How Torrey Smith and Charlotte Aschim Went from Being Full-Time Employees to Startup Founders

I sketched logos of my company's logo. I sketched it for 4 years before I actually united a team and, and figured out how to, how to launch the company. And so imagine all those years wasted.

If you're just joining, this is From Employee to Entrepreneur. Transitioning from an employee to an entrepreneur can seem daunting. It's filled with hesitation and fear of leaving your comfort zone. So tonight we're going to hear from the Founder Institute alumni, um, well, alumni and alumnus, um, who've successfully made the leap into becoming a founder. So you'll discover their journey and how it impacted their lives, um, how they navigated the financial and just emotional challenges that come with being a founder. And then don't miss the opportunity, um, to actually ask questions directly to them. So again, you can put them in the Q&A. And so as I'm about to introduce them, our first guest, I think they're coming in right now, perfect. Our first is actually a graduate from Oslo chapter in 2018. He's the CEO and co-founder of Total Control, a global retail innovator that redefines grocery retail by optimizing operations, reducing costs, combatting food waste. Since late 2017, she's propelled Total Control to top industry rankings alongside giants like Amazon and Walmart just in a short 5-year period. She's an inspiring food waste changemaker in Europe with a personal invite from the Crown Prince of Norway for her societal contributions. She holds a distinction of being Norway's first food mentor. Fantastic. Please put your hands together for Charlotte Austin. And then our other panelist is a graduate from Silicon Valley Chapter in 2019. He's an aerospace engineering graduate from Cal Poly with 17 years experience in medical device design. He's also the CEO and co-founder of one of the coolest companies on planet Earth, NDX. Which is a pill bot. So it's a pill, and he'll talk about it, that you basically, if you've ever seen Innerspace, it may date a lot of people here, but if you've ever seen it, basically it's where they take a spaceship and they swallow it, and then it goes through the whole human body. But the camera will enable 220+ million people around the world to get quick, easy endoscopies At Home. And quick cool fact, he's also a Burner. So if you've ever been to Burning Man, we'll get him to talk about it, but he's done one of the coolest art projects in Burning Man history, and it's actually traveled around the world. Please put your hands together for Torrey Smith. Awesome. Okay, I think we're all good. Aon, if there's anything that we need to know, you can just ping me. So maybe just a quick introduction for the two of you. We'll maybe start with, with Charlotte in terms of just your background and I mean really how you got into doing what you do.

Sure. So let me just double-check that I don't have any problems with my Bluetooth, but Just a short introduction into me. So by education, I am— I have a master's within land management. I've worked since the age of 12 in anything from grocery stores, uh, Can we hear you?

Yeah, we hear you. Charlotte, are you there? Okay, maybe she's having Bluetooth issues, so we'll, um, just for a second, we'll jump over to Tori. So Tori, um, it's funny because I've seen you in a suit fundraising off of major venture capitalists. And then I've also seen pictures of you at Burning Man in a completely not a suit. So maybe a bit of your background and what got you into aerospace engineering.

Absolutely. Well, thanks, Jordan. Super grateful to be here with FI. Thanks, Eihan, for organizing. And thank you, Charlotte, for joining me. Uh, so my background is basically just your stereotypical American dream story. Uh, I was born in a little dirt floor cabin in the mountains that my dad built, and, uh, he delivered me, uh, ditched my mom to go, uh, hang gliding. She hitchhiked down to town, weighed me in produce. I was about 8 pounds. And I went on to become an aerospace engineer because I like to do cool stuff and I went out and got a job, and that was interesting. But I discovered Burning Man, and that was really a place where I learned how to become ambitious in a new kind of a way and really start to build teams. And then with Founder Institute, I was able to finally rip the band-aid off and sort of transition from employee to founder, or co-founder in my case. And so I'm really excited to be here today or this evening to basically just speak to the prospective founders out there. I sketched logos of my company's logo. I sketched it for 4 years before I actually united a team and figured out how to launch the company. And so imagine all those years wasted, right? So yeah, I just want to sort of share a little bit of the adventure, the good, the bad, the ugly. And encourage others who are really serious to do the same.

Awesome. And Charlotte, did we get your audio back up? Maybe not yet. Okay, so maybe just while we figure out Charlotte's audio, then we'll start with an interview with Tori then in the interim. So NDx Innovation have a tiny camera and a pill that has the potential to basically revolutionize healthcare for millions worldwide. What led to this groundbreaking technology, and how do you envision it impacting the future of medical diagnostics?

