Global Startup Report, powered by Founder Institute (18 March 2022)

¡Gracias! What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Fantastic Friday episode of the Global Startup Report. I'm your host, Martin Martinez. Thank you for joining us. As you can clearly see, I'm back home at my home studio. I've been on the road in the last couple of weeks. Taking this show with me and having my producer Dustin in the background being very patient as we've gotten through all that stuff. But I'm back home. I'm going to be here very likely for the next few episodes. So thank you all again for joining us. I'm already seeing people dropping in the chat wherever you all are watching us— LinkedIn, Facebook. What else do we got? That's on YouTube. And of course, Twitter. Of course, Twitter. But yeah, if you had seen the show a couple weeks ago, I was over in Houston for the Houston Tech Rodeo. We interviewed Justin Phelan, managing director for our Houston chapter. If you caught us last week, last Friday, I was downtown in Austin. I'm based in Austin, but we were at the Dell House for South by Southwest kicking off day 1. South by Southwest is still going on, ladies and gentlemen. There's a couple days left in the whole conference and festival. So forgive me if my voice is a little shot, but shout out to the founders that the FI Texas founders that won the Dell pitch competition prizes. I want to definitely recognize them from last week. They did all 8 companies did amazing. All FI Texas family companies grads, 2 took away top prizes. So big shout out to Intuily founder CEO Catherine Webb for taking the top prize, $15,000. And Mariana Montín, founder and CEO of Suneva, uh, for taking the second prize at $10,000. You can watch all of that, uh, at the Dell for Startups page. We can also drop that in, in our chat later, um, if y'all want to follow up on that. But thank you all again. Congrats. That was a fun time. Let's get back to the show this week. Let's bring up Dustin, uh, and we'll get into some news before we get into our special guest Founder, CEO, Fight Camp. Uh, Dustin, how you doing, bud?

Hey, doing great. Uh, yeah, thanks for— thanks for having me on, Martin. Yeah, you're powering through the end of South by Southwest. That's, uh, that's exciting.

Oh yeah, I can't wait to sleep, dude. Can't wait to sleep. My voice is— my voice is so shot.

It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So let's, uh, let's look at some of the news today. I guess I'll kick this first one off. We just had— I just saw this guy yesterday. He was mentoring for one of our postgraduate programs, Funding Lab. Founder, CEO, Torrey Smith, Endeotics. He's making the COVID of MedTech Daily magazine. Torrey, well done, my man. Didn't even bother to say that yesterday in session, so props to you. That's, uh, so yeah, Endeotics is, uh, where robots are now, now getting much bigger, autonomous ones. Tori's building smaller. So these are pill-sized robots that are hoping to revolutionize the endoscopy industry and all the ways that we have to perform invasive discovery in the human body. Tori's working on some amazing things. He's really revolutionizing this space, really the only person that's trying to do stuff in this space. So well earned, Tori. It was good to see you yesterday virtually, amigo. And more covers to come, more magazine covers to come for you.

Yeah, but yeah, super cool to see Medical Design and Outsourcing magazine is like an industry gold standard publication. And yeah, they're really cool to see that from Tori of Andiotix. Yeah, the second story you want to hear, we're also live tweeting, so you can head on over to Founding and I'll try to drop them in LinkedIn also after this, but we're going to live tweet all the links to these stories if you want to read more. The second one here is the headline is Meet Leon Crescenzi. I said that right. He's the founder and CEO of a SaaS startup, Palco. Basically what Palco does, they're now based in the UK. It's an FI Rome startup, but this story from TechCrunch UK is all about, it's a profile of Palco and they provide digital entertainment for brands. Specifically, it's like what we're doing here, like live streaming. It's a platform where they can have interactive live content that people who are watching live can interact with it. So some of the use cases are like sort of like game shows and things like that for brands who wanna do that white label through the Powko platform. So yeah, that's the second one. And we have a lot of them to get to. So if you wanna read—

Yeah, a lot of news, a lot of news. There's one, definitely wanna get to Khalil over here with Fight Camp. I'm excited about this story. But let's power through a couple more. So startup out of Brazil, Alfred Delivery, they just— I'm always terrible with the currency in Brazil. I always call it real, but it's not. That's something else. 12.2 million to— and they're focusing on last mile delivery. But what's different is that they're avoiding the larger markets where it's fairly saturated. They're looking at the underserved communities. Cities with no more than 200,000 inhabitants because they're always largely overlooked. You're never really getting these services at the same speed with the same quality as larger markets. So shout out to Alfred Delivery founder, founder Mikro Mikali, for getting that funding in to expand and grow.

