Veteran's Online Demo Day (Dec 5, 2017)

Alright, we're coming at you live from the heart of Silicon Valley at Founder Institute global headquarters here in Palo Alto, California. My name is Ryan Micheletti. I'm Director of Global Operations for the Founder Institute, and I'm also the co-founder of VetTech. As you may know, Founder Institute is the world's largest early-stage startup accelerator. We've helped create over 2,500 companies in over 150 cities around the world with a mentor network of 9,000 mentors globally. And so tonight we have a very, very exciting event for you. This is our first annual online veteran demo day where we have 5 top veteran entrepreneurs pitching our panel of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. And so what I really like about the event tonight is our goal for tonight is to have the entire veteran entrepreneur ecosystem tune in live with some really great supporting partners from Patriot Bootcamp to The Bunker to VetAid, VetTech, and Founder Institute. And so what I'd like to do now is tune into the Silicon Valley VCs, both Christine Herren and Larsen Jensen, to give a quick background about themselves, and then we'll jump right into the pitches. So Christine, why don't you give a quick background on yourself and what you do over Intel's diversity fund.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm director of Intel Capital. Been there close to 7 years. And about a year and a half ago, I stepped in as the leadership for our diversity fund, which we did some expansion on this past year. So we did expand that to target not only women and minorities, but also folks that we would expect to see in the room but aren't in the room often when it comes to startups and One of those groups is US military veterans. And I do know there are a lot of resources out there, so I'm very excited that this platform is getting started and happy to be here for today.

Awesome. Thank you, Christine. Next, I'd like to introduce my friend, Larson Jensen, Navy SEAL and Silicon Valley venture capitalist over at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Larson, why don't you take it away?

Hey, thanks.

I really appreciate the time here and for you guys having me on board. So again, my name is Larson Jensen. I'm a partner over at Lightspeed Venture Partners. I focus on the enterprise team here. My background is a military veteran. As I mentioned, I was a SEAL for 6 years before making the move up here to Silicon Valley and being part of this inspiring ecosystem. So really excited to see the pitches here tonight and encourage more veterans to pursue a career in entrepreneurship and innovation here in Silicon Valley and around the country.

All right. Thank you, Larson. So first off, I'd like to add some context and ground rules for tonight. So each veteran entrepreneur will have 3 minutes to pitch their company, and the panel will have about 2 minutes of Q&A and feedback. And naturally, these things kind of tend to go over a little bit, so I'll be trying to keep a tight ship and make sure that we rotate on time. So, and then throughout the evening, I'll be making some special announcements, and while the judges are picking the winner, we'll announce some prizes that we'll be giving away in 2018. So, first for tonight is a friend and fellow U.S. Army veteran, Ronald Steptoe. He's the CEO of Warrior Centric Health, and Warrior Centric Health is helping the private healthcare sector provide higher levels of service when treating military veterans in their care. So Ronald, why don't you turn on your slides and say hello?

How you doing, Brian? It's a pleasure. Let me get the slides up and running and get them turned on for you guys. Give me a quick sec. We are all set here. Screen. Ready to share with you guys. Ready to roll?

All right, ready to roll. Awesome. You're on.

All right, so ready for me to go?

Yeah, turn on your slides and then we'll, we'll look at the deck.

All right, great. You can't see them now, right?

No, not yet.

One quick second, try to get All right, there you go.

Take it away.

Awesome. My company, Warriors in Hotels, is developing veteran education and data solutions for hospital staff, unlocking a $300 billion veteran healthcare marketplace for private hospitals. You see, the problem with the private healthcare sector is that they're neither aware or prepared to serve the unique healthcare needs of veterans. Over 70% of veterans actually get their care in the commercial healthcare sector with private hospitals, not by the Department of Veterans Affairs. What this means is that there are actually over 2 million healthcare providers, 5,000 hospitals, and 25,000 clinics that do not have the education or care to address unique needs that veterans sometimes find themselves suffering from. What this will lead to is, unfortunately, improper care, hospitals losing money, and patients not getting the care they need. However, with the proper education and data, hospitals are able to provide the proper care, timely diagnosis, allowing them to make money, stay in business, and also provide the ultimate care to veterans and their families. The Warrior Center of Health solution Again, it's accredited education that allows for hospital staff to, again, be trained and made aware, therefore minimizing misdiagnosis, underdiagnosis, and undiagnosis of conditions that veterans, again, find themselves disproportionately suffering from. Additionally, our data allows for hospitals to actually geo-target in their local marketplaces conditions that veterans may be predisposed to and allows those hospitals to bring their best practices into play to optimize care for veterans and their families, thus improving care and increasing the opportunity to increase revenues to hospitals. Again, with no funding, very minimal funding, bootstrapping, we've already been able to create a pipeline of about $221 million in pipeline potential contract value. We've actually launched the company in 2016 with the acquisition of the R&D assets of the SEPTA Group, We actually signed contract and have been fully paid by one of the largest healthcare systems in Pennsylvania, $110,000. We've been recognized by the American Hospital Association as the member of the year, and we're presently in contract negotiations for $2.4 million worth of contract revenue that we expect to cash flow in Q1 of 2018 with two of the nation's largest healthcare systems. Again, the market opportunity is fairly large, as you can see here, by hospitals, clinics, and healthcare providers in the marketplace. This represents what the Glorious SuperHealth platform is about, a $1 billion marketplace, of which we anticipate having 10% market share within about 3 years. Again, the business model allows for this $1 billion marketplace to expand through our B2B2C platform as we again execute on creating centers of excellence and community practice. As you can see from our financials, they're very strong in their projections, but they're very strong in the dot. So the Warrior-Secret Health team again is committed and motivated, and only that commitment is only surpassed by our commitment and skill sets in ensuring that our veteran population get the care that they deserve, but those who have fallen to battle. Join us. Join our team. Our current investment round is $1.5 million in convertible debt, of which we've already raised $400,000. I look forward to addressing any questions that you may have.