Well, I mean, honestly, you know, you nailed it when you said the movie Innerspace or Fantastic Voyage. We have been reading and hearing about the concept of micro robotic medicine in the body ever since we heard about nanobots or nanites. As Richard Feynman said, you know, there's plenty of room at the bottom. There's a whole universe to explore in the human body. But the thing that was kind of frustrating was like no one seemed to be really doing it in a tangible way. And so our mission at Endyotix is to basically show that you can start this adventure in a very tangible way in the human stomach, right? So we are basically making a little swimming drone that gives a live video feed to a doctor anywhere in the world. It's really inexpensive. It's like $50 to build one of these. The whole idea is let's make it easy for the world's doctors to look inside your stomach and figure out why you have a tummy ache and kind of hope that that starts a market category where people take these robots and do more with them. Go even smaller and, you know, hopefully go to other parts of the body. You know, I hope to see people doing brain surgery with this kind of tech before too long. But Founder Institute really helped me to understand the business side of things as well. And it was amazing to learn about the giant untapped market in the human stomach. There's a lot of good that we can do right there with the first product.

So maybe that's a good segue into, you know, you're a graduate of Founder Institute Silicon Valley. You know, what valuable insights did you learn from just going through an accelerator? And, you know, the overall experience in the program and really how it shaped you as you are CEO today?

Founder Institute, obviously, I think for me, it's going to be one of the seminal moments in my life, which was applying for, barely getting in, and then really engaging at Founder Institute. Because like many people, I have most of the challenges that a typical founder would have. You know, you look in the mirror and you have imposter syndrome. You don't really necessarily see yourself as, as good as you wish you were. Founder Institute helps you with all of that. Founder Institute basically takes you as Someone off the street, maybe someone with a job, someone with an idea. That basically means just about anyone, right? Founder Institute then helps you to see in yourself an actual founder. And then it basically gives you homework week by week where your homework assignment one week might be incorporate your company as a Delaware C, or you're kicked out of the program. You're like, wow, that's pretty serious homework. I remember one of my Founder Institute homework assignments was quit your job this week or you're out, you're out of the program. One of my favorite Founder Institute assignments in Funding Lab is sort of the, one of the phases that came after that, the first program was raise $100,000 this week or you're out. And the funny thing is, although those sound like preposterous, crazy things that, that, you know, to a normal person with a day job almost seem impossible, they were really just the next logical step in the homework that you had been doing in the weeks leading up to it. And so basically, if you truly believe in your idea, then Founder Institute is a really good example of a community that can basically help you step by step make it real.

Yeah, the— so you're in hardware. And they call it hardware for a reason, because it's hard. And not only that, like, it's, it's not like you're doing regular hardware. You're doing arguably the most hard hardware you can possibly do, something that no one's ever done before. I can only imagine that putting machines into your body for the first time is pretty stress-inducing. So, you know, developing IndiOX with like a pill that goes in your body that you're taking most of the time. You know, maybe just take us through that technical and logistical journey, the challenges involved in it.

Well, it's interesting, you know, I see my notebook, so I might as well grab the thing. I actually have— I have all my notebooks from this experience and Here we go. Here's what you need to start Endiotix. You need a notebook and some sketches of robots, right? So that's what we started Endiotix with, was sketches and ideas. We were just a couple of friends who wanted to make a go at it. So we start Founder Institute and very quickly it becomes apparent that we need to build what we're talking about. And we only had about $5,000 on the founding team that we could spend. And so we bought a 3D printer, a liquid resin 3D printer for like $3,000, pretty nice one. And we were able to start printing the hardware for what we call the PoolBot, which has these little propellers. It's like a quadcopter that swims. Got some Raspberry Pi electronics, right? But we used what we learned at Founder Institute and we used our prototype to raise almost $200,000. And we used that money to then transition away from off-the-shelf electronics. We went a little bit smaller. We did our first circuit board that, you know, actually said Endyotics on it. Didn't raise any money with that. But using a little bit of the money we still had left over after filing a patent and incorporating, we were able to get to thumb size. And this was all in the first year of the company, the first 9 months actually. And basically, once we got to this scale, we really started getting taken more seriously. And it was awesome because we already had a trend line established that our robots get better over time. And so to So to the founders out there, you have to take credit for your humble beginnings because if you can show a trend line in time, that becomes very powerful. And so, you know, that takes us to today. This is the robot that we— I think I've swallowed like 35 robots about this size. And then I even have a smaller one I'm working on. But this one isn't fully functional yet. This is sort of the mainstay. And so what we like to show people is just take the resources that you actually have at that moment, work really hard, create something you're proud of, but then hit stop and take that out on the fundraising circuit, communicate to people, raise some money. If you're serious and your team is strong and you're really committed, pretty much at any moment in your journey, there's probably a cohort of investors willing to listen to you. And that's, that's kind of where you want to lean on your FI, your Founder Institute people, 'cause they're gonna sort of help you to understand who you can go talk to to try to raise money at any given moment in time.

