He Lost His Sight — Not His Vision | Meet The Drapers Global: Global TikTok

I'm Tim Draper, and I invest in big ideas before they become the next big thing. I invested in Tesla, SpaceX, Twitch, all when they were just a sparkle in that entrepreneur's eye. This season, I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. I'll bring these visionary innovators to Hero City in the heart of Silicon Valley, where they'll compete compete for a million-dollar investment. Here is the twist. You, the viewers, can vote for your favorite entrepreneurs and help them secure a spot in the finale. Who will rise to the challenge and secure the funding to, to turn their dreams into reality? Let's find out together on season 7 of— Meet the Drapers! We are here in the center of the Silicon Valley, Hero City. Entrepreneurs from all over the world that submitted their business plans on TikTok. We got to see the best 4 of them. Whenever there's an entrepreneur here at Hero City and they have something to announce, they hit the gong. They like to make a splash here. So why don't we go around? We'll ask some of these guys what they do.

We have an AI platform that integrates things between the cross solar generation, farming, and so.

So farmers pay you the access to the information, and the information comes from satellites. Terrific. So you're here on a tour?

Yeah.

They're from Japan. Everybody superhero pose. Over here we got the whole team of Boost VC. Here's the great leader, Adam Draper. We are a pre-seed deep tech fund. I'm also your son.

Interesting.

And I've been on this show a couple times. They know you. They also have a company in this batch. that talks to mushrooms. Beat that.

We want people to do that science.

Mad science.

Boost.

It all starts right here. Everything just starts right here.

Blossom.

By the way, your episode is so good.

Good.

My episode's eh. Your episode is like awesome. Here we are, Draper University. This is the center of all education for entrepreneurship. Do these things work pretty well? Yeah, they're fantastic. What are those? Is that your business?

Yeah, we're making, An AI wearable that takes in 360 input and you feed it into an agent so it has the full context of your daily life.

Hi, Tally, this is Tim.

Can you add him to your memory?

Tally, am I the first one who's ever come to you wearing a Bitcoin tie?

Tim, I have stored your name in my memory.

I don't have a record of anyone else wearing a Bitcoin tie before, but I can store that information if you would like.

Yeah, I think you should store that information. It's incredibly important information. You guys are doing good work here. This is going to be fun. Okay, this here is addressing This is the dressing room for most entrepreneurs, and then they whirl around and boom, out they come! Superheroes.

A $1 million investment.

A million-dollar investment.

A million-dollar investment.

This $1 million will be an amazing step towards our goal.

It would allow us to accelerate what we want to do with existing customers.

It will mean that me and my team can focus on growing this business. It unlocks those frontiers.

The possibility for an entrepreneur to think about what next.

Change visually impaired people's lives.

It will really give us the peace of mind that we need to actually take this to the market.

Bring the z-axis to the masses.

Change the way kids across the globe learn.

Welcome back, everybody, to Meet the Drapers. This is the 2nd episode. of the Meet the Drapers TikTok teaming to bring the greatest entrepreneurs from the entire world to you. So exciting. We've got this partnership. We're so excited about what it can do for entrepreneurship generally. On my far left, it's Bill Draper, my father, a pioneer in venture capital, worked in the Reagan and Bush administration, highest-ranking American in the United Nations. Dad, welcome back to the show. Good to have you. Any thoughts before we move on here? I went to sleep. Listen, I'm really glad to be here. I am really proud of my son, I have to say in front of him. He doesn't have another son, by the way. He's really made this into a wonderful event. All right, and to my immediate left is Nikki Farb Draper. She's been adopted. Founder turned funder. She founded Power of N Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm. Welcome back to the show.

I'm so happy to be here.

Great to have you again.

I'm a tiny Draper.

And breaking out on your own, on your own venture firm.

Trying. I'm learning.

It's so exciting. It's so exciting. Good for you. And on my right, we have another Tim Draper. So Tim Nativida.

Yeah, you got it. There you go.

Draper is the GM US head of enterprise sales and global business solutions at TikTok. What are you going to be looking for here?

I think the thing I'll be looking for is who is benefiting from the core service or the core product, and is that a community that has certain unmet needs? And I think that's kind of at the heart of. Entrepreneurialism.

