Innovation for Disaster Impact Mitigation, with Lifeboat Ventures

Welcome everybody. Hello, hello. I can see there's at least a couple attendees starting to join us right now. My name is Dustin Betz. I am the content editor at the Founder Institute. The Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We've helped launch over 4,500 companies across 200 cities all around the world on all 6 continents. Very briefly, if you're interested in learning more about the Foundry Institute, we are currently accepting applications for virtual-first accelerator programs in more than 50 cities around the world. And you can see that full list at fi.co/enrolling. With that kind of taken care of, the topic for today is gonna be disaster risk mitigation. Natural disasters are becoming increasingly more common, Many extreme weather events, now global pandemics. These are things that are now familiar, um, for better or for worse, to almost everybody who's alive today. Um, our featured guest today to present on this topic is Gopi Mittal. He is the general partner at Lifeboat Ventures, uh, founded in just May of this year. Lifeboat is proposing to use the venture studio model to fund entrepreneurs whose ideas can help humanity to adapt to the new normals of 21st century life. Gopi is also the director of the Chennai Founder Institute chapter, a position that he's held since 2015. Gopi Patel is the founder and CEO of MaxBlocks, an application development platform, as well as of StellarStone, which is an enterprise incentives management company. He's also an advisor at Pepperdine's Graziado Business School, and he's a contributor to thestreet.com Gopi Mittal, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much, Dustin, for inviting me to present. I really appreciate it. And let me get started. So as Dustin mentioned, I have backgrounds in startups, about 20-plus, 25-plus years of very detailed, in-depth startup experience, as well as mentoring and coaching and advising startups over the last 5 years as part of Founder Institute's network. And, you know, in addition to that, I actually today run a couple of businesses employing about 90 people around the globe. So I actually have a very good operational experience of what it takes to run a business.

Different examples, and then we're going to talk about the role that you're building through your new— and we're queuing them throughout the presentation, and we'll get to your questions first during the live Q&A. Take it away from here and get started.

Absolutely, no problem at all. So I want to share with you what has brought me to start Lifeboat Ventures. Some of these events I'm going to go through will be familiar to many in the audience. If you remember, in 2011, we had the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. It happened because as an effect of a tsunami that hit Japan. And what was interesting was kind of the impact of that. So it was not foreseen, it happened. There were many supply chain-related businesses that got disrupted during the process, but there was this one very significant example where there was a subsidiary of Mitsubishi that made an epoxy resin that was used in printed circuit boards, and that was the only supplier in the world to provide that little small component. And because of that, the entire iPad production was impacted dramatically. And so you can see that sort of that, you know, for the want of a nail, the war was lost kind of problems happening as, you know, things happen in one place because of a disaster, all affecting the sales of one of the largest companies in the world. So that was like one of the initial events that got a lot of play as we were looking at it. And that was the start. But then after that, we had a more personal experience. I actually live near San Francisco, but part of my enterprise application companies are actually located in the Philippines and in Chennai, India. And I go to Chennai once a year. And in, in 2015, uh, when I was there, uh, we had a really big storm. And, uh, I was actually staying at a hotel and working from there, even though I have family there. Uh, and, and what happened was that the streets were flooded. And you can see the picture on the right side of the level of flooding that was throughout the city. But it was such a broad level of flooding that Even large spaces like airports were flooded. And then the hotel that I was staying in, in a couple of days, I lost power, which was shocking to me because it was a 5-star hotel. They have the battery backups, the generators, and so on. So I went and explored as to what happened. And what you find out is that, yes, they have all of that, but they couldn't get fuel for the generators because all the streets were flooded. And so we couldn't have that facility actually, even though you had all the investments, it wouldn't work, but it wasn't just the hotels. Hospitals also had the same structures, right? And they had generators and battery backups and so on. And they were also failing and lives were being lost because of that. So that was the start of it, the storm, the floods, and then now we have systems failing. But then the next day we started having mobile phones failing and then the credit card machines wouldn't work. So we were going— and I again was researching as to what happened. The mobile towers that carried cell signals, they obviously didn't have power, but they would have backups that were getting charged by solar power. And because the skies were overcast, they weren't charging anymore. So the entire telecommunication network failed. As a final step, ATMs, which are also using the same networks, also failed. Now, Chennai is a 10 million population city. As a comparison, Norway, the entire country is less than 5 million population, right? This is one, just one city. And it was now highly dependent on ATMs and credit cards to operate. People couldn't even buy food. If they could get outside, right? So the whole cascading effects had gotten down to where money stopped working in a society. So that was a really important epiphany for me that it wasn't just about the disaster. You had to look at all the things that happened afterwards. And finally, we come all the way to today. And this is my staff's experience over the last month. This is—

