struggle struggled to control writing projects because, well, was that file on SharePoint or Dropbox or, uh-oh, maybe it was on Mary's hard drive and she's on vacation and now we're hosed. And I swear I discussed this issue with John, but was that on Slack or Asana or email? The total addressable market for business writing is enormous. $28 billion represents our estimate for only long-form content among only US companies.

Slice is live.

We have paying customers. Emma said that Slice is a 10x multiplier on her productivity. Michael compared its effect on his work to Dropbox in Miro. We recently started focusing exclusively on B2B customers. We've begun selling to agencies and we already have our first account. We also just started a paid pilot program with the world's largest pre-seed accelerator. Slice will have 3 product tiers. Essentials is live now and we need to build it out. We'll release the Team tier in February of 2023 and Enterprise in September of 2023. We project nearly $5 million in revenue for 2024 with a $7.5 million ARR in December of that year. About 45% of that revenue will be driven by the Team tier and the Enterprise tier will be growing quickly. The core team is talented and tight. I excel at driving ideas to market. I did it a couple years ago with a consumer product that I designed and sold into major retailers. I'm now doing something similar with Slice, and because I'm a talented writer, I understand what knowledge workers need. Zeljko is a gifted senior full-stack developer who has also been a product owner, a software architect, and a technical team lead. Mika is another rare find. He's been designing UI/UX for 12 years. He has a master's degree in programming, and he still codes, which means he understands what the dev team needs to work efficiently. Yes, you're reading that correctly. I sold my house to finance Slice. And though the amount was small, we received our first investment from Elev8 Ventures. We're raising $500K in our first round to grow product traction and company value. If we raise more, we'll build more sooner. I hope you can now see two things: the gaping hole in the market for business writers and a rare opportunity opportunity to define a new software category. I hope you'll choose to capitalize on it. Thanks for your time.

Fantastic presentation. Let's bring up Joe to the stage. Joe, how you doing? Let's get that camera going. Let's get our panelists back up. We got you, Joe.

What's going on, my friend?

Hey, Martin, can you hear me? Oh yeah, we hear you loud and clear, man. If we can get that camera going too, we want to see that face.

Oh, you don't want to see this face.

I got a face made for radio.

Are you kidding me? Oh, you got the writing skills of a New York Times bestselling author. So let's get all of that up front and let's kick it over to our panel right now. Sergio, we'll start with you and then we'll keep moving.

Sorry, can Bade and Lucas can go on watching? I'm watching. Hold on, hold on.

Thank you. I wanted to— Joe, thanks a lot for the presentation. I like the way you create a journey around the story and the fact that a market is definitely, definitely being left behind and that's where you're trying to pitch at. So that resonates quite easily with audience. And I think, I think that's, that's a good story. My key question will be, what's your go-to market strategy?

Sure. So we've got a two-pronged approach. We've got direct sales into B2B. And for that, we are going to do some automated messaging on LinkedIn. We're in the process of segmenting or niching down. We're going to start with marketing agencies, people who will derive value from the thinking and focus and flow that Slice promotes. And the second is an SEO inbound content strategy, but we're not just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. We're gonna have a good idea on the traffic that we're going to get before we even start writing because of the way we are approaching our content and the keywords we're selecting to write about. So once we'll start there, we'll niche down, we'll kind of hopefully nail down the agency stuff then we'll move on to the next segment and the next segment and the next segment and, you know, kind of grow organically that way.

So do you have an idea about the distribution among these different markets? I'm sorry, an idea about what? Distribution among the markets. What is your focus going to be across this large market space that you're looking at?

Yeah, so initially we're starting with, you know, the agencies who are doing some type of, you know, long-form content. It could be as short as a blog post, could be, you know, marketing report, some type of client deliverable, people that need to, you know, put a lot of thought into what they're writing. You know, if you're just writing, you know, social media captions or tweeting, you don't need Slice. But if you're writing anything that requires thought, focus, and articulation, then Slice is going to be a pretty darn good tool for you.

Joe, I had the time to watch it because I found it very, very compelling and interesting. And of course you have a French-Canadian last name, Bellavance.

I love it. Not many people get that. I love that you figured that out.

So, um, you know, last year I was co-writing a book in artificial intelligence with like, I think 40 or 50 other writers globally. And I was feeling the same pain, you know, the graphs and everything. The publisher was like, it was Anthem Press. They were lost and they had— it was a mess. So they were watching that, says me, why these guys not doing a partnership with publishers?

I'm sorry, say that again, Sergio. What is what?

With publishers. Oh, publishers.

Yeah, so the issue with publishers, you've got two sides, right?

Like you've got, you've got the consumer and then you've got the producer. And the issue with writing is that a lot of people write with their own process. They do their own thing. So writers can be a bit persnickety about their processes, right? Because everybody's got their own way of doing things. However, if you've got somebody paying you $100,000 advance and they tell you to do X, you're going to do X. So I think publishing is a fantastic channel for us. Right now I don't have the editor built up to the point where, you know, their clients, their writers would be able to do anything they want. Once we get there, it makes complete sense. I agree with you to hit that channel hard.

Fantastic. Maria.

Hi, Joe. Thank you so much for the presentation. Very interesting product services. My question I understood that you will support for the production of the text and you will support the user with that, but you will support as well with the channels, with being a substitute for Dropbox, Slack, and all the different ways that we have to communicate. So how this— why you have— for me, it's like two different products. So why you— the fact to have these two different products and how they interact between them, and why not focusing on one for the launching?