Yeah, really cool. Super competitive space, delivery space all over the world. But here in Brazil, yeah. So they're focusing in the state of São Paulo and smaller cities. Yeah, very cool. Fourth story is a profile in Paperjam, which is a Luxembourg-based business news outlet. So the company is called Salty Llama. It's an FI Luxembourg company, and it's all about their innovative business model, this article. So it's originally published in French language. The founder's name, Ben Smith, he's actually originally from South Africa. But what Salty Llama does, it's like a direct-to-consumer seller of eco-friendly laundry detergent strips. So all biodegradable, like no harmful chemicals. And one thing that I really like in the profile is it says he got tired of working on other people's ideas, so he decided to devote himself to his own, which, yeah, it's a great, good founder sentiment. And I just like that they said that. So, yeah, cool story about Salty Llama.

And, yeah, always a very funny name, too. I like the name. I like the name a lot. Last news update we have this week is a profile of Tash Grossman, founder and CEO of Tryslip, based out of London. Came out of our FI London chapter. Really interesting profile. It's a receipts online application working with retailers. Started out of an awkward wardrobe malfunction that she had. Had to go buy a pair, like return a pair of pants that she wanted to, but she didn't have the receipt. Light bulb moment happened, and, and then thus Tri-Slip was born through it, also through the FI program, which she took, helped really kind of flesh that out. So you can read more about her, learn what she's trying to do to really change just how we even transact after the purchase with retailers and working with big brands to implement that service into their stores.

All right, yeah, but that's how we do a lot of grad news stories today. Yeah, I will follow back up on and put them on LinkedIn as well, but you can go find them @founding on Twitter. And yeah, that's it for me. I'll, I'm gonna disappear now. Let you take it away from here.

Thank you always, Dustin. Can't do this without you. Appreciate all that help. All right, well, I am excited to get into our next segment with our special guest today. They were doing some amazing things in just the at-home fitness market. But he's going to tell you all that story, kind of where he came from, what it's all about, and what he's doing and what he's thinking about reshaping the future. So let's bring him up onto the stage. Khalil Zahar, how you doing, man?

Good, good.

I'm doing well, brother, doing well. Where are you calling in from today, by the way? Again, I'm envious of your background over here. I got all this, I got all this greenery. You're matching me.

I wanted to make sure it was with the F5 brand. Of course. I'm actually in LA.

