🚀 DraperU: Demo Day Best of S2022

I love that you guys are super serious about your coffee. This is great.

Okay.

I'm not gonna drink chai. I need something to justify my existence in my household.

All right everyone, welcome to another Draper University Demo Day. I am so, so excited about this summer's Demo Day. We brought in 79 amazing, amazing founders to our campus in San Mateo. Um, and we had amazing speakers including Ali who came out and helped the founders. Um, and we're bringing you the top 6 today. All of them pitched to Tim Draper last week and Draper Venture Funds. It was, it was a hard battle for the top 6. We, uh, we had a hard time choosing. Uh, we had a good top 20, uh, but, um, Ali told me that only 6 can present on Stocks. I'm kidding. That's top 6, right? So top 6, it's going to be great. But before that, we have a pre-seed venture powerhouse in this StreamYard room right now. So guys, please go ahead and you guys need no introductions, but please, I'll start from Saba. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Please tell us what you can help founders with.

Yeah.

Awesome. Hey, great to be here. Thank you. And nice to see everyone. I'm Saab Akrim, Head of Pipeline at Techstars and Fund Manager for the Rising Stars Fund that just launched about 2 months ago. And look, I really look at founders' pitches, messaging and marketing, customer acquisition strategy, and just figuring out how they're going to be able to scale. So I was a founder before, had a dating app, that we ended up selling off. So excited to see the pitches and just dig into, you know, those areas of growth, if you want to call it, how to go from coasting to growth.

Thank you so much.

I'm based out of LA. If you hear an accent, it's, it's, it's not Alabama, it's Australia. So that's where I'm originally from.

Oh, you finally moved?

Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm in LA now.

Yeah.

We're doing LA Tech Week, I think in August with a16z, Launch House, and it's gonna be in person in LA.

I think I've heard of those companies. Yeah, I'll be there. Yeah, just let me know the time and place.

I think it's August, sometime in August. It's like Miami Tech Week, but like the LA folks are like, we wanna be cool too, so.

No, LA is fine, guys.

So LA Tech Week and more on that, Ali.

Yeah, I'm the founder CEO of Stonks. Did a couple of startups before this in the gaming and live streaming space, active angel, and also fund manager for the Best of Stonks Fund where we write sort of $25K to $50K checks early stage. And early, for early startups, I typically look for team and the founding story, you know, why they're attracted to the problem and why they're deeply committed to it. And my, you know, my personal experience has been nothing I've done has finished the way it started. It's gone through many, many pivots and changes and, you know, survivor— it's been like survivor games, right, for all my startups. And so I feel like the team has to be in it for the right reasons to stick it out through all of the trials and tribulations that are gonna Golden words there from Ali.

And Ali knows about downturns better than anyone because he doesn't get affected by it. He builds long-term. So Ali, thank you for sharing those lessons with our founders there as well. And over to Asra.

Hi everyone, my name is Asra. I am the CEO of Draper University and I'm also the partner at our fund. Um, I absolutely love selling. So if you have any cool— like, you know, I, and I love helping founders like figure out their sales strategy, their sales pitch. Um, I like selling to governments. That somehow became my thing. So if you're selling to B2G, um, let me know. I grew up gaming, so that's a market that I'm very interested in. And, um, also kind of investing in. And then as a fund, we invest across the board, but we like markets where the quality of service is really low, but the price of the product is really high. So there's like huge— and that's kind of our very simple, you know, thesis, if you may call it. And yeah, excited for this. This was a great cohort. And if you guys wanna meet the other amazing founders, please feel free to reach out to Safiyyah and I. This is just a small— snapshot of what this cohort was. So excited to get started.

Thank you, Asra. Um, we're going to start off with pitches in about 5 minutes, but I have a really cool video I want to show you guys. Um, thank you, Ali. Thank you, Sabah. I'll bring you back on stage in 5. All right.

All right.

So that's the top 6. Um, so, so excited for them to be pitching, um, here today. Um, I also want to go over the highlight of, um, this summer. We bring them into our, uh, startup hotel for campus here in downtown San Mateo, um, every summer and fall. Um, and I just wanted to share a few more highlights of this summer and Draper University with you guys. So this summer we had 79 founders living on campus. They've been here for 4 weeks now. They're actually graduating in a couple of days. They came from 24 different countries. They were building in 20 different sectors and they had raised collectively $11.8 million before coming to the program. We had 23 amazing speakers who came out and helped us train our superheroes. And they also hiked 69 miles, which is another fun fact. That's part of an activity we do in this program, which is one of my favorite activities. Draper University is a pre-accelerator for pre-seed founders. We have our flagship program is a residential program, and these 6 founders were a part of our residential program. Over the last 9 years, we've had 3,100+ alumni founders who've gone on to launch 650+ companies, have collectively raised over $900 million, and they've founded 8 unicorns, which has been amazing, and created more than 7,000 jobs. This is, I'm sure you guys have seen a lot of Draper name out there, and we just wanted to unlock the Draper network on how we view it. So Draper University and Draper U Ventures kind of fits in fits into the accelerate piece where you join Draper University at pre-seed stage and we help you navigate through those early challenges. And then you have capital available at pre-seed, seed through DraperU Ventures. And our Series A fund, Draper Associates, and our Venture Network funds, which are over 23 funds, help you with growth stage funding as well. So that's the Draper Network. So speakers, uh, this cohort got the, got the chance to hear from Andrew Chen from a16z. Um, Ali came down to our campus to help out, which is amazing. Um, we had Bradley Camp from Unstoppable, which recently became a unicorn. Danielle from 1517 Fund. And, um, I'm sure most of you here are in tech, so you, you've probably seen Super Pumped. Emil Michael, uh, spoke to the cohort, which a couple of days ago, which was such an amazing chat. We didn't get to record it, but the benefit of not recording it was that we got all the honest answers. Nobody spared him. We asked all the questions we could and he was incredibly honest about them. Having Emil was an incredible blast. We had Thomas Franz from Ledger, May from LeadIQ, some amazing, amazing people in there who helped out throughout this cohort. And Tim Draper, of course, who's also the founder of Draper University. DraperU Ventures over the last 3 years has been incredible. Astra, who you just heard from, has seeded 3 unicorns from this fund. Lemon Cash, Splitgate, High Street. And we've invested in 58 other companies over the last 3 years. And this is, this is it from my end. I don't wanna bore you further. We're gonna move to what we're here for. We're here for the Demo Day. We're here to hear from the founders. Without further ado, Blake Locksmith, we can't wait to hear from you.

Awesome, everyone.

Okay, give me a second. I'm pulling up. All right. Go kill it, Blake.

Awesome.