Sure. So what we've seen for the past 40 years is a focus on one or the other or third. You know, when somebody is writing, they're doing 3 jobs really. They're writing and editing their content, you know, they're managing their projects, and they're researching. And the reason people like Sergio get frustrated when they write a book, and especially when they're writing a book with others or with their editors is that it's, it's just a cluster because you are chasing information and people in your tail all over the place constantly. So the goal is to create the software studio, this workbench that's been needed for 40 years, to help writers focus on what they're actually doing. Writing is distilled thinking. And so what I'm really trying to do here is to promote focus and flow, to help people articulate their ideas and sell what it is, whatever it is that they're trying to express. Spreads, right? Right now, people are forced to chase stuff all over the place. It's very distracting, and you've got all kinds of mental switching costs from going, you know, from, from, you know, platform A to platform C to, you know, tabs, you know, C through Z, right? It's just, it's a, it's, it's a real project. Writing projects are a mess. I'm trying to make it a cohesive, holistic experience.

Makes sense. And then a little bit of follow-up of the same question. And follow-up of your answer. Sergio is B2C, not B2B. So why is your decision to go to B2B first and not to B2C to get a better German audience?

Yeah, so I think we're going to get more product feedback. I think we're going to learn faster from B2B. We're going to have more users using it faster. We're going to have, you know, an affiliate or B2B channel— excuse me, B2B to C channel Eventually we've kind of got a backdoor for that right now. But the goal is to, you know, try to pump up the revenue as quickly as possible. We know we can win, we are winning B2B business. So the goal is to prove out the model that way and then we'll make it available more broadly, you know, B2C later once we've got a good amount of revenue, we've got a good amount of funding and investment and a good amount of product developed to support what's going to come on the backside.

Sorry, uh, what's current status of the platform now?

I'm sorry, what is the— what of the platform?

What's the current status of the platform?

Oh, it's live. We have paying customers. I think we've got, uh, 12 or 13 accounts. I anticipate closing 3 more within the next month or so. We've got 28 seats. It's live today. You know, you can subscribe today after you get off this call, Bade.

And what's the future plans for new features to the platform? Do you have any roadmap for features?

Yeah, the roadmap is ginormous. It would take up far more than the screen space we have available here. So yeah, I've got a whole bunch of features. Many are coming directly from our customers as I speak to them. Many of them I've kind of had in my head for for a while. I just presented the next version of the product with a customer today, and he's like, that is like a, you know, 4, 5, 6, 10x improvement over the current writing process. He was really just blown away by it. So yeah, we've got a huge roadmap in front of us.

Awesome. Rounding it out, Lucas, any other final thoughts?

Um, good, Martin. I had the same questions as Maria regarding the product, so Yeah, right on.

Cool. Well, thank you again. Yeah, any final things, Sergio?

Joe, send me an email. So even if like you're not ready for AtomPress, we'd love to connect you with many of the authors that were involved in this tedious process. I'm pretty much sure we're gonna pay for the next book.

Understood. Great. Thanks, Sergio. We'll do.

Thank you, everybody. Already customers coming in, coming into the phone. Right on, Joe. We will take— yeah, get Thank you again, Joe. Let's kick it over. We got— we have a few more pitches we want to get through. We only have so much time. So this next founder is coming from Mexico, Liliana Medina, founder and CEO of Applicate. So let's take the video and then we'll bring her up to the stage for Q&A.

Of Applicate. Applicate is a wellness app for employees that creates 100% personalized and comprehensive health programs in just seconds. We help companies solve one of the biggest problems they have, that is the high cost that represents having employees out of health ranges. By implementing Aplícate as a wellness program, companies can achieve savings up to $1,500 per employee per year, comply with official regulations, achieve fiscal strategies, and measure the happiness of their employees. Aplícate works with two pillars that work completely automatic: nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness. Each pillar is integrated and synchronized with each other. The more information the user puts on their file, the more personalized the program will be. The nutrition plan can even adapt to vegan diets, diabetes, pregnancy, and more. The training routine is customized to the physical condition, injuries, and makes progressive increases on the fitness level. The emotional diary, gives mindfulness personalized exercises and meditations. Everything is fully automatic, available at any time, any place, without the need of healthcare professional behind on a video call to provide the support or the need of wait for an appointment. Our algorithm is supported by professionals with the best certifications. What makes us different? We have our own certified technology and algorithm. We don't we don't need a human resource behind in real time, and this allows us to grow exponentially and have a higher social impact with a lower price about our competitors. Aplicate can simultaneously help an unlimited number of users in a personalized way at the same time. We work B2B with a subscription model. Our cost goes from $1 to $4 depending on the size of the company, and we We send email sequences and schedule Zoom meetings. Then we sign our contracts and give access to the users. There is a big concern in companies about wellness of their employees and the need of official regulations in LATAM. That can be solved with Aplícate. And there we are, two women that really want to see a change in health through technology. Some of the mentors that have been here along the way And right now we are in the cohort number 6 from Blacktitude, and we launched the app only a month ago, and we currently have 300 users, paid users, from 2 companies with attraction of $5,000. There is a queue of at least 7 companies waiting for the program that will represent attraction of $80,000. These companies are in the waiting list because we don't have this team to give them the service they deserve. And that's why we're looking for $300,000, because we need a bigger team to provide support for at least 200 new companies only for this year, and there will be more next year. And to build an app that can give the best wellness program to employees in all of town. Thanks for listening.

Fantastic, Liliana, let's bring you up to the stage. How are you doing today?

Hello, how are you?

We're doing great. We're doing great here. Fantastic presentation. Well, yeah, let's get that camera going and let's kick it over to our panel. Maria, you haven't had a chance to go first, so I want you to take the first stab at this one for Fabric Showcase.

Awesome, I will do it because if not, our DNA stats will not be good. Okay, nice to meet you, Liana, and thank you so much for your presentation. I love the dynamics and the energy that you have. Um, first question, it's an easy one: are you based in LATAM or are you based in the States?

Yeah, I'm based in the company, I mean.

Yeah, the company, and it's in Mexico City. Yeah, it's in Mexico City.

Okay, and then I didn't— I didn't— um, I want to know more about your competitors, so I know that plenty of startups here in the States are working in this, that there is a big need, and I know that different startups are working in these needs at this point of time, B2B. So what is your analysis of the competitors in a global base, and what is your add value?