I just want to cut you off really quick. I think you mean to be sharing your slide deck at this point. I don't know if you started sharing it because we're just practicing kind of still, but it's not— Yeah, sorry.

I thought I did.

Oh, no problem. That's why I just wanted to prompt because I know you have slides on there.

Yeah. Still, this is a good place to share.

Perfect.

OK, so this is within the LAN. How internet over there? Last week, my staff at the Philippines were dealing with Storm Ulysses, and same thing, flooding, no phones. So in the day of remote working, where you don't have all the infrastructure, you are having large amounts of failure all over the globe due to disasters, which affects people's livelihoods and businesses and so on. So on right now. Okay. So this is the kind of reality that we are facing. Let me get to— and, but that's not all of it, right? So we are actually living in a time of constant disasters. You know, you have heard all the names by now. You've known of the Australia fires, you've known of the Amazon fires, You know of the California and Colorado fires. We've had all these hurricanes. I mentioned a couple, but you remember Katrina and Maria in Puerto Rico, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis. They're all happening on a constant basis. But not only that, these may be local, but we now have global disasters starting from 9/11 wars. Then we had a 2008 economic crisis. Than we are living through COVID-19. So it is actually so interesting that it's not— we're not just having one disaster anymore, and it's not like some occasional things. It's happening all the time. But right now in California, we're living through two disasters, COVID-19 and fires. Likewise, in Gulf of Mexico, it's storms and COVID-19, right? So it's a dramatically different It's a different time, not just because of the incidences, but because of intensity. Like what is happening in the world right now is substantially different with the way behaviors are happening. You may have heard of the, you know, create F5-level tornadoes. So where instead of fire moving across the space, it sucks in air and even I predict these fires. Experts are stunned, right? This is the kind of new developments we're dealing with at this point. Okay. So, so what happens due to this, right? This, I talk about the disaster, but I'm really talking about what happens to people, right? Because of COVID-19, you know, This week, right, yesterday or day before, we have had these thousands of cars lining up in Dallas to get food because food banks were giving out food. And this was not the first time. This had happened multiple times during this COVID-19 crisis. People are suffering, right. Supply chains are failing like we saw in the case of Mitsubishi and Apple. People are losing jobs because of COVID-19 and restaurants and stores and tourism. And so the problem is impacting multiple fields. It's very diversified in the areas that we should be looking at, like jobs or housing and health and so on. But it's also countercyclical because these, these area, these solutions actually perform better in these kind of times when other businesses like travel and so on are not. And these problems are not trivial. In addition to great suffering, they cause great damage in terms of money spent on wasted effort. Typically, most disasters have impacted the billions, but trillions are commonly bandied about. For COVID-19, we've spent more than $2 trillion just in the US alone. During the economic crisis, we put in another $2 trillion. Just large amounts of money is being wasted trying to just deal with the problem and all the impacts. So there's a lot of money being wasted, a lot of money that can be optimized here, right. So, and these problems are real problems, right. These are problems that are affecting all of us and I'm living through it and you, all of you are living through it because you're dealing with COVID-19 and jobs and remote work and so on. So what kind of solution are we looking for? You know, there are a lot of levers to pull. To solve this kind of problem. Government is one lever, right, to solve these kinds of problems at scale. They all do this, and every one of them is constrained in some manner. If you look at businesses, they're constrained because they're looking for revenue almost immediately to be able to justify their stock price. So what are the levers that are not— it's not quite is venture capital, right? That's where I am setting up this, I believe, fairly unique thesis where I'm raising this $12 million venture fund to help create disaster impact mitigation startups. They will reduce the impact of constant disasters like the kind I mentioned, but we're going to use a specific model of the venture fund called a venture studio. We will create ideas, validate them, they will be using software, we will recruit knowledgeable entrepreneurs and help them go from idea to exit. Okay, that's really our mission in this area. And there have been examples of good success. So this is an example of a company that's public called Everbridge, and they simply, all they're doing is sending out communications via phone and email and text for emergencies. And they were doing so well that they could actually go public. But not only that, remember the countercyclical portion I mentioned earlier? You can see that between the time COVID-19 was discovered and within 3 months of that, the stock price of that company doubled. Okay, so there's a lot of countercyclical benefit to solving these problems. Okay, and what are the kinds of startups we're looking for, right? We're looking for obviously companies that will create resilience for in these times of