And Nikki, what are you gonna be looking for?

So, you know, I like the human, so I'm looking for that grit, that paper router. They've been starting businesses from the early days. You know, I'm kind of basic. If I like it, I think the masses probably like it.

With all that, let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.

When we are talking about entrepreneurship, most of the people say if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be resilient. You have to push the limits. You have to know how to deal with challenges. This is the thing that I have been doing for my entire life. If you are a blind person and if you want to contribute and create value for people, you have to cope with challenges. I had to leave my home while I was 7 years old. To study in a boarding school for blind kids. Leaving your home is difficult for everyone, but at the same time, those experiences, they allowed me to develop essential life skills. I was responsible to wash my clothes, make my bed, arranging my wardrobe, and I was just 7 years old, 8 years old. Started using computer in this school. I entered a new world with the computer. I coded a more accessible email client for me. I coded a search engine in a database of my ebooks. All those experiences brought me a perspective. I understood how to utilize, how to use technology to create a more inclusive world for all. As WeWalk, we enhance the mobility of visually impaired people. We develop all our solutions based on lived experiences. We created patented smart cane technology to make life easier. It's like a magic wand. You can ask whatever you want. Hey, WeWalk, take me to Starbucks. Hey, WeWalk, take me to the nearest bus stop. And It guides you step by step. The feedback that we got from our users, thank you to all that you developed this technology and you changed my life. This feedback was the unforgettable moment for all of our team.

Your wife is here with you. Like, has she been one of your biggest supporters through this journey?

Yes, as always, and I cannot Talk against this idea because she can hear me. Instead of making a joke, maybe I can't even. Every entrepreneur knows that you cannot walk in this journey alone. I can't do it without the support of my wife. Thank you, Fugya. Being in Silicon Valley is like being in the ocean. Big waves, endless ocean, and you know what? Whether you are blind or not, everyone can feel the ocean in the same way, and that's why I believe Silicon Valley is the heart of entrepreneurship and excites everyone. Most inventions were inspired by nature. That's why I love to feel the nature, and especially when, when I'm next to the ocean, I feel the most, and that's why I like this environment. I was excited, but at the same time, it was fun. Controlled nervous, let me say. Just before the inception of WeWalk, I was in New York to give a speech at the United Nations. While I was going to my hotel, I was using my traditional white cane with my one hand, holding my smartphone with the other to check the GPS direction. At the same time, I had to pull my luggage with those 3 fingers. So managing all those things at the same time was really a destructive moment for me. And not surprisingly, I bumped into a pole. That's why you can see some scars on my forehead right now. This is not only my problem. There are more than 250 million visually impaired people, and that's why we developed Patented smart cane technology, WeWalk. You feel the pressure because you have to manage different things, deliver a perfect pitch, you have to follow the slides, and also you have to engage with jury at the same time audience. It detects and alerts its users about overhead obstacles, gives turn-by-turn navigation, informs you about restaurants stores, cafes while you are passing by. And also you can get public transport information. Simply, this is the technology that, that I have been using right now. So it's a foldable cane. You can fold, unfold, uh, obstacle detection technology here. It has a flashlight here to, uh, to make visually impaired people more visible at night. And also it has speaker, microphone, physical buttons, motion sensors in itself, such as gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, to provide more accurate navigation experience to visually impaired people. So far, we changed more than 5,000 visually impaired people's lives. We always keep iterating our technology with our R&D partners. So we are partnering with Microsoft and Imperial College London to develop cutting-edge AI technologies and improve visually impaired people's lives.

Terrific, this is very exciting.

I was lucky because they didn't interrupt me while I was pitching.

The GPS, what is it telling you? Does it say you're on the corner of Broadway and Green Street?

Yes, and beyond that, as a visually impaired person, I need more accurate descriptions, so that's why we are— we developed Clockwise. Direction description as well. So it says three o'clock direction, two o'clock directions.

Does it alert you for people coming by or any of that?

Yes, you are right. So like that. So if there is something in front of you, like that.

Yeah.

You can hear the voice. If there is someone approaches you, you can also hear this beeping sound as well. Then you can move right. Or left, and then you can keep walking.

First, congratulations. Even just the technology, and I hear you have a patent. I think the purpose behind the company, I think, is very clear.