And it's true, you're using a, are you using a, like a video game controller?

Yeah, we use, you know, your typical PS5 or Xbox controller. The crazy thing has been transitioning away from, hardware altogether, right? Like, one of the exciting things is we have the robot. You got to swallow that. It's like $35. We have a little jump drive that has a radio on it, and these two talk. This is the mechanical hardware. That's, that's all the hardware in the company. You just throw it out when you're done with it. Super cheap. The real exciting thing is your phone. The phone already has the rest of what you would need. No need to reinvent that. And what we're trying to offer to the world is, you know, look in a hospital, look at all the headache associated with getting yourself to it, affording it, you know, getting in line for a room or a doctor. Now just dematerialize that whole thing into an app on your phone. I see a huge opportunity here, right? Like, not one order of magnitude, I see like two orders of magnitude of impact where I think we can make really awesome medicine like 100 times more accessible. And that kind of means a lot to me just because we spend like $70 billion on endoscopes every year and maybe 1% of people get an endoscopy in their stomach. It's crazy, right? And so this is where just as a founding, you know, member of the company, I'm just excited to show that you can go to FI with a napkin sketch and actually start to do something real.

Yeah, it's incredible. It's like a drone for your stomach. I love it. Complete with its own app. Okay, maybe I think Charlotte's audio is back on, so we're going to feed over to her. So Charlotte, can you hear us? Hopefully. Can you speak? Charlotte, you there? Okay, we're still having some problems. So we'll come back. I know she restarted and then came back in. So we'll come back to you, Tori, in the interim then. So the, you know, as a CEO and co-founder, you know, you got a million things going on. So how do you balance the technical aspects of developing hardware, which is hard, with the strategic and business aspects of just running a startup and, you know, having to worry about cash flow and cash flow is getting down, so you got to go throw a suit on and go fundraise? Or to your credit, you know, Founder Institute, we hosted Founder X in November of 2022. 3 at Oracle in Silicon Valley. And, you know, you were not only actively fundraising there, but you then hosted like the Saturday party, which I heard was a banger. I couldn't make it. But yeah, how do you manage kind of the two of running a startup and then actually being in a startup?

Well, borrowing, you know, a fun science word, it has to be a bit of a superposition of of a few different traits. So you will obviously need to, on the tech side, represent whatever you're actually building. You know, if you're the big loud mouth for it, you better be doing something compelling to make it real. So for me, I am very proud that I get to, you know, design the shape of Pill Bot and, you know, help it squirt water and move in 3D space. Yay, that's like maybe 5% of our tech stack, But at least I can sort of contribute on the tech side in a meaningful way. The other thing though is filling out the CEO role. So you do need to get into public speaking. You have to give yourself permission to be super scared. Sometimes my heart will be racing before a pitch and I'll be exhibiting the signs of like an oncoming anxiety attack. I just give myself permission to be scared. I say, hey, Tori, it's okay to be scared. It's perfectly appropriate for you to be scared right now. And you know what? No one's out to get you. Just, just get up there and speak from the heart. One important thing, though, is you need to start building your team as early as possible. We have a chief business officer now, Chris Green, who joined us as an investor. And when he joined us full time, it was amazing. Like, he's been with us for more than a year now. And our effectiveness as an executive team are now, is so much more measurable and larger having someone full-time doing the business role. So you do have to build your team, but you will have to be a little bit of a superstar in the beginning doing everything at once. The last thing I wanna say on this topic though is you have to be really careful because early on, You need to be a force of nature, unstoppable, breaking through boundaries, probably, to be a startup CEO. But once you start to have some success and you start to have traction and people start to take you more seriously, you need to be prepared to grow with the role or be ejected from the role, right? So you need to learn how to put on a suit. You need to learn how to let some of that rage go and let some of that passion age nicely. And that can be difficult for founders because as you enter the stage where you have employees, employees are going to have expectations and they're going to have appropriate entitlements to security that you aren't used to having for yourself. And when you enter that stage, you have to realize you should be proud to now be in this new stage, even though sometimes it's going to be frustrating acutely. When you realize that people are getting involved at a very different level than when you started the company. And so the only thing that you can really count on is that every single day is going to be a different flavor of your dream. And hopefully you are savoring that adventure and really being willing to change along with it.