All right, on, right on, love it. So tell us a little about yourself. I mean, let's just start kind of, you know, at the beginning, you know, what were you doing before Fight Camp became a reality, you know, what and what kind of led you to really want to start something like Fight Camp? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so I'm basically— I was, I was raised in Quebec City. I'm originally from Tunisia. Moved to Quebec when I was 4 years old, got raised there. I ended up doing a mechanical engineering degree at Laval University in Quebec City. From there, I moved to Toronto to do my master's degree and I was studying microelectromechanical sensors, like this subset of, you know, mechanical engineering. We were working on a medical device at the time, and that exposed me a little bit to really the state of the art when it comes to MEMS, microelectronics, and their mechanical applications. So, a lot of the applications we're looking at is like medical applications of microfluidics and accelerometers, and how they can really track, you know, motions in general. And the idea for FightCamp was actually very different. At the time, it was called Hiccso, which was a terrible name, but at the time made sense with the knowledge that we had. It stemmed from when I moved to Toronto, you know, got into a new city, didn't know anybody there, And I just started doing a bunch of new things. I wanted to, like, I had a lot of time on my hands. I ended up like joining a boxing gym. And when I joined the boxing gym and I was about like 21, 22 years old at the time, it's a sport that I never really dared trying before. And I completely fell in love with the sport. You know, I always talk about this analogy. It really felt like I was like Neo in The Matrix when he gets like the kung fu code uploaded in the brain, you know, and he gets addicted to it. That was like pretty much my vibe there. I was like, you know, you're getting better so quickly. And I always thought of boxing being like you kind of like have it or you don't, but that's really not the case. There's like an insane learning curve and like the first year that you do it, you know, quite regularly, you actually really feel like you're progressing. But a year in or so, you know, it becomes a lot less tangible, your progress. And it led to, you know, a bunch of questions that I had. And I was like, look, if I'm starting this sport this late in my life, I want to I'm not going to make up for the time of someone who started when they were 15 or 14, but I'm going to approach it with all of my scientific mind possible and I'm going to try to outsmart their work. And that led me to try to measure stuff. And in boxing, essentially, there's like the mentality was really, hey, just do this drill and it'll pay off. Just trust the process, which is not really my style. Like, I want to be able to quantify things and make sure that I can optimize it and so forth. So I was looking at any type of measurement that I could put my hands on. And, you know, it led to measuring your output during your workouts and how can you do that? And talking a lot with my coach, and she had a lot of experience with the Canadian Olympic team. She introduced me to people in the field. And what we ended up finding out is at the time, a lot of people at a high level were actually counting. The coaches would count the athlete's punch with a clicker. And this is like 2016. You would think that like an Olympic sport when they come in with all this funding from the Olympic Committee to really bring their athletes to, you know, to Rio at the time. It was like the 2016, and these guys were just there with like a clicker. Little punch card. Little punch card, yeah. Yeah, little door. Yeah, the bouncer clicker. And they would like, you know, compute this data on Excel. And these guys were like some of the most sophisticated ones too. Like a lot of others didn't even count anything. And I was like, hey, like I'm pretty sure we can automate that, you know, using, you know, MEMS and trackers. So as I'm speaking to people about this, it felt like there was a lot of interest. Like, really, you can really think you can do that? You know, like, yeah. And smartphones are obviously becoming a lot more prevalent. Back in the day and today, this feels like, you know, you know, two decades ago, but this is like just 10 years ago. Not everyone even had smartphones that could do that stuff, but it was becoming more prevalent that you can connect the trackers to Bluetooth, you could build an app and you can actually get that data in real time, which was very empowering for the athletes. So that became the focal point of Hykso at the time. So we did that for, we completely over-engineered the product with like, this grant from Canada. There was like $5,000 to work on this project for like 2 years. But at the time it made sense and we're like, whatever, we can work with the Canadian Olympic Games. Amazing. So we just did that for like 2 years from like 2014 to 2016. And we got a lot of traction from it. In 2016, the Canadian Olympic team started using it. We had the US Olympic team starting to use it. We had a bunch of pro fighters and we're going through our first batch of manufacturing. In the process, moved the company from, you know, we did Toronto, then we went back to Quebec City because we couldn't pay rent. So, we were working out of like, literally, it's the classic startup story, but out of our parents, you know, my parents' garage. Then, we started getting some traction. You know, got a couple loans on the business so we can finally kind of get going a little bit. Then we ended up getting our first funding from YC in 2016. We moved the company to California, and from 2016 to 2017, we're just focusing on servicing this pro market. And as we're talking to users, we realize that there's a behavior that just we didn't foresee coming in, it was that like the coaches who purchased our product for their pro or the prospect that they were training started using the product with their fitness clients. And they would give their fitness clients like a goal during each session. Then they'd monitor their progress over time and then they'd give rewards based on the progress. And then they'd ask us like, hey, can you build like this thing for like a class, like a whole gym? Where everyone can have a pair of these and gamify that, uh, you know, that concept. And then we were like, oh, there's like, you know, there's a bigger angle to this.

And then at this point, this point is just gloves. It's just gloves at this point, right?

So it's, it's not even gloves at that point. It's actually just trackers, right? So they're the size of your thumb and you insert them into your wraps and they recognize each type of punch you throw. So they're able to say like, you know, this is a jab, this is a hook, this is an uppercut, and they're able to measure the speed of each of these punches. And then they put a timestamp to it. So essentially you're getting— yeah, yes. When you compute that data, you can basically have, you know, your output performance. You can also know which punch were thrown. There's like a lot of tactical information. So, yeah, so, you know, we're doing this and then at some point we're like, oh, this is like a thing for fitness classes and boxing at the time, just like kind of like perfect timing worked out for us because, you know, boxing, especially in the US, fitness boxing specifically is like really popping off, you know, like some of the fastest growing fitness concepts in the country. Are all fitness boxing related and you have all this funding into creating a bunch more fitness beginner boxers. And as we're looking through this, we're like, home fitness is also popping off at a much faster pace. And what made home fitness different from the back in the day, the P90X or the— Zumba and so forth is, you know, the new, the new products coming in, they're interactive. So the person is kind of working out, but they're competing against other members as, as they're working out from their home. And that's a lot more engaging than just like self-inflicting torture in your exercise room or basement. So we're like, hey, like there's already a strong concept for cycling. and we kind of have the technology already figured out for boxing. We could really make like, you know, we could leapfrog into this market and like not only like allow people to compete, but allow people to learn the art form of boxing directly from the comfort of their home. So we ended up launching FightCamp, rebranded it in 2018.