All right. Thank you, Ronald. Uh, Larson, Let's start with you. Q&A and feedback.

Awesome. I really appreciate this. So Ronald, first from a Q&A perspective, can you describe again exactly what your product function does and like walk me through sort of the user journey of the product, I guess is my first question.

Yes, yes, I can. So the product is actually a solution, if you will, is a combination platforms. It is the education itself. It is the market data. And what hospitals are really looking for is the recognition. You're probably familiar with hospitals that, uh, what we call the Nurse Magnet Program, which are known for having the best in nursing care. Imagine hospitals that now are known for having employer-centered health qualifications, if you will. But those qualifications, again, are measured through our education platform that we have in reference to continuing medical education, as well as the data and also an assessment of the hospital and their staff and what they know and what they don't know. And it's all put together into a credential platform that provides the hospital with the credential. So hospitals are interested in the credential, but they're looking at forward-facing markets, but there are a lot of backend platforms that are running behind that credential.

Got it. Uh, so from my, uh, knuckle-dragger time, uh, on the ground, I like to think about things from like their simple, simple simplest perspective possible. So it seems like you guys are essentially selling the training for them to be certified as being able to take care of veterans based on the process that you guys put in place.

Is that correct? Absolutely.

Okay.

And who would you guys say is your most desperate user? I mean, it's obvious that there's a lot of potential users here. And oftentimes we see that that's the problem with startups is they have like too many opportunities seemingly. And really where, you know, what makes or breaks a lot of these companies is that pure focus in the early days. So if you had to segment and say, this is the one segment of all these hospital systems we're gonna go for, like, what is that?

Yeah, the segment, quite frankly, would be hospitals that are interested in Veterans Choice. As you know, there are many hospitals that are basically, um, looking to outsource a lot of their care to the community. Many of these hospitals, again, don't necessarily have the training for the unique needs of veterans. So we are actually in contract negotiations with several companies now that want to have themselves upskilled. There's very few, if any, products in the market that allows them to do that at scale.

Got it. Last thing, sort of piece of feedback, a thing to think about, and you may know it, is, you know, what, what is the total market size of those hospitals that are part of the Veterans Choice Organization or interested in being part of it? It sounds like this— what your product is offering is something that's a competitive differentiator, uh, for those potential hospitals. So just understanding that's your, like, target market and that's where you're going to build critical mass before you do anything else, I think would really, uh, come through positively in your pitch.

Appreciate that very much. Of course.

All right, Christine, question for you. Christine, you there?

I'm here, but I'm on mute, of course. So, uh, let's say, uh, make it brief. So there's a lot going on in the current administration around veteran healthcare. There's a lot of regulation about who's going to provide it, how it's going to be reimbursed, things like that. So I don't know the answer to how this is going to get worked around, but I would I would not assume that that regulation would not touch your services in some way. So, I'd like to know what's your point of view on, you know, any risk factors there or how you're managing that. And in particular, also interested— this is a different type of regulation— you know, what data hospitals are getting from you and how they're getting that data, you know, where you're getting that data, and what— if there were dependencies you might have around being able to deliver the information that these folks need provide their services?

Actually, I think I understand your question. Thank you very much for it. So a few things. Number one, when we look at the hospitals and records regulations, as I mentioned before, 70% of veterans aren't being seen in the Department of Veterans Affairs. So we do have a platform that allows for hospitals that are looking for market differentiation, especially as they move into areas of population health. So many of the hospitals, again, feel that we're working to exceed what veterans in the marketplace for them to go after, irrespective of Veterans Choice. So again, we have two pathways of which to move. The path of least resistance, obviously, would be Veterans Choice, but many hospitals are coming on board with the other 70%. As it relates to our data, what's very, very important is that many hospitals don't even know that they're seeing veterans. Only 57% of hospitals have been asked the question, "Have you served?" So they have a vulnerability right now as it relates to patients that they're seeing that they're not understanding some of the conditions that we predispose to, and that becomes a risk for hospitals not having that information. And so our data, which is aggregated from multiple sources that we have, over 128 million lines and cells of data, allows for us to pinpoint people from geographic perspective, allowing hospitals to know exactly who's in their marketplace, what their disposition— predisposition may be, and how they align their services, for example, cardiovascular, orthopedic, to align with where their gap in service may exist.

All right. Thank you, Ron. Thank you, Christine and Larsen. And we'll continue on with the pitches. So next up is Alex Peterson, US Air Force veteran, and his co-founder and CEO, Nick Mastronardi. You are the co-founders of Polco, which is a civic engagement tool that helps local municipalities make informed decisions using data science. Why don't you guys take it away? Hey there.

Hey, Ryan. Thanks, everybody. I'm gonna go ahead and flip over to the slides. Ryan, can you let me know when you guys have them?

All right.

Do you see the slides?

Yep.

Awesome.

Now go ahead and take it away.

Great.