Yeah, and I think it's important to note, yeah, there's nerves when you get on stage and you pitch, but I think your nerves are a little bit more heightened or dampened or ruined, depending on your perspective, because you're literally swallowing a pill a lot of times on stage live, and then someone is controlling the, the bot that's literally going through your body on stage. So I think you've taken it to a whole nother level. So congrats on that. I know it's not easy. So kind of fitting into that, I mean, you kind of gave advice then for for ambitious entrepreneurs, you know, and it is tough. You're managing a lot, and, you know, reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk, paraphrasing, saying that, you know, you can't really expect anyone to work as hard as you, the founder. And so, yeah, I think having realistic expectations for that. I think Charlotte, she's coming on right now, but maybe we'll just do one final question with with you, Tori. So, um, you know, you're a burner, you've been to Burning Man before. A lot of ideas come out of Burning Man. So for example, um, you know, someone I know, Nicholas, uh, Reichenbach, who created Flow Waters— if you've ever had Flow, comes in a little, um, environmentally friendly container, and it's fantastic. It's one of the highest rated waters. But anyways, he came up with the idea of Burning Man. Because he just saw so much water there. But maybe, you know, it's a magical place for a lot of people. A lot of ideas have come out of Burning Man. But there's some photos on the back behind you, you know. Can you please tell us about your art projects at Burning Man? Because they're some of the coolest art projects in Burning Man history.

Sure. Yeah, one of the, one of the things that we're most known for in the Burning Man community is building a very large Tesla coil. That's a machine that Nikola Tesla invented that shoots lightning bolts. And he had this amazing vision to use huge Tesla coils to actually oscillate at the same electrical resonance frequency as the planet Earth, with the whole idea that if you were putting power into one, you could actually pull it out with another one and sort of be a way to transmit power. Without power lines. So really cool, really cool metaphors there. Burning Man is very much a choose-your-own-adventure. I mean, you could go to Burning Man to just have some fun and unwind. A lot of people go there to party and stuff like that. What we discovered in Burning Man though was this huge empty canvas. And along with it about 70,000 or 80,000 people to celebrate whatever you were building on that canvas. And that, it took me a few years actually. I think it was like 6 years into my own Burning Man adventure before I finally had the personal courage to say that back in the normal world in Silicon Valley, I wanted to become a founder of a company. And, you know, it's crazy because in that environment, I was, you know, this like cowboy builder guy with all the confidence in the world. But even then, you know, it was a huge leap of faith for me to then go back to Silicon Valley and figure out how to do endiotics. And, you know, it's not— we shouldn't underestimate the adventure and the leap of faith necessary for many people to actually look in the mirror and say that they can actually pursue their dreams, just because so much of the feedback that you get from your normal life is a restorative feedback that sort of pushes you back into your comfort zone. And so Burning Man to me has been an uncomfort zone that basically helps you to transition from one life to another. So I'm I'm very grateful for it and proud that like this past year I actually paid my chief engineer and got him a ticket so he could attend Burning Man on my behalf.

Best boss ever.

And it was amazing, you know, he made really compelling, amazing friends while he was there that have gone on to become really important connections to the company. So it's funny, you don't necessarily want to be constantly pitching your company. Sometimes you want to just kind of participate and maybe learn something. But I think in an environment where, you know, there are a lot of pressures that make it difficult to launch your company or fund or build your company, if you're having trouble in one arena, make sure you're experimenting with all of the arenas. You know, go to Burning Man, but then go to Dubai. You know, go to a big trade show in Dubai, walk around, go to Abu Dhabi, you might make some friends there. You kind of need to attract serendipity at a high rate if you're a founder. And it's hard to attract serendipity when you're hiding under your blanket in your bedroom. So although I know that situation very well, finding ways to get out into the world is really important.