disaster, but we're also looking for a few things. We're looking for continuous revenue, not occasional revenue. We're looking for solutions that solve the problems across the globe, We're looking for them to use software because that's one of the special things we can bring to the table. And we are looking for startups that where the trend is really favoring them. Obviously the broader trend of greater, more intense, more frequent disasters is a trend we are riding, but there are other subtrends within that. And we are also looking for startups that can produce revenue, get to revenue within 18 months. So these are some of the criteria we're looking at. And now let me cover a little bit of the Venture Studio model. And it has a long pedigree from the times of Idealab, which is about 30 years ago, but it's fairly unique within venture funds. So in contrast, you can look at the current way venture funds work, right? Venture funds work today, Well, they have about 75% of their startups completely fail and about 25% succeed, but most of the time they return money when they get a unicorn. And even venture funds, the way they operate, only about 50% of the time do they succeed, even venture funds themselves. And why is this happening? Why do these startups fail? And the data shows that it's a very hard problem. right? You take one entrepreneur who knows development or sales, and they may know one discipline like e-commerce or maybe healthcare or something like that, and we say, okay, here's some money and here are some connections, and we're gonna check back with you in a month or a quarter. Okay, go. And this person or this small team has to figure out everything. They have to figure out legal, They have to figure out marketing, they have to figure out accounting, they have to figure out partnerships and channels. So that's the reason for this kind of failure rate, right? So how are we trying to solve this problem? We're gonna use the Venture Studio model, but we're gonna go more in depth into it. What we are going to do is to first work on ideas and then spend some resources and effort and money to validate the idea. We will literally talk to the customers, verify pricing, get letters of intent, and then we recruit entrepreneurs the way VC firms have entrepreneurs in residence. We'll add that to the mix. We will give them a lot of free technology. We will give them a full team of advisors and mentors, and we will give them logic and task plans to be able to execute it. They may choose not to do some of those things, but generally they will know that these are the things you need to get to the endpoint. Okay, so it's, it's a little bit like the, you know, some of you may be aware of the Moneyball, uh, book and approach that was used by, you know, my favorite team, Oakland A's. Um, so, so, and, you know, I, I recommend highly the book and the movie. It's like really trying to look at all of the pieces of the puzzle and see why these things are failing and trying to fix that. And so if you look at just the entrepreneurs, mostly venture capital is like somebody recommends someone or you meet someone in a meetup and you like the way they talk, like the way they pitch, and you like their background, and then you give them money. But we're using a much more quantitative and qualitative way of judging. So we look at Founder Institute graduates, right? We look at, oh, Founder Institute graduates already have gone through a psychometric test. They have already committed themselves for a 14 to 15 week period. They've already gone through the parts that they actually executed the commitment. That's my bar. I want to have that and I want to go from there, right? So now I have a better quality of people right away. So that's the kind of way we choose each of these things. And the other thing is technology is a key part of software, I mean, to startups. Particularly, we are going to be in software. So the problem is that many startups are started by business folks rather than tech people. The tech people just start building and getting out there, but even tech people don't know many of the things I'm going to talk about. To have a compelling solution in the marketplace, in addition to your business logic of solving a particular problem, you're going to need a lot of what I call plumbing, right? You need security and compliance. You need business intelligence and dashboards. You need API and integration, search and workflow, and all of these things. But most startups are not even aware of that. They don't build these things and then they go to the field, you know, enterprise customers. Let's just take one of these things. So on the left, you see all the elements I talked about that I call plumbing, right? And most new applications won't really include these things. But you're now, let's say you're selling to an enterprise. And as soon as you go in there, they'll have a security department and compliance department. And they're gonna check a bunch of stuff. And you may be competing against an incumbent that has resources and already knows these things. You have to encrypt your data. You need audit log of all the changes. You need role and user security. You need to do multi-user authentication over phones. You need to have single sign-on to other applications. You need to be certified in EU, European Union, for GDPR. Which is their data privacy protection. And in the US, in California, it's CCPA. And throughout the US, we have this financial standard called SOC. And if you're in healthcare, you need HIPAA. But the vast majority of startups don't know that, right? This is the kind of thing that kind of breaks companies, especially in the tech industry, right? And so we plan to give this software to our startups for free on day one. We have very sophisticated platform as a service platform that has all of those things built in already. All the plumbing is there, and it has been certified for a large number of these kind of standards. We know even which hosting providers provide those kind of status, and we can integrate right away with many standard applications— accounting, CRM, etc.