So I'm Alex here with Nick, and we're the co-founders of Polco, a civic communication company that's changing how representatives and their constituents communicate. So this is town hall meetings in America, and everyone from local governments to state and federal Our representatives are relying on these events, and they're actually often the primary means of communication feedback. And unfortunately, they're terrible forums for that. Officials will know how these two angry people feel, but they don't know if it's representative of everyone else. And to supplement their understanding, most are actually relying on outdated technologies like phone calls and even postcard mailers. Every once in a while, we see some that are using email or social media or expensive polls, but those rarely work. And the result is that Decision makers don't get good information or feedback, the squeaky wheels get their way, and the quality of decision suffers. The good news is that we're changing that. So at Polco, we license the platform to local governments and other customers for them to get reliable, insightful data on what their constituents think. The way it works is customers post questions and start discussions on our platform. They share those through all their communication channels as well as Polco's existing user base, and then they receive reliable data in return on those responses. So the key is that we verify the identity of all of our users with publicly available data. We anonymize the results and the comments and then display everything back in insightful dashboards that can be broken down by things like age, gender, district, ward, whatever it is the decision maker needs to make an informed decision. Things have been going well so far. So we're currently in about 30 municipalities, have significantly increased both customers and revenue since the spring. And we're in the middle of a $2 million fundraising round to scale to scale our municipal sales and begin to push into other complementary customer segments. We monetize the product by licensing it on an annual basis to our customers, and those price points can range from $1,000 up to about $25,000 a year, and that just depends on target audience size and the features that they need. Of note, the price points were determined for municipalities so that they could stay below RFP thresholds and make contracting quick. All of this is driving towards a pretty large market. It's over $70 billion in total. We've deliberately chosen to begin with the municipal segment for reliable revenue, user acquisition, and in general brand awareness. And with 90,000 local governments, it's a pretty sizable market in its own right. But the beauty of the product is how widely applicable it is. So many of the complementary segments are actually higher value and higher margin, and we've already had traction in several of those categories. So I want to touch quickly on how that application and complementary segments actually answers a question that we often get, which is, how do you scale this? How do you scale in the public sector, in the government space? So we've established strong product-market fit and continue to grow our municipal customers at a good pace. And now we're adding in some accelerants. And so specifically, one of those is growing our user base. So currently, our sales and onboarding flow involves helping our customers get their own users for us. And believe it or not, they're actually glad to do that. We recognize the power of kind of growing the user base ahead of new leads. So the most attractive opportunity to do that is actually state and federal representatives. They deliver reach, users, and recognition, and they also deliver some serious revenue. So at the federal level, legislators actually have built-in budgets of $500,000 per legislator they can use to engage constituents called the franking budgets. Then there's campaigns and media organizations as well. So again, we've kind of intentionally put a foothold in this stable predictable municipal market, and we'll continue to focus on that. But the key to growth and scale is right here with what you see in these complementary markets as well. So real quick about us, Nick and I met while we were teaching at the Air Force Academy. He was teaching econ, I was teaching political science, and we both kind of had a love for tech. We actually had a brief hiatus from each other. He was at Amazon, I was at Google, but we came back together when we realized we had both the technology and a fantastic market opportunity with Polco. And I will stop there. Happy to answer any questions.

All right. Thank you so much. That was great. First, Christine, let's go to you.

Okay.

So, a couple of questions. One is, what's happening with, you know, the user relationships and, you know, folks who are sort of responsible, they are verifying that they're in someone's district. You know, do you own those relationships? If they move to a different district, do you— Do you own that relationship? Can you share that relationship for, you know, among different politicians that might be relevant for that particular voter? And then, want to understand to what extent you've got, you know, sort of cycles that are related to campaign cycles. So, are you going to have a year of pretty revenue and then a year of terrible revenue just because it was a campaign year versus not a campaign year and so forth? But that does happen often.

Sure, Christine, we got the second part about the cyclical nature of campaigns. Can you talk a little bit about— just elaborate on the first point? It was cutting out a little bit.

It sounds like we may be getting some feedback. Sorry, Christine. Go ahead.

¿Es mejor?

Is that better?

Yeah, it's better.

Okay. Yeah, and I've got a time lag on when I'm hearing you guys, so there's probably like a 5-second, 10-second delay as well. So, the first question was about the relationship with the folks that are being polled. So, if I come in and I respond to a poll, do you own the relationship with me? Is there a particular, you know, municipality that owns the relationship? Is it a particular candidate? or office over that relationship? You know, can they transcend, go across, use different folks that might care about what I have to say? You know, how does that work separately from the sort of Super Bowl issues?

Yep, got it.

Awesome. Yeah, so everyone who responds to content that's posted on Polco becomes a Polco user. And once they're there, they're given a feed of content just like you'd see on Twitter or Facebook, except Instead of kittens and food, it's questions being asked to them by their local government. And so in the sense that we have a relationship, it's kind of an ongoing notification-based relationship. We tell them when new content is posted for them and continue to engage them that way. I'll let Nick take the second question about the campaign cyclicality.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Christine. On the campaigns, our underlying core generator of revenue is absolutely like licensing to the municipalities, 90,000 local governments across the country. Uh, but in the campaign years, there's a lot of people running and there's some real revenue, uh, decisions can be made pretty nimble. So we like to layer that just on top, but always maintain that core. Um, so that's the way we think about it. Yeah, that piece is cyclical, but it's also large and fast, uh, top layer.

Okay, great. Thank you. Larson, question for you.

Sure, I wanted to learn a little bit more about how long you guys have been around and how long it took you guys to get those 30 municipalities on board is my first question.

Yeah, absolutely. Company was founded May 2015, so the first thing, we had 3 municipalities out of the gate. When you launch with the city, you don't want to fall on your face, so we want to make sure the platform was pretty mature. So we actually worked with the first 3, I think, up to, you know, we had a few come knocking on the door, so up to the first 10 It was really like testing features. Then we felt comfortable right around January 2017. And over this year, then we've started to put the pedal to the metal, refine our sales process, refine our sales assets, and just so recently aggressively start the outreach. So most of those have been 2017.

Awesome. That's great. Congrats on that, guys. Curious what sort of the engagement has been on the platform. Is, you know, what have you guys learned and where are things sort of trending from a user interaction perspective?

Yeah, we've learned a lot. The different use cases are astounding. Some of them just want to ask questions about sentiment. How do you feel about road safety in your city and use those breakdowns by district? Some want to do hot topics. How do you feel about the real tax increase? And so the use cases have been— I think they're complementary. What we're starting to see is people who pick one start using the other, and folks who use the other start using the first. So they like to start to engage kind of full spectrum policy lifecycle. So we've learned a lot from them by doing that, but overall it's been pretty good.

But I think on the user side too, one of our— we kind of have two internal targets for our customers. One is that they get more people on Polco than they have on Facebook, and that's amazingly easy to do. And the second is we typically shoot for 1, 3, and then 5% of the voting population in the first year, sequenced off depending on you know, what their communication channels. And we've been able to do that with about half of our customers so far, and not all of them have hit that year, so pretty good. The standard's unfortunately extremely low, so it's very easy to make our customers happy. It's much harder to make ourselves happy, but in that sense, I think the engagement numbers look pretty solid.