Yeah, getting out of the building. And I've always kind of found for early-stage startups, You know, a lot of times you think you need to have an exhibit booth, you gotta spend a lot of money, but the reality is, is that even if you have an exhibit booth, you still gotta go work the show and connect with everyone. So the cheapest way to do it is to just get a ticket and to just work the show. Okay, so Charlotte, did we get your audio back up? We can try one more time. No. Okay, I think we're still having issues. So we'll go into Q&A. So for everyone You should see the Q&A tab. So if you want to ask a question, you can just click that and then put it in and then we'll see it. And Aihan's kind of doing some of the moderating here. So I'm just looking for in terms of we got the most upvotes. Okay, here it is.

Perfect.

Okay, so for someone who is in software engineering, making a decent salary, It's very daunting to quit and do a startup full-time without pay. So how do you overcome that?

This is an interesting question. So my same chief engineer now, he's getting— people are trying to snipe him all the time. He's awesome. Quinton Caron, just like crazy artificial intelligence guy. And he— we've been adding it up. He's now turned down more than $1 million per year across a few offers if you add up what the offers were. Would be. And, uh, it's incredible that, that, you know, someone like that would be committed to, to, to your startup. And, and that's amazing. Um, so the question of, you know, how— if you're already making money, how do you start a company? Um, my answer to this, I have to really filter this through a professional filter, right? Uh, because it's a, it's a topic that I get very passionate about. The more comfort you're used to, usually the less resilient you're going to be as a founding team. For me, I really didn't have a lot going for myself launching this company financially. And so I just decided I would have to be fully committed, meaning if we were homeless, I would still be building robots using sticks and twigs under a highway overpass somewhere. And that level of commitment has proved to be really necessary a few times because we have taken the company to zero cash several times. And so your comfort zone is your cage, right? And you might be in a very, like, you might be in a tiny rusty cage and it might suck. So you might want to get out of that cage. But if your cage is $1 million per year, Gosh, that's a padded, awesome, safe, cozy, cushy cage, and you may very well never be able to leave it. So all I recommend is if you're serious about something, you have to start it with whatever you have on you. The less the better, to be honest. When investors are looking at a founding team, The first question they're gonna ask is, is this person gonna quit when it gets hard? And they're gonna look at you, they're gonna look at what you're used to, they're gonna do your background, they're gonna look at what you used to get paid. And if they get the feeling that you're easy to run when things get hard, that's a hard proposition. So yeah, this is an excellent question. And it sort of, it cuts right to the interesting question where, You know, of the people that graduated my cohort, you know, maybe 2 of us are still seriously engaged in our companies. And that's out of hundreds that originally applied. So you have to sort of decide your commitment level. And it's only the people who are the most committed who are going to actually make it happen.

Yeah, it was like the theory of the cockroach, where, you know, the cockroaches that have survived since the Jurassic period, the And you know, you gotta be comfortable with eating Costco hot dogs sometimes. And if you're not, you know, maybe entrepreneurship's not the best for you, or maybe you're privileged to be, you know, self-funded and you can do everything on your own and still live a comfortable lifestyle. Okay, I think that Charlotte's audio is maybe back up and working. Is that right, Charlotte?

Hopefully. You hear me fine?

Yes. Yes.

Amazing. All the way from Oslo, Norway.

I blame the fact that it's 3 AM in Spain. I blame that.

Oh, yes. Oh, you're in Spain, actually?

Yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah, we'll blame it on them for sure. Okay, so what— so we'll take a pause on some of the Q&A right now. We'll ask a couple questions to you, but then we'll bring some from the floor as well. You know, so you've achieved remarkable success. You're ranked among industry giants like Amazon, Walmart. So what inspired you to start kind Total Control? And how did your experience as an employee really prepare you for the challenges of entrepreneurship?

I think just kind of to take you before I started Founder Institute, which was in 2018, and I was part of the first cohort in Oslo, Norway. So when I joined the cohort, I actually had a full-time job. I worked in the construction industry flying drones and building bridges in 3D, but my actual educational background is land management. So I have a master's within that and worked since the age of 12 within anything from like being, working in the kindergarten, a grocery store, restaurant, gas station, you name it, I've tried it, but I've worked a lot within the food industry. So my reason for joining Tolunay, for joining Founder Institute was actually my experience working in grocery stores. And spending a lot of time every single night walking the date-checking rounds. So looking for food that was about to expire or had expired. And at that time, we had to just waste it. So we threw it in the garbage and the money was wasted, the food was wasted, and the time that we spent was wasted. And that was the original idea of Total Control. And from that point our solution has developed, our company has developed, and we've done a lot of great things. And Foundry Institute has been instrumental in kind of the growth of our company. So going from a full-time job, doing something totally different, and no experience from entrepreneurship. So I had to learn everything from both Foundry Institute, YouTube, talking to people, like listening to audiobooks and so on. So It has helped a lot, but taking the leap from a full-time job, a safe kind of salary every month and no risk at all, kind of had achieved everything I wanted in regards to how much I wanted to earn, having an apartment, car, and everything like that. And taking the leap into entrepreneurship where you have zero salary, where there's uncertainty every single day. Uh, was, uh, quite interesting, uh, and I would recommend everybody to do it, but it's hard.