— which means you have access to their install base, and many authentication systems. And so the startup really has to build only this part, the new application, the business logic, right? So we provide this that no startup is going to be really able to build by themselves. That way, again, we are very, very unique in terms of venture capital because I run the other company and it will provide all this technology. And in addition, we're going to almost on day one provide a full slate of partners at fixed cost to provide a base set of services. You don't have to go figure out who is the lawyer I should be using, which accountant, what software, all of those. They will all be ready. They'll be able to tell you this is what you're going to need to get going and fix it up. There'll be some complex things you may need as a founder, But the basic things, you will be ready so that you can now, as a founder, focus on customer and product. Okay, those are the only things you— we really want you to focus on. Okay, and, uh, so let me cover a little bit about how the funding process would work. We're looking at about 100 ideas in total, and within that, we're gonna pick out through our advisory groups, about 24 of them, we'll spend some money on it to validate them, make sure they are good ideas, there's a market for it, right? Which is, if you remember, was 40% of the failure problem, that there was no market for an idea. Okay? So we would eliminate it right away. Then we would take the founder team, and we're looking at funding 12 companies only, 4 companies per year over 3 years. So we can spend a lot of our own attention on each startup and we'll give them $350,000, right? And we're going to take them over the 18 months to Series A. At Series A, we'll give them another $800,000, help them raise another $2 million. So about $3 million in Series A funding and try to get them to exit. This is sort of the model of us going through the financial portions of the startup. So you can see that we are kind of like Moneyball, thinking through all the steps of how to get a startup to success and provide that sort of entire service set that they, they need, that they may not even know. Okay, so given that, you know, what are the kind of ideas that may work? Like, you know, imagine some of these ideas, right? We have a lot of ideas we're thinking about, but what if this thing existed, right? There has been a solution in the world where to find poachers, there's been an organization where they've used old phones, tied to trees all over a forest, and anytime there's a poacher, like, you know, there's a gunshot fired, it would actually be caught by multiple phones and they can triangulate as to which roads those poachers are likely to take, right? This exists today, but what if you repurposed it, right, and set up a device similar to that that had sound recognition and temperature sensors every square mile in a forest, right? You drop it in some fashion. Now, by picking up those two signals and centralizing it and analyzing it, you can triangulate down to a square mile where the fire is starting, right, which means it can immediately tell people and it's far, far, far easier by scale to stop a fire right at the beginning, right. That kind of idea we would want to fund, okay. That's one sort of idea we're talking about which uses software, right. And here's another idea where we are thinking about. What if, you know, you know stores and restaurants are all closed. Restaurants try to seat people outside, but winter's coming and they cannot even sit outside, and these are super spreader places. What if you could— and we know for many years of technology shows that ultraviolet rays can sterilize viruses and bacteria completely. What if you can put it into a unit that today exists to attach it to your heating and cooling duct system in these commercial enterprises, right? Suddenly every 20 or 30 minutes, all the air is getting fully sterilized, right? And we can even sense if there's viruses there. What if we did something like that, right? We would fund something like that. What if, and, you know, remember I talked about all my staff not being able to work. I want to work. I want my staff to work. I'm willing to pay some money for it. If somebody can give me a kit, I call it a resiliency kit, with a battery, with trickle charging, with solar and wind attached to a satellite phone, I will pay a monthly subscription to make sure every one of my staff members has that available. So that their 2-day shutdowns or storm-related shutdowns or fire-related shutdowns can be reduced. There are ideas like this. There are a lot of ideas, a lot of things. So we really want this ability to build this with founders and create really compelling startups in the world, okay? So my ask today is obviously, you know, as founders, if you're founders, See if these are the kind of ideas that inspire you and you want to solve these things. If not with us, you know, solve it yourself, by yourself, with other firms. Invest in us or connect investors to entrepreneurs. At the end of the day, do something about these intense levels of problems society is facing ahead of us. So that's really my ask of you guys, and I am very interested in answering your questions as they come up.