Okay, yeah, so the, the first competitors, they have like, uh, the use of intermediary apps. They use another apps to give like the service, like a benefit for and we have our own app that has the 3 pillars integrated with each other. That's like the first one, they don't have to be like switching between apps and like having to put their information in 3 apps, like the nutrition app, the exercise app, and the mental health app. Everything is going to be in Applica. And the other thing is that we don't make like the face-to-face advice in real time. We have a certified technology and a certified algorithm by the world of BCI federation that allow us to give all the advice and all the program automatic with the algorithm. I mean, the user only put all the preferences they have, all the— if he had or she had a disease, and just in the moment they click save, they will have all the program just automatic. So those are our first, yeah, differences. Thank you.

Okay, Liliana, nice to meet you. You do have a lovely energy. I like that. And passion is one of the key assets of a founder. My question is, you did mention that the way your platform is, your company structure, that ability to scale is one of your greatest advantages. On the other side, you're telling us that you are slowing down because you have a team problem. How does that match together?

Yeah, it's because it's only me and Katya, the CTO, on the team. So we don't need like a lot of nutritionists or a lot of psychologists or a lot of trainers to give this support on the app, but we need like a legal part, like all the administration part, and it's only me and Katya on the support team in the middle of night just making some marketing mails for the 300 100 users we have already now. So that's why, because we have the waiting list from these companies, but we can do it just me and, and Kari alone for just a service to the company, not for, not for our users. The app can work like alone and completely by their, by itself for the users, but we can provide the service to the company.

Hey Liliana, nice to hear from you. So I want to learn more about the potential new customers that you mentioned, that those 5,000 users, and then you said potentially 200 more companies. Are they like an addressable market that you're like seeing, or you have like, like already had conversations and there's a willingness from those companies to—

Okay, so for— we already have the waiting list and we already we have like a lot of commitment for like implement the program with them. But I mean, it's only me and Katia and I have only like making these email sequences and like the sale of the app only like for 2 days each week for like 6 weeks. So we have like this projection about if we grow this team and we have another girl with us can help us and get that, can like start to making these email sequences and this go-to-market, we can at least achieve the 200 new companies, or it can be more if we grow more the team. So yeah, that's why also we're looking for that investment. Thank you.

Um, hola Liliana. Hola Sergio. Sorry for Marie and Lucas, they don't speak Spanish, you know, that's why they only speak— just kidding. Um, so I, I mean, I have seen great companies, uh, in this field kind of reach unicorn level. So kind of the, the idea is— and you're tapping to the Latin, Latin American market, which is kind of untapped because these players are more for US, Canada. Um, I, I noticed that, you know, like this kind of unicorn competitors that they are more— I mean, the revenue, yes, I mean, the SaaS revenue, it helps, but most of the revenue comes from the coaching side. You know, the corporation pays for the SaaS subscription, and then the employee, you know, wants to have a one-on-one session with a nutritionist, psychologist, or whatever. And those are those sessions that makes lots of money. I think 80% of the money comes from the coaching sessions. So when I was looking at your thing, I was saying Well, she has some the same ingredients, but she's not talking at all about the coaches, which is the key ingredient for making kind of a cash cow, you know, making money. We're here to make money. So then I was wondering why suddenly she loves money, like, you know.

Okay, so we have, uh, like, uh, a prediction for the future. I mean, the first thing that we want to make money is the volume for the company, right? But like, the oldest descriptions they have for all the employees. But because we have like all the automatic part without the one-to-one, uh, we can make like, uh, we can transform like the qualitative, uh, like indicators to quantitative. So if the user or the employees like, uh, put in their file a lot of, uh, ansiedad or a lot of, um, hungry or something, we can like start to like measure that, that like data. So then later, maybe in the next step in the future, we can like start to like go with a one-to-one in the company. But yeah, right now we want to make like the higher social impact about having an app that can have everything just, yeah.

Awesome. Any other final, any other final thoughts, Luli, on what we have her. Otherwise, we'll move on to the next.

Yeah, let me quickly ask, is there any reason why your, your, your model is a B2B rather than a B2C?

I'm sorry, I didn't listen.

Is there any reason why you are focused more on B2B rather than B2C? Oh yeah, the end users of your services are the Cs anyway.

Yeah, we We have a past experience because we used to work with like help campaigns in companies. That was before COVID arrived. So that's why we create Aplícate. So we have like a lot of experience in that part with companies, with the B2B, and we can achieve like more volume of users only talking with one or two persons in one company and have like all the users of that company. So that's why we're like more focused on that. And I think that, I mean, I'm a nutritionist, so there is a huge, like, a lot of competitors in the B2C part about the health part, and that's why we also were focused on B2B.

Okay, fantastic. And as a reminder, everybody in the audience, we've been crushing 500+ attendees all day. All of these founders are going to have virtual tables. So when we break to the networking portion, once we wrap the pitches, definitely take a seat and get to meet some of these amazing founders and learn how you might be able to support them either through funding or becoming a customer or just being a big champion of what they're doing to solve problems out there. So thank you again, Liliana. We'll catch you at the networking lounge. So let's keep it rolling. We're about crossing over the halfway point, everybody. Only got about 30 minutes, so we're gonna move as quickly as possible. So let's bring up our fourth presenter of the day coming out of Hong Kong. Thank you for being up in the middle of the night with us for this. Freddie Law, founder of Storius.