I relaxed more because there's a person who is understanding me. What am I talking about?

How much does this cost?

It costs $850.

$850. And how does that compare to, I'll say, an unsmart cane?

Yes, yeah, so they're around $60. So they are just a plain stick. As a visually impaired community, we need more than that because the better you get around, the better you engage in life.

Is your map owned by you, and is it getting smarter with user data? Hey, this route actually isn't super helpful for visually impaired people. If you would have gone block over— and ultimately then, can you sell that map as a subscription to non-cane holders?

I like this question because I mentioned we are able to gather data about the white cane usage. We even gather data about the obstacles on the way because we have a sensor. Plus, municipalities as well to make their infrastructures more accessible for all. If you build your infrastructure for blind people, it means that everyone can easily get around, you know.

Like a Waze? Is it a fair comparison? Are you ultimately building a Waze for this category or not? Not so fair?

Not really, not really. Yeah, I believe she was, uh, looking for More than just a hardware solution, which is reasonable. I can understand.

Well, Kursat, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers. I'll shake your hand. Thank you.

Thank you.

Terrific.

It was really fun. I have to first see the results. After that, I will decide whether I deserve to celebrate or not. Awesome.

He was very inspiring. I couldn't do anything but give him 100%. Nikki, what do you think?

Yeah, I'm with Dad and the audience. I thought he was really inspiring. It looks like he has a lot of room in the unit economics. $850 MSRP, pretty healthy economics. And he's got subscriptions.

I didn't ask what his costs were.

I know. I had it in the back of my mind I wanted to ask as well. I have to imagine expensive to manufacture.

But then he's got the subscription on it.

I did actually— I'm with him on the cane over the wristband thing because I walked around blind for a day experiment when I was in college. I had a curtain rod, and without that curtain rod, I would not know where I was. So, wow. All right. Way to go, TikTok.

I think, you know, entrepreneurialism has kind of been built into my family. Origin story, I'm an immigrant food stamp kid from Jersey. Parents worked really hard to, to kind of get us through schools and ended up going to Drexel University in Philadelphia, did engineering and moved out to Silicon Valley way back in '96. Ever since then, I've oscillated from big company to small company to founder to investor. For me, though, I do make a distinction between entrepreneurs and founders. Entrepreneurs measure value creation financially. Founders measure value creation with impact. I, I believe storytellers shape humanity. For me, there's almost this war between storytelling and big media companies. To some degree, there's a war with censorship and propaganda. And so I, I want to use our team to help tip the scale on the side of storytellers. I closely tie my personal identity to my core purpose: to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots with the power of innovation, to uplift people. That's my core, core purpose. You know, I'm a single parent here in Silicon Valley. 2 kids inspire me every day. They check me every day, which is always cool. My son specifically, he's been along this journey with me. He's one of my beta In fact, he's one of my grips when I go shoot content with one of the colleges that we're gonna go visit this Saturday. And he's right there with the camera, holding on to the backpack. I see them and I say, all right, well, what are we building? What are we building? Why are we building it? And how can we support their existence and their friends' existence and their family's existence way into the future? When you've been in Silicon Valley for close to 30 years, you see a lot of cycles come and go. I'm a big fan of legacy, and this is one of the big, big reasons why I'm excited about Meet the Drapers, because there is a lineage and legacy between Bill and Tim and Adam, and that's kind of how my family is also built. What would that kid think about where you are now? My internal New Jersey food stamp kid, that kid would tell me that I'm not going hard and fast enough, right? He would say to me, you can do better. You can go harder. You can go faster. You can go bigger. This is media, man.

Cut it.

I think that's one of the best things about California. You can be out here, go along the coast one day, and then you can be in, in wine country the next day and go up to the mountains, you know, in the same day actually. I tell you what, I can golf all year round. I mean, I may not golf well, but I suck fast and look good. California is a destination for everybody on the planet. It represents more than just Silicon Valley or the ability to grow stuff all year round, but also media and entertainment and those types of things. But it really represents an opportunity for people to connect and engage with other folks. When you can bring all of these people together and, and create around ideas, and you have a support system and an apparatus to help those come to reality, That's what it's all about. That's where magic is made. I think it's amazing to be able to kind of surface what we're trying to do with the world. I think that excitement far outweighed any kind of nervous energy I would have had.