Yeah.

Okay, got it. I got out of the phone. So this absolutely shows what we are living through, right? I live in a 10,000-person town in the Bay Area. Which is ostensibly the most tech-savvy place in the world.

Yeah. Okay.

This is what we live through. Then remember that resiliency kit I was talking about? There are real problems to solve, right? If you're living through any of these things, we should be looking at these. So sorry, you know, hopefully this stays on, but continue.

Yeah, perfect, perfect. No, absolutely. We were kind of referencing that while you, while you were down and saying that, saying the same thing, that this is sort of an example of it. I guess one question I wanted to move on to, and we have an idea here basically from a founder in the chat, and we'll start queuing these, but this question is from Carlos. He has a company that is related to disaster risk mitigation. He says their program is for abnormal situation automation. And basically he gives his website, auroratech.com.co, and says it's to increase process safety to prevent incidents like Bhopal, B-H-O-P-A-L. I'm not familiar with what that incident was. It looks like you are. Yeah. So at least a couple of founders who are working in this space in the chat. So please don't be shy with your questions. Question is about aligned incentives. I think you have a company that basically does work related to incentives management. A term that gets, you know, bandied about, at least in COVID, is like this idea of, you know, bad incentives. And so I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about creating more aligned incentives for risk mitigation, or, you know, who the stakeholders would be in aligning some of those incentives, or thoughts on startup ideas related to incentives.

Absolutely, yeah. In my day job, in a way, I have been running a incentive compensation management company serving customers across the world, and it is, you know, it's, we, you know, if people have read books like Freakonomics, they will fully understand how critical it is to have the right incentives. So you really want to look at every one of these solutions as not independent. Like, for example, We talked about the fire mitigation idea, right? You immediately have to know that there are billions of dollars being already spent on trying to mitigate things. And there's a 100-year history just in California.

Oh, I can hear you now coming in.