All right, let's rock and roll. Hey everyone, I'm Blake Faulkner, CEO and co-founder at Blocksmith. We're defining what game development really means in the metaverse, and we're releasing the ultimate marketplace for developers that are building games on metaverse gaming platforms. Our mission at Blocksmith is simple. We want to empower millions of game developers with the technology and the community to sell their 3D models across multiple different metaverse platforms across metaverse. So our platform solves a core problem that developers are currently facing. There's no established marketplace for metaverse-compatible 3D models, which have specific design constraints that make them different from the 3D models that developers can buy now on platforms like the Unity Asset Store, Sketchfab, CGTrader, or TurboSquid. Developers need hundreds to thousands of 3D models every year for their games, and right now they're forced to turn to Twitter and Discord to get the 3D models they need using peer-to-peer transactions, which is very dangerous and tedious. And this is something I ran into a lot. So I've been a game developer on Roblox for the past 10 years, started building games when I was 12, and whenever I needed 3D models for my games, I was always forced to turn to these sketchy Discord servers or doing transactions peer-to-peer over Twitter. I actually remember back in the day I got scammed doing this, and it was one of the worst experiences that I've had as a game developer. I've also spent the past few years investing in scouting and building companies at multiple different VC firms. I'm bringing that expertise to how we fundraise and how we plan to scale Blocksmith. I'm also joined by Mason Williams, who has a decorated background in building advanced gaming technologies for games like Halo Infinite, and also building the largest marketplace for the popular game Star Citizen at Space Foundry. So our business model is fairly straightforward. We take a 30% take rate of every 3D model that's sold on our platform. We also offer a subscription to sellers for $10 a month, that gives them access to advanced analytics and features to make them able to sell the 3D models and distribute them across our platform for different metaverses, which is really cool. Our alpha is gonna be launching soon. We already have over 750 developers on a waitlist. We actually just opened our private alpha, and we're already seeing amazing feedback come in from our users. We also generated $25,000 in sales selling 3D models off of our MVP. We actually sold 3D models off a Google Doc and generated $25,000 in doing so, which really shows the traction is possible in this market. So our revenue model and our business, we're not constrained to a specific metaverse or a specific platform. We're looking at the next 10 years of game development. We want to go across metaverse and capture the over $10 billion in value that's going to be created over the next few years from peer-to-peer transactions for metaverse-compatible 3D models. As we build our team and as we build our technology, we've also raised from Rough Draft Ventures and Dorm Room Fund. Thank you so much. Super excited to dive into your questions.

Thank you, Blake. That was a great pitch. Also, Omar has joined us. Omar, welcome to the panel. Hopefully you can hear us. Hey, all right, so we have 5 minutes for Q&A, guys. Over to you.

Um, hi Blake, great pitch. Um, what, uh, Love the space. Do you feel other marketplaces like the Unity Marketplace or others are just underserving this space right now?

Dramatically. And their existing inventory is actually incompatible with most major metaverse gaming platforms, which makes developers, like I mentioned, they have to turn to Twitter and Discord to get the essential 3D models they need to build games with. So that's why these marketplaces haven't worked, and that's why there's millions of small communities all over Discord and on Twitter where developers are buying and selling these 3D models peer-to-peer.

Awesome stuff, Blake. Sabah here. Hey, how have people felt about the 30% take rate that you've got pinned right now? Like, what kind of feedback or validation do you have, you know, for to justify that? Yeah.

Yeah, totally. So there's 2 aspects to that. The first, a 30% take rate, that's standard for across every major 3D model marketplace. You'll find a 30% take rate on the Unity Asset Store, and you'll find 25% to 30% on the Unreal Marketplace, which is the Epic Games, their 3D model store. The second aspect, everything we do runs by our community. We have a customer board of directors that directly advises us on any revenue model that we choose, any new features that we're going to be rolling out. So we really build within our community and our community is fully supportive of our existing business model.

Okay, cool.

And just to back off that before we go to the next panels, how did you get, you said 25,000 sales. How did you get most of your customers? If you had to say 51% came from a specific area or channel, like what's worked for you so far? I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so it's actually a big part of our future go-to-market strategy. So when I was selling my 3D model creations that I had built as a game developer over the past 10 years, I was doing it over Discord. And like I mentioned, since these developers are using channels on Discord selling peer-to-peer, they're literally uploading a screenshot of a 3D model, typing a little block of text saying what it is, how much they want for it, and and posting that out onto a channel. So when I was selling my 3D models, I was able to generate over $25,000 by condensing all of my 3D model listings from being single posts on a Discord channel to actually putting them on a Google Doc when I was in high school. So this has been something that we really found out over time, and we started to build technology to really solve my needs as a game developer. And then we received messages from hundreds of other game developers over Discord asking us, hey, I want to sell in your marketplace, right? And that was really the light bulb moment for us to build this technology and build this business to support developers like me that are looking to really monetize those 3D model creations that they've worked on throughout the years. And a big part of our go-to-market strategy in the future is more of a go-to-community strategy. So we have a list of over 150 Discord servers that we're going to be rolling out partnerships with, which allows us direct access to over 300,000 possible developers for Blocksmith. And what's great is that's only from 150 Discord servers. And there's thousands of these Discord communities that we're gonna be tapping into. There's millions of developers that are doing peer-to-peer transactions currently over Discord, and that's really a big part of the marketplace that we're tapping into. So a lot of our go-to-market strategy and the advertising spend that we're gonna have early on is actually doing direct partnerships with those server owners and being able to tap into their community and provide value to developers kind of in that space.

Omar.

Hey, sorry, I had some news. Can you walk us again through the revenue model, especially as you onboard more users and the bandwidth, I assume, is going to change dramatically, especially Especially since it's going to be sort of intensive on the ordering side.

Yeah, so our revenue model is a 30% take rate on every USD transaction on our platform. We actually also offer gaming currency, and we built the underlying payment technology to accept gaming currencies on the platform as well for users that don't have access to traditional payment forms like PayPal, etc. So there's the 30% take rate. On top of that, we also do offer a $10 a month subscription for game developers that are kind of looking to up their game on our platform and further promote their 3D models to users that are accessing our marketplace. So what that includes, advanced analytics, the ability to list your 3D model under different categories, like doing limited releases, doing free releases to drive traffic to your profile on our platform as a seller. We're also going to be tiering that subscription up in the future. So the $10 a month is just our base subscription. We're going to be looking at further plans that cost more, that offer even more amenities to developers that are looking to up their game on our platform.

Okay. And when you, when you accept non-USD tokens, how do you manage the risk of that inventory?

Yeah. So in terms of like the gaming currency payments, is that what you're referencing?

Yes.