Nice, nice. So what is, again, you went from just these sensors, that are sitting inside the wraps, you know, what's considerably changed? Because I don't want to spill the beans maybe for people that don't know some of like what FightCamp's doing now and also some of the really interesting partners that have come on as investors to really support this mission and continue to bring FightCamp to the masses. So, yeah, tell us a little bit where's the product at now these days?

Right, so, The product is that it's, you know, from a hardware standpoint, I want to say it's like the third iterations of it. And we're actually going to a very big hardware redesign. And, you know, this is in the works, is going to launch, you know, roughly within, you know, 12 to 16 months. And this, Basically, from a scale perspective, you know, we have north of 30,000 paying homes who, you know, are using the product and subscribing to it, multiple users per home. And, you know, from a scale standpoint, on the funding side, we just closed our Series B actually in April. It was led by NEA. It was a $50 million Series B with participation from IVP and Left Lane Capital who led our Series A in July of 2020.

That's fantastic. And I know you also have some pretty big names in the boxing world that are also kind of backing on this. How did you get in touch with those or did they find you? Like, it seems like you've really got some excitement in the boxing world going on right now.

Yeah, so we have a bunch of celebrities basically joined our round, and just to name a few, we have Georges St-Pierre for the UFC fans out there, we have Francis Ngannou as well, and we have Mike Tyson, we have Floyd Mayweather, we have Usher, we have Katherine Winnick, who's the lead actress in Viking, also very strong martial art adept. And all of these guys basically have a very different story on how they came on board. One of the things that really helped is part of the Series B round, we got Connect Ventures, which is basically a joint venture between NEA and CAA. CAA is Creative Artist Agency. It's basically one of the big two firms that manage talent across the board, music, entertainment, movies, and personalities, and a bunch of athletes actually. So when they came into the round, they had very strong network, and they really helped us close the deals on everyone. GSP has his own story because we got in touch, with his agent actually back in Montreal years ago, stayed in touch, came on as an advisor, helped the company figure out our angle. And this wasn't even the original plan, but ended up exposing the round to GSP and CA came in, Mitch Garber helped us close basically the GSP specifically there, he had like a direct contact with him, exposed him to the product and the company. And George thought it was a very interesting opportunity, came on. Mike Tyson happened just through our network. We already had talked to his team about working with him. So the opportunity kind of came like spot on. Usher was a user of the product. He actually has 3 fight camps. and he's actually a very close friend of one of our trainers. And again, not planned at all. This kind of like all, you know, happened. Of course, being in the LA area, you know, helps. Francis came through CAA, um, Catherine as well. Uh, so yeah, so every single one of them has kind of like a different entry point, but, you know, round coming together, leaving some space there, people expose the deals to them, and, you know, if they really like what they're seeing, you know, things happen.

Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm sure they got some great stories, and I'm sure they share a lot of that activity when they're progressing a little bit week after week, right? Yeah. Um, so yeah, so if I'm— I mean, I'm excited. Like, I wish I had enough space in my— I mean, I have a rolling machine, you know, I got, I got the gym membership, but if I wanted one of these my homes, you know, what if I wanted to get one now? You know, what would I expect? What would I get, you know, in terms of the product? How would that work? How would I get really like diving into the community that you started to build?