Yep. Okay. So I'll just stay on the phone, just the phone connection as much as possible. I promise you I'm not doing it on purpose just to show you guys this is the problem. This is what is happening. But So just think about the FHIR thing, right? You, let's say you find a great solution and then you go in and then the logging companies decide that if they implemented your thing, they cannot log anymore, right? What is the likelihood of you succeeding now, right? So you really need to use stakeholder mindset and stakeholder models. You have to model all of them and say, what are their problems and how can you help them, right? So that's really, really crucial to get the incentives right for every one of them. And I'll just briefly mention that we have another idea that we're working on called ADU Works, which is basically throughout the US, because of rising rents and construction costs and so on, there is a shortage of housing units. So, many states have passed laws saying, it should be okay to build an extra unit on your property. Okay? And that does— that means no land cost. But to do that, when we modeled it, we looked at government, what it wants, what can we give it. We look— looked at contractors, the builders, what do they want, what can we give them. We looked at homeowners that give the land, what do they want, what can we give them. We looked at renters, what do they want, what can we give them. Etc., right? So you have to look at— and there's one more candidate here, which would be manufacturers if you're doing fast housing. So you have to look at all of them and see how to make sure that you are giving them the incentives to support you and not be your obstacle. Go ahead.

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, Xavier has a question in the chat here, and it's sort of about customers. So he says, you know, the potential clients for some of these ideas could be governments, right, or large national entities, and he's saying, which means, you know, that pool of potential customers could be relatively small. And so Xavier is asking, you know, what would a startup go about in terms of building a business case for these kinds of smaller segments of customers selling B2G or to a super large enterprise? And is there any— how would you assist them? Is there, you know, is there a part of the venture studio model that you want to speak to as far as having these big kind of governments or large entities as customers?

Yeah, so that's part of the whole process of working and putting together a business model. We'll do business model canvas, we'll use stakeholder methodologies, and we'll say, okay, you know, you can do this or you can do this other thing, you know. So for example, one of the things with the COVID-19 sterilizing devices that when we are looking at it, there we had like a couple of options. First, we were going to, you know, first responders as they go to a place where there's COVID-19, even at 99.5% clarity of air, they still get infected because the 0.5% is so much of a load. And they, you know, I think you may have seen this week, 900 people in the Mayo Clinic centers have workers, health workers have tested positive. Right? So, so, so, so they're getting impacted. So we initially said, oh, if we can take their equipment and attach this ultraviolet ray sterilizing, then they will be saved. But that is necessary, but the obstacle to getting that through requires going through the FDA, right? So you go like, oh, okay, so now what about this thing? What are the— so You as a startup has to figure out what are your customer segments. You know, you must still do that, but what is your leading pin? What is the first place you're gonna solve? What are the obstacles there? What is the best one? And remember, as a thesis, we're still trying to get you the revenue within 18 months. So we wanna have that conversation with you and say, okay, if you do this, if you go here, what is your, you know, oh, you have to get a direct sales force, which is harder. But if you go here, there's an existing reseller channel, which is easier, right? So you have to kind of figure it out, and that conversation we will assist you because we're already ready for that, you know, it's— we already have mentors and advisors for that kind of a task.

Yeah, yeah. So the answer to your question, Xavier, is like, yes, you know, this Venture Studio model is like much more hands-on, and because the— it's much harder to have to create that sale as opposed to like a a B2C company or something really simple like an e-commerce sale, like you have to do so much that you really do need that support framework. Yeah, really interesting. I want to ask a question here about finance. Obviously, there's the role of the insurance industry for better or for worse as we know it today. Financial tools are often used as like a hedge against a downside scenario of some sort. Are you looking at all— I know you're very software-focused on solutions that are primarily financial in origin for Lifeboat?