Yes. So the gaming currency that we currently facilitate on our platform is actually Robux, which is the virtual currency for the Roblox platform. There's actually zero blockchain behind that. So all of those transactions are handled through Discord or through Roblox's platform. So we actually never handle any of those currencies. The only thing for us is making sure that the users are safe, right? So we are gonna moderate our platform. We've built actually an asset moderation tool that allows us to identify fraudulent 3D models in one click, and we're gonna be automating that in the future using AI. So the way that we're viewing kind of these gaming currency transactions on our platform is that we actually take 0% from those gaming currencies. So we actually have a 0% take rate for any gaming currency on our platform. Which actually contributes to our ability to generate significant network effects and allow users that don't have access to PayPal, et cetera, to sell with gaming currencies, share our platform with their friends, and still have those users on our platform actively engaging.

Thank you, Blake. Thank you, everyone. And I, I can't do it as well as John does, but happy to inform that you are oversubscribed 245%. Great job.

Awesome. Thanks, everybody.

Next up, we have Roderick from Roseman Labs.

Yes. Hello, everyone.

Hello, Roderick. But before we move on to Roderick, Omar, you just joined us. Can you go ahead and introduce yourself for the audience?

Absolutely.

Hi, everyone.

Omar Yahya here.

I'm the managing partner and founder of Prudentia Digital, which is a an early-stage Web3 venture firm. We do everything pre-seed and seed. We also do a lot of incubation at the fund. We like a lot of primitives, including scaling infrastructure, DeFi, metaverse infrastructure. And we typically work with teams on all fronts from ideation, mechanism design, writing your code, hiring, raising money. And at some point, you're going to have liquidity event or something like that. So we work on, on all fronts. So if you're working on that or anything related, uh, I'd love to talk to you, and I'll share my details, uh, with Sufyan.

Thank you, Omar. And, uh, Omar was also a huge part of our, uh, first Demo Day on Stonks, which is a huge success— $19 million oversubscribed, um, the Algorand accelerator. So, Omar, thanks so much for being a part of, um, part of our network, um, and our Helping out our founders. Okay, well, Roderick, over to you.

Thank you. Check it out. Yes, I'm Roderick, founder of Roosman Labs, and we change how the world uses data. According to McKinsey, roughly $3 trillion of value is left on the table every year Since sharing of sensitive data is difficult. It's hampered by legal complexity, technical complexity, and it's very costly and time-consuming. Roseman Labs has built the Virtual Data Lake. It's a software solution that enables organizations to collaborate on sensitive data without the need to trust each other. It's much more cost-efficient, faster to implement, and very scalable. Any data scientist in the world can use our software. So how does it work? Take, for instance, 3 hospitals that want to run an analysis, for example, for who has the best treatment for a certain type of cancer. Traditionally, they would share their data with a central party that runs the analysis. But using the virtual data lake, data remains at the hospitals, and the analysis is being run on the internet on encrypted data. Very fast, privacy by design. We use a cryptographic technique called secure multi-party computation that we have made scalable and very high performance, so it can be used in production-grade applications. And that unlocks a huge data collaboration market, of which especially $45 billion market that can only be accessed by these decentralized encryption techniques is very interesting, and we already use it in practice. For instance, to fight cybercrime together with the Dutch Ministry of Justice. We use it to optimize healthcare treatments, and we use it to uncover criminal networks in, for instance, human trafficking. We do that with a unique team, and we've onboarded 6 PhD-level cryptographers combined with industry professionals that know how to bring this, this technology to the market. Together we change how the world is using data. That is Rosemond Labs. That is privacy by design. Thank you. Back to you, Sufyan.

Thank you, Roderick. That was great. And the floor is open to questions.

Thanks, Roderick. Ali here. What prompted you to work on this problem and start this company?

Thanks, Ali. I myself have a background and I've worked a lot in working on sensitive data with competing companies. So I'm very well aware how complex, especially it is when you handle large volumes of sensitive data from different parties that are actually not trusting each other fully. And through one of our founders, Toon, I came into contact with Nick, and Nick was working on this secure multi-party computation technology, and he made a huge breakthrough in the performance of this technology. He came up with a new type of implementation, and he wanted to bring this technology to market. And together we started to research whether that was possible, whether there is a market for this new technology, because it's quite a new paradigm that you don't have to share your data, but you can still use it. That's how we started.

Thank you.

Awesome. I have a question around a future state of the world. So 10 years from now, if everything works out the way that you want and have designed, What does it look like and which competitor are you taking away most of your, you know, the customers from? Because I was looking through your pitch deck and it wasn't clear to me. I just want to really understand, yeah, the competition right now, but then also the future.

Yeah.

So there's a couple of different privacy-preserving analytics techniques that all have their specific type of applications. And we're currently getting to the market with applications where sensitive data cannot be shared. But our end vision is that what we actually see already is that it's much easier to collaborate on data in this decentralized way. It's much faster to set up a data collaboration, and that does not necessarily have to be on confidential data. So where we're working towards is that this is actually easier than sending Excel files through email or running traditional data analysis. So in the end, we compete with the existing methods, which is like sharing huge amounts of data and centrally processing them. Is that answering your question, Sarah?

I think partially. I think I'll just hone in a little bit more, like name a company that you're up against or will find yourself up against or taking market from in the future.

Yeah, I think there's a company called Starburst that is very successful in setting up data collaborations in the clear on normal data. In a couple of years' time, we are the Starburst, but then for privacy-preserving analytics, for confidential data, privacy-sensitive data.

Super helpful there. Got it. Thank you.

Let me ask you a quick one, Audrey. Why did you choose MPC? There are other sort of state-of-the-art privacy-preserving techniques. Some are a lot cheaper or have been getting a lot cheaper. And MPC requires a proper setup. And some different variants of it require different degrees of trust. So why MPC?

Yeah, so MPC and the way we implement it gives the strongest privacy guarantees. But with the breakthrough from our CTO, we see that performance-wise we can compete with the other techniques. Of course, there's techniques that are more suitable. So MPC is very suitable if you're in a data collaboration. So if you only want to run privacy-preserving analytics on your own data, but you want to do that in the cloud, There's different techniques that are more suitable for those type of use cases. But for data collaboration, this way of using MPC, we really think that that is the future and that is highly efficient.

I will ask some questions from the audience. So, Taron, who's actually portfolio. In chat, he's asked 3 questions. One, how does data get propagated between participants? Can we use the data lake for analytics data? And 3, how do you establish ownership and exchange?

Yeah, so what we do is we encrypt the data at the source. This can be in an API, on a database. But it can also be that you use a web browser in which you encrypt an Excel file, for instance, because in healthcare we see that people still are working a lot with ordinary Excel. We encrypt at the source and then we cut the data in different pieces, and those pieces are distributed among a set of different servers in such a way that if anybody accesses a single server, you can't retrieve the secrets that are being stored. So this way of encryption, if you have a little piece of data, it does not reveal anything about the original data itself.

Roderick, thank you so much.

Awesome, thank you.

And you are oversubscribed.