Deepak and I were in India together. It was during the color festival, Holi, where they throw colors on you and The two of us just got drenched in colors. So fun that you ended up applying to meet the Drapers and somehow coming here. He was a venture capitalist before, or a part of our network, and now he's got a startup. Thanks, Tim.

I appreciate that. Bill, good to see you again. I was fanboying a little bit with Bill a little bit because he signed my— he signed his book about 15 years ago. Storytellers shape humanity. And they're not just our cultural icons or political leaders. They're our kids, they're our teachers. And the formats in which we create stories is constantly evolving, from paint on the walls in caves to paper, radio, TikTok videos. And for thousands of years, we've been staring at a rectangle. Recognize this, Bill?

Dad, there's your book!

Oh!

That's right.

And we just added a z-axis. My team has been asking this basic question: how will humans interact in X, Y, and Z on billions of devices that exist today with the expectation that these things are coming? So we created a completely new media format. It's called a ZCast, and the ZCast enables storytellers to engage and interact in spatial content, and our platform, Zeality, allows you to create it, Deliver it, market it, and monetize it.

So what's the technology? You've created a camera that goes 360. What am I buying from you?

He's thinking about it with the frame, but in the long term, we're thinking about a completely immersive environment. We actually built a new media format. You think PDF, you think PowerPoint, Think ZCast.

I see. So it's a, it's, it's a completely new media format. You don't have a VR headset?

No.

And so we focused on billions of devices that exist today.

So what's special about your format?

We have 20 patents on this format that combine—

What's special about it?

We allow you to import 360 and spatial content, interactive objects, live and on-demand And then we leverage AI and Web3 to create a completely decentralized mechanism to tell stories on flat devices and eventually these headsets.

That's a lot of tech words. Is it a video? Is it a 360 video?

There was a discussion about, wait, is it a camera? Is it a headset? Is there any of those types of things? So I had to do a double back.

Give an example.

I do.

In fact, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's see.

In my head, I imagine like a super tasty.

Let's see.

This is like a super tasty.

I'm gonna go to TikTok and I'm gonna show you.

So this is a Zizzle.

This is a Zizzle.

I like the Zizzle.

Yeah, it's a good name.

Yeah, it's a great name.

Yeah, I like that.

It's good too.

So your You filming some content, almost like a Shutterstock, giving that to me, and I can overlay a story on top of content you're filming.

It's part of it. When I was actually able to kind of show a Zizzle in that moment, I can hear Tim from TikTok as well as Nicky really understand. So we're creating a new breed of storyteller called a Z-Caster, and a Z-Caster can take immersive content and tell stories.

It's all going to be that kind of thing. Somebody telling a story and the background is 3D, moving around.

That's right. What you'll see here is we have a BBC reporter interviewing someone who is actually filming content from destruction in Ukraine.

You've got a couple applications or sectors, as you call them, right? Impact-driven causes and college athletics. What about the spatial imaging How does motion capture technology lend itself to these categories? Why did you pick these categories?

If I stick back to storytelling, we are in this world of fake news, propaganda, censorship, and being able to take someone someplace, even if it's in a still image, and pan around and give someone the feel of what it's like to be there and have people surface that story, that's important. Whether it's underwater, whether it's in a war zone, whether it's taking people to space. I'm a food stamp kid from Jersey, right? And so I'm all about bridging the gap between the haves and have-nots. And as a single dad, I want to ensure that my kids have a completely new way to experience stories from around the world and not just consume 30-second clips. But I love the fact that Tim and the judges actually participate in the conversation. They seem really engaged and interested.

Well, Deepak, great to see you again.

Yeah.

And thanks for coming and pitching your new business.

I felt pretty good, I tell you what. There's such a diverse group of audience— of startups out here. So just grateful for the opportunity to get out here.

What did everybody think? I don't know how good he is, but the market for that That would be terrific.

You know, it's interesting. It's a far-out idea, I thought, but that's not a bad thing. You know, I think the technology's here. The cost to buy a 360 camera can't be prohibitive. I have a VR headset, and I gotta be honest, I haven't found the daily use case. I do think a lot of that comes down to the content there. So I kind of view Zeality as a way to democratize The kinds of creators or video makers, storytellers, that would actually bring their stories into the VR world.