That's awesome. Last question is, can you shed some light on the key metrics that you guys track internally for success? You mentioned a little bit of it right there, But just curious how you guys are, you know, what is good for you guys?

Yeah, we probably have different metrics that we track in the different pieces, but to me, what I'm most focused on every time we get a look from a city, almost every city is using SurveyMonkey right now. It's just not citable. They can't use it. Takes them a bunch of time. Every time we get a good look from a city, there's extremely strong interest. So what I'm most focused on is decreasing the number of touches per city. It's sales process engineering. You know, we're tech guys, we're tech engineers in background. We're just starting to really love now the sales process engineering. So as fast as we can, as few touches, and we're making real progress there. So we're excited about that.

All right. Thanks very much. You guys did great. And thank you to our panelists. Before we jump into the next pitch, who is Eli, I'd like to do a quick shout out of one of our partners who is helping launch and build veteran entrepreneurs all across the country, which is Vetted. Vetted is the optimal veteran transition platform to transform military leaders into tomorrow's industry leaders and entrepreneurs. So they have a— what they do is they identify military talent for transition preparation, planning, executive education, and industry placement in private sector. So what's really kind of great and unique about Vetted is that they're partnered with top MBA programs and universities throughout the country And they've cracked the code to allow veterans to use their GI Bill to take the program. So you can actually use your GI Bill to get your entrepreneur training through an MBA program, which is great. So if you're curious and want to learn more, go to vetted.org and contact them if you're interested in a fellowship for summer and fall 2018. So next up for our pitches tonight, we've got Eli Borden, who is a Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of OnTarget, which is crushing it right now. And they provide visual scheduling for the construction industry. So Eli, welcome to the call.

Thank you.

So while you're transitioning the slides—

Can everybody see my screen?

Give it one more second. It's a little jumbled. Maybe try, try doing it again. I think it got caught in Twilight Zone. Hmm, one more second. Okay, it's looking like there's a technical difficulty trying to get your slides up. Maybe try shutting down some of the apps or other applications that are running in the background, and then we'll jump over to you. Here again, so we'll try and troubleshoot that with Cat, and then we'll move on to the next pitch.

I think now it's there.

So let's get Glen on board. Glen, are you there? Oh, wait, nope, there we go. Here, we see your slides now. There might have just been a little bit of a delay. Are you still there, Eli?

Yes, I am. Can you hear me?

Yep, loud and clear. Take it away when you're ready.

Okay, perfect. Hi, I'm Eli Boron, former combat engineer in the Marines and now co-founder at OnTarget. So what is OnTarget? We're the first data-driven scheduling software that links tasks to 3D models, helping teams avoid delays. So why should you care about delays in construction? Well, according to sources, $250 billion is lost every year in the US due to delays. Just think how many more schools, hospitals, or roads could be built with your tax dollars if we didn't waste so much. So why does this happen? Siloed data, paper-based processes, broken collaboration, and one-way communication. So how do we solve this problem? By taking methodologies from lean manufacturing such as digitization, standardization, and optimization, we can finally bring all the data together to take action. Solution: putting the most critical information in the user's, user's hands. We can finally solve this. So how do we digitize? By putting schedules into our platform and collecting field data in real time, we can now tell the worker where they need to work, what they need to do, and when they need to be done. And how do we standardize? By integrating with several ERP systems, we provide transparency to all team members. Construction managers now have a schedule that's up to date and reflecting what's actually happening on site. This brings us to optimization. Unlike existing scheduling softwares, we factor in several data points like weather, workers' ratings, RFIs, site conditions to provide a dynamic project plan. Updating and reporting a project's progress used to take 30 to 60 days, but using OnTarget, it's real-time, so now you can make proactive decisions. In fact, one of our clients had a 752% ROI on a $100 million project and saved over 4 months. And we've been fortunate to have great success with some of the largest contractors like OHL and Hollister, and we have pilots with several other large contractors. We have over 51 projects on our SaaS platform worth more than $2 billion, and we're growing at 40% month over month. And using a land and expand strategy along with pricing per project, we're confident that we'll hit $2 million ARR in 2018. So what's the opportunity? The global construction market is $9 trillion, and the construction software accounts for 1% of the market. Meaning the TAM is approximately $10 billion and growing. So why will OnTarget lead the way? We have an amazing team from Columbia University with backgrounds in computer science, civil engineering, data science, construction management, and artificial intelligence. And that's—

All right. Thank you, Eli. Christine. Let's start with you.

Okay, um, so a couple of questions that both have to do with sort of how you guys are, uh, inserting into the market. You know, there have been other companies, you know, several over the last, you know, call it certainly the past 5 years, maybe past 10, that have said, hey, construction is, you know, still an industry that, that not really you know, we run the digital domain effectively, whether it's, you know, assigning workforce effectively, you know, whether it's being able to manage building inspections or, you know, sort of doing the project management. So, I want to understand a little bit more about how you fit into that market, you know, who's your competition, you know, why are you the right guys and/or why is now the right time? If some of the guys were great, but just the timing was wrong. So I'd like to understand that as well as sort of work towards, you know, how do you get out of that, you know, same situation maybe as other companies got in where they got lots of folks to do those pilot engagements, but you had some issues getting that to go from, you know, one project a year with construction firms to, you know, 10 or 20.

So obviously us being a scheduling software, A lot of times we get compared to Primavera P6, which is an Oracle product, and Microsoft Project, and there's another competitor as far as Synchro, but those are primarily being used for planning the projects. We're more focused on the execution side of things, updating the progress, and essentially we work with those other platforms. We allow those to be imported into our system. And since we're a cloud-based platform, unlike the other ones, and we're also mobile-based, we can get the feedback directly from the field. And so that's how we're being able to rapidly update the schedule versus printing it out, sitting down with the project managers or superintendents, and going line by line writing the progress. And then handing it over to the scheduler. So we're primarily focused on the execution side of the construction site.