No, you're kidding. Oh, that's awesome. Good to hear.

Oh, next up, We have health gear and biotech. Got this from Cellbox Labs. All right. Gatis, give me a second, pulling up your deck. All right, go kill it.

Okay, let's go. Hello, my name is Gatis and I'm co-founder of Cellbox Labs. We have developed organs on chips for more effective drug development. Back in the '80s, Eli Lilly started to sell ibuprofen. It took them 16 years and a lot of money to develop it. They tested on mice, rats, rabbits, and even monkeys. but they made some shortcuts in clinical trials. It went on sale and people started dying. It was a complete disaster. It could have been prevented with organ-on-a-chip. Luckily, regulations have improved, but the same thing is happening in drug discovery. In preclinical stage, we test on petri dishes and animals, and we let a lot of toxic compounds through to clinical trials. Or they fail and it costs a lot of money. a lot of time. So we have a solution that combines human organ and petri dish called Organ-on-a-Chip. That is a small artificial organ outside our body. More in detail, it's a plastic chip about USB stick size. It has tiny channels less than a millimeter in size on top of each other with a membrane in between that mimics organ wall. We can put cells inside. For example, we can put gut cells in top channel, blood vessel cells in bottom channel. We add flow and cells feel the same environment as in our body, and they grow exactly like in our body. And we can also personalize these chips. Due to our unique technology, we can get very high organ replication and good throughput. We are using razor blade business model. These chips are single use. You grow cells, you do experiment and throw them out. And one instrument can generate sales of $200K per year. 87% of compound toxicity could have been predicted with organ-on-chip technology. A gut-on-chip alone can save more than $2 billion for pharmaceutical companies. We have sales leads from pharmaceutical companies, nutrition industry, and CROs, and we have made the first sale and working on a couple of CRO deals right now. We have a team of 3 PhD co-founders with startup experience and expertise in microfluidics, biology, and product development. And right now we are raising a seed round of €2.5 million to get this technology to the market. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Gatis. That was a great pitch. Um, over to the panelists for Q&A.

Um, thanks, Gatis. Great pitch. Uh, why, um, why, why did you feel compelled to work on this problem?

Um, I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?

Yeah, what, what prompted you to, to work on this problem personally? Okay, you know, why did you start the company?

Yes, so me and Robert, we are engineers, like physicists, and we met our biologist in a meeting between institutes. So Artur, he had a research problem that he wanted to address to study microbiota, and he didn't have any models. There were no models available. So we came together and ended up with organ-on-a-chip technology that can solve this problem because we can make it and he can do his biological tests. And very soon we realized, since we have industrial background, that there is actually space in this field. There's not good technologies right now out there. And we started to work on commercialization of this project.

I feel like Ali took my question, but there has to be some sort of personal narrative. Like, I think this is such a interesting space. Uh, I was reading about this and I was like, wow, this is incredible. But I don't know if I believe that it's just a commercialization opportunity. If you're like, maybe there's something there. Like, what inspired you to want to work on this and solve this? Because with your experience, you could be doing many other things, but why this one? Like, are you sure there's nothing there? You don't have to say anything just because I'm telling you, but is there nothing there that you're like, why you really care about the, the problem that needs to be solved for this, or what?

Yeah, so this is really exciting because before I worked in like liquid crystal displays, solar cells here in Silicon Valley, and this is really like combining 2 completely different fields. This is very multidisciplinary, so that is really exciting to learn more about biology, etc. So, and this can actually solve a lot of problems we are facing right now, every day, everyone, like personalized medicine, like drug discovery, etc. So this is not just like making the new app that will help you, I don't know, find the closest coffee shop or another social app. So this is also like helping everyone around the world.

But what if you find another industrial problem in 5 years' time and you leave this behind and forget about it and work on the next thing?

Oh, the next thing? Yeah. So I have, I'm involved right now also, for example, in development of new type of photonic sensors as well.

Everyone's got a side hustle, don't they? I love it. Everyone's got something on the side.

Yeah, because they use like this completely new principle. It's like non-degradable sensors, for example, for ammonia. It's very good.

So yeah, awesome. No, thank you. Appreciate it. Cool. Who else?

Yeah, so can you talk a little bit more about what— so I know that you guys are starting with the gut cells and related diseases, but what else is related to the gut, or what's the next step towards making this bigger than what it is currently?

Yeah, so since our expertise and specialty is gut-on-chip, so we can use that for pharmaceutical industry and also for, like, test probiotics. The probiotics industry is very excited in this. The design of the plastic part is the same for other organs. So we are developing right now also lung-on-chip, and we can— we will continue with the liver-on-chip, kidney-on-chip, heart-on-chip, and brain-on-chip. So the next thing is actually to combine them, because what you can do, you combine these chips and make human-on-a-chip, and that will be able to replace animals. And that is a huge part because right now there are 100 million animals killed in experiments in the United States alone every year. So if you can combine these chips and you can do experiments and replace animals, that is like huge potential market. And the second thing is you can personalize them. So what we see in the future that you can give your stem cells, for example, and the clinic can differentiate them in different organs and make a bank of organs on chips. And when you go to see a doctor and you have to take drugs, for example, prescription, they can test drugs on your specific organs on chips and then prescribe you exactly that medicine that works for you. Right now we are already working that with the hospital and biomedical research and study center with lung cancer patients. So we are taking primary cells from the patient, from operation material, put them in chips, and then we can test drugs for chemotherapy, what will work the best. And that is like personalized medicine, huge multi-billion, hundreds of billion market, or even trillion in the future.

Thank you.

Thank you, Geddes. That was great. Um, up next we have Yasmine. Panelists, thank you for the questions. I'll be back in 2 minutes. All right, there you go. Yasemin, go kill it.

Sure.

Hello everyone, I'm Yasemin. I'm molecular biologist and co-founder of UniqueGene, and at UniqueGene we discover the potentials of the athletes through genetic As a former athlete, we started to improve the performance of the athletes, and we have seen that, seen that 80% of the people are curious about their genetic data. With your data, you can select the right training program, minimize your injury risk, and take your first steps into a healthy life. So from the previous athletes we studied, we have seen up to 8 times performance increase in the athletes with right genetic training program. The process is so simple. We have a kit. You take your own sample and send it back to us. It's that simple. So the potential is in your package. So we are testing 7 different parameters within 14 different genes, and we have 2 different packages. With these packages, you can take your own sample, but if you already have your raw data, you can download it from uniquegene.com and take your results within 3 days. So we give you a personalized report, but if you're a sports club, we also offer you a personalized, uh, tracking system for your athletes. It's only $10 per month. You give your physical data to us and we combine it with your genetic results. So why UniqueGene? Because we are doing our tests in our own laboratories, we use our own algorithm, and also we are just doing physical and genetic combination. Right now we have tested more than 120 athletes from Turkey, like football teams, sports clubs, national team athletes, and also academies. So we are a team of 12 with molecular biologists, data scientists, lawyers, and salespeople, and we have advisors from tech companies and also sports techs. So we have started with sports sports tests, but we will have nutrition tests, wellness tests, and illness, uh, prediction in the future. So in Draper University, we have tested Tim and also a lot of people, sports people in here, and also we are at the top 6. And in Europe, we were selected as the most impressive startups this year, so we are very happy about it. And right now we are needing $360,000 So if you be as a UniqueGene team, we believe that you're all unique and you have a right to discover yourself with your own DNA. Thank you.