Freddie, CEO and co-founder of Storius. Storius turn your world into a podcast guided museum. This is a location-based podcast for cultural tourism walk. We try to work with knowledge owner that they find problem that they want to reach out with more audience, they want to digitize their content and they want to have a low cost of production. And we in Storyes provide them in a travel context, creating short podcasts and upload with geotags on our app. This is how our app look like, a map with stories on the map and then you can click and listen. It's a daily subscription model, loads of professional contents. And for the content listeners, the walking tour visitors, it's high cost for private guided tour and its limitations during COVID and et cetera. And if they don't follow, they are led to have a long time of preparations to guide themselves. So for Storyers, we provide an affordable, safe, and beyond guided tour limitation and save time to prepare themselves to understand a city. Our business model. At the moment, we already confirmed 30 content partners and 3,000 users in a pre-launch 3-month period with a CAC 0.25. 20% of users that we test are willing to pay us $5.70 for a day subscription, 24 hours, and we charge $4.99. So each user value $1 revenue and Storius can cap a 30% margin. So far, we are using a freemium model model, 80% of the content are for free, and then we charge for the 20% paid content. You can just subscribe for a day, and then you can walk around the whole city in Hong Kong, in Taipei, and soon New York. We benchmark two very successful similar model company in China and in Europe, and they already raised more than $10 million with thousands of millions of users. And the podcast market currently is more than a $10 billion market. With a CAGR of 30%. And in Hong Kong and Taipei, currently there are more than around 6 million paying users a year, and we aim to have a revenue reaching $6 million if we capture these two markets only. Our go-to-market strategy is partner with hotels and accommodations. They share 20% of profit. Co-promotion with different attractions as well as in school. Our differences is we are audio professional content, affordable and accessible. Very much different with guided tour privately or free tour versus other different apps. Our content is professional and much more diverse. We already was interviewed by quite a lot of different medias about travel innovation during COVID about short podcast audio markets, and also were on TV. Our team is amazing. We had enough software engineering experience from leading university working in Stanford, studied at Oxford, and I had cultural experience for more than 10 years, worked in Google, and this is my 5th company. Our advisor is ex-CEO of Cisco and private equity chairman of Hong Kong, and some professors in university. This is our finance. We look for $200K US with a $1.5 million pre-money valuation. Thank you.

Great presentation, Fred. Let's bring you up to the stage. How you doing, man? Good morning. I know you're up late. Thank you for joining us. I know it's like crushing almost 2 AM where you're at, so how you doing?

Yeah, doing good. Little sleepy but exciting.

All right, all right, welcome. Hope it's been a treat so far. So judges, I know many of you might have a hard stop at the top of the hour, so if we can be short and sweet for these, just one question apiece so we can get through the remaining pitches. We'll take it from here. First judge to go up, feel free to unmute and let's take it from here.

I can start. Hey, Freddie. So from the two sides, from the users and the content creators. So I got the users part that you, in average, you get $1 with 30% GM. Do you pay or do you charge the content creators if there are like hotels nearby or sponsors? Or like, how does it work? And does that have to come from your revenue generated from your users?

At the very beginning, the first 30 partners are all free, so they are not paying us anything. But gradually, when we talk to more partners, they were also asking your questions. They say, this is very 'Excellent service, how much do you charge?' And then they are very surprised to know that it's actually free service. And we are trying to explore what kind of partners that we can actually charge them. And then we realize that your hotel are very willing to pay. And then we might switch the model. Right now it's only B2C, we're charging the user. In the future, we're exploring maybe hotel will be the first bunch of partners that we are going to charge them.

Okay, thank you. Right on.

Bade, you're off mute already, so you might have a question.

Yes, uh, Freddie, um, what, what's your— currently you are in, uh, 3 or 4, your 3 or 4 cities, right? You said, yeah, and you're all about East Asia. So are you planning to expand the, uh, into, into the cities, at least within your geographical area, before you go to the rest the world?

Yes, our goal is to go to every city in the world that is well-traveled. To make it realistic, the top 10 cities in Asia first, and then the top 30 cities around the world, and then the top 50 cities all over. That would probably take 5 to 10 years in our plan. Currently, we got accepted in the largest accelerator in Taiwan. So Hong Kong is the first city, and then we expand to Taipei. The next city probably be Tokyo, We are more familiarized with Asia at the moment, but if we get any support around the network, the next station is in New York because we had co-founders currently in NYU, and then we'll see what kind of support we can get.

Awesome. Maria, Sergio, Sergio, you're off mute.

Would you mind sharing some unit economics regarding the consumer usage? Like, you know, how much time are they using, are they coming back, the churn, and so on?

Yeah, this is kind of a sad thing because the first 3 months we get more than 3,000 users, and then February and March we get the hardest hit of COVID Hong Kong city shut down, so there's no more people going outside, everyone stay home. For the last 2 months we only grow 500 users. So these users The monthly active users drop a little bit, drop quite a lot actually from February to March, and then we can see actually users are coming around a month time. So the frequency is low, but this is our travel setting, so not everyone traveling every week inside the city, so they use probably once a month.

May I have—

hi, Freddy, nice to meet you. May I have more information information about the round. You mentioned the round at the end. How much are you raising? What's the valuation at this point? And if you are convertible note, and if you are based in New York or Delaware or where you are?

Yeah, we are currently raising $200K US. We are pre-money valuation $1.5 million US. And currently we are approached by a university in Hong Kong, the City University. They're giving us $100K with safe note, and then they will use university resources to give in as our investor. So we already get $100K to be confirmed within 2 weeks' time. The confirmation is on the 13th of April. So if we get City University investment, we need to look for another $200K.

Okay, awesome, fantastic.

Well, thank you, Freddie. Again, if you want to talk, the chat has been kind of lighting up for you right now, Freddy. People want to use this right now. So if you want to talk to Freddy a little bit more, stop by the virtual table when we break after the pitches, get to know him a little bit more, see how you might be able to leverage his service moving forward. Thank you, Freddy. Thank you again for joining us so late. So thanks. Let's keep rolling, ladies and gentlemen. We got a few more pitches. Want to make sure we're on time with this. Our next founder coming from Calabasas, California. See, we're a global organization. We're all over the place. New Life Virtual co-founder and CEO, JD Mintz. Let's take the video.