Nikki, what'd you think of this?

I think 2 things. I like social media that mimics real-life behavior, and I think real-life behavior is everyone has their phone at the will.i.am concert. And then you help creators create content they can't otherwise on their own, and I think he is. That's pretty radical because I don't want to buy a 360 camera. There's a lot of lingo, so I gotta look Oh, that's a big, that's a big red flag. Yeah, I got a little lost that night.

I did too, and I think you did too.

Yeah.

My name is Haroon Yaseen. I'm from Pakistan, and I'm the co-founder and CEO at TaliMabad. And in a nutshell, this company makes it very fun for young kids to learn. Before I was anything else, I was like a I was a very bored kid and a very bored student. It should surprise everyone that when you ask the majority of people in the world what they enjoyed about schooling, they'll have one teacher or one class or some rare moments in the middle that were really exciting, and otherwise it's a drab experience. And so I really didn't like that at all. That is when I discovered that I could construct the kind of world that I wanted to live in. And so I became a teacher. When I became a teacher, I was obsessed. I was obsessed with every class. It was almost like art, like theater. You had to step in front of the classroom and make sure your audience, almost as if they'd paid money to be in this show, they got a huge kick out of it. Once you do it for like one classroom, You become obsessed with wanting to do it at scale, and so that's what led to the formation of this company, because I wanted to do it for a much larger audience than just the one classroom that I was teaching.

If you win and get a chance to move on, who would be your first call?

Like, who do you share your victories with?

I've got a team of 200 people, some really incredibly bright people who could have been anywhere doing anything else that they put their minds to, yet they decided to do this. Some of them at huge personal sacrifices for themselves. I think those would be the first people I'd tell. I'd probably get all of them on a call and tell them because I think this is kind of a validation that it is possible possible to build world-changing companies in Pakistan. I think in the places where you see the most hardship are the places where you also see the most hope. Being in the redwoods kind of reminds me that some of the best places in the world are some of the quietest most pristine environments. I don't think founders get to plug out very often. If you're not careful, I think you become obsessed with what you're doing, and I think eventually consumes you. And I think almost always when you plug out and go back in, it feels different. There's either a new thought or a new idea or a new way of doing things, which is why, yeah, I think this is rare but very much needed. The whole world recognizes Silicon Valley as a place where most of the transformative things in this century happened. I think this kind of revolution is now going to spread across to much of the world, and I think the emerging market like Pakistan is not any different. And so what I'm looking forward to the most is seeing what's being done here, but then also having a chance of doing something even better back home. I mean, when they say go, you feel great. It almost feels like you've been held back on a leash. It's almost like meditating. You get lost in it. It is probably the world's best-kept secret that kids don't enjoy school.

Not anymore. We got a lot of viewers.

I didn't either, and so I grew up to become a teacher. I opened my first school at the age of 19, and this is the kind of teacher that I became. Hyper-obsessed with keeping my kids on the edge of their seats. My students came from disadvantaged backgrounds in Pakistan but made it to Harvard and Princeton on full scholarships. I started creating YouTube videos on the side on animated curriculum topics. It found its way onto national broadcast television, much like Sesame Street, and eventually we developed an app so that we could engage with these users. You know, governments in developing world spend half a trillion dollars, but the problem seems to keep getting worse. Half of the kids can't even read by the time they exit primary grades. Education is one of those rare things everybody has an opinion about, but also like it is pretty complex. And so we took the data that we had from hundreds of millions of user interactions and used that to train AI. Here's how it works. If you're a teacher, you hate grading exams. This is an artificial intelligence algorithm that creates and grades all of the exams and assessments that are happening in the school, even dirty handwritten exams. It saves hours and hours of work for the teachers. The teacher gets a live coach in her pocket that is telling her how to teach the next day, how to build the problem sets, what to do to get kids to Students on their parents' phones get a live one-on-one tutor. The platform even generates recommendations for policymakers on how they can improve the whole district. Our work has gotten recognition from Queen Elizabeth. It is backed by Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Prize for Education. I'm a teacher. I went to school in the US. I graduated from a US college, Georgetown University. I taught in public schools in the U.S. too, and I absolutely see no reason why this method of teaching and learning can't spread to other countries across the world.