Awesome. Wow, I actually want to start using that. Should we have a question for you? What is one example where someone got this data and started using it, and what was the outcome of that? Like, I want to hear about a story who— like, I get that I can track it, but what can I— or what someone— something someone has done from it, you know?

Uh, okay. Actually, you know, like, there are a lot of global athletes using those tests, and these tests are used, uh, especially in Olympics right now. So we have seen that, for example, I have done this test to myself, and I can say that I'm more of an endurance athlete. So I train basically, uh, in endurance trainings, and I have an injury risk So I have to take precautions. You can get that kind of outputs. And right now, you know, like very professional athletes do this test, especially we have worked with, for example, academies. And we have seen that, you know, 1 second is important in sports. You know, even if you are not professional, gaining insights about your genetic data helps you a lot.

Got it. So Maybe hone into one specific example that comes to mind. Like, someone used Unique Gene and they avoided injuries to 1 per year as opposed to 4. Like, can you think of a specific outcome that might have been, whether for you or for someone else? Because I'm still trying to figure out the exact scenario.

Yeah, for example, there is an Olympic athlete and she was, you know, a bronze medalist, and after she took that test, she has seen that she is— she can just run longer distances. So when she trained, you know, like she had up to 7 times performance, as I said in the deck. And with that data, you know, like you can actually know what's best for you.

That's really cool. Okay, got it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Great pitch. What prompted you? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Russ.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Go.

Oh, I was gonna say, what compelled you to start this company? Why now?

Why now? Because you know, like after COVID and also before COVID healthy life is very important. It's important in U.S., in Turkey, and also in global. So when you gather personalized data about yourself, you can take precautions beforehand, you know, like, and with that data is we have started with sports genetics, but we can use our algorithm with diseases also. And previously we have used in stroke disease, and you can predict your own risks at the end. So, you know, it can be used in not just wellness but also in diseases in And what does your traction look like today? As I said, you know, like we have tested 120 at least, but we have made deals with more than 4 sports clubs. So we are right now trying to make collaborations like including 600 tests. So our aim is to reach 1,000 people at the end of the year. So we have a collaboration with Fenerbahçe Sports Club right now. And we will test there 600 to 1,000 athletes this year.

And Fenerbahçe signed on? Like, is that a firm deal?

Yeah, yeah. You know, like actually we were selected as a top sports startup in Hype Innovation, you know, like an event. So we will work with them.

Cool. Congrats. That's great. And I see Izmir here. I've actually been to Izmir.

Yeah, we are in İzmir.

Istanbul, İzmir, and Ankara.

So yes, that's right.

Maybe a dummy question then, if I, if I may for a second. How do you relate to some of the other I don't know, the very commercial ones, 23andMe or whatever, um, is there any overlap at all?

Actually, it's beneficial for us because, you know, like, if you already have your 23andMe raw data, you can upload into our system. So we have like potential of 17 million users. Like, if you already have your data, you can upload, and, you know, you don't have to test from us. We have a We have one more package, costs $20, it's very cheap. So you can upload that data and get your results within 3 days. So we can also make collaboration with that kind of laboratories. It's a big plus for us.

Yeah.

So I can see if I'm related to Ali and see if I'm a better athlete than him, basically.

You know, like you can just come together and improve your training.

Oh, you're better. I'll tell you now, you're better.

But you know, as I say, if you already have your own data, you can just upload it from our system. It's a big plus.

Awesome.

Um, Yasmin, can you talk about, um, I know that you're currently selling to clubs, etc., but my mom would have bought like 20 of these to make sure every other month to make sure we were like competing on best, uh, you know, potential. So is that a market that you're thinking about, like potential parents, or, uh—

Yes.

Okay.

Can you elaborate? Actually, you know, like we have started with sports clubs, but we have like deals with, um, gymnastics clubs targeting kids. So we just go to the events and, you know, like we also have breadthroughs and we are selling those kits in the events. So parents are a big target for us because, you know, like in our packages we say discover your potential. So to discover your potential, it's the best time to do it to your kid, you know, like when it's early, then the results will be better. Yeah. So as, as you say, Astra, we are targeting like sports clubs, academies, you know, private schools. They are all targets to us.

Thank you, Yasmin. That was great, and you're oversubscribed.

Yay!

See you.

Next up, last in biotech, we have Max from TriLink. Ali, how do you like this hybrid version of the show we've put on?

Uh, I think it's, it's pretty cool. It's, it's working. Uh, I love that like the founders are there in person. They're coming to like a backdrop and place, and it's, it's, it's really cool, right?

We wanted to make it fun. We've been having fun since last night. All right, um, Max.

Hi everybody.

All right, you're up, panelists. I'll bring you back in 2 minutes. Max, go kill it.

Okay.

Hello, everybody.

My name is Max Hardwirwin. I'm a medical oncologist and the founder of Trialine. Our mission is to make clinical trials faster, more efficient, and cost-effective, and of course, to help patients. The problem with clinical trials is that patient recruitment is slow due to the lack of resources for physicians, and this causes massive losses massive profit losses for the pharma companies. The solution is an accurate clinical trial matching app for physicians to increase patient recruitment. We developed Trialing, an app for physicians to find specific clinical trials and refer their patients. With our app, we were able to cut down the patient referral time from 2 weeks to 1 day. We launched in December and have already more than 800 oncologists on board, and more than 250 patients have been referred to clinical trials. Doctors don't have to pay for the app. It's for free for them. We monetize the platform through a B2B model with the pharma companies. Our revenue streams so far include the data analytics and marketing side for the pharma companies, clinical trial advertising, and white label solutions. So far, we have 3 big clients, and revenue this year will be more than $400K coming from these big 3 contracts we have already signed. We closed a pre-seed round last year and expect to raise $1.5 million by the end of this year. We have a multidisciplinary team of experts, including key opinion leaders in clinical trials. This is just the beginning. Our app will be the standard platform for patient recruitment to clinical trials. Also, we are building a unique clinical trial management system to help hospitals, and we will be the leader in clinical trial support services for pharma companies and for CROs. So our platform will help execute clinical trials in a more efficient way, way to cut down losses, to improve return of investment for pharma companies, And of course, to save lives. Thank you very much. I'll be happy to take any questions.