I'm JD Mintz, founder of New Life Virtual, a community healthcare platform that utilizes the same addictive power of social media to change how we treat addiction. Did you know that 100,000 people died from an overdose in the past 12 months? That's one human life every 5 minutes. And this is what we help solve. Addiction costs the US economy $1 trillion annually, affects 1 in 3 households, is burning out caregivers, and causing a significant rise in drug use among our youth. It's personal. And I almost died because the current treatment model didn't work for me, which is why I opened up treatment centers in 2014, realized what worked and what didn't, and set out to solve the problem. It's because the current treatment model doesn't work. Has too much friction and isn't scalable. People don't know where to turn. Care is fragmented and transactional, which is why only 10% get help, leaving 90% to suffer. NewLife is a community healthcare ecosystem that integrates telemedicine with life, social support, and community. This results in higher engagement. Treatment needs to be accessible to everyone and provide the measured outcomes insurance payers need, and we provide that. NewLife makes trusted care frictionless accessible and affordable. Anyone can download the app and instantly be engaged with a treatment center, individual practitioner, and peer network. We're built for the patient, but the treatment centers and providers pay for the platform. We add direct and immediate value to every stakeholder by lowering overall costs, allowing providers to serve more people and generate more revenue by yielding measurable, actionable outcomes to improve results. NüLife helps reach the 90% who aren't getting care by removing friction and increasing connection to care from anywhere when people need it most. The substance use market is growing rapidly. There are 16,000 facilities and 500,000 providers, and they're tapped out serving 10% of this potential $300 billion market. Our revenue model is a monthly subscription fee scaled based on the number of practitioners and active patients. We had $500,000 revenue in 2021, which allowed us to build, validate, and sell the new life platform. We have 8 paying clients on 3 continents and project having 40 by the end of this year with a successful cap raise. By coupling clinical and outcome assessments with AI, we empower existing providers to operate at their best. This empowers patients to control their care, their recovery, and give their support system peace of mind. This is what makes NewLife unique to all of the other platforms focused in the addiction space. Our core leadership team consists of industry professionals, technology expertise, and clinical experts. We have deep connections in the substance abuse vertical and a scalable development team. We're currently seeking $500K to expedite our sales and marketing efforts to further validate product-market fit and take advantage of some immediate opportunities. I don't want people to know where to turn or who to talk to. And we want to impact millions of lives by making recovery accessible and rewarding and ask you to join us on our mission. Thank you.

Right on. Fantastic presentation, JD. Let's bring you up and get to it. JD, how you doing, my friend?

I am doing well, Martin. Thanks for having me here.

Well, thank you for joining us. Let's get that camera going. To our judges, who wants to go up first?

Lucas, can I make a clarification with JD first? Uh, maybe you can help us, uh, to prepare the, the ground for the questioning. JD, I want to understand, are you a platform and a software as a service for professionals, or are you providing professional services to end users? Excellent question.

We are a platform that enables existing providers and professionals to provide the care.

Okay, because that, that was quite important for me. So the reason why I wanted to understand that is the, the, the, the composition of your team. You tend to have extend your team to professionals. What is the purpose of that if you are just providing a platform for the professionals to use?

Well, our— actually, our, our team, uh, is comprised that we do have clinical supervisors or clinical, uh, aspects to the team to help ensure that, you know, we're enhancing how people, you know, the best features of the platform. So these professionals provide that feedback, but the bulk of our team is operations, customer success, product management, and sales.

Okay, awesome. Thank you. Lucas.

Yeah, hey JD.

Hey Lucas, how are you? Nice to meet you.

Good, thank you. So I wanted to learn more about the user interface for the patient. Like how dependent success is on the patient being proactive getting help through your app?

So yeah, no, great. It's a great question. So ultimately the app is available for anybody to download and use, whether they're engaged with a professional provider or treatment center, or they just wanna join in a social capacity community, talk to other people in recovery, for example. But our first phase is actually going to existing treatment centers, clinics, and individual providers and caregivers to digitize their services and scale their services with their existing and past clientele. So to connect them, provide easy access to care, kind of surround them and create a community around them, digitize assessments, collect data so that they can continue to keep them engaged in care and in community and on the right path.

Thank you.

Let's see, see who's going to be first to unmute.

Maria, Sergio, Maria. Yeah, I am not the shy one here.

Right off the draw.

Quick question about your forecast. If I understood properly, you are planning to, or you are already in different countries, correct? Correct, Maria. And how that works from a legal perspective, perspective for the medical services, because different countries have different legislations. And how you adapt the app for all this? What's the idea, everywhere?

Right, great, great question. So, um, our focus has been in North America, but we were brought to— so we have two clients, two treatment center clients in South Africa, and we have one in the UK. Now, because we're just a software as a service provider and platform, it is built in the— our individual clients are responsible for providing the care, being the licensed provider. So they are the ones that handle all of their own regulations in the care that they provide in their clientele. So we just empower and help them digitize and scale what they're already doing with their clientele. So if you can imagine where we've gone through COVID and some of these, especially where we've seen South Africa, you have a lot of people that travel from Europe for care. They've been able to maintain connection and treat their clients that maybe have went back home, but they handle that themselves.

But you mentioned to Blade that you have as well clinical specialists, right?

Or not? We have clinical advisors, right? Help us design functionality and, uh, features, assessments, services, um, and then some other—

but they are not in operations of the—

they are not in— they don't provide clinical care or operations, correct? Okay, so it's a pure platform and SaaS, um, uh, uh, play at this point.

Makes sense. Page idea, fantastic idea. I mean, the The issue of caregivers, I mean, I have seen many startups trying to solve that. So I think you're approaching on the right way with having the software for enterprise. Why are you not targeting specifically the silver economy? At least in Canada, that's where kind of the demand is huge because now we have our population on the silver side is like I think it's a majority. And like, there's no private resources and the government resources, and it's, it's just a mess, you know. And there is a tremendous market. Was just wondering why haven't you just concentrated as being new life for the silver economy for the consumer?