Okay, Larson, let's go to you. Questions?

Sure. What's your guys' revenue model?

Revenue model?

It's primarily been basically pricing per project. We do a 10th of a percent usually of the hard construction cost. It's very similar to other soft platforms within our market.

Got it.

And so can you walk me through sort of your sales process when you go in? You know, first of all, who is the buyer within the construction company organizationally? And secondly, like, what is sort of the business case that you're pitching when you sell this product to them? And finally, what do they say in response?

So we primarily sell to general contractors. We typically go after the superintendents, the BIM managers, or the schedulers. The guys actually that are on site, you know, managing the projects. And we primarily go there and, you know, tell them the idea that, you know, we can keep your schedule up to date. So you make proactive decisions instead of reactive ones. And that's kind of our go-to-market strategy as far as what we pitch.

Right. But what, like, what further than that, like, what is sort of the metric they're looking for? You mentioned in your deck that you save construction time. So like, what sort of like is their ROI hurdle, for a lack of a better term, that they require in order to buy or not buy?

Well, a lot of times, they're spending probably an extra 2 hours a day to keep the progress updated. Or if they want to essentially expand their company to other— to more projects, they essentially have to either hire more project managers or schedulers. But with our platform, we can essentially schedule— can manage 6 jobs instead of 3.

Thank you.

All right, thank you, Eli. Up next, we have Glenn Dakin, and before I introduce him, another shout out for one of our partners who helped support and promote this event for veterans is Patriot Boot Camp, and Glenn is actually a graduate of the Patriot Boot Camp program. And so admissions are actually now open for their San Antonio program, which is scheduled to be the weekend of February 16th to the 18th, in 2018. And for all those who didn't get a chance to pitch today, we had over 50 applications but could only select 5. I highly recommend applying for Patriot Bootcamp. It's sort of, you know, they've been around for almost, I think over 5 years now, and it's become sort of a rite of passage for many veteran entrepreneurs in tech to go through the program. And right now they're recruiting a cohort of about 50 participants. So they run a 3-day technology entrepreneurship bootcamp that's modeled after the Techstars accelerator. To provide educational training and one-on-one mentoring to inspire and advance tech startup founders in the veteran community. So I couldn't speak more highly of them, and I highly recommend people join the upcoming cohort. So Glenn, you are fourth on our list. You are the founder of Presto, which is the Amazon.com of car buying that allows consumers to shop, finance, trade, and drive new and used vehicles. So why don't you go ahead and take it away?

Hey everybody, yeah, thanks Ryan, good to see you again. And yeah, I couldn't speak more highly of Patriot Bootcamp myself. So without further ado, I'll share my screen, we'll get to it. Hi, can everybody see my screen? Good. Yep. All right, loud and clear.

Take it away.

Perfect. So we've all been there, whether we've bought one car or many, we've all really had that feeling, "I'm stuck in the dealership and I can't get out." So hello, I'm Glenn Dakin. I'm a Navy pilot turned serial entrepreneur, and I'm a lifelong car guy. I'm founder and CEO of Prestio, what you can think of as the Amazon of car buying. What is Prestio exactly? It's the evolution of my bootstrapped dealership that I started in 2013, given the pains I experienced buying cars. Prestio is the one-stop platform allowing consumers to shop, finance, trade, and drive new and used vehicles all online. What makes our team special is we have the experience necessary to combine a fintech automotive lender and a just-in-time dealership model that is not disruptive to dealers. Many have failed at building a fully online dealership, and they are missing critical experience that our team has, ranging from Lending Club to Lamborghini. A big red pain point lies at the center of the traditional dealer experience. And we've all been there. That's why I started a dealership from scratch in the first place. On the B2B side, dealers have many problems such as increasing days in inventory and outdated technology partners preventing them from truly selling online. The overwhelming majority of consumers do not enjoy the dealership process. So at a high level, you could think of Prestio as an AutoTrader meets Rocket Loans meets Amazon. Prestio is the first company that has combined a lender and a dealer into the in the same building. So like Rocket Loans, our finance technology lets you finish the car buying process 100% online, whether buying from our dealership or a partner dealer. Our competitors. On the top left, we compete with traditional dealer groups like CarMax, which are convenient for one-stop shopping, though lack of innovation keeps the process long and fully offline. In the bottom left, we have what I call the old school sites. They offer only pictures and really nothing else to the online shopper. In the bottom right, we have what I call new form startups like Carvana and Autogravity, though they all only innovate in one area of the complex car buying transaction, preventing a true one-stop Amazon-style experience like Prestio. The end-to-end solution our product offers allows consumers to move through their transaction in 4 experiences as seen in our product screenshots. Imagine artificial Intelligence-powered shopping tailored directly to you, a transparent finance process, getting your trade purchased hassle-free, and finally a great option for in-store or at-home delivery. We've successfully used advanced digital marketing powered by big data, PR, and direct mail to find and sell to hundreds of in-market car shoppers now in 42 cities across the US and growing. This was over 4 years of running our bootstrap dealership prior to founding Prestio as its parent tech company. We will add AI marketing partners and fully online loan originations facilitated by real humans to quickly grow these channels. By building a company as both a dealer and a lender with significant to-your-door logistics capability in our partners, we create what we call our Golden Triangle, powered by technology at its core. This at the bottom creates 5 revenue streams adding value in both B2C for consumer sales and lending, and B2B for partner dealer sales, lending, and SaaS. We just closed a heavily oversubscribed pre-seed round, enabling our 4 developers to beta test our product with our existing profit-generating customers. We need customers and dealers as partners to help us scale. Prestio is a true one-stop platform allowing you to shop, finance, trade, and drive. Again, my name is Glenn. Thank you for your time. And I look forward to your questions, Larsen and Christine.