Here to interrupt the awkward silence, or— Saval, let's start with you.

I'm probably the worst person to start with. I'm not very attuned to this stuff. Let me dumb it down and maybe ask a question that will also help you, right? Like, how does this affect me? I'm an investor, but take that away. I'm just a potential customer. How do you make this feel like this is important for me, for me to care about this and feel like I need to tell my friends about it? There's a lot of technical stuff in there and a lot of things that are implied language that I need to know, but I don't know enough of it. So again, not your target audience directly, but indirectly, how do you make me Interested?

Yeah, yeah, great question. Yeah, actually, uh, we are building some tools where the end user is the physician, hospitals, also pharma companies. But at the end, the one who benefits from all these things are the patients. Like, we have, uh, 18 million new cancer patients around the world, and we are talking only about cancer. Clinical trials are like studies conducted in humans to get new treatments. And these clinical trials are most of the times a unique opportunity for those patients to be treated. When you have advanced cancer, you can only get one chance, 2 chances, and clinical trials are needed to get more treatments and also to have drugs approved. And platforms like these will help enroll more patients in clinical trials. And another big problem that affects everyone is that less than 20% of hospitals have clinical trials. So majority of patients do not have access to these treatments. So we are raising awareness of all these treatments so all patients have the same opportunity. So how affects you? I hope it never will affect you. But, uh, so we are reaching out to try to help patients at the end and to, I mean, uh, try to change how the pharma industry, the clinical trials are working today.

Very good answer. Thank you. That definitely made me more aware of it. There's a couple things that you said now that made me just connect the dots. Thank you for that.

Thanks, Hafiz.

And we have a special guest joining us. Ameen, hello. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Hey, hey, Sufyan. Hey everyone. Yeah, nice to meet you all. Ameen from Founders Fund here. Unfortunately, I'm sorry for being so late. I wanted to drop in for a few minutes, but nice to meet everyone and thank you for having me.

No, thank you. Of course, uh, we'll hear from you right after we've taken the round of questions. I'm not sure where you joined, so, um, other panelists, questions for Max?

Uh, Max, um, congrats, great pitch. And, uh, um, um, uh, 2 questions. One, um, what prompted you to get into this and solve this problem, right? Why you? Why now?

Why?

And, and 2, Uh, how did you sign up these 800 physicians and 5 hospitals on the waiting list? What, what's worked so far?

Okay, great question, Ali, and I thank you very much for, for requesting that. So, uh, how did I begin this? I mean, this is a problem I really had— me, my co-founder, our colleagues— because this is a tool we doctors needed. Of course, when I first had this problem, when I was a junior physician working at the hospital, visiting cancer patients, my first thought was not, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going— my thought was, I'm going to look for if exists any tools so I can look for these clinical trials. So there were some initiatives, but they weren't helping me. So there was a point that I really needed this, so I start with this project. So everything came from a problem I have. I validated that problem with a lot of colleagues. I mean, doctors have this problem usually, so I take this step to try to build it myself. The second question, how did I get these 800 oncologists on board? So this first stage, I mean, we launched the platform in December. Everything is organic growth right now, word of mouth. We are having a great network effect. Because we have 3 main players here: the physicians, hospital, and the pharma companies. So every time we speak with the hospital to tell them about the platform, we enroll like 20, 30 physicians. Or if we talk with a physician, he would talk with their colleagues. And even though this is not enough, pharma companies are always visiting the physicians. And when they hear the problem, like we need a platform to look for clinical trials and say, okay, somebody told me about trialing, so you can go there. So these 3 main characters, physician, hospital, pharma company, are making a huge network effect. Also, we are starting now doing inbound sales, and we'll start early next year with outbound sales, sales representatives, but this would be another stage. So far, it's totally organic.

Thank you. Have you been doing the sales yourself, or is there someone else on the team?

Well, right now we are a team of 17. One year ago, it was only myself and my co-founder, and we were like doing emails, not cold emails, only for colleagues. We have now a medical and clinical trial-specific team doing the inbound sales, but I'm always on the front talking with the physicians, with the pharma companies, and the hospital myself.

Thank you.

Thank you, Max. Great pitch. And before we move to the next one, while I have all 4 of you in the same room, Ameen, let's start with you. So tell us more about what your focus is at Founders Fund. What are you looking for? We just had 5 amazing pre-seed founders pitch.

So—

Great. Yeah, yeah, I'll be, I'll be very quick. And yeah, so yeah, based in San Francisco, principal on the Founders Fund team. And we have a pretty broad mandate. We'll do anything from a pre-seed all the way through pre-IPO investment, very much so multi-stage. I would say nowadays, given market conditions, spending a lot more time in early-stage software, particularly vertical software, SMB SaaS. But we have folks on our team who cover everything from crypto through healthcare, hardware, Kind of all the above. But yeah, you know, I'm looking— always enjoy these pitch sessions. So thanks for having me.

I mean, thank you for joining. Okay, last pitch for the day. We have Jiwon. Jiwon, there you go. And I will bring up the panelists in 2 minutes.

Save reverse S-word bias. symbolizing the need to overturn the patriarchal bias. I'm Jiyoung Park from Saibenco, a femtech company designing high-quality sexual wellness products for women. I'm a professor dropout from UT Austin. While teaching, I came across the different perspectives around female sexuality in the US and in conservative Korea. Like Korea, female sexuality is still a taboo in many countries even today. More than a billion STIs are acquired daily, and half of the pregnancies are unintended. Current market is targeted toward male satisfaction only, and most of the products contain harmful chemicals including carcinogens. Saif is reversing all of this. Our products are high quality and safe, and it's female-friendly, and we empower women to be in charge of their own sexual health. Starting from the carcinogen-free condoms and vegan and organic lubricant and feminine wash, we are adding vaginal health, fertility care, and STI prevention products. We are disrupting the male-dominated industry with a female-first mindset. Our— we only use healthy and safe ingredients, and we even developed and patented our own formula enhancing female reproductive and urinary health. Our award-winning design provides female-desired experience, and all our products are made in Korea with our team's rigorous R&D and quality control. Health and wellness industry is $3.6 trillion, and sexual wellness industry is expected to double over the next 5 years to reach $125 billion. We've sold more than 860,000 products through 10,000 stores stores across Korea, and we are expanding globally to reach billion sales this year. With the amazing team of superwomen, Saie is designing a high-quality sexual wellness product for women because we care what she puts inside her body. Thank you.

Cutting in for the awkward silence, Sabah, you're our usual suspect.

I don't think I'm qualified to answer this one either, but no, this is awesome. So much awesome traction here. I'm curious, is there not a lot of competition for this? If I believe what you're saying off the bat, then that's clear. Is there no one in that space at all? Because that sounds wild and like a really good opportunity for you, which is why you're seeing a lot of traction there. But is there anyone competing?