You mean, is it— yeah, I mean, it's a great, great question. Um, we will be going on that that trajectory. But first, our strategy is to, is to get these— a lot of the treatment centers and providers are either independent or small providers. So we want to build a network of providers and clinical experts providing the, you know, building and scalable their own businesses on our platform, connecting them, and then expanding that to attract consumers and leading them into the correct provider based on their needs, perhaps their geography, or based on how the provider's performance has been by utilizing our assessments and feedback modules so that we can more appropriately make those matches. So it's, it's an iterative process. So that's, that's our, our roadmap. Okay.

If you ever are ready to target the silver economy, there are specific investors for that category. And you can tap, for example, in Canada, there's an organization called AgeWell. Man, you're gonna receive million dollars of grants just to beta test that. So I mean, the market is huge. Don't underestimate it.

Interesting, Sergio. Thank you for that information. Awesome.

Fantastic. Thank you, JD. Again, there's some people resonating in the chat with what your mission is all about. So I hope you get a chance to meet them and I I hope you get all in the audience get a chance to meet JD when we head into the networking lounge. So thank you, JD, one more time. We got two more to go. I know that we have a couple of our judges that are, that need to leave at the top of the hour. I hope you can stay with us for the next one, for the last two. We're going to try and move this very quickly, but I do appreciate all the time you spent with us today meeting these founders. So let me know if that's possible and then we'll kick it to our second to last presenter coming from Montreal. Sergio, that's where he's at. Jennifer Creed-Boes, founder and CEO over at Blossom. Let's take it to video.

And $1.5 trillion a year buying wellness services online. Wellness creators work hard to help people feel better, but they still don't have a dedicated platform to grow, manage, and monetize their communities. Before Blossom, I built and ran a corporate wellness business helping thousands of people in schools and hospitals and offices feel better. While working with teens with eating disorders, I received hundreds of questions from families and medical staff about where to find reliable wellness creators. I could have sent them to traditional platforms but the teens shared repeatedly that these platforms negatively impacted their mental health. With the rise of the creator economy and digital health, there's a 76% increase in people seeking alternative online communities for learning and connection. Introducing Blossom.

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Imagine if you owned part of the platform you post on.

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From coaches to trainers to healers and beyond.

Create videos, courses, and more.

Apply for your social token, then reward your community with personalized experiences, NFTs, and exclusive content.

Finally, a platform for wellness creators and their communities to build a vibrant future together. We are growing at 46% month over month. With 50,000 wellness creators, our revenue potential is $100 million annually, and we're on track to get there by 2026. We earn money with a monthly subscription fee for creators and transaction fee for members. My co-founder and CTO, has 15 years in technology and is a 2-time founder with 1 exit. My other co-founder and head of community has been a wellness creator herself for 10 years. We're raising $1.6 million to continue our growth and get us to that next round. We have a product and customers and marketing and sales pipeline that's working. We're on track to bring on 10,000 wellness creators and 200,000 members. This sets us up for $1 million in monthly recurring revenue by Q2 '23. My name is Jennifer Krudeboss. I'm so excited to meet you and tell you more about Blossom.

Book a meeting today.

Oh, fantastic. Jennifer, welcome to the stage. Founder Showcase. How are we doing today? I'm great. Thank you. Oh, fantastic. Awesome. Well, let's kick it over to our judges. I know Sergio may have had to step out, unfortunately, or at the top of the hour, but let's get it going so that you can get to know some of these remaining judges we have. Oh, nope, he's miraculously reappeared. Good, I hope so. He's also based in Montreal, so I was glad he's here for you too. So first judge up, buddy, Lucas, you're already off mute. I don't know if Maria, Sergio, y'all want to kind of play hot potato and go back, but I'll kick it to whoever wants to start.

First.

Okay, hi. Well, okay, uh, thanks, Jennifer.

Um, I wanted to know, how does your monetization work? How— when you create tokens for creators, all right, do the end users buy the tokens, or how does that process work?

I love that question. We think about this and discuss this all the time, and it's important for me to, before I answer that, say that we first set up a Web2 monetization strategy very intentionally so that we could be making revenue as we figured out and developed our tokenomics. So with that being said, our tokenomics so far, we are developing it that we will take 1% of tokens minted and 0.2% of transactions. So we are currently building that out now.

Okay, so you're pretty much doing the traditional Web2 monetization today.

Today we are, and we did this because our creators, they're not gamers, they're not from tech. Their wellness teachers. So this is health coaches, yoga teachers, meditation teachers. And we knew that they weren't your typical crypto early adopters. But what's been really exciting and a delightful surprise that since December, we've been doing monthly education gatherings, and they are hungry for it, because they're entrepreneurs themselves. And they are, you know, they go against the status quo by nature, and they're very fast learners. And they want it, they're excited by it, and they want to learn more.

Okay, so how do they, how do they, uh, charge their community today?

They currently create digital products on Blossom— micro lessons, courses, master classes, one-on-one sessions— and they sell them at the price that they want to charge. And then we take a 7.5% 5 transaction fee, and that caps at $7.50.

Okay, all right, who's next? Bonjour, Jennifer.

Okay, I'm worldly in this panel today.

Yeah, I embrace the global citizen part, you know. So, you know, it's kind of supply and demand. So from what I see, you have solved the supply side by having 50,000 wellness creators. So would you mind sharing a bit about the demand side, the consumer side? So, okay, 50,000 creators, how many consumers? Yeah. And what's, what are the unit economics? How much of them come again every, every day, every week, every month? I mean, tell me about I need more some meat. J'ai besoin de la viande.

Okay, je vais te donner du viande. So, again, this is a great question to ask, especially in a marketplace. And you know that marketplaces have the hard side or the supply side. So we established that with the wellness creators. And another delightful surprise we discovered is that this atomic network that we built of health coaches They're humans who are very interested in growth and wellbeing, and they have created their own ecosystem of hiring each other's services. So at this moment, we made the decision to continue our focus on the supply side because it is self-sustaining. Then as we continue our scaling and go-to-market, uh, continuing to grow, we are going to get more of the demand side through wellness partnerships, through partnerships with universities that certify health coaches. And all of our health coaches are amazing marketers in their own right. And some of them have communities that are as small as 10 people. And some of them have communities that are as large as 25,000 people in Facebook groups that want to leave Facebook and be in a more intentional, and healthy and safe space. So a lot of that has been built into our Wellness Creator Community already.