Yeah, absolutely. So, first thing is if you just want to check it out and you're not sure you're kind of like ready to pull the trigger yet, you know, it's a fairly expensive product. You'll get the full gym for $1,000. You can just go and download the app and check out the workouts. They're not equipment, the ones you get access to are not equipment required. It's not the full experience, obviously you're not gonna have the trackers, you're not gonna be able to like compete and really engage with FightCamp, but you'll have an idea of what the workouts are like and you can actually get great workouts and it's free. Then if you go on our website, you're ready to pull the trigger, What you get, you have 3 different options. Let's say you have your own bag, then you can just get trackers and get started directly on the platform and use your own bag. If you're trying to get the full FightCamp setup, it'll come with a freestanding bag, a workout mat, pair of gloves, and the technology, the trackers. Then you can get a family package, which basically extends more pair of gloves and wraps. It gets shipped to you. We're actually in the process of implementing last mile delivery. You were talking about last mile delivery before, because otherwise you have to fill out the bag by yourself, which is frankly a little tedious, and we're really looking forward to providing last mile delivery to our customers. But you get everything, it gets assembled for you, it has 300 pounds of sand, inside that bag and literally you can hit it as hard as you can. We have literally Mike Tyson on our YouTube channel going at it as hard as he can. The bag is not moving. So it's a very stable bag. You can really go as hard as you want.

That's a big thing to say. You know, Mike can just break a wall with his finger.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so from there, you know, you download your app, you sign on, then you're getting the premium experience. And within the premium experience, you can, depending what's your appetite, if you're very new to boxing, which is about like two-thirds of our customers, they've never done boxing before, then we guide you through what we call the prospect path. And it'll teach you the stance, it'll literally have sports science type tutorials with like, you know, cameras from different angles, you can really You have the best tutorial on the planet on how to stand, what's proper form, and you learn the 6 punches. And out of the 6 punches, now you're learning different levels. Then you're learning the slips, the roll. So you're basically learning, but every time that you learn a little lesson, the lessons we make them purposely very short, you know, from 2 to 3, 4 minutes. We put you into a workout that basically challenge that lesson. And after you unlock the next lesson, and as you go, you're competing against people that went through the exact same experience and have the same level. So as you're doing this, this isn't just, okay, I'm doing it and I'm just hoping for the best. You actually are challenged at every round. So every, every time there's a new round that starts, you're going to have a specific punch goal you're expected to hit. And you're going to have— basically, you choose if you want to go against the average member, which is a bot, right? Or if you want to compete against your friends specifically, you can find them and have their score basically in real time and you're competing against them. And the whole time you're kind of like the combos change every 30 seconds. So you're doing 30 seconds of something as you're mastering the combo. Then the trainer guides you to another combo. And then you're basically looking at the data, you're looking at the bag trying to perfect the combination, and then you move to the workout. Sometimes we'll challenge you physically, we'll be like, okay, no punching for a minute, we're gonna hold the plank, and the next day you're expected to be pretty sore.

Oh yeah, I could imagine, man, I could imagine. I was curious too if whether or not you could compete with friends and challenge each other. It seems like you answered that question. One of our close, one of my close friends, also FI Austin director and an FI grad, Harold Hughes, is a big, big fan of that. Met the team going through our funny, they went through the Funny Lab program together, obviously. So he's been a big Fight Camp supporter since basically day one.

Yeah, shout out to Harold.

Harold, yeah, Harold's awesome. Yeah, he's a great, great guy. But yeah, so I mean, I'm sure just like it was for a lot of like just home fitness products out there, COVID was kind of a boon. For everybody. And now as we're seeing kind of the big leader in the space, Peloton, going up a little bit, you know, it seems like they had a couple missteps, you know, over going a little too bullish on inventory, now having to shed a bunch of that, holding off on production. You know, is there anything you're doing, taking some of that, those lessons from an organization like Peloton to ensure that FightCamp isn't going to make those same moves, but also preparing for this kind of equilibrium that's starting to set? People are going back into the gyms. And, you know, are there steps that you're putting in place to ensure that FightCamp can continue, you know, on that upward trajectory of growth?