Where is your edge? How are you going to rise above the rest?

There's a lot of education companies out there. I think it seems that everyone has cracked it. As a teacher, I understand nobody has. I think it is in the accuracy. Even if the kid has drawn something and written Urdu and the handwriting is really dirty, those accuracy rates are really, really high. And because it's deployed in public schools in whole districts, that means that every single time a teacher tests a check, the accuracy keeps on getting better and better and better.

It's amazing that you've stuck with education. You know, my wife, she's been a teacher in South Central Los Angeles for over a decade. You told us here you started at 19 years old. as a teacher, and I just think so often people in that field drift off into something else.

Yeah.

And I think teachers are one of the most underappreciated workers out there.

When you see a family member going through that, like he sees his wife going through it every day, I think that's when you realize what the pain points are.

You know, I get that the technology here is primarily the AI-based. Where does the data come from?

The data comes from, for example, like when we take on a district, It is hundreds of thousands of kids. It is on their parents' phone. The kids are using it. There is about 5,000 or 6,000 teachers in each district. They're using it every day. One teacher executing one class generates hundreds of data points. That's where all of the data comes from. But then more importantly, not just from schools, we've got this public-facing product. And imagine if 10 million users are using it to learn, And you start to develop some kind of patterns. So that's where you curate this huge dataset, and that kind of like drives the improvement of the model.

You've had $1.4 million in revenue. Is that over the last year?

Yeah.

Who's paying you? Is it the teachers, the parents?

The people in charge of running the whole district.

I see.

Yeah.

So that works in Pakistan. That would be very difficult here.

There are a lot of companies that say we use technology and we work in education, but I think whether they really sort of change the trajectory of a child's life is a very different story. One of the interesting things that we're seeing right now is, you know, for the first few contracts that we did, we primarily sold to the district superintendents. That's a top-down model. I'm inherently uncomfortable with that because that means you're at the mercy of a district superintendent to decide. You know, one of the things that happened when this sort of exam checking tool that came out, we had teachers leaking out their usernames and passwords en masse to like teachers in other districts for them to use the platform. I think what that fundamentally means is if you solve a really hair-on-fire kind of problem for a teacher and they start picking it up, before you know it, if teachers love it, use it en masse, then district superintendents have a better reason to access that. I think fundamentally what they didn't understand was also If you build a product that everyone loves, almost doing it district by district becomes much easier.

Terrific. Well, thank you, Haroon. Thanks for being on Meet the Drapers.

Once you get into the whole pitch, it becomes a lot of fun. You almost forget that you're pitching. It just becomes like a conversation.

Well, you said this is tough. You're up.

Gosh, I don't know. He's got a lot of traction. 140,000 students. He is the user. I really like it. I like it. I don't know the market well enough.

What I was curious about was who would want to buy it, right? And I think the track record is, you know, would say local governments, but kind of translate— you brought this up, Nikki, which is the state standards, county standards. I think maybe in a US context, the buying customer could be those passionate parents, the ones who are buying Kumon math, extracurricular activities, the ones who are willing to say, you know what, I want my kid to get a half step ahead.

The teachers will probably love it, being able to have their, their tests changed and graded. You don't have to keep making up a new test. You can say, AI, make me 10 different tests. So we've had 3 of our 4 entrepreneurs for this show, and we are about to move on to Our next entrepreneur, but before we do, what do we do? See what's going on behind the scenes.

Hello, my name is Mario and I'm the founder of CleverFi. I created a new solution that allows people to connect to Wi-Fi automatically and securely without having to ask what is the Wi-Fi password every time. I came to America in 1998 and there was no Wi-Fi. At the time. But the first time I saw a Wi-Fi router, I immediately fell in love. I'm like, wait a minute, we don't need a cable to be connected on the internet? I realized that that technology was gonna be the next big thing, and it did become the next big thing. At the end of the day, internet is not, you know, like just a place for going on social media. It's access to knowledge. It's access to your monetary The world needs to be connected, and the problem is that nobody really cares much about the security. You know, I envision a world where my mom— she's not tech savvy— you know, if I buy her a ticket from Verona to Rome, I want her to get on the train and simply be connected in the whole ride easily. To date, we basically started doing pilots in New York City. We put it on Airbnbs. We have 3 different locations where our technology is running: in New York, in Miami, and in Milan. We also put CleverFi in a few coffee shops, a few restaurants, and now we're implementing into a coworking space. So literally everywhere I go and I touch and I get to meet people and I tell them about CleverFi, they're like, oh, can we try immediately? Can we put it on my place?