Fantastic. Right on.

Maria, Lucas, Maria.

I don't have any specific question. I think that it's a very neat solution for a niche and I like it. So we will content.

Great. Awesome. And Lucas, rounding it up?

I'm good. I had the same question as Vale with regarding the tokens and monetization. Awesome.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jen. Fantastic presentation. Love a little video in between. Feel free to hang out during the networking hour and, uh, definitely connect with some of the attendees here. Thanks again. Um, last but not least, uh, we're keeping it in Canada. Thank you again, Sergio, Maria, Lucas, Bade, for being with us and sticking along a little bit past the top of the hour. So this final presentation is Vivian Lu coming from Vancouver, Canada, and her company is May, also known as Making Auto Easy. Let's take the video.

I'm the founder of May, which stands for Making Auto Easy. We are building a guided car shopping experience For women by women. After spending 7 years in the auto industry consulting dealerships on behalf of General Motors, when it came down to buying a car of my very own, I still thought about bringing my boyfriend or my father with me, which felt absolutely ridiculous considering I know way more about cars than they do. And it turns out I'm not the only woman who feels this way. In fact, 90% of women wouldn't visit a dealership without a man, despite the fact that 85% of car purchases are influenced by them. And even though women purchase the majority of all cars, most women don't know where to start when it comes to buying one. We have built an unbiased, guided car shopping experience that helps women make smart and confident car buying decisions using our recommender system that is customized, accurate, and relevant to what women actually want in a car. It is no surprise there are many big players in this space. While our competitors focus on the research and purchase stage on the right, Mae will focus on the early discovery phase on the left to help women pick the right car for them. Our team consists of experienced women in and out of the auto industry to help turn this wrong into a right. Besides myself, Claire, our tech lead, had a successful exit recently. Our designer, Shelley, founder of an edtech startup that went through Techstars. And Layla, our very first customer, is a mom of two who loved the experience so much that she decided to join the team as a community manager. Manager. So how big is Mae's opportunity? Based on the 19 million cars that are sold in Canada and the US every year, 10.6 cars were purchased by women and influenced by online research. This represents $61.2 billion in revenue every single year. And through our extensive customer validation process, serving and interviewing women, we learned that in their journey to buy a car, they start off as a Rachel from Friends, She's undecided and indecisive before turning into a full-fledged Monica who is detail-oriented and picky. Our competition will consistently offer biased and sponsored recommendations, results that are not accurate and not comprehensive, and they're always in long-form content that's always written from a man's perspective. Taking into what we've learned, we've been helping women as personal car shoppers to understand how to best help them with a very manual process. And now we have built that process into a software version that we've been recently tested with over 150 women, where 70% of them stated they would use Mae right at the beginning of their journey to help them pick a car. Here's how it works. A Mae user will start with an interactive survey where we get to know you. They can shortlist their options with speed dating and review their recommendations with a personalized comparison chart and be supported through the rest of their buying journey by being a part of the Mae community. May will be a two-sided marketplace between car buyers and dealerships. We will offer buyers a one-time premium subscription service and monthly subscriptions for dealerships for these high-quality leads. In the next year, we plan on testing a beta, raising an initial round, building a dealer network, and launching in Canada and the US. We are so excited to be putting women in the driver's seat and just making auto easy. Thank you.

Thank you, Vivian. Final presentation of the day, Founder Showcase Spring session powered by Dell Technologies, Dell for Startups. Vivian, how we doing? Representing Canada today. Everybody's just coming with the heat. Yeah, feeling good. Good. Thank you for rounding it out for us. Let's kick it over to the panel real quick. Again, thank you all again for sticking with us a little bit past top of the hour.

Martina, I can't I had to go, so I'm gonna just share my feedback right away and leave. Vivian, I found it very interesting. One of my good friends owns Ash Gregg, which is one of the biggest car dealerships in East Canada, and right now in the US as well. So whenever you're ready with the POC to test with the dealership, so ask if I— to my email, so reach out to me, and then we can chat about partnership, whatever connection with you, and if everything goes well, we might invest.

Absolutely. Thanks so much.

Okay, cheers. Have a great one. Thanks again for joining us today. Um, final 3 panelists, let's open it up. Who wants to start?

Okay, I can, I can go ahead. Uh, hi Vivian, nice to meet you. Um, quickly, I'd like to understand what's the end journey All right, is it an advisory service or does it end up in actual sales?

Yeah, the goal is to actually lead people to complete their purchase with May. We're focusing on the influence side of it so that it helps them understand what cars are going to buy. We've now developed a higher quality lead because that person is more confident in that decision. So then we would carry them through their journey to figure out where is the best place to buy their vehicle, what is the best financing or leasing route, what are the aftercare services that are best for them and that vehicle with the best expertise. So the goal is to be the full experience, but we're just working on the beginning so far.

Okay.

Hey Vivian, nice to meet you.

Um, I have a quick question.

Why, why is the— your focus, uh, only on, on women as users? Have you explored if there's probably a lot of non-women users that would need help with car buying process?

Yeah, the reality is that majority of men these days don't actually know much about cars either, but the industry is very focused on men. The information is portrayed very much from a man's perspective, and I'm trying to build something that essentially anybody can use, but I want to build it with women in mind. Based on the information that I understand about women and myself in the car shopping experience. Rather than putting that, you know, a lot of women now, they're putting that decision off to their husbands or their spouse or things like that, but not knowing that they actually understand their needs for that car better than anybody else, for their kids and for the family. So I want to build something that's going to help them understand their options in a way that the industry hasn't shown before. And the reality is Anyone can use it, including men, but I want to build something for women because it just hasn't been done.

Thank you.