Yeah, yeah. So, two things. First, on the, you know, the lessons learned, thankfully to our CFO, actually our CFO, Diane Goodentag, did did an amazing job at keeping us financially responsible because we also raised our round in March and April of last year. So, we were really prone also to start spending a lot on all of the above. But, you know, she really like kept us in check, you know, and she was like, hey, look guys, like, you know, like the COVID tailwind is at some point it's gonna get slower. So, you don't wanna go ahead and increase your cost structure super, super quickly. Let's be patient here a little bit. Let's make sure that we're not scaling the company to like a, you know, an unsustainable level. So, she actually did that. So, we managed really well the finances throughout last year and we scaled the company very responsibly. We're actually still hiring. Like a bunch of people are laying off people, we actually are hiring people. So that's on the lessons learned. I think, I think it's, you know, we— it was— I think everyone that benefited from COVID was like inclined to just like believe they're like, that's it, you know, we just like we're superhumans now and we're not going to be subject to, you know, any type of reduction of market demand. And this new reality is just going to be settled in and Nobody's going to come back to their old habits. So I think you always have to keep yourself in check a little bit. I think on a growth standpoint, you know, Peloton is dealing with very different scale still than us. You know, they're like about 20x bigger than us. So they are probably facing TAM questions that we're not facing at the moment. Right? So, like, as their first product with cycling is reaching, like, you know, millions of subscribers, you know, they— with the price point that they have, at some point you're gonna, like, run out of people who can just afford, like, a $2,000 bike. You know, for us, I think we have a lot of headroom ahead of us, and, like, we're looking into, you know, the rearview mirror, and we're not seeing anybody in martial arts that is making a serious dent. So I don't think we're dealing with the same issues. I also think that, like, frankly, internationally speaking, boxing and martial arts have been around forever. You know, you're thinking about Canada, Australia, Europe, and the UK, very strong boxing culture. We think we have quite a bit of an opportunity internationally that maybe is not as present for other forms of working out.

Yeah, that kind of ties into the next thing. I'm seeing a, um, you know, culturally, at least in the US, there, there was like a, you know, people started to think less of boxing. MMA, UFC started to come in, but now it feels like it's starting to come back. I don't know if— how would your perspective is? I mean, there's influencers from YouTube now becoming boxers and making big, big noise and splash in that space. Is there anything cool about just the industry in general not even tech-related, that's exciting you with respect to boxing or even that relationship with the UFC?

Yeah, the UFC sold to IMG WME in, I think it was like in 2019. It was like the biggest sports acquisition in history. I think they sold for $5 billion. Really doing a good job at like popularizing the sports of and really bringing kind of like a fresh light on, you know, on martial arts in the past 15 years. And I think the sport is only gonna go up from there. Now you're looking at boxing and there's just a lot of things happening. You know, you mentioned the Paul brothers and how much of a new audience they're bringing to the sport, an audience that like, you know, really, you know, 10 years ago would not have probably paid attention to any of that. And with all the YouTube followers and so forth, and I think it's a very controversial approach, but I think that frankly, the whole industry is benefiting from the attention, whether good or bad. I think there's also definitely a resurgence of a lot of things that are interesting. You're thinking about Karate Kid and Cobra Kai and the resurgence on Netflix of that series. I feel that it was always present, but in terms of top of mind, martial arts is definitely often at the front of the billboard. You're thinking about the movies of Creed with Michael B. Jordan that came out lately. And generally speaking, for us, it never really disappeared. Martial arts was always there. It's one of the oldest sports, if not the oldest sport in the world, thinking all the way back to the gladiator time. So we don't think it's going to go anywhere. What we think, though, and this is kind of like reflected into the user base who join us, like think about like a third of the user base is literally never stepped in a boxing gym or like a martial— like an MMA gym. We're literally their entry point to the culture and the art form. And it's 55% female, 45% male. Yeah, a very even number. And to us, it comes back to, you know, it is a very empowering workout exercise. It is a very empowering way of getting fit. And the reason why is because you're learning, frankly, a very useful skill as you're actually getting fitter. And that stays with you regardless of your conditioning level. You always remember how to defend yourself, you know, basics. We're not teaching you defense because nobody's throwing punches at you with Fight Camp, at least for now, but you're still learning the basics, and that's a very empowering feeling.

Oh, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. Thank you again. Thank you again, Khalil, for joining us today. Ah, South by Southwest is trying to kill my voice. I apologize. Thank you again. We are just about out of time, so again, we're really grateful you joined us. Us this Friday at a lovely LA. One final question, question I ask every guest so far on the show before we tie things up, direct fairly to our audience, like to them. If there's somebody in the audience right now that wants to start a company and they don't know where to begin, what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them right now so that they'd get a, have a better shot at getting that thing into reality?