You know, hopefully we'll have it at I'm just wondering if there's anything that you've learned about yourself from being an entrepreneur.

For me, being an entrepreneur is kind of like being self-aware that, you know, I, I can control my future. You know, obviously I can't control everything, but at least I can control what I'm doing every day and bring on the passion and the passion that I have for what I'm solving. I migrated from Italy in 1998. I've been here for 25 years. When I get to San Francisco, it's a melting pot, like in any way possible. So in technology, in culture, in background of people, you know. And this is the place where everybody can blend in. You can You be from know, any culture, any background, and you can blend in.

I'm from Italy.

because when we speak tech, we understand each other. We speak the same language, you know. California is where I spend a lot of time being as a tech founder, and this is where my prospect customers are. This is where my next big move is going to be. And so the more I come, the more I see how important it is to be in this side of the world. A lot of the time people say, oh, is San Francisco Is San Francisco dead?

Is San Francisco over?

San Francisco is done? No, San Francisco is not done. Silicon Valley is not done. This is the place to be if you really want to build a technology company. The, the amount of people that can help you grow your business here is incredible. And the good thing is that everybody's willing to help. A little bit nerve-wracking, right? You know, you got the light coming pretty strong on your face and you have to like pitch and you put under a lot of stress. I am the founder of CleverFi and I'm here to tell you about the future of Wi-Fi. So we all been there traveling and having to ask, what's the Wi-Fi password? Come on, how many times have you asked this question before and not being able to do your work? Or your school study and exercise, right? But then there's another thing that nobody tells you about the security concern related to connecting to a Wi-Fi of a shared password. Our solution solves all these 3 problems, allowing you to connect to Wi-Fi securely and automatically without having to ask what is the Wi-Fi password. And the beauty of this is that you will not need another app. How does it work? We provide to you It's your Wi-Fi name with your Wi-Fi password. So instead of you having to go and type in like a random password again into your next Airbnb, you will use your own Wi-Fi name and password. You know, the moment is so tense that I basically blanked. We can even teleport your home Wi-Fi anywhere else in the world. So if you go to Italy, visit Rome, you can have your Wi-Fi from the US right in the Airbnb when you get to Rome. Wi-Fi hasn't been disrupted in so many years. We have 12 patents granted in the US. My co-founder Fernando, he's a blockchain expert, worked for the largest bank in South America. And Luis, our advisor, he's in charge of about a billion logins that happen every day in Adobe. Join me to change the way we've been connecting into Wi-Fi for the past 25 years.

Okay, so if I've got my own home Wi-Fi, then I'm in New York, I'm in an apartment and they've got 15 different Wi-Fi connections and they're all locked. Do I get to use those?

I think that Tim was hard to read. If you get into, let's say, an Airbnb in New York, right, you have a reservation. So Airbnb actually knows exactly which apartment you're going to be in. And so every home router in the United States can do 2 Wi-Fi.

So if I'm at home and I have my own home Wi-Fi, is it without my knowing or permission, is CleverFi taking my Wi-Fi?

No. So when you teleport your home Wi-Fi is a secondary step. Like initially what we do, just to not confuse people, because obviously this is a new technology, people have been doing things for 25 years. If you're like a One of the moms that came to my Airbnb and she's like, oh, I'm trying to come in, I have a son, he has to sleep with the sound. She wanted to put the baby camera. I'm like, okay, now you can activate CleverFi where you can teleport your home Wi-Fi from Oregon into my Airbnb in New York. So when you plug in the speakers and the baby camera, they connect automatically. So in the future, people will have their home Wi-Fi, the office Wi-Fi, and then CleverFi. The one that they use when they travel.

What's the number one reason I sign up for CleverFi?

The 2 things, the security and the convenience.

They're equally number one?