Hi, Maria here, and thank you so much. I love it, and I was smiling through your presentation because I am one of these women, uh, that I am going to my husband to ask advice, and he's like, he doesn't know anything about cars either. I don't know why I am asking to him, but, um, and I would love to have a platform like viewers that will speak my language when we are talking about cars. The question here is to— I think that in the shopping process, it's more a— it's not a tech problem, it's a cultural problem, right? So how are you going to change the culture for women in order that we will be willing to go to your platform and make the change in our habits in how we shop a car?

Yeah, I find that the initial way that I've seen a really big difference in the adoption of mei is through the way that we go about it in our content, in our language. So we're not talking about performance or horsepower or the, you know, your cargo space in cubic feet or legroom in a matter of inches or centimeters. Like, that doesn't mean anything to anybody. It's all relative. Everybody's life and individual, their family is of different size, different height, So these things matter. So it's trying to build everything culturally to understand what the way that women, the preferences and behaviors that women show and exhibit when it comes to car shopping in general. So that's kind of where the way we're going about it. We're going to put your preferences first if it's a matter of safety or a matter of convenience.

Love it. And my second question is about your go-to-market. You are going B2B to dealerships, or you are going to to see a step forward to women? It's going to be both.

So my plan right now is to be a marketplace. I'm catering to customers right now, but the end journey is to map them to the right dealer partners. So that's, that's the goal.

Okay, and a quick question also follow-up for me, uh, what's your revenue model? You did mention that, um, for the, for your end users, you intend to have a one-time subscription service and a monthly subscription service for the dealers.

How does that work? Yeah, so on the, the car buyer side, uh, so the service is free unless you want the additional concierge service where we— it's an expedited service. So rather than going through 4 months of car researching, we can help you figure out the perfect car for you in a matter of days or weeks, uh, which, you know, saves a lot of people the Saturdays that you'd rather spend with your kids than going car shopping at dealerships. So that is a one-time fee for the premium service. On the dealership side of things, dealerships, because of my experience in the automotive industry, I know how much they spend to gather those leads. That's how dealerships operate. They live off of these leads. So a lot of companies will take a percentage, but my plan is to build a tiered model that is a monthly subscription service that gives them access to leads and availability to show their inventory to my customers. So it's going to be more of a SaaS model on that side. And that's where we're going from there. And what I realized is it's not a matter of getting all the dealerships to sign up per se, but I would like to find the right partners that are going to be the right dealerships to work with my customers.

Okay. All right. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you, Vivian.

Thank you for rounding out this, the, this quarter, the spring founder showcase. Fantastic presentation. Presentation. I love it. I was just in the market for a car, uh, so I definitely think there's a whole swath of people that could really use your service as you get this off the ground. So I appreciate you joining us for the Founder Showcase. And that, that's going to do it for us today, but stick around, ladies and gentlemen. We got the networking lounge opening up right now. Um, big shout out to, uh, David Brown and Jonathan for kicking off things with an amazing fireside chat, keynote, learn a little bit more about how Techstars and the Founder Institute really work together and really try to build some amazing companies from the ground up, serving the betterment of the world. Thank you again to our awesome panel of judges, Bade, Lucas, Maria, and of course Sergio had to leave a little bit early, but thank you all again for giving your thoughts, your feedback, and your time to meet these amazing pre-seed, early-stage companies. And just giving them a little bit of insight on how they can get to the next level. Amazing presentations throughout. So here's what we're going to be up to moving forward. Big shout out again to Dell for being our presenting partner for this event. Head on over to dell.com/founderinstitute. There are some great offerings for you, the Founder Institute community, to get more involved with what they're doing with the Dell for Startups program. If you want to get in touch with them directly, Lucas is here. You can go talk to him at the networking lounge. There's the Dell table. You can sit down. But if you want to shoot him a note, head on over to startups@dell.com and someone will be in touch with you to see how they can help you scale your business using all the amazing things that Dell brings for technology companies. So we'll drop some more of that stuff in the chat. Thank you again, everybody. So here's what's going to happen next. We're all going to disappear into the ether. And what you're going to see on your browser is going to be a couple ways for you to really leverage the virtual networking lounge. There's gonna be a variety of tables. Each— there's our Dell partner table right at the front, and then you're gonna have tables for each of the founding presentations startups right at the top too. So if there's somebody or many of the founders that you really wanna connect with one-on-one, you can take a seat at a virtual table, have a smaller group discussion, and really learn more about what they're doing, be it if you're an investor and you're ready to write a check, and I'm sure a few of you are, Maybe you're a customer, you want to learn more about how you can use the product today. Or you might be a supporter. Hey, you might even meet somebody here that wants to join the team. Please connect, connect, connect. We're going to have these virtual lounge open for at least the next hour. We usually keep it open much longer. I've come back a day later and there's still like 2 dozen people hanging out in here. I don't know why, but you all have fun, keep doing that. That's going to happen. There's also, again, if maybe you don't want to jump right into a bit to a smaller networking table, Right at the top, you're gonna see individuals doing speed networking. So you'll have 5 to 6 minutes. You'll connect automatically with somebody else looking to speed network, and you can have some one-on-one conversations with fellow members of the audience. We're still sitting at well over 300 attendees. So we got plenty of people in the room. Certainly want y'all to connect with each other and learn a little bit more about what each of you are doing. Spend a couple minutes, get to know each other, and then y'all can move on to the next one, next, next session or jump into one of those tables. So thank you again for all of you for joining us. We'll be back in August for another Founders Showcase, some other things on top of that, but we'll announce those dates a little bit later in the weeks and months ahead with another amazing keynote and some awesome founders that are going to be presenting just like you saw today. But for everybody out in FI land, my name is Martin, EIR, with FI and lead director for our Texas programs. Thank you all again for watching. This is so much fun to host and be able to show you what we do here in the FI community and feature some amazing founders that are really breaking ground, enacting change for the communities around them, for solving problems that really matter in the world. So thank you all again for joining us. Please be safe. Please be well. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Build the future that you want to see for the community around you, solving the problems that need to be solved. And we'll see you next time.