All right, thanks a lot, Glenn. Larsen, what questions do you have for Glenn?

Hey Glenn, great pitch, man. I appreciate you giving it. Appreciate that. Wanted to understand a little bit more about, you know, you mentioned the competitors in the space. Rightly or wrongly, the space just feels extremely crowded. So trying to understand here, like, what is your, unique area of differentiation versus everybody else here? You alluded to that you're going to be like the one-stop shop to include the financing aspect of this. Is that the differentiator, the sort of fintech angle that you're playing for this online dealership?

So yeah, Lars, the one thing that kind of centers at the core of what's not being done right now in automotive is a fully online fintech lender. That's one of our differentiators. Another is that we choose to partner with dealers to enable their operations, and by partnering with them gives us access to inventory, but therefore allowing consumers to get that access to the inventory to buy online. Then finally, we look at a just-in-time dealership model. So we don't believe in inventory for ourselves. We believe that the best dealers out there stock the best inventory. However, if you look at different markets, you're always going to see supply and demand differences between those markets. and we've been successful at taking advantage of those supply and demand differences for arbitrage opportunities for several years. So we like that a lot as a revenue stream. It's actually doubling dealership gross profits in less than half the turn time in our, in our historical past couple years. So pretty exciting part of that model as well is that just-in-time differentiator.

Awesome. And what's your, you know, go-to-market strategy with this tech platform? Like, what's your beachhead market? Where are you starting?

Yeah, that's a great question. We, uh, at a real high level, like to just pitch and say we're going after the Amazon Prime crowd. We're looking for people that are craving convenience, time-saving, and hate the dealership and would actually pay extra for that convenience. So notice at no time in the picture, you know, in the slides, as we mentioned price as a competitor. We're here for convenience-driven Amazon Prime style customers.

Great. Christine, question from you.

Last question, sorry. And who, who are those folks and how are you going find them?

So it's, they're the same folks. The dealership that actually started 4 years ago was set out to be an exotic dealership. So we've sold everything from Lamborghini, Maserati, all the way down to Mercedes, BMW. So we know how to find exotic car buyers, but our real bread and butter is luxury. And so basically this is big data-enabled zip code targeting using direct mail, equity mining, and those kind of things. Because again, this is a product that people buy maybe every 3 to 5 years. So we don't want to market to everybody using billboards, we want to market using hyper-targeted direct mail and digital the same way we have for years, and then we want to power that with AI to figure out who's going to actually intend to buy when they land on the site as opposed to a bunch of tire kickers that are sitting on autotrader.com right now.

Check. Really appreciate it, man.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sorry, there was a little bit of cross feedback. Go ahead, Christine, your question.

Okay, so my question was all operations-oriented, so I'm sort of at like 3 points on the operations side I'd like to understand. One is understanding where the inventory on the platform is coming from. Are you— is it the same car that might be on, you know, 5 other platforms, or is it a car that's only on your platform? You know, what kind of deal would you have to cut to get that into, into your platform? And so forth. So the second piece is around the loans and how those loans are being funded. Are you funding them? Do you have a partner that's going to fund that and so forth? And the last one is around customer acquisition, because your value in the debt platform in theory is going to be some of that customer acquisition. You know, what do you anticipate when it comes to customer acquisition costs? You know, and are you going to bear that yourselves? Are you going to be sharing that or pushing that back to the dealers in some way? So if you could sort of walk through that, that would be very helpful.

Yeah, I appreciate that, Christine. Great questions. And they're the ones that we've received a whole bunch of times. So I'll hit them at a high level. If you want to deep dive any of them, then feel free. So on the inventory side, we look at basically 3 main inventory pipes. The first would be dealerships. They have retail inventory ready to go, retail and wholesale. They're willing to actually wholesale out some of their slow-moving inventory. So we want to take advantage of that. but we also want to enable them to sell their new and used cars online. Second would be your traditional dealer-only wholesale networks. You can kind of think about these, you hear about them as the dealer auctions. So there's literally hundreds of thousands of cars in the dealer auctions transacting every day that are not on AutoTrader, they're not on Cars.com, they're not on any of these retail shopping sites. We want to take full advantage of that. And finally, one of the biggest inventory pipes out there, as we call them our 3 pipes, is is the captive finance off-lease. So basically, when you're looking at the auto manufacturer, you have the captive finance company. When they get that car back in, they need to actually offload that. They're in the business of leasing, not selling used cars. So they sell those cars back to their dealers. If their dealers don't take them, that's where we can come in and take that inventory feed and sell it direct to consumers. So 2 of 3 of those inventory pipes are not available on an autotrader.com platform day. The loans, we fund them as a direct fintech lender using in-house credit facility or credit warehouse. And finally, customer acquisition costs anywhere in automotive ranges for about $600 per sold vehicle. Fintech ranges all the way down to $200 per sold loan. So we anticipate, we were planning on a little over $600 in our early years, trending all the way down to somewhere between $200 and $600 as we offer the unique value prop of both fully online lending and the car fully bought online.

All right, thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Christine.

I love that you guys started a dealership first.

Yeah, it was painful.

Awesome, thank you both. So in the interest of time, we're going to keep moving on to our next pitch of the evening, which is Robert Slater. So Robert, you're part of the Bunker Labs community out in Ohio, and I know that they've got a really exciting announcement for January. They're actually challenging over 1,000 veterans to start their own business with a new program that they call Launch Labs Online, which is a 10-week interactive entrepreneur course that features weekly instruction videos and check-ins with fellow founders, tools, resources, and homework to help you build a strong foundation as an entrepreneur. So applications for their January 2018 cohort are now open. You can check out bunkerlabs.org for more info. So if you're a veteran who's looking to make the leap into entrepreneurship, your first stop should be Bunker to get educated, get connected locally, and if you haven't been to a Bunker event yet, I highly recommend it. It's the best way to connect with local entrepreneurs. So, uh, Robert, you're the co-founder of 10XTS, which is helping early-stage companies and investors unlock the power of cryptocurrencies for fundraising purposes. Why don't you take it from there? I see you got Mike there. Hey, Mike.