No, it's a great story, and I think that, you know, story's key where it's like, you know, if you're a startup and you're the founder and you're pitching to investors, let's say, um, you know, and let's say they have their LP, uh, sort of like general partner, um, you know, meeting on Mondays and they need to talk about the meeting that they had with you You know, a lot of times that's what they're going to remember is the story because they have to retell your startup story. And so, yeah, you coming from within the grocery store is a great story. Not a great story is I remember working in grocery stores when I was young and some of the guys on shift would bring spoons with them because they would peel open the ice cream and scoop a little bit off the top and then eat it and then reseal it again. So Make sure your ice cream's sealed. Okay, so you're a graduate of Founder Institute OZO 2018. You know, there's lots of valuable insights that you can get from the program. But you know what, for you, what really helped shape your entrepreneurial journey going through Founder Institute?

For me, especially since I didn't have that entrepreneurial background or education, it was just kind of, it was a It was a bootcamp in regards to learning everything. So testing both my idea, if I had the right team, if there was someone that was willing to pay for what we were developing, because our company, Total Control, is developing and selling software, which helps our clients become more efficient, more profitable, and prevent food waste from happening. So One of the things that we had to kind of always test was, okay, are we able to sell this? Are we able to build this? Is this something that could scale? Is this something that people want to invest in? So those areas were fairly unknown for me before Founder Institute. So learning that and getting a lot of advice from experienced mentors helpful, making sure that we were connected to a huge network, global network, which meant that we were able to kind of talk to people around the world that had different experience. Because Norway, where, where we're kind of headquartered, is a pretty small country with 5 million people. So we needed to get some more input from around the world just to make sure that our company and our solution and basically what we were doing is is viable for the market.

We had a question kind of earlier, um, so maybe kind of related to that and asking it to you is, um, you know, the making that leap of faith to be able to go and take a zero salary for oftentimes years, um, you know, what advice would you give to anyone thinking about making that deep faith.

I would say you need to make sure if you have a family or kind of if you have someone that's close to you or lives with you, make sure that they understand that this will be something that will also impact their life. So make sure that you have— you're surrounded by people that understand that this is something different than a 9-to-5 job. You're gonna miss some birthdays, you're gonna work in during holidays, you're gonna kind of have your ups and downs. So make sure that you have the support around you. I think that's important. And I think you have to be realistic, like starting a company, doing something new, something innovative, something that no one else has done before, and trying to make the world a better place or change stuff. It requires a lot of, a lot of grit. You have to be patient. You have to handle the fact that you don't have a lot of money, that you're always short on time, that you will face employee, investor, market challenges. There's going to be a lot of challenges, but the great thing is that there's more ups than there's downs. Even though in times it doesn't feel like it, it's, it's so worth it building something, creating something and being part of changing something for the better and making an impact. So I want to make sure, or I highly advise that you have the passion to withstand all of the ups and the downs. Nobody expected COVID or all of the wars and they all kind of the uncertainty in the world that's going on now. So you have to make sure that you can stick with what you're doing. And so I would say just kind of make sure that you have the patience, the grit, and the support around you.

Yeah, keyword grit. Uh, okay, we have lots of questions, so we're going to get into one right now. Um, so maybe we'll bring this to Charlotte. What's your advice on choosing, finding a co-founder? Um, so you can use an entrepreneurial DNA that can help, but outside that, uh, what's different and similar for choosing, founding or other early engineer teams, example, non-partners?

So in my case, I started the company with my best friend. So I already kind of had a co-founder, so I didn't need to look for someone. But the problem was that just 6 months into the company, she got sick. So basically I've run the company on my own for the last 6 years. And I would suggest having a co-founder because that would help a lot. So make sure that you find someone that is opposite of you, but has the tenacity, has the kind of the work and the moral to go through everything and ups and downs and make sure that they are eager to work, to stay up late, to make sure that things happen and are stable enough to handle all the challenges that comes and are like, are extremely passionate about what you guys are doing. But yeah, I just, if you don't know the person from before, I recommend you guys test your relationship and make sure that you have the legal agreements in place in order to make sure that if If something happens, if somebody gets sick or anything, that, that you have your shares and that you can continue running the company without it being affected.