I mean, there are some brands like us based in the US. We didn't have any competition in Korea, but we didn't also have the market either. But we had to start educating the market to be able to sell our products. So it was a long journey, but we did make some strong traction. out there. So we see like when we are doing the expansion to the US market and the European market or like a Western market in general, we will have better chance because like there's already market exists here. Like women consumers would like more to choose better product for themselves.

Yeah. One of my friend's companies, Ovira, a femtech product that helps with period pain. I think the biggest, I don't know if you've heard of her, but it doesn't matter. I think the biggest success for her is that she has a community of female founders that can relate to and talk to about not making periods taboo. And there's an Instagram, there's a huge community following, and she gives a lot of credit to that. So question for you, are you doing something like that where you're building community together to let different users connect and just normalize it?

Yes, of course. Because we entered the South Korean market where it was still very— sexual wellness is still a very foreign concept. So in the beginning, we spent a lot of our energy on trying to build a community and try to gather a group of women who can get enthusiastic about our brand, but at the same time, who can be our brand ambassador spread the word to their community members as well.

Yeah.

Okay.

Very cool.

Ali, Amin, questions?

I mean, go ahead. Sure.

Oh, I was going to say, yeah, thank you for the pitch, Jiwon. We're investors in Ritual. in the States and kind of a couple others adjacent to the space. So yeah, like Saba, cannot claim to be an expert, but I would— I'm definitely curious in terms of what the expansion strategy outside of Korea and like the home market looks like and whether that will remain, you think, more D2C or partnerships, et cetera.

Yeah, I think it should be both. Like, we are approaching it both ways. We do need some partnerships because localization is hard for us because it is literally a sensitive topic culturally. So we do need some good partners who understand the market better than we do. Also, another barrier that we are facing is all our products falls under either medical device or OTC drugs and things like that. So we do need to go through those regulatory affairs and try to get the FDA equivalent approval and things like that. So what we've been doing is last year we opened a global cross-border D2C e-commerce. So basically we ship over 30 countries directly from Korea. And what we've been doing is we are utilizing that as a testbed for the market validation. So what we are trying to do is a little bit of advertising to the targeted market and see if you can get enough traction. And if so, we can go through the expensive and long process of getting the approvals and things like that. And so currently, our products are officially being sold not only in Korea, but in Japan. And we are in the process of doing it in Taiwan's market, which will be completed by the end of this year. And we also in Hong Kong, where the regulations are a little bit easy, and we are ready to sell in the US market because we have all the FDA approval already and completed.

Got it. Got it. Thank you. And then I guess the answer to this question may be the markets that you've already started demoing in, like Taiwan and Japan. But I guess there's got to be a balance of markets where there's not a lot of existing players where it's crowded out, but there is like a cultural embrace for these types of products, I'd imagine, or like a more friendly regulatory environment. What sort of fits into those like handful of markets that are, you know, not, don't have the, the, you know, don't have the already penetrated market like they do in the US, but also are, you know, well positioned from either cultural or like governance regulatory perspective?

Yeah, I mean, for example, US market, we do have some direct competition, but if you come, if you compare it to the like a number of like, you know, the big players in the market, they are still very small market share. So I think that there's more room for brands like us to be penetrating. But what is good thing about in the US market, the customer is already existing. So in Korea, less than 10% of the condom purchase were made by women. So we had to try to build up the market for ourselves. But here, like, 40% of condoms are purchased by women, so the market already exists. So we just need to persuade them this is a better alternative. They can— they have options to choose from.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you, Jiwon. That was a great pitch. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but what a great day. Top 6 from our summer program pitching. We had some great guests come in. We had great panelists. To wrap it off, let's have some fun conversations. I'll start off with who still wants to come to in-person Demo Days? That's a me question.

Maybe you can walk in before Ali gets to tell us the beauty of Stonks. Maybe we can walk into a venue with like Stonks devices so I can do all the things that I can do in this virtual world. Otherwise it's just 2-dimensional, isn't it? Walking in, seeing a pitch and walking out. So maybe Stonks can make some hardware devices to vote up, make an intro, $10,000 check.

What do you guys think? Amin, what do you think? Remote Demo Day, in-person, like happy hour after, what the best format would be for Demo Days going forward?

Uh, I mean, you know, I'm just a guest here, so I wouldn't— I don't, I don't want to overstep. I mean, I think my bias is always for in-person, but, um, you know, that's just kind of— I think, uh, after seeing the last few months, like, the beauty of spending time with people in person. But I also understand that folks are distributed and, uh, it's a lot easier. So, um, but yeah, I think all in all, I'm probably, uh, net out more in favor of in-person.

Hell yeah, one more vote for IRL. Ali, what do you think?

You guys, you know, you put on some great events and I think the last few months also like in-person, I don't think there's a replacement for in-person, like it's so great, but we're starting to see more and more people do hybrid. So they'll set up an in-person where the in-person is really more around meeting and socializing and networking and face time versus the actual pitching is just done on some sort of live streaming format. And it sort of combines the best of both worlds.

Oh, I absolutely don't like networking events. I don't drink. And I don't like, you know, just generally going to a room full of 50 people and, you know, just— it's—

I—

yeah. So for me, I think a good con— I love doing demo days online because they're so much more efficient. I don't have to drive anywhere. I can really like pick and choose, um, like people I want to talk to. And then of course meeting them in person. I don't think anything replaces working in person with people or learning from people one-on-one.

Yeah.

But the more events we do, um, that are more efficient and done online, especially like big events, I think that to me is the really good marriage between Real. And like, for me also, in my head, I don't think of online as like a different world because I grew up online, um, like playing video games. So I don't have that differentiation in my head of, oh, this is real and this is like in real life. So might not be the best person to, um—

oh no, we lost her.

Oh, I think her laptop died. Did nobody get her to the charger?

Shoot.

One thing I'll add, the key difference is live is a huge difference to prerecorded, right? Whether I'm watching a video on the screen or seeing someone pitch in front of me, a video, if it's prerecorded, just doesn't make us feel as timely and FOMO and real and authentic. So that's probably the difference.

I agree. I'm sorry, I saw you dropped out.

Oh, nothing. I was just saying that I absolutely love this marriage of virtual and in real, like more efficient, more effective.

So yeah.

With that, we do have an IRL event. We have our 9th annual partners dinner and alumni reunion coming up on 28th. Amin, I don't know if you're here for it, but would love for you to join. It's on June 28th. Saba, you're in LA. If you're willing to make a drive down, Ali, I know you're coming. So guys, we do our annual alumni reunion and partners dinner every year. And for those of you who are interested in collaborating with Draper University and interested in working together, please feel free to reach out and we would love to meet you at our annual event. Okay, one more question. What are you looking forward to in the next year or so with the current market? Start off with Amin.