Hey, what's up?

Yeah, so we got the co-founder. We're going to get our slides up here. You got them?

One second. Okay, you might be sharing the wrong screen. I don't know if you have two screens up or not.

No, we just got one. What, what are you seeing right now?

It's sort of the same problem that Eli had. Maybe try closing an application in the background and then relaunching the share screen. Sometimes it takes a minute or so to kick in. Okay.

Try it again.

How about now?

I'm still getting the same issue.

Yeah, we saw that.

No worries. Bunker Labs while we're waiting.

I spent a lot of time working with those guys. I know you guys have too.

There we go.

All right, we good? Cool.

All right, go ahead and take them away.

All right, cool. Hey, uh, thanks everyone. I'm Rob Slater, former active duty Air Force officer having served as an Air Force research lab program manager, current member of the Ohio Air National Guard Combat Engineers of the Air Force, and I'm here here this evening presenting my company, 10XTS. There are approximately 8 million in the US that are allowed to invest in unregistered Regulation D securities as accredited investors, but only 370,000 of those are active. At the same time, almost 6.5 million new startups were launched in the US in 2016, but only around 1% of those new startups actually received funding. So the JOBS Act was passed to enable regulation crowdfunding However, crowdfunding is complex and adoption has been slow. Second, blockchain-based token offerings have raised over $3 billion this year, surpassing angel and seed rounds. And token offerings are not just limited to startups. VCs have jumped in. Blockchain Capital—

Hey, Robert.

Yeah, sorry to interrupt. It looks like the slides aren't transitioning. Maybe do it. I know you're trying to or you're using the presenter mode, but we see it as in the Okay, there we go. Now, now it's moving along. So maybe just take it out of presenter mode and keep going. Sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, no problem. We had this issue in, uh, trying to rehearse this. We're not actually in presenter mode, which is weird, right? So we're trying to figure this out kind of real time. Take it from the top. Okay, well, it sounds like y'all can kind of see the notes, but, uh, we're just going to I'm gonna kind of push through, I guess, real quick. So again, uh, just kind of hit the highlights. Rob Slater, Air Force officer, served in the Air Force Research Labs, currently in the Ohio Air National Guard, a major in the combat engineering unit. And we're going to talk about, uh, 10XDS. So again, there's 8 million, uh, in the U.S. allowed to invest in regulation securities as accredited investors, but only 370,000 of those are active. And at the same time, there's almost 6.5 million new startups that were launched in 2016, but roughly 1% of those actually received funding. So with the JOBS Act came out, enabled regulation crowdfunding, but that's still complex and the adoption has been pretty slow. As you guys have seen lately with ICOs, those have come through and raised $3 billion this year, surpassing angel and seed rounds.

It looks like we're still having the same issue, Rob. Okay, there we go. Now it's back. Now you're back. Keep rolling. There we go.

We'll keep it this way then, I guess. Also, there have been a couple of VCs have jumped in. One is Blockchain Capital. They raised a $10 million fund through a token sale recently. The regulatory paths are emerging for blockchain tokens, and we believe that platforms that align with existing legal will help the technology hit mainstream. So of course, blockchain is hard. It requires a lot more than code, the developer talent is in high demand. And what we developed was DD View, and we recognized these challenges and built a blockchain-based fintech software platform to help these early-stage ventures and investors raise capital funding through these regulatory-compliant blockchain tokens. And what's unique is we, we do this through an easy-to-use intuitive interface that doesn't require any programming knowledge. So DDU allows non-coders to come in, create these blockchain tokens with all the necessary business rules to maintain governance, reporting, and compliance. So our platform enables decentralized exchange that permits secondary market trading. Our goal is to make it easy to invest in and trade early-stage capital assets as other traditional investment platforms. Sorry about the, the slide stuff we got going on. I'm getting some feedback here real time. So anyway, this will provide investors with the needed liquidity, ultimately reducing their risk. And DDview can be tailored to support tokenization of literally any type of asset class. So in addition, the DDview platform includes built-in due diligence and monitoring, and we have multiple target market segments initially focusing on early-stage funding, and that represents an estimated $21 billion in 2016 in the US, with our go-to-market focus with channel partnerships through angel networks, VCs, crowdfunding portals, and accelerators. So now our business model— DDView actually makes money as a hybrid SaaS model. It uses internal DDView tokens to activate features and pay for services on a transactional basis. We also charge fees for things like like issuing new asset tokens, reporting, and trading. So we're in active discussions with Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, and we have scheduled presentations for C-level and senior leadership of many others. Currently, we're in the process of finalizing our $1 million seed raise for 10xDs, but there's still room. The seed round helps us launch the upcoming DDV token sale.

We'll be—

we are— we're currently conducting a limited presale of DDV tokens, and we'll initiate a full public crowd sale in the spring of 2018. So again, I'm Rob Slater, the COO of 10XTS. You saw earlier I have Michael Hiles, our CEO. He's a career digital entrepreneur and also the director of Founders Institute Cincinnati. Our CTO is John Bentley, and we're already experienced in all the competencies necessary and have full careers spanning industry, government, and academia. But we've also built a strong advisory team that represents a global expertise expertise in economics, cryptocurrency, AI, marketing, finance, and legal. So if you're interested in discussing how you can participate with us, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you for your time and attention, and we hope to talk to you soon.

All right, thank you for powering through the technical difficulties. Larson, I know you have to jump off shortly, so why don't we start with you?

Sure, uh, I appreciate it. That was super interesting. Uh, can you walk me through your first target customers again and how you plan on servicing them? To get this thing off the ground and running?