Yes, because there's like a 50-50%. A lot of people are like about the security and the privacy, and a lot of people are like, oh yeah, just want to connect, make it easy for me, you know? And Nikki, she was a founder herself, so she definitely knows like what it's like to be a founder. Like starting a company and all of the struggle that we go through and so on.

I want to make sure I understand the vision right. Let's say we go on the next show with Meet the Drapers and we're in an Airbnb, and Nicky, Tim, and Bill and I, we're not— we don't have CleverFi.

Sure.

This Airbnb does. At that point, as users, we then have to create our own CleverFi username and password?

No, you will get onboarded automatically. Did I impress him? I guess no. It's always your password that will be following you. That was one part that the judges did not understand. I can do the demo if you want.

Yeah, do you have it?

Yeah, so basically, like, I can simulate you either checking into an Airbnb.

Draper's on the road. Let's do this.

I guess I got the bunk bed.

Where are we going? Atlanta?

So here we go.

Does anyone have a phone?

I have a phone, but I don't want to give you mine. No, it's okay.

Call Delta!

Tim is the best. He's very spontaneous. He's kind of like the grandfather of every founder. Do we want to try it with your dad, William?

Yeah, go ahead.

Do you want to type his mobile number? Anybody in the audience, please open up your phone and check the Wi-Fi. There is a new Wi-Fi called CleverFi. Simply, this is going to be his Wi-Fi. He has a password. He can connect. Once you connect once with the phone, then forever.

Okay, I just signed up.

And it's very slick.

And it's been sent separately so that you can copy and paste it to make it easy to connect, because this has to be, you know, user-proof that anybody can do it.

Do I get my phone back?

Yes, your son Tim has it.

It looks like you get your phone back. Well, let's wait. And you have Wi-Fi. Yes, there you go, Dad. You have Wi-Fi right here.

Not only was I able to pitch but also to demo my technology to William Henry Draper. He's a legend in the VC world. Like, he started First VC 60 years ago. I started to do this because I'm one of the first Airbnb hosts in New York, and somebody actually committed a cybercrime in my Airbnb.

Mario, thank you. Thank you for being on Meet the Drapers and for giving my father Wi-Fi.

I'm definitely going to celebrate here in San Francisco because we all put a lot of time and effort into our company, and I want to cheers everybody that pitched today.

What'd you think, Tim?

You know, I'm struggling with it a little bit. It's a little bit of a complicated scenario, the dynamics between the Airbnb host and the user. I like the idea of ubiquitous Wi-Fi and getting that Wi-Fi if I'm at a cafe shop, if I'm at an airline, but there are companies that do that, and I use I pay them about $50 a month. It's called T-Mobile, right?

If this thing always shows up, CleverFi, and I know it works, boom, done.

So that would be, once you get that part done, it's game over.

Yeah, then it's over. Nikki, what'd you think?

Core Basics, I like him. He seems smart. They'd sold a company before. He has a unique approach to the market. The pain maybe for the Airbnb host is big enough. But then is the pain for the user? Like when I go to the coffee shop, am I again like, yeah, I really need that convenience. That was slick what we just did right there. That was crazy. That was crazy.

I mean, with Dad's phone.

Yeah.

I mean, I had to crack his password. We had to find his phone number. Your Wi-Fi password.

4BA.

Go ahead, try it. 7535. Hey, with that, let's bring up all our entrepreneurs. It's a motley-looking group.

It's—

God, I have no idea. Do you guys have any idea what we should be doing? Okay, so it's difficult. I think we got to ask the ball. Getting different. Okay, a lot of different vibes. Am I feeling Feeling Wi-Fi-y or education-y or is it a new kind of net, internet storytelling? I'm feeling a story coming on. Is it a walk?

A walk?

We Walk, Brandon! Congratulations. Terrific! Congratulations! Good job, man.

I felt super happy and also relaxed because it's a long journey. Starting of new era for all visually impaired people across the world.

I think you should vote for us because we want to be able to kind of activate a completely new way to tell stories.

I think you should vote us back Because the world needs our technology. You all need to be able to connect to Wi-Fi securely and automatically.

Not just Taleemabad, but any company that is looking to just change how schooling is done, they should be voted for.

See you next time on Meet the Drapers!

All right.

Woo!