I think 2 things. One, definitely, I think that there are some silver linings of the bull market, but I think one of them is like, once we have more reasonable kind of fundraising expectations, I feel like it takes this pressure off of off of founders to go out and instantly get a 3x, 4x markup in 6 months. I think it can actually lead to more sustainable company building. And I think all in all, it's a positive when valuation expectations do reset a bit, especially in the earlier stage. I think it also alleviates pressure, gives people time to build. And then if you look at the ashes of 2009, 2010, a lot of great companies will continue to be built. So that's kind of what I'm looking forward to.

And are you guys all into Web5?

Let's go.

Ali, next year, what are you looking forward to?

Jeez, next year is so far away.

Within the next 12 months. Let me reframe that.

You know, in terms of investing, I think this is one of— this is going to be one of the best times to invest in a decade or more. You know, the S&P with the crash and the turmoil in the markets, you know, we haven't had this big of a tech crash really since the financial crisis 12 years ago, right? And that was the time when a lot of legendary funds and early seed stage And, you know, reputations were built. A lot of great investors invested in some of their best startups, some of the best vintages out of IC and others. I think the same thing is gonna happen again, starting, you know, now or a few months ago. So to Ameen's point, I think reasonable valuations, these times are honestly the best times to build a startup because a lot of the fluff goes out of the market, you know, A lot of the opportunists who are sort of in the space to get rich quick will find other ways to get rich quick and they'll go somewhere else. And what you're left with are builders or people who are really trying to solve a problem or who are mission-driven or customer-driven, which is, you know, you need really deep commitment to sort of get through the rough years of what, you know, what it takes to build a startup. So I think we're gonna see really, really good companies come out of this downturn and they will be, they will define the next decade. And the investors who support them are going to see some of the best returns. Conversely, you know, 2019 to 2021 will probably be lower than average returns. And this period starting now for the next few years is probably going to be, you know, really great for returns.

Great words there. So for all the founders out there, actually all the investors out there, this is great news. Saba?

Yeah, I won't pretend to be an expert in this or know how to predict the future, but what the 2 gentlemen said so far is super inspiring to me, at least, you know, I'm up and coming in this world. One thing that comes to mind Is I, I kind of feel like there's going to be like some unbelievable disruption, and I'll tell you why. During COVID like one example is like airlines were like, "We're here for you. We're going to take care of you. Reach out if you need anything." Then COVID went over, planes came back, and they treat us like shit again. It's like, "Wait, what? You said you were there for us, and now it's back to normal the way it used to be." And like if you follow me on Twitter, I hate flying. The whole process of it sucks. And I'm like, man, like I thought it would, things would change and it wouldn't be so annoying. And so, you know, I think 10 years ago, I think the companies like, I don't know, was it Uber and Airbnb, whatever, like really good companies came out and changed it, changed the way things work. And so I'm looking forward to some of that happening. You know, at Techstars, we started making investments in over 750 companies per year now. Like next year, that's gonna be over 1,000 a year. That's almost 2 companies a day. So, you know, 1 in 50 or 55 companies is a unicorn statistically. The future's bright. Like we're gonna make a lot of bets. We're gonna see a lot of companies, but you know, that's always the case. But I do think we're gonna see a lot of crazy disruption in places we haven't seen before and things I don't even know, which is why I love hearing pitches and coming to these events and talking to founders and just seeing what they're working on. 'Cause it's humbling to be in the position You know that we are.

750 years, so it's still going. And flights, I think you and Astra might share the same emotion about flights. Astra?

Oh, I'm definitely looking forward to not getting tagged in 30 crypto Ponzi schemes a day. But aside from, so I don't wanna speak on the VC experience, but let me talk about the founder experience. I built my last company during a recession and I didn't know that the US market was in a recession because I was building it in the Middle East and raising money here. And, uh, also like I didn't realize what— I was not as well educated on recessions. Um, and raising money for people who don't have a network in the Valley is hard. And, uh, there's like no two ways about it. So if you're a founder who's building great things, just Like I think keeping your head down building, and because there's a lot less noise, it actually helps just get work done and also helps get yourself in front of the right people slightly easier. And I think that's kind of how it is. It's not just keeping your head down, working, building. And then I think platforms like Stonks or like all these newer methods of fundraising, or at least connecting with investors that weren't there during the last recession. So like angel syndicates, you know, so that is going to be something that also really helps. And again, the noise over there is also going to reduce, but because a lot of these, again, NFT or like crypto funds are no longer going to be investing. So that money gets taken out as well. So that just, it's a more streamlined process of fundraising for everybody from like a founder perspective. And I think hopefully, like touch wood, it's not going— it's going to be like fundraising is never— it's like a process. So you just have to go at it like that, build a funnel. But I think building that funnel, there's a lot more tools available now and a lot more companies or a lot more options like Stonks and AngelList, et cetera, that are going to be extremely beneficial for founders with the reduced noise.

Adding to your point, like platform like Stonks, I see we use it for fundraising, but what it's underutilized for possibly is networking.

Okay.

And I was actually giving a demo to founders on how to utilize it for networking. Like we had 220+ people tune in, right? It's Stalking 101, guys. Go over, switch to attendees, see whoever you want to connect with. Their LinkedIn and Twitters are there and just go DM them. Just go reach out to them. Like, that's how I got all 3 of you.

That's right. Yeah, you slid into the DMs.

You're absolutely right. I slid into DMs. That's how you do it. But guys, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for taking the time. Amin, I know I've kept you like 20 minutes longer. Ali, I knew I put it on your calendar last minute as always. And Saba, thank you so much for always being so gracious with your time.

Great startups today, by the way. Great startups. I think we're gonna invest in 2 of them.

Woohoo!

Really good quality. I think Blocksmith and TriLink, at least from our small fund.

Awesome. Well, guys, great news for you guys. I don't know, Ameen will probably have a deeper look at startups after this on the deal page. Saba will probably have a deeper look as well, but thank you so much everyone for coming in. It was actually a special day because I have most of my mentors and supporters on this panel. So Asra, Ali, thanks for being great mentors and supporters over the last year or so. Asra actually pretty much taught me everything. And Saba, thank you so much for always hopping on to support our founders, like whatever time it may be, whatever time we may ask of you. And Ameen, you're great with time. Like you made sure you came. Thank you so much. I know it was super last minute, but you hopped on. Thank you for being— yeah, thank you for being gracious with your time. And everyone else in the audience, like 200-odd people, thank you for tuning in. This was great. Our Demo Day on Stonks was oversubscribed.

So thank you everyone.

Bye.

I look forward to meeting some of you. All right, see you guys.

Bye.