Yeah, I completely agree. And also, I mean, anytime we've had founder issues, I found bringing in a mediator helps a lot, and creating job descriptions helps a lot so that everyone kind of knows what they're in charge of. So we're going to do another question. Being a software person and not a business person, what first steps need to be taken if you want to convert some crazy idea into a startup? Maybe Tory, we'll bring this one over to you.

Yeah, I mean, you're on the right call for it. Look, you have lots of options, but my first answer is go apply to Founder Institute. Honestly, that, that's exactly what FI is for, is If you are really passionate about something and you're really kind of good at it, or you have some edge to deploy, then Founder Institute will help you figure out, okay, well, how do you build a company around that? Otherwise, to answer your question, I'd have to open up all those notebooks and all my old Google Docs and basically just walk you through line by line what the the program actually does, not for you, but what the program forces you to do for your company.

Yeah, Charlotte, kind of the same advice.

Yeah, great. There's— yeah, I just kind of would agree with what Torre said. Yeah.

Okay, we got one more one. And apparently, it's a good one. And then we're going to transition to kind of the breakout rooms. So last question of the night, how to make our significant one with no business background to be on board with support, supportive with our entrepreneurial plans. So basically, if you have a partner, they're along the ride whether or not you choose it or not, assuming that they're— you're doing it. So maybe for both of you, how do you get them on board?

Um, maybe don't and just keep your day job. Um, like, like, honestly, the only reason I'm here on this call right now is that I literally made a death pact with myself, and I was like, nothing will stand in between me and my dream. Nothing. Literally nothing. Total war. Like in World War II, we were bombing mass civilian population centers. It was outrageous. We don't do that anymore. Now we do selective war. We're like, okay, take out just the military target. If you're gonna be a successful founder, it's more like total war, right? That's why most of our heroes come across like raging psychopaths because it's simply what you're seeing is usually the aftereffects of full commitment to one thing, right? So I now have a son on the way and like for the first time ever in 5 years, I'm like, holy crap, what does this mean for me? And I'm so thankful that now I have this awesome huge team. Like, we're more than 20 people now. You know, it's amazing. And, and the team can, can cover for me if I'm not going to be in all the time. But if you're launching a company and your significant other is not really all in on it, you have to realize that the very next thing a few months from now that you're going to be dealing with is your rent is not paid and you're facing an eviction notice. Like my chief engineer who's turned down $1 million in salary, he's been physically kicked out of his apartment because he didn't pay rent because he joined us. All right, he's been forcefully and illegally evicted and he simply came in sleeping at the office, laughing and talking to us with his beautiful French accent because to him, this is the Silicon Valley adventure he wanted. Right. That's par for the course. Right. So what you probably need to do with a significant other and a family is define some limits of what, what they can expect you'll put up with or what you'll put them through before you call it quits. But just understand that when you define even a single limit, you make yourself very weak in the eyes of an investor. An investor would much rather invest in a founder that they know is so crazy that they'll go to the devil's house for the company. And so that's the hard thing. None of us, not myself, not Charlotte, none of us is entitled to be a founder. Now, I believe that we as humans are absolutely entitled to things like health, opportunity. I would love everyone to have access to education. You know, I would love everyone to basically be able to travel around the world and figure out what they want to do and, you know, kind of go do that thing. But what you're not entitled to be is a rock star. You, you can go buy a ticket and watch a rock star, right? That's 75,000 people in a big arena. All right. 3 people on stage, 25,000 to 1 ratio of employee to founder, right? And that's the question you have to ask yourself, is are you willing to draw a line and say that I'm going to be on one side of this line and 25,000 other people would, would naturally fall into the other side of the line? And then understand that it's going to be 10 different measurements where you have to fall into that category. All of a sudden, a successful founder starts to look like a very weird person. And all it really boils down to is you need to have an idea that you are fuming with passion for, and you need to have the commitment to back it up. But the, the statistics do not just generate a world where you have sort of infinite number of founders and successfully founded companies. It's more like there are ashes, and standing in those ashes, there are a few very interesting people That's great advice.

I think, yeah, Charlotte, from you?