I think the first thing that I would do unequivocally is to talk a lot about your ideas to people who are in your mind customers of it. And that is the most significant step that people always skip because it feels uncomfortable. They don't want to get told that maybe their stuff isn't like as useful as they think it is, but it is literally part of the process of refining your idea. Also keeping you like, frankly, a reality check to make sure that like you're not gonna spend 3 years on something that nobody's gonna want. And this process is never-ending. You always have to keep it literally like us in our exec team, 3 weeks ago, We literally was like, hey, it's actually been a couple weeks that we haven't spoken to customers. You should kind of like go back and spend some time just making sure that, you know, whatever we're building, they will want, as well as like understanding their pain points. So, that's where I would start. I would talk to as many people about your idea. People are scared that people are gonna steal their idea as if like, just because you hear something, you're just gonna quit your job. And, you know, because of this other person talk to you about an idea Nobody ever does that. So, you know, I would talk to as many potential customers as possible about the product, about the idea, about the service. And, you know, I'd really refine the angle until you're really ready to build. And then frankly, on the other end is I would try to not do anything else that is glamorous or, you know, going to a lot of startup conferences and you know, networking events and so forth, at the end of the day, the best companies are gonna be the ones that they have a product that people are paying for, and that's it. So, I feel like for the first 2 to 3 years, that's really the only thing that matters, none of the other. You can think about that, what's gonna be our hiring culture, and let me define a, uh, at the end of the day, you know, just build the thing, and try to put it in people's hands. That should be the focus.

I love that. Yeah, always be talking to customers even before you build it, and then don't stop talking to them while you're building it. That's great, great advice. Thank you, Khalil, again, one more time. Founder, CEO of FightCamp. Um, so that's just about do it. I'll let you get back to the day. I'm sure you got a good fun weekend, uh, work and A little, maybe you get a little bit away from the bag, just, you know, just to get outside for a second. But you got lovely weather over there, so I ain't jealous. I'm a little jealous of that. Um, any, any final things you want to share to the audience, ways to follow you, any of that cool stuff?

Yeah, follow us on, on, on Facebook, Instagram, uh, @FightCamp. Uh, you know, if you guys are, uh, a great engineer or, uh, a great designer, a great product person. We are definitely hiring, so definitely hit us up. We're a remote-first company looking for the best talent to join us. So please come work with us. We have an awesome culture and you'll love working here.

Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if I was on the market, I'd be looking to apply right now too. I think I'd be having some fun. You get some workouts during the day too. So I found that sport a little bit part of the—

Careful, careful, Martin. I might reach out to you and Behind Adeo's back, he's gonna be stealing from FI on it.

He's gonna challenge you to fisticuffs, and I'd be worried about his prospects on that end. All right, all right, here we go. Thank you again. Um, we're gonna wrap up here shortly. Um, I hope to catch you in person very soon. Um, so thank you. Yeah, thank you all again for watching us across the internet. Uh, we're, we're doing this weekly for you. I'm certainly having fun doing it, and And I think we're really on this, a really special show with the Global Startup Report. Thanks again to Khalil Zahard-Fayekam for joining us today. Awesome, awesome discussion. Tune in next week.

We'll be back.

I'll be here in my quiet studio, not sitting in a university in Houston or in the noisy confinements of a South by Southwest event venue where I have no special guests. We'll talk about some great news coming on. As always, if you're looking to join an upcoming FI program wherever you are, we have over like 4 or 5 dozen active cities recruiting right now. Head on over to fi.co/join and start that process. You know, it's a simple application, takes— doesn't take too long at all. You have a little assessment you have to take after that. But head on over to fi.co/join, check out an online— we're doing everything virtual still, a little bit of hybrid programming these days. As you can see with what we're doing here in Texas, we're starting to shift a little bit into some in-person stuff, but you can still take all of our core programs online. So head on over to there, fi.co/join, see if there is a chapter active in your city or close to you. And head on over. We're also recording everybody in Texas, so if you are in Texas right now looking to join any of our summer programs, you can do the same. So for all of us here at FII Land, we hope you find you well, safe. Take care of yourself, take care of each other, build the thing in the community of yours that you want to see reality, solve that problem, and don't, and don't stop. So we'll see y'all next time. Have a great weekend.