Building Entrepreneurship Platforms with YouNoodle | Torsten Kolind

It's such a pleasure to be here today. I've known Draper for a while, and it's a great program. And you guys are now 2 weeks into it, more or less. Yeah. Lots of internationals and foreigners like myself, so that's really cool. I guess welcome to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. So I— they gave me about an hour or so, so I don't want to talk too long. I actually would love to hear a little bit about from you guys what you're working on and what are some of the challenges. But I want to give you a little bit of a background of my own story. I've been in San Francisco and the area for about 7 years. So that whole story of coming over from Europe to here, a little bit about the company for those of you— I don't know how many of you have heard of Unoodle before. Just show of hands. So a couple of you. Some of you may even have used it to get into various programs or or startup competitions. But I want to tell you about my own story, a little bit about the company, and then really just like ask me questions and see what do I know that could be useful to you guys. So think about questions as I go through this. Yeah? Sounds good? Yeah. So this first slide is the world that I and we live in. And I should probably also tell you that I have Mariana and Chilpe from Unoodle here as well. So you can grab them afterwards and ask them questions. On our team, this is the world we live in. And this is the really, really fun stuff. It's a fascinating change that has happened really only over the past 5 years or so. So you guys may not think a lot about this, but it's not more than 5 years ago that you had to actually— if you wanted to scale an app or a web business, you had to actually rent or lease physical hardware and servers and put it in a secure facility where you needed it. I remember I had like a hand scanner I had like to go in and fiddle with servers in an actual colo back in the day. And it's like more than 5 years ago. So there's all these tools that are now making it easier, cheaper, faster to grow cool startups. But there's also a lot of cultural changes that happen. There's a lot of learnings that you have from various— in various places around the world. It's much easier to sit somewhere else and actually understand a little bit about what happens in Silicon Valley. It's not as good as coming here. But you can actually learn a lot from abroad, which is also very useful. So speed. Think about Instagram. How fast that company grew from nothing to a billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook. It took them 3 years. 3 years. And at the time they were acquired, there were only 13 people. So it's really fascinating how fast this is going. And that's all good stuff and good news for you guys. It also means that everyone— it's hard to now pin a country or a city on a startup or a team, 'cause we're all from different places. We all probably started somewhere and then we went somewhere else and somewhere else and we learned a little bit here and then we got another co-founder from here and then we pivoted and then we shut down and we opened a new company. And so the whole startup world is just so international and it's really, generally really good news. But why do I care about this? So a little bit more about my own story. So born in Denmark, I have been a hacker and a nerd since the early days. I had, I remember, a 486 computer that you probably only find in museums these days. And went through kind of a very early startup experience. I started a company back when I was in high school, just when it was cool to do websites for people. So it was nothing fancy, and it did not turn into Facebook or anything valuable. But it— I learned a little bit in high school about, like, what does it mean to have a client and send an invoice and file your taxes, and like just the very basics of running a company. I also ended up studying abroad in a lot of places. So although I went to school in Denmark, I studied in 2 other continents as well, which I think made me meet a lot of people and actually some of those relations I have today, and they're very, very useful in the startup world. And yes, I am a bioinformatics and biotechnology major, and yes, I play music, but we're not here to talk about that. But it is actually funny, bioinformatics, how many of you know what bioinformatics is? DNA structures? Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's essentially the application of computers to biological data. So genomes or proteomes or other large datasets in biology. And there's a lot going on in that space and I studied it back in the time where it wasn't really as cool and now I just, I can't, help thinking about what could be done with those 2 areas now. So maybe one day I'll find myself back in the biotech area. Are any of you in biology or biotech or anything? Yes? Yeah? Maybe? A little bit? Yeah, it's getting relatively easier actually. It's funny, some of the developments that I showed you on this slide here that happened for software, that's actually now happening for hardware. And it's partly also happening for biology. So there is actually a lot of cool stuff happening. Anyway, so I worked in Denmark. I ran this little startup competition in Denmark. And then 7 years ago, I moved to San Francisco to join a startup. And that taught me a lot of stuff about what works and what doesn't work. And because obviously, as in any startup, and as it is for you guys, there are ups and downs. And there are things that don't work really well. And I think it was really useful before Rebecca and I started Unoodle. 5 years ago, it was really useful to have a few learnings from another startup here so that we didn't have to do the same mistakes. So feel free to ask me questions about this journey here and all the stuff like visas and all this crap about how you move to the US. OK. So YouNoodle. For those of you who don't know it, here's a very, very, very quick version of what we do. We source startups globally. So people like yourselves— that are working on stuff, wherever you are, we're interested in what you're working on. Because we see all these opportunities pop up, as what I showed you before, and we want to figure out who should go to who, which of these opportunities. And that's a really interesting challenge, given the fact that there are startups everywhere, and that this is chaos, almost like the signal-to-noise ratio is horrible. There's so much chaos in the startup world because everyone is pitching everything. We're interested in picking out who actually has something useful and who will be a good fit to some of these opportunities. So we do that with a lot of partners. And some of them are corporations, some of them are universities, some of them are governments, foundations. It's really very, very varied because there are so many different stakeholders in the startup world these days. But the process by which we do it is really what's unique. So what happens in many cases is because there are so many people that are interested, in opportunities, grants, prizes, accelerators, programs, there is a process of competitive applications. So you apply and you are treated the same way as everyone else who applies. It's very different from how Silicon Valley traditionally has worked, which is very much about who knows whom and how can you get introductions. We're very much based on an unbiased, kind of equal, leveling the playing field approach. evaluate what you have versus what somebody else has on the same terms. So we use lots of different experts from around the world that volunteer their time. These are people that have started multiple companies, or they're investors, or they're in various ways very interested in the startup world. And they help us evaluate startups to figure out which ones should, let's say, go to Startup Chile, or be introduced to a given corporation, or whatever that product is. So you're not the only one that's evaluating them. So it's really an army of thousands of these experts that are helping us figure out what happens in the startup world. Does that make sense? So it happens all over the world, as you can imagine, which is the part that I really like. There is a— I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but essentially the company, because you guys are also building companies, so what products do we actually have? Well, there is a platform that any of these programs that need to run and application process. They can run it on the SaaS platform. And that's either free or paid, depending on how complex it is. But we also have a product called Access, where we— this is what I talked about with the best startups meaning the best opportunities. We try to go across all these hundreds of programs to figure out, based on these evaluations, who needs to go where. And you can, as a, let's say, a company or an investor, you can buy that product from us, that we help you with introductions. So— to their startups. So it's always free for founders and startups, but other people can pay us for introductions to the best ones. Thank you.