Totally agree. And I would say, like, if you— to convince your significant other, I think one of the things is if you don't follow your passion or your dream, you would, like, die inside. So if that's kind of the case, make sure that that's communicated to your significant other. Because continue, if just in my case, if I would continue working 9 to 5, I would say I wouldn't live my dream. Even though the dream is hard to achieve, I wouldn't feel happy. I wouldn't, wouldn't stay up to 3 AM in the morning to do what I love and talk to people that do the same and inspire and kind of are on the same journey. Um, I think you need to kind of do a reality check with your significant other in regards to what it entails. Maybe create a business plan, uh, saying that if it doesn't work within the next, the next 2 years, then you will quit that journey. Uh, if you don't see an income in the business and so on, or do something that makes them feel somewhat secure, but I think the best, best advice is just tell them that this is something that you really wanna do because this is your dream and you don't wanna continue in a, in a place where you're unhappy. So yeah, take the leap.

Yeah. And I would just add, I mean, what I've seen work well is like ultimate ultimatums. So it's like, you know, we have to achieve this milestone by this date. You know, and by not having, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says, not having a Plan B, you know, it forces you to put yourself in awkward situations and take things where they shouldn't normally go. But I think it's just on a sobering note before we kind of wrap things up here, you know, all founders eventually should be planning to have an exit. But, um, but you know, the worst type of exit is, um, you know, harming yourself through this process. So that's why it's important to have partners, um, whether or not it's in life or whether or not it's in business, to be able to hold you accountable, um, but to support you and pick you up. Um, because there's, um, you know, it's a very lonely journey, full transparency. And, um, you know, it's really important to have that support network because I think we've all known founders who have chosen different routes to end things. And it's just, it's unfortunate and it's part of the journey. So yeah, you need support within the community. And that's why we created Founder Institute in a lot of ways to be able to create that support. So thanks to everyone, huge round of applause. Thanks to Charlotte and Tori for joining us. They're gonna stick around hopefully. So we're gonna break out from this. We're gonna go into the breakout rooms. You'll see tables so you can jump into those tables. Huge thanks to Aihan for getting up early to help moderate this. It's been a huge joy. In the last minute or 2 minutes before we go, I'll hand it over to you first, Tori. Tori, is there anything that you need help with? Are you hiring? Are you looking for investors? Really quickly, this camera, this camera, this camera. Is there something you need help with?

Yeah, I mean, it's an exciting time. We are about to enter clinical trials with PillBot. I think I just swallowed my 35th, but that doesn't count. So we're going to New Zealand and we're gonna be entering finally, you know, the Series A phase of the company. We're kind of leaving the ground floor stage. Absolutely looking for investors interested in that. And we are hiring, right? We're hiring very passionate, fiercely intelligent individuals that want to make robot pills real and then want to take them beyond the stomach.

Awesome. And for you, Charlotte, anything you need help with? Anything you're promoting? Are you hiring? Are you fundraising?

I need help with so many things. No. So one of the things with Total Control is that we're stepping into the commercial stage of our company. Now. So we've been testing the market for a while. And we are also part of a big EU project to make sure that we ensure transparent— transparency within the food industry from farm to fork. So we're basically looking for hotel groups and restaurant groups as our pilot customers in those projects. And I would recommend everybody in this session also to check out our website or LinkedIn and see how how our solution and system works and more about our story and how they can get involved. And that's basically it. Just spread the word. I'm happy to share more and just connect me. I also have my, my Calendly link on my LinkedIn if you want to chat or see any, any opportunities that match with Total Control. And I just wanted to also end on a high note in regards to there's been a lot of talk about the challenges of entrepreneurship, but it's a heck of a lot of fun. So it's well worth it.

Totally. Yeah, you get to be your own boss, you get to make your own hours, usually long hours, but it's still rewarding for sure. And there's something to be said about creating something larger than yourself that ideally can carry on, you know, without you if you become a chair of the board or whatever, step away from the company you have a liquidation event. Just one quick follow-up, Charlotte. So you're looking for pilots where— maybe I missed it specifically— where were you looking for pilots?

Also, for the EU project, we were looking for European pilots, but for our commercial scaling now, we're looking for clients globally. So if you're a hotel group or a restaurant group, mid-sized meaning having 5 to 15 locations in your, your chain or your group, that's our target market. And you're, if you're looking to save time, prevent food waste, and, and make more money, then you're our ideal customer.

Awesome. Okay, thank you so much. So we're going to break out into the breakout rooms and we'll see you over there. So thank you again and talk to you soon.