Starting Wonder | Justin Wohlstadter

So my name is Justin Walstadter. I'm the founder and CEO of Wunder. I'd love to start off by giving you guys a background on myself and kind of showing Wunder to you guys to set the stage for kind of an overview of what we've been through for the last few years. There's a part in the oath, I think it was like fail, fail, and try again or something similar. It's a slog. It's really, really tough, and it takes time. And we've been at this for about 3 years now, and it's only now really starting to take off. So it's exciting to see that, and it's exciting to share what it's taken for us to get here. And I hope it kind of helps you guys get a sense for how much time and effort and commitment it takes to actually get to the point where something is going really well. So yeah, so before I actually show you Wunder, So, background on myself is I graduated college in 2009 from Harvard, had a crazy opportunity to build an early-stage venture fund. Basically, and hopefully in the Q&A you guys can dive into this a little more if you're interested, but a wealthy older gentleman gave a friend and I a blank check, and in 2 years we invested about $30 million into a bunch of early-stage companies. It was 2009, so the timing was really good. That's Really awesome. good. We were the first investors in a company called Indiegogo. We invested in Klout, which was bought by Lithium. Reportive was bought by LinkedIn. GoInstant by Salesforce. Blaze by Akamai. ThinkNear by Telenav. A bunch of others. It was really exciting. We had no idea what we were doing. We made a lot of stupid mistakes. Our first investment was a down-round Series Series C into a food truck company, which was crazy, but they're doing very well right now. So happy about that in hindsight. And long story short, I spent about 2 years in venture. I got intellectually bored with doing that. Venture is a lot of fun because you basically get to play God, but it also has its downsides. That same kind kind of component, I think, is dangerous for young people because it kind of creates this sense that you actually know what you're doing and you don't. Yeah. And more importantly, the value of doing a startup is you actually get to do. You know, you get to create. And that's really exciting and really powerful. And as a VC, you don't get to do that. So after doing that for about 2 years, I decided to leave to go to England. to do a master's. I wrote a dissertation at Oxford on the future of education, and that was the impetus for Wunder today. Before I went to start Wunder full-time, I joined one of the companies we had invested in called Divide, or at the time, Interfroid. They were bought by Google last year, and now that is Android for Work. And Divide, the idea was to to create a work environment on your personal phone. So at the time, all these bankers and consultants would have 2 phones, a work phone and a personal phone, which was crazy because banks were then in the business of maintaining a fleet of thousands of devices, which was just not what they were in the business to do. So Divide came in to just build an app that sits on your personal phone that a bank or a law firm or consulting firm could monitor. And they built it into a great company. So after I graduated from So when I was in the summer break from my master's, I asked the founders if there was anything I could do for them, because I wanted to get experience running an engineering team and doing design and a bunch of other more operations-oriented things. So the founders were really nice. Basically, the CEO said I could shadow him for 3 months, and that's what I did. I just went to all of his meetings, and I took notes, and I did a lot of random things. So you were a product manager? And after a while, we saw some really interesting opportunities for me to run the iOS team and run the product design team. And I did that out of Hong Kong for a year. I lived there for a month every other month. And when I wasn't there, I was between London and New York. There were 3 offices for Enterpoid. And then after doing that for a year, basically in October 2012, I left to start this full-time. So we've been We've been going at it for almost exactly 3 years now. It's gone through many iterations of the same idea, the same vision, but different implementations to try and get to the right thing that works. It's been a slog. It's really tough. I've hired people. I've fired people. We've built dozens of different designs and implementations and UIs on many different platforms to So finally we get to the stage we're at right now where we have awesome users and customers and where people are actually paying us for a service, which is really exciting. So I wanted to— I think a lot of people talk about how it's not this direct path to success, but no one really kind of goes through and says and shows you how it's— all the mistakes they made. And, you know, all the implementations and stuff they built that just didn't work out. So I wanted to kind of walk you guys through some of that and hopefully get through it relatively quickly and open it up to questions and go from there. So I want to start by showing you what Wonder is today. So the end product of all that investment and all that work, Wonder is an on-demand research service, or as I like to call it, knowledge delivery. The idea is that for the past 10, 15 years, Google, I mean the internet in general, has done an incredible job democratizing information, right, and providing access to it on the internet. But while you can access information, the access to knowledge, the synthesis of that information, taking those bits and pieces, those facts, and turning it into actionable, decisive knowledge that you can use is still not evenly distributed and it's very expensive. It's the reason why large companies pay hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to consulting firms and expert networks. It's why you guys pay a lot of money for your education. It's because taking that information and turning it into something useful is still very difficult. So today when you go to Google, right, you're You're not just— most of the time you're not just kind of messing around, you're going to Google because you need to find facts and stats for a marketing campaign you're putting together or a product you're developing or an investment you're making, right? So the process is not just typing words into a keyword box and getting the first link that comes up, but generally if you're looking for something like how big can the Bitcoin market be, you start with Google and then you go to a blog and you click a link to a news story and you read a report and you back to Google again and you refine your search terms and over and over and over again, right? And it's a multi-hour process, which is a real pain in the butt, especially if you're a consultant who's being paid hundreds of dollars an hour. It's a very expensive time investment, right? So whether you're looking for, you know, market sizing for Bitcoin because you're an entrepreneur putting together a pitch deck, or if you're trying to look for best practices in SEO, there's resources all over the place. Or, you know, if you're trying to figure out what the top 10 best web design firms are in Denver, or the top 20 data scientists in Israel because you're looking to make a hire, it's a very time-consuming process. Putting together criteria, looking through reviews, ranking options, until finally all those facts, all that information actually gets synthesized into something useful in your brain or on paper. So this is what we built. Wunder to solve. I'd love to show it to you before my computer dies. So— Do you need a charger? That might be a good idea. Yeah, if you have one. Old MacBook. So this is Wunder. From now on, when you guys are doing a project or a campaign or something, you can go to askwunder.com. You get— I'm running out of battery. So there's a startup in here somewhere. So you can go to askwinter.com, and it's very simple. You have a text input here. You can type in any question you want. Does anyone have a project they're working on, something they want to know? Report a, you know— How large is the How large is the real estate crowdfunding industry? I think that's a great question. Good question. I know the answer, so I'm just— Oh, cool. How large is the real estate crowdfunding market? That's really good. Right? If you want, you can add more details. Totally up to you. You hit submit, and you're done. It's off your to-do list. So that few hours of work that you just had has been completely eradicated. That is so cool. So you skip like the whole— holy shit, dude, that's great. So basically what's happening here on the backend is your question is going out to a network of expert researchers around the world. And those researchers have access to a dashboard, a Slack channel, a few other things. And your question gets posted anonymously to that dashboard. Any researcher can grab it. We have researchers with subject expertise, you know, in tons and tons of different areas. And because we pay a fixed price per request and not per hour, people who know most about something in the marketplace will grab that thing and will work on it. And within a few hours, you get back an email in your inbox with an overview on the topic and a bunch of resources you can explore. Is it free? So I'll show you what this looks like. Is it free? It is not. Well, I'll get into that. That's a whole interesting area of discussion. So this is what you get.