So yeah, we are looking at the insurance industry particularly. Anything that we do, we think is going to make the insurance industry's losses less. If you can reduce the fires, if you can reduce businesses failing because of COVID-19, all of that will help the insurance company. So we initially think of them as obviously investors, in the fund itself, but we also see them as strategic partners to some of these startups. As part of their cycle, it's like, you know, we have to take them like initially we'll get them going, but we want to get second round funding, etc., right? So we'd go and say, hey, you're going to be like doing fires and the companies have stopped writing fire insurance or home insurance in California because of the fires, right? They're avoiding risk, but they're also losing revenue. I can get you there because if we do this this way, this is going to help you, and you do these things, and you say, okay, there are about 40% of California land forests are privately owned. Okay, so then you go to them and say, hey, you know, these people that you want to insure, and they're going to pay a lot of premiums, but I can build a system in, and you require that they implement it. Suddenly it's a win-win for both of them, right? They get more money, et cetera. So there are a lot of things that we can work with insurance particularly. It's probably the industry that's closest to this idea of disaster impact mitigation.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting, yeah, thinking of them as, you know, potential customer or certainly a beneficiary or, you know, their customers, their premiums go down, their beneficiaries, or maybe even the insurance company is the customer. Who implements it, you know, and reduces their clients' premiums that way somehow. Yeah, really, really interesting. Obviously ties closely.

Exactly, exactly.

Question from Amy here in the chat, you know, she says she knows she probably, you know, can't contribute to your fund, but if one could contribute, is there a minimum investment? Are you working— I know you're still closing this first fund. Is it only for institutional investors, or how would that work?

Oh, uh, no, we actually— we're still closing. Our minimum investment is, uh, $60,000, and the $60,000 is a commitment. We are raising it in 3 tranches. So you, you invest 20% only in the beginning, uh, now. In the second year, you'll invest— that'll be $12,000 upfront. In the second year, you put in 30%, which would be about $18,000, and the remaining in the third year. 'Cause again, we are timing it like 4 startups per year, so we can actually invest properly, unlike other venture firms where they kind of try to get all the 20 or 30 companies going immediately. We're more timed this way.

Perfect. We have another audience question. I'm just gonna keep plowing forward 'cause we only have a couple of minutes left, so I wanna try to get to some of the audience questions. This one's from Yachad. He or she is asking, you know, what is the name, I don't know if you said, for a housing company you had mentioned for, I think this is expanding square footage for ADUs. Did you mention a specific company?

Yeah, ADU.Works.

ADU.Works.

Yeah, certainly looking for founders to participate that can really take these things. We have, you know, some of these ideas we really worked on and we think we can But I'm looking for these kinds of folks that go, "Oh, I have some interest, I have some overlap there. I'd like to be part of this group and this team and make it happen." So yes, certainly we're looking at that.

Perfect. Perfect. Yeah, hopefully that answers your question, Yashod. We put it in the chat there. I have a question sort of about human psychology, and I don't know if there's really an answer to it. But I mean, the human brain has evolved to perceive very acute and immediate risks, right? Like people are afraid of snakes and spiders because they can bite you and you can die from them. But they don't really, the human mind isn't super well tuned to think about like these longer term risks. Is there anything that you have to say about that? I guess, I don't know, that's a broad question, but is, you know, does human psychology play into risk mitigation? And is there any way that you're thinking about that at Lifeboat?

Yeah, really interesting thing. There's a lot of research on that. And again, Freakonomics is a great example of, you know, how people assess. But one thing people may know is, you know, people, you know, when you look at car travel and airplane travel, people get into a car without even a second thought, but they're always nervous about, not always, but a lot of them are nervous about getting into a plane. But the data shows that Car travel is a lot more dangerous than plane travel. As a matter of fact, there was a clear experiment that showed that when 9/11 shut down air travel. So people traveled by cars during that one week and they could measure and see that they had 1,000 more deaths because people that would go by plane were actually going by car. So it's more dangerous, but the way our brain works is that I have control I will be safe. I don't have control over the plane. And the other thing is, is this, I don't remember the name of the bias, where you're anchoring yourself to near-term events and cannot, we discount long-term events, right? Which is really what we're dealing with. So, so there are all these complexities. We in the, in the Blackboard Ventures itself, we're not looking at that as much. We're not saying, psychologically, this is the kind of stuff we have to do. But we are looking at, uh, creating community. Like, every one of these ideas is going to help solve some very important problem, and I think there's going to be a lot of people that are going to want to follow, participate, help, etc. If we talk about fires, for example, or COVID-19. So we are wanting our startups to really leverage crowdfunding and other mechanisms to create a community to help them spread their message, help them to bring in more funds, etc., etc. So we're gonna assist in sort of thinking about people as a resource of the startup's journey.