Yeah, so we have identified key channel relationships like with the Angel Capital Association chapters, and we're actively in discussions with multiple early-stage entities because that's the time when to actually tokenize the asset. It's a lot simpler when you're creating brand new legal. So we have a pipeline of multiple VCs, multiple accelerators. In fact, I've been haranguing Ryan about the Founder Institute warrant pool to tokenize what, the $2.5-3 billion worth of warrant option agreements at Founder Institute. There's plenty of assets to tokenize.

So you guys are tokenizing, you know, your go-to-market is tokenizing startup equity, essentially?

Yes, that's correct.

Got it.

Super interesting.

Thanks, guys.

Christine, let's jump over to you because I know you have a board meeting to get to.

Yeah. So again, it looks like it was pretty interesting. I'm like, well, you just sent me the slide deck. I think I'd like to actually see it.

Well, we'll send everyone all the slide decks afterwards.

Okay, great. So, so several questions. I think One of them is wanting to understand— you mentioned certain new legal and new fund formation. You know, a certain blockchain-related fund, you know, rumor on the street is they spent $1 million on the legal to set that fund up, which is outrageous compared to what a typical fund costs. I would love to know, you know, if someone's using you guys to sort of go through that process, you know, what happens to the cost of setting something up? What's the cost of doing this with you versus without you? Whether you're a fund or someone who's got a different kind of asset. And then I'd like to understand, you know, why you guys? Why are you the right guys to do this? And who else is trying to do this? And why are, you know, why are you going to get chosen?

So, uh, great questions, Christine. Um, so the question about, uh, I'll address why us first. Um, I've got a career in not only tech and tech development, but also in early-stage startups and funding and venture capital as well. So I have a real keen understanding. And so we developed the business model as a result of about 2 years' worth of discussions with various accelerator groups. So the question is, why us? What's the cost? Aside from the implied legal, we expect that someone would come to the table essentially with their own LP already created. And hand us the parameters, in which instance we would create the tokens that represented the asset and encoded all of the business rule logic around those tokens themselves to comply with, you know, Regulation D or any of the business rule parameters for the LP itself.

Okay, great. Um, I know we're running a couple minutes over, so I'd love to announce the winner. So while Christine and Larson text in their vote for the top 3, and then we'll select the one who wins the competition, I'd like to make an important announcement on a special initiative that we're launching at Founder Institute. So many people in the veteran community know me as the co-founder of VetTech. Beau Rogers and I created VetTech back in 2012 to help give veteran entrepreneurs access to Silicon Valley through our expert mentors, access to a funding network of investors out here and introductions to corporate partners. And so part of what we do, being headquartered at the Plug and Play Tech Center, which is the world's largest incubator— so they have a 180,000-square-foot facility here in the heart of Silicon Valley with over 400 startups, 100 corporate partners, and locations in 9 countries. And so we utilize the Plug and Play Tech Center as one of our engines to help startups, but also the Founder Institute. And so part of an initiative that I'm working on is combining the two together to try and help veteran entrepreneurs all over the US access Silicon Valley resources. So with Bo in a leadership position at Plug and Play, myself in a leadership position at Founder Institute, VetTech literally straddles the two largest entrepreneurship organizations in the world and helps provide access to veterans. And so if you're currently raising capital or you're interested in engaging, drop me a line. My email is ryan@fi.co. I'd love to connect with you. And this is important because part of what Founder Institute is doing in 2018 under an umbrella that we call Founder Institute for Good or FI for Good is we're launching a Veteran Founder Initiative, which is a coalition of the leading veteran startup organizations who are banding together to help build 100 veteran-led technology companies each year. And so that's both within Founders Institute and, and without. Many of the partners that we've spoken with, uh, are about today are joining that coalition. And so in every one of the 150 cities around the world where the Founder Institute operates, we'll be issuing special veteran fellowships through these partner organizations, which allow veterans to take our Startup Launch Program for free. Uh, we'll also be providing special invite-only access to join VetTech and gain direct access to the Founder Institute's funding program for Founder Lab, which previously was reserved only for Founder Institute graduates. And so we'll be providing more information probably in a follow-up email here in the coming weeks. And if you're a veteran startup founder, you want to get connected to the largest startup network in the world, definitely connect with me on LinkedIn, shoot me an email. I'm happy to learn more about what you're doing. And we currently have applications open right now for the Founder Institute program in Silicon Valley. With the chapter that I lead down in LA, Washington, DC, New York, Southern Florida, and 20 other US cities. So go to fi.co/vets and apply for the veteran fellowship. So I think here we're ready to announce the winner. And so let me just get the final tally. All right, so, The winner of tonight's Pinch Competition is 10XTS. Congratulations, guys. And so one of the prizes that you win for this competition, it's not a cash prize, unfortunately, but our team at VetCon decided that instead of just giving out a free ticket to the winner, that not only would you automatically be accepted into the semifinals for VetCon 2018, but also that you would be able to— that everyone on the panel tonight will receive a free ticket to VetCon. So if you're one of the veteran entrepreneurs pitching, we'll make sure that you get a free ticket. And so same with the investor panel. And for those of you who didn't make it to VetCon last year, VetCon is the largest startup conference in the country located in the heart of Silicon Valley. We had startups from all over the US, helping them gain access to hundreds of elite mentors, Silicon Valley investors, and a tight-knit community of veteran entrepreneurs. So whether you're planning to raise a Series A or bootstrap your company, it's a must-attend event for the entire veteran entrepreneur ecosystem on an annual basis. So VetCon will be in April 2018 and tickets will go on sale in January. Last year was the first year I couldn't say better things about the team at VetCon and what we were able to accomplish. And so we want to use it as sort of the annual gathering point for people around the US who want to tap into Silicon Valley and connect with the national and global veteran entrepreneur community. So with that said, in closing, uh, every one of the partners, and I believe I speak on behalf of them, believe that military veterans are the next greatest generation of world and business leaders. And we believe we need to empower more veterans to start companies, to help them gain influence in the community, and also build great, uh, companies that can change the world. So my name is Ryan Micheletti, and I'm from Founder Institute in VetTech, and we're signing off. Have a great evening, everyone.