Perfect. I know we have time for at least one more question, maybe two more. Srini is asking in the chat about— I think it might be slightly off— she said earlier you mentioned that 75% of VCs are failing. I think the actual stat was 75% 25% of startups fail, but then what they're asking here is about the venture studio model and how it can create success. And so they're asking if you have any data about the kind of venture studio model or venture studio funds, or maybe just anecdotal examples. You mentioned, I think, like one or two venture studio models that have been successful that we could point to.

Yeah, yeah. IdeaLab is, again, a very established 30-year-old firm that's generated a lot of companies. As a matter of fact, Idealab invented the Google Ads model of raising revenue, and Google wasn't making money, they were just a search engine. They borrowed that, and that's how Google became what it is. So, but much more well-known, uh, venture fund is in Europe called Rocket Internet. A lot of people will know that. And their thesis is very interesting. They simply said, if I see a startup really scaling in the US, we're gonna rapidly create a copy of it over here and we're gonna give it a ton of money. And they have billions of dollars in investment, billions. So it's a very successful venture fund that shows that this can be done. There's some data about success. There's one, Venture studio called Human Ventures. There's a partner there who did analysis and he was— he could show with data from pitchbook and so on that if you compare the venture studio to its like closer similar models like accelerators and incubators, venture studios have less failures and more exits. So clearly even like that. So then generally accelerators tend to have better results than VC firms, just on terms of success and failure. So there's some data for that. Perfect.

Yeah, thanks so much for that. Okay, we have one more audience question I want to get to before we wrap up. So this is Nuno, and he's asking, you know, are you only looking at software-based solutions? I know there were hardware products that you included as potential examples, but are you looking, he says, at physical products? Or any hardware product should have a software component.

We're looking at physical products and software in many cases. A few may be just software, but I think substantial, like for example the FHIR idea will have a physical product. The COVID-19 idea will have a physical product for sure. And even the resiliency kit will have a physical product. As much as possible, we want to reuse existing technologies in new ways. But then wrap it with a kind of software ability to have recurring revenue. Hardware tends to be one-time revenue, and that's not the model we want. We want a long-term model where we have continuous revenue, high CLTV for every customer.

What are any final closing tips for founders who are working on solutions related to impact mitigation, or, you know, where to start, who to reach out to?

Yeah, I would go to like the thesis is good and I think all of us, like, you know, you probably all heard Quibi. Quibi failed after like $1.7 billion raised. And what was it producing? Short-form video. Does the world really need short-form video right now? Right? You know, for $1.7 billion, how many problems could have been solved around the globe? So if you are looking at ideas, whether you work with me or not, please go out and create ideas. There are a lot of problems to solve. All you have to do is to open the newspaper and start reading, right? Solve those kinds of problems, that is my recommendation. The second recommendation is, again, whether we are there or not, understand that startups are an incredibly difficult problem to solve. It really is like climbing Mount Everest. So find a full structure to support you. Accelerators, incubators, venture studios, all of those I think are better ways to start than just directly going and saying, "I know, give me some money, let me get going." So that would be my second recommendation.

Perfect. I think that's all really, really great advice. We're gonna kind of bring this to a close here. I wanna say thank you again to you, Gopi Mittal, for joining us today and speaking on this topic, and thank you, for working through the technical difficulties along the way. Everybody who's here right now or who signed up for this event will receive a copy of this video in their email over the next couple days. And everybody out there, stay safe, stay healthy, and work on ideas that matter.

I appreciate it. Thanks, Justin.

All right, take care. Bye.